markwilson.it

Tag: Useful Websites

  • Online personality tests

    A week or so ago, I spent two days on a technical leadership course as part of my work. I’m not sure that the course really spent much time teaching me to lead (it’s kind of implicit in my role), but it was an opportunity to take stock of where I am and made me realise that I need to think about where I want to go next.

    My higher education was entirely technical but I do find it fascinating to look at some of the business models that other people employ, and some of the behavioural models that are used to categorise people. Particularly interesting on my recent course were concepts such as the Johari Window and the four Cs of leadership (credibility, capability, career management and character), the accelerated learning ladder and the situational leadership model. I was also able to take some online tests including the leader behavioural analysis II (LBAII) self-profile and the occupational personality questionnaire (OPQ32).

    Whilst the LBAII was interesting, it is entirely based on my own perception of how I would react in a given scenario (and it’s only natural to answer with what is considered to be the “best” answer – i.e. how I should act), but it does seem that I adapt my leadership style to meet the needs of those I am leading – something which surprised me.

    Although it’s also based upon self-assessment (and hence possibly different to the way in which others view you), OPQ32 is harder to fool (not that I deliberately tried to fool any of the tests) – for anyone who has ever taken this sort of test, it’s the one often used for psychometric profiling as part of interview processes, with many questions, each subtly different where you often think “haven’t I answered this already?”. Amazingly though, having read the report from the analysis of my answers, it’s pretty spot on in assessing my personality (as verified by my wife, who knows me as well as anyone).

    Both of these tests require payment to the companies that own them; however I stumbled across a free, online, personal DNA report whilst casually surfing from blog to blog last night. My personal DNA report indicates that I am a “respectful leader” (fitting in with my LBAII and OPQ32 responses) – anyone who is remotely interested can mouse-over the graphic below to see how it categorised me:

    At the end of the day, you can read as much or as little into these personality tests as you like, but I found the OPQ32 to be frighteningly accurate and the personal DNA test is very similar in some ways. If you still don’t believe it then you can get others to assess you (based on their view of your personality) – now that could be really scary!

  • Windows Live OneCare Safety Scan

    Based on the content I write, I imagine that most readers of this blog will be IT professionals. That generally means two things:

    • Your family don’t understand what you do (e.g. “Mark works in computers”).
    • Your family and friends think that because you “work in computers” that you can fix their PC.

    I fell foul of this a couple of times over the last few days. The first time was no big deal – a few months back, I had given my parents an old laptop and now they are really getting into e-mail and the web; however it was booting very slowly because a well-intended friend of theirs had installed the popular (and free for non-commercial use) AVG Anti-Virus (along with a load of unnecessary applications) and it was performing a full scan on every boot (I had already installed Symantec AntiVirus which was working quite nicely in a far less obtrusive manner). Once I removed AVG, performance was back to normal… so much for well-intentioned friends.

    The second instance was last night, when my brother said he’d applied some updates to his PC and now he couldn’t get into Excel. That was easy enough (Microsoft Office XP required the original media to complete installation of an update), but I decided to check out the general state of the PC and was a little alarmed. Because the PC is only connected to the Internet via a modem, downloading updates takes a long time – automatic updates will trickle feed and my brother had kept his anti-virus definitions up-to-date but it still needed a lot of attention. Microsoft Update told me that it would need most of the night to download it’s updates, so I took it home (disconnected everything else from my LAN as a precaution) and hooked it up to my ADSL line, before spending the next couple of hours downloading and applying 61 Microsoft updates (as well as updating AdAware SE Personal Edition, which was over 700-days out of date).

    Having given the PC a clean bill of health with AdAware (luckily the dial-up connection had minimised the spyware threat and it just had 52 tracking cookies to remove), I decided to check out another tool that, ironically, an Apple support page had alerted me to the existence of – the Windows Live OneCare Safety Scan.

    Other antivirus vendors have online scanners (e.g. McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro) but the advantage of the Microsoft version is that the full scan checks for viruses, spyware, disk fragmentation, temporary files, redundant registry data, and open network ports – what would appear to be a fairly thorough healthcheck, all through one ActiveX control.

    Another feature is that you can run individual scans for protection, cleaning up or tuning the system (each effectively a component of the full scan described above). Finally, for Windows Vista users, the Windows Live OneCare site also provides a beta for a Vista-aware full service safety scan.

  • Sysinternals is back online

    Windows Sysinternals
    A few months back, Microsoft bought Winternals – including Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell’s highly-regarded Sysinternals website with many utilities considered essential by Windows administrators. The site then went offline for a few months but it’s now back in the form of the Microsoft Technet: Windows Sysinternals microsite.

  • Catching up on events by listening to podcasts

    Maybe it’s a sign of getting older but, along with new tastes for full-bodied red wine and extra mature cheddar cheese, talk radio (mostly BBC Radio 4) has joined my list of preferences; and as I regularly spend approximately 12 to 15 hours of my working week driving around south-east England this is a perfect opportunity to catch up on the modern equivalent of talk radio – podcasts.

    Podcasting (and the various derivatives thereof) have really caught on over the last year or so (helped by Apple’s bundling of podcatching capabilities within iTunes) and were the main reason I bought an iPod last year, although it’s probably worth mentioning that you don’t need an iPod – any digital media player will do – the main requirement is to be able to receive new podcasts via an RSS feed and synchronise with the digital media player. My iPod is connected to the car stereo via a 3.5mm headphone jack but other options include the Griffin iTrip and burning MP3 CDs to listen to via the normal CD player.

    Much of the available content originates from the United States but there is some British content too – many “old media” companies have jumped on the podcasting bandwagon and even the BBC has some content available for download. I highly recommend The Now Show but many popular radio shows now have podcast derivatives and even BBC News has got in on the event with audio and video podcasts.

    It’s not just broadcast media that is using podcasting to reach new audiences though – forward-thinking organisations have recognised the power of the corporate podcast (e.g. First Direct); and when Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 last November they released a 45 minute audio download to complement the launch events, featuring information from their developer and platform group experts.

    As a techie, podcasting is a great way to keep up-to-date with industry news and the UK trade weekly IT Week now has a short podcast discussing two or three of the week’s top stories. The TWiT network also has several podcasts that I listen to routinely – including This Week in Tech, Inside the Net and MacBreak Weekly – and last week this list was extended with a new Windows Weekly podcast featuring well-known Microsoft commentator Paul Thurrott. Other tech podcasts that I listen to include The iLifeZone.

    If, like me, you are suffering from e-mail, blog and paper-based information overload, then I recommend podcasting as an alternative method for catching up on events.

  • UK white pages available online

    I don’t know how long this has been available but I just noticed a link on the BT website to the Phonebook – the UK’s residential and business white pages service. Many years back I used to have some sort of dial-up terminal access to a directory lookup system but I didn’t know it was now available on the Internet. Won’t find me though… I’m ex-directory!

  • An interesting look at the connotations of colour

    I’m working on a feature for a local community magazine and one of the items that’s become quite significant is the choice of colours for the artwork. Alex sent me a link to the color in motion site, which describes itself as an animated and interactive experience of colour communication and colour symbolism. The use of colour is equally applicable to print and web work and this site is worth a look if you have five minutes – in my opinion, it’s one of the few sites where the exclusive use of animation is worthwhile.

  • Avoiding compulsory website registration

    I’m sick of giving out my personal details (even false ones) to websites that require me to register. A few months back I wrote about using a temporary e-mail address to avoid spammers but now (thanks to a comment on a post at 4sysops), I’ve discovered BugMeNot a site that allows ‘net users to bypass compulsory registration. Simply enter the URL for the website that requires registration and the site will tell you if it has a set of credentials on file that you can use.

    Of course, there are sites that I do register with because they provide a service that I consume, but as Michael Pietroforte notes in his never sign up for ZDNet white papers post, sometimes it’s just a way to get your details (in this case from a company which has been accused of being a Spamhaus) and then refer you to a vendor’s own freely-available information.

  • New bookmarking links

    This blog is overdue for redesign, but I barely have time to write posts at the moment so a new layout (using improved CSS and standards-compliant XHTML) will be a while coming yet; however I have been tinkering a little bit with the template and I just added bookmark links on the bottom of each post.

    The trouble with social bookmarking sites and customised start pages is that there are so many of them – I used start.com (now renamed Windows Live) for a while, I have a Google personalised home page (that I don’t really use) and last night I had a play around with Protopage.

    3spots has provided icons and details for over a hundred bookmark buttons but for now I’ve just put in del.icio.us del.icio.us, Digg Digg, Google Google Bookmarks, Technorati Technorati Favorites, Windows Windows Live and Yahoo Yahoo MyWeb.

    Note that the 3spots site uses a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial sharealike licence and, even though I haven’t got around to switching this site over to Creative Commons yet, any reuse of the del.icio.us, Google, Technorati, Windows and Yahoo icons above is subject to the same terms (I got the Digg one from Digg).

    It looks a bit messy right now so I may adjust the layout slightly over time but please let me know if there is another one that you’d really like to see and, if there is enough interest, I’ll add it.

    Finally, if I write something that you think might be interesting to others, please click on the Digg Digg It! link.

  • Mac 101 and Switch 101

    Last week I took delivery of my new Apple Macintosh. I’m still having some teething problems (more on that when I get a resolution to my networking issues) but right now the Mac is at home and I’m in a hotel in London, surfing and blogging from my Windows Vista notebook. Anyway, I just came across the Mac 101 and Switch 101 sections of the Apple website which are really cool resources for those who are getting used to a Mac for the first time (either as new computer users or switching from Windows respectively). Useful stuff.

    I particularly like the Switch 101 tag line – “Lose Ctrl. Gain Command.”

  • Using a temporary e-mail address to avoid spammers

    A colleague just sent me a link to Mailinator – a service for creating temporary mailboxes that are valid for just a few hours in order to receive (but not send) e-mail, e.g. when registering on a website and needing to see the initial registration e-mail, but wanting to guard against receiving unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE – more commonly known as spam) afterwards.

    This is how the guys at Mailinator describe it:

    “It’s like super-instant, always-ready, any-email-you-want email. Right now. It’s your personal disposable email account. Here is how it works: You are on the web, at a party, or talking to your favorite insurance salesman. Wherever you are, someone (or some webpage) asks for your email. You know if you give it, you’re gambling with your privacy. On the other hand, you do want at least one message from that person. The answer is to give them a mailinator address. You don’t need to sign-up. You just make it up on the spot[…] — pick anything you want.

    Later, come to [the Mailinator] site and check that account. Its that easy. Mailinator accounts are created when mail arrives for them. No signup, no personal information, and when you’re done — you can walk away — an instant solution to one way spammers get your address. It’s an anti-spam solution for everyone. Your temporary email account will be automatically deleted for you after a few hours.

    Let’em spam…”

    I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds like a great idea!