iTunes download.

Loads of people have blogged about itunes being available on Windows machines. Interesting to see that the software is only available for W2k or XP machines though. Still thats ok by me, so I’ve Download ed iTunes 4 and will update you on how good it is. I just hope that the songs that I want in particular are available to download. It will certainly be cheaper for me being albums on itunes at $10 than it would for the same album in the uk at £13
Update Well it would have been nice if you could actually use the service in the uk, but apaprently you need a billing address in the states (and it looks like the bands that I wanted to download are not on the list anyway)

Perl programming

What a horrible language! Just spent ages debugging a if-then-else loop only to find that comparisons of strings don’t use if $fred == $jim but instead use if $fred eq $jim and seeing as though $fred was a variable but $jim is actually a fiixed string I had several combinations to get correct before it would work, and I have no reason why using lc($fred) to convert $fred to lowercase didn’t work. Unfortunately Demon don’t support php or asp on their server so I can’t program in these languages (which I know a little more about).

Autorun locations

Alan Sugano writes an article on checking a server for the Backdoor.Beasty Virus and details checking various autorun locations in the registry – the last one I wouldn’t have checked (and neither did he first time round).
HKLM\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Run
HKCU\Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Run
If the machine is running Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Win2K, or Windows NT, you should also check
HKLM\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ Explorer\ Run

Sus Updater

A useful utility that can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Systems Update Server. If you have a pc that needs installing (or patching) but isn’t normally on the lan, then this utility forces the client to update against a named sus server, apply the patches and then on reboot sets it back to use Microsoft’s servers. Excellent for patching friends pc’s or remote worker pc’s who are not normally on the lan and are WAY out of date.

Comment Spammers plugin.

I’ve installed James Seng’s Bayesian filter for MT on this blog and laboriously went through all my comments and marked them as not spam. (A button to mark ALL comments as spam or not spam would be nice for first installations. Most people have probably already cleaned out their comments from spammers when they install something like this). Now it reckons that all my comments are 50% likely to be spammers and 50% unlikely to be spam. Will be interesting to see if this changes over time!