Does citibank have the worst website?

I've used a handful of banking/credit card websites, and I have to say of them all, Citibank's by far the worst of them all. They are the Comcast of banking websites.

I logged into my business credit card account to try and get the yearly total interest. I can not find this information anywhere on the website. So I am guessing it might be included on the statements. Unlike every other website which usually give you the last 24 months of statements instantly available, Citibank makes you request a statement which then may take as long as 48 hours to be available.

Are they running their website off of floppies and a commodore 64?

And to make it just a little more unpleasant, their request form, which consists of nothing more than 2 drop downs and a submit button, doesn't work in chrome. I mean, requesting pdf statements is I think pretty basic functionality. The fact that it doesn't work in one of the most popular browsers is not a good sign.

But don't worry. Citibank has a plan to keep you happy. You see, if you go to their contact form to let them know what you think of their lackluster website, you get to play a guessing game. You get to guess which character that you entered in the form is the special character they don't like in the form. And when you go back to the form, you get to fill out the whole form all over again because it all gets wiped out. Isn't that fun?

**spoiler alert** the special character (one of them anyhow) is the single quote. Apparently the single quote is not considered standard punctuation according to Citibank. I guess they frown on contractions. I mean they allow you a whole 20 lines of text so I guess there's no excuse for contractions.

A single quote can be used in a special type of website hacking attempt. However, if handled properly the single quote is not a problem. Telling people to re-write their message is not handling it properly. Hell, they could just remove the single quote on their end, which is still not the right way to do it and would still be a much better way to handle it then the way they are handling it now.

As far as I can tell, they've basically done zero usability testing to see if the website is user friendly. And it's functionally poorly implemented. It's pretty astonishing that a bank as large as Citibank can't manage to put up a better website.

Is Verizon purposely slowing down Netflix traffic?

I have Verizon FiOS at home. I have the 50/25 package, which means I should get roughly 5 megs a second download and 2.5 megs a second upload. I don't normally have too much need for the upload, but I do download quite a bit and I have to say for the most part I pretty much get what I pay for. When I'm downloading from someplace that has the bandwidth to support my max speeds, I usually get my max speeds or even a little faster. Any time I run a test on speedtest.net it pretty much always maxes out at what I pay for.

I also just recently re-activated my netflix account. And while I haven't experienced any issues with pauses during playback or having to wait a while before the video plays, it does take a while before it'll play at HD resolution. And sometimes it just won't play at HD at all.

Now Level3, which is the internet provider Netflix uses to connect to the internet, claims that Verizon is responsible for the slow down. They claim that verizon's network has plenty of capacity, and what it all boils down to is verizon is deliberately not increasing the connection speed between verizon and level3.

You can read about it in a blog post from level3 here: http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/verizons-accidental-mea-culpa/

In order for Verizon to fix that situation, all they would have to do is spend a few thousand dollars and connect a handful of wires. And for a company of Verizon's size, spending a few thousand dollars is nothing. Even further, Level3, also a large company, offered to cover the expense themselves and even connect the wires. And Verizon still has done nothing.

I decided to test this by installing a VPN (Virtual Private Network) using vyprvpn. There are other vpn services out there. But I wasn't trying to review VPN services, just determine if Verizon really is doing something to degrade netflix service.

A VPN is exactly what it says it is - a Virtual Private Network - it's a private network between myself and vyprvpn's servers. All the data between myself and the vyprvpn servers is encrypted so even though my internet connection is with Verizon, Verizon really doesn't know what I am sending back and forth between the vyprvpn servers. So with the vpn turned on, all my internet traffic flows from my Verizon connection at home, to the vpn servers, and then from the vpn servers out to the rest of the internet. Verizon has no way of knowing if I am browsing my email, watching Netflix or playing a game. All they can tell is data is going into the vpn server.

Without the VPN on, my download speeds from Netflix were very unimpressive compared to how my download speeds normally are. I wasn't even getting 1 meg a second. In fact, some of the time during playback it was so slow that it didn't even say it was buffering for HD, it just said it wasn't playing in HD at all.

The instant I turned on the VPN, suddenly my connection was fast enough that it started to buffer for HD and within a few seconds it had buffered enough that it was playing in HD. In fact the speed that i was downloading from Netflix increased by a factor of 20 or more.

So, lets recap.

When I'm not using the VPN and my data flows from me --> verizon --> level 3 --> netflix my speeds were very slow. About 0.2 megs a second.

When I am using the VPN and my data flows from me --> verizon --> vpn --> level3 --> netflix, I can play in HD within a few seconds of starting the video and my speeds went from 0.2 megs a second to anywhere from 2.0 to 6.0 megs a second. So that's 10x to 30x faster. The traffic flow that I marked in red is the traffic that Verizon doesn't know about. The only way Verizon could slow down my Netflix traffic while on the VPN would be to slowdown ALL traffic into the VPN. And I'm sure if enough people start to use this VPN service to get around Verizon's throttle of Netflix, Verizon will eventually throttle the VPN service as well.

If Verizon were not slowing down Netflix traffic, then using a VPN should actually result in worse performance since I now have a longer route to connect to Netflix. The more direct your connection is, typically the better your speed will be.

What this all comes down to is greed. We pay our ISP to connect us to the internet so we can download whatever content we're trying to access. And Verizon and the other big greedy ISP's now want Netflix to pay to send us that data. So they are literally trying to charge you coming and going. It would be like us paying FedEx to send someone a package, and then FedEx demanding the person receiving the package also pay them.

Don't fall for scam artist website designers

I registered a new domain the other day, and literally within 24 hours I was receiving emails from people offering to help me build a website.

That should probably be your first and last clue not to do business with them if they are spamming you within 24 hours of registering a domain name. But in case you are tempted, or maybe they contact you several weeks or months after you register a domain name, here's some tips on how to tell if they are legit or a scam, or just incompetent.

The first one that contacted me claimed to be from www.clickingz.com

The first thing you should do is pull up their website. If their website looks like crap, what are the chances they are going to make your website look better?  And in my opinion, that site looks VERY outdated. Another thing to note is that at the bottom of the site the copyright says 2002-2008. Which either means the last time they updated the site was in 2008, which is a long time to never update a website. Or it means they've forgotten to update the copyright notice, or don't know how to make it update automatically. Either way that's not a good sign.

However, to be fair, one point in favor of clinkingz is that they have been around for several years. Most scammers change their names as often as most people change their socks. So clickingz might not be a scam. They just might not be very competent.

For comparison, another email i received claimed to be from www.webdesigncup.com

Their site certainly looks nicer when you first view it - but after about 2 seconds you'll realize their entire site consists of just one big giant image with zero content. There's no contact info. There's no links to any of their work. Literally the only text on the website is their domain name. That's a HUGE HUGE red flag.

Another thing you can check to get some idea of how long they have been around is to go to www.networksolutions.com/whois and type in their domain name.

If you look up clinkingz it says they registered their domain name in 2007. That's a point in their favor. However, their registration information is private, which to me is a little bit questionable.

On the other hand, if you look up webdesigncup, it says they registered their domain name on Sept 27th 2013. Big red flag there. And their domain information is also private - another red flag.

The other thing to look for on these sites is contact info. If there's no contact info listed, as is the case with webdesigncup, then don't contact them. Clickingz at least has a phone number and address on their site - another point in their favor.

If they do have contact info, plug it into google maps and see where they are. In this case I have a feeling the above business address is just a mail drop and not an actual office. There are several international shipping and mailing business at that same address. Plus you'll notice their suite number is 13389. If you look at that building on google maps i doubt there's thousands of offices there. Most office buildings either number their offices sequentially or number them sequentially with the floor number as the first set of digits. So my guess is 'suite' 13389 is nothing more then a mail drop that forwards to where ever they are actually located. In this case i have a feeling they are outside the US, due to the international shipping at that location. And the email i received from them was sent from some where in India.

There's nothing wrong in itself hiring someone in India. There's plenty of competent people there. But I wouldn't want to hire someone who's lying about where they are located.

Another thing to look for is if they have links to any of the websites they've done - or I should say claim to have done. In the case of clickingz, they have a link to compass-hs.com which they claim they did. And that site certainly looks better then clickingz own website. However, if you scroll to the bottom of many websites, you'll often find a link back to whoever designed the site. In this case, compass-hs links back to someone entirely different then clickingz. Does this mean clickingz lied? I don't know - they might have done a website for compass and then compass might have hired someone else to make a new design at a later date.

But it does say clickingz hasn't update their site in a while if they are linking to a design that's not theirs.

Another website they link to is firstchoiceyc.com  - this design is not that great. And again - the bottom of the site says someone entirely different designed the site for them. In fact every site they linked to that I went to, none of them linked back to clinkingz, several of them linked to other sites as the designers.

So is clickingz a scam - i'm not sure. There does seem to be some questionable stuff about them. But the fact that they appear to have been in business for several years and do list an address and phone number gives them a little bit of legitimacy. Assuming of course that the address and phone number actually work. I did not try calling or mailing them to test that.

Scam or not, I wouldn't bother contacting them for design work as they effectively have no current portfolio of work and their own website is badly in need of a redesign.

In the case of webdesigncup, my guess is that's a scam. Their website has nothing on it. There's no contact info for them. There's no links to any work they claim as their own. And the domain appears to have been created less then a month ago. I can't imagine a company claiming to do web site design would have no design at all on their own website. A single background image is not a website design, that's just wallpaper.

So to summarize my ramblings:

1. Always look for links to past work and try to verify they really did the work. If you are unsure, try contacting whatever website they claim as their design and asking them if they did really design the site for them.
2. Look for contact info and google their address - see if they are located anyplace that looks shady.
3. Do a google search on their domain name, email address and phone number and see if you find discussions about them.
4.Look up their domain registration to try and determine how long they have been in business. The older the domain name the less likely they are scam artists. And if their domain registration is not private another point for not being scammers.
5. Lastly - if they emailed you out of the blue without you contacting them first, that's spam. And I wouldn't really want to do business with someone who spams.  But that's up to you.

Email Password security tips

Here are some general security tips to keep your email account safe.

1. Use a unique password for your email that you do not use anywhere else. The reason for this is pretty simple. Most websites when you register on them ask you to give them your email address. If you give that website your email address AND you use the same password that you used on your email login, you've just given that website access to your email account. Most websites are probably trustworthy. But what happens if that website gets hacked and someone steals all your registration information? Now some hacker has your email login information. So ALWAYS use a unique password for your email account that you do not use anywhere else.

2. Do not use a simple password. A simple password would be one that's only a few characters long and/or consist of simple words. Most hackers are not sitting in front of a computer typing in one password at a time. They have tools to automate it. So if your password is very short or consists of simple words, they can use a dictionary to guess your password. The best passwords are at least 10-12 characters long. Longer is even better. And it's good if it contains a mixture of letters and numbers. Even better if it contains letters, numbers and punctuation characters like $#@!%. Most passwords are case sensitive, which means mypassword is not the same as myPassWord. So mixing up the casing of the letters is another very good method to make your password hard to guess. The best passwords combine all of this into something called a pass phrase. A password implies a single word. A pass phrase is a combination of words.
So rather then having 'password' as your password, you would have 'this is my password' as your password, or pass phrase. And if you combine it with the other suggestions it might look like '@thiS is mY 1 passworD!'

3. Pick security question/answers only you know. Many websites ask you to set up security questions that you can answer if you ever forget your password, or login from a strange computer. These security questions can turn into security holes. If you pick a very simple question ' what is my favorite color' and pick an equally simple answer 'blue', it wont take very long for someone to guess your security answers. The best thing to do is to pick questions that only you would know the answer to. However, many sites don't allow you to type your own question, you have to pick one of their questions. And their questions are often questions that other people know the answer to. Like what school you went to, the name of your spouse, your first job etc. Those are all questions other people have the answers to and in many cases even strangers can find the answers to them by doing a little google searching. For example, if you have a linkedin account,  your first job AND what schools you attended might be listed there. Your spouse might be listed on facebook or another social site.

So if you can't type in your own question, you can always give an answer that has nothing to do with the question or is completely made up. For example, if it asked what school you went to, you might say Startfleet Academy (although in my case my friends could guess I'd pick that answer). Or make up an answer that's completely random. Instead of Starfleet Academy, you could say apple pie. You just have to remember the answer you give. The key is to make sure it's an answer know one but you knows and no one could figure out.

4. Don't type your password into strange computers. It's basically the same as catching an STD. You don't know who else used that computer or where it's been. That computer could have a virus on it and as soon as you type in your password, it's recorded it and sent it off to some nefarious hacker who now has access to your account. This applies even to your friends computer, unless you are sure they are practicing safe computing.

How can you tell if you were hacked/if a friend was hacked?

5. Don't click strange links. If you get an email from a friend that has a ton of people it was sent to and all the email contains is a strange looking link, chances are they were hacked. I would contact your friend other then through their email and ask them if they sent it. If they did not, have them read this post and then change their passwords. I said passwords, plural, because once someone has access to your email account, they could potentially gain access to your other online accounts since many of them have a forgot password feature that will email you instructions on how to change your password. So the hacker gains access to your email account and looks through your emails to find an email from your bank. They then go to your bank's website. The first thing they'll try doing is using your email password in case you used the same password for your email as for your bank. If that doesn't work, then they'll try the forgot password feature and within a minute they could have access to your bank account. I'm sure they'll enjoy spending your money.

6. You wake up one morning and suddenly find a bunch of returned messages in your email. This is a good sign your account may have been hacked. This could be because the hacker logged into your email and then sent out an email to EVERYONE you ever emailed before. Or at least everyone in your address book. Some of those emails might have gone to addresses that don't exist anymore, or might have been caught by spam filters. That's why you'll suddenly have a bunch of returned messages in your email.

Many email websites allow you to check and see all the places you logged in from. if so, take a look and see if there's a login from somewhere you've never been, or at time you know you weren't online. If you find a strange login or have an inbox full of returned messages, it's time to change your passwords and contact your friends and let them know not to click any links that were sent.

Prevention

7. Use 2-step authentication. One of the features I like with gmail is something called 2 step authentication. It's basically using two passwords. You only are prompted for the 2nd password if you login from a new computer, or it's been 30 days since the last time you used the 2nd password.  If you have a smart phone, you download a small app to your phone and the app generates a new password for you every 30 seconds that you would type into your account the first time you log on from a new pc. That means even if a hacker gets your password, they still wont be able to log in because they wont have that random password generator. I still won't log in from a strange PC even with this if I can possibly avoid it. But at least if you do you know it'll still be almost impossible for them to get into your account. If you do login from a strange computer I would still change your password when you get home even with using the 2 step authentication.

I strongly encourage you to see if your email provider has 2-step authentication. If not, I would switch to someone who does.

Crashplan is untrustworthy - do not trust them with your back or data

I started using Crashplan for my backup needs back when Mozy switched away from doing an unlimited backup.  Initially I was very happy with their service.

However, since at least June of 2012 when I first noticed it, Crashplan has had horribly slow upload speeds. Many people are getting much less then 1mb uploads even though their internet connection supports speeds many times faster then that.

For anyone who frequently adds files to their backup set, this would make crashplan almost useless since you would never have a complete backup. You would always have files pending to be uploaded.

I myself could probably live with these speeds since I don't often add files to my backup. What I can not live with though is a company that lies. And crashplan lies. Their support has NOT ONCE responded to the thread I started here: https://crashplan.zendesk.com/entries/21660011 (they require you to register to view threads, probably to hide complaints from showing up in search engines - i'll post a complete copy at the end of this post).

That thread is almost 6 months old and has NEVER received a response from someone in support. It did however receive a response within a day when I finally got fed up and accused them of being incompetent or liars. Then a Mike Evangelist (listed as Chief Marketing officer according to his linkedin profile) suddenly stepped in and deleted my post accusing me of 'name calling'. I'm not sure what other conclusion you can come to when you have a problem that's ongoing for months and the only response you get from CP support, if they respond at all, is to tell you the internet is shared resource. Basically their excuse is that the internet is slow, not them. Apparently the internet has been slow, ONLY for crashplan customers, night or day, for months.

His idea of customer support was to offer me a refund. That's a pretty shoddy business model - no actual response to the problem itself, just someone who gets upset when you use harsh words about the lack of support and communication and then tells you to leave.

The only conclusion I can draw is that crashplan is either incompetent and doesn't know how to fix the problem or is otherwise incapable of doing so, or they are lying to me. I think it's both. I suspect they signed up too many users too fast and don't have the resources to support them all and are just hoping people wont notice.

As I said earlier, I could probably live with the slower upload speeds. But I will not do business with a company that treats their customers like this. They lie to their customers pretending there is no problem or pretending the problem is with you and not with them. They don't respond to complaints in their forum for MONTHS and then the only official response they finally give is to delete a post that calls them out for what they are - liars.

I don't know about you, but I would not do business with a company that is dishonest with you and treats their customers like idiots. Would you trust all your personal data with them? What's going to happen if their servers ever get hacked, do you think they'll actually let you know? Can you be sure you're data is really encrypted and safe on their server? And what happens if some day you need to download your data, how can you be sure you'll be able to get it? Or that it wont take months or years to download because of their poor service?

I apologize if this sounds like a rant, but I am angry. I think anyone would be angry if they are lied to for months on end. Because of this I've canceled my subscription to crashplan. Oh, and they are actually planning on raising their rates at the start of 2013. I'm going to use amazon glacier with cloudberry. Shockingly, the shared resource that is the internet seems to have no problem maxing out my upload speed when uploading to amazon. And it'll cost me less then what crashplan charges.

Edit: I've been using cloudberry in conjunction with amazon glacier for several weeks now without a single slow down. And it's only costing me $2/mo. To be fair, it looks as though the issue with crashplan has been resolved, at least the technical issue has. The customer service/honesty issue though has not. Crashplan only once admitted to there being any problem and it was a rather vague message along the lines of 'some' customers report problems and 'they are looking into it'. No explanation as to what the problem was. No explanation as to what they did to fix it. No sort of apology. I still don't trust them.

Edit 2: It loosk like CP might still be lying to their customers. Someone who just signed up with CP starts off getting 6mbps uploads but then quickly drops down to 250-300kbps. When they contacted CP support, this is what they were told:
I looked over your backup logs from the past few days and it looks like everything is going exceptionally well. 200-300 KBps sustained transfer rates are normal for most people and are common when the CrashPlan Client is backing up media files or other large chunks of data (applications come to mind). Those types of data don't compress well and therefore have to be sent in their entirety versus smaller chunks that have already been efficiently indexed by the CrashPlan Client.
That's the first time I've heard that not being able to compress file means it'll download MUCH slower then your maximum internet connection. The support rep went on to say turning off data de-duplication might speed up the upload. Which I assume is also either a lie or an indication their system is poorly made if data de-duplication means a 20x reduction in upload speeds.

Edit 3: For anyone still using crashplan and having problems, you might want to take a look at this blog post. He greatly sped up his upload speeds by disabling the deduplication function in crashplan's client.

Is Time-Warner cable scaming people?

I'm really getting tired of what I consider to be deceptive advertising with cable companies and the internet service they provide people. Used to be when they said you would get 'up to' a certain speed, it was an honest statement since you don't always get the maximum speed of your internet connection due to technical issues beyond their control.

Now 'up to' basically means they can give you whatever speed they want.

Here is an ad on one of the TW portal website advertising their internet packages:
TURBO INTERNET SPEEDS UP TO 20Mbps

but when you scroll down on the same page, it says:
Download Speed: Up to 10 Mbps

Hmm, up to 20mb and up to 10mb. This would be like buying a car where it says the MPG is 15 or maybe it's 30.

But it gets worse. I used their online chat to ask them about this. And they told me that the up to 10mb is a mistake, that I would really get 20mb. They told me this TWICE. Because I asked before I signed up, and then I asked again after I signed up for their service and discovered I was NOT getting 20mb, I was getting 10. Lo and behold when I called, I'm now told I have to pay an additional $10 to get 20mb.

Not only does it appear as though they are lying, but I think they are actually stealing your money. Because they offer a standard internet of 'up to' 10mb for $34.95 and then the turbo of up to 20 but really up to 10 for $44.95. So I really have no idea what extra you are getting for the extra $10 upgrading from the standard to the turbo, since it looks as though you really get the same speeds from both. Unless when they say 'up to' 10mb on the standard package, that really means you get 5mb.

I'm attaching an image of the chat convo showing the rep confirming that the turbo package should be 20mb.

AddToRun - add any program to the windows run screen

http://sourceforge.net/projects/addtorun/

A cool little program called AddToRun will let you specify any program you want with any name you want, and add it to the run menu (windows key + R). If you don't want to clutter up your desktop with shortcuts and don't want to dig through the start menu, this could be a convenient little tool to have. All you do is pick the program you want to run and give it a name. Then you can open the run menu (windows key +R), type in the name you gave the program and hit enter. And viola, you're program is running.

Some general comments on backups

Given my last post about mozy doing away with their unlimited plan, and seeing all the reactions from people, some of which seemed to be in a panic at the thought of possibly not having a full complete backup for a few weeks, I thought it would be good to make a few suggestions about backing up data.

The first thing to realize is your backup is exactly what it says - a backup. It should be a secondary copy of your data, not your primary storage. Forgive my nerd analogy (you did read the title of this blog didn't you?) but it's like being on the USS Enterprise while fighting the Romulans. Captain Kirk doesn't use the backup systems first, he uses the primary systems. He only asks Scotty to engage the backup's when the primaries are in trouble.

That's what your online backup should be like. They should mainly just be used for when your primary data storage - your hard drive - is in trouble. So if your online backup goes away, it shouldn't be cause for panic. Because your primary system should still be in relatively good shape and the chances of the primary going down while the backup is down should be pretty small.

The thing to keep in mind here is making sure your primary is always in relatively good shape. There's a few simple things you can do to ensure that.

1. Run a disk monitoring program in the background to keep tabs on your hard drive. A very basic, and free program, is HDD Health from panterasoft. It'll monitor your drives and let you know if they report any problems.
2. If you want to be even more proactive, you can schedule windows to run a chkdsk every week or month. You can either schedule this as a task in windows, or you can run it yourself. You have a few choices as to how you want to run the command, as it can drastically effect how long it takes to run the check, and also whether or not you can use your PC while the check is running. You can run it as chkdsk c: /F /R /X. replace c: with whatever drive you want to check. This command will take the longest and possibly require you to reboot the pc and wait for it to finish before you can use your PC again. Having to reboot is almost a certainty if you are going to check drive C.  If you want to speed things up a bit, leave off /R, which does a more intensive scan of the disk looking for bad sectors on the disk. If chkdsk starts reporting bad sectors, it's time to replace the hard disk. You can look up the warranty on the hard drive to see if it's still covered.
3. The other suggestion I have is to replace your hard drive once it's 2 years old. Hard drives are pretty reliable - i can't remember the last time I had one fail. But if you replace them every 2 years or so, you are even less likely to see a failure. Given how cheap HD's are (and they keep getting cheaper), you'll more then likely be able to be a hard drive twice as big as the one you are replacing, for less then it originally cost you. So not only will you be ensuring the reliability of your data storage, but you'll also get more space out of it. 
4. If you replace your hard drives like I suggest, you can then use those hard drives as backups, in addition to any online backups. You can buy an external enclosure for the drive on newegg or amazon for $20 or so. 

One thing to remember if you replace your drives and you are not going to keep them or re-use them - make sure you wipe all the data on them, especially if you plan on selling them or giving them away to anyone else. You can use Eraser to securely delete the data from your drives. It's also free.

And for some more free and useful sofware, check out my post about gparted, which you can use to partition those new hard drives and copy data from one drive to another.

One last suggestion when it comes to replacing hard drives - keep your original drive on hand for at least a week or two before you erase it or do anything else to it. The most likely time for a new hard drive to fail is right when you first start using it, if there's was any sort of defect to it. Otherwise, any decent hard drive will most likely last you several years. 

Mozy ditches unlimited backup AND increases prices- time for mozy alternatives

Mozy sent out an email to (most) of their customers last night announcing they would be dropping their unlimited backup plan in favor of a tiered pricing plan. Mozy has offered their unlimited plan since 2006, so to be fair this isn't a bait and switch type scenario. And I can understand prices increase over time and they may need to adjust their pricing to stay in business. But I think they went about this the wrong way.

They claim that most of their users backup less then 50gb of data, so that is the new cap on the account. But to add insult to injury, they are going to charge you more for giving you less. I can understand if they want to get rid of those customers that are backing up 500+gb of data. But it seems like they want to get rid of some of the under 50gb data users as well. If it were me, I would not tell my customers "We are going to give you less now, AND we're going to charge you more for it as well".

Granted, it's only a dollar more per month. But it's a dollar more, AND getting less in exchange for that dollar. I think they should have at least kept the price the same. Or you can pay $10 a month for 125gb which will also let you back up 3 computers. Personally, if I am paying per gigabyte now, mozy should not be restricting me at all. I should be able to backup from as many sources as I want. If you want to back up additional computers, up to 5, it's an extra $2/month. Or it's $2/month for an extra 20gb of storage space.

So lets say someone is currently using 200gb of storage with mozy. Their monthly price would now go from $5/mo to either $22/mo or $14/mo if they upgrade to the 125gb/3pc plan.

I think 200gb is a moderate amount of use. For any users with a more extreme amount, say 500gb the cost becomes $48/mo under th 125gb/3pc plan. At that price point, you can BUY a 640gb hard drive. Why would anyone pay $50/mo when you can get a 640gb HD for less then the monthly price? Heck - you can get a terabyte drive for under $60.

It seems clear from their new pricing that mozy is actively trying to get rid of any users using more then say 200-250gb. I think they are also going to get rid of some of the users using under 50gb as well - they've gotten rid of me. There are still other online backup providers offering unlimited backups at the same price, or cheaper, then what mozy is now charging for the 50gb plan.

Carbonite offers unlimited backups for less then what mozy is charging for 50gb. 1 year of unlimited backup space will cost you $55. Mozy will cost you $66 for 50gb.

There's also backblaze which offers you unlimited backup for $5 a month per pc (or $4/mo if you pay for a year).

And there's crashplan which offers you 10gb for $2.50/mo down to $1.50/mo if you pay for 4 years.
But they also have 2 unlimited plans. The first one allows you to backup 1 pc and the price ranges from $5/mo down to $3/mo for a 4 year plan. Or you can get unlimited backups for up to 10 computers for prices between $12/mo down to $6/mo for the 4 year plan. A two year plan will come out costing $8.33/mo (or $3.75/mo for the single pc plan). And they are offering a 15% discount on all their plans right now for mozy customers

Livedrive also offers unlimited backups starting at $6.95/mo - price goes down if you sign up for a year. They do not throttle bandwidth and they support file versioning for up to 30 versions. They also support media streaming to the iphone and ipad.  Live drive offers some additional features, at additional pricing, which is aimed more at file sharing or file syncing. They give you a virtual briefcase which you can view through a browser or set up as a mapped drive on your pc. You can share files with other users or between multiple pc's. It also supports uploading files through an email attachment

And then we have Idrive, which while not unlimited, still offers what I consider to be much more reasonable data limts and prices then what mozy has decided to go with. For $5 (a dollar less then mozy) you get 150gb (3x what mozy gives) or for $15/mo you get 500gb of backup that you can use for up to 5 PCs. Plus they also do not automatically delete files and they work with external drives as well. A much better deal in my opinion then what mozy is offering now.

F-secure offers an unlimited backup option for 12 months for $49.99 which comes out to $4.16/mo. Although it looks like their online backup comes with the least features compared to any of the others. And it looks like you can only backup certain types of files.

Carbonite and backblaze both offer a 15 day trial. Crashplan has a 30 day trial and a money back guarantee. Or you can try their free version, which does not backup to their servers but does allow you to backup to any of your own external drives or even to the drives of friends and family with crashplan installed - a sort of cloud family backup solution. LiveDrive offers a 14 day trial. F-Secure comes with a 30 day trail.

Edit: Backblaze is now offering a 10% discount with the code 'byemozy'

Edit2: Happy to say crashplan seems to be working well at least as far as uploading goes. As far as I have seen, it has been uploading at the max speed that I have set it to and that my internet connection will support - around 2mbps. In about a day it has uploaded around 15gb of files.

Edit3: Well, looks like crashplan might have finally been flooded by mozy users. My upload speeds have been cut in half for the last 6 hours or so.

Edit4: Looks like crashplan flipped a switch somewhere. About an hour ago my uploads stopped completely for a few minutes, and then resumed but back at full speed again. So the slow down started at around 1pm and was corrected at around 11am the following day. Not too bad I guess.

If your prices suck, hide them - seems to be register.com's policy

One of the websites I host used register.com to register their domain name. I wanted to ask them to allow me to transfer their domain name over to my godaddy account because it makes things easier for me if everything is in one location. Plus if I have admin access to the domain name it makes things easier if I need to make any updates - I don't have to bother them to do it or try to figure out some other registrars processes.

I went to register.com to check to see what they charge per year for a domain name, only I couldn't find any price listing on their site for just domain registrations. I went into their help and searched on 'price' which did give me the link i wanted - only that link just redirected me back to their home page.

So I opened a chat session with one of their support reps. I'll post the entire chat conversation below, but the short version of it is that they say they don't post the pricing for domain registrations because they don't want to 'confuse' anyone by giving too much information. Apparently they don't have a problem displaying the pricing if you want to host a website with them. But for some reason, they think it'll be too confusing to have a single page that just tells you how much it'll cost to register a domain name. I wonder why they think it'll be 'confusing' to tell you they charge $37/year to register a .com name. I'm sure that they charge more then 3x what godaddy and many of the other registrars currently charges to register a .com domain name has nothing to do with them hiding - i mean simplifying their website. Those poor godaddy users - they must be all confused with a link right on the home page that lists all their domain registration pricing.

Even if their pricing were just a few dollars more then godaddy's, i still wouldn't use them. If a company can't post their prices, then they are hiding something and it's not worth doing business with someone like that in my opinion.

I've removed the name of the chat session agent since I'm not trying to get any single support rep in trouble, otherwise, the text is unchanged:

<Agent>.: Hi, my name is <Agent>.. How may I help you?
<Agent>.: Hello Ian. My name is <Agent>. I will be your Chat Representative. How are you today?
ian : Can you tell me where your pricing is for domain registration? i can't find a link on your home page and the link i found in your support section just takes me back to the home page.  http://www.register.com/about/pricing/general.rcmx
<Agent>.: I do apologize Ian, but our site does not have the pricing, because we offer several different packages, and discounts for services.
If you can let me know what you are looking for, I can certainly help you.
ian : I just want to know the pricing for registering a domain name - i'm not interested in any packages or other services, just registering domain names
<Agent>.: Is it a .com domain name? This would help determine the price as well.
ian : yes - you don't just have a listing of domain name registration pricing? But yes, right now i'm looking for .com
<Agent>.: No, unfortunately we do not have it listed online.
.Com domain names are $37.00/ year.
ian : i know this isn't your fault and I'm not trying to blame you - but i think it's a pretty crap thing to do not to display your prices. If your prices aren't good ($37/year is not good) then lower your prices. Hiding the prices just seems like a dirty business practice to me. Again - not trying to blame you I know it's not your decisions. Just maybe you can pass it along to someone. thanks for your help
<Agent>.: We do not "hide" our prices, but because we offer so many other services, and domain extensions, etc, we do not display them so that they are not confusing.
I appreciate your suggestion, and will pass it along.
ian : sorry but i disagree - you do hide them. what you just said is an excuse. i dont think it's confusing to just have a page which displays the price of registering a domain name. thanks anyhow

Thinking of doing business online? Don't use paypal

http://blog.apparentsoft.com/business/124/is-paypal-good-for-your-microisv-business-a-short-paypal-horror-story/

I've had this same experience with paypal several years ago. They closed my account because they thought some transactions violated their terms of use. They would not tell me which specific transactions. They gave me conflicting information when i called them. And they also sat on the money in my account for 180 days before they let me withdraw it. Which is basically their way of forcing you into giving them a 180 day interest free loan.

I will never use them ever again for any online business. And i try to avoid using them for paying for anything online when ever i can. I refuse to link any bank account to them and if I wind up with any money in my paypal account i always spend it as soon as i can.

You might want to read this site as well before considering paypal: http://www.paypalsucks.com/

Paypal is not worth doing business with. The guys from the above post were lucky that they had a 2nd account to use. Otherwise they most likely would have lost ALL of their sales due entirely to paypal's unprofessional behavior.

Star Trek

Sorry, but as a trek fan, i have to vent. (some spoilers if you care)

The new movie is a good scifi movie, but barely an ok trek movie. The plot though was just really stupid.

A giant mining ship from the future comes back and is able to destroy an entire fleet of ships, but the enterprise by itself was able to destroy an entire salvo of the same torpedoes that destroyed an entire fleet. And the main component of the ship, the drill, can be knocked out with a handgun. And no one on the entire planet of vulcan had a single ground based weapon to shoot that thing with? Hell they could have just flown a shuttle pod into it. And lets not forget we have a ship full of romulan MINERS, not soldiers. But somehow nero is able to convince them all that they should wait around 25 years in the past to get revenge on someone who tried to help them - instead of like, going back to romulus and warning everyone. Hell, they could have taken the red matter and destroyed the star that destroyed romulus. (i'll ignore for the moment that any star going super nova, even if it was close enough to somehow destroy the planet, would still take YEARS to get there) But no, lets run around blowing up planets instead of saving the people we're so upset over losing. Convenient that the romulan mining ship happens to look so evil as well, instead of looking like, i dont know, a mining ship.

And lets see, spock needs a single drop of that red stuff to destroy a star, but decides to take along 50 gallons of it - were there a lot of other stars he planned on snuffing out? And when was the last time spock willingly surrendered such a powerful weapon to the enemy? He would have swallowed the red stuff before handing it over.

And i have to say, the engineering section of the enterprise sucked. no fancy words, it just sucked. it looked like a sewer treatment plant, which isn't too far from the truth. They shot all those scene in a beer factory. Did anyone tell abrams that the enterprise runs on anti-matter and not steam power? I mean the bridge looks like a futuristic glamor studio but the engineering section looks like it was processing toilet flushes.

I'll ignore for now that kirk just happens to get marooned on the same planet as future spock AND scotty. And I'll ignore that they happen to also be located in the same area on the planet. And i'll ignore that they managed to beam themselves not only onto a ship at warp, but several light years away.

I cant ignore though that a fresh out of the academy cadet is promoted to first officer after he sneaks onto a ship he was never supposed to be on. I get that pike thinks kirk has potential, but frankly, that's bullshit. Seems a bit unrealistic to me that a 17 year old chekov is also serving on the bridge of the fleets flagship. So he entered starfleet academy when he was 14? And i call bullshit on kirk being promoted to captain of the enterprise the next day, even if he did save the earth.

And why exactly did vulcan need to be destroyed in this 'reboot' ? Do they actually have something interesting planned with that or was just it some random crap they included?

And what was the deal with spock and uhura? His mom dies and suddenly they are in love with each other? The characters themselves were ok. I think quinto did a good job as spock. I think pine did an ok job, although i think they tried to make kirk a little too over the top. Scotty was too goofy - did anyone actually watch any of the original cast? Uhura was ok. chekov was ok, sulu was ok. I think the best job was Urban as McCoy.

It felt like they tried to cram too much stuff into 2 hours. if they make 2 more movies (apparently they bought the rights to do so) maybe those will be a little better paced and have a somewhat realistic plot. I hope so - because maybe then it'll be a little bit more trek, and a little less 'reboot'.

is google becoming evil? they are breaking website keyword tracking

Googles moto says not to be evil. But a change to their search page is going to be very evil for a lot of web site owners.

Normally when someone searches on google and clicks a link in the search results, the website owner can determine what you searched for that brought you to their site. This is very useful since it makes it easy to figure out what people are interested in and can be extremely useful for websites that make money off of ads on their webpages. For example, if people who search for 'tires' come to my page a lot, then someone who sells tires would probably be more interested in buying ad space on that page then say someone who sells cookies (unless they are cookies shaped like tires ... mmmm...cookie tires). 

However, a new change google is starting to push out will break this. This means a LOT of web site owners who depend on this information are going to suddenly find it missing. This is information that is basically a web standard for all search engines.  The ability to track keywords is something that works with all the major search engines.

You can tell if this is happening the next time you do a search by looking at the url after you submit your search term.

If the url looks something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=dogs

Then when you click on one of the links in that search result, the website you go to will know you searched for 'dogs'.

However, if the url looks something like this:

http://www.google.com/#q=dogs

And you click one of the links, they wont know what you searched for.

Hopefully google will reconsider deploying this new change, because it's going to hurt a lot of websites out there.

Free disk partitioning tool - gparted

I've used partition magic in the past, and it's a great tool. But it does cost money, and being able to do the same thing for free is always nice :)

It's called gparted. It's free and open source and runs on top of linux (don't worry it works with windows, and you don't need to install anything).
gparted.sourceforge.net

You can download it from there. Download the stable cd ISO image. At this point you can burn this ISO image to a CD using whatever cd burning application you normally use. Once the disk is finished, just reboot your PC and select the option to choose your boot device and select the CD drive to boot from. Everything runs off the CD so there's no need to install anything to the hard drive.

If you prefer, you can boot gparted from from a usb thumb drive. Its a fairly small boot image, so a 256meg thumb drive will give you more then enough space.

To do this, you can download another open source and free utility called UNetbootin from here: unetbootin.sourceforge.net Again, there's nothing to install. Just run the program you downloaded, select the ISO image, choose the gparted iso you downloaded, select your thumb drive and let it do it's thing.
WARNING: doing this will erase whatever is currently on your thumb drive so make sure you've backed up anything on there you might need.

After you do this, plug the thumb drive into whatever PC you want to use this on, reboot the PC and at the start up screen, look for whatever key combo you need to press to select the boot device, and if you are using a relatively modern PC you should have a USB option. Select that and in a few seconds you should be up and running with gparted. It has a fully graphical interface and you can use the mouse and keyboard to shrink, enlarge, move, delete or copy partitions from the same drive or another another drive.

There you go - totally free hard drive partition management (except for the cost of a CD or thumb drive).

Windows 7 - first impressions

So just in case anyone is curious, the next version of windows after vista is called Windows 7. Microsoft decided to go back to just numbering them instead of giving them names.

Anyhow, I've been beta testing it for the last week or so. I have to say so far i am impressed. This is the first beta release and so far I've found no major bugs and only some very minor ones. I even pushed my luck and decided to try doing an upgrade install from vista ultimate to 7 ultimate and .... it worked! So far I've only found two programs that didn't work after the upgrade. one of them i fixed by just uninstalling and reinstalling it. The 2nd one i just haven't gotten around to trying to fix yet since i don't use it that often. Perhaps ironically, one of the problem programs was chrome. although that was fixed with a command line switch: --in-process-plugins

performance seems to be a little better then it was under vista. networking seems to work more reliably then vista. Although the network icon is very uninformative. No indication of if you are no longer connected to the internet like in vista, nor is there any indication of network activity. Hopefully this will change before the beta is over.

Also, i do not like the new task bar in 7. Instead of getting the row of buttons/title bars on the task bar, you now just get a small button with just an icon of the program on it - no text. When you mouse over the icon, you'll get a small window preview of whats running. If it's something like IE or FireFox that has multiple tabs, you'll get a preview window for each tab and clicking the window open the browser up with that tab open. I suppose for someone who has a LOT of stuff open, maybe this would be nicer since you can fit more stuff on the taskbar. And you do have the option to turn off the grouping (like you do in xp and vista) so that if you open a few copies of the same program, each copy gets its own button instead of being grouped under one button. But with just icons and no text, it would be a pain to find the right icon since they'll all look the same. I haven't checked yet to see if you can get the same taskbar look and feel as from xp and vista.

The start menu works basically the same as it does in vista, which i think is better then xp. You can type in a few letters and it will (quickly) find everything that matches. So if you have a lot of things installed, you don't have to scroll through a long program list. you can just click start and type a few letters to quickly get to what you want. Windows explorer though gets a bit different. In addition to the normal things, you now also have 'libraries'. These are just basically quick ways of accessing all your photos, videos, documents etc. It will search for all your files of certain types and then display them in one grouping.

So far it looks good. Although again, just like vista, I'm not sure there's enough there to be worth the upgrade price, especially if you are upgrading from vista. Hopefully MS will offer a hefty discount to upgrade from vista.

problems changing a readonly text box

Just ran into this problem today. I had a page which was running under .net 1.1
This page had a textbox which was set in the aspx page to readonly=true. there was a 2nd page which was changing the value of the text using some javascript. This all worked.

When i upgraded to .net 2.0 though i ran into problems. The text of the box would appear to change, but the value that actually came through was the original default value. My client side validation passed, but the server side did not since it was still seeing the default value. Turns out that setting the textbox to readonly really is readonly :)

You can work around this issue by not setting readonly in the aspx file. Instead go into your codebehind and use TextBoxID.Attribute("readonly") = true - you'll now have a text box that the user can't (easily) change but you can still change the value of the textbox in your code using javascript.

New microsoft commercial with Jerry Seinfeld & Bill Gates

I'd say this is a good commercial for vista - it leaves me with the same feeling i get when thinking about vista - *shrug* eh.

cool service to test website on multiple browsers/os

I discovered a cool little service that you can use to test how your websites behave on many different browsers and several operating systems. It's called CrossBrowserTesting.com. The service starts off free, limiting you to 5 minutes each session but unlimited sessions. This is usually good enough to give a website a quick once over or to test some specific functionality of a site.  

You log into the site, request a session, pick which operating system you want to work in which determines which browsers you'll have access to, and then using a VNC like interface directly in the browser window, you get access to the system desktop where you can open which ever browser you like and load up your website. 

If you need more then 5 minutes a session, you can buy 5 minute block intervals starting at $1 each. If you buy them in bulk (starts with 6 or more) the costs go down.

I think this would be an invaluable service for any web developer/designer.

Chrome - the google web browser

So some of you may or may not have heard by now that google, somewhat suddenly, announced availability of a browser they developed. I'm typing this blog post using it. You can download it from www.google.com/chrome - it will live side by side with IE, FF etc.

It does have some rendering quirks on various sites, but for the most part it works. And when it does work, it works fast. It renders pages noticeably much faster then IE6 does. And perhaps even a tad bit faster then FF3. It has tabs which sit all the way at the top of the window. And one nice thing about them is that each tab runs in it's own process so if one crashes, only the one tab goes down. It comes with it's own task manager to monitor the tabs (shift-esc to bring it up) which will show you the cpu, memory and network usage of each tab, plus plugins.

Another nice little feature when you first start it (and it starts as fast as it renders) are medium sized icons on the start page of the most frequently visited sites. I also noticed it will let you resize a multi-line text box it make it easier to type.

And for those of you who prefer to surf anonymously, it comes with an incognito mode, which will basically erase the history, cookies etc of that session once you close the browser. 

I also just noticed one other little feature. The little icon in the corner of the tab will turn grey and rotate counter-clockwise if its trying to connect to a website, and it will turn blue and rotate clockwise if it's downloading content from a site.

If you are using it and notice anything else cool (or not cool) about it, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

competition for google?

I heard them mention on the radio today some new search engine called cool, although it's spelled cuil. They boast that they have indexed 3x as much content as google has.

I've tried 2 searches on them so far and I'm not impressed. Search results took a while to show up on my first search, which was for the maximum memory card size for my camera. It returned just 3 results. The #1 result was for a website which doesn't appear to exist anymore. The 2nd result was also for a website which doesn't exist anymore. Just some parked domain name with a bunch of ads on it now. The 3rd and final result was at least almost on topic. It pulled up a page selling a similar model camera with a bunch of user comments on it. Although no where is my particular model mentioned on the page.

I tried a 2nd search at random for some information related to an online game. Cuil returned ZERO results. Google returned pages of results, although I admit I didn't look past the first page since the first search result was all I really would have needed.

In both searches i typed in the exact same words. I used it without any quotes since I think the average user doesn't use quotes when searching.

There is one thing about cuil I like - if you happen to actually get a page or two worth of results, they display the results in 2 or 3 columns, so you can see more results on the page then with google. You get more a little more sumary text and you get a small image displayed next to each result. Although it would probably be a good idea for them to offer an option to turn off the little image in favor of speeding up the page and having more room for text.

With cuil's layout, I got 8 results in my 3rd search on the top of the page without scrolling, compared to 7 results on google. And cuil gave me a little more text for each result compared to google as well.

In my opinion, Cuill.com isn't ready for prime time yet. Their search results are too sporadic and inaccurate. And their site takes way too long to return the results. Although it's possible this slow down is just growing pains. If they just recently got a lot of press, maybe their servers are getting hammered right now.

I would give them plus marks for the display of the information when they do return relevant results. They do give you a choice of displaying 2 or 3 columns, however, the size of the columns does not change, so it's rather pointless.

I'd say wait 2-3 months and check back.