This kind of get’s glommed into hardware, software and security categories all…. I’ve mentioned DBAN a couple times already (Darik’s Boot and Nuke). I had a chance to sit down this afternoon to nuke a few disks I’ve collected over the last little while and thought I’d pass along some points on the DBAN for securely wiping the contents of hard drives. First, no matter what you do to a drive, there may be a data recovery center that can get something from it. I’m talking clean rooms, 1000’s of dollars and some good forensic recovery techniques. Why?
Category: Software
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MySQL setting up database replication
Database replication is one of those useful things that can really make your life simpler. It’s not really a way of backing up the data in a MySQL database, because if you inadvertently issue a command to delete the entire database, it won’t save you from yourself…. it will faithfully replicate the change to the slave servers. However, in the event of hardware failure or other abrupt disruption of connectivity, the concept of replicating from a master to a slave server is ideal.
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Great online educational Games
One of the great things about computers is their potential to help teach/ help us learn. One of my favorite categories of software is that of educational. I remember spending long hours going through a states and capitals game back on the atari 400 years ago. I have also been fond of language vocabulary drilling games more recently. The nature of the web is that now many good tools like this are available online, finding them is the problem.
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Microsoft Office tips to annoying little problems
PCMag has an article on a number of little puzzling “how do I”‘s in Microsoft Office. It looks like a great listing and worth adding to anyone’s battery of MS Office tips.
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PCworld top 100 products of 2005
Although some of the linked reviews are old, PCWorld has released their list of top 100 products of 2005. It’s nice to see a number of familiar products in the list, several Google offerings are listed (main search engine, desktop, and GMail at #2). Ubuntu makes #26 which is noteworthy. I notice Wikipedia is in there as well. Many of the items on the list of course, have been out a bit longer than a year so it’s not 100 top NEW products, just 100 top products. Mozilla Firefox tops the list at #1.
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Firefox 1.5 has over 2 million downloads already
OS Dir has the story that Mozilla Firefox 1.5 has already been downloaded more than 2 million times. It was released publicly on the 29th of this month (Tuesday afternoon) and today is Friday… not bad for just a few days. I suspect that the rate will slow now that all the folks that were watching for the release have got the new version downloaded.
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Another IE security flaw this one could lead to data theft
I saw this earlier this afternoon at betanews.com there seems to be a flaw in the way Internet Explorer deals with css that could put your data at risk. According to this article it is a risk combined with Google Desktop. This can be “fixed” by disabling scripting or using Firefox as your primary browser. Currently Microsoft says it is “investigating the problem”…
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Microsoft touts Windows vista restart manager
Okay – here we go…. Microsoft is talking about a new feature of Vista that allows you to …
update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine.
If that works as advertised that’s great. Update something related to networking, just restart networking *(kind of like what unix based systems do “service network stop/start/restart…)
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Home Linux terrabyte backup system
This is something I’ve wanted to build for some time. I hadn’t actually thought about a terrabyte of storage, but… linux journal has the article on making your own home network backup storage solution using an old pc, linux and relatively cheap discs. The concept of any backup system is redundancy so that a single failure doesn’t take out your data.
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Sunbelt acquiring Kerio Personal Firewall
Kerio Personal firewall will be acquired by Sunbelt according to the sunbeltblog. It looks as though the acquisition will be complete within a month. They hope to offer downloads “within weeks”. There will be a price reduction and discounts for Sunbelt users, and discounts for Kerio users on Sunbelt software. Also it looks like the free edition will continue.