My web hosting account came up for renewal this week, and I just can’t do it.  You see, about two months ago we had a little “incident” where several of my sites on the same host were defaced, with no good explanation as to how/why.  We suspected it had to do with a FrontPage Extensions vulnerability at our web host.  Which wouldn’t have been that big a deal if the note I sent via the company’s prominently displayed “Tell our CEO how we’re doing” link hadn’t been summarily ignored.  Twice.So this weekend, to take my mind off a grueling week at work (don’t ask - wasn’t pretty) I decided to drill in and migrate my stuff, including blahgKarma, to a new hosting account at A2 Hosting.  I found A2 via 43Folders (thank you Merlin), where they not only heartily endorsed A2 (they host 43F), but had a sweet 20% off coupon.  And, I could finally dump Windows hosting, which I’ve been wanting to get around to for some time, but haven’t.So far, so good.  The A2 control panel, cpanel, is WAY better than my last host’s.  And, Fantastico is making for some fun playing around with various Open Source web-based CMS installs, including Drupal which I used for a project last year and liked.Web hosting is certainly a commodity these days, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy it inexpensively AND have it work well.  Now if I could just find something with a cpanel equivalent on an OS X Server backend, I’d be REALLY happy… 

For anyone else out there working to move off Win to the Mac, here’s a tip…

If you intend to use an external drive to share between the machines, or to facilitate your transition, consider formatting it as FAT32. MacOS X will read from an NTFS volume, but is unable to write to NTFS. Sounds simple, right? Just connect the external drive to the PC, and use the Storage Manager to format and move away…

Not so fast there, Junior. XP has a limitation as to the maximum size FAT32 partition it can create. While FAT32 partitions can (at least theoretically) be as large as 2 terabytes, the Win2K and later (at least through XPSP2) can only format up to a 32 gigabyte partition. Which is a pain when you have about 120 gigs to move around, and have a 250 gig drive (9 partitions, anyone? I don’t think so). Why? Because monster FAT32 partitions don’t perform as well as monster NTFS partitions, that’s why. Makes sense…

What to do? Well, you could format an NTFS partition and then deal with it being read-only on the Mac. Or, you could look around the Web and find the ever-cool “SwissKnife v3” drive manager from CompuApps. SwissKnife, found at CNET’s Download.Com site, took longer to download than it did to create the requisite 248 gig partition. I moved a few files to the drive, connected it to my loaner PowerBook, and then dragged a couple of files to it and guess what - IT WORKED!

I’m in the process of switching from Windows to the Macintosh, and today realized what Reason Number Two is for me doing so.

Despite using two spyware programs that actively scan for intrusions, PLUS Norton’s Internet Security Suite, the browser on my Windows laptop was hijacked a couple of days ago. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to figure out what hijacked it and how to un-hijack it (since the security programs STILL don’t pick up the problem), and then I accidentally tripped over it this morning. While running an Ad-Aware Professional spyware scan, I happened to see a path I didn’t recognize, inside my Windows user folder. Sure enough, there was a folder in there innocuously called “complete”, but hidden from view as it was flagged as a System folder. It revealed a small package - just 2.6 GIGS of crap .zip files that point to all sorts of BS on the Internet - ads for software, services, prescription drugs at a discount - you name it, it had it.

Its going to be really nice to work on a machine that’s not being so heavily targeted by the crap-eating dogs that develop spyware and viruses. Oh, I know - to plenty of folks the Mac is just that much more inherently secure than Windows, and I believe that to a degree, but lets face it - the sociopaths writing this slime are going after the big hits, and with Apple being the BMW of the personal computer industry with around 5% of the overall market, part of the pressure on Windows has to be related to big bang for the buck.

See… size does matter. In this case, smaller is better. Buh-bye Windows, hello Mac.

I scan around 150 blogs at the moment via RSS, and

I’ve read about folks who use blogs as a way to capture info they’re likely to be interested in (themselves) later, and until recently thought “Why would you want to do that? - Just store the stuff on your HD”. Well, today I think I figured it out - my hard drive doesn’t really have an application that would allow me to annotate the material like I can on a blog (read: mini content management system).

Lets say I want to start tracking “stuff” about a particular topic. I want to make notes on the “stuff”, link to websites, maybe maintain a file or two (although not many), etc. I could do this in my main blog by tagging the content… or, if I think a different audience may be interested in the material (like mainly me, but perhaps a few others), I could just jam it all into a separate blog altogether.

I’m thinking about trying this… WordPress has a decent tagging mechanism and I may cross-post the stuff to both blogs, but this will give me a chance to check out what (if any) multi-blog capabilities WP has. Wish me luck!

Hey TechWatchers… this just in, from Halley

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