I’ve first encountered Cygwin back in 1995. It’s now a nearly complete Unix environment that runs on a Windows machine without replacing Windows or dual-booting. You can install a complete X11 server (XFree86), SSH, shells like bash and zsh, telnet … pretty much whatever you might need. If you need Unix capabilities on a Windows machine it would be worth your time to check it out.

Today I received announcement of a 3270 emulator, suite3270. For those that don’t know, 3270s are CRT devices that are often used on mainframes. They typically consist of a keyboard and a monitor — no mouse. For old mainframe jockeys like myself, 3270s were a godsend, allowing us to break away from punch cards.

Secunia reports this flaw here. It’s another failure that’s related to use of an ActiveX component. Secunia’s advice: remove the offending DLL.

I spent quite a bit of time over the holiday catching up on news and such. I’ve got a couple of computers here at home and Bloglines came in so handy that I’ve gotta plug it again. If you use multiple computers like I do then there’s really no better way to stay in touch with your subscriptions. Since Bloglines is a web-based service, all of your subscriptions are maintained on their servers, allowing you to see the latest from any machine that’s connected to the Internet.

And for those of you not on the RSS bandwagon yet, c’mon, get with the program! If you visit a site at least once a week, RSS can help. Look for the little orange XML tag or for something labelled “syndication” or “RSS”. Grab that link and give it to Bloglines and it’ll automatically hit the RSS feed about every 30 minutes looking for updates. When it find one it’ll store it away for you to look at. And if your favorite sites don’t do RSS, check out NewsIsFree.com and Syndic8.com. Besides that, just about every weblog has an RSS feed and you can find list upon list of those at places like weblogs.com.

I forgot to mention this and a friend of mine brought it to my attention. The NStorm games connect back to the mothership (i.e. the NStorm site). Their Privacy Policy discusses this under the Gaming heading and they say that all they do is collect the fact that a specific game is being played. Their “About NStorm” page tells you that they’re an “advergaming” company so it makes sense. For what it’s worth, I still play their games. YMMV.

NStorm has been one of my favorite gaming sites for a long time. That’s saying something cause I’m not much of a gamer … just occasional visits to the Space Invaders site and NStorm. Anyway, I’m a fan of quite a few of their games such as Elf Bowling. Haven’t played it yet but I’m looking forward to it.

Check this out. Looks like their business is listing companies because they’ve got printed directories as well. And they have them for more than just Northern California, like one for Arkansas, Louisana and Oklahoma, one for Texas and a couple for Southern California.

CERT issues quarterly summaries and the one for this quarter is out. Besides some new Windows vulnerabilities and some Win32 viruses, there are exposures in SSL/TLS, Sendmail and OpenSSH.

OK, I don’t know why but a simple change of browser rectified the Control Panel performance issue I wrote about earlier. I now use Firebird and the Control Panel performs quite nicely!

I saw this a couple of weeks ago and forgot to post something about it and, wouldn’t you know, when I thought of it again, I had to go dig up the info again.

Anyway, Infone is a relatively new service which, for 89 cents, gives you 15 minutes of talk-time to a real person for assistance (time beyond 15 minutes is billed at 5 cents/minute). What kind of assistance? Well, nationwide directory assistance, of course, but there’s more. You can upload your address book and have the attendant read you information from it or place a call. You can upload your calendar and get information on your appointments. You can call and get dinner reservations or check on flight status or get driving directions … y’know, stuff that, if you’re like me, you’ve said “Gee, I wish I could …”

No monthly fees, no charges of any kind until/unless you use the service.

Oh, by the way, if you have them place a call for you, the clock is running until you hang up.

It’s not the same-old, same-old. voiceglo offers phone calls over the Internet for, get this, DIAL-UP as well as broadband users. The information on their site is pretty sparse as to the particulars but it looks like you can use your existing phones if you have a broadband connection, otherwise you have to use one of their free USB phones. Apparently they are a full-fledged telephone service provider as you get an actual phone number (how else would someone call you?). The good news is you get to pick the area code you want. I can’t tell what area codes they serve as their area code map won’t come up on my machine for some reason.

Prices look good. Since they operate over your existing Internet connection, you’ll have to keep a wireline provider.