pmik's blog

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:42:18 GMT

Patch management: tech or process is the bottleneck?. This fun piece looks at the following curious security issue: is patch management simple or complicated. I've seen people say its very simple ('just set Windows Update to On') or horribly complicated ('we have a staff of 10 and they are overworked just doing patches'). Why is that? This article affirms that patching Windows in Windows-only environment is actually pretty simple. Patching Unix is not too hard also. However, the author claims that when people aim for an ambitious multi-platform patch solution to "patch everything", all hell breaks loose and complexity reigns supreme... [O'Reilly Weblogs]

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 22:07:20 GMT

iPod tipped to boost Apple's desktop share. Apple could soon control 5 percent of the desktop computer market, Morgan Stanley predicts, thanks to the success of the iPod. Elsewhere, Apple released Mac OS X security update today. [OSNews]

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 22:06:24 GMT

Reviewing the BenHur2 20, Part 3. [continued from part 2] What you are seeing here is the admin interface to BenHur² in german. You can select the english version at login time or replace ".de" at the end of the url with ".en" any time. Since Ragnar asked me about updates, this is what it looks... [vowe dot net]

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 21:24:27 GMT

From Archive.org, Free Multimedia Hosting for Life [Slashdot:]

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 17:08:17 GMT

PSPCasting. PSP Video 9 is a free tool that will manage and convert video files to play on your PlayStation Portable. The cool part is- you can add Videora and using RSS, and BitTorrent subscribe to video feeds. While this is just another example of podcasting, videocasting, etc... the really interesting thing here is that many portable devices capable of playing audio and video are hitting the market with applications that can automatically grab and convert stuff you want from the cloud using RSS and BitTorrent. Music, Audiobooks, eBooks, how-to videos, movies, TV, it's all starting to really happen. [MAKE: Blog]

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 02:27:54 GMT

Reviewing the BenHur2 20, Part 2. [continued from part 1] This is the scenario I am running BenHur² in and it is pretty standard. My mail gets delivered to a number of POP3 mailboxes at my ISP and various other mail providers. BenHur² uses fetchmail to pick up mail from these mailboxes and delivers them to... [vowe dot net]

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 19:08:20 GMT

Rex Hammock: "As those who fly first class between technology conferences take over the podcasting story, the focus will be more about the business of podcasting (and, thus, the inevitable boom and bust) and not on the more important issue: the transformational nature of what happens when everyone who has an internet connection can truly add their literal voice to a worldwide conversation." [Scripting News]

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:43:40 GMT

Reviewing the BenHur2 20, Part 1. I have received a BenHur² 20 server friday and have spent a large part of the last 24 hours to install it and migrate a lot of services onto the machine. In a nutshell this is a firewall router with VPN support and an application server for mail, web, fax,... [vowe dot net]

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:32:36 GMT

To-Do List: Shop, Pay Bills, Organize Brain. Two new visually oriented programs are designed to organize everything from tasks and obligations to ideas. By By JAMES FALLOWS. [NYT > Technology]

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:24:37 GMT

Home Sweet Studio. Making an album used to mean booking time in an expensive professional studio; now, it can be a matter of rolling out of bed and pressing a button. By By JON PARELES. [NYT > Technology]

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:09:37 GMT

The Tailor as a hacker. English cut is a blog from Thomas Mahon, Bespoke Savile Row Tailor, London. I've been reading Thomas's site since Hugh McLeod dropped it on me. Clive Thomson from Slate properly identified why I think it's so appealing... "After all, suits have many of the things that geeks particularly appreciate: Intense levels of engineering, an obsession with structural elegance, physics, totally wicked gear that's used to create them, topographic geometry, and materials science that burrows right down to chemistry and - these days - nanotechnology. And when it comes to ties, my god, you've got the most awesomely realized application of knot theory on the planet". [MAKE: Blog]

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:02:53 GMT

Programs Designed For USB Drives. Jeremy Wagstaff has a great collection of programs (or ways to run programs) off USB drives. Chat/instant messaging, Browsers, Operating Systems, PIMs/organisers, Email, Encryption, Office, Music, and Web Authoring- I have a few of these on my perpetually hacked up Shuffle so when I visit foreign computers I can get stuff done without installing anything. [MAKE: Blog]

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:00:54 GMT

FreeCycle. FreeCycle is a hub of email lists from different cities where you can post WANTED, OFFERED, or TAKEN messages to get, give and look for free stuff. There are over 1 million members out there in over 2,500 communities. You have to go and pick up the stuff in person, but that's not a bad deal at all. There has been some talk of a Maker-like list where you could offer up usage of tools and equipment, but I think the FreeCycle list(s) might work. You could post OFFERED: Use of DNA sequencer, etc... [MAKE: Blog]

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 01:18:03 GMT

Google reaches out to open-source community. The site is aimed at providing the open-source community with software tools developed and used internally by Google, contributing code that external developers might find useful. [Computerworld News]

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:44:28 GMT

iWork05.0.1. Keynote 2.0.1 addresses isolated issues that may have affected reliability for some customers. Pages 1.0.1 addresses isolated issues that may have affected reliability for some customers and resolves an issue related to deleting complete pages. That looks like a change log published by Apple. ;-)... [vowe dot net]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 21:02:43 GMT

Do it yourself "Death Clock". I don't mean to be morbid, but I thought this was a fun clock to make to remind me not to waste time (and always opt for a faster computer)...Here are instructions on making a countdown clock for your Mac which gives a "rough" estimate how much time you have left before you kick the bucket- it's based on a few stats and health factors. [MAKE: Blog]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:32:12 GMT

Your Next OS: Google?. A c|net editorial posits that Google may be well on its way to developing a complete suite of internet-based services that could act as a computing environment for any thin client that's capable of accessing it. And Microsoft may be planning a similar move. [OSNews]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:09:10 GMT

Google offers OS X-themed frontend to service [The Macintosh News Network]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:07:56 GMT

Google and Their Server Farm [Slashdot:]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 16:57:52 GMT

PJ: iPod not Apple's only growth avenue [The Macintosh News Network]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 13:46:55 GMT

Fedora Core 4 Test 1 released. Fedora Core 4 Test 1 is now available, more info here. [OSNews]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 13:24:19 GMT

Knoppix 3.8 and UnionFS. Wow. Just Wow.. Klaus has released the latest version of Knoppix, 3.8, to the crowd at CeBIT 2005. This version includes the normal round of updates including the 2.6.11 kernel by default, KDE 3.3.2, and Firefox and Thunderbird instead of Mozilla. The exciting news, however, is the addition of UnionFS. UnionFS stacks your Knoppix ramdisk on top of the read-only filesystem on the CD, the effect being that you can apt-get install, and otherwise modify all of the files on the system as though they were all writeable. Here I'll go over why I think this is going to change Knoppix in a major way. [O'Reilly Weblogs]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 13:23:40 GMT

Introduction of a Bootable Windows LiveCD. BartPE is a tool for making a bootable LiveCD out of your Windows 2000/XP/2003 CD. The bootable LiveCD, BartPE creates, will give you a complete Win32 evironment, support for networking, FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support and the Windows GUI (800x600). You can check out the screenshots or download it here. [OSNews]

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 02:06:04 GMT

How to never miss an episode with BitTorrent and RSS. [Scripting News]

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:48:24 GMT

Blockland. Today on the Screensavers they had some cool user created images from Blockland, a free multiplayer application where you build LEGO like structures, people, things...I'm going to download this, build some stuff and post up the images in the Make pool. The site says there's a retail version coming soon too, congrats! [MAKE: Blog]