Just how fast IS you connection? I know... your ISP says that you are getting 3meg down x 768 up but, are you? If your Internet connection seems slow, you should do some checking before complaining to your ISP. There are many sites available with Internet speed tests.

Internet speed tests let you know how your connection is actually doing at that point in time. And, with some reference tests done you go back to ISP with more information than; "Hey my internet is slow!!"

You can go to Google, search for "Internet speed test" and you will literally get Thousands of sites returned. So, to save you some time, here are my top nine sites that I have found most reliable and pretty easy to use.

1. SpeakEasy.net - Integrated down/up test
2. Speedtest.net
3. PC Pitstop
4. Dslreports
5. CNET tests
6. Bandwidth Place
7. MySpeed Server
8. Audit My PC
9. McAfee.com Speed Test

I got a note this morning about an interesting article over at IT Security.

It's been called one of the safest operating systems of all time, but Mac's OS X Tiger may not be as safe as it seems. This list provides its top security issues and how to plug them.

They've just released a report detailing some "Holes" in the OS X Tiger Operating system. They've given some suggestions on how to plug these holes. If you're a MAC user or a thinking about being a MAC user you need to check this out.

Check out their article here.

One of the things with this Vista machine is the fact that I didn't have all my trusty book marks from FireFox any longer.

It's easy to get your Favorites from Internet Explorer... just copy the Favorites folder in your user profile to the new machine and you're done. But, FireFox.... there's no file to copy for them. But, luckily in FireFox it's easy as well.

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Just a quick reminder to everyone out there... It's a New Year ... (Yippeeeee!!!) If you're still doing it by hand, don't forget to update the Copyright Dates on your web sites.

If you're doing it automatically.. Good for you!! Keep up the Good work. Just check to see that it did what it was supposed to do.

If you want to do it automatically, I blogged about a couple of methods a while back:

Update-Copyright-in-Javascript-and-Coldfusion

Check it out... great time saver.. Enjoy the weekend!

I just found a new Extension for FireFox. It is...

Performancing for Firefox

• Works with all major blog software
• Easy WYSIWYG Editing
• Trackback, Technorati and Del.icio.us support

Once installed, just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right of your browser window to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

Lets see how well it works with BlogCFC. This is my first Test.

IE 7 has been officially released.

Here are a few of the reported enhancements to the browser:

Simplified User Experience: The Internet Explorer 7 frame is reorganized to make it noticeably simpler, more streamlined, and less cluttered with unnecessary items. This maximizes the area of the screen devoted to the webpages that you want to see and makes performing the most common browsing tasks easy.

RSS Feeds: Automatically detects RSS feeds on sites by illuminating an icon on the toolbar. A single click on the icon allows you to preview and optionally subscribe to the site's RSS feed, and then be automatically notified as content is updated. Read RSS feeds directly in the browser, scan for important stories, and filter your view with search terms or site-specific categories.

Tabbed browsing: View multiple sites in a single browser window. Easily switch from one site to another through tabs at the top of the browser frame.

Kinda sounds like FireFox Now..

But, IE 7 is only available for:

• Windows XP (service Pack 2)
• Windox XP Pro x64
• Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition
• Windows Server 2003 (service Pack 1)

Sorry win2k people, you'll have to live vicariously through your friends... or just use FireFox.

This will add some difficulty for web designers... Not being able to run different versions of IE on a single machine. Testing new site layouts will be tricky for a while.

People everywhere seem to have their own "blog". Sites like "Blogger", My Space and Xanga make it really easy to publish your content. But, if you or your company already has their own servers, running a blog over at one of those other sites may provide less than desirable results. May be security issues banner ads that you don't want, etc.

That is why I completely recommend the BlogCFC software written and provided by Raymond Camden. Ray is, from my observations probably the smartest man alive and really provides a great product to the Internet community.

Besides the "diary" type blog format, just look what the newest version has to offer:

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