by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 12, 2005 | Front Page
Everyone by now knows about the Mac Mini. I think I will be placing an order for one on Friday, I am having some trouble deciding on the configuration though. I know I need more than 256 Mb RAM, but I wonder if they would be as user serviceable as other Mac’s – I suspect not.
The Apple Store charges ยฃ50 for the upgrade to 512 which is a bit mad really. I also do not know if it will be worth getting the faster model for the extra money. I do not need a new/another computer. It is more a matter of wanting to properly evaluate the Mac OS X and so forth so therefore I am aiming at affordability really.
Eventually I see this machine sitting near my TV and plugged into it with a wireless keyboard/mouse. Will use it for a media player etc, I recently pushed the configuration of my main desktop way up so I am not expecting to use this for a day to day machine, but it would make a very sexy media center pc especially since it has no fans.
I am leaning towards the smaller CPU version with wifi, bluetooth and 512Mb RAM this should set me back ยฃ480 which is a steal really.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 10, 2004 | Front Page
A Post on Bugtraq identifies a lot of issues with wget. Comes down to dodgy webservers can overwrite any file that the user running wget can write to. He also provided a proof of concept.
So far no fixes have been created and if the author of the advisory is correct about the state of wget’s source I wouldn’t hold my breath.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 25, 2004 | Front Page
Over the weekend I gave the smtpinvite thing that I found on TechTV’s server a try. The idea is that the primary MX will always defer people – it exist solely for adding sending hosts to a whitelist – when the remote MTA then goes to the secondary it will let the mail through.
This works fine for most MTA’s that I looked at during the few hours I had it up. Sendmail however will not contact the secondaries when it gets a defer message it will just keep trying to talk to the primary on each retry! Surely that is wrong, I have not gone to study the RFC’s but it seems very stupid to me. So unfortunately I had to abandon the idea.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 13, 2004 | Front Page
Microsoft today again showed us all why we really should put all our eggs in their basket by releasing 10 new security bulletins:
Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer
Vulnerability in Windows Shell Could Allow Remote Code Execution
Vulnerability in NNTP Could Allow Code Execution
Vulnerability in SMTP Could Allow Remote Code Execution
Vulnerability in Compressed (zipped) Folders Could Allow Code Execution
Vulnerability in Microsoft Excel Could Allow Code Execution
Security Update for Microsoft Windows
Vulnerability in NetDDE Could Allow Remote Code Execution
Vulnerability in WebDav XML Message Handler Could Lead to a Denial of Service
Vulnerability in RPC Runtime Library Could Allow Information Disclosure and Denial of Service
7 of these are marked as critical while the NetDDE one – that allows remote code execution on 7 of their operating systems, including 2003 – only marked as important.
Of the 7 critical ones 5 affects Windows 2003 Server, their much hyped security in Windows 2003 is starting to look a bit like the much hyped Oracle 9i’s “Unbreakable” claims.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 7, 2004 | Front Page
I have deployed a new site menu on this site, at the moment it will be shown to all browsers matching /MSIE|Gecko|Opera|Konqueror/ in their user agent string, this ensure that older browsers and stuff like Links, Lynx and search engines can still see my old static menu and navigate with that.
The menu is from visualmenu.com and I can highly recommend it, it comes with a very nice desktop based menu generator that makes it all too easy. With this new menu I will be able to cram a lot more in there, already I now have a sub menu for the photo collections that I put up periodically which I could not really fit into the old menu.
Next I will need to investigate mod_gzip since I think things are getting a bit top heavy for modem users.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 19, 2004 | Front Page
Last night I posted my 200th entry. The blog as it is has been around since 6th September 2003, the older entries in the archives were added all at once with some back dates to the time they were written. I updated the theme of the site on the 1 year anniversary to what you see today. Some stats:
These stats exclude all my own machines, and only include browsers that supports javascript or loads the stats image, so this excludes spam bots, rss aggregators, search engines etc.
Number of unique visitors: 8201
Search Engines: Google 5439, Yahoo! 170, AOL 40, MSN 6, Virgilio 6
Top 5 keywords used in search strings: allofmp3 (726), devco (621), mutt smtp (336), openssl frontend (79), nikon d70 reviews (69)
Browsers used: IE6; WinXP 3436, IE6; Win 2000 1046, IE6; Win98 307, Moz 1.6; WinXP 301, Netscape 6; MacOSX 284
Browsers Total: IE 5591, Mozilla 1683, Netscape 610, Opera 242, Konqueror 35
Operating Systems: WinXP 4222, Win 2000 1576, Linux 726, Win 98 539, Mac OS X 351
I started the blog to have a place to put stuff where I can find it again and also to experiment with the blogging revolution and some of the technologies it employes such as personal CMS systems and RSS/Atom. I also wanted to discover the workings of the new wave of personal sites that interact with each other, where people comment on the same topics and know about each others posts using sites like Feedster and Technorati.
It has been interesting to see the positive growth and improvements made in this regard mostly by a grassroots movement but it has also been interesting to note the success and failures of businesses trying to capitalize on this new media.
Feedster is the leader in weblog searching and while being useful often suffers under its own success with slow response, downtime or other issues. And still I have to wonder about its place in the market given that I almost never see referrers from it – which may be an indication that only a small % of web browsers use it – and also to see it suffer under the growing pains of RSS such as inclusion of paid for ads that appear in the RSS feeds in their search results. Google now at least fetches my RSS feeds often – they may be checking for updates on weblogs.com since they are quite quick off the mark once I posted something. New articles appear in the Google search results very quickly after publishing.
For me, Google is still king and I hardly ever use Feedster for anything, and usually once I used it, I go and do a Google query in any case since it tends to be more relevant and useful results. Often I do the Google query while waiting for feedster to produce results and find what I wanted by the time feedster managed to render a page. I know the Feedster team has added some new machines and stuff recently and indeed it is a bit faster now.
Other useful sites like Technorati has a great idea and good software but it is often unusable due to load and so forth, hopefully the recent cash injection they received will allow them to upgrade their service and be a useful resource again, for now it is just too irritating to sit and wait for their progress indicator that never gets anywhere most of the time.
