I just finished the free Electronic Discovery for Dummies booklet that Mike McBride blogged about. It didn’t take long to read as it was 42 pages but it was quite interesting. Like Mike’s review I found the book easy to read and a good start for IT Managers or someone who may need to talk to a CEO to explain implications of IT practises. In my case it will be useful to explain the implications of mail (and data) archiving policies. Several questions have arisen lately about archiving and deleting mail to reduce the load on the mail servers. Some of the reasons for doing this is cost, but then recovering all the data from all of the backup tapes could prove far more costly. However, having a short retention time for backups seems to be acceptable as long as the company has a strict policy for this and that it is adhered to.
I’m not sure what happens or if it is possible to have different retention schemes for different users (or management levels) but I do know that whatever solution is used, the ability to stop deleting things according to the policy must be possible in the case of an ediscovery request.
I passed the book along to one of our sales people as it is a good, quick primer and should really be required minimum reading for any tech dealing with backups, restoration and deletion of software.
I had a blackberry today that would not receive mail from the BES server but could send. It could also send and receive PIN messages but not mail. To get the mail working I deleted the phone from the system and sent an activation request. I then obtained the password from outlook’s email and entered it into the enterprise activation window on the blackberry – this hung and never completed. I then followed the Cingular instructions on how how to complete Enterprise Activation on a RIM BlackBerry. Details in the extended entry in case the Cingular site goes offline.
I’ve been getting an annoying dialog box that pops up whenever I tried to open a web page from the start/run or my address bar in windows. The dialog box would say “Windows cannot find
I’ve just kept clicking ok (or ignoring the dialog box) and the page would load anyway. Today I found out from the mozilla bug database that this is normally caused by AdBlockPlus, an extension to assist in hiding adverts but in my case it turned out to be AdBlock – the original version. I removed adblock, installed the latest version of adblockplus and everything is working again.
Unfortunately I’ve had to disable the ability to search the comments on this blog as apparently the script was using up too much memory. I ran a search this afternoon and ended up with the generic 500 Server error page. Looking through the error log (which can be found in ~/logs/errors/domain name/http/error.log for dreamhost users) I found that mt search page was being killed before completing but only if I used the SearchElement=both on the absoblogginlutely blog (the other blogs are fine). I must admit I am a bit surprised at that as I only have 3103 posts and 1446 comments so I wouldn’t have thought this would put *that* much strain on a server. Dreamhost just said that I was “using too much memory” and to check the MovableType forums for support 🙁 I did a quick search and that recommended fastsearch, but this doesn’t support searching comments either, so for the time being the search will only do the content (although interestingly I can search with no errors from the admin interface).
Hopefully this won’t be the same in MovableType4 which I might get around to upgrading too one day.
Update The feature is back – after clearing out the junk comments the feature started working again.
I’m very pleased with the new camera purchase so far. Unfortunately the picture quality may go down a bit whilst I work out how to use all the new settings on the camera. The first couple of shots I took outside the house I couldn’t understand why the camera was bleeping at me and then the photo was taken. It turns out that the self timer was turned on and it was giving me 10 seconds to get into the picture!
I’ve also ordered a couple of extras to go with the camera, the rc1 remote control which enables you to take instant photos and 2 second delay photos with the remote. This will be useful for group shots and also for taking photos while reducing camera shake. I’m also getting a replacement lens cap as the one that comes with the camera does not have a loop for attaching to a strap so I know it won’t be long until I lose the original cap. I’ve already purchased a 2GB Compact flash card from Bestbuy for $35 with the camera as they had a good deal on the card and was even cheaper than Amazon. I went for the extreme version of the card as it twice as quick as the ultra cards at reading and writing, with quoted speeds of 20mb/s and speed is important when writing many pictures to the card in quick succession when using the multi shot mode.
I’m also hoping that the tripod quick release mount arrives in the post this afternoon – I ordered it on Sunday and it arrived in Dublin this morning according to USPS. This is slightly longer than I hoped for, one of the books I ordered from Amazon at the same time arrived on Wednesday (although as usual with amazon, the other books have not arrived including the one that really needs to be here.)
The picture of Kate is a reduced and cropped version after she ate some of Katie’s birthday cake. She’s looking a bit sad as all the cake is gone and she is suffering from a cold/fever/virus infection (but she did cheer up when eating the chocolate and icecream cake)
BestBuy have a pretty good deal (or it looks like it to me) of a Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP camera, 18-55mm lens, 75-300mm zoom lens, bag, battery and uv filter for $700 with a minimum of 8 per store, but you’ll probably have to get there at 3am to get the vouchers they hand out – OR you could just order it online for the same price. I am sorely tempted by this one as the camera is normally 550-600 alone. I’ll let you know what we decide!
Update You can actually get approximately $25+ off this price (on a subsequent order) by signing up for their rewards card. They are doing a holiday promotion gift package where you get $15 extra reward points (750) if you spend over $500 AND you get the original $10 reward for the first $500 and an extra 200 points for the next $200 – thats one less camera available for purchase 😉
Update 2 I went to the store Friday morning and purchased this camera. Then I had a horrendous time trying to get hold of someone to cancel the web order but I eventually managed to. Fortunately Bestbuy’s website have a feature where you can use the computer to call them so you don’t have to waste minutes on your phone plan.
Several people have asked me how to download videos from Youtube and unfortunately KissYouTube is no longer working. However, GiveAway of The Day has Wondershare available for free (today only) that will allow you to do just this. Naturally this should only be used to download public domain content.
This is now the fifth (I think) Thanksgiving celebrated in the States. It’s a funny holiday as part of it is so traditional with the relatives around, Turkey dinner and the listing of things that we are thankful for (and the football game) . Kristen’s brothers and family are up for Thanksgiving which is cool, Brian’s daughters have been keeping us amused with Kate’s love of spaghetti and attempts at clicking her fingers and Mia’s pride in the pink cake we had last night and it was cute when she couldn’t wait to give me the pretzel they had brought from the mall (and waited patiently for her tip – a piece of Kristen’s pretzel). I’m really thankful for the 4 day break as I need some rest and a chance to recharge my batteries. No studying will be done this weekend.
We all know that you should have good secure passwords and you can enforce this in Active Directory, but it is the other applications on the network that might raise a concern.
I got a helpdesk ticket saying that the password for a Peachtree database was not the normal one….the password that was the same as the company name! After trying password, no password I then discovered that a google search for Peachtree password removers comes up with tons of hits but no free ones. The shareware ones were about 60 bucks for a corporate licence but about $30 for personal use. However, one of them would demonstrate that it could actually break the password by revealing the first two characters of the password. I thought this might give me and the user a clue as to what the password could be. When the first two characters were revealed to be 12 it didn’t take the user long to realise what the password was and they got it on the first attempt.
Sometimes it is really hard to demonstrate the reasons that passwords should be used and you would have thought that the importance of security and a good password for company financial data would be recognised…
I wonder what will happen if at the next Board meeting I do a demonstration of insecurity with LIVE data…..
It’s rather ironic when the laptop Blue Screens as I start to install the debug symbols in order to debug a blue screen on a server. I think the pc is having one of those days – much like my past two weeks (I think I’m still trying to catch up on having 4 days vacation in October – and yet I’ve got two more days off at the end of this week – can’t wait!)
Update Annoyingly, the pc reboots after the blue screen appears for about 2 seconds. I have turned off the restart on system failure option in My Computer properties. It occurs whenever I double click one of the symbol.exe files across the network.
Update2 After extracting the symbol files from a local version I was able to analyze the dump file and it told me that the problem was in ip_fw.sys – which at first glance looks like a firewall driver. Sure enough, a google search told me that it was from the wipfw openbsd firewall implementation on Windows. Removing the software means I can run the exe with no crashes. The strange thing is that I’ve never heard of wipfw before and I certainly didn’t install it (by itself) as I log all the programs that I install and that wasn’t one of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if it came with another program such as wireshark or bidiblah or something along those lines…more investigation to come.