Josh the Aspie’s Blog

This is part three in a series of articles where I define different slang words used to describe different kinds of Hardware, or Software - often clumped together as ‘ware when talking about these terms.

Crapware is a term that has recently been popularized in the computing world. Crapware is basically a way of describing, in one word “All the crap that comes loaded on computers”.

Crapware describes the majority of the software that has been pre-installed on your computer without your asking for it. This is especially the case if you can’t think of why you would ever want it. Most of the computers you buy from an online retailer like Dell or a big box store like Best Buy is going to come with a large amount of software pre-installed on it, much of it trial or partial versions of that software that you’ll never actually use. This is Crapware.

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For those of you who are new to Josh the Aspie’s Blog, I’m currently working on a series of posts to let people know what certain terms on the internet mean when it comes to software.

In cases where the meaning is somewhat nebulous, I give the terms as I use them, rather than the meaning as used by the companies that don’t want the term applied to their software. Most of these terms have at least a partially negative connotation, so you can see why most companies wouldn’t want those labels applied to their software.

In this installment I’ll be talking about “Spyware”, one of the phrases most commonly applied to internet software.

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This is a fairly common computing term in the programming circles I frequent. Unfortunately most of my non-programming friends, and even some older programmers I talk to don’t know what the color of someone’s “hat” has to do with the internet, or programming.

The short answer to this is that in old westerns and cartoons about westerns, the hero wears a white hat, and stands for honesty and doing the right thing. The villain, meanwhile, wears a black hat, and is the villain because he doesn’t care who has to get hurt for him to get what he wants. Sometimes a hero will wear a black hat, and the villain a white one, but it’s relatively uncommon, and usually comes up when the villain thinks himself to be a hero, or when the hero has a dark past he has to overcome.

This is similar to how in many books and movies the good knight wears white, or has glistening armor, while the villain of the story wears armor painted a matte black.

Grey is simply the color in between these two extremes. However to get a more in depth understanding of all this, we’re going to have to look at what colors tend to represent in the culture that spawned these idioms.

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There are a lot of different kinds of software available to be installed on the internet. Many of them are available for free. Others aren’t.

A lot of the time, certain terms are bandied about the net about this software, and to someone who isn’t an experienced netizen, this can be rather confusing. Even worse, most companies that produce software that is in one of the negative categories create their own definitions of these terms, so that they can artificially exclude their software from that category.

So I figured that over the next few days I would provide descriptions of these terms, and give examples of software that fits in these categories. Keep in mind, these are the terms as I use them, and some people will have differing definitions… such as anyone who produces any of the software I place in these categories.

Today we’ll start with Adware.

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Not only have the students that were killed and injured and their families suffered, but now they are being exploited as well. There is, of course, the exploitation of the media. All you have to do to see this, is turn to CNN or Fox news. But in addition to this, you now have people registering the domain names of the shooter and their family members.

I found out about this through Thor Schrock’s Technology Blog, and Thor found out about it from Garry Conn, a blogger who talks about ways to make money online.

But not only are the domain names of those involved in the shooting being exploited, the disaster as a whole is.

The following domains have also been registered.

VIRGINIATECHLAWSUITS.com
VATECHLAWSUITS.com
VATECHLAWSUIT.com
VATECHLAWSUIT.info
VATECHLAWSUITS.info
VIRGINIATECHLAWSUITS.info

One great bit of functionality I have been told that Wordpress has is pingbacks, which apparently are like trackbacks, but harder to spam. I’m going to be testing this capability out over the next few hours, to see if I can generate any pingbacks for Josh the Aspie’s blog, now on Wordpress.

As you can see if you click on the title above, the address for individual posts no longer uses the search engine unfriendly method of post variables where the page name is appended with a question mark, and a string of variables. Instead it uses the date, and name of the post.

Well, in case you’re reading this through a text browser, or are wondering what on earth is up with the site, I have installed Wordpress, imported my Nucleus blog, and am now looking into the options, power, and functionality of this new format. Unfortunately, one of the first things I’ve noticed about Wordpress is that my new blog doesn’t seem to validate.

If I can’t figure the validation problem out, I may well be moving back to Nucleus.

Recently someone clued me into a place called “Technorati”, which is the leading authority on the section of the web consisting of dynamically updated webpages such as Blogs and Forums. If you’re a blogger like I am, you can actually claim your Blog there and create a Technorati Profile, like the one I’m linking you to now.

Hopefully claiming my blog will help me get a -bit- more traffic and commenting here. In the mean time, I have a few more posts I’ve been working on. Hopefully I’ll have them up later today.

Well, I’ve been trying to figure out some way to get the Nucleus “Fancy URLs” to work over the past few weeks. The Fancy URL core mod doesn’t work on our server, and so far all of the url re-write mods that I’m at all interested in have it as a pre-requisite. I may be looking at different blogging software in the near future.

For those of you who don’t know, Fancy URL is an optional modification to the Nucleus software family of blogs, which allows you to convert the post data urls such as http://blog.joshtheaspie.com/index.php?itemid=24 to one that looks like http://blog.joshtheaspie.com/item/24 which are far more Search Engine friendly.