Supportus Maximus Blog

Jill Bolte Taylor, who is a neural anatomist, talks about her own stroke. This is one of those speeches that will literally change the way you look at life and your experience in it.

Dear Clients:

I have been seeing a lot of pretty tough viruses lately. They are getting more and more clever and the anti-virus software seems to be losing the battle at this moment in time. The clever thing about the viruses I've encountered recently is that they are designed so that it is very difficult for you to use the tools to eliminate them or prevent more from coming in.

Here are some tips about how to defend yourself against viruses.

1. Install some kind of virus protection on your computer or on your network. - Whether you have a Macintosh or a PC computer, you are vulnerable to viruses. If you have a Windows computer, you are definitely much more likely to get a virus, or some kind of spyware. Using some type of antivirus is a must. It is true Apple computers have much less market share than Windows computers, so they haven't had much trouble with viruses, but it is probably only a matter of time, as they become more and more popular, that they too will have to contend with viruses. Why not be ahead of the game and have some antivirus already installed when that day comes?

2. Have a router or firewall installed on your network. - Even if you have only one computer on your network, you should have some kind of hardware firewall that keeps your computer safe from hacking. The best way to do this is just to get a simple router. I recommend Linksys Routers, but there are many other kinds that can be obtained cheaply. If you have a wireless network, chances are you have one of these routers already, but if your computer is plugged directly into a modem, your computer may be sitting directly on the internet waiting to be attacked.

3. Keep all of your installation disks and licenses for everything. - If your computer is compromised by some kind of malicious attack, you can never be sure that it is completely out of your system, unless you do a complete clean install of your entire operating system and software. This can be time consuming, but it is much more time consuming and costly, if you don't have your software licenses and original software. The most important of these is the original disk that comes with your computer.

4. Back up your important data. - The most important, irreplaceable data on your computer are the things that you create, whether they be documents, photos, artwork, emails, music, financial records or whatever you have generated. Make sure you have a backup of this data. Onsite backups and offsite backups can be critical to keep this important, irreplaceable information. The next important items are the things you've bought or collected. This is everything from bookmarks, to software licenses to music.

5. Be careful where you surf and what you click on. - This applies to emails as well as surfing on the web. Don't click on anything unless you are absolutely sure of the source. If it sounds like a scam, it probably is. Know the difference between a pop-up window on the internet and one on your computer. Often times websites will try to imitate the error messages on your computer to trick you into downloading something destructive to your computer. Also emails will arrive in your inbox with either a malicious attachment or a link asking you to log into your account or download something. The scams are too numerous to mention here, but when in doubt, don't click. Investigate first and be absolutely sure.

These are a few things you can do to protect yourself. If you have any questions, you need one-one-one training, anti-virus or backup, feel free to call me or email me.

Best,
Joel Marshall
www.supportusmaximus.com
310-592-5848

Remote Support Anywhere in the World:
http://www.crossloop.com/supportus

Please take a moment look at whether you have a backup of your computer data, and if so, ask yourself how solid this backup is. If your computer died today, what would you lose? Chances are you have important documents, your family pictures, your writings, your correspondence and many other valuable things on your computer.

I have seen a lot of hard drives die lately. I suspect that this is because they are getting to be larger and larger capacity and tend to have more moving parts that can go bad. Hard drives as we know them are not a stable technology and soon will be replaced with solid state drives, which are much more reliable because they don't have moving parts. All hard drives fail, it's just a matter of when.

Please take a moment to see what your situation is with your backup. Ideally you should have two backups. There should be a drive attached to your computer, or on your network where you backup your data. This should backup as much as possible and should continue to backup on a daily or weekly basis.

Then there should be some kind of off-site backup. This can either be another external hard drive that you backup data on and then take to a relative's house or it can be one of the many online backup systems. This is in case you (God forbid) have a fire, flood, earthquake or theft that leaves you without your computer and your backup hard drive, or if your main hard drive fails and your onsite backup fails too.

Supportus Maximus can design a solid backup system for you and implement it. If you need us to check to see if yours is up to snuff, we would love to do so. It's much more pleasant than trying to recover data once it's lost.

Best,

Joel Marshall
Supportus Maximus, Inc.
www.supportusmaximus.com
323-634-9098

What is a content management system?

A Content Management system or CMS, is a tool to use on a website that enables you to quickly and easily store and display information. On websites, this information could be blog posts like this one here, it could be products, it could be photographs, and any other bits of information you can dream up. Common open-source content management systems include Drupal (used here), Wordpress, and Joomla!. When we say "open-source" we mean that the system is freely available and the code that makes up the program is maintained and improved by a community.

The benefit to using a content management system on your website is that you can build in a lot of functionality to your site without having to build the structure yourself. The management of the data is usually done through an online database, and the presentation of the data and the manipulation of the data is done through programming code languages such as php and asp. These are just languages that enable the content management system to get data from the databases that are attached to it. The databases of open-source content management systems are MySQL.

Many times the common content management systems can be installed from the control panel of your managed hosting plan.

I have just purchased blogo by a company called brainjuice, and and I'm using the Browser Integration, which is described her in this video that I posted here using Broser Integration. Get it?
Check out this video. This is a wonderful product that makes blogging much easier on Wordpress, Drupal and other Blogging tools. For the Mac, this is the best I've found so far. It also has a real sense of style that I appreciate greatly.
The reason I've moved to this tool is because Wordpress seemed to be having trouble with my Safari 4 Beta browser. When I went to add a picture, it froze. That was kind of a drag.
This is a Drupal site but I find that Blogo works great here too.
Previous to using blogo, I actually was booting into Windows to use Windows Live Writer, because I couldn't find a blogging application that worked as well. Now I think I've found it in Blogo.