Ever get tired of your office network administrator blocking youtube or facebook? Wished you could surf and get your daily dose of facebook and blogs from your office? Well there are many ways around this…most straightforward would be using a web-based proxy service like hidemyass .com or proxy4free.com. However, contrary to general opinion, your network administrators aren’t lazy(or stupid!). If you know about these proxies they probably know about it as well, so they’ve probably have a whole loooong list of sites categorized as ‘proxies’ that are completely blocked from access. So how do you access those web-sites your administrators have deemed…unworthy?

The solution is  simple. Host your own proxy. This too can be blocked, but if you work in a fairly large company your own little private proxy is unlikely to generate enough traffic to warrant investigation and ultimately be blocked. So if I hosted my proxy on http://proxy.keithrozario.com its unlikely the traffic it generates would warrant anyone looking into it and eventually blocking it.So you have to strike a balance, surfing too much via proxy will arouse suspicion, too little and it defeats the purpose.

So how do you host your own proxy?

My wordpress RSS feed has always been a bit dull without the accompanying pictures I scour flickr for. However, today there is promise as I stumbled across a post by the wordpress geniuses at catswhocode, there was a wordpress hack to include pictures in your RSS feed, and all it requires is to post the following code into your themes functions.php file.

Troy Hunt a Software Engineer, Microsoft MVP and the genius behind the website www.troyhunt.com, did a huge analysis on recent password hacks on Sony and Gawker to come up with a pretty daunting conclusions on how people choose passwords and why email accounts are easily hacked.

When the web was starting up and I was still using a 14.4kBps line for dial-up I used hotmail as my default web-based email service. Back then it gave out nearly 4MB of storage (wow!), then about 5-6 years later I migrated my email account to Yahoo Mail! as it offered nearly 250MB of storage, finally about 2 years later, I switched to Gmail that offered 2GB of storage, and I haven’t maxed it out since (it’s nearly 7 years of email now).

Google went the way of Apple, instead of supplying mediocre storage Google supplied 2GB and made Gmail accounts invite only, which took a while to get viral but it eventually did. Apple did the same thing when they launched the 20GB ipod back when iriver was offering paltry 128MB.

Want to figure out how long your site loads across the globe. This great app called Loads.in provide a simple straightforward interface to time your webpage load time from various locations across the globe.

Besides having a very apt url, loads.in actually has a great looking design. The app is design to do one thing and one thing only, and that’s to let you know how many seconds your webpage will load depending on location. I found the app pretty impressive and would definitely recommend giving it a go to see how fast your page loads.

Updating Wordpress is a pretty important step in keeping your blog safe and secure. Older versions of wordpress (even those just months old) have security flaws/bugs that are public knowledge, what this means if that if you run an older version of wordpress for your blog you’re vulnerable to these security bugs unless you upgrade. What’s even worse is that the security threats are public knowledge and even a un-skilled hacker could compromise your site. So upgrade to stay secure and get the most out of blogging experience.

So here’s how you update your Wordpress. It’s actually very simple, and I’m going to use the manually way which should be applicable regardless of which webhost you’re on. For this example, I’m using my own blog at www.keithrozario.com which is hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.

It’s been near

ly 3 months since I started this blog and so far I’m no where near my target of 1000 hits a month. At least I’m about 30% of the way there, but that last 70% seems like a difficult mountain to climb here, but I’m going to try. Once again with hard work, good content and savvy marketing I’m hoping to jack up the blog hits from where it is (383 hits/month) now to where I want it to be  (1000 hits/month).

Fox news, the great TV channel that brought us the Simpsons and Bill O’ Reilly today had it’s twitter account hacked. Hackers manage to break into @foxnewspolitics twitter account and start posting bogus tweets, one notably about an assassination of Barack Obama. The hackers painstakingly painted a picture of Obama dying from two shots to the head over the course of 3-5 tweets separated by a couple of minutes.

Recently I registered at fetch.io for a free account to try out it’s service. For those who don’t know, fetch.io was a site that ‘fetches’ files for you from rapidshare, megaupload and a host of ofther file sharing websites and ‘Full Speed’. What that means is, no waiting 5 minutes for the file to begin download or throttled speeds. Fetch.io will get the file at full speed and store it on its servers for you to download. You can then download the file…once again at full speed (presumably).

A cool poster from bonkers world demonstrating just how fragmented IT companies really are…I’m not sure where they got the data from, but it’s just cool.