Digital Choke Daynotes

 Tuesday, November 29, 2005       mail    link   the story

I think that I am recovering from my self-induced 'triptophancoma', although I am having relapses each day at lunch when I have another turkey sandwich. (Fresh-baked bread, mayonnaise, turkey, cranberry jelly.) One of the best parts about this annual celebration is the turkey sandwiches.

We had a nice family get-together this weekend. Jared (son-in-law) was able to drive out from Salt Lake City (UT) for a weekend visit (although he had to work Friday, so missed the actual Turkey Day). Stacy had arrived from BYU-Idaho (Rexburg, ID) Thursday morning (she was supposed to arrive Wed night, but was delayed by weather, taking a trip from Rexburg to Twin Fall (ID) to Los Angeles to San Francisco to Sacramento). Jason (son) came over for the day. And Christine (daughter) and the three grandkids (Joelle, Liam, Max) have been staying at our house, so there was a good group around for the weekend.

We did the usual turkey (oven-baked in a plastic bag, which makes it quite moist), garlic mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, freshly home-baked rolls, and the 'green jello with whipped cream, walnuts, and cherry' jello. All are my favorites. I managed to not be over-stuffed, but it was all good. Pies from Marie Calendars (berry, lemon chiffon) and home-made pumpkin rounded out the meal.

While dinner was cooking, the women of the family poured through the newspaper ads in preparation for their annual "Black Friday" attack on the local economy. It's a tradition in our family: the ladies go shopping, and the men stay home and babysit. They get up at 430am, out the door by 500am, and do the shopping thing until about 1100am. They return with all of their prizes, quite happy with their success at finding bargains. I stayed home with the three grandkids; the two oldest managed to not wake up until 630am. They jumped into bed with me, dozed off a bit, then woke up to watch children's shows on the TV. We all got up about 730am, and got dressed and wandered down to the kitchen.

I, with all the culinary skills I could master, got out the frozen waffles and tossed them in the toaster. Some glasses of juice and a few minutes later the waffles were on their plates with some Log Cabin maple syrup (my favorite from childhood -- I remember when it used to come in a metal log cabin shaped container). A good breakfast was had by all. The kids wandered into the family room to watch movies (they love Christmas movies all year long), while I cleaned up the kitchen and read the newspaper.

That afternoon, I put up a few outdoor decorations, although not as extensive as our neighbor down the street, who's display is quite extensive. I've just got the icicle lights on the eaves, some lights around the front window, and a small lighted Santa and three reindeer. I also replaced the front garage lights with red and green bulbs, and put the wreath around the lights. The front door light got a green bulb (didn't think that red would be a good idea).

Saturday started out with a bit of cleaning (not much), then in the afternoon we all piled into the van and truck and drove out to our usual Christmas Tree farm. We've been going there for almost 20 years. Some years are harder than others; a couple of times we've spent more than an hour wandering around looking for just the right tree. This year, Pam spied a freshly cut Douglas Fir within five minutes of our arrival. A new world's record! We visited with the owners a bit, got some treats from their little snack shop (cookies and hot chocolate all around). The grandkids picked out a special tree ornament, and Pam got a freshly made wreath.

Then back into the vehicles for several more stops. First was the Newcastle cemetery, where we placed a small Christmas tree at Pam's father's grave site, and looked at the site of my Aunt and a nephew. Then off to the local mandarin orange farm for a couple of boxes of mandarins. Down to the Rocklin cemetery for a drop-off of a tree at our daughter's site (she lived about three hours; there were pretty extensive internal mis-development problems). Then back home to prepare the tree to bring it into the house. It got placed in the upstairs 'bonus' room (partly to keep it away from the youngest grandson). That night it was off to "Red Robin" for a family dinner.

Sunday was the usual church thing, although Pam had to take Stacy to the airport for her 600am flight. Jared left to go back to SLC about noon, so Sunday afternoon was mostly relaxing.

Back to work yesterday, catching up on all the email and other tasks. Last night we decorated the tree. My job is to put up the lights. Pam and Christine and the grandkids' job is to put up all the ornaments.

All in all a pleasant weekend. Hope yours was the same.

 Thursday, December 1, 2005       mail    link   the story

Yikes! December already. Need to get into the shopping mode. <sigh>

At work, been working on some batch files that will get a remote workstation's registry entries. The intent it to quickly survey all workstations for the proper Automatic Update values. The process uses a REG QUERY command for a remote workstation, then parses the output with various FOR and FIND commands. The result should be comma-delimited file that I can open with Excel and analyze.

It's been a learning process, and quite interesting. Not quite done with it yet, but making good progress.

Over at Dr. Jerry Pournelle's place (here: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail390.html#Thursday; scroll down a bit), I found a link to an initially impressive holiday lighting display that is set to (and synchronized with) music. Dr. Pournelle calls it "This is what happens when geeks get bored." Here's the link: http://jamphat.com/xmas.wmv .

Then I looked at it a bit more closely. It may be that the movie was manufactured, as discussed on a couple of other "Interweb" sites.

It would seem that the movie is a series of still pictures put together with a movie-making program, then synced to the music. If you watch the foreground (the lawn area),  you'll see a bit of 'jumpiness' in the blades of grass, which would indicate a series of still shots (or very short video shots) that have been carefully pasted together to sync to the music.

I'd be interested in a frame-by-frame analysis to see if the grass in front is in the same position when the same pattern of lights is shown. I don't have the equipment (or skills) to do that, though.

But, even if it is stitched together, it was quite impressive. Much like the "Pipe Dream" animated music movies from Animusic ( http://www.animusic.com , go into the "DVD Info and Clips" section; the site loads a bit slow; the videos are snippets from the DVDs they sell).

The other interesting part of the Christmas movie is that the parent site of the Christmas movie URL has been taken over by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) (http://www.jamphat.com ).

 Friday, December 2, 2005       mail    link   the story

Dr. Pournelle (in his Chaos Manor "Daynotes") complained that Outlook had blocked an expected executable attachment that he was expecting. And while several of his many readers chimed in with solutions, I chimed in with this divergent thought:

Regarding your problem with Outlook blocking executable attachments. While inconvenient at that time, it is an important part of the malware protection at our office (even though we don't use Outlook as our mail client).

We (at our corporate site) block all incoming executables attached to emails. No exceptions. This policy has saved us from several possible "0-day" attacks, most recently the latest surge of the "Sobig" virus.

It usually takes at least a day for the anti-virus vendors to provide protection against a new virus. During that time, a computer with current AV protection could receive mail with that 0-day virus attached. And in a large environment, one user is bound to decide to open an executable attachment, no matter how often we remind them not to.

By blocking all executable attachments, we protect against that user falling for a 0-day attack. That protection saved us earlier this year against prior Sober and Bagel virus attacks, including the one that took down large organizations and was widely reported in the news. We block several thousand executable attachments each day, and 99.99% of the time they are viral in nature. (One of my duties as a security officer is to monitor the effectiveness of our email and web filtering.) There are occasions when an executable is needed, and we have a process in place to quickly release such a blocked message.

But my advice, as a Security geek, is that blocking of executables is a Good Thing, a way to protect against malware, especially the 0-day attacks that are now more common.

I would suspect that your email address, because it is visible, contains a lot of spam, and much malware. Although your awareness of 'evil' attachments precludes you from opening those attachment's, other users are not as aware. And the protection against executable attachments by automatic blocking will help those "Aunt Minnies". (Those hundreds of thousands of 'bots' are proof that malware distributed with emails are quite effective.)

One solution might be to have your email program alert you to an executable attachment when it is blocked. At first glance, this would seem like a good idea. Until you look (as I have) at the number of malware-loaded messages one receives. Notification of each blocking would only increase the 'load' on your in-box.

Of course, there are ways to get around this automatic blocking. You could rename an executable before you send it (but most email filtering software looks at the structure of a file, rather than it's file extension). You could ZIP it, but filtering software is able to look inside a ZIP and analyze it. You could password-protect the ZIP file, but filtering software can detect that (the mail administrator determines the action on all of these cases). Or you could encrypt a file, although encryption is not really easy to do for many. Or your sender could alert you via a separate email about another message containing an executable (the executable will still be blocked, but you'd know it was coming.)

I'd be reluctant, in a corporate environment, to agree to an option in Outlook that would alert you to the blocking, and give you the ability to 'un-block' the attachment.

Overall, executable blocking, IMHO, is a Good Thing. It has saved our organization from many "0-day" malware attacks. It sometimes causes a delay, but that is, again IMHO, an acceptable problem.

Something to consider.