My web wanderings

I have to say that I got an excellent MP3 player from my wonderful fiance’. We go jogging most mornings and I have always dreaded it because it is just me alone with my thoughts, how scary is that? So anyway many times I have almost just gone ahead and spent $30-50 dollard on a cheap mp3 player but I am glad I didn’t Ellen bought me this awesome MP3 player that has a voice recorder so I can record thoughts and ideas I have while jogging and it scroll’s the tracks that are playing on the screen. The sound quality is excellent and I now feel bad that I have the better MP3 player of the family.

Ellen I love you so much

P.S. this was a birthday present. Shhh….

This site has a guide to extracting Tivo data and burning it to DVD. Here is the direct link to the really geeky stuff.

I really need to get around to putting a homepage up for this site. I really love some of the stuff that these guys do. I have been thinking about a old green screen terminal look to take me back to my DOS days.

What I really need to do is spend some time learning about how to use Outlook to become more organized. They also have training on all there other Office 2003 products.

Do you know what the most beautiful light in the world is? I am sitting here typing at my computer and the most beautiful light is shining in my window at work.. It is sunlight filtering through a young spry willow waving in the wind. It is so nice to be able to see the sun and sky after so much smoke and haziness over the last few days.

Here are some security tools that I find useful.

Because I love Open Source software here is how to make your own Web Security Appliance for Apache

With the holiday’s coming up I have family asking what I want for a present. Well what would any information junkie want… More information.

I typically buy about 3-6 magazines a month and browse many more while Ellen and I are at one of our favorite weekend hangouts Barnes and Noble. So I figured I would put up a list of the magazines I read monthly and see how many people I can con into buying them for me. So without further ado here is my list.

Oh and I also want this clock for work.

This is for my buddy James, he is looking at the Dell Powervault 650f.

Power Solutions is a great resource for info on Dell systems. You can subscribe for the quarterly magazines here. They also have Dell Insight a great info resource for general IT issues

< rant begin >It seems that everytime Ellen and I go to the movies we encounter some young kids acting like they are five years old. At what point does it repeating someone cease to be funny? In case you can’t guess we went to see Kill Bill for a matinee show. The movie was excellent. It definitely is not something you would want to take grandma to but if you are a fan of action movies and/or samurai movies it is a must see. So back to my story we are sitting in the theater and five teenage boys sit down in front of us and proceed to talk through the entire previews, that isn’t what made me upset it was that once the movie started they continued there discussions. So I decided to shhh them at which point the started to loudly shhh and “Please be quiet” the entire audience. Well little did they know that there was a gentleman in front of them that was even less impressed with their antics than I was. Just as I was about to say something to the little Sh%ts the guy in front of them turned around and laid into them good and loud. It was the funniest thing I had seen in a long while. They deserved it and tried to mask there embarrassment in giggling to themselves. At what point do teenagers grow up? I am sorry ladies but I can’t single out the boys on this one I have seen teenage girls be as rude and discourteous as the boys.< /rant>

BTW if you aren’t a geek like me the < rant begin >< /rant > is an homage to html.

GNU utilities for Win32

Windows 2003 Certificate Services article #1

Windows 2003 Certificate Services article #2

MS Cluster guide and tool

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for creating and configuring a typical single quorum device multi-node server cluster using a shared disk on servers running the Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition operating systems.

Download

The Cluster Recovery Utility is a tool that collects together a number of pieces of functionality that are particularly useful in a server cluster after a disk on the shared bus has failed.

Server cluster configurations manage disks on a shared storage infrastructure that are visible from multiple nodes although only one node in a server cluster can access any given disk at any point in time. In the event of the failure or corruption of a disk on the shared storage interconnect special care must be taken to restore the data and recover the applications.

The Cluster Recovery Utility is a tool that collects together a number of pieces of functionality that are particularly useful in a server cluster after a disk on the shared bus has failed.

This utility is primarily aimed at the following scenarios:

Restoring resource checkpoint files
Replacing a failed disk
Recovering from disk signature changes
Migrating data to a different disk on the shared bus
 
Note: this tool works on WIndows 2000 too!

Download

Institute for Security and Open Methodologies

Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual

Secure Programming Standards Methodology Manual

Operational Security Tools

Software Testing Checklist (STICK)

SIPES - Security Incident Pollicy Enforcement System

Mobile Access in Exchange 2003

To help me keep track of all the new PDA’s

Blogs to look at

Web Application Security devices - Recommended by Steve@BofA

I would love to have this Dilbert IT Clock

Jabber

Dell  - We just bought two fully loaded 1655MC’s and need to buy these rails

I saw this OS personality test on SBC DotNet Weblog.

Looks pretty funny.

I saw SQLspy on Mike Gunderloy’s blog today. It looks like a good quick and dirty tool to monitor MSSQL. HybridX has some other intresting tools on his site including Addon’s to SQLspy and SQLinsider.

Which brings me to another point, why must some web developers feel the need to restrict the ability to right click just to “prevent” someone stealing their images. Anyone with half a brain will realize the image is in their browser cache or can use an alternative browser such as Opera or my favorite MozillaFirebird. Are you still stuck in IE with no tabs and advanced features. You might as well be using AOL then.

Sorry for the rant.

BrookTrout makes by far the best fax cards but get ready to give your CFO a heart attack

We have decided to go with GFI FaxMaker for Networks and we will migrate to GFI FaxMaker for Exchange when we upgrade to Exchange 2003, have a look at this review

Looking for a Fax server for NT? How about a free one for linux and no need to worry about integrating it with windows

Cerberus Helpdesk - We use cerburus at work and have been pretty happy with it.

RT: Request Tracker - I am still looking into RT since I have found some intresting features for it.

John Lam has launched Practical Eye for the .NET Guy (subscription link in the sidebar), a newsletter dedicated to practical advice for working .NET developers. The first issue has some thoughts on build processes and an excellent NAnt tutorial. Good stuff.

Understanding WSDL - Aaron Skonnard walks through the basics in a nice clear article.

The one and the only RRDtool

• Cacti is one of the prettier network monitoring and graphing tools - plus it runs on MS
• Oh here is a gallery of RRDTool uses.  This is an intresting one that tracks tickets in RequestTracker.
• Here is an advanced implementation at Library consortium
• I know Jason hopes that one day we will monitor our servers this well
• Last but not least here are some frontends for RRDtool

Microsoft appears to have decided that business users are their best hope for selling Office 2003. There’s a special Tools for Your Job section on Office Online, and a press release titled Microsoft Office System Survey Says Solving Tough Problems Beats Promotions and Pay Raises as America’s “Greatest Moments at Work”. Yeah, right. Management is eternally trying to convince themselves that Attaboys are more important than pay raises. I am reminded of William Wimpisinger’s response to some asinine management “job enrichment” proposal, back when he was president of the Machinists’ union: “If you want to enrich the job, enrich the worker.”