Uncategorized

SynchronEX is an interesting looking tool. Can do N-way syncs of files and folders between a laptop, a server and a desktop (for instance) at the click of a (mouse) button.

Still not too crazy about it (Kerio V4 beta 5) and this morning, after the laptop going into and out of hibernation about 8 times over the past few days, the Kerio firewall driver failed … think it ran out of memory. Unfortunately, I was right in the middle of something pretty important so I didn’t record anything, just rebooted and took off again. One other problem I had yesterday, it seemed to freeze me out of the network twice after coming back from hibernation. I just disabled and reenabled the firewall and everything got back to normal. It’s a beta — things aren’t supposed to work 100% yet.

Aside from those little hiccups, I’m still not comfortable with the interaction mechanism. The color scheme of the pop-ups or something makes me wanna hurry up and permit or deny access as opposed to thoughtfully selecting the right options for the more-or-less permanent rules. And the “simple” rules are recorded in a different place from the “advanced” rules and the two don’t mix — you can’t take a simple rule and make it in to an advanced one. I’m gonna stick with it a while longer, though.

Next up is the new Zone Alarm Pro V4. A friend works at ZoneLabs and he’s recommending it highly (hi, Alex!) and he’s not the kind of guy that would steer me wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with it, just that I prefer the interaction methods of AdSubtract PRO. Course, WebWasher Classic is free and AdSubtract PRO costs money but I don’t think that necessarily has anything to do with it — the WebWasher folks have plenty of other products that cost money so they probably know how to do a UI fairly cheaply. One thing I do wish, though: that updates for AdSubtract PRO were forthcoming. It seems almost like they’ve stopped developing it and maintaining the ad database. That said, there’s nothing wrong with it. Oh, sure, one thing I’d change: I’d like to be able to request that AdSubtract PRO ask me if I want to allow a pop-up window to appear instead of just always silently killing it — that’s what CookieCop 2 from ZDNet does.

Check out http://www.pcworld.com/resource/rss/0,00.asp. News as well as top downloads.

I’ve been running XP for, what, almost 2 years now and, while I’ve considered some of his suggestions before, seeing them in print finally motivated me to make some of those changes on my laptop. See his article in Information Week.

See this link at TechBargains — look for the Epson C82 item. There are 2 rebates: a $50 and a $20. In-store price is $99.99. Printer has both USB and Parallel interfaces. Note this is not a Photo Stylus.

kbalertz.com has been around for a while, emailing the newest additions to the Knowledge Base to subscribers to the free service. Well, now it’s got RSS feeds, too. Go to this page and select the technology you’re interested in (don’t click on the Hot link, click on the name of the search). You’ll see the orange XML logo next to the title of the technology. Grab that link into your favorite RSS reader and you’re off. For instance, the RSS feed for “All Microsoft Search Topics” is here.

Both are in beta. I’ve been running Tiny Personal Firewall V5.0 beta for the past few weeks and like it a lot — it appeals to my geeky side cause I get to configure rules and roles and filters and application capabilities and stuff like that. For example, you can define a set of authorizations as a “group” and you can assign an application to one of the groups, giving that application all of those authorizations. You can move apps between groups, thereby modifying the authorizations of all of those apps in exactly the same way. Authorizations come in several different flavors: IP addresses, port definitions, file/directory access (read, write, create and delete) and registry key access (like file/directory access).

Kerio V4 beta 5, on the other hand, is a lot simpler. There are applications. You can authorize apps to start, start others and modify (don’t really know what this is yet … the help is less than helpful) and access the network in various ways (by port and/or IP or by network group). There is also an intrusion detection module with high- medium- and low-priority intrusions (why? dunno … yet).

Of course, both can display the active connections. Kerio groups the display by application (with no way to undo the grouping) whereas Tiny has no grouping, just a list … which you’re supposed to be able to sort.

Right now I’m WAAAYYY in favor of Tiny but I just switched. Gotta give Kerio time to grow on me.

Who knew that Windows XP Home doesn’t come with a web server? — Windows 98 does. But it doesn’t so you can use this free piece of software along with another, free, 3rd party product: ActiveHTML to run an ASP-capable web server. BadBlue makes it easy to share files (with and without passwords) plus it supports searching and will automatically display images as a photo album. All that and it can do PHP and Perl. And did I say this was all FREE? With these features you may want to run it instead of PWS or IIS.

YMMV, proceed with caution because I haven’t actually experimented with this software.

Find out at this site. No, my last name isn’t listed.