Today I ordered a new Dell 24inch TFT monitor for my main PC. I currently have a 19inch Sony (1280*1024), and the new 24inch widescreen monitor has a lot more desktop space, which comes in handy when you work with lots of open programs.
The main reason for buying was that Dell had a special discount till the end of Februari 2007 (nearly 300 euro's off). The secondary reason was that I wanted to treat myself for my upcoming birthday :-). This evening I was surfing the net, and ended up on the US website of Dell, and saw the prices there.....
just take a look at the pictures, and explain the difference to me (I know that you have to add sales tax in the US, but that's not what I'm pointing at).
US Dell Website
Dutch Dell website
I have several wireless devices in the house. Some of them are not capable of connecting to 802.11g (54Mbps) networks. For these devices I have an older Linksys Accespoint (802.11b / 11Mbps). For my other wireless devices (Mac Book Pro, and a Windows Laptop from work), I have a Speedtouch DSL router with builtin 802.11b/g wireless.
Somehow my Mac has some problems connecting to the faster networks. But the problem is that this used to work correctly in the past. The last couple of weeks everything works fine in the beginning, but after a while the connection gets terminated, eventhough the wireless indicator displays full reception.
Switching the 54Mbps network to the Linksys access point (which also support this) is not helping. The only thing that keeps working is connecting to the slower 11Mbps network. I also tried modifing security settings (changed from WPA-PSK to WEP), but that also gives problems. I even tried different wireless settings (changing channels,SSID's, etc.)
I found some possible solutions, like removing the
com.apple.airport.preferences.plist file in
/library/preferences/SystemConfiguration/. This removes all settings concerning the wireless networks for the airport. The result is that you need to reconfigure all wireless networks. After the reboot and reconfiguring the wireless networks, it seems to work a short while.
Another thing, which is very peculiar, is that it seems to happen mostly late at night (like 10 minutes ago). This could be a coincidence, because that's when I use my MBP the most. It's is more than annoying. It's driving me crazy. I have even thought about buying a genuine Airport Extreme, but only if I'm sure that it solves my problem......
AAAAAAAAAAAARGH
A while ago, I thougt that I had contracted a virus on my Windows laptop from work. Unfortunately, there's no chance that I can migrate to a Mac there :-(.
The strangest things were happening on my laptop. Suddenly there appeared strange pieces of text in Word documents, and in e-mails I was writing. My first reaction was that someone was typing along with me.
After scanning my laptop with three virus scanners and using several anti-spyware software suites, it turned out that there was nothing wrong. After that the uninvited pieces of text were gone..... Until yesterday. But this time I had a clue what had happened.
I use the keyboard a lot for copy, and pasting (CTRL-C and CTRL-V). It seems that WINDOWS-V starts voice recognition. I must have pressed the wrong key combination. This key combo starts with a dialog box explaining that the mic needs tuning. I canceled that dialog, but somehow the voice recognition is still being enabled. There's no visual indication that it's running.
It seems that Windows doesn't recognize the Dutch language, and therefor it starts
guessing what you say and displays that in the focussed window.
Lame ass Windows functionality if you ask me.......
Last year, I bought a
HP iPaq hx2790. Partly because I'd been without a PDA for a couple of years, but mostly because I don't want to boot up my laptop to see my mail or calendar.
The hx2790 comes with Windows Mobile 5 (WM5), wireless, bluetooth, fingerprint scanner, and built-in encryption. All very very nice.... Well, there is a downside to this nirvana;
- Wireless broke down after a couple of weeks (also see an old post on my old blog). The first time they fixed it... they didn't fix it at all. So it had to go back for repairs again.
- On the weirdest occasions all my synced e-mail bodies were complete gibberish or they were just empty. The only way to solve this was break the pairing with ActiveSync remove everything from the PDA, and sync it again.
[SOLUTION: disable the HP Encryption Tools crap]
- 9 out of 10 times I had to reset the device when I powered it on. So most of the times it would be more time efficient to boot up my laptop.
[SOLUTION: don't use the HP Encryption tools for securing your device. Just use the simple standard PIN code for logging on to the PDA]
- Applications would crash easily. Result: more resets.
[SOLUTIONS: do not install third-party software]
As long as I stick to this everything works just fine.
This makes me wonder why would I buy an PDA with a gazillion megabytes of free space, and lot's of SD/MMC/CF slots for adding even more bytes. Every program I add makes the device more unstable.
During these periods of complete misery I also tried a PDA encryption suite of Utimaco. I just wanted some sort of encryption to protect the data on the device. Their latest software version includes support for the hx2790 fingerprint scanner, but after installing the software everything went berserk (again). Uninstalling didn't work, so the only solution to get back in control again was to reset the damn thing to factory defaults.....
One more thing; why is it that EVERY older Windows Mobile version has an iPaq backup program for backing up SETTINGS, and the WM5 OS doesn't have this. Every time when I needed to reset the thing to factory defaults (about 8 to 10 times so far), I had to setup my mail accounts, etc manually. This feature isn't even available on ActiveSync for WM5.
No more Windows Mobile devices for me in the future. I just hope that this crappy piece of software holds on till the end of the year when the iPhone is being released.
Most companies/institutions use Windows clients (Windows 2000, XP), but their backend might be different. There's the
Microsoft Active Directory, [cough]
Novell eDirectory (former NDS)[/cough], or a more Generic LDAP (like the
SUN Directory ONE).
The problem with network authentication with the use of Microsoft clients is that the authentication process uses MS-CHAPv2. This is a Microsoft mechanisme for authenticating. This means that the RADIUS server used for authenticating should also be able to authenticate using MS-CHAPv2. The Internet Authentication Service from Microsoft is pretty MS only, so not much of a help with other backends. So there's a need for a RADIUS server which talks to different backends. One option is the great RADIATOR RADIUS server. It's fully customizable, but
not for free.
Today, I stumbled on
FreeRADIUS. This RADIUS server is free (duh), and is also fully customizable. Downside is that you need to compile the software yourself, and the documentation is not that great.
Tried to compile/install it on my FreeBSD 'server', but
make was missing. So I downloaded
make, and installed it, but the install script kept saying that
make wasn't installed.... Well I guess that's one of the reasons why Linux won't be adopted by the masses soon. Spent about an hour to fix it, but I just have to give up.
Well, time to download a precompiles Win32 version from
freeradius.net
The new and improved security in Microsoft Vista regarding DRM may have (and probably will) have great consequences for the end-user. Peter Gutman published
his research on the DRM features in Windows Vista, and his findings are staggering.
The biggest concerns are related to hardware certification revocation, and dynamically downscaling quality.
Dynamically downscaling qualit means that if Vista plays some DRM enabled media on the PC (HD-DVD, or whatever), all other in and outputs are degraded. This means that your high quality pr0n has a lousy quality, while you're listening to DRM enabled music..... Well that suck, but implications can be huge, as Peter Gutman explained.
Furthermore, the revocation of driver certificates. If, somehow, a driver signing certificate gets stolen from a manufacturer, Microsoft has the ability to revoke that particular certificate. This means that the complete install base for that drives becomes totally useless. It could mean that your PC won't be able to boot (and everyone else's) if you have that particular brand of motherboard. What if key public services become useless because of this driver revocation? No more fresh water, traffic lights gone haywire??
Peter also mentiones that the DRM scheme in general is very weak;
Note B: I'll make a prediction at this point that, given that it's trying to do the impossible, the Vista content protection will take less than a day to bypass if the bypass mechanism is something like a driver bug or a simple security hole that applies only to one piece of code (and can therefore be quickly patched), and less than a week to comprehensively bypass in a driver/hardware-independent manner. This doesn't mean it'll be broken the day or week that it appears, but simply that once a sufficiently skilled attacker is motivated to bypass the protection, it'll take them less than a day or a week to do so.
Funny thing is that engadget recently posted
an article about a piece of software that claims to remove DRM from HD-DVD movies...... So Peter's thoughts on that weren't that far off :).
Personally I think that the entire Music and Movie industry needs to come to their senses, and stop treating every customer as a criminal. But unfortunatelly, I don't think that that's gonna happen
soon.
My current iPod (Photo, 20GB) started to give funny noises. If I gently shake it, I hear weird crackling noises from, what I think is, the internal drive. I had the same thing when we were in Tibet last year. That time the entire iPod refused to work permanently. Brought it back to the shop, and it got repaired (or so I was told). No the same thing is happening all over again :(
I just hope that the iPod will remain working for the next one or two months, because there might be a full screen video iPod early next year :P
So, anyone wanna buy a 20GB Photo iPod (it's little over a year old)?
Fiddling with my (Windows) mail server ended up in a 'serious' crash. The result was one week of mail down the drain :(. Even though I still had all my mail offline in my Mail.app, there was no way (at least not that I could find) to import it again in the IMAP folders.
I still have those mails in a backup of my Mac book Pro, so I could find the info with SpotLight.
If anyone has any ideas to import them back into the IMAP folders, please drop the ideas in the comments.
That was a Fridays night well spent :(
Just spotted
an article about the new security requirements for a
DigiD. A DigiD is an online username password for (secure (??)) communication with the government. The ID is also used for filling in your taxforms and submitting them online.
I was, and still am, not in favor of a username and password for communication with the government. Username and password is a very weak form of authenticating people. Especially when those usernames and passwords can be used for identity theft.
Now there are
additional security requirements for having a DigiD. It seems that they require a unique phone number (a cellphone) for non basic services. At this moment there are multiple entries in their database which share the same phone number..... What's wrong with that? I don't own a cell phone. The cell phone I have is owned by my boss. I'm not using this phone number for this ID, because this phone can be used by my colleagues. Same for my wife. That leaves us with the phone number from my good-old analog (non SMS enabled) phone. That's one phone number for two people.... I guess that means that I'll be doing my tax returns the old-fashioned way.. by paper.
A couple of days ago, I upgraded Internet Explorer on the laptop from my work. Initially, everything seemed fine... Until I wanted to access our web-based HR system (PeopleSoft).
In the good-old-days, this website worked (not good, and not bad). Since IE7, the login page remains blank, while the sourcecode of the page is fully loaded. So no way of logging to my personal HR page. I have no idea what's causing this (PeopleSoft or IE7). I do know that the (simple) login page holds a gazillion lines of Javascript.... Why? It's just a login page.
A temporary work-around is using FireFox 2.0. Version 2.0 seemed to have solved some of the bugs I got with FireFox 1.5.x in PeopleSoft. Problem is that I need to change proxy settings for FireFox. I use IE for intranet browsing, because the developpers are MS-fans, and FireFox for global Internet browsing.
Mind you that you have to
disable the NoScript extension for FireFox (when installed). Just allowing all scripts for the PeopleSoft website gives erratic behavior, and lot's of errors on the pages. Only disabling the extension seems to work (which requires a reboot :( ).
Anyway, somebody has to do some work to improve things.
