Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet application used by millions, is an incredibly powerful and versatile suite. And yet most users don't reach past the fancy coloring and simple formulae.

A lot of people don't realize Excel's support for the Visual Basic programming language. You can make use of this, even if you're not a programmer yourself. Pre-written VBA code, often already implemented in Excel files, can be found online.

Below are, without further ado, the top three sources for these free Excel programs.

Microsoft Office Templates

Probably the richest and most extensive repository of free Excel programs is of Microsoft's own making. On the Microsoft Office website, you'll find countless pre-built Excel templates. The complexity of, and use for, these templates varies widely, although most of them are clearly intended for business purposes.

So you'll find everything from pre-built time sheets, financial calculators and academic calendars, but also Excel 3D examples, and even a playable piano octave. The uses are many, and you'll take a long time to just browse all of these categories.

If you're a regular spreadsheet user, you can be sure to find your fair share of free Excel programs here, and ultimately save a ton of work.

The only downside is the site's usability, which could use some improvement. As such, it is impossible to browse the templates by application alone. The best way to work is to find the My Programs field in the left sidebar. Here you can add all Office programs you own, and thus eliminate the better part of superfluous templates.

Although irrelevant (read: empty) categories will still be shown in the category overview, the underlying templates should all be compatible with your version of Excel.

Vertex42 Excel Templates / Financial Calculators

One site, no matter how big, will never show you all that's available. That's where our runner-up comes in. Vertex42 is a website dedicated to everything related to Excel including templates and financial calculators.

Although they deal in smaller numbers, the programs shown are of pristine quality, and make Vertex42 the best unofficial source for Excel programs. A large part of these even work on Open Office as well!

The site's content is divided up in two major categories; Excel Templates and Financial Calculators. Both of these show a clear overview of the available programs, without any further hassle with filters. In that, Vertex42 has clearly bested the Microsoft Office official templates site.

Excel Games

Combined, Microsoft Office and Vertex42 should be able to fill the needs of serious businesses. This last website is complementary, and wouldn't be considered useful' by all parties.

Visual Basic of course isn't limited to dull timetables and financial calculators. If you're stuck at work and limited to the games already installed on your computer, you can use Visual Basic in Excel to play games and if you put some big numbers in the next tab, you can quickly switch panes when your supervisor sneaks a peek. Don't forget to move some serious work, though. These games won't pay the bills if you get yourself fired!

The Excel Games site boosts just under forty different games, mostly classics like Pong, Battleship, Tetris, Bubbles and a variety of card games. These are all downloadable as simple XLS files also compatible with older versions of Excel.

Do you know any other sources for useful, free Excel programs?

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WordPress is a powerful content management system, and its popularity as a portfolio solution is enticing to many. There are a lot of themes out there that claim to do the job, but if you're as picky as me you'll find some pretty annoying flaws in many of them.

In my search for the best of the bunch, I installed about 30 offerings (out of the hundreds I looked at) and after trying them out and changing my mind a couple of times I finally settled down with a theme. This took me months, so I'm going to save you the bother and present the five free Wordpress portfolio themes that made my own particular shortlist.

SimpleFolio The Best All-Rounder

Despite being a tricky free WordPress theme to set-up, SimpleFolio by Omar Corrales is worth the hassle. For your troubles you'll get a clean and easy-to-navigate theme with a separate portfolio section (with the option to exclude portfolio posts from your blog) and a home screen to die for.

The home screen includes a JavaScript front-page slider to exhibit portfolio entries, which does a great job of making your work look awesome with its smooth transitions. There are a further three widgetized areas on the home page, so adding a contact form or Twitter plug-in is as easy as pie.

If you like the look of this theme and fancy giving it a go, then you're going to need a little help. There's a fantastic little guide over at WordPress Handyman which guides you through the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining your new portfolio. As always with WordPress, you can edit the style.css file to suit your personal tastes.

Vikiworks Infinity For Social Media Types

For an aesthetically pleasing, majorly customizable portfolio that's plugged in to Flickr, Twitter and Delicious, look no further than Infinity by Vikiworks. The free WordPress theme follows a three-fixed column style, and whilst not being widget ready could probably be modified with some serious Notepad'ing.

There are two PSD files to download as well as the theme, which makes customization in Photoshop that little bit easier. Blog posts themselves are presented in two thumbnail cover-style columns to the left of the page, so if you're not bothered about separating your work and your blog then this one's for you.

For the more courageous there's a sister theme called Mashup based on Infinity, only with widgets and a style switcher. The developer has appealed for help in completing it, and needs guinea pigs willing to give it a go. If you're not averse to beta testing, you can download Mashup here.

FolioGrid For Speed-Freaks, Designers, Photographers & Artists

This sharp looking offering from FrogsThemes has a little something for everyone. Utilising the tried-and-tested grid layout, the theme comes in a variety of colours and is easily altered with some handy CSS. All the styling is done through the theme's stylesheet, meaning you really can open up and customize this one.

The menu lives at the top of the page, and is always accessible from anywhere on the site, making it a cinch to navigate. There's some lovely use of jQuery for slick transitions, and the theme is widget-ready. For a fast and lightweight WordPress portfolio, FolioGrid does the job.

Fullscreen For Style-Conscious Photographers & Videographers

If photos are the order of the day then you may want to pay close attention. Fullscreen is a portfolio package developed by Graph Paper Press that delivers nothing but a menu and blog posts (represented by just images). It all makes for a very sexy looking clean interface, with some fancy JavaScript image rollover effects for added garnish.

One thing to look out for is some issues with the menu not displaying correctly in older versions of Internet Explorer, though some of you won't really care (and those that do can customize, of course).

Images can be implemented into posts using the WordPress media gallery, which makes for easy posting. If you want your photo or video work to be the main focus of your site, then this theme will honour your wishes.

Contrast The Black Sheep

SmashingMagazine once hosted a typographic layout competition for WordPress and Tumblr themes, and Paul Linder's Contrast didn't win. But that doesn't matter, because it's awesome all the same.

Using nothing but XHTML and CSS, it's lightning quick and beautiful to look at. Presenting you with a straight-up black and white home screen, Contrast is designed to be left as a portfolio rather than a blog as well.

As the focus is on text, many writers, copy-editors or web designers may find this appealing, though the minimalist design could suit anyone. It's bold, unique and quick.

Have you used any of these free WordPress themes? Got another favourite we've not featured here? Spread the word in the comments! Are you a photographer? Check out our very own photography PDF manual by Bakari The Essential Guide To Digital Photography.

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Mary and her husband set out to build a stock portfolio worth $25,000 as a college graduation present for each of their children. That's a lofty goal. How did they do it? In her entry to the GRS video contest, Mary explained:

Here's how Mary describes her method in a post at her site, Frugal to Rich:

When our children were born and people wanted to get a gift for the baby, we asked family and friends to give us the gift of money that we would invest for them. We felt this was a much wiser choice than some new toy that would soon be worn out or in which they would lose interest.

We set up a very low cost stock index mutual fund (such as VFINX), along with a general stock mutual fund for each child and started investing.

When the children were old enough to start working, we wanted to really encourage their frugal living and investing, so we made them an offer they could not refuse: For every dollar they contributed to their savings, we would match it so they would double the amount of money they had to invest!

When Mary's kids graduated from college (debt-free!), she and her husband transferred portfolio ownership.

I think this is a fantastic idea. It's a great way to teach children about frugality, investing, priorities, and more. Do you know anyone who's done this with their children? What other effective ways have you seen to teach kids about saving and investing?

---
Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• Beat the Market with Lazy Portfolios
• Workshop for Kids
• The Lazy Way to Investment Success
• Index Funds: Why Choose Anything Else?
• How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get on With Your Life

CAIRO Aid group Doctors Without Borders said it has been forced to suspend work in a volatile part of South Sudan because of attacks against his staff, as violence between rival tribes surges in the area.

The group, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, said Friday that armed men stole medical equipment from one of its health clinics twice this month in Jonglei state. Staff members have also been attacked while delivering aid, the organization said.

Heavily armed southern tribes have had to compete for scarce water and pasturage in the area. Clashes reignited more than a year ago and intensified beyond traditional cattle raids to include attacks on civilians across the entire south.

Aid agencies have said some 2,500 people were killed and 350,000 others were displaced in 2009 due to the violence.

A statement on Doctors Without Borders' website called on armed groups to respect its neutrality so it can resume providing aid. It said more than 160 malnourished children had been receiving treatment at its clinic in the Gumuruk area and that there were about 20 new cases each day.

A 20-year civil war between north and south Sudan ended in a peace agreement five years ago, but left the south awash in weapons. Sudan has continued to suffer widespread violence, including in its western Darfur region.

Shared by M3wThr33
Now THIS IS a parade.

A new parade, Mickey's Soundsational Parade, will stomp, clang and drum its way to Disneyland park next year.

Today, we're sharing the first preview of the artwork for Mickey's Soundsational Parade. It gives you a glimpse of the vibrant colors and exciting array of Disney characters that may appear on the streets of Disneyland park in 2011.

Plus, there are a whole lot of exciting elements for the new parade that can't be captured in this artwork:

• The parade is an explosive music festival with thrilling rhythms and bold percussion that will bring to life some of the most beloved melodies from Disney films.
• Live musicians will amplify the fun. Mickey Mouse and some of your favorite Disney characters will play live and will encourage members of the crowd to join a giant jam session.
• Lively dancers will stomp out rhythms as a syncopated drum line, twinkling cymbals, steel drums and more entertain guests with sensational sounds!

The parade promises to be the most foot-stomping, infectious festival of music you've ever seen or heard! I've heard it's soundsational!

What do you think of this new parade? Is there a particular parade float in the artwork that you're most excited about?

It's a beautiful thing to watch people tweet. Especially when you try to figure out what they're tweeting about, how they feel, and where they're tweeting from then put that all on a map and animate the changes over time.

Researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard College recently built a pretty and captivating visualization of U.S. Twitter users' moods, as determined by sentiment analysis. You can watch two days worth of tweeted moods in this video:

Watching the cartogram pulse as it indicates the proportional volume and sentiment of tweets is probably more interesting than the researchers' conclusions about their data: people are happier on weekends than weekdays; West Coast happiness trends are usually about three hours after East Coast happiness trends. Still, it's neat to learn that Thursday evening aka just about the time I'm posting this is the time of the week Twitter users tend to express the most negative sentiment.

Meanwhile, over at Betaworks, they've just posted a visualization of the record-setting sustained volume of tweets from around the world during the World Cup. There's no sentiment analysis here just counting of relevant hashtags but you can see the volume of tweets corresponding with the occurrence of games that people in a country are interested in.

People seem to tweet less about being frustrated than being triumphant; for the championship game, Betaworks noted an immediate lack of traffic in the Netherlands after losing while the attention in Spain persisted through the next morning. Or it could be that disappointed tweeters just left off the proper hashtag formulation when lamenting their team's loss.

These aren't the first Twitter geography-plus-time visualizations videos, of course. Here's one from last year that maps tweets with the words just landed and just arrived in:

Just Landed 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

Here's another of tweets from people who were pleased about Barack Obama's inauguration. And here's one from the New York Times depicting tweets during the Super Bowl. (Those two aren't embeddable, so you'll have to click through.)

Perhaps the data geeks who made these were too busy thinking about the visuals, but for some reason or another none of them include a soundtrack. So it's up to you to put some trippy music on, chill out, and watch the Twitter visualizations.

(Tech Support | Victoria, Australia)

Caller: I hope this won't take much time.

Me: It won't, ma'am, it's only a few simple steps. First of all, I need you to double click on My Computer.

Caller: Excuse me?

Me: Ma'am, our records show you running a Windows computer. Has that changed?

Caller: I don't think so.

Me: Okay, now just double click on My Computer for me please.

Caller: How can I do that?

Me: It should be right there in front of you. Make sure all other windows are closed down and you should, hopefully, see it in the top left corner.

Caller: How am I suppose to click on your computer? You must be like hundreds of miles away!

It's bizarre. Suddenly every piece of linguistic research is spun as a challenge to "universal grammar". The most recent example involves Ewa Dabrowka's interesting work on the linguistic correlates of large educational differences Quentin Cooper did a segment on BBC 4, a couple of days ago, about how this challenges the whole idea of an innate human propensity to learn and use language. (Dr. Dabrowska appears to be somewhat complicit in this spin, but that's another story.)

It's hard for me to explain how silly I think this argument is. It's like showing that there are hematologic effects of athletic training, and arguing that this calls into question the whole idea that blood physiology is an evolved system.

When I wrote about Ewa Dambrowska's work on the linguistic correlates of large educational differences, I carefully avoided the whole "universal grammar" aspect of her presentation ("'Unable to understand some basic sentences'?", 7/9/2010; "More on basic sentence interpretation", 7/12/2010; "The Wason selection test", 7/15/2010).

That was because I thought that her work, though quite interesting, has essentially no bearing on the question of whether or not our species has an evolved substrate for speech and language. At least one commenter disagreed, but on the whole, the discussion was mercifully free of innateness bombast on either side. But the BBC's listeners were not so lucky when Dabrowska was featured on Quentin Cooper's BBC Material World program, 7/29/2010.

The web site's synopsis of the Dabrowka segment was: "Are we born with built in grammar knowledge and if we're not, can we learn it?" And here's how Quentin Cooper starts out:

Seventy-odd years ago the writer William Somerset Maugham argued "it is necessary to know grammar, and it is better to write grammatically than not but it is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated."

If that is the case that grammar is a formula formalizing what we do naturally rather than a set of rules to control it, then why does common speech follow these patterns? What leads us to put together our words in these particular ways?

It's long ((and)) often been suggested that deep beneath all languages there is a "universal grammar" that our brains have evolved to use and which helps children to rapidly learn how to speak. But research about to be published in the journal Lingua has come up with evidence that seems to go against this theory, showing that some native English speakers who left school early have difficulties with even basic grammatical constructions.

Since the BBC (why???) withdraws audio access to its radio shows after a few days, here's the whole ten-minute segment in a more durable form:

It seems to me that Cooper's explicit argument that the existence of individual differences correlated with training shows that there's no evolutionary substrate for language acquisition is so silly that to state it is to refute it. You can tussle among yourselves in the comments if you don't agree.

I'll just mention another example of the same bizarre meme: the spin given to Lera Boroditsky's interesting work on how morphosyntactic differences between languages have a bit of an effect on how their speakers tend to remember certain experiences ("Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame", 7/26/2010).

Since I still haven't had the time to offer a detailed analysis of her findings, which are Whorfian in the classic sense, for now I'll just point to Lane Greene's lovely summary:

She sticks mainly to pretty careful statements about things she's tested. If I had to sum up in plain English my conclusion would be not "language shapes thought" (much less "language restricts thought"), but probably "language nudges thought" (in certain circumstances).

I still plan to discuss Boroditsky's work at greater length, but I hope to ignore the whole "universal grammar" discussion as thoroughly as I can, because I think it's an irrelevant waste of time in this context. In support of this view, let me offer another analogy. Suppose we find that deaf people are somewhat more likely than hearing people to remember the individual facial characteristics of a stranger they pass on the street. This would be an interesting result, but would we spin it to the world as a challenge to the widely-held theory that there's an evolutionary substrate for the development of human face-recognition abilities?

Please note that I'm not arguing here for any particular epistemological theory, either in general or in specific cases. I'm just surprised in the intensity of what seems to me to be a transcendently silly belief: "if there are any effects of experience, there must not be any evolved biological predisposition".

Shared by robdiana
If you use Oracle and your query is a bit slow, read this. Please read this. Your DBA's will love you for it.

select prod_category, avg(amount_sold)
from sales s, products p
where p.prod_id = s.prod_id
group by prod_category;

------------------------------------------
 Id   Operation              Name   
------------------------------------------
   0  SELECT STATEMENT              
   1   HASH GROUP BY                
   2    HASH JOIN                   
   3     TABLE ACCESS FULL   PRODUCTS
   4     PARTITION RANGE ALL        
   5      TABLE ACCESS FULL  SALES  
------------------------------------------

   GROUP BY
      |
     JOIN
 _____|_______
 |            |
ACCESS     ACCESS
(PRODUCTS) (SALES)

When you read a plan tree you should start from the bottom up. In the above example begin by looking at the access operators (or the leaves of the tree). In this case the access operators are implemented using full table scans. The rows produced by these tables scans will be consumed by the join operator. Here the join operator is a hash-join (other alternatives include nested-loop or sort-merge join). Finally the group-by operator implemented here using hash (alternative would be sort) consumes rows produced by the join-opertor.

The execution plan generated for a SQL statement is just one of the many alternative execution plans considered by the query optimizer. The query optimizer selects the execution plan with the lowest cost. Cost is a proxy for performance, the lower is the cost the better is the performance. The cost model used by the query optimizer accounts for the IO, CPU, and network usage in the query.

There are two different methods you can use to look at the execution plan of a SQL statement:

1. EXPLAIN PLAN command - This displays an execution plan for a SQL statement without actually executing the statement.


2. V$SQL_PLAN - A dictionary view introduced in Oracle 9i that shows the execution plan for a SQL statement that has been compiled into a cursor in the cursor cache.

1. EXPLAIN PLAN command


2. V$SQL_PLAN


3. Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)


4. SQL Tuning Set (STS)


5. SQL Plan Baseline (SPM)

SQL> EXPLAIN PLAN FOR
 2   select prod_category, avg(amount_sold)
 3   from sales s, products p
 4   where p.prod_id = s.prod_id
 5   group by prod_category;

Explained.

SQL> select plan_table_output
 2    from table(dbms_xplan.display('plan_table',null,'basic'));

------------------------------------------
 Id   Operation              Name   
------------------------------------------
   0  SELECT STATEMENT              
   1   HASH GROUP BY                
   2    HASH JOIN                   
   3     TABLE ACCESS FULL   PRODUCTS
   4     PARTITION RANGE ALL        
   5      TABLE ACCESS FULL  SALES  
------------------------------------------

• plan table name (default 'PLAN_TABLE'),


• statement_id (default null),


• format (default 'TYPICAL')

SQL> select prod_category, avg(amount_sold)
 2   from sales s, products p
 3   where p.prod_id = s.prod_id
 4   group by prod_category;

no rows selected

SQL> select plan_table_output
 2    from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(null,null,'basic'));

------------------------------------------
 Id   Operation              Name   
------------------------------------------
   0  SELECT STATEMENT              
   1   HASH GROUP BY                
   2    HASH JOIN                   
   3     TABLE ACCESS FULL   PRODUCTS
   4     PARTITION RANGE ALL        
   5      TABLE ACCESS FULL  SALES  
------------------------------------------

• SQL ID (default null, null means the last SQL statement executed in this session),


• child number (default 0),


• format (default 'TYPICAL')

1. Directly:

   
   SQL> select plan_table_output from
    2   table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor('fnrtqw9c233tt',null,'basic'));

   
   
   
2. Indirectly:

   
   SQL> select plan_table_output
    2   from v$sql s,
    3   table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(s.sql_id,
    4                                  s.child_number, 'basic')) t
    5   where s.sql_text like 'select PROD_CATEGORY%';

   
   

SQL> alter session set optimizer_capture_sql_plan_baselines=true;

Session altered.

SQL> select prod_category, avg(amount_sold)
 2   from sales s, products p
 3   where p.prod_id = s.prod_id
 4   group by prod_category;

no rows selected

SQL> select SQL_HANDLE, PLAN_NAME, ACCEPTED
 2   from dba_sql_plan_baselines
 3   where sql_text like 'select prod_category%';

SQL_HANDLE                     PLAN_NAME                      ACC
------------------------------ ------------------------------ ---
SYS_SQL_1899bb9331ed7772       SYS_SQL_PLAN_31ed7772f2c7a4c2  YES

1. Directly
   

   select t.* from
   table(dbms_xplan.display_sql_plan_baseline('SYS_SQL_1899bb9331ed7772',
                                              format => 'basic')) t

   
   
   
2. Indirectly
   

   select t.*
       from (select distinct sql_handle
             from dba_sql_plan_baselines
             where sql_text like 'select prod_category%') pb,
            table(dbms_xplan.display_sql_plan_baseline(pb.sql_handle,
                                                       null,'basic')) t;

   
   

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
SQL handle: SYS_SQL_1899bb9331ed7772
SQL text: select prod_category, avg(amount_sold) from sales s, products p
          where p.prod_id = s.prod_id group by prod_category
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plan name: SYS_SQL_PLAN_31ed7772f2c7a4c2
Enabled: YES     Fixed: NO      Accepted: YES     Origin: AUTO-CAPTURE
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Plan hash value: 4073170114

---------------------------------------------------------
 Id   Operation                 Name               
---------------------------------------------------------
   0  SELECT STATEMENT                             
   1   HASH GROUP BY                               
   2    HASH JOIN                                  
   3     VIEW                   index$_join$_002   
   4      HASH JOIN                                
   5       INDEX FAST FULL SCAN PRODUCTS_PK        
   6       INDEX FAST FULL SCAN PRODUCTS_PROD_CAT_IX
   7     PARTITION RANGE ALL                       
   8      TABLE ACCESS FULL     SALES              
---------------------------------------------------------

Formatting

1. Basic
   The plan includes the operation, options, and the object name (table, index, MV, etc)
   
2. Typical
   It includes the information shown in BASIC plus additional optimizer-related internal information such as cost, size, cardinality, etc. These information are shown for every operation in the plan and represents what the optimizer thinks is the operation cost, the number of rows produced, etc. It also shows the predicates evaluation by the operation. There are two types of predicates: ACCESS and FILTER. The ACCESS predicates for an index are used to fetch the relevant blocks because they apply to the search columns. The FILTER predicates are evaluated after the blocks have been fetched.
   
3. All
   It includes the information shown in TYPICAL plus the lists of expressions (columns) produced by every operation, the hint alias and query block names where the operation belongs. The last two pieces of information can be used as arguments to add hints to the statement.
   

select plan_table_output
from table(dbms_xplan.display('plan_table',null,'basic +predicate +cost'));

-------------------------------------------------------
 Id   Operation              Name      Cost (%CPU)
-------------------------------------------------------
   0  SELECT STATEMENT                    17  (18)
   1   HASH GROUP BY                      17  (18)
*  2    HASH JOIN                         15   (7)
   3     TABLE ACCESS FULL   PRODUCTS      9   (0)
   4     PARTITION RANGE ALL               5   (0)
   5      TABLE ACCESS FULL  SALES         5   (0)
-------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
2 - access("P"."PROD_ID"="S"."PROD_ID")

select plan_table_output from
table(dbms_xplan.display('plan_table',null,'typical -cost -bytes'));

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Id   Operation              Name      Rows  Time      Pstart Pstop
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   0  SELECT STATEMENT                    4  00:00:01             
   1   HASH GROUP BY                      4  00:00:01             
*  2    HASH JOIN                       960  00:00:01             
   3     TABLE ACCESS FULL   PRODUCTS   766  00:00:01             
   4     PARTITION RANGE ALL            960  00:00:01      1     16
   5      TABLE ACCESS FULL  SALES      960  00:00:01      1     16
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
2 - access("P"."PROD_ID"="S"."PROD_ID")

Note Section

select plan_table_output
from table(dbms_xplan.display('plan_table',null,'basic +note'));

------------------------------------------
 Id   Operation              Name   
------------------------------------------
   0  SELECT STATEMENT              
   1   HASH GROUP BY                
   2    HASH JOIN                   
   3     TABLE ACCESS FULL   PRODUCTS
   4     PARTITION RANGE ALL        
   5      TABLE ACCESS FULL  SALES  
------------------------------------------

Note
-----
- dynamic sampling used for this statement

Bind peeking

variable pcat varchar2(50)
exec :pcat := 'Women'

select PROD_CATEGORY, avg(amount_sold)
from sales s, products p
where p.PROD_ID = s.PROD_ID
and prod_category != :pcat
group by PROD_CATEGORY;

select plan_table_output
from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(null,null,'basic +PEEKED_BINDS'));

------------------------------------------
 Id   Operation              Name   
------------------------------------------
   0  SELECT STATEMENT              
   1   HASH GROUP BY                
   2    HASH JOIN                   
   3     TABLE ACCESS FULL   PRODUCTS
   4     PARTITION RANGE ALL        
   5      TABLE ACCESS FULL  SALES  
------------------------------------------

Peeked Binds (identified by position):
--------------------------------------

1 - :PCAT (VARCHAR2(30), CSID=2): 'Women'

Social engineering is the (morally vague) art of tricking someone out of their company's technical secrets just by talking to them. It often involves deceit and relies on the fact that the weakest link in any computer security system is a human.

At the annual Defcon event, held in Las Vegas this week, attendees, mostly professionals in the computer-security business, engage in several contests. A new this one year involves launching social engineering attacks, where contestants must obtain the answers to questions about a company's security defenses. People working at big companies such as Google and Apple failed to realize they were being social engineered by con artists.

This year, about 20 Defcon attendees in Las Vegas participated in the contest, which stirred a lot of controversy. The organizers of the conference were three security experts who know how to do social engineering: Chris Hadnagy, (pictured top right) operations manager for Offensive Security; Mati Aharoni (pictured middle), trainer of Offensive Security, and Jim O'Gorman (pictured left) of Continuum Worldwide. They created the site www.social-engineer.org for the contest, which occurred for the first time this year at Defcon and runs through Saturday.

The contest has proved so alarming to the targeted corporations that some called on the help of the FBI, which quizzed the organizers on why they were doing the contest.

We wanted to start a social engineering program because we believe in security through education, Hadnagy said at a press conference at Defcon.

The participants were instructing to engage in passive information gathering to find out some sensitive information, such as where its dumpsters are located. (Dumpster diving is a common practice by hackers who want to find documents with company secrets on them). By looking things up on the Web, the participants tried to track down company details, such as what kind of Web browser the employees used and what version of Adobe PDFs they were using. (The answers to these questions can be used to launch cyberattacks against the companies.)

Tipped off by the announcement of the contest, the FBI met with the organizers ahead of time, and the organizers enlisted the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil-liberties advocacy group, to represent them. In that meeting the Justice Department voiced its concerns about whether any laws would be broken in the contest. The EFF offered legal advice about how to structure the contest; for instance, participants were not allowed to impersonate law enforcement officers during phone calls, as that is a crime.

In almost every case, company representatives gave up secrets they should not have. The companies targeted included Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, BP, Shell,Google, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Ford. The contestants were given flag points as rewards for each answer they pulled from employees.

Contestants cold-called employees to get the information. In three cases, company employees did not give any details over the phone. But the contestants, posing as journalists or customers, still got data from every company. One contestant managed to get an answer out of his target company in just 22 minutes. The contestant used tricks, such as preying upon emotions, by saying that they had to finish the project and get answers that day.

Because of publicity around the case, a number of contestants dropped out. Some said their bosses would fire them if they participated in the Defcon event.

Companies: Apple, BP, Google, microsoft, Offensive Security, Procter & Gamble

Samuel and Charles Wyly, the billionaire brothers from Dallas who are large donors to philanthropies and to conservative causes, were charged Thursday with conducting an extensive securities fraud that the Securities and Exchange Commission said reaped $550 million in undisclosed gains.
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The brothers, who founded Sterling Software, a business software and services company that they sold for $4 billion in stock to the software company CA in 2000, were also charged with insider trading violations from which they profited by more than $31 million, the S.E.C. said.

Charles and Samuel Wyly, along with their wives, have donated $2.5 million to more than 200 Republican candidates and committees over the past 20 years, including over $1.3 million to the Republican National Committee, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The top recipients of their largesse have been Texas Republicans. George W. Bush received at least $100,000 raised by the Wyly clan during the 2000 presidential election. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson has received $30,400 from the family; Rep. Pete Sessions, $29,000.

Other Republican senators who've received their donations include John Cornyn of Texas, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, John Thune of South Dakota and Kit Bond of Missouri. Sam Wyly also funded the Swift Boat campaign that torpedoed Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.

And the Wyly brothers have been busy in the 2010 election cycle, most recently writing a check dated June 10 for $10,000 to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. Charles Wyly has contributed to FreedomWorks PAC, which has been instrumental in the Tea Party movement. The Wylys and their companies have also reportedly contributed $353,500 to Texas Gov. Rick Perry in recent years.

It's takes a certain type of person to get excited about a work productivity tool. Mark Nielsen and Patrick Carmitchel, unsatisfied with 37Signals Basecamp, have decided to disrupt the productivity software industry (see their incredibly twee video above).

Says Nielsen We decided we'd rather not see the light of day for awhile than have to live with knowing that with just a little bit of creative, a pinch of logic and a dash of sexy, we could revive the productivity software world with a tool that would even make Apple cry.

Previously unknown to the blogosphere, Nielsen and Carmitchel emailed us at 2am last night and emphasized that they were out for 37Signals' blood (we'll get more into why we actually listened in a later post). When reminded that the formidable former Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz was also in the collaboration tool space, joining the likes of Salesforce, Zoho, and Atlassian with his stealth startup Asana, they replied We'd like to see how [Dustin Moskovitz's] deep pockets stand up against moxie and energy.

The RULE.fm product itself looks like what would happen if Apple got serious about productivity software, with much emphasis on design aesthetics. Right now its basic function is a ramped up contact list manager with real time updates from your contacts pushed to you, a Yammer-like discussion area, a place for tasks, and a communal file sharing functionality. Nielsen describes it as a place to know and understand everything that's going on with in your organization and hopes the company will eventually expand into wikis, customer retention management and accounting tools.

For those curious, the tour is live on the RULE.fm site right now, and the platform itself will go live on Tuesday August 3rd, making the productivity software industry just a little bit more badass.

Web analytics service Clicky has announced the launch of their video analytics service which is part of the overall Clicky web analytics platform. Clicky has integrated directly with video hosting company Viddler and provides the ability to track videos from YouTube and Vimeo as well.

The Viddler integration will go live sometime in August as Clicky notes that the Viddler team has some additional work on their end before the connection is made live. The Viddler integration will not require you do anything different to make sure the video stats reach Clicky.

To use the YouTube connection with Clicky, there is a bit of work involved. You can read about the changes to your blog or website that must be added on the Clicky help site. It addition, the way you embed videos is different than just copying and pasting the code directly from YouTube into your blog. The same goes for Vimeoyou would need to add some code to your templates and then change the way you insert videos into your blog or website.

Here's an example of the stats page:

Note we are an affiliate for Clicky but none of the links in this post are affiliate links.

Find more stories about: analytics, Clicky, online video, Viddler, YouTube

Twitter's hosting provider, NTT America, is upgrading a portion of our internal network starting July 31 at 11PM Pacific. ( August 1 at 600 UTC)

This maintenance will last approximately five hours. During this time, there may be intermittent periods when some users are unable to use Twitter.

During these intermittent periods you will see the maintenance page (as pictured above)
which will link to our status blog where you can read the latest updates on the progress of the maintenance.

On July 13, VMware announced the introduction of vSphere 4.1 to "advance the foundation for cloud computing." Advancing the foundation of cloud computing is then broken down into five sets of enhancements. Within the category of enhancements called "increased performance through open integration with storage environments," lies a diamond in the rough. It's where you find that vSphere 4.1 enables 10Gb iSCSI hardware offload.

Before VMware supported 10Gb iSCSI offload, data center managers connected their VMware servers to 10Gb iSCSI SANs using a combination of NIC hardware and fat iSCSI device drivers, a configuration where most of the iSCSI protocol processing is done by the VMware server. Now with vSphere 4.1, VMware supports the latest generation of converged NICs (C-NC) that use thin iSCSI drivers, a scenario where most of the iSCSI protocol processing is done by the iSCSI offload engine in the C-NIC.

iSCSI HBA offload boosts the performance of 10Gb C-NICs in terms of IOPs per GHz of CPU resource, or CPU efficiency. According to Page Tagizad, product line ddirector for Broadcom High Speed Controllers, "Broadcom 10Gb C-NICs with iSCSI HBA offload deliver nearly 2X higher CPU efficiency when compared to NICs without iSCSI HBA offload."

The result is, as of July 13, 10Gb iSCSI storage deployed with VMware uses a lot less of the precious CPU resources that rightfully belong to virtual machines and business applications. This may be a small step for VMware, but it's a giant leap for data center managers and vendors that have a stake in using VMware and iSCSI storage together.

The biggest beneficiaries of VMware's new support for iSCSI offload are data center managers using iSCSI storage. Always striving to increase the density of their compute nodes in order to save money and simplify management, VMware just awarded these data center managers free server resources they can use to create a little performance headroom or to support more application loads.

Dell, EMC, HP and IBM also benefit from VMware's new support for iSCSI offload. Each of these leading storage vendors are experiencing growth in the mid-market with iSCSI storage and are knocking on the door of large data centers with enterprise-class 10Gb iSCSI solutions. VMware support for iSCSI offload means the new class of massive 10Gb iSCSI storage systems won't bury enterprise servers with iSCSI protocol processing that should be done by C-NICs. Storage protocol processing offload is a requirement for enterprise-class SAN deployments and iSCSI offload will help the leading storage vendors design iSCSI storage into large virtualized data centers.

Another big beneficiary of VMware's latest announcement is Broadcom. The company's 957711 10GbE C-NICs have the only iSCSI offload engines certified by VMware today. That means until other iSCSI offload engines are certified, Compellent, Dell, EMC, HP and IBM, and other storage vendors are likely to recommend Broadcom C-NICs when they're designing iSCSI SANs for vSphere 4.1 environments.

Just as IT organizations wouldn't think of deploying Fibre Channel SANs and expect their VMware servers to do Fibre Channel protocol processing, they never should have to deploy iSCSI SANs with their VMware servers wasting cycles on iSCSI protocol processing. That work has always been done by Fibre Channel HBAs and can now be done by 10Gb C-NICs. With vSphere 4.1, a new best practice has been established for server virtualization and iSCSI storage: iSCSI offload must be enabled.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks at General Motors Auto Plant in Hamtramck, Michigan. The Hamtramck GM plant is one of nine that GM recently kept open during a scheduled summer shutdown in production.

Today the President was in Detroit visiting workers at a Chrysler plant and a GM plant that have not only survived, but found success after critics looking to score political points claimed there was no hope for them. For those critics the President offered a lesson: "Don't bet against the American worker."

During the two years since the economy took its hard downward turn, millions of Americans have had to fight with everything they had to stay afloat, to keep food on the table, to keep their businesses in business and nowhere has that been more true than in Detroit.

The President has also been fighting alongside America's workers from the Recovery Act that's saved or created about 3 million jobs, to the fight today over small business lending and of course for the workers in Detroit and across America who contribute to the decades-old craft of American cars. When political opponents said that helping the American auto industry survive was a lost cause, and tried to turn public frustration against the President, he stepped in and made the hard choices anyway. There couldn't necessarily be a life raft for everybody, but he was not going to let a million American jobs fall by the wayside simply because it opened him up for cheap political attacks.

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At their genesis, bike-sharing networks were low on tech and heavy on grassroots, cooperative spirit. But the programs and systems rolling out today for tracking and distributing up to thousands of bicycles in cities from Milan to San Antonio are of another generation one built upon mobile access to the real-time web and GPS chips.

Armed with these IT tools, new and evolving bike-sharing networks fit into the larger trends of smarter digital and networked transportation systems, innovation around providing mobility as a service, and moves by unconventional players (from non-profits to advertising giants to health insurance firms to new startups) to assume new roles in the transportation sector.

Public entities are getting into the act, too, with Montreal's BIXI system being deployed in cities in the U.S. and the UK, while federal and state governments are providing seed money and ongoing funds for some programs. The hope is that the right combination of technology, pricing and convenience will help integrate bicycles into the larger transportation system at mass scale (right up there with buses, trains, ferries and taxi cabs, for example) and spur the growth of some new businesses in the process.

On Friday, the world's largest bike share network will launch in London, with 6,000 bikes at 400 stations. It's an illustration of what technologies like text messaging, smartphones with GPS, and the real-time web are ultimately driving in the bike-sharing market: a shift in scale, as infrastructure costs come down, and growing convenience attracts a broader market.

As it becomes increasingly common for consumers to have web access on the go and operators can use sensors and real-time communication to flag available docks and bikes barriers to adoption are falling away. It's just plain easier to find a station and a bike that's ready to roll. And with GPS chips that can locate you, a bike, or a parking spot, operators have a tool for tackling the bane of bike sharing networks of yore: theft.

A similar shift can be seen on the automotive side of the mobility as a service market. Whereas car sharing providers have had networks at the city or regional scale for years, often using a nonprofit model, Zipcar has built up a national footprint and begun to extend its reach overseas over the last decade. While the company which filed in June for a $75 million IPO has never turned a profit, its revenues reached $131.2 million last year, up from just $13.7 million in 2005.

Zipcar, which has also grown through acquisitions, developed its fleet technology with a plan to scale it. The company's vehicles carry some essential hardware, including a black box device (a custom circuit board, processor and modem) fitted to a vehicle windshield that allows users to unlock the car they've reserved, and also lets Zipcar remotely monitor vehicles. It's a relatively streamlined customization process, compared with competing systems that require installation of keypads in the dash, for example, or a hands-free calling setup. In fact, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith has told us that the ideal vehicle for car sharing would be modeled after smartphones, with an open platform that would allow Zipcar to roll new cars into its fleet with little more than a software download.

Zipcar's grand vision is for a subscriber who lives near its Cambridge, Mass. headquarters, for example, to rent a car in a Barcelona or London Zipcar fleet just as easily as in their home network. Might we eventually be able to rent a bike just as easily in any city around the world, with the swipe of a smartcard or by sending a text message? The race is on to find out, as a growing number of operators seek to replicate their systems in other cities.

We put together a cheat sheet on 10 bike sharing networks to watch earlier this year. But the pace of growth in these programs called for an update, so we revamped our guide to show how bike-sharing networks are putting technology to work, who's paying how much, and what you might expect to find in your own city sometime soon. There are dozens more that we couldn't include on our list (tell us about em in the comments section), but here's 20 places to watch as the latest generation of bike sharing systems put chips to work for pedal power.