Rudolf Henning

For those of us having wireless networks here is an article with a couple of good tips on how to make it more secure and easier to manage.

http://www.bigbruin.com/techtip.php?file=019

Some of the items mention seem pretty obvious but not everyone remembers to to do those things...

Let me quickly go inspect my set-up ;)

IOL got a story on some civilians now helping out the traffic department. Now u must also watch out for other 'civilian' traffic watchers... good idea if u ask me.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20050331065008270C846112

They should have done this long ago! Lets just hope these new 'speedcops' are as honest as they should be.

Who will be watching the watchers?? Next thing we'll need someone to monitor them and those that monitor those that monitor... this is getting confusing.

I know of a few taxi's that must be pulled over.. and a few BMW drivers and and and... ;)

A survey done by Computer World found some interesting statistics (at least for me).

The majority of development is still concentrated around 32bits. About 50% focus on so called 'open source' development. In terms of framework technologies the top 3 seems to be .Net, Linux/Unix and then Win32/COM etc.

And then as far as development languages goes...tara tara!

C# - 72%
Java - 66%
Visual Basic - 62%
C++ - 54%
Javascript and related - 50%

Don't ask me how they manage to get more that 100% in total.... C++ still seems to be hanging on there. They did'nt make any distinction about VB6 and VB.Net??

http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/development/story/0,10801,100542,00.html?source=x10

Check it out. The first official service pack for Windows 2003 has been released!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?amp;displaylang=en&familyid=22CFC239-337C-4D81-8354-72593B1C1F43&displaylang=en

About 337MB!

Happy downloading

Please see my post on SADeveloper.net

http://www.sadeveloper.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=57564#57564

We have to at least have one decent LAN this year!

From Anantech I read about how Firefox also have its security holes...however, look at the bottom line of this. Although Firefox had 21 vulnerabilities and Internet Explorer had 13, only 7 of Firefox's were considdered critical while 9 of IE. Additionally the fixes for Firefox came out much faster then those of IE. In fact, some were fixed before anyone even realized there was a hole.

http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=24011

The key difference here is that Firefox is still developing (the dev team still works on it) while on IE (exclude IE7) this is not really the case - yes they have a few guys doing boring fixing stuff but essentially its a dead project. Any developer would much rather work on something new than fixing old code. From a developer's point of view I can appreciate this. As far as I'm concerned they should never have stopped developing it. Their arrogance in thinking that the market is now won made some managers think there is no need to innovate anymore... makes me think of that patent office story at the beginning of the century...

So unless MS wakes up (on that front) they will loose the browser war. Hopefully(for them) IE7 will solve this. Perhaps we must thank Firefox for kicking them in the back to wake up. For the next foreseeable while I'll stick to Firefox.

It was bound to happen but a study done by  the Florida Institute of Technology and  Company Security Innovation compared Windows server 2003 and Redhat Enterprise Linux ES3 and found Windows 2003 to be the clear winner.

Read more on it at http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/57986

The major part of the claim they r making is that on average users are less vulnerable given a Windows security hole than on the Linux platform. This is purely because of the reaction time to implement a fix and the time before a fix becomes available. Seems the open source model does have some drawbacks.

I still say the only way to totally secure a web server is to switch it off :p

I came across this site after going through my referals (people visiting my blog). It seems very interesting allow for some customization of what feeds u want to view plus have a whole list of predefined ones.

http://www.start.com/1/

Really interesting

[update:]
There is a newer version of the site here: http://www.start.com/2/default.aspx

wonder if the next version would be 3... hehe

After some draught writing articles I managed to write one on SADeveloper.net again. Please go and check it out.

http://www.sadeveloper.net/Articles_View.aspx?articleID=261

In this edition I show how to make use of the auto refreshing that is supported by list controls if you implement a sertain part of the IBindingList interface. I'm still having issues with enabling sorting on listboxes but one day is one day...and I'll solve it.

I came across a blog entry of Scott Wiltamuth  where he talks about someone's suggestion to extend the lifetime of a variable declared inside the try {} block to be visible in the catch{ } or even finally{ }. He expains the difficulty in implementing this and why it possibly might be a bad idea.

http://blogs.msdn.com/scottwil/archive/2005/03/21/400140.aspx

Personally I think it could be very useful at some times. Perhaps it must be declared using a special access modifier like:

try
{
  exceptionVisible string myVar;
  myVar = ...
}
catch
{
  Console.WriteLine(myVar);
}

For reference types it might be a bit more tricky as they might not have been initiated yet.

 Get a load of this one. How would u like to have a linux server the size of an RJ-45 jack? These guys have done it and have several versions including a wireless one available. Now u can start building that 'smart' device like a robot... hehe

http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS8386088053.html

Someone sent me some details about the guy at multichoice that was responsible (apparently) for making the decision to remove the sci-fi channel. Now I have a dilema. Should I put his contact details up or not?

There is a change the information might be false. it is also possible that he was merely given the order to do this by their management. I do not want to put some innocent guys details on the web so everybody can shout at him and possible insult him as well (and believe me there were a few very angry people posting comments on my site)

After eventually getting so far as to make them realize what the problem is (not intended against the techie - he's just doing the job) now the idiots wants a purchase order to be filled in and approved by what ever managers they can dream up next!

Hello? People, it [RAM] just need to be replaced... but no, they claim the pc is out of warrenty... Guess who's fault is that? We've been asking for newer and updated pc's for how long? Really, this is enough to piss anyone off.

I'm might be starting to look for greener grass soon. Loyalty to a company doing this to u is madness.

A new version of Firefox has been released.