Tech

HA! I was wondering when something like this would happen. "The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) touched off a storm this week when it recommended for security reasons using browsers other than MS Internet Explorer."

Frankly I wonder what took so long, especially after it was demonstrated that a Windows 2000 box could be cracked by a person using IE 5 to view a webpage with a specially crafted .bmp image.

I would strongly suggest downloading the latest version of Mozilla or Firefox.

Update: Emily switched over to using FireFox! She had to use a bookmark extension to get some of the functionality she wanted, but that is one of the strong points for open source, being able to make additions to existing projects.

In light of Moveable Type's new license model, and needing more content management features I'm planning on switching to either Drupal or Mambo server. Several of the non-profit orgs that I support need some type of content management solution and running it first on my home linux box and then on biohabit would seem to be a great way to get up to speed with it.

Two of the software packages (NetBackup and IntraLink) I support at work are very opaque packages that are results of merging many different products together. I have been neck deep in supporting these two packages the last few days and I just pulled 14 hour day getting one of these packages back on its feet.

My central complaint with opaque computing is when something is not working as expected, finding out what is going on almost requires a mind meld and blood sacrifices. Thankfully no blood sacrifices were required tonight, but I am going on day three of getting a lot less sleep them I need. If these packages were opensource I very likely could have found out what the problem was and how to fix it using google, ethereal, truss, and a CLI (command line interface for either unix or sql) in about 30 minutes. Of course having a 24x7 support contract for both of these products would have replaced some of this need, but how many times have you been on a tech support call where you basically have to prove that the computer is on?

Near as I can tell, the problems of the SSL warning about a self-signed cert should no longer bugging you if you leave a comment.

I'm still investigating why but the bottom line is comments appear to be broken. More specifically it bans your IP address after the first post and MT-blacklist appears to really not like how I have MT setup, where I use SSL on for logging in (the CGIPATH) is going to a different URL but the site is (I thought) entirely viewable via standard http port 80 traffic.