May 22nd, 2007 by Paul Mah
93,324 Views
We’ve heard the mantra often enough; that security is a multi-faceted affair – that it is not about the latest bleeding edge firewalls or antivirus software, but that it is also dependant upon users practicing a culture of safe computing.
Yet you know that the road ahead is a very long and arduous one when an on-line advertisement promising to infect virus-free PCs with a virus actually gets clicked on.
May 21st, 2007 by Paul Mah
1,313 Views
You might be the IT manager, departmental head, or perhaps just the chap that your boss put in charge of IT because of your slightly better literacy than the rest of your department.
Regardless of the size of your company however, you will definitely come across situations where you have to liaise with external IT vendors or providers to procure either the requisite hardware or services for your organization.
May 16th, 2007 by Paul Mah
1,752 Views
Was hit by a virus attack couple of days ago. Have just (more or less) got most of the software back in and my laptop back to a functional state.
Read on to hear my experience of it.
May 12th, 2007 by Paul Mah
1,707 Views
Saw an article about thin clients on Network World recently. Essentially, it talks about how Verizon Wireless is currently heavily involved in a project project to replace thousands of call center PCs with Sun Microsystems’ thin client terminals.
By switching over to thin clients, Verizon was able to obtain both direct savings in terms of dramatically lowered power consumption and manpower required to support the help desk as well as indirect ones such as lower downtime. Plans are afoot to convert other existing call centers as well as all new ones using this architecture.
May 11th, 2007 by Paul Mah
1,020 Views
According to their press release, Research In Motion (RIM) will let developers create applications for BlackBerry phones using Microsoft’s .NET programming environment.
The ability will come in the form of a plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio that lets developers to write application that integrate with existing back-end servers through .NET Web Services, according to RIM. It will work through the existing BlackBerry Mobile Data Service that is an integral part of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES)
May 7th, 2007 by Paul Mah
1,387 Views
There’s a very annoying bug with UltraVNC on Windows in which shutting down a (local) Virtual Machine on VMware Server will cause it to immediately disconnect a VNC’ed client. Not only that, it will then enter into an endless loop that terminate any further attempts to connect.
Not such a big deal you might say; well, try that on a headless server with no monitor or keyboard in sight.
Well, stop snickering will you. Yes, I run a headless Virtual Machine on Windows XP using VMware. In fact, I run two. And they run so stably I actually saw a spike in my electricity bill last month. Ouch.
But why not run it on Linux or some other uber-geek OS? Well, that would be another article for when I’m not so pressed for time as I am now. But I’m a realist, and suffice to say that Windows XP is actually quite secure behind a NAT’ing firewall, fully patched and running without any client-interaction (i.e. headless) to trigger off the plethora of IE/GUI bugs.
There you go. Well, looks like VMware finally got updated properly now. I need to go back to installing Solaris 10. Oh yes, just to whet you appetite some, I am actually half-way through an article about the (in)security aspects of Wi-Fi.
May 4th, 2007 by Paul Mah
1,304 Views
eWeek has another interesting feature in which they present a list of the most important open-source applications in a series of slides. See if you agree with their appraisal, or if you have more to add to the list.
Below is the full list, with my own comments tackled on.
May 2nd, 2007 by Paul Mah
1,119 Views
Business 2.0, the technology-aware magazine published by Time, periodically reminds readers of the importance of backing up computer files. In fact, a 2003 article likened backups to flossing - everyone knows it’s important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.
It appears that Business 2.0, just last week, got caught forgetting to floss.
Essentially, on the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine’s editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server - which was never used, and hence never thought twice of, had failed to back up.
In hindsight, perhaps it would make sense to and a “best practice” to have a separate department solely responsible for performing and validating the “restorability” of the company’s backup.
In this case, the articles in question were recovered via proofs e-mailed out to litigation lawyers for checking. Artwork, on the other hand, had to be frantically recreated. You can check out the original story at on the International Herald Tribune, here.
Now, when was the last time I performed a backup on all the articles on this blog as well as the contents of my laptop’s hard disk…
