David Strom

What do the services Pixelpipe.com, Etherpad.com, Tr.im and namechk.com have in common? All four are tools that I can’t live without these days and didn’t even know existed a few months ago. That is how fast the Internets are changing. I suggest you give each of the four a quick try out and see if […]

Proxy servers have been in the news as of late, both as a result of the Iran putative election and a new legal case where Microsoft is suing alleged purveyors of advertising click fraud. I thought I would take you through what proxies are, how they can be used for both good and evil, and […]

For those of you that feel good about yourselves because you are IM’ing and Tweeting, your online life is about to get a whole more complicated thanks to Google. More on that in a moment, first let me set the stage. I remember back in the day when many of us first got on email […]

When I was growing up as a nerdy teen on Long Island, needless to say I wasn’t one of the Popular Kids. Back then we called it Junior High rather than the current appellation Middle School and now nerds are the new cool kids. In my youth, we didn’t have reality shows where beauties met […]

What is the cheapest PC you can buy that can sport 8GB of RAM? You would think this was a simple question, and within a few minutes of online shopping you could figure it out. Alas, this has turned into Yet Another Project, and I am nowhere near the answer. Why would anyone want such […]

It is time once again for our annual look at what has happened and will happen in the server virtualization space. For the historical record, check out the comparison of VMware vs. Microsoft vs. Xen from 2008 and the same virtualization vendor comparison from 2007. In the past year, Microsoft has come out with Hyper-V, […]

This isn’t any April fool’s story, but a rather depressing one about how easy it is to compromise a corporate network. Markoff’s recent story in the New York Times got me looking for the research paper by Anderson and Nagaraja that should be required reading by anyone in the email and network security space. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-746.html […]

In preparation for a keynote speech that I am giving next month, I took some time to look at a variety of social media consolidation and notification services. You might find one or more of them useful for your purposes, even for those of you that still don’t poke, tweet, or know what RSS really […]

If you are looking for something better than Google Docs to work on a document or a presentation with a colleague, this column is for you. I will touch on four alternatives that are all better solutions and can give you ways to create your work product faster. I have tried Google Docs in a […]

While many of us marvel at those Web sites and “viral videos” that take the Internets by storm and quickly gain viewership, I think the sign of truly successful sites are those that more slowly and incrementally gain their fans. The motto for today’s essay is that slow and steady will win the online video […]