The Contract Programmer

Use the Java Contactor to protect your business or personal assets. As the following Morningstar article recommends, protecting your passwords is a best practice to avoid identity theft. In addition to using complicated passwords, it is best to have a different password for each online site. Once you use the Java Contactor to save passwords in an encrypted (protected) database, you can click on the website from within the Java Contactor to go to the login page making your password protection strategy easy and safe.

Be Password-Savvy

“Also be careful with the passwords that you use, particularly on sites where you conduct transactions or provide personal financial information. Don’t use obvious passwords, such as the name of your spouse or pet, or your birthday; that makes it easy for identity thieves to guess at yours. Also don’t use the same password again and again. The hardest-to-hack passwords are gibberish or use a combination of numbers and letters.

Windows will ask you whether you want it to “remember” your passwords, and then it will populate the password field automatically. That makes it a lot easier to surf online, but be careful when using this feature. Use it only when you’re on sites that don’t store sensitive information, such as your local newspaper’s site, rather than on sites where you actually execute business transactions. You can also shut off the Windows feature that asks you whether you want it to remember your passwords.

Using “password manager” software is another way to guard against phishing and other online scams. These programs store your user names and passwords and encrypt your information so it’s not accessible to hackers; however, these programs may not be able to handle some of the more complicated password formats that some banks require.

If you manage your various user names and passwords on your own, perhaps by maintaining a Microsoft Word or Excel document on your computer, take care to ensure that document’s safety. If your workstation doesn’t require a password to log on, take the step of password-protecting your document (Four Strategies for Avoiding Identity Theft, Morningstar.com).”

After I received 4,000+ spam comments to the blog over the past week-end, I suspended the ability for anyone to post a comment. Sorry. But seriously, how much traffic can a porn site get by posting a comment on thousands of unsuspecting blogs? I mean if it ends up generating traffic, then it makes me wonder if the mighty Google is really working that great. But my real guess is that the spammers are totally convinced that the long tailof leaving tons of spam posts on blogs is going to enrich them…

Last night I had dinner with some friends that run a business that focuses on amateur pilots. My good friend Andrew writes a blog, and Guy does camera work.  Andrew used to be a newsman at New York 1, but then he went back to law school and now works in publicity.  I think that Andrew has changed more directions in his career than I have, which is a feat I think!  Aside from the blog, they make and sell DVDs about aviation, the latest of which is called Flight School.
So Andrew updates the blog pretty often, well more often than I update mine anyway.  And it’s gotten some attention too, but they wanted to spruce up the site and I recommended Wordpress for the blogging software.  Then we got to talking about advertising and trying to get more traffic and marketing a website.  We all know one guy who spent something like $50.00 a day to advertise a DVD that he made about the Lake Plaid miracle USA hockey team, and it didn’t bring in any incremental revenue.  I had the same issue when I was doing the pay-per-download program through CNET for the Java Contactor.  I was bidding between $0.30 and $0.45 per download, and was maxing out my budget after only 4 or 5 days in a monthly cycle.  After maxing out the budget, I’d sit and wait for customers to buy a licensed copy of the software…but no. Then CNET created a wrapper program that forced a registration.  And that’s when I realized that the quality of users downloading the software was total crap.  Most everyone registered bogus names, email addresses, street addresses etc.  Everyone wanted free goods and wanted to remain anonymous too.  Pretty hard to run a business with anonymous non-paying customers:)

Man it’s tough getting a little attention for some shareware.  That’s probably my fault and it’s not like I wasn’t warned about it, like years ago.  For example, I wanted to be a writer at one time and my grandma told me that it was a really tough field to get noticed in.  She bought me a book about marketing novels to the world and the thing I really remember was that it said there are 2 kinds of writers, one that writes a book and then goes to find agents and book publishers to publish them, the second is one that finds what needs to be written and seeks a contract before writing the whole thing.  The lesson was that the latter makes the consistent money. When I take on new self-created projects, I’m usually in the former category.  I dream up something and then get running on it, sometimes without realizing what a huge dump of time and energy it is going to be.

I started writing a personal information manager written in Java back in 1999.  Over the years, I’ve gotten lots of suggestions about cool features to add in; features that one person thought would be the cat’s pajamas.  For instance, my best man thought it would be really hot to add the ability to pop off an email to anyone in the list.  So, I added a wizard to send email to any group within the contacts using any field in the contact list.  Then a customer told me that it would be a state of the art personal database if you could change the field names dynamically.  He wanted to use it for his business and had some special fields that identified clients.  Then another customer groused that “not everyone lives in the states” meaning that the address fields weren’t right for his international contact list.  So, I added the ability to change the field names, which also makes it easy to turn the PIM into another language, well except that the help page is still in English.

What I found interesting is that after finishing these new features, some of which are pretty time-consuming, the customers are not always so enthusiastic.  Sure, they use the new features but then they come up with other new features right away or imply that the feature isn’t exactly the same as they envisioned.  So you bust your ass and get a mediocre thanks in return if you’re lucky.  Excellent!