sterlinganderson.net

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Blogger takes joy in bashing Mac, blogger doesn’t tell whole story.

03 August 2006

What a shock. I read the following in which the blogger was happy to point out how easy it was for a hacker to gain control of a new MacBook through a flaw in the wireless network drivers. Of course, he neglected to point out that the demo was using a third party network card, not the built in airport card on the MacBook. Most likely because the Apple hardware does not have a known exploit at this time.
Of course, it is always important to be conscious of security, but it gets rather annoying at the lengths people go to to ?¢‚Ǩ?ìprove” how the Mac platform is just as bad as Windows. The fact is the mac is more secure. When Apple posts a security update to patch 26 security flaws one needs to realize that most often much of what they are patching is services that are not in use and are not a concern to the average user.

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A flash flood, and our car is toast.

28 July 2006

Or, I guess I should say our car is soggy bread. I had to run down to campus yesterday to pick up a laptop that was being worked on, but thought I’d stop and say hi to my old coworkers at the Primate Center first. Shortly after I got there it started to rain. We ran in the rain to the closest restaurant, Taco John’s, and were pretty much stranded there. We had to wade through approximately 1 foot of water to get to dry land when we finally left. Here’s some pictures from Taco John’s.

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Host change successful

24 July 2006

It took far longer than it should have but I am finally switched over to my new host. I chose to switch from site5 to TextDrive. I was not all that happy with how site5 was dealing with Rails hosting so I decided to switch. I gotta tell ya, not too happy with how site5 handles things right now. One would think it would be easy to just change one’s DNS servers and wait for the changes to propagate. Not that easy apparently. I have two domains, both have their DNS hosted by site5. I changed one, but the other would not update, I was either getting errors from their web server, or the changes would just not ?¢‚Ǩ?ìstick”. Support took forever to respond to my requests. In the mean time, the domain that did update was not propagating. Five days later I emailed them regarding that and the response I got was ?¢‚Ǩ?ìAre you sure? Everything looks fine to me.” Magically, DNS had been flushed and the domain was pointing to textdrive’s servers. I didn’t buy it. I got the same type of response when I asked about why I couldn’t get the other domain to even update. After 48 hours of no response, I finally get one stating i was doing something wrong. I go back to the site and magically it now works. I update my record, but again three days later the changes have not propagated to the rest of the web. I email support and half an hour later the DNS if pointing to the new host and everything is working. For having wizz bang automated systems I am not all that impressed at the amount of time I had to spend email asupport at site5 over and over again.
Anyway, Everything seems to be working. After I screwed up the blog performing an upgrade to Typo I’m up and running smoothly.

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Changing hosts

17 July 2006

I’m changing site hosts and if you can read this then the change has happened.

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More on Google

26 June 2006

I’ve been fully using Google for about two weeks now and am quite happy. Gmail is great. Google Calendar is great. I’m also using a Rails application called Tracks for my GTD stuff. When I am sitting in front of a computer it is the perfect solution. The thing is, I actually got my dream phone/PDA, a Palm Treo 700p. It’s a great device. I can’t sync Google Calendar to the Palm calendar app though. Google also does not have an interface for their Calendar that works with the small screen web browser of the Treo. For the time being it looks like I will be using the Palm calendar app and going back to iCal. Tracks works okay in the Palm web browser so I can still use that.

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Taking Google for a spin

09 June 2006

I’m not sure Apple has earned my $100 this year when it comes time for my .Mac account renewal. So I’ve been taking a more serious look at what Google has to offer. I took a quick look at Yahoo!, but their new beta web mail interface is basically a web based copy of your typical three paned email application. Nothing special at all.

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