Not Just Another Weblog

I am a huge fan of KixTart. Insofar as logon NT scripts go, it rocks the world. Found this awesome site today: Scripts for McAfee since I don't have nearly enough time to read the 700+ page manual for ePolicy Orchestrator, this is fantastic.

Manage Windows Automatic Updates via Registry

[Geeks are Sexy] technology news: Hard drive recovery utilities: when you can't afford to lose that data

A story at El Reg about how Microsoft just won a case with the US Patent and Trademark Office over the FAT file system. I'm wondering how much this will ultimately impact the Linux community. Linux is definitely the future of computing. They're garnering more and more of the enterprise server market. As IBM and Novell push to get it on the desktop, it's only a matter of time. (Hopefully it's both drive down the price and motivate improvements of Windows....) Microsoft wins FAT patent case | The Register

From Digg : Microsoft forces WMF Patch on users

From Digg - The Last iPod Video Guide You’ll Ever Need at Plastic Bugs

From Fergie's : An article over at InfoWorld - IBM expert warns of short life span for burned CDs. Also at Slashdot. While hardly news, this reinforces an important point: Archiving data on CDr's is a bad idea.

After administering and using Outlook & Exchange for years, I've joined an organization that uses Lotus Notes. We're running what was, until a few weeks ago, the latest version (client 6.5.4, and presumably Domino 6). The UI on the client is hideous. It's like IBM went out of their way to violate or reverse every single basic Windows UI standard. Want to copy & paste an email address? Forget it. It's total crap. Utter garbage. Refuse. Hideous. Abysmal. It's an abomination to the end-user. Notes Designers, are you listening? This Site Says it all, in great detail: Lotus Notes Sucks

I realize this is one of those little things that 99.99% of people don't give a crap about...but it's something I've needed a couple three times over te years.... Came across this great fix for hiding the VNC icon in system tray : "[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3] 'DisableTrayIcon'=dword:00000001" VNC rocks.

from Computerworld via Fergie's

I saw this at both Techdirt and Slashdot ; and I'm hoping that there are some critical details left out--because otherwise the school district looks profoundly foolish: Apparently an Ohio high school student was arrested, and later released on bail, for organizing fellow students to refresh the school's website using the schools computers, in order to slow down the web server. ( Their site is up , even if it is hideous). Having previously worked in IT in public education for some time, (and grateful as hell to be back in the private sector), this is really disturbing. Lots of people refreshing the schools web site is no more a felony than flushing some or all of the toilets in the building. (Which, by the way, is how you tell whether or not the solution is properly built/configured). It's a sad day when a student's little prank is taken for felonious activity. These people need to pull their heads out of their asses. Public Education is broken. Privitize.

I know, I know, why would you do this? What can I say...I like the way I can customize IE. But after getting hit with this stupid WMF vulnerability (the popups are back, by the way, the box is hosed), IE is dead to me. When running at higher resolutions (XGA & up), it's great to be able to combine toolbars. In IE, you can drag and drop toolbars onto the same level. Turns out in Firefox, you can customize & put all the objects onto one or two toolbars . Beautiful. You can even get a skin to make Firefox look like IE. I know, I know. But it's all about comfort level. And not getting infected with the next zero-freaking-day-freaking-exploit. Besides, if you can make Firefox look like IE, then make it the default browser for you end-users....most of them won't know or won't care. There are some exceptions (Exchange 2003's Outlook Web Access is positively beautiful in IE). I'm more/less talking about day-to-day usage.

neat little plug-in over at microsoft.com, the Social Networking and Relationship Finder. OK, honestly I'm just running it because it has a cool acronym. But if emails from family and friends can be automagically prioritized higher than subscriptions, shopping receipts and other (ham) crap, kewl.

This article says it all : copying three DLL's to the FireFox plugins directory gets one of the big three players working in FireFox.

There's this really good horror story over at Attrition about their recent hardware recovery. It's the stuff legends are made of.

a post over at PC World talks about a third-party patch available for the zero-day WMF exploit from Steve Gibson. Ya' know, if we have to start patching our own Windows, they need to release the bloody source code. Makes another argument for ditching and running a Linux flavor. Where's the Linux for the masses? And don't tell me it's OS X, (really BSD). That over-priced, hardware-intensive, peice of crap. Sounds alot like Windows.... Anyone seen the latest Windows Vista beta? Looks a lot like OS X. Oye.

It's done, the popups are gone. Ewido Anti-Malware did it. I'm surprised, I would've guessed Ad-Aware or SpyBot to have gotten it. Ewido's app is worth the $30. Edit - forget that. Removing one of the other anti-malware demo's brought the popups back. May have been the Trend Micro demo. Ewido is nice, but didn't resolve this.

As soon as ewido started it's scan, it found a couple of threats. And after cleaning those threats, MS Anti-Spyware Beta found, cleaned, and repeatedly does the same for something called "startup.nameshifter.og". Keeps. Finding. It. Every. Minute. Sucks. Google currently has one hit for this on a Japanese site. I can actually speak a tiny bit of Japanese, but can't read it. Translation sites are only so-so. Anyhoo, it appears that the Ewido anti-malware is a decent tool. While the demo for Webroot Spy Sweeper found a variety of objects, it won't remove anything without a subscription. Good for them; wankers. Remember the crazy chick with the buzz haircut with the infomercials a decade ago, always screaming "Stop the Insanity!"? She should be doing ads to sell anti-malware apps.

Oh what a peice of work is spyware. Have to say, I've been pretty lucky. Have been able to fly under the rader for the most part, where malware is concerned. Sucks that this week, there was this zero-day vulnerability discovered, and didn't I stumble across a site with it? Yes, yes, got infected with a handful of spyware. And while most of it (and a handful of bugs that Norton caught, God Forbid I have anything good to say about Symantec), one popup persists, (along with who knows what else). Also getting some other pop-ups, just general advertising BS. Irritating. Ugh. Regretfully, until yesterday, I had been telling everyone to use Firefox, but I myself was still using IE6. Yes. Bad, Martums, bad. Finally made Firefox 1.5 the default browser. A wee bit late. So here's what I've done to get rid of these popups, some of which end in yyy65.html installed Microsoft's Anti-Spyware beta, ran scan/sweep/etc. Thought that was already here. had previously inst