Friday, 19 July, 2002

I discovered that IAYFT.com hasn’t been registered. Hmmm.

Ars Technica published this “blackpaper” on wireless security.

Forbes is publishing a special report on Linux.

Wednesday, 17 April, 2002

Is nothing safe? Now it looks like the Back button (or backspace) can be used to exploit your computer. Is Nothing safe?

At the prodding of Ken Levy to fix the stuff I messed up yesterday, I got to play with the Web Services interface of http://www.foxcentral.com. Pretty slick and simple and elegant.

Ten-thirty AM, and the web server is up and running in the basement, er, the server room :). Not bad. Three-thirty PM, with a break for lunch, and Steve and I have the Dell Workstation set up with a clean installation of Windows 2000 Server, with SP2, SP2SPR1, and dozens of other security patches. Can’t get Terminal Services to work, but everything else is running. More tomorrow.

Microsoft isn’t the only one doing underhanded things to boost revenue. Oracle looks like it took the state of California in grand style, and Microsoft is shaking down the state of Texas for 5-year-old licenses.
.att%KBAlertz is a new service on the web that will send you email about changes or additions to the Microsoft Knowledge Base on the topics you select, for free. Good deal!

Thursday, 04 April, 2002

Last night was the Windows 2000 User Group. Joe Stagner, Technical Evangelist for the Waltham Office presented an unofficial, sometimes irreverant “sneak peek” at the next version of Windows Server, tentatively named NET Server. Interesting stuff.

Some of the links he mentioned:

http://uddi.microsoft.com
http://www.gotdotnet.com

Tough day. Working on the test laptop (HP Omnibook 7100, PII-266, 8 Gb, 160 Mb RAM), and installed a Microsoft USB Optical Intellimouse. Ran the tutorial, visited the web site to try to get the latest drivers, chose to ‘repair’ the installation. That was the end of that operating system. WinXP? died an ungraceful death. Last Known Good Configuration wasn’t good. Turns out the floppy drive is bad. Attempted a re-install. No Product Key. Microsoft won’t let me on to their MSDN Universal downloads so I can get another one. Doesn’t matter what I tell them – no access. So this is what good Microsoft’s anti-piracy does for them. I’ll install Win2K instead. Or maybe Linux.

Learning more about Twiki. That, at least, works.

The private MVP newsgroups have had some fascinating discussions on wireless, although I’m a little concerned with setting something up on the home office LAN. A high school is 100 yards away, through the backyard. Reports of 802.11b cracking of WEP-protected WLANs makes me concerned. Until today, I thought my choices were limited to 802.11 flavors a and b, with a faster, more expensive, but just as insecure. Today, I ran into HomeRF (link broken), which apparently has been around for a couple of years, and HiperLAN/2 (link broken), a European import, and power-line based home lans from Linksys. TMI – too much information!

Another item of interest today is http://www.books24x7.com, a place to read books online, for a fee. The annual fee, $299 for an individual, may sound stiff, but that’s only 6 books at $50 a year. I easily go through that many. Worth considering.

Another CoolLink for those with too much time on their hands: “The Sad Parable of OS/2” – some very good PC History, not too much Microsoft-bashing. Interesting stuff.