I’ve been having trouble finding inspiration and motivation in a particular area of my job lately. Allow me to try to provide a metaphor:

Imagine you built a treehouse for your son. A lot of hard work, extra time, sweat, and effort went into it. It’s got a couple loose nails, but it’s an otherwise awesome treehouse that does it’s job very well and is used constantly by your son. Then imagine you get a new father-in-law (not likely, but play along here). In trying to adopt a grandson, he buys a new treehouse. But it’s one of those chincy play-school houses (not meant to be in a tree…) and as such it’s really cheap, not being used for what it’s meant for and doesn’t even have a ladder as a result. But he insists that it gets put in and now you need to build a ladder. Unfortunately, you can’t just build one straight to the new treehouse from the ground as there is already quite a substantial ladder structure in place for the existing treehouse; you need to connect the two treehouses. But the new one doesn’t hold up very well and it’s not exactly easy to connect the two. So in the end, it’s not easy to do, nor do you have the motivation since you know the new treehouse is not going to be anywhere as good as the old one, but you have no choice…you have to connect the two.

This is the dilemma I am in and it is quite discouraging, to say the least. I know my treehouse is better, but I have to accomodate the new one despite all its misgivings. Is this to be expected when new family comes along?

With the recent update of Google’s index, I appear to be better represented. Previous searches of Damon Cortesi on Google didn’t bring up this page at all while similar searches for Damon Cortesi did. I’m still nowhere near the most popular Cortesi or Damon out there, but I don’t really have a problem with that. Sometimes I enjoy being obscure…

Seems there was a nerd on Jeapordy (from Carnegie Mellon…no surprise) that wagered $1337 during Final Jeapordy, or in leetspeak - “elite”. Nice.

via Boing Boing

The complete first season of MacGyver is going to be released on DVD! It’s not until January 25, so no Christmas present for me, but I can’t wait! I’d love for Airwolf to come back, too.

So like everybody else seems to be doing, I picked up the new Audiovox SMT5600. Besides a minor service activation issue between Amazon and AT&T, the purchase went well and it’s a pretty nice little smartphone. I’ve been trying to find some good freeware for it, but there’s not much at all out there. Granted, software only costs $5-$20, but I just want to play with stuff right now! I did find some useful info on it over on Dan’s blog. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make better use of this thing than all my other previous pda’s.

I’ve been playing with my new phone all day and I can’t believe what it just did. I was setting up a new moblog and I needed to configure email on my phone so I could send in my pictures. I figured it wouldn’t work since I have a somewhat custom configuration (SSL over IMAP, but on the regular IMAP port). Amazingly, my phone identified I was using SSL and logged in fine! wow…I think it might already be worth the -$25!

Google put up a nice cheat sheet on how to use some of their advanced search features - quite useful!

Sorry for the lack of posts lately - I detached for the past week and took an awesome vacation. More details later when I haven’t been looking at a screen for over 12 hours.

So I got a new camera recently (justification to follow). For a picture of the best feature, take a look at my S4i gallery. grin

OK, it’s time for a little rant!

I am tired of people complaining about MS security, or rather the lack thereof. This is such a horribly over-generalized statement. If you take any system, application, or device and throw it on a network without tailoring it to what you need and making sure it’s got the latest software on it…you’re asking for trouble.

I’ve managed NT/IIS systems in the past that were Internet accessible (not even a firewall) and never had a problem. And yes, I would have known if a problem came up! grin When my superior’s came to me yelling “nimda nimda!”, I simply shrugged my shoulders as I had already patched all of our systems and only production webservers were running IIS in the first place.

Unfortunately, not all Windows administrators out there are as cognizant of the security aspects of administration as they should be. This is where a great deal of the failure has occured. Yes, there are numerous issues with Microsoft products, but there are issues with Cisco, MySQL, Linux, Oracle as well. You simply cannot drop a system in, make sure it works, and walk away…but this is what happens! Not all administrators have that little BSD devil sitting on their shoulder wondering what holes were left in a system.

So that’s how we dealt with systems of three or four years ago that weren’t even programmed with security in mind. But take a look at how Microsoft is coding today. Let’s take IIS6, for example. Michael’s post about IIS6 vs Apache2 is what got me fired up about this. Since the release of IIS6, there has not been a critical issue with Microsoft’s latest web server. This is an amazing accomplishment and indicative of the way that Microsoft is trying to do (Trustworthy Computing…) to address the problem of what drives administration - making things work.

Are there problems in Microsoft products? Yes Are there problems in other vendors products? Yes Is it possible to secure Microsoft technology? Yes!

So stop whining about how Microsoft is the worst software around. You can make it secure, it just requires a little effort.

end rant