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Customers most satisfied with Apple

By on August 20, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X

OSNews reports Apple Leads Industry in Customer Satisfaction. “Newly published data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index show that Apple leads other personal computer manufacturers, beating out Dell, HP and others. On a 100 point scale, Apple merited a score of 83, according to the ACSI, a 2.5 percent year-over-year increase and a 7.8 percent increase from 1995, the first year the ACSI measured the PC industry. The annual ACSI is sponsored by the American Society for Quality and University of Michigan's M. Ross School of Business. It's derived from phone interviews with customers contacted by using digital-dial telephone samples. More than 70000 consumers are identified and interviewed annually.”

No surprise there.

Run a root shell in Windows while LPU

By on August 17, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

When running Windows, you should always run as the “Least Priviledged User” to do the tasks you need. If your user context doesn’t have the rights to mess with most of the system settings, some evildoing script in the compromised javascript, jpeg, word doc, html page, worm, virus, trojan or other Windows nastie won’t have those rights either.

However, sometimes you need to run a simple command that requires system priviledges. Logging in and out or switching users is too much hassle. For this, I created a shortcut on the desktop and labeled it “RootShell.” (Bear in mind when you run commands from this shell that you have nearly complete control of the machine. With great power comes great responsibility.) The shortcut links to a batch file with the command:

runas /noprofile /env /user:MyMachine/MyAdmin cmd

UPDATE: There ought to be a backslash between MyMachine and MyAdmin. My blogging software helpfully deleted it. Grrr.

This batch file runs the command interpreter (cmd) as user “MyAdmin.” (Supply your own settings for ‘MyMachine’ and ‘MyAdmin’. In domain- and ActiveDirectory-controlled networks, the syntax will be slightly different for specifying the user. Type HELP RUNAS at a command shell for guidance.)

Double-clicking the icon opens a command shell and prompts for the administrator’s password. Get it correct, and the shell runs yet another shell in which you can type the commands you need to run. Get it wrong and it closes.

Handy and quick.

One view of LinuxWorld Day One

By on August 16, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Over at NewsForge, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier blogs A slow start at LinuxWorld during the seminar day before the main trade show opens. It sounds like the conference had many of the classic faux-pas, hard to avoid but difficult to overcome. I'm not picking on LinuxWorld for these, they happen at every show (and I've been guilty of more than one), but to remind us all what conference attendees expect:

  1. Schedule changes: “I'd hoped to attend Greg Kroah-Hartman's “Write a Real Working Linux Driver” session, but it had been cancelled.”
  2. Not delivering what was promised: “Unfortunately, the presentation was not a “hands-on” affair at all.”
  3. Losing control of the session: “Kirkland turned out to be something of a disappointment. Kirkland spent too much time at the beginning of the session discussing the types of RAID and taking questions from a particularly inquisitive attendee at the back of the room. I enjoy sessions where the presenter takes questions during the presentation, but a good speaker knows how to control the audience and will shut down questions when they start to derail a presentation.”

Lenovo offers SuSE ThinkPad T60p?

By on August 15, 2006 in Linux, Technology

Lenovo debuts Linux ThinkPads.

(InfoWorld) – “Lenovo Group announced on Tuesday the availability of the ThinkPad T60p, its first laptop computer preloaded with the Linux operating system… The new laptop is primarily aimed at engineers, the company said… Linux users will welcome Lenovo's decision to preload the open-source operating system on its new ThinkPad.”

Well, the left hand forgot to tell the right hand. The links on the Lenovo site lead to http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/t-series/wor where it says, “The ThinkPad T60p Mobile Workstation does not come preloaded with SUSE Linux. Users must obtain SUSE Linux licenses from Novell. The ThinkPad T60p comes with DOS entitlement only and ships with a blank hard disk drive. SUSE Linux OS will be supported by Novell, while Lenovo will support Hardware,” Hopefully, they will get the story together over the next couple of days.

The whole point of buying such a machine is to get a pre-installed image that supports all the oddball features of Bluetooth, hibernate, ACPI, power management, the funky specialized buttons, the pointer, the touchpad and so forth. If you have to go out and buy and install SuSE yourself, what's the point? Buy the T60p with Windows, snapshot the image, shrink the partition and set up the machine to dual-boot.

Trouble starting XAMPP's Apache on Windows

By on August 15, 2006 in LAMP, Microsoft

In attempting to set up XAMPP on a Windows XP Pro workstation, I couldn't get Apache to start. Attempting a command-line start gave me an error message that port 80 was in use. The netstat command showed nothing listening on that port. As a work-around, I edited the config file for Apache to work on http port 8888 and https port 8443 and confirmed that Apache was installed correctly and working fine. Finally, digging around in the Services applet showed that the IISAdmin was running. Dredging around on Google yielded this blog entry that recommends disabling the service and rebooting to detect which app is launching IISAdmin. That cured the problem; Apache's up and running. XAMPP rocks.

HP endorses Debian as Linux of choice on HP

By on August 14, 2006 in Linux, Technology

HP announces support for Debian Linux.

(InfoWorld) – “Hewlett-Packard is throwing its support behind the Debian Linux distribution, the first major hardware maker to align itself with the noncommercial community-based Linux offering… HP also announced Monday that unit sales of 1.5 million Linux servers generated revenue of close to $6.2 billion for the 12 months ending in May, 50 percent more revenue than its nearest competitor.”

I think we'll continue to see some interesting alignments between vendors and Linux distributions: Lenovo's announced SuSE support, HP aligns with Debian. The Dell Linux site makes it clear they're not going to lose a sale over the choice of OS: you can pick your own, but RedHat and Novell SuSE are their top picks.

We don't want to go back to the one hardware vendor – one OS model: Ultrix, Solaris, HPUX, and the rest created a Balkanization of UNIX that lead to its downfall. However, vendors supporting Linux, especially multiple flavors, is a good sign.

MS06-040 exploited, a few days

By on August 14, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

Slashdot post: Botnet Herders Attack MS06-040 Worm Hole. “Laljeetji writes “eweek reports that the first wave of malicious attacks against the MS06-040 vulnerability is underway, using malware that hijacks unpatched Windows machines for use in IRC-controlled botnets. The attacks, which started late Aug. 12, use a variant of a backdoor Trojan that installs itself on a system, modifies security settings, connects to a remote IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and starts listening for commands from a remote hacker. On the MSRC blog, Microsoft is calling it a very small, targeted attack that does not (yet?) have an auto-spreading mechanism. LURHQ has a detailed analysis of the backdoor.”

Sounds nasty. An auto-spreading mechanism will turn this one into an epidemic. Patch now, if you haven't already.

Data provenance

By on August 13, 2006 in Technology

Joho the Blog points out Authorial authoritative provenance. “Jon Udell blogs about Lorcan Dempsey's blogging of the OCLC's fuzzy matching service that searches the Library of Congress Name Authority File, finding misspelled authors' names, etc. Jon discovered that his own name was misspelled in the Authority File, and he explains the process for getting it corrected. And, Jon says, we should be making provenance and ways to correct provenance more explicit.”

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