If I have more time at a later date then I’ve really been meaning to write a more detailed review of each podcast in the IS realm that I’ve been listening to for the past 6 months, but since that time never seems to make it my way I’m just going to post links for now. Whether it’s on my feed reader or the BlackBerry, each of the shows has been extremely valuable in keeping me up to speed and looking at the horizon. Thanks guys (and gals)!
SecuraBit
Security Justice
PaulDotCom Security Weekly
Hak5
Network Security Podcast
I was lucky enough to hit the A-list at work for an upgrade to a BlackBerry 8830 from my usual cell phone. This is the first mobile device that I’ve ever owned and I’m totally hooked. It’s like the move from dial-up to broadband — I’m not sure I could ever go back to a standard cell phone or not owning some type of 3G device.
That being said, I’m disappointed with the lack of solid, free applications written for the platform. I spent hours trying to find a reasonable program to view my school books (PDF format) from my media card and mostly found paid subscription software that was grossly overpriced. I ended up creating a BlackBerry email account and sending my PDF’s to it. It’s a workaround that I’m willing to live with rather than fork out money for something we all take for granted in the PC world. I don’t understand why BlackBerry developers think they should be charging for something as basic as a reader that is free on virtually every platform I’ve ever used. Charge for the added value of the writer (like Adobe Acrobat), but give the reader away and get your name on the device.
The next thing that got me was the difficulty in listening to streaming music on it. I know I can throw MP3 (maybe OGG) files onto it and play them locally, but I really just want a Pandora or Last.fm setup where I can play a tag or similar artist station. Pandora doesn’t support the BlackBerry and their web-based player thought my IP was from Norway so wouldn’t work either. Last.fm doesn’t support the BlackBerry directly as well and even if I wanted to scrobble tracks played locally I needed to buy software (3rd party). End of the road here is that I applied for a Last.fm API key so that I could attempt to write my own streamer for the BlackBerry. More to come on that I hope — still waiting on the key.
And yes, if and when I complete this project (I already have a name picked out) I will absolutely release it for free.
Here’s a pretty simple script I put together that I’m using to monitor our VPN tunnel. It’s fairly basic but I’ve extended it so it can be used in a number of ways. It’s been a lifesaver over the past few days so I thought I would share.
Read more…
It was interesting to see some action on the Google Toolbar taking over the standard 404 error page on a website. I guess some web developers out there are a little up in arms, but hasn’t Internet Explorer been doing this for years? Any 404 page under 512 bytes is taken over by the browser, and now the Google Toolbar will have a thing to say about it too.
For me as a webmaster this is a major intrusion into my own intellectual property.
Source
See Google’s explanation:
When a visitor tries to reach your content with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor.
Source
This isn’t worth sweating over. If you use custom error pages then you already know (or should) to combat IE hijacking you need to make them larger than 512 bytes. If you’ve already done this, then the Google Toolbar will respect that too.
Playing around with Microsoft Visio for class. Here’s a question I answered as well as a quick diagram.
The transmission of communicative data through any number of mediums can be described as either synchronous or asynchronous. The difference between the two is clear, and is important to recognize when evaluating if requirements are being met by using one product over another.
Synchronous data can best be described as a constant flow of information. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a good example of this as when a user enters the chat stream it continues to flow with comments by other users already in the room. The only discernible beginning or end to the stream is left up to the individual, but the stream itself can only end when all users have left the room.
Asynchronous data is similar, but the flow of data can start and stop at different intervals. The message itself is still the same, but the speed is undoubtedly slower because of the interruptions between reception and response. An example of these would be an online message board. Users would login to the board and post a message, but the message would not by default broadcast to all other users. Instead, the message is retrieved at the convenience of other users and then responded to.
While I’m personally a huge fan of UltraVNC and the RealVNC projects, some video issues with our software made them extremely unstable to the point that I had to find an alternative remote support solution. I looked at a few of them and settled on LogMeIn’s IT Reach.
It’s an impressive product and very affordable, even when my initial subscription set consisted of 60 computers for deployment. I was instantly blown away by the Dashboard that each system displays when I first logged in to them. I have been able to restart Services and kill frozen Processes without even needing to view their desktop.
The biggest flaw that I’ve found with it is connectivity. I’m definitely a person willing to accept the bad with the good, provided that the good is worth the effort. In this case, I feel it is. I was also willing to accept that since there was little information regarding remote systems losing their online status that it might be due to the setup that we use in our retail kiosk locations. As such, I devised a workaround via the Windows Task Scheduler. Every 10 minutes I run a script with the following line: net start logmein.
If the service is already running then it simply reports such and disappears within a second, and if the service is stopped for some reason it is started again.
Oh yeah, as you can see, the client is all browser-based and cross-platform.
[tags]logmein, it reach, remote support[/tags]