Dec 21
It is amazing how fast this year has passed and not only this year but the past nine. This article reflects on some neat things that changed our culture in the 00’s … http://is.gd/5wQgh
Oct 23
If you are having problems with a certificate error internally due to your cert being signed only for the outside fqdn (example: webmail.somedomain.com and internally is mailserver.somedomain.local) then take a look at this great blog post:
http://www.shudnow.net/2007/08/10/outlook-2007-certificate-error/
The above isn’t the only solution to the problem but a good one that works.
Some more links as well:
Sep 02
Some quick news hits from my favorite podcast of indeterminate length, Buzz Out Loud from CNET with my own titles and of which I will comment on at a later date…
iJustice!
Man uses ‘Find My iPhone’ to locate his iPhone… and three robbery suspects
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/08/30/man-uses-find-my-iphone-to-locate-his-iphone-and-three-robbery-suspects/
Twitter: just as I thought, no one uses it as much as Facebook
Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/30/why-dont-teens-tweet-we-asked-over-10000-of-them/
New iPods anyone?
Apple confirms September 9, 2009 “rock and roll” event
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/08/apple-confirms-september-9-2009-rock-and-roll-event.ars
Snow Leopard joins the Achaeans
Snow Leopard’s malware protection only scans for two Trojans
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=4139
Yay Google Earth! Where’s bigfoot?
Loch Ness Monster surfaces on Google Earth
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/28/google_earth_nessie/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10318790-36.html
Speaking of Google, Books anyone?
Google now offers over a million free e-books in EPUB format
http://mashable.com/2009/08/27/google-million-free-ebooks/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10318843-265.html
Why your WPA isn’t safe anymore, better have mac authentication
New attack cracks common Wi-Fi encryption in a minute
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20090827/tc_pcworld/newattackcrackscommonwifiencryptioninaminute
Transportation
Wheelchair of the future takes on the scooter
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-10320802-247.html
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/08/31/rodem_hi_tech_wheelchair/
Aug 31
Recently I noticed I was unable to open voicemail attachments in Outlook 2007. For a while I could do a quick preview and then that stopped working as well. I dealt with it and just listened to them on my iPhone figuring I’d get to my problems later and then someone else that I support had the same issue. At that point it was time to check it out. From my research online I found a thread from the UK where others were having the same issue and it pointed to a great article explaining that clearing the Outlook temporary files folder would take care of the issue.
The article is located on the “HowTo-Outlook” site at http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/securetemp.htm
For the search engines, the error I was receiving was as follows:
Can’t create file: VoiceMessage.wav. Right-click on the folder you want to create the file in, and then click Properties on the shortcut menu to check your permissions for the folder.
Aug 28
I noticed several NFS volumes of servers that no longer existed attempting to be automounted in OS X. I found a post online to disable the automount for the server AD and it worked well for me.
The article can be found at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030211060027212
For several months now, my automated nightly incremental backups to an NSF-mounted remote device have been failing. After many false leads, I finally traced the problem to the program automount in /usr/sbin.
This program causes the remote disk to disappear when you log out, and things like remote backups at 2am will then fail. They even fail if you are logged in but the screensaver comes on. This unfortunately is (now) the default behavior, and automount, without asking or warning you, hijacks your NFS mounting point, moves it to its own directory, and creates an alias. I wonder if Bill Gates wrote this? Anyway, you can turn it off by editing the file /etc/hostconfig and changing the line AUTOMOUNT=-YES- to AUTOMOUNT=-NO-.
This will take effect after a restart. If you currently have NFS devices that have been automouted, you will have to unmount them by hand, delete the alii created by automount, remake the corresponding directories for the local mount points and then remount.
This can all be done in NSF manager except for the last step, which now fails with a cryptic “system error 255″. You can get around this by mounting with the root command mount -a.
Now my backups work at 2 am like they are supposed to.
Aug 28
We have several sites in our local network that have found their way onto Internet Explorer 8’s bad list when it comes to XSS. These are not necessarily sites we have developed but part of 3rd party published applications that provide a web interface. There’s a quick way to disable this for trusted sites through IE settings which I will show below. First, let’s take a look at what XSS is…
What is XSS? Is it like CSS?
XSS stands for “Cross-Site Scripting.” It is one of manymethods a hacker can use to exploit a site and gain information from a user. Basically code (usually Javascript) is injected or included in a page that makes referece back to another site providing a method for access and transmission of information. For examples see the cheat sheet of code at this site. You can also read the Wikipedia article.
How do I bypass the filter for trusted sites?
Generally you woudn’t want to turn the XSS filtering in IE 8 off at a global level unless there is a great reason to do so. What I have done is added the site I want to adjust to my trusted sites group and then manipulated my trusted site settings.
Head to Tools -> Internet Options -> Security. Click on “Trusted Sites” and click the “Custom Level” button.
Scroll down in the options until you see “Enable XSS Filter” and choose “Disable”
While you are in there you also may want to adjust for mixed http and https content. You can do that in the heading “Display Mixed Content”
I hope you found this post useful … it’s just one of those things we learn as IE 8 is used more. Overall I’m very thankful for the update IE 8 has provided.
Feb 17
Learn Objective-C
In reading “Learn Objective-C on the Mac” by Mark Dalrymple (Author), Scott Knaster (Author) I ran across a great quote that I felt was worth posting here on my blog. The quote is as follows: An old saying in programming goes something like this, “There is no problem in computer science that can’t be solved by adding another level of indirection.” When looking at many of the various languages programmers work with on a daily basis it is easy to see how indirection is becoming increasingly popular and a forefront of new language introduction. C, C++, and Objective-C have made use of this throughout from the simple use of variables and pointers, to file and database references for application settings. As programmers have become more accustomed to OOP (Object Oriented Programming) practices we have learned to extend the OO approach to our lives and other realms of computing. A great example of this can be found in the forefront of Web 2.0. The new approaches to data sharing and mash-ups on the web today speak volumes on how OOP has gained roots not only at the desktop level but in web applications as well. Several years ago web applications were minimal, not robust, and inline, not OO. The emergence of greater and more usable frameworks and methods of development on the web application sphere has created a volume of wonderful web applications that have begun to rival that of desktop applications (think GMail, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc). Such acceptance of SaaS (Software as a Service) and Cloud Computing has lead us down a road where we are using the concepts of indirection outside to programming world and injecting it into daily enterprise and personal computing. It will be interesting to see how far we can go in the next few years to greater share and extend our data to multiple devices and mash it up (to say in Web 2.0 speak) into a singular personal computing experience. Ahh– Indirection.
Feb 17
This is just a note for folks out there that when you allow connections by IP on your receive connector and you add an IP that you sometimes will need to restart the transport for Exchange to pick up the new changes.
Feb 16
If you’re trying to upload/insert media into your blog post in Wordpress and keep getting an error saying that the upload_max_filesize is xM then it is time to edit your php.ini file. After PHP5 their are additional rules that keep you from just changing this so you may need to contact your hosting provider. In my case I’m my own hosting provider so my instructions are for Windows Server 2003. You may have multiple php.ini files so it is important to know which one you need to edit. If you make your changes and nothing happens then do a search on php.ini.
I found my php.ini and did a search for “upload_max_filesize.” Since I’ll sometimes post large files I just set mine to 120M. You also must change post_max_size. If you do not change post_max_size then Wordpress will still tell you there is a problem with upload_max_filesize. Set them both to the same value and save your php.ini file. Open up a command promp and type: net stop w3svc … then … net start w3svc. This starts and stops the world wide web publishing service which will cause a re-read of php.ini.
You should be good to go, happy uploading!
Feb 09
I have been trying to do more work with development on the Apple platform rather than booting into my VMWare Fusion Windows XP VM for general development. As a result I’ve migrated my blog to DasBlog to Wordpress. DasBlog worked OK for what I needed but just is so far behind Wordpress in ease of use and features. I’m looking forward to the new blog platform and kicking the tires over the next few weeks 