WAC Champs. Congratulations to the University of Hawai'i Men's Basketball team for winning the Western Athletic Conference championship this past weekend. The win brings with it an invitation to the National Collegiate Athletic Association playoffs and a chance at the national title.
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! No, it's a Plane! No, it's a Russian space station falling from the sky! March 20th is the latest date for the Mir's final mission. Russian officials say the actual date may vary a little but that the 20th is the best guess right now. Just in case the guess where the remnants of the station come to Earth is wrong, the Russians have reportedly taken out an insurance policy in the amount of $200 million (US). Keep you heads down Mike and Jonathan.
M-Commerce. As your 10,000 shares of that hot IPO you got six-months ago goes spinning down the toilet, comes the newest trend - Mobile Commerce (You heard it here first. Or not). Internet access, and buying, comes to the hand held device. Whether a cell phone or a Palm, the latest craze is to get your business accessible to these devices. Will it become a $10.8 billion (US) business by 2005? You decide - but I wouldn't bet on it. See the article here from the Los Angeles Times.
Speaking of Meaningless e-business Words and Phrases. The word "stickiness" comes to mind. But even though it is used in an InfoWorld column by B. Gomolski, you should still read the column (see it here). Why? Because one of the better ways of having customers come back to your "e" or "m-commerce" site is by having a clear warranty and then making it easy for your customers to use it. It also helps if you have a good product that doesn't need to be returned, but if it does fail, you have to stand behind it and make it right.
TweakUI 1.33. For those of you who have recently upgraded to Windows 2000, there is a version of Microsoft's Tweakui utility (get it here) that is compatible with not only 2000, but all other shipping versions of Windows as well. This utility makes it easy to make changes to the user interface. Personally, I think this should be part of the standard install, but I guess some people could get into trouble using this, so maybe not. But as MS says, use at your own risk, this is NSS (not supported software).
If you are looking for the rest of the NT downloads you can find them here and the Win2000 downloads are here.
I'm still working on my paper for class. Fortunately, the deadline for turning it in has been postponed until Sunday so I have some more time to work on it. Joy. - Aloha!
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Tuesday - 13 March 2001
Raise the Ehime Maru. I know this sounds like something out of a Clive Cussler novel but there is a possibility that the US Navy will try to raise the Japanese training boat sunk by a US submarine nine miles South of Diamond Head last month. The Navy's proposal would take six months and cost a projected $40 million (US). It would involve a two-step process of towing the ship closer into shore where the ship would be examined and any remains removed.
The Navy is cautioning people that there are all kinds of engineering challenges to overcome and that they have never tried to lift something so heavy (almost 500 tons or 454-tonnes) from so deep (about 2,000-ft or 610-metres). A Netherlands-based company, Smit-Tak, did the feasibility study. One wonders if they asked Dirk Pitt to coordinate...
Speaking of Slippery Things. Hundreds of people were evacuated from a local public housing project after being contaminated with mercury (sometimes also known as quick silver). The mercury, which was found by children at an abandoned Navy pumping station near Pearl Harbor on Saturday, was taken to their homes and then to their schools (smart kids that they are), contaminating themselves and everything that they came in contact with. Reports indicated that some of their parents also took some to work to show everyone there (smart parents that they are). Perhaps they can be nominated for the Darwin Award...
Tiny Dancer. I downloaded and installed a personal firewall program called, strangely enough, Tiny Personal Firewall, from tinysoftware.com. Unfortunately, it had all kinds of problems with my PC. I don't know if it's because we have Token-Ring network interface cards (NICs) or there was something else. Their web site does not indicate what kind of network cards are required so I assumed any type would work. Perhaps this is not the case.
In any case, I got two error messages, which continuously popped up on the screen as long as the program was installed (a maddenly stupid thing to do. Take note you programmers out there).
Windows - Fatal Application Exit
Tiny Personal Firewall Driver:
NdisHookAllocateAndFillBuffer: Unknown medium 1 !
Windows - Fatal Application Exit
Tiny Personal Firewall Driver:
FilterCoreRaw: Unknown medium 1 !
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My test configuration is as follows:
Dell OptiPlex GX1
PII 333MHz
128MB RAM
Maxtor 6.2 GB 90645D3 Hard drive
Windows 2000 Pro, SP1
IBM PCI (Olympic Chipset) Token-Ring Wake on LAN NIC
TCP/IP and IPX/SPX/NetBios bound to the NIC
Novell Client32 ver. 4.80.20000.717
Norton SystemWorks 2001.04 build 50
I have reproduced their comparison chart for those who are interested in taking a look at the various Windows-based personal firewalls out there. But since I couldn't get it to work, I can not make a recommendation.
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I have to get back to writing my paper so I gotta go - Aloha!
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Hump Day Wednesday - 14 March 2001
Research Design. The current module we are working on in class is research design. Yes, I agree - boring. Especially the statistical stuff. Not because it isn't necessarily interesting, but because I use this stuff at work so it's not new to me. For that matter, neither was the last module on administrative rules. Hmmm. I'm starting to wonder if I'm working on my Masters more just to get the degree on my resume then to actually learn something new. I guess I have to understand that the first year may be more of a review of what I already know. I hope that next year's classes will be more of help to me than this year's.
With that, I have to finish my paper and also get ready for a Legislative hearing tomorrow on a bill relating to juror exemptions. I have the testimony drafted but I need to review some of the back-up statistics I've gathered that supports our position - so, I gotta go - Aloha!
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Thursday - 15 March 2001
Patchwork. The latest newsletter from Steve Gibson notes a couple of interesting topics. The first is a scanner for Windows NT or 2000 Internet servers which is supposed to determine if your server is vulnerable to attack, or if it has already been penetrated. As usual for Steve, the file is small and fast. I can not vouch for how well it works but I guess it's better than nothing. You can read about it here. Note that the file is actually at the Center for Internet Security here. You do NOT need to register for their service to download the file. Just click on the link here if you want to bypass everything and just get the file. But I encourage you to read about what the file can and can not do, first.
Steve is also announcing a utility called NetFilter. It is still vaporware and won't be available "for awhile". When it is released, it is supposed to be able to block web ads, web bugs, cookies, email viruses, and spyware. See the page here. I hope he gets this done soon!
For those who want to find out if a program has spyware hiding in it Steve points to http://www.spychecker.com. This site has links to various programs that hunt down and kill spyware programs. The site also has a database of programs that you can query to see if what you have has spyware in it. Note that if they were being altruistic about it they would just post the list of spyware files. Instead, you have to query the database one by one (which would be incredibly time consuming). I'm not sure what their "angle" is but there must be one so keep your wits about you [Where the heck did he dig up that old phrase? - Ed.].
And finally, a couple of links to free firewall log analyzers. The first is for ZoneAlarm users and is found here. The second is for BlackICE Defender users and is found here.
As usual, I have no control over the content of these other sites, and as such, I take no responsibility for what happens to you when you go there [hows that for a mealy mouth disclaimer, eh? - Ed.]. YMMV.
I finished the first draft of my paper yesterday. It's now 11 pages but I will probably edit it down to 10. I have the Legislative hearing to get ready for so I gotta go - Aloha!
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Aloha Friday - 16 March 2001
It's Friday!
Strange Happenings. I tried to access my web site this morning and got nothing via HTTP. So I tried telnet and then FTP. No joy. So I sent an email to Pair support. Within minutes, access was restored. Now, this was probably coincidental, but I am curious as to why I couldn't get in earlier (there were no announcements about the server I am on). Strange. Ah! I see they have now updated the notice page and have the following:
[Mar 16, 2001, 12:00 PM] ciot Downtime
ciot, www161 crashed under heavy load, and was brought back online after a manual reboot. Downtime was approximately fifteen minutes.
Hmmm. Crashed under heavy load. Well, why was it under "heavy" load and why did it go boobsup (to coin a term) under that load? They just upgraded this server last month with more RAM, faster CPU, and the latest version of FreeBSD OS. Hmmm. Strange Mk. II.
While at pair.com, trolling through the support pages, I noticed that the formail script is being modified so if you are a pair.com user, and you have access to and are using the cgi script for email you may need to make some changes to how you use the script (see the page here).
I turned in my paper yesterday. It ended up being 12 pages plus 7 pages for the appendix. The next paper is due in about two weeks. Sigh. Tomorrow we have our second Saturday class of the month. Another six hours on research design and statistics. I'm getting so tired I'm not sure if my chi can be squared anymore<g> Sorry. A little stat humor. Kurtosis is NOT a debilitating foot disease producing pungent odors. Sorry. I never said statisticians were a funny lot...Statisticians correlate, regress, then deviate. Okay! Okay! Enough already.
Have a Great Weekend Everyone! - Aloha!
© 2001 Daniel K. Seto. All rights reserved.