This is revolting.
Aggregating within Outlook
I just found NewsGator, which aggregates RSS feeds directly into Outlook! How cool. I’m going to have to try it and see how it works with Outlook 11. This could be big.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Test
| Let’s see how this looks for a blockquote.
From the halls of Montezuma |
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Filed under Uncategorized
SF goes after Speicher
Tonight on ABC Radio (about 1940 EST), I heard an interview with Amy Waters Yarsinske. She’s the author of Leave No One Behind, the story of Navy Lt. Commander Scott Speicher. He was shot down during Desert Storm and is widely believed to still be a POW in Iraq. Yarsinske claims that a Special Forces team was inserted to retrieve Speicher, and that he is known by the US government to have been alive as recently as Monday, 3/17. Incredible, if true.
Follow the money
Dan Gillmor reports that Clear Channel’s sponsorship of pro-liberation rallies is raising eyebrows. Of course, it depends on your reading of the idea of sponsorship; the source article doesn’t explain how Clear Channel is involved, other than by allowing their on-air talent [sic] to mention and promote the rallies. By that same logic, I could bust CNN’s Aaron Brown for “sponsoring” the antiwar rallies last night in Chicago and San Francisco, since he spent quite a bit of time discussing them. So, inquiring minds want to know: did Clear Channel actually pay the tab for any of these rallies? And who’s paying for the organization and logistics involved with the antiwar rallies? All those port-a-johns, podiums, and speaker systems aren’t free.
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Filed under Musings
No errata yet…
I don’t have any errata yet, but instead of maintaining a separate static page, I’ve decided to create a new category for errata. What prompted this? I got mail from the guy at Microsoft Press who heads the support team for their security books, asking me if I’d answer reader email. “Shell, yes”, I told him; the new category is preparation.
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Filed under FAIL
Choices, choices
This Wired story poses the question: if your cat needed a $9,000 kidney transplant, would you pay for it? What if it meant that you couldn’t pay your mortgage? All this for an 11-year-old cat. I don’t know whether to be touched by the loyalty or angered by the stupidity. If she just wanted to throw away nine grand, she could have donated it to a worthy cause– I mean, that’s a ton of money for pet medical care. I can imagine how this would play out at our house:
Me: Honey, the cat needs a kidney transplant or it’s going to die.
Wife: How much will that cost?
Me: About nine months’ worth of mortgage payments.
Wife: WHAT?!
David: Well, living in a cardboard box might not be so bad.
Thomas: Two rights don’t make a wrong. (Ed note: he says this at random intervals)
Wife: That’s as much as it’ll cost to replace the roof!
Me: Boys, living in a box means no more TiVo.
Chorus: Goodbye, cat; been nice knowing you.
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Filed under Musings
Get aggregated
If you read more than one or two blogs, and you’re not using an aggregator, you’re missing out. See, most of the software used to publish weblogs is designed to support RSS, a protocol that allows syndication. (For those just joining us: syndication is republishing someone else’s content, as when your crappy local paper publishes someone else’s weather data.) Anyway, the advantage of aggregators is that they gather up all the weblogs you’re interested in and put them in a single interface, so you can skim through them quickly. Mainstream news sources (including the NYT, Christian Science Monitor, and others) have syndicated feeds, too. I currently have about 50 blogs in my subscription list.
On the Mac, I use NetNewsWire. On the PC, I’ve heard good things about Syndirella and NewzCrawler, though I haven’t tried either of them.
Now, word up to DefenseTech, Bob Thompson, The Bloviator, and JohnP: your blogging software doesn’t support RSS. Please upgrade. That is all. (I was going to add Charlie Stross to the list, but even though there’s no link for it, pasting his URL into NetNewsWire does the trick.)
Personal to Julie: add the “syndicate” div to your template, OK? I had to find the URL by hand.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Is this thing on?
Jeremy seems to have broken TrackBacks somehow. This post is solely to add a TrackBack to see whether it works. Move along; nothing to see here.
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Filed under Friends & Family
Don’t go near the water
Dori shares a sad tale of swimwear that’s not meant for swimming:
I called the company up today to complain and was told that (wait for it) their suits are not appropriate for wearing into pools or hot tubs, as that may cause colors to run or fade.
That’s pretty cool– sort of like those fake fruit bowls at my doctor’s office.
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Filed under Musings
Buffer overflow in IIS WebDAV: Patch it now!
Microsoft has MS03-007 out. The bulletin describes a buffer overflow vulnerability in the WebDAV component of IIS 5.0 on W2K; Windows 2003 and Windows XP aren’t affected. The practical effect of this vuln is that an attacker can run code of her choice on your server (at which point it’s not really your server anymore.) The worst part is that an exploit for this problem is already circulating.
There are several ways to avoid this problem:
- If you were already running URLScan, you’re in good shape. Its whole purpose is to block malformed or bogus requests before IIS ever gets them. If you’re not running URLScan, well, why not?
- Go to the download page and download the patch. It’s a self-installing executable; after installing it, stop and restart the W3SVC service. You don’t need to reboot.
- Go to
Windows Update and scan for the patch. The Windows Update installer may prompt you for a reboot. - Use the Automatic Updates client to download and install the patch. Unfortunately, this route will prompt you for a reboot, although you can sneak by by killing its process and bouncing the W3SVC service.
- Disable or remove IIS. Obviously you can’t do this for your Exchange servers, but other servers may not need IIS. See KB article 321141 for details.
- Disable WebDAV only. This is easy to do.
- Download the URL Buffer Size Registry tool and use it to set the MaxClientRequestBuffer value. Microsoft recommends setting MaxClientRequestBuffer to 16K, but in the same sentence they warn that doing so may break “some programs.” In my testing, a setting of 16K didn’t seem to interfere with OWA or Exchange, but your environment may have a different mix of requests. I’ve asked MS for a definitive statement on this; in the meantime, you can either use a larger value or use URLScan, which has templates for OWA. (Side note: of course, by reading KB article 816930 you could make this change yourself, but the tool can scan multiple machines to find those that haven’t had this limit applied).
- If you choose to apply MaxClientBufferSize, you should probably also use a group policy setting to apply the registry key and you’re in business.
What about long-term solutions? Well, you should definitely be using IIS Lockdown on all your Windows 2000 servers. If you combine that tool with reasonable attention to patches, you will be in relatively good shape. You should aggressively follow up with MBSA scans to check for correct patch installation. In almost all cases, your life will be easier if you deploy the Software Update Service (SUS) to pull patches and stage them for mass installation. When I get a free minute, I’ll be writing an article here describing exactly how to use SUS.
In the meantime, if you read and follow the recommendations in chapters 6 and 14 of the book, you can relax.
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Filed under Security
Too bad most of my friends are married
I wonder how long it’ll take for eBay to remove this Instant Girlfriend kit from auction.
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Filed under Uncategorized
Kung-Tunes
So, I finally found out how to make my blog reflect what I’m listening to: Kung-Tunes is a small background application that asks iTunes what’s playing, formats the result using a template I specify, and uploads it using scp. Worthless, but nifty.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Get Smart
So, as everyone within range of a television knows, Elizabeth Smart was found and returned safely to her family. Now the Salt Lake Police Department has some explaining to do (they seem to be better than Boulder but nowhere near the NYPD). But that’s not what I wanted to talk about; instead, what’s with all this “it’s a miracle” talk?
Don’t get me wrong. I know full well that God answers our prayers; I have a firm testimony of that. What I see missing from most accounts is the connection between her safe return and the fact that Elizabeth’s family never gave up. They continued to work to get the word out, and they were aggressive in prodding the slow-moving SLPD to get with the program when their younger daughter identified the handyman as the perp. Their hard work helped implement the miracle. It’s tempting to dismiss this as another case of “God helps those who helps themselves,” but I prefer to think of it in another way. My friend James Harris often advised people in difficult situations thusly:
Get down on your knees and pray as though everything depended on the Lord. Then get up and work at it as if everything depended on you alone.
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Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
TechNet chat: Using ISA Server to Securely Publish Exchange Server
TechNet is sponsoring yet another Exchange security chat, this one with folks from the ISA Server product team. April 9, from 1200-1300 EST / 0900-1000 PST / 1600-1700 GMT.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
