The
TrueCrypt developers have
scheduled the release of v5.0 for
Januari Februari 2008. This release will also have Mac OSX version. Now we're getting somewhere. Finally, true cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and OSX) encryption, and it's completely free.
TrueCrypt 5.0
Release scheduled for: January 2008
- Windows system partition encryption with pre-boot authentication
- Mac OS X version
- GUI for Linux versions of TrueCrypt
- Parallelized and pipelined read/write
- and more.
The following features are planned to be implemented in future versions:
- Support for external authentication modules (cryptographic tokens)
- 'Raw' CD/DVD volumes
- TrueCrypt API
- and more.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a
photogear wishlist. This list contained a
Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 ED lens. This lens is nearly 10 years old (introduced in 1999), so Nikon introduced a new version in November 2007. The
Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S is the successor of the legendary 'Beast'.
And now, good fortune is knocking on my door (e.g. I won 10 euro's in the new years eve lottery). I'll probably order this new lens this weekend :D . Together with my dad's Nikon D3 it should be a smashing combination.
I evaluated the MDaemon v9.7.2 mailserver, and I must say that it's quite complex to get it to run... my way.
It's quite common to separate the program and the data. So, I tried to put the data on a different disk. This isn't done by using the GUI, but you need to edit the
Mdaemon.ini file in the
App directory (not every directory can be changed by the GUI). After changing the defaults, the MultiPOP feature didn't work. It seems there's another config file for remote mail stuff. This file (
schedule.dat) needs to reference the same location as the
Mdaemon.ini file. Why is that? Why use two config files for one program? And why use a different extension (.dat versus .ini)? Beats me.
For a mailserver that pretends to be a fair, and relatively
simple alternative to the over-powered and over-featured Microsoft Exchange mailserver you need a '
rocket science engineers degree' to get it to work properly.
I've been looking for a GPS logger for a couple of months. A GPS logger can be used for attaching GPS information to your digital photos. This way, you can display your photos on publicly accessible maps in Flickr or Google Earth.
More and more of those GPS loggers are surfacing on the market [
Sony GPS-CS1 /
GPS-CS1KA,
Globalsat DG-100,
Qstarz BT Q-1000,
GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr,
WBT-201]. But they all have one problem; None of them seem to work (natively) with an Intel Mac running Leopard (
source). Some of them require open-source drivers to function. The downside of that is that an update from Apple or an updated firmware in the GPS logger might cripple the functionality.
Why is it that GPS manufacturers won't create a GPS (logger) device that simply works on both platforms. It couldn't be that hard. Just create a GPS device that is also recognized as a external drive, containing the raw GPS data in the most common format (e.g.
NMEA). This way even the Linux users are not left out.
Everything is possible, but nothing is allowed. A typical description of the United States. A country where everyone sues everyone else. This is the reason why manufacturers place the most absurd warning labels on their products. Just in case someone is lacking plain old common sense (like a lady who put her dog (or cat) in the microwave to dry the animal.....) and sues the company for millions of dollars.
Check the most ridiculous warning labels
here. You can even buy a book [
amazon,
bol.com] with the 101 most stupendous warnings.
W00t... KPN is finally starting to
upgrade their network to support
VDSL. This COULD mean a major speed upgrade for me. Currently I only have a 4Mbps ADSL2 line (but with a 1Mbps upload, thanks to
XS4ALL). This is the maximum throughput for me, since I live too far from the distribution hub.
Other interesting news is that KPN won't charge their customers for
MOBILE data connections made from the
21st of December till the 30th of December 2007. So, it's all you can download via GPRS, UMTS :-)
The release of the beta
PGP v9.7 a couple of weeks ago, made me kinda curious if I had to pay for the new update. I bought v9.0 officially, and every update 'swallowed' my old license info. And what happend today, when I installed the newly released full version of
PGP 9.7 Desktop... It swallowed my old license.
B.t.w. the original purchase was for the Windows version of PGP, but the license also works on the OSX version of the software (it always did). So it's not necessary to buy a new license when you switch platforms.
There is a downside though; It's not possible to download a full version for the license holders. You need to download the
30-day trail version. And you'll only get it when using a valid e-mail address.
In the old days they had some restriction on how many times (and in what time frame) you used an e-mail address.
Major bummer: the sign and encrypt buttons are no longer available in the Apple mail.app. So you need to use the builtin PGP proxy. So basically, there is no way of manipulating single messages (other than using the clipboard). There is no need for me to sign every mail I send, nor is there the necessity of encrypting every mail I send to a certain person.
Having a day off from work meant that I had some time to clean-up my server from everything crap. This also meant trying to upgrade Coldfusion MX 7 to
Coldfusion 8. The new version supports some nice
new features, with which I wanted to experiment.
Since none of my production websites run on Coldfusion (currently PHP), I could safely uninstall and install the new developer version. When I pressed 'remove' I had this flash from the past. When I tried to install version 7 I had humongous problems with the installer (services didn't register correctly with IIS, etc.). But this could be just a coincidence...
Installing Coldfusion itself was straight-forward. The fun began when the installer wanted to launch the admin-panel to finalize the installation. No responds from the webserver. Even my blog was not working ("
System cannot find the file specified"). Seemed that there were references to the old Coldfusion parser in the IIS.. After removing those instances, I had my blog back up-and-running.
Next was to finalize the Coldfusion 8 installation. I had to manually add the Coldfusion parameters to IIS (allowed Web Services, document types, ... the works) After screwing around for nearly two hours, I could finish the installation.
Just to make sure that it wasn't me, I installed it also in a virtual machine. And off course it worked flawlessly. Guess I need to reinstall my server in the next couple of weeks. Who knows what else is f*cking up the system.
Oh, another thing; I used to use RDS for development of the websites, so I tried to configure it again.... Well you might guess it... Not working. After yet another hour searching I found that RDS uses a '
virtual file' called '
ide.cfm'. This file is located in
/CFIDE/main/. The actual location (
main/) doesn't exist, so IIS returns a 404 error.
It seems that you need to uncheck '
Verify if file exists' in IIS for the .cfm extension for RDS to work. Or do as I did; create the directory '
main' and create an empty file called
ide.cfm in that directory.
Well, this was an afternoon well spent.... NOT.
Next mission is to upgrade MySQL to version 5. So expect some serious downtime.
UPDATE: MySQL has also been upgraded to v5.something. It went surprisingly easy.
