Simpsons Trailer – looks good!
A video showing the effects of a laptop battery exploding – After watching this I’m not sure I ever want to use a laptop again! What makes me laugh is the comment “if this happens move away from the laptop” – I think that if smoke starts pouring out of a laptop it wouldn’t be on MY lap for much longer. The speed, temperature and explosion of the subsequent battery cells is pretty scary (but needs to be seen, especially by people who don’t want to send their laptop battery back after it has been recalled.)
My parents are flying over to the US right now to spend time in America for Thanksgiving. Kristen and I have been pretty busy working on the house to clean and tidy it up. We’re looking forward to them arriving and doing stuff with them – have a safe trip Mum and Dad!
Danny wanted the ability to have stats for his subdomain so he can see where visitors were coming from. However the stats program that he used to use started to generate popups when the website was visited. I was not happy with this so the script was disabled. By following the instructions at AWStats Access I was able to provide him a url, username and password so that he could access stats for his website without having to provide him the control panel username and password. As he doesn’t have ftp access to the directory the stats program is loaded, it is secure from the end user downloading the control panel password. (I hope!). I’ve also renamed and edited the couple of files to ensure that the filenames are not common to avoid any guesswork and file inclusion via any vulnerable xss scripts that could occur.
It was interesting to see that details about the packaging for Windows Vista was released today – JCXP links to MS Tech today which has a picture of the neat dvd box. Contrast this to the cd’s that I received from Dell for the SBS 2003r2 server I opened. Not only was the media on CD (which means a painful 4 cd install after Dell’s install creates a small 25gb boot partition) despite the server having a dvd drive, but the cd’s were in the paper sleeve envelopes that you normally get with an OS installation from Dell. What was worse that disks 1 and 2 were in the same envelope with a piece of paper slid between them, the same for disk 3 and 4. This is really cheap, likely to lead to scratches and not a good first start impression of a brand new server!
(Note that I don’t know if SBS was requested on cd instead of dvd or whether that is how it comes but even if it was ordered on cd, it could at least come in a reliable case.
Ages ago I wrote a feature on how to backup a cpanel account. Just recently one of my clients purchased a dedicated server that uses cpanel as the website hosting manager. I purchased cpanel
Naturally I now have to go back and make sure that the script still works and make any changes necessary.
The homepage at a customer which is checking ie7 compatability was complaining that the website wanted to run name.dll from Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately the error message doesn’t really tell you WHY it needs to run the dll or what functionality you will lose if you don’t trust it. BSimser posts that it is the sharepoint presence “magic”. Looks like the homepage needs to be added to the trusted sites (although it should be already!). A good candidate for ensuring it is set in group policy I think! Update see Stewed Prunes on how to do this.
Update 2 – Be very careful if you do this. Adding the intranet to the trusted zone could cause the issue “The Local Security Authority cannot be contacted” when you try to connect to a sharepoint server and have added the server to your trusted sites. See this post and scroll down to March 13 2006
This tutorial on How to secure remote desktop connections using TLS/SSL based authentication is pretty useful. There are two advantages – 1, the data is more secure between the client and the server and 2, the requirement to authenticate before a username/password is entered stops brute force crackers disabling user accounts.
RD Tabs looks like a good tool for easily managing remote desktop sessions ala firefox. Works pretty well and having the toolbar to switch screens whilst in full screen mode is very useful.
I really wish the tv companies would increase their fees for advertising so that the politicians couldn’t afford to run their stupid mud slinging adverts which tell you absolutely nothing about what they will be able to do for the voter and that contradict each other. Some of the advert breaks are getting ridiculous with the number of political ads running one after each other. If the kids tv channels weren’t already running their christmas adverts I’d be watching the kids channels for the next week.
Politicians – grow up, stop slagging off the people you may well have to work with and get on with your job of improving the country and letting us know what you are going to be doing for the next few years.