afongen

I don’t make a very good patriot. I’ve never much liked the “Star Spangled Banner” either. It’s alright as a poem and all, but it’s too hard to sing to be a decent national anthem and has never really had any emotional impact on me. At sporting events and graduations and such, I sit, unmoved, impassively ignoring the glares of those around me as they sing.

Tonight, though, something was different. Tonight I sat and listened as our national anthem was sung before a ball game. I watched the players’ faces on TV, I watched those around me, but most of all I listened. To the music and to the words.

And I cried.

Check out the HTML4.01 and CSS2 sidebars (for Mozilla/Netscape) on DevEdge. I’ll probably be using these all the time.

It’s looking like Apple may release OS X 10.1 next week. Much will be improved. If you’re a Mac user I recommend OS X . . . but not yet.

Mainly because the apps aren’t there. Microsoft plans to release its Office suite for OS X this November, for about $500 (!). That may more more than I’m willing to spend, but problem is there really is nothing better for the Mac. I really do like MS Word, and AppleWorks outright sucks. I might be able to work with StarOffice / OpenOffice once they’re ported to OS X, but I’m not sure about Kiara. We’ll see, I guess. There are other priorities. In the meantime, Office2001 is more than fine.

What I really want, of course, is one of these babies.

Quiet night. For the first time in a long time, I’m just kicking back. Listening to Sade, occasionally reading a Terry Goodkind book that my brother gave me but mostly just relaxing. It feels good. Maybe I’ll tackle some of the problems on this site tomorrow…

…but probably not.

CERT Advisory on Nimda.

And Nimda info from SANS.

I’m serious about this question: why run IIS? I’m not wondering why Windows, just IIS. What functionality does it bring to the table that makes the security risks worthwhile? If you have thoughts, please let me know.

Yep, a new worm. More info is available. It affects IIS web servers, of course.

Update: Microsoft’s posted a fix for IIS. Well, not so much a fix as a preventative tool: it filters requests based on the URL, according to a policy set by the administrator. Pretty useful-looking, that.

And still watch out for readme.eml when browsing the web, especially if you’re using Internet Explorer.

So tell me again why people run IIS?

Our servers are getting pounded with what looks like a new worm. Watch out for a file called readme.eml. I don’t know if that file’s necessarily connected with what’s hitting our servers looking for cmd.exe, but I suspect so. We’ll see.

Among the neat new features in Mozilla 0.9.4 is the ability to disable the JavaScript window.open() function on load or unload events. This has the effect of eliminating almost all pop-up or pop-under ads. Yay!

Also, at long last, the Macintosh version lets you change the display font size. Until now you had to do it by setting general font preferences, which is a lot of work just to change the font size on a given page. This function has been available on other platforms for some time, but not on the Mac. At least in the Mac binaries; I’ve never compiled it…although I was beginning to think that I should.

Interesting. Slashdot: Preserve Your Rights Online. “Saturday a small group of people, including U.S. Representative Lynn Rivers, from Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, met in the University of Maryland Baltimore County [UMBC ] library to discuss ways to maintain Americans’ civil liberties despite major pressure to curtail them in the name of ‘fighting terrorism.’ The government does listen, you know, if you speak to the right people in the right way. So here’s a guide, a HOWTO, if you will, that will teach you how to lobby effectively for your Constitutional rights.”

To clarify what I was saying yesterday: do I want law enforcement agencies to be able to track terrorists’ communications, decrypting encrypted messages? Absolutely. Do I think that weakening crypto products will help? An emphatic no. Terrorists will find a way to communicate secretly; they won’t care whether it’s legal or not.