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The good is oft interred with their bones.
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I've never stopped studying administration of the operating systems, but I stopped acquiring Microsoft Certification a couple of years ago when I came to the same conclusions Mark Minasi (Senior Contributing Editor, Windows 2000 Magazine, help@minasi.com) has in his article: Microsoft Certification: A Measure of Competence or Profit-Making Scheme? His plea falls on deaf ears but it's still worth restating:
"if anyone's listening in the Human Resources departments around the world, please stop using MCSE certification as a touchstone of competence."
The terrified economy? Let's put the terrorist attacks in a proper perspective because claims about its economic impact have got way out of proportion.
And while we're at it, let's not make Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends...and Pseudoscience Begins.
The San Francisco Bay Wireless Internet Access Point List provides maps of the coverage of Wi-Fi networks that you can access with a wireless network card and a laptop and enjoy broadband internet for free. Private individuals are installing access points like the $565.00 ORiNOCO AP-1000 with range extender antennas which should have an outdoor range of 3,000 feet. Ostensibly for personal use, anyone in range can take advantage of the network.
If you put one up in Kailua, Oahu, and you'd like some help testing your installation, let me know.
"Most intranets suck", says Robert Scoble, who picks apart the requirements in order to come up with his employer's solution. There's a lot to recommend Manila as the foundation of a scalable, easy to use content management application for your intranet. Except for the the $899 price tag and the requirement that it run on your own server. Hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses, say 25 seats or less, could benefit from a user friendly intranet but would be hard pressed to justify the expense. GreyMatter is a customizable content management solution that only requires a web account with support for Perl 5, and a little imagination. The program itself is free.
If you like to read the manual before you begin the installation and DOCUMENTATION spins your dials, and you should click on over to ITPapers, the Yellow Pages of White Papers. Links to 20,000 titles in a searchable database.
Cisco posts: How to Protect Your Network Against the Nimda Virus, by filtering malware from packets passing through Cisco routers.
Paula Sharick at Windows2000 Magazine suggests ways of Expediting the Arduous Security Update Process.
Paul Boutin says "Installing the Code Red patch isn't enough."
Which is something you're not going to hear from the folks at Microsoft TechNet Security. But they do have quite alot to say!
Kali and the tactics of network destruction: Eric Norlin applies the physics and the philosophy of networking to the network that is terrorism and finds in the devestation of one a strategy that may help to destroy the other.
Pirated XP selling like hotcakes in Asia: hmmm, perhaps I spoke too soon when I implied that 73 Million Users of XP by 2002 might be Uncle Bill's wishful thinking. (Here in Hawaii the term, "Uncle," is one of respect not disparagement.)
The Hawaii State DBEDT has created the Special Visitor and Unemployment Update website to help interested parties monitor the condition of our visitor industry and its relationship to unemployment claims statistics. These figures would have been interesting even before the former went south and the latter went north, after September 11th.
HOW TO CREATE A LINUX-BASED NETWORK OF COMPUTERS FOR PEANUTS, Part 3 is online. If you haven't been keeping up with this step-by-step practical exercise that chronicles the installation of the same Linux system empowering the town of Largo, Florida, then be sure to read the earlier installments. And be sure to click on the links at the end of each article that connect to Related Stories and Related Sites. They're like the gravy on top of a loco-moco; you could do without but it wouldn't be quite the same.
Also in Threes: If you're looking both ways, here's a three part list of what to study in order to pass the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server exam. Expect the collateral hassles of registration and email exposure, they come with the territory when you're studying for Microsoft Certification. What? No Hotmail account?
Tiny versions of classic games, this is TinyCheckers: This screenshot is the actual size, squares are 6x6 pixels. Serious hand/eye coordination required and extended play could lock your face into a permanent squint!
Most opinions restate the obvious. You may not be too familiar with the following: "The Nimda virus is aggressive and exploits a number of propagation methods. In the end, however, it relies on the fact that Microsoft has ignored the need for good security for years."
But in an interview with TechTarget, Scott Blake, security director of BindView, explains that MS has responded. He contends that systems administrators haven't been too quick to install Microsoft solutions:
"New security vulnerabilities are discovered at a rate of several per day. Microsoft has issued 43 security bulletins this year, with more to come. Typically, each bulletin references at least one patch. Second, patches don't receive the same level of QA that other software releases get. As a result, installing the patch may break something on the system. In other words, the cure may be worse than the disease."
Perhaps in desperation: Gartner, one of the web's most prestigious consulting firms, has recommended that businesses hit by both Code Red and Nimda immediately investigate alternatives to IIS (Microsoft Internet Information Server), including moving Web applications to Web server software from other vendors such as iPlanet and Apache.
It's taken them almost two years to come up with an evaluation that was obvious to this computer technician in the third quarter of 2000, when the Love Bug/Hybris.worm was devastating Windows software over the Internet. Expect this groundswell to grow to tsuname proportions by Christmas.
While you're investigating "other vendors," you'll want to cleanup your NT/2000 servers. NTFSDOS Pro allows you to boot infected NT/2000 systems into an MS-DOS environment where Nimda can’t operate or replicate itself. You can then run most DOS-based virus scanners to clean the infected system.
Which reminds me: scroll down the page to read about my favorite anti-virus program, F-Prot for DOS.
FYI: Infected computers constantly scan the Internet for other vulnerable machines to infect. The continuous scanning creates increased traffic on a network and impacts all users. Because of this, some broadband access providers have decided to cut service to customers whose machines are infected.
Here in Hawaii, Oceanic Cable's Road Runner users with infected machines are being notified by the service of their status. Beep, Beep!
Clear Channel, the company that bought up 1,200 radio stations - 247 of them in the nation's 250 largest radio markets - and that not only dominates the Top 40 format, but controls 60% of all rock-radio listening: has suggested that its managers NOT play a list of 150 songs during this "national emergency."
Get rid of that text file you keep on your desktop with all those passwords you need for network accounts, online services and x-rated websites. Use a Blowfish encrypted password utility instead: Password Safe.
Fans of The West Wing who wonder, "Where the hell did they get those figures?," can get their own at Zogby International.
Know your enemy: F-Secure Virus Descriptions of W32/Nimda@mm.
There's a lot of AV software around the web but my favorite, since 1995, has been F-Protect for DOS and it's still free! If you download the program, be sure to check that the virus definitions (Signature files) are up to date: the latest release is September 20, 2001.
There's going to be a lot of WinNT and Win2K re-installations before the Nimda Worm is patched into submission and supplanted by more devious code. Speed up the process with QChain.exe, a utility from Microsoft that lets you install multiple hotfixes with one reboot.
"Save it and use it, sooner rather than later": A Disaster-Recovery Reference List for Microsoft products.
I get most of my news online, but the rest of the world reads black ink on (somewhat) white paper. Pretend you're getting ink-stained fingers at Newspaper Direct, where you can view 90 different newspapers from around the world in graphical format. Try it before you ask, "Why?" It'll come to you...
The Great Game: the past 200 years of the history of Afghanistan in a 1500 word capsule that's easy to swallow.
A new, malicious worm targeting Microsoft Web servers is loose in the wild. The worm appears to use e-mail to propagate itself, arriving in a file attachment named "readme.exe."
NewsBytes.com, 18 Sep 2001, 11:18 AM CST
Subscribers to the NTBugTack mailing list received the following this morning:
Subject: Alert: Check your IIS boxes now!
To: NTBUGTRAQ@LISTSERV.NTBUGTRAQ.COM
Numerous people have reported that on IIS servers infected with w32.nimda.amm, when visitors browse to their website the visitor is offered up README.EML, which in turn downloads README.EXE to the visitor.
Please, check your IIS boxes now to see if you are infected. I've had reports of IIS servers with more than 10,000 .eml files present (mostly as a result of nimda).
While we don't have any conclusive disinfecting procedures yet, any IIS box that has been infected definitely shouldn't be available to clients until we do.
Cheers, Russ - Surgeon General of TruSecure Corporation/NTBugtraq Editor
Before your Internet connection slows to a crawl and dies under the next DDoS attack, get thee over to Paper Darts and Paper Toys where you can find how to have fun the old fashioned way, recycling the byproducts of dead trees.
Microsoft and their mouthpiece, International Data Corporation (IDC), might like to believe that saying it will make it so but 73 Million Windows XP Users in 2002??? Get a grip, Uncle Bill!
Dave Winer has posted an expanding directory of links to Points of view from Central Asia, as suggested by Scripting News readers.
Sometimes I work the web to find ways to put the web to work for me. Diatra has made it much easier to find network-based applications, tools and services.
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) will make the course materials that are used in the teaching of virtually all of MIT's courses available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. Although they won't begin to be available until 2002, you can get an idea of what will be online from their Course Web sites. This will be one to watch for.
An MIT graduate student's thesis, "introduces a visualization process titled Organic Information Design. The resulting systems employ simulated organic properties in an interactive, visually refined environment to glean qualitative facts from large bodies of quantitative data generated by dynamic information sources." In the colloquial: The design of a user interface for data minining of realtime flows. Heady stuff in an 8.6M PDF download.
You can read about Computer Associates Unicenter TNG that, "provides the single point of control for administering virtually every hardware, software and non-IT critical resource regardless of vendor." And then, thanks to Darwin Sanoy's Desktop Engineer's Junk Drawer, you can download the Desktop Edition for free. (Registration required and it's a 15M download.)
There's a lot of different tools in a Desktop Engineer's toolkit and they're not all Wintel fixes: Introduction to RIPping: Raster Image Processing, refers to the conversion of a PostScript file to a high-resolution bitmap, a necessary process in typographic-quality printing.
This tool is a gift: TenCorp invites MIS departments to use their Knowledgebase. This database is what their own help desk uses to support over 500 applications and every major operating system. It's broad and wide and deep!
Sometimes the tool is just a tip: Enabling High Performance Data Transfers on Hosts is a collection of tuning tips for various operating systems that explain how to tweak TCP/IP for good performance when moving large files
David Strom is waiting until next year to switch to Linux. (It's the tax, man, the Microsoft "Tax"). Forbes provides a Windows XP Return on Investment Calculator to assist you with such a decision and you can evaluate all of the Linux distributions online. If you've already succumbed, then you'll find the Windows 2000 Configuration Guide helpful. It's meant to cover configuration of a Windows 2000 install from your first login (and before you connect to the internet). Because you'll find that a default Win2K install brings with it IIS, you'll need this: an excellent new security tool for IIS that analyzes URL requests for odd attributes. From Microsoft.
I'm glad this weekend is over and I can flow back into the distractions of the tech. It's calming to hear the rational response to Blind Hate, but I'm a former Marine and I know that the value of terminal solutions is their finality (and that a country the size of America moves slowly no matter how much rhetorical force is applied to one end). Certainly there are repercussions to every action and violence may breed violence but none have returned from the shade for repeat performances.
And I fault such notions as a universal ethical principle that theorizes equal value to human life and a situational morality. There never was, there never will be: I will choose to save my own child first. You can choose for yourself. Just don't block the aisle.
LexisNexis, the fee-based legal information service, is offering at no charge "relevant content from its deep archives." There's terrorist background data and updated victim/survivor lists but also information about the World Trade Center including lists of businesses with addresses in all of its seven buildings.
As you should expect, the view of America from the Middle East is somewhat different than our own or that of our long time friends and allies. From Egypt, The Middle East times. From Pakistan: The Frontier Post and DAWN. From the United Arab Emirates: The Khaleej Times. From Iran: The Tehran Times. From Israel, Ha'aretz, The Jerusalem Post and Debka (a weblog). Transcriptions of shortwave broadcasts throughout the Middle East are revealing a whole different facet of the area. There are oceans between the lines. There is a cultural, historical and political universe separating us. It's time we came to know these neighbors on this small planet a little better, especially if we're going to war with them. Or against them, as the case may be.
I shouldn't be surprised that so much of what I read on the net lately is so rational. Bloggers and webworkers (writers, designers, developers and systems/network engineers) are intelligent people trying to cope with last week's psychotic mass destruction in a reasoned and thoughtful manner. Tomorrow I'm putting my head back into the tech, but today Dinah Sanders has posted a letter from Sri Lanka, where for years they have been Living with Terror and Peter Merholtz has been looking for answers in the fundamentals of fundamentalism. Usman Farman, a Muslim from Pakistan who used to work at the World Trade Center, describes his escape from the disaster.
In his own purposefully meandering way, Chris Locke illuminates the intuitive: "What creates terrorists is living too long in terror. Until you no longer care. Until you would gladly die to make a difference. Or even just a dent. Their acts may be inconceivable. If we dare to look deeper, their motives are not."
Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan: "We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that."
"We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program."
Rotten.com, what alt.tasteless became as the Web matured, posted this link to a Reuters story about Twelve Tons of Gold in Rubble of the WTC. "It's probably safer than it's ever been." (But you can bet we'll be watching what those dump trucks are hauling away now, won't we?)
NTKnow begins this week's installment with, "In these terrible times, it's good to watch the tech community put its problems aside, and supply what we were all so desperately short of: plenty of wild unsolicited opinions." Trust these Brits to flail away with their own dry witty bar sinister. They've also got a suggestion if you're, "Stuck in the US with a few days to kill before they introduce martial law?
John Perry Barlow wrote to his BarlowFriendz: "Within a few hours, we will see beginning the most vigorous efforts to end what remains of freedom in America. Those of us who are willing to sacrifice a little largely illusory safety in order to maintain our faith in the original ideals of America will have to fight for those ideals just as vigorously." He finished with a quote from FDR, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Thanks, I sighed, I needed that...
Then I came across this: "We are in another kind of war. Waging it requires that we become a different kind of nation. One cannot have open borders during war. Many other liberties must be suspended."
And I knew that some were just beginning their journey into chaos and that Barlow's assessment was spot on.
Reason persists: "There will be pressure to suspend our freedoms, to allow the government to invade our privacy and control our speech as part of the glossy new war. If terrorists force America to give up its freedoms, then they will have won."
But Wired News reported that hours after airplanes smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, FBI agents reportedly began showing up at network providers asking to install the Carnivore surveillance tool.
Some experts have surmised that a secondary explosion is a necessary factor for explaining the collapse: You can decide for yourself. (Scroll down to the paragraph that begins with, "The structural system, deriving from the I.B.M. Building in Seattle, is impressively simple.") There's an informative flash animation at the Spanish site Elmundo.es, and many more at Infographics that show the placement of stairwells and elevator shafts within the structures of the towers.
Gartner: "To help organizations make decisions in the wake of recent tragic events, Gartner has been providing open access to research. Unfortunately, some individuals have exploited this situation and were downloading all Gartner research for inappropriate use." It would have been pleasant to spend the weekend browsing their database but it looks like not all the badguys in the world are terrorists.
The world changed this morning. Things will never be the same.
This is what the World Trade Center looked like at sundown, once upon a time. Those towers are gone now. Hundreds of different pictures, taken more recently, will be burned into our collective memories but I'd like to remember this one for a while longer.
Fred Langa isn't happy about the Windows Product Activation (WPA) technology that will be arriving in October with WindowsXP.
"By crude analogy: It's as if a mugger announced he was going to assault you, but instead of taking your entire wallet, he just takes some cash. Commentators might opine "You'll be pleased to note that our criminal has 'softened' the mugging. You'll hardly notice the loss of what he's taking. What a nice mugger!" (Read the whole screed!)
"Because newer is not always better," the folks at Oldversion are posting a growing selection of dated (or if you prefer: time tested!) software. Newer versions might be adware or nagware but the older ones work just as well without the distractions. If you're going to be using that Win98SE machine for a couple of more years, you may want to download and hoard some of these programs or replace their ill mannered younger siblings with more friendly code. Get 'em while you can...
You also might want to have a copy of Mark Minasi's Expert Guide To Windows 98. It's free!
You pretty smart, you prob'ly local! You take the test! For sure they no All Look Same!
"Gómez Performance Network measures Web page and transaction performance in real-time, enabling your e-business to continuously monitor site availability and responsiveness end-to-end, worldwide." And you can test your own URL to see how your site is perfoming!
Third party software seems to do a lot of things better than what comes fresh from that holographed shrink wrapped disk: CacheSentry doesn't attempt to accelerate your web viewing by cache manipulation, it basically takes over the job of managing the cache from Internet Explorer and will help to make your web viewing more enjoyable.
Every now and again I look back at some of the links I've saved and revisit places like the Arcata Police Log. Probably the same things happen in your town too, but I'll wager that nobody posts them with this same flare or style.
Microsoft is publicizing their new OS, Windows XP, due for release to a CompUsa somewhere near you on October 25th. They announced separate pricing for the two main versions: Windows XP Home Edition will cost $99 for an upgrade and $199 new. Windows XP Professional will cost $199 for an upgrade and $299 new. You can click up PCPitstop's XPReadiness Test online and determine if your machine and the software aboard it are capable of surviving the upgrade. Or you can just ignore this announcement and expect that early adopters will sacrifice time and effort to help bugfix this release. (The next one will work better and might even cost less!)
There are only so many really good search engines and winowwing the best of them from the chafe is the job of research professionals like Pat Ensor. She's been updating her Tool Kit for the Expert Web Searcher for a couple of years now and I think she'll add a brand new entry called WiseNut as soon as she evaluates it. It doesn't push Google out of first place in my kit of useful tools, but the field is certainly becoming more competitive.
A wonderful refresher on the power, physiology and theory behind color is presented at The Interactive Color Experience by Poynter.org to assist journalists who are learning to write for the web. In the very near future most of the writing we do will be done on the internet and presentation is something all of us could do well to think a little bit more about.
Network vulnerability assessment tools are used to find holes that hackers could use to access a system. No single tool has been devised to automatically test for every possible situation, but Typhon will scan a given host for known security holes and vulnerabilities. This version is free and requires WinNT or Win2K.
Metadata is "data about data" - information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. It's track info from CDDB on your CD-ROM, the filename of a document on your hard drive. It's been touted as the answer to the management of knowledge systems but Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia should re-initialize your perspective.
You've heard that soon there'll be a computer in every kitchen appliance, a microchip in your pots and pans (as if you needed that) and all interconnected via the Internet. Enjoy a more credible vision in John Robb's discussion of decentralized computing and the future will become much clearer.
A fortunate coincidence brought my niece's software requirements into conjunction with my skill sets but has left us both dissatisfied with the compromises that had to be made in order to effect a solution. The answer has yet to be formulated, but it's good to know others are working on it, too. I won't go into details, but Brendad Scott has in his paper, Copyright in a Frictionless World: Toward a Rhetoric of Responsibility, in the most recent issue of f¡®sT-moñd@¥. And Sun Microsystem's announcement of the forthcoming release of Star Office v6.0 is at least another route around the problem.