If you use Internet Explorer to browse the web, I’d suggest finding the instructions to disable active scripting, or drop it and use something else in light of the recent exploit floating around. It seems that in spite of Microsoft’s infinite wisdom that “Microsoft has determined that an attacker who exploits this vulnerability would have no way to force users to visit a malicious Web site. Instead, an attacker would have to persuade them to visit the Web site, typically by getting them to click a link that takes them to the attacker’s Web site”…. the reality is that legitimate sites have been hacked and the malicious code has been added. (Over 200 legit sites…)
Category: Software
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Rumors and more on Vista
It’s interesting to see the rumor mill around Vista – I saw articles this morning claiming that 60% of the Vista code would have to be rewritten and the Xbox team was pulled to work on Vista – from what I can see both of those are not true. I suspect people are looking to explain why the release has slipped into the next year. I do find it interesting that there were such ambitious plans for Vista which have gradually evaporated and pushed to a future release and the pruned back plans just aren’t within reach in a short amount of time. However, in some ways software development is about making big plans reality, sometimes it just turns out to be bigger than you thought.
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Another critical IE flaw
I should mention a fairly big Windows vulnerability (which involves active scripting). Apparently there are proof-of-concept exploits circulating that do innocent things like open up the calculator. Unfortunately, once exploits are out that can do this, it’s trivial for them to do worse. The bottom line is, be careful what sites you visit, beware of “driveby downloads” using this tactic consider alternative browsers until you’re patched. (Although in reality, with IE’s integration in Windows, it’s hard to be completely safe this way with other apps using IE to view html objects….)
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Customized small download linux iso….
This is a good idea…. let’s say you want a linux install, but you’re very particular. You’d like to have a certain setup out of the box, say a basic desktop with OpenOffice and Firefox/Thunderbird. Nothing fancy, just a basic desktop and you wanted to deploy over several systems. Some distributions give you the choice to save settings for a later install, but for most, this can be the start of a fairly tedious install-fest. Someone has come up with a good solution to this (and a solution to the multi-GB of iso downloads….) You go to a web page answer a few questions and then download a CUSTOMIZED linux install iso that then takes care of the whole process for you.
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Your own wikipedia….
I’ve made quite a bit of use out of the wikipedia in recent years. I know it has it’s flaws (I’ve run across some first hand), but I’ve found typos in textbooks as well. However that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a very useful reference. In fact, in some of my browsing I’ve gone through the spanish language version of the wikipedia putting some of my spanish reading skills to the test. Anyway, in the last couple days I became curious for various reasons about actually downloading a copy and installing the wikipedia locally. Now, I know one of the benefits of the wikipedia is that it’s collaborative and this way I’ll miss out on current and changing/improving/updating articles. But I can see some reasons to want to have a “snapshot”.
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AVG – Cannot Launch AVG Internet Update
Last week sometime I was doing maintenance on an OLD Windows 95 machine (yes there are some still out there….) and noticed the Antivirus had not updated in a good while. They were using Grisoft’s AVG and so I tried to force an update. I was greeted with an error message… “Cannot Launch AV internet update” Which was puzzling since we were online with no connectivity problems. On looking, this is known to be an issue with Grisoft AVG on Windows 95…..
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Bashpodder linux podcasting client
So, juice (formerly known as ipodder) was a bit too gui-only for my tastes, I took a look at bashpodder which is a bash-script based podcast client. Really, this is very much to my liking as it can be scripted to run via cron (or at)… basically, there are three required files from the main site. There is a gui for it, but that’s not necessary…. bashpodder.shell, parse_enclosure.xsl, and bp.conf are required. bp.conf is the main configuration file and you basically enter one feed address per line.
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Juice – formerly ipodder podcast client for Linux (Windows and Mac too…)
I’ve been playing around a bit with podcast clients the last couple of days. I’ve been finding online news feeds for the onlineradiotv.com site and for many of those I have bash scripts to handle downloading or streaming the audio available from shortwave broadcasters. I did run across a few podcasts too though and thought it might be time to take another look at linux podcasting clients…
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Running kontact components standalone
Not long ago, I switched from Evolution to Kontact as my primary mail/calendar/addressbook/etc…. program under linux. One of the nice things about the Kontact suite is that you can either open up the “umbrella” application kontact or, the individual applications. I like the fact that they can still be used standalone. So, I was a bit frustrated to find every link for each of the components to bring up the “umbrella” kontact application, instead of the standalone….
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Mozilla Firefox 1.5 for Mandriva 2006
Mandriva 2006 released without Mozilla Firefox 1.5, it came with 1.0.6 (which included security fixes and other patches from 1.0.7)…. anyway, source rpm’s for Firefox 1.5 became available in cooker, so I’ve built rpm’s for Mandriva 2006 for easy management on my systems. I’ll post links here as they may be of use to others as well. …. These are provided as is, with no warranty express or implied, etc. etc. etc. The src.rpm is straight from cooker, so, if you like, you could build it yourself….