I saw an interesting question over at slashdot on the topic of how many companies actually had their employees power down their PC’s overnight. The site in question had about 8000 PCs about half of which stayed powered on overnight. There’s a lot of talk these days about “going green”. I’ve always been interested in the idea of conservation because it just makes sense to not be wasteful where it’s possible. So, as many of you know already I have somewhere around as many hobbies as there have been Presidential debates this last year…. At one point in time I’ve spent a lot of time working with off-grid power ideas (built a small somewhat portable emergency power system with solar/car recharge capabilities.) And if you’ve ever seriously looked at alternative energy you know that you need to learn about power consumption…. so based on what I learned here are some things to think about…
Tag: REAL
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Internet Explorer 7 on linux
Haven’t had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I’ve been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a linux install. (But why oh why would you do this?) For many that do web design it’s a tremendously good idea to test what a website looks like in multiple browsers because they all have their own unique …. quirks. Of course, there are other reasons…. sites that refuse to work with anything but IE. (Blue Cross/Blue Shield for instance has some web apps that will not work with anything else.)
Well… now Internet Explorer 7 is supported by ies4linux….
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Vmware launches beta of real to virtual converter
Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare’s virtualization products. The converter also can convert images from competing virtual machine “platforms”(?) (Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or higher) to VMware virtual machine disk format.)
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Is the firmware current?
The other day I was struggling with something that should have worked “out of the box”. It was a little wireless bridge (Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge). The idea was to just connect it to the pc and it would just work. Well…. in a word NO. It “sort of worked”, the problem is the pc didn’t receive the dhcp address, so I had to manually set it. I didn’t know the correct gateway information (should it be the bridged device ip or the REAL gateway.) At one point I got dns lookups working, but routing to the internet was not working, then the access point got pulled off a shelf and EVERYTHING stopped working. Checking in on the bridge would show it was just cycling through the WPA handshake process over and over and over.
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Kubuntu Free CD’s
One of the things I’ve really admired about the Ubuntu project is that they will MAIL you REAL cds of their product for free. That can give a much more professional look for redistribution than a hand burned cd with handwritten green ink saying ubuntu linux 5.10…. Well, Ubuntu has done this for quite a while, NOW the “Shipit” service is available for Kubuntu. You’ll basically need a Launchpad account first. Also, Edubuntu now will ship free cds as well.
According to the FAQ… “All CDs currently contain version 6.06 LTS, development codename “Dapper Drake”. For every CD you order, we will send you one package that contains a single CD (live CD installer) in a cardboard wallet. This is true for all architectures.”
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The spammers win a round
There is a company (well, unfortunately, WAS a company) called Blue Security. They had an innovative approach to stopping spam. A small download essentially sent opt-out return emails that were junk back to the REAL spam sender (clever concept huh? bouncing to the person that REALLY sent the message… Of course what was clever here was that they were coordinating the responses of all their users – herding a “white hat” network of sorts.) Anyway, it was a successful concept at getting several of the top 10 to clean their mailing lists.It looks as though 6 of the top 10 agreed to clean up their mailing lists. Unfortunately, they were the subject of a Massive DDOS. They managed to recover and come back, but the dDos took out other sites as well and there were threats of more it seems.
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Detecting Rootkits on a Linux machine
Rootkits are a piece (or pieces) of software that someone can be used once a system is compromised to a) regain access to a system and b) remove traces of a compromise and c) many times hide itself. There are some tools for linux based systems that can be run to detect traces of rootkits and probably the best known is a tool called chkrootkit. I’ve know of it for what seems like years now and it can run a relatively quick test for traces of a wide range of KNOWN linux rootkits.
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Sun Java security updates/ Windows software update rant…
Incidents.org has the story on Sun’s release of new versions of the Java Runtime Environment and the Java SDK to fix some remote security vulnerabilities.
These security vulnerabilities could allow malicious, untrusted code to compromise a user’s computer. Sun recommends that users update to the newest version of the SDK and JRE available at http://java.sun.com .
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10 Million Candlepower Spotlight
I have no idea where to put this. It isn’t exactly high tech…. Anyway, we live out in a rural (becoming suburban…) area which means good lighting is very useful. We have a good outdoor houselight, but have never wanted an always on area light. Flashlights are good, but even the biggest mag-lights seem ineffective against the depths of the dark nights around here.
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Nasty regedit bug
This is unusual, but it sounds like there is a bug in regedit (and regedit32) which prevents the displaying of unusually long registry keys. Now, that sounds innocent enough, it also prevents the viewing of keys entered under them. Again, ok not a crisis. Imagine if you had an extremely long registry key entered in the ….software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/run area? Annoying maybe? Ok, what if it were put there by malware? Oooooooh… that would be bad….