Month: December 2004

Stardock: Object Desktop – ObjectDesktop

Stardock: Object Desktop – ObjectDesktop
Object Desktop is a desktop enhancement suite designed to allow users to turbo-charge their Windows experience. It’s like getting the next version of Windows today!

I think I saw PC Mag recommend this so I checked it out. I ended up downloading part of it called Desktopx since it was a free download. I like the weather, clock, noteit, and todo list widgets. I am even running the fish. The cpu and memory usage is minimal but I did find high usage when I was trying to run taskmonitor replacements. Pretty cool! I am almost tempted to waste a lot of time and create my own widgets and objects.

RSSOwl | RSS / RDF / Atom Newsreader

RSSOwl | RSS / RDF / Atom Newsreader

A few days ago I saw that a new version of RssOwl had been posted. I had tried a previous version it was pretty clutzy compared to the competition so I was curious how much it had changed.

The installation went smooth and my first impression was that it was pretty quick. The user interface is much improved over what I remembered. I made a few changes to the preferences. I created a shortcut key to mark newsfeed as read when closing a tab, and turned on one-click. This got me pretty close to what I am accustomed to in RssBandit. Overall I like RssOwl but I am not ready to drop RssBandit. I do not have an easy way on XP to blog a new item like I can with wbloggar in RssBandit. When I have some time I will try this reader on Linux since RssBandit is not available on that platform.

My wishlist for RssOwl is:

  1. I would like some some type of blog a news item support.
  2. I would like a newspaper style listing of the new postings to a newsfeed.
  3. I would like share a remote subscription list.
  4. It would be nice if I could use FireFox for my default browser especially if I could use JustBlogIt.
  5. I think the icons on the tabs should reflect the favicon.
  6. I get a IE script error on certain pages when I open the page with the internal browser.


Get RSSOwl

Kitten’s Project Blog » Kitten’s Spaminator

Kitten’s Project Blog » Kitten’s Spaminator
Kitten’s Spaminator

I have been annoyed recently by the comment spam I have been receiving so I installed Spaminator. So far I have had no false positives and all of the comment spam has been deleted. Great work!

RE: RSS Bandit v1.3.x (Wolverine) Alpha Installer Available

As promised in the RSS Bandit roadmap, the preview of the next version of RSS Bandit is now available for general download. You can now download it from http://rssbandit.sourceforge.net/ (0 comments)

[Via SourceForge.net: SF.net Project News: RSS Bandit]

I had a small problem with RssBandit that started about the time I was installing RssOwl. Although they do not share any files I started getting an invalid feedlist error popup when I started RssBandit. The error file complained about a System.Xml.Schema.XmlSchemaException which I thought was referring to the feedlist.xml. I would then get another popup complaining about an invalid object reference. I thought if I updated to the latest version of RssBandit the error would probably disappear. The error stayed. Most of the time I wasted on this problem was trying to figure out what was wrong with the feedlist.xml file. Today I traced the error down to the subscription.xml file. When I renamed it and recreated a new one I was okay. I had to be careful with importing of OPML files. I corrupted the subscription file when I tried a large import. I think the large opml had some “bad” entries that caused problems for RssBandit and xml parsing.

How To Speed Up Firefox (Helpful Vanity)

Several people have commented that these instructions really do work. They are right. I also went and updated my registry so IE could do the same thing. You can find the IE speedup at the Registry Explorer site. It is Tweak 11. Now both browsers are non-compliant since they allow more than 4 connections to a web server. Since I am on a broadband connection this should be a minor issue .

More things you can do with a phone line

A couple of months ago I did not take the option of paying for my “free fax phone ” and let the phone number expire. I do not use faxes very often so it did not make sense to pay for a fax line. Since I switched my internet access to the DSL line, my regular phone has available for other duties, such as, part-time fax duty. A couple of years ago I had acquired a second phone number with a distinctive ring. I found the distinctive ring support among the modems I purchased to be practically non-existant so this feature was not very useful since I had a free fax line. Somewhere along the way I remembered that the folks at Command Communications had a box that could probably do a respectable job with distinctive ring. When I looked up their products I found that they were priced at less than $50. So I bought a Commswitch 5500 and set it up on semi-automatic mode for distinctive ring. The semi-automatic mode keeps the Commswitch from picking up the line on regular phone calls. When a fax call comes in other line it gets routed to the fax port where my SBS fax software picks up on the first ring. Hey, it works! I am now playing with routing the fax to Sharepoint database. Routing it via email is another good option.

Droping spam

Since I finally stopped looking at the spam on my Yahoo account for false positives, I decided to stop looking for false positives on my farm account. The farm’s web site has been around for a long time so it was getting a huge amount of spam(1000 spam per day). I had never seen a false positive. Mailwasher made the job of looking for false positives a little more bearable but it was generally a waste of time. The problem was how was I going to delete the spam automagically rather than storing it in the spam folder. The answer was found after a quick search of the web. Someone recommended creating an email filter in cPanel. When I went to the email portion of cPanel, cPanel displayed a hint showing how to drop email identified as spam by spamassassin. That was easy!

Upgrading my SBS server

At the beginning of this month I got curious about upgrading my server. What is a problem to some people is a curious lab test for others. Since the parts are inexpensive I opted to try two different options, add a second cpu and add memory. I guessed that I would get the most bang for my buck by upgrading the memory since my server had a minimum amount of memory for a server, 576K. I ran a baseline test to document my starting point. It complained about the queue length on the one cpu. Cpu utilization was low and the paging was okay.

I bought both parts from Ebay and they arrived last week. I put both the memory and the cpu into the server last week but had to immediately remove the memory. Despite my best efforts to get inexpensive but compatible memory, the memory I bought conflicted with my existing memory. The second cpu worked flawlessly. I was surprised to notice an immediate impact, the login process went much quicker. I ran another baseline test and it said everything was fine. The queue length problem was gone. Exchange and SQL slowness appear to be gone. For the fifty bucks I spent adding a second cpu is a winner. I may still buy an additional 512K but I think I have a new insight on SBS hardware requirements. Memory is still very important but CPU power is much more important than I originally thought. Having two cpu’s is probably a very good idea for something like SBS which runs Exchange and SQL on the same server.

I bought a BlackBerry a few days ago

Actually it is a Christmas gift from my parents. Well, sort of…. Today it was finally working right. It took me a day for T-Mobile to configure my account properly and another day for web access and BlackBerry web client to get worked out. I can know read most of my Yahoo mail. Some HTML mail is not readable. The PIM features are pretty usable.

JDK 1.5 and Java Web Start Problems

I fixed an annoying problem with using the Java Web Start. I was getting this error.

Java Plug-in Fatal Error
Cannot load class sun/plugin/JavaRunTime

I found that if I changed the network settings via the Java Control Panel to explicitly name the proxy server rather than use the browser settings this error went away. My browser uses an automatic configuration script. I tried to post my findings in the developer forum but it croaked at me.

Problems with POP3 leads to more problems

I didn’t realize it until this morning but yesterday my the POP3 process on my server got hung up yesterday evening. I have applied the patch that supposedly fixes this problem but it still occurs occasionally. I find out about this problem when I get an email complaining about low idle time on the server. I got the email but I guess I didn’t read my email last night. Since the server is typically maxed out, this problem causes problems for other processes like backup and virus checking. This morning I found that the backup job and virus checking job were still trying to complete. I have them scheduled to run at different times so that they do not compete for the same resources. Despite the competition they both completed. Whew! What a way to start a Friday!

Azureus : Java BitTorrent Client

Azureus : Java BitTorrent Client

I saw that there is a new version Knoppix so I decided to download it. Since my son’s PC is on the other side of the firewall I decided to try Azureus. I picked since it is consistently is high on the sourceforge list. It took me a few extra minutes to install and startup since I had to install JRE also. I now have it running and it is consistently averaging about 75-80K. That is pretty cool since most of my downloads are typically limited by the download server.

Chart on Effectiveness of Diceware versus Random passwords

This is just an estimate using the formula provided on Diceware. I put this into an Excel spreadsheet to give me an idea of the effectiveness. The random passwords are composed of multiples of 4 symbols. The total number of symbols being 26+26+32+10=92.

Diceware Words Basic Entropy Entropy from adding punctuation Entropy from adding single digit Entropy of random password Effectiveness of Diceware vs. Random

12.9 5.0 3.3 6.5
2 25.8 30.8 34.2 52.2 65%
3 38.8 43.8 47.1 78.3 60%
4 51.7 56.7 60.0 104.4 58%
5 64.6 69.6 72.9 130.5 56%

More Goofing Off with password management

KeePass got me thinking about using more secure passwords and I suffered the consequences today. I went back to the Diceware Passphrase Home Page and played around. He recommends using dice to pick 4 or 5 random words from a list.The combination of words, a random capitalization, and a random punctuation makes a passphrase that is tough to crack but easy to remember. I wondered why there wasn’t a computer verion of his algorithm. The problem is that most computer algorithms for random numbers are not adequate for the security task. I decided to overlook this fault and when I found an easy dice routine written Python. With a little more work I created a Python program that simulated his algorithm using the dice routine. I learned a little about Python along the way.

I am not sure whether I want to commit to much stronger passwords. Although I can create random passwords with KeePass, I know I will not remember them and be reliant on KeePass to fill them in. This requires careful thought about backup and recovery. Windows logins are specially difficult since cut-and-paste is not an option. Hmm….

More additions to PHPwebsite

It looks like the latest version of Article manager is now 3.0. I will check it out in the next couple of days. A new plugin, xwysiwyg, caught my attention. You have to read the comments on the post to find its features.

FEATURES
========
-HtmlArea included 3.0 RC1
-FCKeditor included 2 beta 2
-Some plugins for HtmlArea
-Some Skins for FCK
-Settings for both editors
-Only one PhpWebSite file (wysiwyg.php) is to hack
-Easy install
-For PhpWebSite since 0.9.3-4
-Should work with IE5.5+ , Mozilla1.4+ , Firefox0.10.0+

You can find both of these at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/phpwebsite-comm/
(section files)

Review of KeePass Password Safe

I have been using Password Safe the last couple of months to help manage my passwords. It has done a fine job. Yesterday I saw another open source password manager was released so I decided to check it out. It is called KeePass and you can find it here. It does everything Password Safe does and a couple of things more. KeePass appears to have better encryption although I am no expert and really don’t care. The feature that caught my interest was the ability to open urls in the web browser and fill the normal username and password fields. It worked for several of the urls I tried. It did not work on all of them. Still it could be minor timesaving feature that may encourage me to use more difficult passwords(i.e. random). I was very pleased that my exported passwords from Password Safe imported into KeePass without a problem.