The Many Faces of Mike McBride

This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.

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Saturday, February 16, 2002

Weekends

I probably won't be posting much the next couple of days. The in-laws are coming up for a visit, which is cool. I actually get along pretty well with them. With it being a 3-day weekend I'm still hoping to get some geek stuff done for myself on Monday. Mostly I need to get the laptop hooked into the home network and get some software updates. I haven't been traveling so it hasn't been needed, and it's fallen behind. Not that I'm planning any traveling in the near future, but you never know when the 'net connection is going to crap out at work again, so having an up-to-date laptop is never a bad emergency plan.

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Friday, February 15, 2002

News and stuff

Here's the info on that MSN Messenger Worm.

Amazon opens up bridal registry. Why didn't they have this last year when I got married?

Slashdot editor proposes on front page -but was it only in response to the Amazon Bridal Registry? Was it just a case of needing to be an early adapter in it? *L*

Keygen routine producing valid WinXP product keys? -Not enough information on whether WPA is truly toast or not, but surely we all see the day when that's coming, don't we? We all know that WPA is much more about treating consumers as criminals than trying to stop hardcore piracy.

Radio 8.05 is out. Apparently some bug fixes and a few new improvements. If you're a ~~radio-head~~, user of Radio, you've been informed :)

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go move PC's for the privileged people who are getting new carpet put in their offices and are incapable of moving their own PC's.

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To judge or not to judge?

You'll of course remember a few days ago when Chris posted his Blogger's Manifesto, right? Well now David Weinberger has parodied that into the Real Blogger's Manifesto, which is pretty funny.

Then, Mike Sanders kicked in with his question about the original manifesto; how Chris can routinely judge others while asking not to be judged himself. Now having some background into what Chris was trying to write, and interspersing my own thoughts, let me say this. I don't think Chris judges people in the same way that he's asking not to be judged. For myself, I can disagree with someone's ideas, and publicly say so right here on my blog, but I try to not judge them as a person. There's a large difference between saying "Chris, I don't think you're right about that and here's why..." and "Chris you're an idiot".

I try and always follow a simple rule that was laid out by a wise mail-list admin years ago. "Attack ideas, not people". If I post something on here about someone that seems judgemental, I always try and make it about specific ideas or actions, not about the person as a whole. I expect the same from my readers. If you disagree with me about something, leave a comment, post something on your blog, say something, engage me in debate. Maybe I'll turn out to be wrong, or maybe we'll both learn something new about the area in question. I don't claim to be the purveyor of all correct knowledge, that's for sure! Or maybe, because this is the written word and prone to misunderstanding, you'll give me the opportunity to more clearly explain what I was trying to say. Don't leave a comment and tell me what a worthless person I am, or anything like that, because that ends all further debate, and it's not a comment that I'm going to respond to, on a good day. On a bad day, look out! *L*

So maybe what Chris should have written was "Judge the content of my blog as you will, but don't use it to judge the content of my character." That's how I try to treat people who are discussed in the blog, whether it be other bloggers, big companies, software makers, the government, etc. And it's how I expect to be treated in return.

Update: Chris has changed the point! The Manifesto now reads "Judge my thoughts, but not me" Simple, direct, and exactly what I was talking about here!

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Thursday, February 14, 2002

It's official!

I am officially a stud, according to Google:

Search for "do that to me one more time i can never get enough of a man like you"

Someone actually searched for that, and actually came here. I can only imagine the disappointment they must have felt. They probably looked like those Canadian pairs skaters. *L* Update: Apparently my wife got a hold of Google and got that entry corrected. I was a stud for a few hours, but now my site doesn't even come up anymore in that search. While I'd like to tell myself that she got rid of it to keep me as her little secret, I'm afraid the truth is she couldn't get anything done, what with the laughter everytime she thought about it.

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CSS anyone?

Steven, I agree that girls and boys both are doing things their parents would be shocked at, which is why I pointed to the article as an example to make sure you learn as much as your kids do. I don't really care if it's boys or girls, kids need their parents to have some idea of what's going on online, and how it's effecting them. By the way, the CSS has started to look pretty good over there on your site!

Speaking of CSS, Jeff has collected a bunch of CSS references over on his blog. Looks like more bookmarks for future reference for me!

Rob is also doing the CSS thing and pointing to this resource, which may or may not be in the previous resource lists I've pointed to. I haven't gotten through them yet. :)

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So you want to work in IT?

Consider this fair warning if you're thinking of working in IT. While I can't get into the specifics of this situation, suffice it to say that somewhere along the line in your IT career you'll be in the middle of this situation. It involves a former employee, a security policy breach (among other reasons why he's a former employee), a challenged unemployment compensation claim, questionable management ethics, interoffice politics run amok, and it ends with a nasty email sent from his wife to my wife giving great detail about how it was only my witch-hunt (with my wife's help, of course) that got him fired. Like I have that much power! Like there weren't other documented and undocumented reasons for it to happen! Like I wouldn't lose my job for not reporting policy violations! Like I care if you think I'm evil incarnate or not! HA!!

OK I'm done ranting for now..

Jason Shellen points us to this little fact; Microsoft Outlook® 2002 discontinues support for Net Folders. You might want to know that before upgrading to Office XP.

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Wednesday, February 13, 2002

News and stuff

Comcast: Will Stop Tracking Users - Why were you doing it in the first place? Duh!

Web Surfers Not Fond of Paying to Send E-Cards - Duh, again! The whole attraction to e-cards was that they were free, of course people are going to stop if they aren't.

Girls know way around Net, parents- read this if you don't think you need to know as much as your kids do when they are online. Ignorance is not good.

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In firewall news

According to the last edition of the LangaList, Agnitum has a free firewall out, and a release candidate for the Pro version of Outpost . A quick look at it makes it seem pretty cool, maybe an alternative to Zone Alarm. But it looks like the pay version will be way better than the free version, in fact with so many options available only in the Pro version I have to wonder what, if anything, the free version actually does! Anyone using it?

Speaking of Zone Alarm , Fred Langa also lets us know that they apparently have a new beta "in the works". Keep an eye out for that.

Ev points out that Bryan is blogging a behind the scenes look at the Olympics. Funny, funny stuff!

This morning was meeting time, and well, it was sort of disappointing. To solve some upcoming tech issues we seem to be taking the road of least resistance, which means less work for me, but only really puts off the issues we are going to have with incompatibility until a later date, it doesn't really foresee any sort of solution or even get us working toward some solution. The lack of vision, while not surprising, is somewhat disappointing. It means buying up some extra licenses for NT before MS cuts off sales of them, but doesn't deal with the issues of knowledge about XP. I would prefer biting the bullet and getting a copy of XP, in order to have some background with it before we're forced in that direction, but the management would rather save the money now and deal with upgrades later. Which means less work for me now, but more for me (or someone who takes my place when I leave.)later, because I'll be dealing with a whole new OS in a year or two.

Besides, I just really wanted to play with something new, *sigh*

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Tuesday, February 12, 2002

Help my wife, please..

My wife's artistic side is raging again, and as much as I want to help her and support her, my non-artistic side has no idea about her new designs. I'm just not programmed that way, as any look around here will tell you! *L* So go take a look at her creations and give her some real feedback from real people who have the ability to judge graphic beauty, unlike your's truly.

According to CNet Microsoft has issued a cumulative patch for IE, so if you haven't been keeping up with patches you need, you can get them all.

You know what I hate about my job? (part 265 *L*) I hate it when we have an issue, like today, with the telephone system. Nothing big, but something needed to be reprogrammed in it. The vendor sends the VP of Operations an email saying that they'll dial-in and do the reprogramming today. The VP forwards me this email and tells me to let her know when it's done. Umm how would I know when it's done? Well I would know when I can dial 10 digit telephone numbers for local calls. (We're going to be an overlaid area code so we will need to do this starting in Sept., our phone system was not setup to handle that.) She is more than capable of checking that herself. Then, when I do that and tell her it works, she sends a broadcast to all of the employees with more information about how the phone system will handle 10 or 7 digit for now, yadda, yadda. At the end of the email she tells people with questions that they can ask me when she goes on vacation later this week. I don't have any idea what she was talking about and don't have any more info than was in her email to everyone. How am I supposed to answer questions?

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Security is Happiness

No seriously, I attended an Internet Security Systems demo/seminar this morning and they gave away t-shirts with big smiley faces and "Security is Happiness" printed under them. They're pretty silly looking, I'll try and webcam it tonight so you can see what I'm talking about. The seminar was decent, it's always humorous when you setup a wireless access point to demonstrate how insecure they are and in the process of searching out the access point to do a demo hack, you find the access points for the hotel you're holding the seminar in. "Um ignore those 2 access points, and pay attention to the one we setup for this. This is for educational pruposes only." *L* They were using a program called Netstumbler to find insecure access points. It looks like a good security utility to find vulnerabilities in your own wireless network.

A bit more about StatcounteX. I had already thought about doing exactly what was suggested in the last post's comments; keeping an empty copy of the database around and downloading the current database when it got too big and replacing it with the empty one. I'm not worried for now, the download site said it was getting to be a problem for them, but they get 4000 hits a day, my 100 or so isn't any threat to get too big anytime soon. There is one thing that I like about the Bravenet counter though, it has one click access to resolve the last 50 IP addresses of visitors to their hostnames. I may keep the counter on here just for that ability. Other than that, the new stats work great, I get page hits, referrers, seperate internal and external referrer lists, OS, browser, and the ability to look at stats per day, week, month or year. I need to tweak the code to add the ability to determine Windows XP systems, it seems the code was finished before XP was out, but it shouldn't be too hard to do. (again a benefit of Open Source, I can tweak it at will) It also doesn't determine Opera browsers, but that's no big deal. Since Opera gives users the ability to run in IE compatbile mode, I think, it would be hard to really tell if it was being used anyway. Besides, I'm not doing anything too intense on the site that would have some browser not be able to render it, which would be my reason for tracking it to begin with. (Or are there browsers that render it all fudged?)

One final cool thing about it, you can use any image as the counter. I could have used the MMOnline logo that appears on all the non-blog pages of this site, or I could have used an invisible image (height=0 width=0), so that there was no "advertising-like" image at the botom of the page. I might still do that, but for now I like it so much I wanted to give the project some exposure.

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Monday, February 11, 2002

Confusing but good

I did get to try and install StatCounteX yesterday, and then this morning found the version that adds password protection to the stats, which I was rather disappointed wasn't there to begin with. Turns out it was a user uploaded version. There wasn't much in the way of documentation, I guess that's a hazard of being open source..:) But I muddled through and got everything up and working. I really like it, it does everything that I want it to, and then some. It keeps all the stats on my server, so I can tweak them or do whatever with them as I go along, etc. I am a bit worried that eventually they'll take up too much server space, but I can delete old stats or use the compacting utility. Again, it's all at my discretion, I like that.

I got an alert this morning about a potential security hole in the BlackIce firewall for Windows 2000 and XP. I'm not currently using it, but if you are running it on one of those systems, you want to grab the patch.

Steven is going through the switch to css on his blog. It's still in the remodeling phase right now, but he's collected a fine bunch of css resources and linked to them, so you might want to bookmark those for your own css remodel, if it's in your future. I'm not sure if it's in mine or not, I think the blog will always pretty much be what it is, but other pages might get the css treatment, should I get bored with them.

Privacy Policies: Cut the Mumbo Jumbo -Amen to that!

Oh and guys, the wife and I went to see Brotherhood of the Wolf yesterday, and I know what you're thinking, "Oh no, not a movie with subtitles, those never turn out to be good guy movies." But trust me on this one, this movie is worth reading subtitles for, it's a good story, packed with some super cool "guy" scenes. (You know the one's with blood, and fighting and people being killed..*smile*)

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Sunday, February 10, 2002

Whole lotta blogging going on

Cory points us to a rant about a company called Critical IP, who are apparently calling domain owners, including personal domain owners and trying to sell you business network security. Sheesh, get a clue!

Chris creates his Blogger's Manifesto. I think somebody's been getting too many flame mails, eh?

An InfoWorld article that talks about the fine print of MS Windows XP license. I may have to check that out before I ever agree to upgrade to XP. (via Michael Webb)

Taxes are done, turns out we benefit slightly from filing seperately, but I owe money while Angela is getting a whole hunk of cash back. Maybe she'll be kind enough to spend some of it on me? :)

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