August 2003

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.