Working vacation

I’ll be away on a working vacation for the next week. Have a safe &
good Memorial Day weekend. Time to get on the road to catch our flight.
Hopefully security won’t be too bad …

Oh, I had to smile on the
FAA ” EZ-pass ” that was discussed this morning on TV. This nifty card will have
our biometrics & fingerprints, so you can just walk through the security
without needing to be checked. Sounds like an optional national ID to me. Could
be a good thing, but I already hear big brother in the background. Maybe they
should just upgrade our driver’s licenses or international passports. New
resident alien cards already have biometrics and an extensive background check.
Anyway, that’s food for later. Have to run! Enjoy the long weekend.

Mac OS X 10.3.4 update

Mac OS X 10.3.4 update. Small updates to
applications, improved file sharing & burning, support for certain hardware
& 3rd party apps, a few fixes and the recent security updates built-in -
in detail.

Amongst other things:
long URLs in Mail should now open correct & external firewire drives that
were lost in 10.3.3 (gggrrrr) should be found again!

12 GB Compact Flash card

If you’re into serious digital photography you have to pre-order a Pretec 12 GB CF card They’re only $14.900!
Before taxes. All joking aside, it’s nice to see they are squeezing that much
capacity into a compact flash card. Of all camera storage media, compact flash
is my favorite and the most economical.

Bleedingheart or Dicentra Spectabilis

First time I saw this type of flowers, called Bleedingheart or Dicentra
Spectabilis.

Canon G5 5MP - Return to Canon

Wanting to grow into a more versatile & better digital camera, we
upgraded to a Canon G5 a short while back, and, I have to give
it a failing grade. With over a 1000 exposures, I’ve taken enough time for (a)
the camera to prove itself and (b) for me to grow into it. I made sure I wasn’t
overlooking anything by checking things with the manual. After all it’s a very
capable camera with lots of settings.

I generally know my way around
electronics, cameras & digital cameras, but getting this camera to take a
picture was often a nightmare, and then still it wouldn’t have the right focus!
Day to day I mainly use P mode -1/3 stop down + manual white balance. On this
camera I also used auto mode to complement trying both continuous vs single and
center vs evaluative focus in P mode, because I simply wasn’t getting the
results a camera of this level should produce. (read more)

Pantherized

I took the plunge I Panther-ized my Cube. My Cube’s Jaguar
partition was filling up and the system getting a little slow, so, rather than a
clean sweep, I did a painless & quick Panther installation (followed by the
“somewhat” slower internet updates). I still need to install and configure a
series of things, but the essence is there, and it’s fast. I’ll share some
Panther observations later.

I had a long fit with Thunderbird 0.6 (TB) this morning. Installed the
new v0.6, and of course it did not import nor want to recreate my profile nor
accounts (folders, messages, etc.) from the v0.5 backup. Looking at TB support,
both migrating from 0.5 to 0.6 and restoring from backkup, are just a matter of
copying the old profile, trashing the new (default) one and on you go - which is
what I thought. Not!

After different trials, ideas and quite a bit of
time; I finally found it. When you recreate your profile and all accounts
manually (which you’re not supposed to have to do!) and then copy the backup
mailboxes into the recreated accounts, Thunderbird will recognize your accounts
& messages. All support pointing to copying the profile or the accounts into
place did not work in my case. Only infusing the recreated profile and accounts
with the mail folders. At least I’ve got it working now.

Thanks to
Paul Baily’s iBlog Backup, restoring my blog was
effortless. I’m just curious now if iBlog will publish or act up under Panther.
We’ll see.

[edit] Well, publication went fine. Only it was followed
by the dreaded iBlog crash after publication, taking a new entry I was typing
with it. Note to self: don’t work on a new entry while publishing.

The moose is loose

Just a quick post to share one of our exciting pictures of the day.
We just returned from our moose safari, with Maine guide Ed Mathieu from moosecountrysafaris.com (who we went
dogsledding with back in February), and this is one of the moose we saw.

More security risks - not.

I can’t help but laugh and shake my head about some of the technology
headlines.

A new Intego
trojan warning. Do they really need to make a fool of themselves,
again?! You’d think they know what is what since they’re in the security
business. Let’s see. There is a small applescript file you can download from P2P
networks related to cracking Office for Mac, which in fact wipes your home
folder. Does that sound like anything virus-, trojan-, whatever-like? Not to me!
It’s nice that they alert against such a file but it has zero to do with the
virus & security realm. They need a computer dictionary.

A new
critical wireless
802.11b flaw has been detected at a university. (Ok, you have my
attention.) You can disrupt a wireless network with a certain adaptor or
transmitter and block communications. Really?! And you need to be at a
university to figure that one out? Throw a metal/lead shield around a
transmitter and it’ll be mute. Put a more powerful emitter near the
infrastructure and it’ll blow the legitimate one out of the air. This has
happened with radio communications since whenever. Nothing new. Oddly enough
this would only affect 802.11b. Wrong. It affects every kind of radio
communication. The only difference is that with 802.11b you can hack the network
easier with cheaper tools and then mask the 3rd party router as the one to
authenticate with, get people’s NICs, the WEP keys, … and go to work with
those later. Old wireless security news in a new jacket.

Just two
comments

2 Travel photos

Just a quicky:
Jogging between Damme & Sint-Kruis, West-Flanders

Detail of City Hall in Brugge.

Quiet Sunday

Finally a calmer day, and some time to catch up with different things
and watch a movie. We enjoyed some laughs with the movie The Visitors. A French
production about a knight & his vasal who got teleported into our time.

Time has just flown by with different things (not in front of and
unrelated to computers) which is not necessarily bad, but, it itches that I
haven’t blogged anything, not checked in on my online friends and neglected my
email.

I’ve been pretty pre-occupied with a possible big project for
the near future; which will take up a lot of my time and energy the coming
months (in positive ways). I’ll reserve announcement (either way) for later,
once things are firm and official. We certainly hope & wish things will fall
into place. So far things seem to go well. Keep your fingers crossed!

My body also seemed to want to play catch up with some lack of sleep
in Europe & jet lag, this past week. The first days we returned I fell
asleep where I sat by 9PM (rather than 11-12), cutting my days a bit short. Jet
lag is not generally an issue for me (at least it wasn’t really in the past) so
I bet it has to do with a few stressing days over the pond. Family issues …
(sigh)

Oh, spring has finally arrived. I can tell by my allergies
starting to act up. Hum hum. I went past the arboretum and the following two
days my sinuses are acting up more and more … Anyway. It is so wonderful to
see nature come to life. After our visit to Belgium where everything was so
green and spring so vibrant, it looked like winter here! … Which reminds me
that I need to surface some Belgium & spring photos! BRB

More worms & phishing

Things just got a little worse, again. Getting a bogus corporate email
that your Citibank / Ebay / Paypal / … account has expired / been compromised
/ … with the kind request to update them; is one thing.

Enter
SEPUC: You receive a blank email with hidden
code that downloads & installs pieces of code on your system which build a
keylogger Trojan that transmits your sensitive data nicely back out. Nice! Thing
is we had more than a few of those in the past week.

Oh, have you
heard about the new SASSER? It’s a worm that hits a vulnerable
machine, scans the internet for more vulnerable machines, forwards itself
without user intervention onto that machine through a windows security hole and
then it continues from there. No email involved!

Why again do I
like using Mac OS X on my primary machine? No, it’s not for some of the
features it’s lacking With increasing frequency we find ourselves on the
front line, before certain patches and updates have been released. Even with the
right tools the security side is a time consuming stressful side effect of
Windows computing. I’m starting to see Mac OS X running on C’s desk in the near
future (even though her incredimail email client has no Mac
brother/sister).

OS X security update

Apple released a small security update. Time for software
update.

PS: You’ll note that QuickTime 6.5.1 appears in the list as
well. It has a new lossless audio codec, improved AAC encoding, improved support
for iTunes.

More iBooks qualify for repair + iTunes 4.5 Mac & Win

Apple’s iBook logic board repair program now covers May 2002 till October 2003.

iTunes
4.5 for both OS X & Windows systems, with new features like WMA
import, iMix, Party Shuffle, CD inserts, …

iBlog Backup script

If you are using iBlog, then Paul Baily’s iBlog
Backup is likely THE must have tool.

It automates backing
up and restoring your iBlog data and preferences into a few clicks process. I
helped a little testdriving it, and it’s really a handy tool. No need to
struggle with the finder, iBlog Backup will do it for you.

So, don’t
risk losing your entire blog, … keep a compressed backup around which is just
as easily restored as it was backed up.

Keep your seatbelt fastened till the plane stopped at the (railway) station and …

Now, that could be a while! Good thing they let us off the plane at the
airport The Dutch flight hostess uses the train a lot, I suppose

Anyway, we’re back, safe and well. It was a nice, but short trip. As
you know, I’m sure, 6 days fly by. Sightseeing & photography was limited
because of some obligations, but you can look forward to some new photos.