http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog Technology for a Clear Mind Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:54:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The word "free" is always dicey when you talk about computer software. Usually, free software is a loss-leader for the software company, and such software often comes bundled with stuff which tries to separate you from your money later on. And, in the worst cases, this "stuff" is ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2008/11/06/free-antivirus-software-packages/ Thought I'd give a shout-out to the makers of LogMeIn (http://logmein.com), who have come up with a useful free version of a product which turns out to be more handy than my previous option (a combination of DynDNS, VNC, and fiddling with routers).   In the span of 3 months, ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2007/12/03/logmein-good-stuff/ A client of mine ran into an odd event last week: the computer seemed to be infected either with a virus or with an anti-virus program which wouldn't shut up. After looking at it a bit, I had to shut down the web browser, and though I couldn't find any malware, ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2007/11/19/new-kinds-of-malicious-website-advertisements/ http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39187298,00.htm brings up an interesting issue. Part of the topic really is a lack of management at such places. The types of tasks which need to be done in the enterprise haven't been analyzed, and thus employees are allowed to do basically anything they want with their machines. They consequently ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2006/04/17/small-to-medium-business-uptake-of-linux/ Just a few quick speed hints for using SCP, which came my way: The -C flag will tell SSH/SCP to compress stuff. In general I use it all the time. CPUs are so much faster than networks still so compression is your friend. Depending on your platform, using the blowfish cipher should ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2005/04/17/scp-hints/ What I appreciate about this article over at RedHat (as I read): 1. This guy clearly will bounce between operating systems. He mentions "MSYS" (http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml) which also should be in one's bag of tricks with cygwin. 2. He is willing to consider some old 8086 machines and dot-matrix printers as potential ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2005/04/17/open-source-in-the-police-department/ The linux world, in its fight to act like a point-for-point rebuttal to the Windows and Mac worlds, are busily adding features and bloat to desktop offerings. However, in the process, a regular mainstream Linux distribution like Mandrake or Red Hat take as much, and at times more, memory and ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2004/10/19/lighter-weight-linux-distributions/ Open Source Is Fertile Ground for Foul Play contains important security concerns. One part of the Total-Cost-of-Ownership will be, basically, open source code auditing, for those companies who go that route. No way to gloss over that. It is most certainly possible to inject malicious code into distributions, but you ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2004/04/19/open-source-security/ One of the most enjoyable and potentially useful bits of linux paraphernalia has been the explosion of "bootable linux" distributions. For quite a while, the main ones which were well known were tomsrtbt and Knoppix. Since a couple years ago there has been a truly wonderful proliferation of bootable distributions, ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2004/03/02/bootable-linux/ Habeas apparently makes their money by giving folks tools to receive email which is 'wanted'. Hilariously enough, however, one of the main ways they accomplish this is by: inserting a haiku into the headers of an email! A recent spam to my account showed the poetic verve of the company: X-Habeas-SWE-1: ... http://www.clearmindtech.com/blog/2004/01/19/spamku/