December 2005 Archives

I have watched with a certain amount of amusement the national debate [sic] over the correct words to label the passage of time when the Christians celebrate the birth of their lord, and the Jews celebrate the miracles of a small army rising up successfully against a larger army and the oil which should have lasted only one day but instead lasted eight, and when retailers all over America make it into the black.

I have always thought that we used "Happy Holidays" because it was more inclusive, AND ...

... because it is easier for me to spell. For some reason I always want to leave the "H" out of Christmas. And I have no idea how to spell Chanukah without some kind of help.

Which brings me to the first of two reasons this post is in the Search Engines category. I use Google to correct my spelling. If the application I am using doesn't support spell check, many times I will search for the term. If I spell it wrong, Google will generally provide a correct suggestion. It always knows what I am looking for, why shouldn't it know what I meant to spell?

I recently decided to install a new operating system on a server that has been running for about 2 years. I have had a few problems with bad discs; but I put that down to a bad shipment, because some from the same batch failed in another location too. They have all been replaced for about a year now.

When I tried to install, I got an error and was unable to complete the installation. The screen was a little garbled, but I saw words (signal 11) which subsequently lead me to believe this was a memory error. I fiddled around a bit, and on the 4th try I was able to get a basic operating system installed and running. And so I went off to find a program to check the memory for me.

What I found was Memtest86+ a "Stand-alone Memory Diagnostic" developed by Chris Brady, released under the GNU public license. Since it is a stand alone program, it doesn't run under Linux or Windows, or DOS. (Although the release notes mention the bootstrap does come from a Linux Kernel) You boot your computer to the program and it runs patterns through all your memory repetitively to look for errors. It will keep running forever, but the web site indicates one pass through all the tests should catch most errors.

There are instructions on how to make a boot disk under Windows and Linux, although under Linux, this wasn't necessary for me, I added the image to grub and rebooted. So far, it has made one successful pass, but I think I will let it run through a few more times just to be sure.

If you haven't updated to Firefox 1.5 yet, I would wait a while. I think they still have some bugs to hammer out of this version, and there are also a number of extensions that I use which haven't been upgraded.

Today is black Tuesday. (That is what I call the second Tuesday of each month when Microsoft releases the patches for the month, it is usually a long day.) There will be important fixes for Internet Explorer. If you own a computer, you should make sure that your computer gets updated today. On a related note, I was very pleased to find out from E-Bitz that Small Business Server is supported by Microsoft Update now. If you don't know about Microsoft Update, its like Windows Update providing automatic patches, except that Microsoft Update also provides patches to applications such as Microsoft Office, MS Exchange, and now SBS too.

I've been saying it for years and now SANS, one of the of the most respected security organizations in the country, has agreed with me. In the most recent NewsBites, SANS inaugurates a section called the "Application Security Hall of Shame", and the first inductee is ...