Digital Choke Daynotes

 Monday, December 27, 2004       mail    link   the story

Busy the past few days. Shopping for Pam (I made some points there), wrapping a lot of presents (only until 1:00 am), family get-togethers, and the best part -- watching my children and grandchildren open their presents. That is my favorite part. There's not much that I need or desire (I'm sort of a cheapskate), but I don't mind spending money on the others in my family.

So, the holidays are over, but I am still at home. I've got the whole week off, although (geek that I am), I do check the work email daily. I'm on a few security bug mailing lists, which generate a lot of traffic, so I'd rather check those out daily rather than plow through about 1000 messages if I waited a week.

I'm thinking of a few projects to complete this week. One is to put shelves in the office closet to get that more organized. Another is pruning the office computer to get rid of old stuff, and to make backups easier. That system is several years old, and contains some important information, so backups are important. I'm inclined to update that computer (or replace it), but there is that 'cheapskate' thing. I could put together my own system out of various parts and save a few bucks. But there is also an advantage to getting a package system. A visit to Robert Thompson's site, and perhaps Tom's Hardware might be in order to help with that decision.

Another project is to get a scanner to get some personal photos and documents into electronic form to share with my family. There's also some video tapes to convert to DVD's (Sony has a new product that does that easily). And there is all the trash from presents, so there may be a "Lone Ranger" trip. ("To the dump, to the dump, to the dump-dump-dump...".) Lots of choices for projects.

So, it's a Monday morning here at 'the ridge'. Blustery day outside; we're getting some sprinkles and gusty winds from the storm that is over on the (CA) coast. The weather dweebs are saying that most of the rain will run down the coast towards LA (watch out, Dr. Pournelle).

In the meantime, if you haven't already, point your friends and relatives with new computers to the "Simple Steps" page here. Those steps will help to keep their computers safe.

And there is the "Three Stooges" marathon on AMC on Friday, so will need to prepare for that.

Hope your holidays were as pleasant as mine.

 Tuesday, December 28, 2004       mail    link   the story

Catching up:

Perhaps there is life on Mars? (see Reuter's report here:). I believe this has been ignored by everyone...where is the follow-up?

" LONDON - An unexplained phenomenon akin to a space-borne car wash has boosted the performance of one of the two U.S. rovers probing the surface of Mars, New Scientist magazine said on Tuesday.

It said something -- or someone -- had regularly cleaned layers of dust from the solar panels of the Mars Opportunity vehicle while it was closed down during the Martian night.

The cleaning had boosted the panels' power output close to their maximum 900 watt-hours per day after at one stage dropping to 500 watt-hours because of the heavy Martian dirt.

"These exciting and unexplained cleaning events have kept Opportunity in really great shape," the magazine quoted NASA rover team leader Jim Erickson as saying.

You may want to bookmark this site before your next shopping trip for that 'special something for someone'.

There is some worry about some new Windows vulnerabilities regarding Windows Help Files. The folks at F-Secure said this in their weblog (look for the Tuesday 12-28-04 entry):

We're a bit worried about the four new Windows vulnerabilities that were found during Christmas holidays...especially since there a no current patches against them. Windows XP SP2 is immune to some - but not all of them.

These vulnerabilities could be used in future viruses - for example in massmailers.

They are:

* Windows LoadImage API vulnerability. Can be used for remote code execution through crafted bitmaps (.BMP), icons (.ICO), cursor (.CUR) and animated cursor (.ANI) files

* Animated cursor (.ANI) vulnerability that causes system crash.

* Help file overflow that can be exploited through crafted windows help (.HLP) files. This vulnerability reportedly also affects Windows XP SP2.

* HTML Help Control exploit that uses a number of different vulnerabilities to bypass IE's Local Zone protections in order to run scripts on the host. SP2 is vulnerable.

At least this last exploit has already been used for dropping Trojans.

The usual advice: get Windows XP SP2 installed, along with the other 'simple steps'. And keep your data backed up.

And how secure is your office? Are your desktops and laptops locked down? Apparently, not at the California State Water Resources Board building (just a few blocks away from my office). Even though the building has security guards, and all employees have ID cards, somebody took off with "computers, laptops and personal items" to the tune of about $10,000.

Hmmm.....computer cable locks .. $30. Security guards: $8.00 per hour. Being able to steal computers out of the building: priceless.

 Wednesday, December 29, 2004       mail    link   the story

Spent some time with the extended family today. Pizza lunch, then a few errands, and back to the mother-in-law's house for dinner and some visiting.

Big storm hitting California today. Most of the rain went down south yesterday, just a bit of light rain today. But tonight, very windy, and lots of snow in the mountains. Which is good, since we haven't had much snow up there since late October.

Nothing much else to report. Just enjoying some time off. And not getting much done (although I did backup some important data from the home computer).

 Thursday, December 30, 2004       mail    link   the story

Continued storming around here; it rained most of the night, sometimes quite hard, along with some good gusts of wind. The mountains got a good deal of snow, with reports of 3-5 feet during the evening news, and it's not done yet. The next 'wave' started in again this afternoon, and a look towards the Sierra Nevada mountains (east of here) showed what appeared to be snow-laden clouds. Late this evening, the rain continues, heavy at times, with some wind. A nice night to be inside.

Pam, Stacy, and I went to the movies today, watching "Ocean's 12". An enjoyable movie, three out of four stars. Although I was disappointed that the snack bar didn't have any Milk Duds (no, not those things in "Sienfeld", but the chocolate-covered caramel candy).

Then a late lunch (at "Jersey Mike's", a sandwich deli) and home before the next batch of rain started.

One of the web servers at work wasn't delivering mail to the mail server. Turned out that the primary DNS server died, and the backup DNS server had a typo of an IP address. That got fixed, and mail is flowing again. I was able to do my part from home using remote access to the affected server.

 Friday, December 31, 2004       mail    link   the story

We started out the day with a fit of cleaning. All the holiday decorations are down, the tree has been removed (it was quite dry), a full-house vacuum, and the outside lights were taken down (there weren't that many of them). The garage is a bit of a mess (although the car still fits inside); I'll spend a bit of time tomorrow getting all the holiday stuff organized into their boxes. The local Scout troop will be by tomorrow to pick up the tree -- a $5 donation will send it to the recycler.

I usually wait a bit longer to remove the outside lights, but there was another big storm predicted for later today, so wanted to get it done. And, as advertised by the weather dweebs, it arrived this afternoon. A bit windy, but not as much as yesterday, but quite a bit of rain. Lots of snow up in the mountains, with the last storm dumping up to 8 feet of snow.

So the local news stories were chock full of reports from the high country of lots of cars stuck in the traffic, road closures due to snow and spinouts, and people waiting for hours to get to the ski resorts. One guy had been waiting for over 10 hours. No, he didn't look very bright. The usual stuff.

This evening, the last day of the year, Pam and I are spending inside our warm house, away from the crazies. Pam is enjoying some "chick flicks" on TNT ("You've Got Mail", "Kate and Leopold") while I do a bit of "couch geeking" with the laptop and the wireless connection to the 'net.

I'm also working on the backups of the desktop computer. I've got a USB hard drive (from Ximeta), but it doesn't seem to be working right. I've done the full CHKDSK thing, but still get errors writing the MS-Backup files. So it's doing a format right now, and we'll see how that works. I'd like to update that computer to WinXP (it's running Win2K Pro now), but that will require moving a few programs around. And I'd like to get a good backup copy (or two) of the data before thinking about that.

I'm thinking of getting a new hard drive; I only need about 40GB, so that won't be too expensive. The big part will be moving the programs over. A new install of MS-Office is not hard; I've got those CD's. But we've been using Quicken for a long time, and have many years of data on there. Quicken has been updated a few times along the way, so I think that it might be better to just grab a new copy and install that, then restore a backup of the data. It's getting close to tax time, so there will be lots of discounted copies of Quicken available along with the tax software.

At least, that's the plan. Backups first, then we'll work from there.

So, it's off to the new year. As I write this, some of the Daynotes Gang are already there. My big job is to try to stay awake until midnight.

Thanks for stopping by. See you next year.

 Saturday, January 1, 2005       mail    link   the story

Hmmm....not only do I have to remember to write "January", I also have to remember to write "2005".

Advance warning: next Monday is "Odd Day" -- 1/3/05 . And start planning for your "Five-Fecta Day", which will be 5/5/05. Although I'd bet some of you could come up with a better name for that. Suggestions via our mail form here.

The tragedy of the tsunamis has resulted in reports of tsunami-related "phishing" emails. I sent this off to Dr. Jerry Pournelle a couple of days ago:

Your mention of donations to help the victims of the tsunami brings to mind the need for caution. Although I haven't seen any indications yet, there is the strong possibility that email and web "donation" scams will soon surface.

So it seems prudent to caution readers to ensure that their donations are sent to an organization that is responsible. I would look at the administrative overhead costs of an organization as one indicator. If a large percentage of donations never make it to the victims, then there are probably better places to send your donations.

I'd also be careful with web- or email-based donations; one needs to ensure the security of one's credit card information. And emailed "Phishing" expeditions are likely to turn up with disaster-related themes.

I'd suggest that donations be directly targeted to the 'big guys', such as Red Cross, etc. It is important to donate, but donate with caution. Do not click on a link in an email or web site; go directly to the site by manually typing in the web address.

So, donate what you can, but make sure you donate to a reputable organization. And I think that a monetary donation is best. Those organizations can better use cash, rather than physical items. You might try Amazon.com, which has made it quite easy to donate to the Red Cross right on their front page.

Enjoy the new year, but drive (and compute) carefully.