Bloki.com now has weblog import working!
Ok, to review:
* they provide free web pages -- and NO banners
* you can select from several templates and modify them as you desire
* they have a full-featured HTML editor
* each account has forums
* each account has a weblog
* each weblog has comment capability
* each weblog has an XML feed
What's the downside? Uhh ... I don't care for the overall look -- kinda 50's bowling-shirt retro. But, hey, their feature list is great and they actually listen to their users. They have a Yahoo! group and a discussion forum on their web site, both of which they monitor and respond to. I'm preparing to move my weblog over there if I can master their HTML editor -- I gotta admit, though, blogger.com's weblog editor is extremely easy to use ... it'll take some effort for me to abandon it.
Thanks to my brother for these:
http://winfingerprint.sourceforge.net/
http://www.softperfect.com/products/networkscanner/
http://www.gfisoftware.com/lannetscan/
From Woody's Office Watch of August 1, 2003. There's a wealth of information that can be stored in a Word document that you might never see. Witness this story on ComputerBytesMan that discusses some interesting information stored in a UK government Word document dossier on Iraq. Fascinating reading!
If you just wanna cut to the chase, in Word 2002, go to Tools -> Options -> Security and check the box labelled "Remove Personal Information From This File On Save" and then save the document. According to Woody's investigations, this information is not recorded in any easily retrievable form in Word 2002 nor Word 2003 documents; it's only present in Word 97 and Word 2000 files.
From this entry in Jeff Key's ASP.NET weblog. I fancy myself a bit of a tip-fiend but there were about a dozen which I'd never heard of.
From the 7/30 Lockergnome Windows Daily comes this handy tool:
ShareWatch lets you continuously monitor who's using your network shares via a small system tray app.
ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode) is an LDAP directory service that can run on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 but runs as a user-level service as opposed to a system-level service. The download is here.
SecureIE from Winferno Software can supposedly help lock down IE and help keep you from the nasties out there.
Lesse ... I found this link from this article on RootSecure.net which is actually a link to this PC World article.
Found this in kbAlertz: MSKB article 825750 tells you how to disable DCOM. Why would you want to do that? It obviates the recently identified and hyped and over-hyped problem where a bad guy can take over your machine (discussed in MS03-026 and supposedly addressed in MSKB 823980).
And, of course, it happened at the worst time and I didn't take the time to record the error information. Oh well, I'm sure it'll happen again. In the 30 days or so that I ran Tiny I never had a problem like that. Hmm ... just another data point.
My 30-day eval period for Tiny Personal Firewall V5.0 beta has expired. Now, who ever heard of a company applying the 30 days to a beta? -- you'd think they'd want people to continue to test. Anyway, I'm now running a 30-day eval of ZoneAlarm Pro V4.0.123.012. I don't care much for the UI but I never have -- too flashy for me. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. Right now, Tiny is my fave, even with the bugs/problems. Note that I haven't had any functional problems, just issues with the UI ... I can deal with that.
Got this from the Windows XP mailing list maintained by Sunbelt Software (great mailing list, BTW -- there are lots more here). If you've got a port that's open or being listened to on your system, chances are you can find it at one of these sites.
http://andrew.triumf.ca/cgi-bin/port
http://www.neohapsis.com/neolabs/neo-ports/
http://lists.gpick.com/portlist/lookup.asp
http://www.snort.org/ports.html
Shure In-Ear Earphones reviewed here.
Seen those things stuck in performers ears at concerts? Those are "monitoring devices" that, apparently, block out a lot of sound except what's coming through the earphone (they claim 10-20dB attenuation). ExtremeTech explains about 'em and reviews 2 of Shure's. Go to Shure and look for E1C and the E2C.
Woody Leonhard does it again. In this issue of Woody's Windows Watch, he discusses the truth behind the story circulating last week about cracking Windows passwords in less than 15 seconds. Well worth reading!
He also discusses Windows Product Activation -- seems that someone has gone through every byte sent to Microsoft during the activation process and has been able to account for all but a couple of bytes.
This is all over the ASP.NET weblogs. MSDN has put up this page that lists some VB weblogs. Here's Duncan Mackenzie's post about it ... he's apparently the author/owner and maintainer of the page.
Read about it in this particular ASP.NET weblog. Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in C++" is available as a download or you can buy it from Amazon.com. The author of the weblog entry swears by the book. I'll have to download it and give it a look-see. I'm an old C programmer and was just getting in to C++ when I went over to the dark side (read: joined management). Fortunately, the "good" side kept drawing me back and I ended up trying to help both sides understand each other ... but that's another story.
Slashdot has a pointer to this article on O'ReillyNet by Dru Nelson who talks about Trustic -- a service by Mark Fletcher, creator of Bloglines.com. The deal is, Trustic creates blacklists based on feedback from its registered members.
Anyway, this mention is part of a larger discussion about "Defending Your Site Against SPAM" -- Part 1 and Part 2. Part 2 discusses implementing protection with qmail and how to incorporate Trustic into your configuration. Very interesting stuff!
Gary Burd's weblog explains how to construct your own RSS feed of an amazon.com query. It's really not hard, either -- it's all in the URL. Sorry, but I can't remember where I found this link (I like to credit my sources when I can). It was probably one of the Lockergnome newsletters ... errr ... RSS feeds. Now, that I'm using bloglines.com and RSS, I rarely read newsletters anymore -- no reason to!
And, from this entry in Dan Gillmor's eJournal there's this link to a page on Amazon.com discussing their syndicated content. It also gives a couple of good links to more information on RSS and readers.
Published by Microsoft. See this list of their feeds.
You can download it here (a 1,247KB download) and read more about it in MSKB article 817778. Briefly, it includes IPV6 support, including a firewall, and support for the peer-to-peer networking components (peer-to-peer networking name resolution, peer-to-peer networking graphing, peer-to-peer networking grouping and the peer-to-peer networking identity manager). If you're interested, read the MSKB article.
I've set my test mailami.com account up to block everyone so if you want to see what kind of bounce message you get, send it email. I tried it and the bounce message is just as they say and the go one step further: they request that the sender remove this address from their lists. Will that help? -- probably not but it can't hurt, either.