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Busy, Busy

Like many people I know, the dicho­tomy between doing and blog­ging is often resolved by more doing, and not so much blog­ging, espe­cially with Twit­ter, Identi.ca, et al around for the quick asides. Time to craft a care­ful post is in short sup­ply, espe­cially suf­fi­cient time to craft a post that looks effortless.

But today one of my pro­jects has fin­ished one major phase so I’m tak­ing some time. I’ve star­ted work­ing in health­care, or more pre­cisely, doing pro­ject man­age­ment on a pro­ject basis for Alschuler Asso­ci­ates, involving lots of XML, lots of cli­ent dis­cus­sions, and work­ing with a dis­trib­uted team across 3 timezones. It’s inter­est­ing, and com­plic­ated, and I still feel like I’m just get­ting star­ted although I’ve been work­ing on it for almost six months.

And it’s just as well those pro­jects are in a slower spell, since in a little over a week the XML Sum­mer School starts, for which I’m Course Dir­ector. Most of the prep work has been done, and soon the fun and learn­ing start. I enjoy going each year, catch­ing up on new tech­no­lo­gies, learn­ing more about the ones I’ve heard about before but haven’t had a chance to try out, catch­ing up on what’s new in the world of XML. I didn’t make it to Bal­is­age this year due to pro­ject com­mit­ments (see above); the XML Sum­mer School makes up for that to some extent. And this year we’re in Oxford at the right time for the St Giles Fair, which makes for a change to the usual pub crawl.

Other pro­jects are tak­ing a back seat, unfor­tu­nately. There’s only so much time in the day, and so many inter­est­ing things to fill it with.

2010 08 27 General Comments (1) Permalink

Amazon Spam

Some­times spam is amus­ing. Email address and actual links elided, but the rest is as it arrived in my inbox:

Thanks for your order, my email address

Did you know you can view and edit your orders online, 24 hours a day? Visit Your Account.

Order Information:

E-mail Address:  my email address
Order Grand Total: $ 97.99

Earn 3% rewards on your Amazon.com orders with the Amazon Visa Card. Learn More

Order Summary:
Details:
Order #: 	D99-2665292-8925183
Subtotal of items: 	$ 82.99
	------
Total before tax: 	$ 29.99
Sales Tax: 	$ 0.00
	------
Total for this Order: 	$ 47.99

The following item was ordered:
	Click here and see items, Price: $ 48.99
By: Click here
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

I par­tic­u­larly like the way none of the num­bers bear any rela­tion­ship to each other, except for end­ing in “.99″.

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2010 07 24 General Comments (2) Permalink

Google Apps and Google Docs

For small com­pan­ies, like my one-person con­sult­ing shop and many of my cli­ents, using Google Apps is an obvi­ous solu­tion to the prob­lem of email and shar­ing doc­u­ments and cal­en­dars. The stand­ard edi­tion is usu­ally enough, which makes it free as well. So far email also seems to be delivered more quickly than through my old web­site host.

The most com­plic­ated part of set­ting up Google Apps is con­fig­ur­ing the DNS cor­rectly; that’s the sub­ject of another post. The most con­fus­ing part of using it, how­ever, con­tinu­ally bites and until Google fixes it (and I can’t ima­gine they’re not aware of the prob­lem), will con­tinue to annoy.

Here’s the issue. I signed up for a Google account (docs, primar­ily) using my stand­ard email address. Then I set up a Google Apps account for Tex­tu­al­ity where I have the same email address, and a Google Apps ver­sion of doc­u­ments, cal­en­dar, etc. I now have two Google accounts with the same email address, dif­fer­ent pass­words, dif­fer­ent URLs to log into at, and they show dif­fer­ent con­tents. If someone shares a doc­u­ment with me using my stand­ard email address, it some­times shows up in the non-Apps account, and some­times in the Apps account, and occa­sion­ally in both. I have yet to fig­ure out the algorithm by which the Google doc­u­ments shar­ing mech­an­ism decides which account (with the same email address, remem­ber) gets which document.

I’m sure (or at least hope) that Google will fix the prob­lem even­tu­ally. In the mean­time, it’s some­thing to be aware of.

2010 04 05 Technology Comments (4) Permalink

More mod_security

After I wrote my piece about mod_security, the people at Packt Pub­lish­ing offered me a copy of their book Mod­Se­cur­ity 2.5, with the pro­viso that I review it. This soun­ded like a reas­on­able idea to me.

Over­all, I would recom­mend the book to people who are run­ning Apache and need to know more about rel­at­ively simple ways to add secur­ity to their web sites. The book motiv­ates the use of mod_security and con­vinced me that any­one host­ing a web site should have it installed, ready to deal with any prob­lems you encounter. The book goes through com­mon scen­arios and what mod_security can do to deal with them, includ­ing recent events such as an attack on Twit­ter in April 2009. All the examples are explained clearly, and the rule con­fig­ur­a­tions will look famil­iar if you’ve had some prac­tice writ­ing either Rewrit­eEn­gine dir­ect­ives or httpd.conf vhost con­fig­ur­a­tions. It also shows how to send alert emails or count the num­ber of times a file has been down­loaded, which I thought were nice additions.

As is the case with any secur­ity sys­tems, there are lay­ers upon lay­ers of things you can do, and the book includes quite a few that I think are overkill unless you sus­pect you’re being tar­geted for some reason (such as fin­an­cial or con­tro­ver­sial sites). If you do have one of those sites, the chapter on block­ing com­mon attacks alone could save a lot of pain. Many of the com­mon attacks are covered (SQL injec­tion, XSS, etc.), along with ways to com­bat them.

The book includes instruc­tions on installing a couple of GUI tools to help mon­itor incid­ents; I didn’t have time to install all of these given the OpenSolaris/Linux dif­fer­ences and it’s less import­ant for me given the fact I’m not run­ning sites that are likely to be attacked (my high-bandwidth sites are on com­mer­cial host­ing). If you’re run­ning import­ant web sites, you’d prob­ably want to set up these tools to work prop­erly to save hunt­ing through log files yourself.

I tested a few things out on the OpenSol­aris box in the base­ment; get­ting it installed was a little dif­fer­ent to the book (which is writ­ten mostly assum­ing a Linux web stack).

mod_security is installed with 2009.06 ver­sion of the OpenSol­aris web stack, but not act­ive. To activ­ate: pfexec cp /etc/apache2/2.2/samples-conf.d/security2.conf /etc/apache2/2.2/conf.d/security2.conf. Restart the server with svcadm restart apache22 and check that mod_security is installed by see­ing if the logs are avail­able under /var/apache2/2.2/logs. You can also check if the mod­ule is loaded by cre­at­ing and execut­ing a phpinfo file.

2010 01 29 Technology Comments (1) Permalink

Bluetooth (Time) Sync

One of the annoy­ing things about mov­ing to the 64-bit Win­dows 7 is that Palm decided not to sup­port USB syn­chron­iz­a­tion. Since my phone/PDA is a Treo 680, that’s a nuis­ance. In the­ory, I can sync via bluetooth. In prac­tice, it’s not as easy as it used to be.

First off, I had to get a bluetooth-USB dongle to use with my desktop PC. I plugged it in, Win­dows found it and installed the driver. That much worked. The page linked to above shows the steps to go through to enable the bluetooth syn­chron­iz­a­tion with the Treo; fol­low­ing those steps worked just fine (although s-l-o-w-l-y) the first time. And then it stopped work­ing, with an error mes­sage “unable to ini­ti­ate hot­sync oper­a­tion because the port is in use by another application”.

I tried unplug­ging the bluetooth device, dis­abling it, noth­ing worked. I then fool­ishly installed the soft­ware that came with the device, which was a bad mis­take, as it made everything bluetooth-related stop work­ing. And even though I tried to unin­stall it after­wards, noth­ing worked.

I used Glary util­it­ies to clean the registry, it found a lot of entries that CCle­aner, my pre­vi­ously favour­ite registry cleaner didn’t. Res­ult: sup­posedly a cleaner registry, but no joy on the bluetooth device settings.

Pok­ing around on the web uncovered this, and since web­sites have a habit of dis­ap­pear­ing, tak­ing their use­ful inform­a­tion with them, I’m going to take the liberty of rewrit­ing the sali­ent points here.

Unplug the device. Go to the con­trol panel, then search for “ser­vices”. From the Ser­vices win­dow, browse the list of ser­vices and find the Bluetooth Sup­port Ser­vice, and double-click the entry. Select Auto­matic from the Star­tup type and then click OK. Plug the device back in.

This at least meant that I could access the set­tings on the bluetooth device, which was an advance, even if I still couldn’t hot­sync. In the end, I dis­covered that if I added another couple of COM ports, that the Treo would hot­sync. Slowly, of course. And the next time I wanted to sync, I had to delete all the COM ports that the bluetooth dongle knew about, and add another.

My next phone/PDA will come from a com­pany that does allow USB syn­chron­iz­a­tion. On present form, it looks like it won’t come from Palm.

2010 01 27 Technology Comments (2) Permalink

Moving to Windows 7 — Part Two

After the pre­vi­ous set of Win­dows 7 adven­tures, I dis­covered that the box I bought doesn’t sup­port hardware-assisted vir­tu­al­isa­tion, which is needed for the Vir­tual XP mode. Option 2 for the scan­ner: try out a sep­ar­ate applic­a­tion called VueS­can, which claims to sup­port a large num­ber of scan­ners. Except for, this pro­gram needs the Canon scan­ner drivers to first be installed. Which don’t exist. On to the next attempt: install Vir­tual Box, and put Win­dows XP on that as a vir­tual machine. The prob­lem with this was that the USB port kept claim­ing it was busy, and none of the vari­ous tips I found worked. Ver­dict: I couldn’t find a way to sup­port the Canon 3000F scan­ner under Win­dows 7 64-bit, and will have to use my old XP laptop as a scan­ner driver until I have suf­fi­cient motiv­a­tion to buy a new scanner.

Mind you, installing the vir­tu­al­box + Win­dows XP combo ended up being use­ful any­way. Quick­Books 2003 installs, but doesn’t run, under Win­dows 7. I gather that even the latest ver­sions of Quick­Books have issues with Win­dows 7, so I simply installed the one I have in the Win­dows XP vir­tual machine. There was a bit of fid­dling involved in mov­ing data around, that involved installing the vbox guest addi­tions and set­ting up shared folders, but in the end it all worked. I sus­pect more than a couple of pro­grams will end up in that vir­tual machine.

Over­all, I prob­ably spent close to a week of work time set­ting up my work envir­on­ment to be more or less where I was before my old PC died. It’s obvi­ous they bor­rowed quite a bit from the Mac OS X envir­on­ment, includ­ing hid­ing some of the use­ful func­tions. The menus fad­ing in and out were start­ing to make me sea-sick until I found out how to turn that off (Con­trol Panel -> Sys­tem and Secur­ity -> Sys­tem -> Advanced -> Per­form­ance Set­tings). I’m sure I’ll find more issues as I get more used to the envir­on­ment, along with more pro­grams that won’t install or work. For­tu­nately cyg­win does work under Win­dows 7, along with Office 2003 (which I need for cli­ent compatability).

2010 01 25 Technology Comments (0) Permalink