I don't often browse Techmeme - but it was a slow day on my other favourite URL haunts. Spotted Zemanta - it's an interesting browser plugin or a Microsoft Livewriter plugin for blogging. You can be blogging away and Zemanta will display relevant photos from the web as well as other website urls that are similar in subject to the content you are writing You can click on a photo and Zemanta will generate HTML to embed the photo
Seems to work differently for different publishing platforms - for example, I'm getting more features in the Blogger editing screen than the Movable type editing screen. My Live Writer Build 12 does not appear to load the plugin.
In what I thought was an uneventful week tech wise, I gave the Zone Alarm Force Field 1 year lifetime freebie a try. Not often am I impulsed to install an unresearched product on my production desktop PC. It sort of worked - Firefox and IE responded with toolbars to denote virtualisation of browser activity - but I eventually found the virtualisation slowed down web page rendering to a crawl and uninstalled the thing.
Firefox 3 on my machines has been giving me a hard time - slowdowns, freezes after 5 seconds, not persisting last use state. It's due to probably corrupted user profiles caused by overuse of Firefox Extensions or something but it could be something else - either Firefox itself has some problems or some global extension (McAffee SiteAdvisor, Evernote) etc... On one machine, I am reverted to the scared Opera Portable. Opera is quite a pleasure to use, problem is, it does not have enough market share and is significantly different in programming Object Model / behaviour to break several favourite Google facilities. The magnified text and fit-to-width when browsing is still superb.
My favourite bookmarking facility - deli.cio.us is now delicious.com with a re-designed presentation. Retrieval and reviews of your recent bookmarks is now a lot nicer. I do have some regular bookmarks that I keep locally in the browser but delicious gives me browser independent, machine independent bookmarks - that's my number one in-the-cloud facility.
Microsoft Office 2007 - are you moving on?
It's now past mid-year 2008. Office 2007 has been out for a long time. CAE's courses are now predominantly Office 2007 and some corporates are rolling out Office 2007. Some migration are very abrupt - one day, you're out of office, the next day you're out of Office 2003. Leaves users staring at the Office 2007 Button and the massive Ribbon. Other corporate IT approaches are more kind and have engaged a migration plan. In this day and age, some IT departments are still living in confinement - Microsoft has gone the extra mile to provide the Enterprise Learning Framework except that no one appears to have heard about it - don't worry, it's not ITIL. It's just a web wizard. Microsoft knows how to make user assistance Wizards. Well, they do, they just took a few detours from time to time, Bob's manager being, I think, Melinda Gates notwithstanding. Anyway, ELF is a an interview wizard that filters the list of Microsoft Technet articles based on your responses as IT guru and then downloads a Word file with hyperlinks and one liner descriptions - for staff to read on their journey to Office 2007 and Vista.
For the third time, I think, I'm moving my Microsoft Office resource notes to a new blog - I try to add my own slant to things.
Photography wise
We saw aussieboykie recommend the Epson V700 in the forum. By reputation and word-of-mouth, that is one fine film scanner and it is speedy since it does things in bulk.
Life was easier in the analogue world - you just walked around with Pantone swatches or something. Nowadays, people talk about mysterious things like Colour Gamut - guess you need the Gamut Vision. After which you wish you had the budget to acquire a Dell 2408WFP which features 104% of AdobeRGB Colour Gamut because it's an S-PVA panel. Or consider whether a Samsung 2493HM cheaper T/N panel would do.
Walking round the shops I see a few Acer Aspire Ones - compared to the early ASUS EEE PCs, the Acer for once, looks more chic, more glossy. The Intel Atom seems quite a good, low power chip, fairly responsive - of course compared to a dual core, you wouldn't like to multi-task too much. Maybe I'll get over my aversion to that brand.
The Centrino 2 brand stickers are out. You can see them on some attractive Toshiba notebooks (again nice glossy lids, really nice keycaps which look like the print will take wear) as well as HP Pavilions. HP I think, reached a peak with their high gloss, wear resistant palm rests last year. This year, they've gone over the top - the palm rests look shinier than a stainless steel fridge and the keycaps don't match the finish or look wear resistant
I guess I follow the weirdest blogs. Amit Agarwal usually writes reasonably strait laced blog articles. His latest has a quirky ring to it. He refers to the Gates Foundation funded campaign, produced by the equally respectable BBC World Service Trust. There are all kinds of Flashy activities introduced by a turban wearing green parrot.
We at the Bleeding Edge Centre for the Study of Computer-Induced Psychopathologies are particularly proud of our latest contribution to DSM-IV (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition).
Only our intimate involvement with technology allowed us to identify Obsessive Boy Scout Syndrome: a condition which leads to an overwhelming desire to Be Prepared.
Unfortunately, as frequently happens with our particular field of specialisation, we developed the condition ourselves: a fact which has allowed us to track the progress of OBSS, and identify the apparent cause.
Our studies have proved conclusively that OBSS is directly associated with internet telephony. The symptoms generally occur shortly after the subject is introduced to VoIP (Voice over IP) telephony, and realises just how much money might be saved — provided one has carefully deployed one's resources and has carefully studied the fine print.
The preparations begin with the choice of VoIP carrier. Most people are happy with one. The OBSS sufferer, however, finds his woggle tightening about his throat at the very idea of having only one VoIP service … and possibly paying more than he needs to for particular calls, or depriving himself of a particular advantage.
Dan Bernstein (DJB) is someone who you've probably never heard of - yet his work has covered an astonishing amount of territory and benefited everyone who today uses the Internet or e-commerce. His achievements include forcing the US government to allow import/export of cryptography, working out how to protect the Internet from debilitating attacks, writing what may be the world's most secure email server (used on over 700,000 servers), and discovering faster algorithms in key areas of mathematics.
Unfortunately, despite all this, most of the world decided to ignore him when he claimed 8 years ago that DNS can be forged. In order to counteract these problems he even wrote his own DNS server (djbdns). Most people didn't use it, instead using the far less secureBIND server. (I don't know why - I've been using djbdns for 8 years and it's faster, easier to use, and more reliable than BIND.)
I've been going back over DJB's writings on the topic of DNS to see what else he's been trying to tell us. One of the pages that came up (from 1999!) was his description of how even SSL-secured web sites are vulnerable to DNS attacks. SSL "security" has not improved at all since then - it's still incredibly easy to create an effective phishing site.
This all goes to show that, if there's anything we can learn from history, it's that we very rarely learn from history...
If I am not seen for a couple of weeks some may think I am glued to the tube watching the Olympics and sadly that carries little weight whilst I can watch TV in a window I am wondering if I should just pull the internet plug.
Now go for the headline grabber “Vista's Security Rendered Completely Useless by New Exploit" that will be demonstrated at the upcoming Black Hat Security Conference this week by Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc.
“These techniques are being seen as an advance that many in the security community say will have far-reaching implications not only for Microsoft, but also on how the entire technology industry thinks about attacks. Expect to be hearing more about this in the near future and possibly being faced with the prospect of your "secure" server being stripped completely naked of all its protection.”
With all that Aussie Aussie Aussie... See you in a few weeks......
A Wow! find after I completed my most recent post. I've been keeping an eye and an ear open for USB diagnostic utilities ever since my early (bad) experiences with USB hard disks and USB Flash storage devices year. Free Download A Day spotted software called USB Drive Letter Manager - the thing looks interesting enough to try out this wet and cold Sunday. However, Uwe Sieber's other Troubleshooting USB pen drives under Windows XP webpage is fantabulous - it's exhaustively researched, rich with hyperlinks to command line Device Manager info, Filter Drivers, managing AutoRun (pretty useful when the USB Flash malware is virulating through computer labs used in training and teaching). Do be clear about disabling AutoRun though - it's a prudent security measure but it also breaks user expectations of "shove in a device, something happens".
Well, it's COB Friday and the working week is over. Been quite eventful and I guess the Beijing Olympics will hold a fair bit of interest for a fair number of people for a while. What did pass my eyes this week? A recent article about putting solar powered GPS units on cows by spotted by Mike Elgan.
And in lead up to Photokina, Nikon's unusual P6000 camera (using a new NRW RAW file format that Nikon's standard software doesn't know how to process, containing, yes a GPS for geotagging, and an wired ethernet connector. Mount the thing on a panoramic pole, tether it to a notebook and guess you could do your own Streetview then eh?
The big buzz in the consumer digital camera industry industry is of course, the announcement of the Micro Four Thirds Standard. This lays the foundations for building an EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens) consumer camera, but interestingly is not a fully open standard - hmm - I guess "Standard" has now joined the list of English words subverted to marketingese. Some people are already planning wishlists for such cameras, others are denouncing it as the usurper of the genuine Four Thirds Standard models, others are saying "The King is Dead, Long Live the King". Outside of an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) though, no actual hardware has been sighted. Real Soon Now. Or not.
Charles has had his head in the clouds, more and more. People started writing about a cloudy Notepad - MyTextFile. Initially, I was puzzled and then realised, it's supposed to prove that Google App Engine will work.
Old Things I spotted while searching for references:
We elite athletes in the Savings Olympics know that gold medals are not won purely by individual ability. Success requires the sustained efforts of a team of dedicated experts and supporters.
That's particularly true for the David and Goliath event of our Olympiad, which pits competitors against the might of telecommunications giants like Telstra. We've won silver and bronze medals in this event with the deployment of a Linksys SPA3102 analogue telephone adapter, which we wrote about last year, and with a basic installation of an Asterisk open source PBX solution at the Bleeding Edge cave a few months ago.
But to have a chance at gold, we knew we'd have to install an Asterisk system in the spouse's business, which handles many more calls on several extensions and requires sophisticated facilities like interactive voice response.
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