Lost!

Best Buy has been having odd problems lately. Most recently, they called the police after a customer tried to pay a bill with $2 bills - legal tender. At first, the clerk didn’t want to take the bills, responding “I don’t have to take these if I don’t want to.”

After a brief exchange of idiocy on the side of Best Buy, they called the Police because they thought something was wrong, even asking if the bills where real. The poor guy was handcuffed in the store for using legal US Tender and the Secret Service was called in to handle the situation while the guy was cuffed and leg ironed in the police station. Check out the full story.

I’m not in the US, but from the stories I’m seeing floating around on the Internet, when I get back, I won’t be buying anything from them.

I’ve made the decision to start separating my general content and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) content. This means that my rants and such will stay here, but all my Alfresco, SharePoint and MOSS will be posted onto a separate website. Basically the ECM content is starting to get a little popular and people don’t want to dig through all the other non-related crap, so this is more of a divide and conquer attempt.

Before everyone panics, I will keep all the older posts, but migrate copies of them to the new website. I will also finish the Alfresco vs SharePoint (MOSS) series on both websites. After that series is done, all ECM related content will be located at……. www.protocol16.com If you’re a geek like I am, you should either know (this falls within the super-geek category, which I am not) or be able to find out what Protocol 16 is. After that, you’ll understand why I chose this domain name for my ECM related content - describes it perfectly.

I will also add a temporary header across this site for ECM redirection and all ECM stories will have a link inserted in the top to redirect any visitors coming from Search Engines directly to the new article on Protocol16.

On top of all of that, I’ve been running Lost! long enough to know that I want to customize some stuff on the new site. So, a new theme (which I’ve customized), new Plugins, etc. Whew - lots of work. I honestly have not made up my mind about Ads. I originally didn’t believe in them but started using them to attempt to supplement my bills, but I haven’t had too much luck. I may place ads on Protocol16 and not here, I may not have ads anywhere - only time and my stubbornness will tell.

Now, one thing I will not do is transfer all the comments over to the new website. Sorry, but it’s just too tedious to pull the comments, redo the back end to point to the proper post, etc. Not my cup of tea. With the new stories pointing to the old stories in an [Editors Note] style, you’ll get to see comments either way.

All of this would have happened a few weeks ago, but right as I finished up customizing WP, a new version was released and I decided I might as well jump in and break everything again. That and I couldn’t make up my mind over Theme issues…

We all know what Captcha’s are (ok, if you don’t, they’re the annoying things that you have to figure out what letters are in an image then type them in to get page X to do Y), some of us find them annoying as bloody hell as well. I personally don’t like them because I’ve seen how badly they interfere with disabled users.

Some companies have even gone so far as to allow people to listen to Captchas so disabled users can solve them.

Anyway, someone has come up with an uterly brilliant idea that is starting to change my mind about Captchas and the like. Continue reading…

If you use Berlac Adviser, need to read this now. If you use Berlac to run your software reports, it may have ended up on the internet in some form or fashion. This allows people to use Google to search for the license keys of software installed on your computer. Check it out (Google::XP Pro Keys).

That said, any software that you paid a large amount of money for (and it talks back to “home”), you need to be careful. This stuff posts the license IDs inside the reports and when you post, it’s public info. For instance:

Adobe Systems, Inc. - Adobe Acrobat 4.0 KWM3xxxxxxxxx095-477
Microsoft - Internet Explorer 55274-640-1619103-23620
Microsoft - Plus! 55705-980-0000007-04234
Microsoft - SQL Server xxxx33-3×5-88×1-056xxx
Microsoft - SQL Server 2000 5xxxx-335-88xxx-0xxxxx21
Microsoft - MSDN 58xxxx-362-54xxxx32-04xxx45 (Key: R2D43xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx29DY) (……..OH YEA BABY!)
Microsoft - Office 54185-640-0xxxxxxx3-17976
Microsoft - VisualStudio xxxxxxxxx524-652-0xxxxxxxxxx-18592 (Key: D64Gxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx2YDYB) (…..Good stuff!)
Microsoft - VSA 55524-652-0xxxxxxxx007-18592 (Key: D64xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxYDYB)
Microsoft - Windows XP Professional 5xxxxxxxx4-640-1xxxxxxx-23xxxxxxxx
Microsoft - Plus! for Windows XP 55705-980-0000007-04234

That was some random developer that posted their report online. Granted, he doesn’t have that much licensed software installed (about a quarter of what I do), but it’s enough to mess things up for him and help you.

Story originally broke here.

It seems there’s big trouble in little china for Dell and Google. The OpenDNS project has an entry on their blog about a DNS Redirection Package causing all sorts of problems for mistyped domain names. It seems that past news of Earthlink and others providing custom redirection pages with advertisements has popped up again.

If you’re thinking about buying a Dell, I urge you to read this article, not to mention this is gooey information about a Google Partnership gone wrong.