Information about joeware mixed with wild and crazy opinions...
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/business/16378045.htm
Robert Nardelli walked away from The Home Depot Inc. on Wednesday with a parting pay package worth $210 million. Shareholders can only wonder how much more he might have pocketed had Home Depot’s stock price increased while he was chief executive.
AFA has sent out a another poll. Their polls make me laugh with how they are phrased. This one was particularly funny so I thought I would share.
You can see the actual poll here:
http://www.afa.net/petitions/islam/islam.asp
As you can see it is about Islam. You can see the current results at:
http://www.afa.net/petitions/islam/ThankYou.asp?s=407537821
Here are the results as if this second:
Islam and America Poll Results
Do you consider Islam to be a peaceful religion?
Yes 10,795 No 145,308Do you consider Islam to be a tolerant religion?
Yes 5,997 No 149,821Would America be a better country if it were a Muslim country?
Yes 852 No 154,860Should America place equal emphasis on the Koran and the Bible?
Yes 3,626 No 151,772Would it be good for America to have more Muslims in elected offices?
Yes 3,687 No 151,214Would you vote for a Muslim for president?
Yes 3,257 No 151,885As a general rule, are women treated better in America than in a Muslim country?
Yes 142,664 No 12,587Is America too dependent on Muslim countries for oil?
Yes 149,725 No 5,520Do Muslim countries do more than America to help the poor?
Yes 3,849 No 150,474
I think their polls are funny because they all seem to be yes or no, true or false, positive or negative. No room for “well maybe”, or “I don’t know”, or even “quite frankly I actually don’t have enough info to have an intelligent opinion on that topic”. Plus it would be fun to have room for comments for the questions and then display those comments.
The second to last question is likely my favorite… Is America too dependent on Muslim countries for oil?… Relative to what? Non-Muslim countries or relative to not being dependent on any countries? Personally I think we are too dependent overall, I don’t care what religion the countries are we are getting it from.
joe
Back last May I talked about building my latest desktop PC. It was entry – http://blog.joeware.net/2006/05/15/371/
One of the pieces of hardware was an HP DVD840 which looked to be pretty good and it was a decent price, something like $80 or something like that from Amazon or NewEgg which I felt was a decent deal – certainly I couldn’t find it for less anywhere else.
Well now after using it since then, nay, suffering with it since then, I am here to say it sucks. I swear I reported this back to you all in the blog here but I couldn’t find it in a quick search. Anyway I built another PC back in about October and was going cheap on that one and threw in a Samsung SH-S182M for $32 and it blew the crap out of the HP drive. I mean it was like a race between a 60’s era Shelby Cobra with a 428 and a 1975 Pinto. Didn’t matter if I was reading or writing CDs, DVDs, you name it. They all sucked on the HP but raced along on the Samsung… Plus Vista RC2 couldn’t burn to the HP DVD for some reason but had no problem with the Samsung.
I ordered a new one for SuperFastMofo and although it came in back in November I finally got a chance to install it this evening and it is just great.
Avoid, I say avoid the HP DVD840. This is sad because I have had other HP DVD models that worked great. This one sucks.
So if you are looking for a good inexpensive DVD Burner with LightScribe capability – go to
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16827151136
joe
There is a company called ScriptLogic which makes various tools including various AD Management and Security tools. I have never really looked into them as they have nothing that calls to me that I couldn’t just put together myself or already have put together for myself.
In a recent set of newsgroup posts though a couple of their support analysts called out for attention. Someone was asking the question in the newsgroups… “Hey I want to give out Admin rights on a DC but I don’t want the folks with those rights to have rights in AD, how do I do this?”
The answer, of course, is you can’t. If someone has admin rights on a DC, they can do whatever they want in AD. Without getting into details[1] that is just the way it works, that is the way it will work for some time. It isn’t rocket science to do it, it is quite basic and getting from there to Enterprise Admins even across domains isn’t that much higher of a step. If there was a way to lock down Microsoft would have 3 KB articles and a whitepaper or two describing how to do it, it is asked about enough to justify that kind of work… However there isn’t any documentation because you can’t enforce that lockdown. They know it, we know it. The DS team is busting their balls working on a solution to try and help… The next version of Windows Server currently code named Longhorn server has some added features to help with this exact scenario though it still won’t solve the problem for all cases. It allows you to make a specific DC a read only DC and then delegate administrative rights on that DC to someone not trustworthy enough to be a “real” admin. This doesn’t mean they can’t hurt anything, it simply means anything they hurt *should* be limited basically to that site which is better than hurting the entire forest. Still not something I like a whole lot but it is a huge step up from what we have now.
In every version of Windows Server up to Window Server 2003 (yes R2 too), if you have admin rights on a DC, you have control of the directory. You cannot lock the system down to prevent this. This is very well known at this point and should be a core level item in everyone’s security thoughts/designs for Domain Controllers. Failure to come to terms with this fact and to deal with it can result in severe exposure of your domain and forest.
Well enter Michael P. Perrault MCSE, CCNA, A+, MBA and Senior Systems Engineer for ScriptLogic Corporation saying just the opposite… That of course you can lock AD down to protect it from this kind of access. Thinking Michael is just a little confused I correct what he wrote and he doubled down and further said he tested it in a VM… Of course I am sure what he did protected the system from him, but it doesn’t mean the system is safe from folks who understand AD/DC Security. Some others jumped in and tried to point out the error of the ways as well but Michael is adamant at being publicly incorrect. I am not sure whether I am more concerned that it is a case that he refuses to say he doesn’t know or is wrong or that he absolutely believes he knows what he is talking about. Either way, it isn’t good to see in people delivering and supporting administrative tools, especially when some apply to security. How can you properly produce/support security tools if you don’t understand the basic core concepts of the products you are producing tools for. I held out hope that maybe this was just one guy in the company who felt this way and maybe it was just luck of the draw, the one person watching and responding to newsgroup posts was not as informed as he should be. Well another ScriptLogic employee, a Matt Farr (title and certs not declared) jumped in trying to say the same thing… that as long as the user wasn’t a domain admin everything could be locked down…
No no no no no no no no no. If anyone who works for ScriptLogic reads this blog, PLEASE help these poor support folks along with understanding how AD Security works. Best also to keep them out of the newsgroups as I for one certainly can’t say I would be quick to jump into using ScriptLogic products now that I have seen the capabilities of a couple of the support folks. If someone from ScriptLogic wants to contact me, that is great, you can find the email address, I’m in the book. I would love to hear about any plans for correcting the the knowledge level of your Senior Systems Engineers. One of my really good friends is an AD Trainer who is the best in the business that you should pay triple to get in ASAP for a week or three. He gets called in to help Train MSFT ITG and PSS folks and teaches them a lot, your support folks would likely have brain overload.
joe
[1] This is something I refuse to detail. It is stupid to give out details on how to hack computer systems when there is no way to block the attacks. If someone is bright enough to figure it out, bully for them but don’t publish the details as a whole bunch of people who wouldn’t normally be able to figure it out won’t be playing with it then. The last thing we need is someone to produce some automated tool that will hack an AD if it figures out some “admins” userid has enough rights to get in because some DA was silly enough to give out the rights thinking it was safe. Yes I agree security by obscurity sucks but if you have nothing else you don’t have a whole lot of choice. The best thing DAs can do is lock down who can do what to a bare minimum (meaning NO rights on DCs to non-DAs).
While I completely failed in getting the Dual Tuner Hauppage card to work previously, adding some additional single tuner Hauppage cards worked beautifully and after a little registry hacking as per Green Button and Peter Rosser (MSFT) and a reboot I have 4 tuners up and running seemingly perfectly.
Next step, load up Vista Ultimate and make sure everything works as well…
Just wanted to follow up on Google Picasa. I used it heavily over Christmas weekend to search through my images to find various pics to put together on little creative things I was making (cards, coupons, etc). I have some 40,000 plus images on my machine, Picasa was rocket fast. The one complaint was that I couldn’t drag pictures from the Picasa form into my MSFT Digital Photo Editor application.
Two exciting Marvel characters are coming to the big screen this coming year.
Johnny “Ghost Rider” Blaze (Nicolas Cage) in the movie about Ghost Rider
Trailer – http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/ghostrider/hd/
and
Norrin “Silver Surfer” Radd (Doug Jones) in the new Fantastic Four Movie
Trailer – http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/fantasticfourris…
Top 10 Science magazine`s breakthroughs of 2006:
http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?rep=2&aid=343860&ssid=364&sid=ENV
http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm
Since Microsoft opened the format for the VHD, WinImage (Shareware) now supports it.
…did I place my ass at?
Swamped
Oh yeah, it is attached, no chance at losing that. Good thing too, I have just been so swamped with stuff. I am hoping to play a little catch up over the holidays here. No doubt I will fail but I will certainly give it an effort. You may find I blog over the next week like a 42″ Pike flopping around in a 15 foot bass boat sort of tossing and turning here and there and going every which direction until I clunk myself good in the head or flop overboard. I have some drywall work I have to get done in the kitchen and actually hopefully also paint as well. Plus well there is the whole gifts and family things that go on.
Work
Work has just been terribly eventful the last few months with some hugely bad news for me personally in the last week regarding my manager. The whole reason I actually came back to work for the company I work for. He gets things done and leaves you alone while you get things done. He pounds you if you do something wrong, he pats you on the back when you do something right. If you need something he gets it for you or explains to you why you don’t want it in the first place. Other than that he stays away. He is about as anti-micro managing as you can get. I could easily go a month without talking to him at all since he was in Colorado and I am in Michigan. He hires what he feels are good people and then lets them do what they feel they need to do. A very good system. A very good manager. I have been lucky to have a few really good managers, sucks to lose another one. On the positive side, the last time he was my manager and I got re-orged to another manager I was fired within like 2 weeks. It is doubtful that will happen again, in fact, several managers would all love to have me on their teams and the main concern from everyone is that I will quit since I won’t have my old manager any more. Rest assured, I am not quitting right away. I told everyone I will watch to see what happens in January. We are working on doing some pretty interesting things and as my former manager told me when I chatted to him about this unfortunate event said something like… “Even without me you still have it pretty good although you are very underpaid.” 🙂 I said that I will watch to see what happens but certainly I will be looking closer at what the head hunters send me now.
Google Picasa
Oh if you play with images at all, you may want to look at Picasa from Google. Very cool. I saw it on a recent business trip and finally loaded it and looked at it. It is one of the smoothest tools I have seen, just beautiful. Rocket fast as well. Plus, the easiest/best red eye reduction and auto color/light/saturation correction I have seen yet. I am going to point it at my folders with about 43,000 images this weekend and see how it handles it.
Microsoft Expressions
I downloaded the Expressions Web Creation software trial this week. I am curious to see the FrontPage replacement. I have been looking to revamp joeware.net for some time now because the Frontpage “goodies” annoy me every time I go surfing through the structure with SmartFTP and if I want to make small changes FrontPage always wants to upload a zillion new things. I have thought about going to a nice retro look too. Gray backgrounds with courier new font, all driven by perl cgi… I would prefer something zippy though and maybe Expressions is what I want to do it with, we will find out. Oddly it doesn’t seem to be available on MSDN Subscriber downloads. Since it replaces FrontPage and FrontPage was there that doesn’t make sense to me. I wonder if Google is going to come out with a Web designer package. If it were like Picasa I expect I would end up running it.
No Air Pistol for me it looks like
I ordered an Air Pistol to get myself as a end of year / work bonus / christmas gift present. I looked around for a while and settled on a nice Weihrauch HW 40 PCA (.177 caliber). It is a single shot pellet pistol with about 410 feet per second max velocity. It is nice because it is supposed to be highly accurate and is a single stroke pneumatic meaning no CO2 cartridges. I am not looking for a gun to shoot creatures, I just wanted to do some paper and metal trap target shooting. I even ordered the match pellets instead of the tear through everything pellets. Unfortunately the day after I ordered the pistol I get a nice email saying my order was canceled because the State of Michigan won’t let you have a pellet gun with a rifled barrel unless you have a permit from the police department. If the pellet gun had a smooth bore barrel I would be fine even if it fired at three times the velocity. This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever. I can’t seem to find any local shops that carry that brand which is upsetting as I picked it because it appears to be good solid German quality, however I did find out that the Beeman P3 is very similar and there is a place not too far away that carries it so I will go take a drive at some point and see what the story is. If it is something I can handle through the gun dealer, I will do it, if I have to muck with the cops, I won’t bother.
It isn’t looking a lot like Christmas
I have friends in the Pacific Northwest and friends in Colorado who say they have been simply BLASTED with snow this week. Here in southern Michigan the weather is actually quite amazing for December. While we have had small snow falls with maybe an inch sitting at one point, the last few weeks have been getting up into the 50’s. I love it. This is just fine for me. I grew up in Northern Lower Michigan, I saw all the snow I wanted then. If I want snow now I can go find it easily, it doesn’t need to be all around me for months and months. I don’t know if that has had impact on me but I have been having a rather good time shopping for presents this year. Normally I hate going out into the malls and shops and looking for things during this time of year. The people all annoy me near to death. This year I have spent more time in the stores than ever except for when I worked retail and I am fine doing it and I am even nice and cheery and smiley to the retail workers which seems to shock many of them. I think that even though I have some crappy things going on at the moment that really test the limits of my patience, overall I am doing very well and really quite happy with myself and the people that are in my life and excited about what is to come because I feel some amazing stuff is just around the corner for me. Sure there are all sorts of things I would change if I could, decisions I would handle differently, exercise I would have done more of, food I would have ate less of, things I wouldn’t have bought, other things I would have bought, all sorts of things that could be changed but overall, things are pretty good in my corner of the world.
joe
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