Ok, I have too many interests. One of them is listening to shortwave radio. I guess in many ways I’m a news junky. Also, I’m working on my Spanish so, listening to shortwave gives me vast listening resources. I know, I know, “can’t you stream the feeds over the web” Yes, many of them, but it’s just nice to get away from the computer and tinker with something completely different, a radio and hear the whistling and the drift, etc.
One problem though with shortwave is (more…)
I think it was last night on the local news, they led with a story about a local family that, during a recent thunderstorm heard/saw a very close lightning hit. They had some nice film footage of a tree that had its bark completely blown away and a nice rip down the side of the tree. (My guess is the lightning hit flash heated ( vaporized) the sap or water inside the tree and the pressure of that is what blew bark around. I don’t know though.) The report talked about how North Carolina is high on the list of states with regards to lightning strikes (more…)
I just saw this article at zdnet news a few minutes ago. Basically a new security bulletin is out with regards to Windows Remote Desktop Server being vulnerable to a denial of service (DoS) attack. Essentially it affects Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003. It appears that under an overwhelming flood of requests the system could blue screen. This vulnerability though, I think points out a flaw in the software firewall of XP (more…)
This may cover a fair amount of ground, but here goes….
Today I was looking at a system to see just what software was in use, evaluating the possibility of linux as a replacement. Office, of course was a must (at least the ability to read .doc and .xls files.) This is something that can now be done a number of ways with linux, Kword, Abiword, Openoffice.org, Gnumeric, Kspread all come to mind, as well as Microsoft Office running on Crossover Office. Frankly, I wasn’t too concerned about that. Publisher is another story, but on the linux side, I’ve tried Scribus as a replacement and it’s a maybe. It seems Kword has some of the flexibility of a desktop publishing program, but I may have to look further there. What caught my eye and prompted this update was a peculiar little file on the desktop. It was titled something related to a lease. I rightclicked to get more info. It was an executable file (.exe) I opened it. It was a viewer for a lease form which had been emailed. The building owner had appearantly emailed it in this format to the business owner.
Well to start out, this might should be crosslinked in the computer security section, but I’m putting it in commentary primarily to catch those who might not typically look at computer security.