Newb Tech’s purpose

I’ve been thinking.. This blog was initially created as a personal blog to hold my thoughts and views on practically anything. So I wanted an online diary of sorts. However, when i started setting up everything, a clear purpose behind this site suddenly eluded me.. and i started going in all sorts of tangents..

I saw that the majority of the blogs out there served two purposes: 1. a personal blog that was hardly visited apart from family and friends, and 2. a resource blog that specialized in one or more areas and over time grew to have a wider audience.

Also, i noticed resource blogs coming in many flavors. A lot of resource sites out there are simply portals that spin out dozens of posts every week with links to everything to do with their subject. This is "good" in some ways, but the articles are not really written by the site owners.. they are simply pointers to other peoples work.

Then you get the great tutorial sites that pick a product such as Photoshop and go hard out in teaching its audience on how to best use that product.

I didn’t (and still don’t know) the purpose behind my blog.. Ideally I want this site to be a place where people can come and see my experiences with test driving new applications or technology. This doesn’t mean that I need to be an expert at these applications. Rather its more of a casual look and more than just providing a blurb and link. Certainly a product may take more than one article to cover off and we want to start doing that as our knowledge of that product grows.

I want a wide set of audience and LOTS of comments :). I don’t want this to be a portal site as such (y’know… the articles that begin with "25 ways to do something" and end up with 25 links to other sites).

So, if there are any products out there that you want us to test drive and play around with and give our thoughts on, please let me know via email or leave a comment here. Our next applications will be the Zoho suite of online applications and ScreenToaster (a great little tool everyone can use to "Record" their desktop and create mini movies)..

Till then.. thanks for reading my ramblings and leave a frickin’ comment!

Microsoft IE 8.0 Browser Security best of all browsers?

security thumb Microsoft IE 8.0 Browser Security best of all browsers? Erm.. surely it can’t be true? Where has Firefox and Chrome gone? Could this be just another marketing hype released to coincide the release of Microsoft IE 8.0?

Just like the article announcing how IE8.0 beat Safari and Firefox in the Pwn2Own contest (forgetting to mention the wee lil fact that Google Chrome actually outlasted it.. – article from ITPro)…

NSS Labs recently released a paper that touts putting all the current browsers through over 154,000 individual tests over 12 days and coming up with some "interesting" results. In particular they were testing the browsers’ capability to intercept and stop Malware.

The tested applications included Safari, Chrome, IE8, IE7, Firefox and Opera. The article itself makes for an interesting read especially for the skeptics amongst us.

The actual article can be read (pdf format) by clicking here: Test Report

If you get a chance, please do have a quick squiz at the tests they performed and while they tried to be as unbiased as possible, most people will read it as very much a pro-microsoft article. Even withstanding the fact that IE7 was one of the lowest rated browsers in terms of malware security.

They did mention that Firefox added sites to their block list faster than IE, they went on to add that Firefox identified significantly fewer malware sites.. i just don’t like that word i guess… Also, i’m unsure if they used any add-ons in Firefox…

Still.. have a gander.. make your own mind up. As for me, I’ve got IE8, Chrome and Firefox installed on my machines and funnily enough, find an excuse to use them all at some point or other…

Let me leave you with an excerpt from one of their conclusions… surely the gap cannot be this much?
security2 thumb Microsoft IE 8.0 Browser Security best of all browsers? 
Again, the link to their PDF article is here: Test Report