Here is what the tweet will look like:

It brings you to the same type of site, again no malware or spyware executing by visiting there.

By now the site should be in your anti-phishing dialog (Chrome and Firefox caught it, I had to bypsas that to get to the site)

You do have to watch out because the method of distribution of this attack appears to be very SLOW to hit, I’ll see tweets come 2-3 or 15-20 minutes a part from the same account, so be wary of the tweets we’re in for a long night of this infection continuing to spread!

If you have been infected – Change your password, and make sure you haven’t stopped following people.   That’s all I can say for now.  Reference these links for more details on this Phishing Scam on Twitter

Twitter Phishing Scam with Blogspot – Post Mortem

Phishing Scams finally hit Twitter!

Gone Phishing

So on to our question of – Who is Craig Martin?

Which is a pretty good question, he appears to be a traveler and a Kiwi – I love Kiwi’s, especially with Strawberry!  

Well, for one thing by the look of his website he’s a pretty busy guy out wining and dining err wining.

He’s an editor of websites, so I’d suggest checking out his (various) sites, because from his main site alone, wow! Looks good to me! Very structured especially inlight of others trying to do similar and only inducing chaos.   I also think it’s cute how he says “zed” in his little video, not to mention that he has a whole introduction and video going on – while sitting in a beautiful garden!

He’s a traveler, adventurer, Ninja.  Okay, maybe he’s not a traveler, but he is a hardcore ninja, the likes of which you could only counteract with Pirates.

So, be sure to follow @craig_martin and check him out, he’s great and apparently with his following of 666 followers he’s in lieu with the devil so help break him from that habit! ;)

Oh, and he’s very friendly so check him out! :)

First of all, this involved infecting a single or single groups of people.

Distribution consisted of Infect a person by sending them to a site to capture their credentials.   Once those usernames and passwords were collected, they would then use those compromised credentials to send this same message (via DM) to their followers, and continue the spread.

If Joe has 10 followers and DM’s it to those 10, and those 10 have 10 followers and DM it to the next 10, shortly you’d have thousands who are redistributing this – So long as they’ve visited the site and entered their credentials to be captured.

I see a lot of anger “I’m going to get person ‘x’ who sent me this message!”

It’s not the fault of the sender, not entirely.   They were compromised by a phishing scam, it happens, you should work towards educating them instead of castrating them.  So next time it will be part of their sense to not transmit their username/password to an untrusted site.

How could this terrible thing have happened? Now I hate (BlogSpot, Twitter, Followers)

Don’t hate the player, just be glad that it WAS done this way (a semi-safe site with only a small portion of cookies which get added to your browser)   Here is what could have happened if it were introduced in an effective ‘distribution manner’.

You visit the site, you are prompted for credentials.  Perhaps you’re prompted for credentials, though the better payload would be in the form of Malware, Spyware, Phishing-ware, Password capturers, and a number of other infection mechanisms.

Once this would be done, you’d be able to compromised on a number of fronts and able to distribute this to millions instead of just the few followers you have – Infecting Facebook, your banking account, etc so on and so forth.

What can I do about this in the future?

The universal rule of communication, especially unsolicited is ask yourself a few questions.   Would you visit this link if you were having a conversation with the person? Having established rapport with them while talking? Yes likely.

However the tip here is – Random “auto-dm’s” does not guarantee a reason to visit their link.  Yes a lot of people DO send out auto-DM’s, to the bane of all of us (SocialToo/ChrisBrogan– Thanks for helping limit that exposure!)  However, don’t bane all communication in the future.   If you think someone seriously DID write a funny blogpost about you because the person knows you, definitely do check it out! But in all seriousness, if you’ve not had some kind of established communication with this person to justify it, and let alone it brings you to not a funny blogpost, but to a fake twitter login page – Be sure to question it and use your common sense here.

Oh, and be wary of ever entering your credentials – again unless you explicitly trust the source.

Hopefully this Post-Mortem helps you deal with this situation, I’m still waiting for my self-infected account to start tweeting out to me (Controlled infection) For every problem there will be people looking to exploit it, and others trying to solve and contain it.   I’ll be there trying to find new solutions and rid the world of future exposure as well :)

Good luck, and feel free to follow me if you like :) @cxi

In light of the recent Twitter Phishing Scam Jason asked this very poignant question:

Big question is do people truly believe someone would write a funny blog about them?

Well Jason, the honest to god truth is.  Yes, some of us indeed will, especially because YOU asked that question!

So, who is Jason Mitchener? That’s a good question, by his Profile it looks like he’s a Christian Author, Artist, Songwriter, Speaker, Aspiring Screenwriter – Physically disabled but Mentally thriving.   First of all, let me just say.  Wow.

That is quite a laundry list of not only accomplishments but aspirations and developments for any living person.

I visited Jason’s website JasonMitchener.com to find out more about him and to tell you the truth he sounds like a great person!   (Not to mention having a really decent webpage and layout!)

Jason is Confined to an electric wheelchair with a rare form of neuromuscular disease, using a ventilator to breathe.

His body may be confined, but his spirit soars free.

At this point, I want each of you to think for one moment, if you were in a similar position or situation would you have the same level of accomplishments?  Now put that to the side and ask yourself, what more you can do with the opportunity which is around you every day.

Jason is a perfect example of – It doesn’t matter what cards you’re dealt, it is how you play them, and by the looks of it Jason has a full house.

Jason you’re an honor and an inspiration to anyone who you might come across in all of the avenues you look to pursue and I’m glad that Twitter is graced with the opportunity for your poignant questions about who’d write a funny blog about them (Even if this isn’t funny, but rather insightful! :))

Thanks Jason and welcome to the tweetosphere!

You might receive a message similar to this:

Going to this page causes a redirect to this lovely site: http://twitter.access-logins.com/login/

Wow, that looks like the Twitter login page, however it isn’t Twitter.

Don’t enter your credentials, for you begin to enter into the world of being Phished!

Simply clicking on each of their links results in a broken page as well (That’s not very good phishing!)

Not Found

The requested URL /about was not found on this server.

Even their SignUp link is broken!

Once you enter your credentials you’re passed on to the Twitter.com mainsite and are able to see the basic information you’d see as if you were logging in to twitter.

I created a test account specifically to bring you that information :)

So, beware, and be sure not to visit this site and enter your credentials.

This is REAL Phishing in motion!

FYI: When this operates correctly, it appears to operate in an almost “Worm-like” fashion by infecting one person and then sending the payload “Auto-DM” to everyone that is following the person, so on and so forth while it spreads itself through the interwebs.

I’m still trying to self-infect a test account in order to see it in action, but so far on luck!

Just a recap of the last Dashboard snapshot, the portion we’ll be addressing is Visualizations!

Once you click that little gem of a link you’ll be brought to a page which looks like this:

As usual I censored out the Filer name, Serial # and other things, but I did leave in some nice details.   Note:   based on latest loaded AutoSupport: 2008/12/27 06:00:00 PM -06:00

The reason I mention that is, you can run one Visualization report for say, December, and then pull one for November and then compare them for whatever reasons you need.

That single benefit alone makes it even more super cool ;)

At this point, click one of the objects in there (System, Disks, Raid, QTrees or Storage)

It will render the data and make it available to you: You can also export it to PDF of XLS

Time for a view of the System Tab:

This is the top portion of the System Tab.  Notice how it breaks things down as if it were an actual system, giving you details.  Something which you may not notice unless you hover are these cool popups (Popups do not function in Chrome)

System Options

Services

VIF3

And so on and so forth! You can hover over any object (Interfaces, Shelves, Loops) and it will provide you information which you’d normally spend your time scouring through sysconfig’s in order to find.  That little bit right there is pretty damn sweet if you ask me!

Now when you go over to Disks you get a similar picture:

And hovering over one of our disks gives us information like this:

Details of a Disk 

Now taking this journey along, we visit the Raid View of the Disks:

This one is fairly straight forward, same type of pop-up data – Very useful, but not really super exciting, unless you are looking forward to this specific data (I do at times, but at the moment, It feels anti-climactic with what is coming ahead! :))

Here is where it gets really cool (Part1) with Volume Logical Layout: QTrees and LUNS:

This is the first of the coolness! Below I’ve included something with LUN’s in it so you get that perspective as well.  

And last but definitely not least Capacity View! *Cheer!* Err.. :

While there are so many things I can hover over and get details on (When you hover it will ofcourse tell you information about the volume, settings, etc) I want to make a special focus on the one with the yellow border!)

Notice the “See Recommendations” That is amazingly cool, if you ask me ;)

A little click on that and suddenly you see:

Remember as I’ve mentioned this before, this is a suggestion of discussing your state and that you ought to look at it.  If it is part of your design to run something where you get a notice, that’s just fine! If you weren’t aware of it on a volume though, definitely worth investigating!

And that brings us to the end of the NetApp Premium AutoSupport Visualizations segment.   I’d like to note the export to PDF and XLS are very cool, however you do not retain that same level of ‘interactive popups’ in PDF format that you do accessing it via WebGui.   So, this is a pure case of What you See is What you Get – once you export out to PDF.  And when you export to XLS You don’t get any pretty pictures, but you do get all of the raw data that you would see in the Popups, so they’re very complimentary to each other, and your ability to present and manipulate the data!

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this segment, I’ll be working on Configurations next so look forward to my next post!

Let me first off by telling you that @girlkawasaki is a very real person who has a very real blog.  They’re a very good friend of mine and are fortunate to have been an influence of the first draft of this (Originally it could have been the @cxi effect, but that’d be lame and the fruits of my labors resulted in the direct effect to apply to @girlkawasaki :))

So, WTF is this?!? – Alright, I’ll tell you!

While studying the way Twitter works, and more importantly how other people on Twitter work, I began to analyze some trends and patterns of likely events.  I personally love conversation on all topics, so I would follow people of all backgrounds on twitter.  When someone re-tweets someone else on something interesting, I follow them as well, continuously spreading the love of knowledge whether me sharing or simply learning from others experiences.

I noticed that when you add some people, you may get an immediate follow-back, and more often than not an Auto-DM (Direct Message).  A lot of people find these Auto-DM’s to be a bit annoying.  I simply find them to be rather insincere and only a little annoying. ;) I do like them because Auto-DM’s typically give rise to the fact that you’re using a 3rd party service like SocialToo or others which auto-sends that, and often Auto-follows on your behalf :)

So if you have a boatload of followers like I do (Hey I’m no @guykawasaki) But I do have a fair number of followers, many of which happen to reside in my own industrie(s) You’ll tend to find that by following a lot of people, a lot of people will often follow you back.

So in that first test, @girlkawasaki wanted followers for the same reasons I do (People to learn and share with) so she followed a bunch of the people I (@cxi) happen to have been following and a number of them ~half followed her back.  And this trend would carry on for some time, of people following her either directly (a response to being followed) or randomly based upon tweets, comments and interaction.

So the next phase of this, once @girlkawasaki was seen to have a comfortable following of stable tweets, I then tried to follow everyone (minus spammers and locked accounts) that happened to be *Following* her ~650 people were following @girlkawasaki which were then followed.

This is where it gets interesting.  You might think “I’ll get a mass of followers instantly!”  But that isn’t true and isn’t the case, because people use different services which have large databases with different scrubbing and updating routines.   The result turns out to be that after the first hour of following ~650 people,  ~130 twitter accounts followed back.

This is after the first hour ofcourse, and after several hours we’ll see how the numbers reflect.    I’m not saying you’re guaranteed to get hundreds of followers if you follow everyone who is following @girlkawasaki, however after one full day I’ll update this to include what the final number looks like.    The account I used in this test is indeed an actual real twitter account so these are real live and valid numbers to be working with. :)

This is not a test of a Denial of Service, more of an interest of parties out there (like me) who want to follow more people and want more followers so we can continue our conversation in life, in Tweetdom and most importantly with ourselves :)

This is no disrespect to anyone who follows @girlkawasaki and are interesting in what she tweets (both actual tweets and her wonderful blog posts :)) Just think how many followers you get by consequence when you don’t fall into that small criteria of auto-followers :)

Thanks, and don’t hesitate to ask any questions or leave any comments on your success! :)

Control Group: 373 followers in 17hrs, for 56% followback!

When that’s out of 650 that’s pretty amazing!

For those of who you use Google Apps will realize it is free, so you can host your email (as I do) and have the rest of the apps controlled and assigned out there for the huge cost of $0.00

Let’s take a look at a few of the distinctive features.

By the looks of it, I have Webpages (I don’t use) Start Pages (Don’t use!) Email (Do use!) Chat (Use while in Email) Calendar (Don’t use) and Sites also not being used.

One cool feature of User Accounts is Contact Sharing!

A cool specific features for the Domain Settings happen to be some granular control, one feature of which Sarah was interested in knowing!

Another cool bit is Service Setting does allow you granular control over each of your Services that you have available.   But those few things aside, this was just an extremely high level look at the Free offerings that Google has as part of Standard Edition

For those who remember the last Dashboard snapshot, we had a number of warnings and notices on this filer!

So, we’re going to drill down into the 12 warnings and 6 notices!

The Health Check Details will provide you with a number of “sections” which will provide a number of bits of information (You may have one or more of the areas I’ll be quoting out)

It all starts with the Health Check Analysis:

Very basic, straight forward and provides you with a timeline of what the recommendations are based upon.  This can be especially useful if you say “I fixed that!” you know when its referencing so as to not freak out!

Next comes System Level Warnings:

You’ll need to zoom in to see what kind of cool stuff there is, but I’ll zoom in for you in some areas I want to make sure you recognize.

That little bad boy there, oh my god, so cool if you happen to want to actually find out Why there is an error instead of knowing there is one.

So, if we click on that lun.offline message to figure out “WTF” is going on, we get this!

For simplicity sake, it showed us the exact error in the logs, showed us an indication as to why this happens and provides corrective actions on what to do!

There are other better examples of corrective actions (such as replace disk, unmap/remap luns, collect a trace) and so on and so forth to help you not only manage your system better, but come to better terms with the ‘warnings’ of your systems so you can be in better command and control of your own operations.

Next up is System Level Notices:

This is cool because it tells you something outright, and then provides you a link to a Bug Report on it, so you can follow the status especially if it applies to you!

Now this is cool as well, Volume Related Notices:

Note the disclaimer: These are based on conservative guidelines and may or may not be applicable to this system, but you should definitely know about it if you weren’t aware!

What I like about this, is it calls out specific volumes and discusses their snapshot usage, snapshot reserve and snapshot schedules (3 areas I find often accidently configured wrong and a hotbed of areas to clean up!)

And last but not least, another favorite area, Summary of Disks requiring Firmware Upgrade:

I personally hate playing guessing games of “Hmm, are my disks on the right rev? Do I need to upgrade?” etc, etc, etc… that same old story.  No matter how many types or different disks you have in the system, this Health Check will tell you the skinny.  

The only thing which would make this cooler, is Shelf Firmware Upgrade:

(I had to go to another filer to get this screen capture, because all these filers are current ;))

One of my favorite parts of this Health Check tool is that after I’ve upgraded and updated a system and I want to feel all warm and fuzzy about the work, I’ll go look at these details and make sure I’m not seeing warnings, notices, backrevved disks or modules, etc.

This not only saves me and my customers time and money at that moment, it also pays off dividends in the long-term.  Less work to be done to manage and maintain, less chance for unknown downtime because you know the EXACT state of your system at any given point.

The Premium AutoSupport toolset (This being just one part of it) opens the door to allowing you to not only self manage, but self-control and I’ll tell you – any system I’ve felt comfortable and confident in after building it, has never gone down.

It’s not magic, a special arcane craft or art form.   It’s clear conscious best practices and using the tools available to you, an ounce of prevention is worth an hour of downtime! :)

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this segment, I’ll be hitting up Visualizations next so look forward to my delivery of that!

Disclaimer: The information above reflects only some of the type of notices you can receive.  If you do not see any of these notices on your system that is great! If you encounter additional ones (Aggregate Level Notices, Volume Related Warnings, etc) it is not a problem just an education of the current health of that particular system and should be reviewed.

I think “OMFG” can easily classify the type of excitement I have for this tool, the simplicity it will introduce into your life, and more.    I can honestly tell you, that without this tool a lot of the things I do on a regular basis would take a lot longer, so if you know anything about me, it is that I like simplicity with reason, efficiency and getting the most out of my resources.

For those of who you think “You can’t get excited over a tool, especially one involving storage” Well wait and see, because you’ll be drooling along with me! ;)

This is part 1 of an almost endless series because there will be more things coming out of this, that and I don’t want to create one massive difficult to read posting on Premium AutoSupport.

So, let’s get started!

All things begin with the NOW Page – So go ahead and login to now.netapp.com

Once you’ve logged in, you will see a section titled:

“My Netapp Products”

Within that section “My AutoSupport” it’s easy to see with the yellow “NEW!” – Go ahead and click on that and you will be ready to start taking advantage of Premium AutoSupport!

Here it is zoomed up a bit so you can see what I’m talking about!

Alright, we’ve clicked in (Yes, this is very basic tutorial for now, I’ll get into the guts soon!)

Alright, you’ve gotten this far! Wow, there are some cool things on this page, which are often overlooked.   I’d like to point those out, just so I’ve done my civic duty!

Okay, here is the disclaimer text.   Browser Support lists IE 6,7 -  Firefox 1, 2, 3 (With SVG) And it cites that Apple Safari is not supported.   For the purposes of all of my screenshots I AM actually using Internet Explorer, however I exclusively use Chrome 99% of the time.   I’ll mention what works and doesn’t work across browsers, the IE and FF experience are absolutely great but you won’t be crippled if you’re not using them – You just won’t get as Rich of an experience.   And the facts behind that are, sometimes you won’t want the rich experience when doing some specific nitty gritty things.   So don’t fret over browsers there is much support!

Another cool thing, which is a great supplement to this, is the WebEx Tutorials and Flash Demos!  Oh, and the iPod contest it mentions, which takes you to a Tech On Tap article from May of 2008.   If you’re seeing this post and not that one, it’s because it’s honestly hard to find anything from those, it’s a great article though by Jay Mistry! (FYI: The screenshots in the TOT Article do not reflect the way Premium AutoSupport looks today. :))

A brief quote from that article:

Now, Premium AutoSupport’s Upgrade Advisor tool does all the hard work for me, saving me four to five hours of work per storage system and providing an upgrade plan that’s complete and easy to follow. The tool works for both standalone systems and clusters and supports all Data ONTAP releases since 6.3. Among the things that it checks for are:

• Known upgrade issues
• Required firmware revisions
• Applicable field alerts
• Software license issues
• Version compatibility of dependent  software products (SnapDrive®, etc.)

Another advantage of the Upgrade Advisor is that it gives us a complete plan to back out each upgrade should a problem arise. We’ve never had to use such a plan, but new regulations in the finance industry are starting to mandate this capability, so it’s nice to have it covered.

I mention this now, because I didn’t even plan to tap on Upgrade Advisor until much later ;) But nonetheless, we’re almost there! It’s time to click the “Premium Autosupport” link!

And this is the part where I stop, and take you directly to the dashboard of one of my demo systems!   You likely will be presented with a list of systems you manage, so select one and you’re ready to rock and roll!

Certain sections have been blocked out, in order to protect my still having a job! ;)

However I’ll go into depth of each of these sections which are hard to read, how they can benefit you and a number of other cool things… In the next post :)

At the high level, the key sections I’d like to mention here which I’ll go into depth are:

• Health Summary and Detailed Healthcheck
• Visualizations
• Configurations
• Raw AutoSupport Data
• Performance
• Upgrade Advisor
• Customize Notifications
• EMS Log Viewer

…and more as I can :)

I did try to order them in the order I intend to deliver them, so if they don’t come out in that order, we’ll deal with that.   Nonetheless, this is the end of this high-level overview, hopefully you’ve learned a bit more about the Premium AutoSupport from this alone (Like its existence) and you’ll be on your way to ensuring a more simplified storage management experience.

I know once you start using these things you’ll be saying “OMFG” too. :)

Psst, see the Performance section? There’s a lot more in there as well, soooo super cool! I’ll try to get these other ones out there as soon as possible so you can benefit the same way I personally do with the magical mysterious things I do! :)

How I personally handle this issue (And I haven’t hit an API limitation using just Tweetdeck)

Is go in and modify the API values to look like this:

As you can see, the major difference is the “All Friends” has been increased from 1min to 1min 12s.

That minor difference alone is easily enough to make up for the API limits on an hourly basis.

If you continue to run out of API calls in an hour, increase that number to 2 minutes or beyond.

While you’re at it, upgrade to Tweetdeck 0.21 Beta released: Christmas Eve!

• - Added spell checker
• - Added sent DMs to DM column
• - Added “narrow columns” preference
• - Added confirm box when closing a column
• - Added TweetShrink functionality to tweet panel
• - Introducing TweetDeck Services
• - Fixed bug with missing tweets from All Tweets feed in between your own posts
• - Fixed #searches not updating properly
• - Updated interface to make it slimmer, reduced some UI spacing
• - Added tweet actions now cause tweet to be marked as seen
• - Added logic to auto-add http:// where necessary to urls to be shortened
• - Added double-check so reply column tweet must contain @username
• - Added “unknow” message to profiles where returned data is incomplete
• - Updated “mark as read” to “mark as seen”
• - Updated saving of window size & position and url shortener code
• - Updated logout button location
• - Updated “All Tweets” to more accurate “All Friends” column name
• - Updated 12seconds video to be more in line with tweet UI
• - Fixed hanging when deleting tweet
• - Fixed bug so edited group names update straight away
• - Fixed hanging when marking as read
• - Fixed bug where a cleared column now updates with just new tweets
• - Fixed bug with DM counter
• - Removed auto-update of favorites column
• - Removed cross column marking as read - performance issue, temporary measure
• - Removed cross column deleting - performance issue, temporary measure

[NDTV via NewLaunches]

She has made quite an accomplishment for defeating the previous title holder Arfa Karim from Pakistan who was 10 Years old at the time she completed her MCP exam in 2005.

Apparently, she is 8 years old, and not 9 years old as some of the stories report (Her own website reports this)

Okay, time for the Therapy Faq on this.

Q: Should I feel bad about myself and my own certifications?

A:  No, why should you feel bad?   If you had a photographic memory and were 8 years old, wouldn’t you be able to find the time to study just a bit? I mean, outside of your regular 80 hour workweek fixing networks or dealing with your significant other, I’m sure you’d be able to find a few minutes to study for an exam, right?

Q:  What? But seriously, she’s 8 years old! Not even 9 years old like the other reports are saying!

A:  Wait, you’re right.    I forgot these exams aren’t based upon sole memorization and require you to have to think about extremely bound concepts the likes of which cannot exist in books.   I mean when I go into the Oracle to take the exam, it analyzes what I have in my brain and then starts providing dynamic questions the likes of which noone could ever hold challenge to.

Q: Does this happening make the Certification process at all less valuable?

A: Absolutely not.   That same analysis could be said of the Bar Exam, SAT’s or GRE’s.    Some people are extremely good at certain things (say, memorization) but that is not to say that they know everything there is, only what they’ve read.   So, while you can know the ‘answer’ to a defined question, if provided with a question outside the context of original discussion that shows your true ability to innovate and provide a solution.   If I want someone to be able to recite back to me verbatim a fixed question/answer, I’d get Wikipedia or something.

Q: So you’re saying I should feel good for this girl, and not feel bad about myself?

A: Exactly.  I think it is great, prior to this a lot of people didn’t even realize there was such a thing as the MCP.  Now perhaps some may feel this is bad PR, but any PR is better than none, and this will pass.    Especially when a girl who is cited as having performed feats of memorization at age 3? No, this will definitely do wonders for the Certification community and help to improve the process as a whole for years to come.   We’ve been watching it come for the past several years as tests have improved to be more relevant, and this will be no different.

Good luck out there, get ready for a whole new Certification year! And I look forward to the new innovative Betas as you should!

So, how does it work? It’s actually extremely simple!

Go to happytweets.com Type in your name and click “Get Happy!” It’s that easy!

So lets see, just how happy am I today?

Wow, would you look at that! I’m very Happy! Even with a nice pretty orange to show just how happy I am!

But not everyone is happy, and the colors certainly do change based upon the numeric ranking out there!

So, whether you’re feeling orange with excitement, or blue or grey and down in the dumps, this certainly can be a good indicator “Hey, wait a minute, apparently I’m being a real downer in tweeterville! Maybe I should spin it up a bit!”

This is more than a social experiment as Tim creator of this tool has intended it to be.

This actually serves as a “Social Service” because if you’re down, and the software says you are – Do something about it! Tweet a little happiness into your life and I’m sure you’ll find your attitude towards the world shift!   Think about everything you have to take for granted, like food or civil rights! :)

So, thanks @u2elan for bringing us this! Have a Happy Holidays, and a Happy Tweetlandia! :)

It’s called sadly.. Not logging in :) Yes, it is lame, but it works for me! So on to the communities!

At the high level it looks like this:

Which if you look around you’ll find a communities section with breakouts, Recent Content, NetApp TV and the top 5 discussions, documents and the latest poll!

Down a bit further (out of this section) you find Top participants, tags, recent blog posts and…. twitter!

So drilling down a bit we find this kind of stuff

This is a pretty straight-forward area, which provides indepth information for you to ask questions where you’ll get responses from both NetApp folks as well as other customers in the field with your same problem, questions or even solutions of their own!    We’re fortunate to have a number of followers (Internal/External) who monitor and moderate certain forums in order to provide their input into the types of things you’ll encounter out there!  The number of subjects is numerous and you’re always game to discuss any topic under the sun and get some good participation!

Occasionally, you’ll see new and updated Polls! Like this one:

It’s through polls like this where the user community can speak out about their configurations or situations to get a feel for what others happen to be doing.  In this particular poll it shows of the 15 respondants, 40% of them have NFS connectivity to VMware, which is certainly great for those considering NFS and were not sure who else was out there doing it.

And occasionally in the Recent area, you can get an exposure to just some of the types of questions being interactively asked – And who knows, I might even respond ;)

So be sure to check out those communities, check me out while out there as well! I’ll see all of the posts even if I’m not actively watching the site and my contact information is scattered there as well as the rest of the internets as a whole ;)

Take care getting your NetApp on and soon I will tell you how to do even more faster and easier with my other really cool planned things :)

Here is our good friend Friend or Follow!

It’s actually very simple to use.  Simply browse to their site, enter your name hit submit and you’re off!

Pet the bunny! :)

Then suddenly you’re brought to this wonderful page!

At that point, you can click on their names and decide if you want to continue following them or not.  It’s a useful way to see who it is that you are following who is not following you.   But the benefits don’t end there!

Simply by clicking on Fans, you’ll get a list of people who are following you, but YOU are not following back!

This happens to the best of us, or they’re spammers which haven’t been removed yet, in either case you can click on them and choose to follow or not!

Here is where it gets tricky.   Let’s say you chose to follow ‘x’ number of folks and they’re not reciprocating, and you decide “Alright, I’ve had enough of this!” I hear it more often than not.

Well, with Friend or Follow here, you can open up every page, perform your 3-4 clicks and remove them as friends.  Oh I forgot, I don’t have that kind of time and carpal tunnel, do you have another option?

Introducing Twitter Karma!

The security conscious folks abound will be concerned about using this as it does require you to enter your password (It will be performing calls on your behalf so that’s understandable that it needs credentials)

You need to be cautious when using this, if your API limit is close to being maxed as it may “appear” as though it’s not working.   Just try again in an hour if it’s not working as expected.

(Infact, merely connecting the first time is often enough to exceed your rate limit – Be warned)

Then simply change the “Show” field to “Only Following:”

Pop on down to the bottom and make your decision:

If you’re looking to drop everyone, do a “check all” and “Bulk Unfollow” and it’ll go through and unfollow them.

A bit of warning, this may take some time, so please be patient.  I find the best way to keep up on whether it is working (Because it goes into work mode the instant you click it: Would be to go to your twitter homepage, and watch the numbers increase/decrease appropriately.

One of the hardest parts for me to unfollow people is, I enjoy reading their conversations and interacting with them, regardless of whether they’re following me.  But Twitter Limits and other restrictions force you into these situations! :)

One of the nicest parts is it will show you when they “Last Updated” so you can feel better removing people who haven’t updated “Ever” or “not in a year” or so.

So remember, if you’re looking to mass follow, mass unfollow, or take any kind of mass actions (Or even just get a feeling of how unbalanced things may be)  - The two tools mentioned above will help you achieve that!

Be sure to be running the latest version of TweetDeck and Adobe Air also, just in general :)

And be sure to add me @cxi on Twitter and @cxi on 12seconds!

You ever sit there and wonder what that little   is up in the control section? A click on it will reveal much excitement to be had!

Simply clicking that little 12 will bring up this prompt: Asking you for your 12seconds.tv creds!

Then, get ready for it, because all of a sudden you have access to Video in Tweetdeck!

OMFG What is going on here? Why are there videos in Tweet Deck? This is actually kind of cool!

Hovering over it will prompt you to Play the clip, or click the arrow and Whoa! Wait a minute you can RT from here as well?!

RT cxi: 12seconds - http://12seconds.tv/channel/cxi/64782

#Playing in TweetDeck

It’ll grey out your background while it displays video! 

Okay, this all seems a bit weird.  I thought we could only interact with each other in 140 character segments (Less in a reply) but now we can suddenly interact in 12 second segments?    Sure, you might think 12 seconds doesn’t seem like a lot, You say I want more, I want 12 times 12 seconds to get my point across! But seriously, that’s Gross But seriously, you can say a lot in 12 seconds and this gets to that point.  The first time you’ll realize just how long of a time 12 seconds indeed is :)

*I won’t even mention the iPhone Application they announced on the 18th! ;*

How cool can this possibly be? Think about it.  It’s been integrated into Tweetdeck for how long now? And we’ve never even noticed it?  I think it’s time we take notice (Especially with the TweetDeck Holiday update coming Dec 24th! hooray! :))

As always you can find me on twitter at @cxi but you can also find me on 12seconds @cxi!

So get out there, give it a try, add me in my shaven and unshaven form and lets celebrate the 12 seconds of christmas together!

Bought any Picture Frames recently? They might be hacked! (Or vulnerable) If you’ve purchased the SPF-85H (From Amazon) or in general, you should be aware of this!  By the looks of it, “some” of the media have been delivered with the W32.Sality.AE worm on the install media! WTF?

Get your removal on if you’re affected!

Greetings from Amazon.com.
We have recently learned that Samsung has issued an alert affecting its SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frame. Our records indicate that you have purchased one of the digital photo frames through the Amazon.com website and are therefore affected by this alert.
The alert involves the SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frames w/1GB Internal Memory, designed to work with Windows-based PCs via a USB connector. They were sold between October and December 2008 for about $150.
The alert concerns discovery of the W32.Sality.AE worm on the installation disc SAMSUNG FRAME MANAGER XP VERSION 1.08, which is needed for using the SPF-85H as a USB monitor. If you are using Vista or a different version of Frame Manager, this issue does not affect you.
If your anti-virus software displays a Virus Alert after you have installed Samsung Frame Manger 1.08 using the installation CD, please perform the following procedure:
1. Quarantine or delete the W32.Sality.AE worm.
2. Uninstall the current version of Frame Manager 1.08 you installed from the install CD. (Click Start –> Settings –> ; Control Panel ->; Add or Remove Programs. Find and then click Frame Manager in the Add or Remove Programs dialog, and then click Remove.)
3. Download and install the updated version of Frame Manager XP 1.082 from the Samsung Download Center
4. After you install Samsung Frame Manager 1.082, reboot your computer to complete the process.
If these steps do not correct the problem, please call Samsung Service Hotline at 1.800.SAMSUNG (800-726-7864).
If you purchased this item as a gift for someone, please notify the recipient immediately and provide them with the information in the Samsung Alert concerning this issue.
We regret the inconvenience this alert has caused you but trust you will understand that the safety of our customers is our highest priority.
Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com.
Sincerely,
Customer Service
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/

Happy Holidays and keep yourself Malware free! Thanks to @silvakreuz for the heads up!