May 2005

The Windows Secrets newsletter has a really good column by Brian Livingston in this month’s issue that explains why we/you need wireless security and discusses various forms of protection. It’s kinda long but informative, nonetheless.

BTW, the article contains this link to a WinGuides.com site that has a pretty decent password generator.

Check out this article from Tom’s Networking and, if you’re using WEP, run, don’t walk, to WPA.

Cooperative Linux is an open source project (on SourceForge) that lets you run Linux “alongside” Windows without using things like VMware or VirtualPC. No, it’s not a Cygwin clone — you actually run the Linux kernel AND Windows XP. It’s been around for a while but I just found out about it.

This article lists 249 (or close to 249) “cool” hostnames using the various TLDs around. Examples? Sure, how about

mous.ep.ad (Andorra)
rut.aba.ga (Gabon)
spot.lig.ht (Haiti)
com.puser.ve (Venezuela)
del.icio.us (United States)

Chad ran across a good article about ontology and how categorization has become much more of a personal thing than it used to be. I’ll refrain from starting a discussion about how the amount of personal information we all manage has become so much greater and just let you read Chad’s weblog post as well as the original article. Suffice it to say that if I had a good way to tag more of my files, bookmarks and such I think I’d search less and find more.

Microsoft‘s free USB Flash Drive Manager is a utility that lets you backup your flash drive, control autorun and a few other things including backing up your wireless configuration settings, according to this week’s Windows Tips & Tricks Update. This is a weekly enewsletter available free from the folks at Windows IT Pro. You can sign up for their enewsletters but don’t bother trying to find this tip on their website until next week — their article archive trails the newsletter by a week.

This article from ExtremeTech gives a good explanation about the power needs and also recommends a few brands. Good article if you’re trying to build your own PC.

And this free online book. What is Greasemonkey? It’s an extension you can use to add scripts to a web page to change its behavior. More (much more) information is available on both sites referenced, above.

Aunty Spam’s Net Patrol reports in this article that a federal appeals court has ruled that the FCC overstepped their bounds in mandating that the anti-copying scheme be implemented in all devices and digital broadcasts. The facility was supposed to be effective July 1, 2005.

I wonder if there will be a further appeal, don’t you?

This article from Silicon Beat (a technology news weblog from our local rag) links you to this site which shows you traffic info from Yahoo! laid on top of a Google map. Yes, you can switch the map to satellite and back. Pretty neat. Don’t know how many applications there are for this … I suppose you could see where construction is being done and recognize it by landmark or something. I liek it, though! It’s a creative application of technology.