The GAO said yesterday that Homeland Security has serious IT issues. We are not surprised that a federal agency that is made of 22 other federal agencies, including the trouble plagued INS, will have problems. MAny of the small businesses that we know of face these same issues albeit at a different scale.
Read more about the GAO's report from the source:
http://www.gao.gov/pas/2003/d03102.pdf
http://www.gao.gov/pas/2003/d0395.pdf
http://www.gao.gov/homelandsecurity.html
We use a distribution (brand) of Linux called RedHat. The reason we use it is familiarity. We rush to mention this because we want to hold off any arguements about what distro is "best"; this article isn't about merits.
In addition to version numbers, RedHat code names each new release, although we are unable to find the names for the 2.x series. Each name is supposed to relate to the last name in some way. It is rumored that Erik Troan picks the name by asking key people in the organization at the last minute before they send the distribution to production.
See if you can figure out what the relationships are before you check out the source of this information. (A former RedHat employee.)
There's lots of bleary eyed network admins out here this morning. Looks like another* MS SQL server vunerability being exploited out there. We know of at least one server that was driving 80Mb/s to the Internet.
All this can be avoided by patching your operating systems correctly. Most users can go to their Internet Explorer browser (the big blue "e" on your start menu) and on the Tools menu, choose Windows Update. Follow the instructions. For whatever other beefs one might have with Microsoft, they do their critical update service very well. Its free, and it could save you thousands of dollars.
If you run if you run Linux or some other operating system please consult your manuafaturer's update pages, or install some program to automatically download the required software.
* Symantec reports that this activity is related to vunerabilities discovered in 2002, and at the time this is posted the incident has not yet been published at NIPC, CERT or similar sites.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 23 is now online at:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021223.html
Jakob Neilson is known for his fairly drastic positions on web usability. His Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 represents a significant deprature from previous efforts in that he includes funny pictures.
If you suscribe to AlertBox you'll probably "get" this post. If you don't you should probably glance the the article anyway.
The National Sciences Foundation has puiblished the 2002 Science and Engineering Indicators survey. It's a fairly clearly organized site, chocked full of statistics, more statistical data, and presumably damned lies. (With respects to Clements, who poularized the phase, and Disraeli who coined it: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.")
The good news is that this site is a nice expample of how an organization can use the web to communicate a large volume of information. The site fairly closely follows the conceptual model for document construction. This is the model we were taught in high school composition class, with an outline and supporting paragraphs, and bibliography, table of contents indexes, and so forth.
The bad news is two-fold.
First bad news is the actual content. There are pages and pages full of discouraging facts such as:
50% of American adults does not know how long it takes for the earth to make a revolution around the sun.
The second bad news is the code. The have a perfectly organized outline, and a language that tries to enfource that model. (I'm guessing they meant to either present this as HTMLor XHTML although the document code doesn't say.) And they choose to put this in tables.
Tables may have been popularized as design elements during the 4.x browser wars because it was fairly easy for designers to get similar effects in very poorly compliant browsers. But let's move on. As it says in the standard,
Tables represent relationships between data. Authors specify these relationships in the document language ...
All of which is to say that tables are supposed to show users some data in a grid layout for easy creadability. Though use of other elements and correct CSS authors can do most things that we used to do with tables and still have our code and document layout meet standards.
It seems that everywhere I work, I end up writing about DNS, or the Domain Name System. It probably doesn’t help matters any that there seem to be so many different permutations of the acronym. There’s really only one authority (although there are several references) and that’s the Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF. The relevant documents these days are RFC 1034 and RFC 1035, which obsolete RFCs 882, 883, 973.
And if you read any of these, you’re likely to become more confused. Don’t worry; the concept is easy, even if the specifics are a bit obtuse.
Computers “talk” to each other on the Internet using IP addresses that look like this:
192.168.144.120
Humans remember computer addresses like this:
www.some.com
DNS is the service that translates human names into network addresses so the Internet can work for everyone.
Why should you care? In your whole career, you will probably only need to know about DNS for two different reasons.
You’re setting up a network or Internet connection on your computer. Your ISP has name servers available to your computer, and when you click a link to www.somereallycoolsite.com your computer will look up the address from your ISP’s DNS servers. Most ISPs and proprietary consumer on-line services set this up when you log on, so you may never even know this has happened. If not, the instructions your provider gives you should include 2 IP addresses and how to apply them correctly to your specific configuration.
You’re registering a domain name and the registrar is asking about name servers. In this case, you need someone to keep track of the names and addresses of your domain. The people who host your website probably provide DNS service for your domain, they can tell you what server addresses to use, if they don’t do the domain registrations for you. This probably is NOT your ISP. Nothing against them, but their business is getting you connected to the Internet. Even if they do that well, you’ll be dealing with a different group when you setup your web account.
We may be slightly impartial, but we think your best bet for DNS or other web services is someone whose business focus is providing web services.
I have two qualifications to write about Powerbook with OS X on it a few weeks before Christmas.
Ordinarily a UNIX jocky like myself can't be bothered to keep up with events in Appleland, but when Bob sent me a link to the new Powerbooks I was moved to check them out.
I'm not saying that everyone should switch and I hate the commercials. (Except the one with Yoyo Ma.) Most of the commercials are off target and make no sense in a larger context of reality. (Apple publicity has always been a little on the fringe of reality in my mind since the "1984" ad campaign.)
But boy is that 17 inch monitor slick looking.
Mostly the thing that makes me think about using one is OS X. Apple has finally fought back. In a strange way they have finally learned to take the good things about other operating system is in fact BSD UNIX implimentation.
I treated the claims of "industrial-strength foundations" and "host of features and capabilities that will impress hardcore Unix users" with the skepticism they deserve. I poked around for command prompt and found it.
ls and cd produced the expected results, but heck I think my WinXP box knows how to do those. What really blew me away was
perl -MCPAN -e shell
which resulted in the [correct] Are you ready for manual configuration?
[Yes]
... More adventures as Bob is here and I can play with his Macintosh some more. Let me know if you use Mac OS X and like it. (Or if you don't)
There are lots of sites on the Internet that have far more interesting weather imagery than will be found at the big commercial Weather sites. Try a few of these locations next time you get snowed in.
Satellite imagery from around the world can be found from this page. Home of the National Satellite Services Division of the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.
It turns out the local SUNY has a Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and their home page has links to lots of super cool Doppler Radar Imagery.
My longtime favorite for imagery was TerraServer. Unfortunately it seems to have gone downhill. It was commercial, and it was slightly disfunctional. (I know thay used to have 1 meter aerial photography of where I live, but I was unable to re-locate it by any method.)
The guy is here to plow the driveway, so I have to go move the car.
I'm a painter. One person I know says that this causes me to have grasshopper brain. I think she means by this that my mind jumps around quite a bit. She's right.
Because of my job, I spend far too much time in front of a computer, usually looking through the viewport of a web browser. So AdvisorBits will be my attempt to point out some of the good things I see. (And maybe later because my mind wanders, I'll rant about something BAD.)
And I'll definitely be tweeking this presentation. So check back soon, and send me questions.
I was looking at Jesse Gardner's site again today. I like the layout and I think it renders fairly well in most browsers. He has these creepy eyes that pop-up in a window. I'm not sure what they mean, but I have my ideas. The JavaScript he uses automatically closes that window a few seconds after the main document loads, and I think that has interesting possibilities.
What if there was a headline or image that really caught your eye and then faded away. You could leave a clean simple link on your pages that only had text that says "Tell me more about that thing I saw again..."
I'll have to think about that. I'm not sure if there's a decent market for local links, but I keep thinking about it. What could set it apart and make it better than the run of the mill banners?
I was looking to see when he last updated the site. He's working on the new KinetixHosting.com site, and I haven't heard from him in a while. It's been a while since he explained the name of the site, Plastic Mind. Seems it came from a realization he had in college while drawing a "blonde-haired bowling-ball".
And I thought grasshopper brain might be a problem...
The Internet turned 20 yesterday. No kidding, in January 1, 1983 the ARPANET switched from NCP (Network Control Program) to the more familiar and beloved TCP/IP (Transport Control Protocol and Internet Protocol).
Source: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg18554.html