Here is a tip that may help some of you out there that are working with Windows and Internet Explorer, which can get kind of quirky at times. I don’t know about any of you, but I have found it rather annoying that I can’t download Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft’s website, other than the online installer that downloads as part of the install. Well, here is a way to use that installer to download the source files so you can perform an off-line installation, which has been useful for me sometimes.
Author Archives: Laz
Sun and IBM make a deal that helps Solaris
It appears that Sun and IBM have struck a deal to help Solaris adoption by supporting it on many IBM servers. This could really help Sun and IBM both, and from someone who is deeply entrenched in Solaris (ableit on the SPARC platform), I think this is great news. As much as I love Linux, nothing I have seen can scale as large or run as well as Solaris. Linux is great, and works for many things, but when you need big systems, Solaris and SPARC work wonderfully. Now, one note is that if it fits the situation, Linux clusters have proven very powerful. Check out the article.
Site Upgrade Complete
In case anyone out there using WordPress didn’t know, there’s a security update available bringing the current version up to 2.2.2. I just completed the upgrade for Solarum, as well as all the other WordPress sites that I host. So far it seems to have been a quick and painless upgrade that any of you affected ought to do in order to plug any potential security holes. Heads up!
Windows is free?
Here is an interesting article that I ran across. It’s in response to another article comparing Windows and Linux and attempting to show why Windows is so much the better. The article I am linking to is a rebuttal, yes, but more of a take on the comparison of Linux (which is open source and free) to Windows (which is not free, or maybe it is in some respects). It’s a good article, and he has some valid points I think. All in all I thought it was worth the read, so I decided to share it. Enjoy!
Protect your passwords!
Since I seem to be on a roll lately with password related posts, and since I linked to PasswordSafe in my last article about Good Password Practices, I thought I would post a Cool Tools entry about it too, because it definitely belongs on your kit! A quick synopsis for anyone who doesn’t already know (go read the Good Password Practices article!), PasswordSafe is a nifty open source application that allows you to store your passwords in an encrypted database. It offers some neat-o features like password history tracking (every time you change a password, it keeps a record of x number of old ones, just in case), you can group by category and store notes and more, all safely encrypted in one single file. It’s a great tool, and a must have.
There is another tool that was mentioned by a reader called Keepass, and although I am not near as familiar with it, I have used it in the past since it runs on Linux among other things. PasswordSafe is a Windows app, I just use it under Wine when I need it on Linux. Either way, the point is the same, plain text files and password protected Excel spreadsheets art out baby, encrypted databases are in. Keep your passwords safe!
PERL script to generate passwords
I guess this could be considered part of the password post that I put up a few minutes ago, but I wanted to post this script over in the forums that is a PERL script which generates passwords for you. Check it out, take a look and maybe you can get something beneficial from it!