Archive for May, 2006

The FTC and Online Security

Friday, May 19th, 2006

The Federal Trade Commission has created a web site to assist online users in protesting their private information as well as their Internet connected machines. Their web site for accomplishing this is located here, OnGuard Online. Want to attack hackers trying to get on your wireless network? Play the FTC’s online game titled Invasion of the Wireless Hackers.

While the game mentioned above is easy for those of us who are involved in technology on a daily basis, I think this is a good thing for novice users to check out. Other content on the OnGuard Online web site may be just the place to send family and friends to for furthering their education on safety on the Internet.

Until next time…

Firefox Extensions for Developers

Friday, May 19th, 2006

I haven’t posted in a while (has anybody even noticed?), so I thought I might get back in the game by telling you about several Firefox extensions I have been using.

There are MANY extensions available for Firefox and I certainly have not even began to review them all. However, I have come to love and adore several of the developer extensions. My thanks goes out to those who have written these extensions and made them available for us to use.

BTW, these are listed in no particular order or ranking.

Firstly, I really like the Web Developer toolbar. This extension installs as a Firefox toolbar and includes many tools that a web developer might find useful. While there are still several I have not explored, I have really enjoyed the CSS tool.

Secondly is IE Tab. This tool allows you to open an embedded instance of Internet Explorer inside a Firefox tab. You might ask, “Why would you want to do that!!?”. Well, many people still use IE for browsing, so this is handy for checking how IE will render a page without ever leaving Firefox (I shudder at the thought).

Thirdly, the HTML Validator tool is very slick. This tool, based on HTML Tidy (which is apparently embedded in Firefox), allows you to quickly validate HTML on the local machine. No need to submit the site to a third party server for validation. The report is really useful. If there are any errors in your HTML (gasp!), you can select an error message and the extension will highlight the area of code that is problematic. No more counting lines! The extension even has an option which will allow Tidy to attempt to fix any invalid HTML for you (although I haven’t tried that yet).

And lastly, but not leastly, there is the View Formatted Source tool. This addon features the ability to view the formatted and color coded source code of a web page. It even has a code collapse feature and also allows you to selectively view only the portion of the page you are interested in.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the the extensions available for Firefox. It is simply a list of several that I have found to be useful. Who knows, maybe you will too.

FreeBSD 6.0 to 6.1 Upgrade

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

The FreeBSD team released the latest version of the 6.x branch of FreeBSD, 6.1-RELEASE, on May 8th, 2006. FreeBSD also publicly released their new logo and it is in use now on their web site, along with “Beastie“.

I upgraded my laptop over the weekend, using the instructions located here, with success! It took a little while, but not as long as I expected, to download and compile all of the system and kernel sources. The process defined in the previously mentioned tutorial was basically the same thing you can get from the FreeBSD Handbook here. The tutorial basically dumbs down the steps and has them all in one place. Very helpful!

However, recompiling all 348 of my installed ports and packages took a very long time because I wasn’t able to sit down and babysit my laptop to answer all of the make configuration prompts that some ports have. Out of the 348 installed ports on my system, only 9 failed. One of them was OpenOffice.org and I am glad it failed. Last time I compiled OOo it took about 42-48 hours. I don’t really remember the exact compile time but it was long. Some of the other ports that failed I uninstalled as I never use them and it wasn’t worth my time to research the issue and resolve it.

I have noticed some performance increases since I upgraded to 6.1. I don’t know if they are true increases or if it is just like when you used to get new kicks in school: you could always jump higher and run faster with your new kicks on. Maybe this is the same thing, I don’t know, but it does seem faster! I also have support for my iPod Video now and that rocks!

Until next time…

Visual Task Tips: Windows Shell Enhancements

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

This was posted on UneasySilence (that’s the only blog I’ve gotten around to reading today). It looks pretty useful. Basically, you hover over one of your appliation’s taskbar icons and it shows you a small screenshot of it.

I have the same thing in my Alt-Tab window, thanks to the Alt-Tab replacement utility in the XP Power Toys.

Here’s a screenshot of the Vistual Task tool in action:

Visual Task Tips

Download and install at your own risk, however, since this is NOT a Microsoft provided product. Always be cautious when installing software from people you don’t know.

If you want to know what’s going on when you install software, use VMWare (there’s a free version) and install FileMon, RegMon, and TCPView in a Virtual Machine. Then take snapshots before and after you’ve installed the software and compare the two.

This still looks like a very cool Windows add-on!

Little humor for the day

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

One of the forums I visit has a joke thread where there’s ALWAYS funny stuff being posted. I haven’t had a lot of time lately to visit but I am subscribed to the thread so I get new posts emailed to me.

This one came in today and, while only semi funny, I think we can all relate to being a little stressed and wishing we had someone to take it out on.

Anger Management

When you occasionally have a really bad day, and you just need to take it out on someone, don’t take it out on someone you know, take it out on someone you don’t know.

I was sitting at my desk when I remembered a phone call I’d forgotten to make. I found the number and dialed it. A man answered, saying, “Hello.”

I politely said, “This is Chris. Could I please speak with Robyn Carter?”

Suddenly a manic voice yelled out in my ear, “Get the right f***ing number” and the phone was slammed down on me.

I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so rude. When I tracked down Robyn’s correct number to call her, I found that I had accidentally transposed the last two digits.

After hanging up with her, I decided to call the ‘wrong’ number again.

When the same guy answered the phone, I yelled “You’re an *******!” and hung up. I wrote his number down with the word ‘*******’ next to it, and
put it in my desk drawer.

Every couple of weeks, when I was paying bills or had a really bad day, I’d call him up and yell, “You’re an *******!” It always cheered me up.

When Caller ID was introduced, I thought my therapeutic “******* calling” would have to stop.

So, I called his number and said, “Hi, this is John Smith from Verizon. I’m calling to see if you’re familiar with our Caller ID Program?”

He yelled “NO!” and slammed down the phone.

I quickly called him back and said, “That’s because you’re an *******!”

One day I was at the store, getting ready to pull into a parking spot. Some guy in a black BMW cut me off and pulled into the spot I had patiently waited for. I hit the horn and yelled that I’d been waiting for that spot, but the idiot ignored me. I noticed a “For Sale” sign in his back window which included his phone number, so I wrote down the number.

A couple of days later, right after calling the first ******* (I had his number on speed dial), I thought that I’d better call the BMW *******, too.

I said, “Is this the man with the black BMW for sale?” “Yes, it is,” he said.

“Can you tell me where I can see it?” I asked.

“Yes, I live at 34 Mowbray Blvd, in Vaucluse. It’s a yellow house, and the car’s parked right out in front.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“My name is Don Hansen,” he said.

“When’s a good time to catch you, Don?”

“I’m home every evening after five.”

“Listen, Don, can I tell you something?”

“Yes?”

“Don, you’re an *******!” Then I hung up, and added his number to my speed dial.

Now, when I had a problem, I had two *******s to call Then I came up with an idea. I called ******* #1.

“Hello.”

“You’re an *******!” (But I didn’t hang up.)

“Are you still there?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said.

“Stop calling me,” he screamed.

“Make me,” I said.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Don Hansen.”

“Yeah? Where do you live?”

“*******, I live at 34 Mowbray Blvd, Vaucluse, a yellow house, with my black Beamer parked in front.”

He said, “I’m coming over right now, Don. And you had better start saying your prayers.”

I said, “Yeah, like I’m really scared, *******,” and hung up. Then I called ******* #2.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hello, *******,” I said.

He yelled, “If I ever find out who you are…”

“You’ll what?” I said.

“I’ll kick your ***,” he exclaimed.

I answered, “Well, *******, here’s your chance I’m coming over right now.”

Then I hung up and immediately called the police, saying that I lived at 34 Mowbray Blvd, Vaucluse, and that I was on my way over there to kill my gay lover. Then I called Channel 9 News about the gang war going down in Mowbray Blvd, Vaucluse.

I quickly got into my car and headed over to Mowbray. I got there just in time to watch two *******s beating the crap out of each other in front of six cop cars, an overhead police helicopter and a news crew.

NOW I feel much better. Anger Management really works.

BTW, if you haven’t checked out http://www.bash.org yet, you really should. It’s a collection of IRC log snippets that are always hilarious. I promise if you read through a couple of them (they’re all really short, one or two lines, tops) you’ll quickly make that one of your daily stops!

Passwords, authentication, security

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

I e-mailed Jeff yesterday with the following question and he felt it safe and applicable for AA…

“I have a question for you and I feel it to be to sensitive for AA. I trust that YourPlace is similar to MyPlace in that you have a network (AD) password and passwords for various other software packages for the various types of software, e.g. Tellers, credit checks, and other secure software. How do you handle uses passwords. Do you have them renew every so often, Do they have different passwords for different software, do you have a lot of work orders to unlock or reset passwords.

The reason I ask is that here there are about 100 work orders a day for people needing to be unlocked in AD or Unix, and they have to keep up with several (3 to 5) passwords. I understand them forgetting them because I have a hard time keeping up with my own. The environment here is much more secure than a school and I understand having passwords expire, but they don’t all expire at the same time and the passwords have different length requirements. ”

He replied…

“We have the same problem. We have a lot of applications, Unix, AD, Banking Software, Intranet, NADA, etc. that require all users to use a different password due to them being changed all the time (30, 60, or 90 days). How do we handle it? We don’t! We reset passwords all of the time. Work request after work request and phone call after phone call.

We are looking at getting biometric authentication with single sign on capabilities. What this will do is allow the user to sign on to the PC with one fingerprint. If a password expires, the authentication software will randomly generate a password for that user and tie it to their finger print so the user never has to know what their password is as long as they bring their finger/fingerprint to work with them. Anyway, what’s your solution?! ”

What are ya’lls thoughts.

But Superman can’t do that-

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

I was at the local Wal-Mart a couple of weeks ago and happened upon an action figure from the upcoming Superman Returns movie.  The toy manufacturer seems to have taken a few liberties with the Superman character and I decided that it was worthy of parody, so I drew up a comic related to it.  Have a look for yourself.

Software to save your …

Friday, May 12th, 2006

I found a free software this morning that has saved my bum.  It is a file undeleter that is free and works…well!  here is the link:  http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/index.htm

How About a New Horn for the Car?

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

I am sure this is extremely old and I am way behind the times, but I stumbled upon this tonight and laughed out loud. This is quite funny!

Here’s the link…

Upgrading From Win2k to Win2k3 domain

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

Here at the Uber Credit Union in Huntsville our domain admin is going to be upgrading the domain from a 2000 to a 2003 domain with new domain controllers and finally getting to use all the wonderful features of XP/2003 for wrangling those pesky users. He has done some Internet research and asked a few Microsoft trainers about any gotchas and things to be weary of, but the well of knowledge seems to be dry. I offered to post this for him and get feed back from real admins and geeks on their thoughts, experience and wisdom. So, any suggestions, or heads up?