My pal Tyler Regas has been working on PDAHandyman, but I’ve only recently gotten around to visiting it. Nice site! I am certain that he’d like to hear from all you Linux folks who are using Sharp’s cool-but-IMHO-impractical Linux handheld. Personally, I have a Treo pricing rant that I’m saving up to send his way.
Never heard of ISS?
Brian Bilbrey asks who ISS is and whether they’re in bed with Microsoft:
According to their website, ISS is Internet Security Systems. I hadn’t heard of them before this last few weeks. Certainly not one of the big boys, until all this recent press. From their marketing crap on the homepage (http://www.iss.net), it appears they are in the same biz as McAfee and Norton, but at a different tier.
So, let’s start with the simple stuff: ISS has been around for a long, long time as security firms go. I believe they started officially started operating in 1992 or so. Chris Klaus, the founder, dropped out of Georgia Tech after developing the core of what became ISS’ lead product, the RealSecure scanner. ISS had the first useful security scanner for Windows NT, and their products are very widely used out in industry and government. So, the answer to question #1: ISS is for-real, they didn’t just fall off the truck, and they are well-regarded in the security community.
Now, for Brian’s more interesting question: is ISS in bed with Microsoft?
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Filed under Security
The Programming Soviet
Dori Smith points to a fascinating essay, The Programming Soviet. Here’s a sample: “The Unix and Open Source worlds excel at improving life for programmers, not for users.” Worth reading, even if just to fuel up your rant generator.
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Filed under Musings
Matthew birthday pics
By special request, before-and-after pictures of Matthew and his birthday cupcake.
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| before… | after! |
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Filed under Friends & Family
My security’s better than yours
I consider Bob Thompson a good friend, as well as being a very knowledgeable guy. We’ve had a number of friendly debates about various things (hey, Bob, you still owe me a 3-liter bottle of caffeine-free diet Coke for this one!) We’re now engaged in a religious battle about Microsoft’s security. You can get the backstory of this particular debate here.
Greg Lincoln chimed in thusly:
It really annoys me when people call OpenSSH or Apache or “insert app that just happens to run on Linux here” vulnerabilities “Linux” vulnerabilities. OpenSSH and Apache are NOT Linux. They are applications that run on Linux. They also run on Windows and quite a few other OSes.
Most of the recent reports against Windows are in the media player or IE, or some other component which is considered by Microsoft as part of Windows and can not be removed. Therefore, they are holes in Windows.
Well, OK, I can see why that would bug Greg, but I think he’s wrong. Is Apache installed by default on the most common Linux distros? Yes. How about OpenSSH? I am less sure, but I’d bet the answer is “yes”. The issue isn’t whether or not they can be removed, but whether or not they’re default parts of the OS. Point being, of course, if I install a new Windows or Linux box, am I getting vulnerabilities without my knowing it? In addition, let’s not forget that one key feature in Windows XP SP1 is compliance with the consent decree requiring increased modularity in Windows. (And, FWIW, you can certainly remove, or not install, the Windows Media Player; I don’t have it installed on any of my boxen.)
Nauvoo temple dedicated today
The Nauvoo temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is officially being dedicated today. For those of you who aren’t up on Church history, the Nauvoo temple was the second one built after Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, but the Saints there were only able to use the temple for a short while before mob violence forced them to leave Nauvoo. An arsonist burned much of the original temple structure in 1848, and a tornado pretty much finished the destructive work in 1850.
I’m excited by this, because temples are an important element of our religion. We believe that they are literally God’s dwelling place on the earth, and that by prayer, study, and performing sacred ordinances there that we can draw closer to Him and prepare ourselves for exaltation. It’s a milestone for the Church that we’re able to restore this important piece of Church history.
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Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
Happy birthday!
Baby Matthew celebrated his first birthday yesterday. I have some hysterical pictures and video of him “eating” [sic] a cupcake that I’ll post later today. He was really excited by the cupcake, but puzzled at the icing. I expect he’ll handle it better next year.
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Filed under Friends & Family
Real estate frustrations
Selling a house is frustrating, and I think the biggest reason is the amount of uncertainty. Will our house sell in a week? A month? A year? What about our poor ex-neighbors who listed their house, bought another one, and then couldn’t sell the first one for 500+ days? We sure don’t want to end up like them. We have a good Realtor, and since we’ve worked with her before we have some idea what to expect… but that doesn’t change the fact that the house might sell tomorrow, not until after Christmas, or not until the cows come home.
Close behind the uncertainty is the hurry-up-and-wait factor. We’d much rather have this house sold so we can get serious about finding a new house, packing up our stuff, and moving. We’d obviously prefer to move before the new school year starts, but if we can’t, is that worth getting a bridge loan and betting that our Alabama house will sell soon? Who knows.
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Filed under Friends & Family
Danger: word game ahead
TextTwist is a simple yet addictive Boggle-like game. Thanks to Tony Dowler for posting the link in his blog; now I can get no work done.
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Filed under Uncategorized
What a beautiful day!
Leave aside the sunshine and clear skies; today is a beautiful day for two reasons. One is that two legendary Exchange gurus, Chris Scharff and Kevin Angley, are both celebrating birthdays today (happy birthday, guys!), and the other is that the new version of Internet Explorer for Mac OS X has beautiful anti-aliased text that makes even crap look stunning.
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Filed under Musings
Mixed-gender training and the US military
David Hackworth is at it again, with a blistering article he originally wrote for GQ. The article’s first paragraph gives you a taste of his tone:
Nothing is more basic than Basic Combat Training. Basic to the ways of war. Basic to national security. Basic to the very survival of the United States. So how come Fort Jackson, the single largest producer of Basic grunts, male and female, is under the command of a general who piled up more friendly fire casualties than anyone else in Desert Storm?
It goes on from there to examine, or rather lambast, the current state of US Army basic training. I admit to a certain degree of Marine Corps bias, but…
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Filed under Musings
Press 1 for broken stuff
For some reason, this month has been an unusually tough one for various components of my geek lifestyle. By extension, this has made it a tough month for me, as I’ve had to spend an inordinate amount of time in voice-mail hell. Here’s the rundown on what broke and how hard it was to get fixed:
- The plastic case on my ThinkPad has cracked in such a way that the back part of the case, just above the row of Insert/Home keys, is pulling away, threatening to spill the keyboard out onto the floor. I called IBM, spent about 2 minutes on hold, and got a case number. The shipping box will get here tomorrow, so I expect to have the machine back next week sometime. I give their support phone system a 4; it was easy and quick to get to someone who could help me.
- My PowerMac G4 Cube suffered a failed DC-to-DC converter, so it’s at the Apple body & fender shop. Apple’s phone support is legendarily bad, so I just took it to MacResource so they could fix it.
- The paddle to our bread machine mysteriously disappeared. I suspect my four-year-old’s involvement, but there’s no evidence to prove it, and he’s at Grandma’s this week. Sunbeam gets a -1 for their phone support process; first you call a number that says “Press 2 for breadmakers”, followed by a choice that says “Press 1 to order parts”. When you pick that option, the service center you get connected to doesn’t sell breadmaker parts. Ooops.
- cyclone, my primary Exchange & file server, has two disks in it. One of them started making an awful clunk, click while I was backing it up this morning. I’m heading to Gigaparts to get a replacement drive. No phone calls required!
- My Siemens 2420 phone system is “fencing” (clipping audio in a predictable pattern), but only sometimes. I suspected 802.11a interference, but it still occasionally does it even when all my wireless gear is off.
Granted, these aren’t major catastrophes. Thank goodness the air conditioning and refrigerator still work, both cars are running, and the septic tank isn’t plugged. Everything else is small potatoes.
Filed under General Tech Stuff
Viva futbol!
I got to the Seattle airport early, figuring that
between Boingo’s wireless and the
Delta
Crown Room that I’d be able to get some work done.
Of course, I didn’t count on the World Cup.
The TV was tuned to ESPN, which was broadcasting the
Korea-Italy game. I started watching just after the 23rd minute and ended up
watching, off and on, for the rest of regulation time.
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Filed under Musings
No rain, but much light
Peter & I were working at the Redmond office until about 9:30 PT last night. Seattle gets a bad rap for having lots of rain, and– true to form– it was mostly overcast most of the time I was here. However, in the summer months I’m always struck by how late daylight extends. Since I was born and raised in the South, and have lived there almost my entire life, I never cease to be a little disconcerted by the fact that at 9pm (or later!) it’s still light enough to read a newspaper. The Qur’anic definition of dawn is the time when you can distinguish a black thread from a white one, so I suppose the reverse is true. Using that logic, dusk here doesn’t fall until around 10pm, or later, this close to the summer solstice. Weird. The fact that it’s only about 60F outside doesn’t help, either.
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Filed under Musings
Service pack shuffle?
Bob Thompson said:
The Inquirer reports that Microsoft may release WinXP SP1 sooner than expected, possibly as soon as the end of this month. As was the case with Win2000 SP1, the first SP is going to be huge, perhaps 120 MB. It sounds like there are a lot of bugs to be fixed.
This isn’t entirely fair. SP1 does include a ton of bug fixes; if it didn’t, the screaming penguins would be complaining that MS doesn’t fix their bugs. However, as part of the Strategic Technology Protection Program (that’s “get secure, stay secure” to you & I), MS is including new security functionality as part of service packs. There are a wealth of new SP1 features, including some significant enhancements to the way IPsec works and rollups that result from the Windows division’s security push. Of course, SP1 also includes changes to the OS that are required by the consent degree in the Microsoft antitrust case. Bob was too polite to point this out.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
