Hi all,

Welcome to the first edition of my semi-regular (read: Whenever I actually have time) Techno-Oddities column, "Ramblin' On." As you can surmise by the title, I'm going to be doing just that -- yapping about anything that catches my attention, makes me chuckle, or pisses me off (more than likely the latter).

Getting right into it, let's talk about the whole Daylight savings time thing the folks in DC are proposing. If you've been living under a beach umbrella, you might have missed that our fine politicians have proposed an extension to Daylight savings time, extending it a month. Their logic -- more daylight increases productivity, cuts down on traffic accidents, and conserves energy.

Cut down on accidents huh? Tell that to the three I passed (at five miles an hour) this morning on the Long Island Expressway. Maybe all this daylight got in their eyes?

And I'm sorry -- conserve energy? Not on our side of the workforce fence. In fact, there's a chance that we'll have some tweaks and mods to make on computer clocks and other various programs that rely on time-based software. So computers will be running longer while fixes are made, and our IT guys will be staying later at work while making those fixes, and surprise...end up driving home in the dark anyway.

But hey, why worry? As Reps. Edward Markey of Massachusetts says, the change "...will make everyone sunnier."

Gosh Golly, Ed's right! I'll be so much happier with the sun smiling down on me as I skip down sugardrop lane on my way home to my Gingerbread house in snugglefrump valley.

(Sigh.)

No doubt the folks at AOL will be happy for more sun in their workdays -- it'll give them time to test their new Mobile Search Services. The service will let wireless phone users search the Internet and link to regular Web pages that it will reformat for tiny cell-phone screens.

Okay, has ANYONE really surfed the web using a cell phone? I mean come on -- really. I bought a cell phone a while back that had browsing capabilities. I used it once. I ended up with a new cell phone a few months a later. The most I've done with my current cell phone is downloaded a cute little version of "Burger Time" to play while my wife is in the store. And even that gives me a headache when I try to stare at the little frankfurter and eggs chasing my lil' blob of a chef guy as he tries to stack the hamburgers. Why the migraine? Because the screen is WEE! It's just a teeny thing. Who the heck wants to check out websites on these little screens? I don't even bother text messaging anyone -- Then again, I'm not fourteen and sitting in a boring ol' Biology class.

Surfing the web belongs on a computer, not on a cell phone...unless you're a smurf.

Alright. Enough rambling for one week.

T

As the first reviews of the initial salvo in the telecom-legislation reform movement drift in, it's clear that the lobbying power of the Bells and the Cablecos is in control of legacy telecom. That's why the VoIP industry and other future-looking communications players need to craft their own playing field, as soon as possible.

This Friday's Freebie is for application developers and is from Watchfire.

Watchfire® PowerTools^TM is a set of free web application security developer tools comprising the following utilities:

• HTTP Proxy - An HTTP intercepting proxy which allows users to stop, edit and submit requests and responses between the client and the server. It includes the ability to write automated scripts in JavaScript using the utility API. This enables users to manipulate requests/responses automatically on the fly. HTTP Proxy also includes logging facilities for debugging of HTTP communications.
• Connection Test - An HTTP pinging utility which helps website developers and auditors to test the connection between a client and a web server. Unlike the command PING, which uses the ICMP protocol (sometimes blocked by firewalls), Connection Test uses the HTTP protocol to communicate with the website.
• HTTP Request Editor – An HTTP Request Editor that enables users to create specific HTTP requests and send them to a website. The editing can be performed either on the raw request, or by viewing the request in a parsed mode. The response to the request can be viewed either raw, or in an embedded browser.
• Expression Test - A tool for testing regular expression patterns on a given text.
• Encode/Decode - A utility that transforms text strings into several encoding methods, such as URL Encoding, Base64, 3DES, MD5, SHA1, HTML entities, Overlong UTF-8 and more.

You can grab the tools from Watchfire's new Security Zone

Wow! For a minute there, I thought I was back in 1988, as I listened to an IBM presentation on its new mainframe.

VoIP is easy, isn't it? Fiddle with a few configurations, buy a little extra hardware, and voila, you can start saving money fast --- and get new applications in the bargain.

Ah, if only life were so easy.

Let's see, we've had travel (to Chicago), testing (of fixed-point wireless systems), an industry name change (Longhorn becomes Vista), and continuing news of vulnerabilities and attacks. In the midst of all this, I had a very good conversation with Dr. Hugh Thompson, chief security strategist at Security Innovation. We spent some time talking about the state of security in general, with some special attention given to the things that application developers can do to build security into the software they're building It was a good talk, and you can listen to it here.

I realize that I've been asking for comments when our comments section has been broken. Sorry about that--the web team is working to get things working again as soon as possible. In the meantime, feel free to send comments via e-mail to the address you'll find in my bio. Oh, one other thing; if you look over to the left, you'll find the link to subscribe to the Security Channel podcast. The folks who work behind the scenes here at nwc.com have done a super job making it possible for me to podcast, and I hope that you can take advantage of all their hard work.

The music in this podcast is "We Live as We Dream" from the album Secret Journey by NumberSix. They're an Internet-savvy group, and you can find their album here. Give them a listen.

I'm currently working on a business intelligence review and the first test began to run into issues as soon as it started trying to make sense of the data in NWC Inc.

Dates that are strings is bad and so is allowing just any old data into the database. BI tools like nice clean data to work with and my dirty data is driving tools crazy.

So I spent the morning cleaning up the data, including adding a new column to handle real dates. Of course then it was necessary to change the widget ordering code to make certain the new dates were entered into the database. And there's always that moment of "should I really hit enter on this SQL statement?" Nerve wracking, to say the least!

Then I added some indexes to some of the commonly used fields for reporting, because churning through more than half a million records can be a pain when you're pulling it across the network and trying to load it into Internet Explorer. I think it's helping... cause I"m finally able to pull data that makes some amount of sense:

Wow. Wonder what happened in 2002 that we only made $5,969? This year's looking good though, isn't it? Too bad it isn't real money, I could buy this, fix it up and still have money left for other things, like gaming books.

Alas, it's back to cleaning up all that dirty data. And you thought your mom wanted you to wash your hands just to keep germs away. She was just worried about dirty data and what problems it would cause later on.

So remember, always wash your hands before you enter data...your DBA will thank you for it.

For the latest Top 11 List, we're looking for all you Muggles to conjure up the "Top 11 reasons Harry Potter would make a lousy IT guy." Make us snicker like a slippery Slytherin and we'll post your entries in print and/or online. Here's a few to get you started:

• Shoving a wand into a PC's USB port and shouting "Fixio" doesn't solve anything.
• Leaves sticky fingerprints on your keyboard after eating Chocolate Frogs and Bernie Bots Beans.
• Constant, daily battles with Lord Voldemort (shhh! Don't say that name) leaves server room in shambles.

Now leave me alone...I'm still in shock over what happened in "Half-Blood Prince."

Last week, Microsoft decided it was to drop the tag "Longhorn" for its upcoming operating system. Instead, come 2006, everyone will prostrate themselves before "Windows Vista."

The Redmond folks have some real clever marketing planned for this puppy -- the software's tagline is "Bringing clarity to your world." Plus it also gets three very powerful keywords -- "Clear, Confident, Connected."

Can't you feel the confidence building inside you right now? (Maybe it's just lunch repeating on you)

Curious, I took a stroll over to the Mirriam Webster Dictionary online to scope out the definition of "Vista." This is what I found.

Main Entry: vis·ta
Pronunciation: 'vis-t&
Function: noun
Etymology: Italian, sight, from visto, past participle of vedere to see, from Latin vidEre -- more at WIT
1 : a distant view through or along an avenue or opening : PROSPECT
2 : an extensive mental view (as over a stretch of time or a series of events)

These definitions aren't all that far off I guess. After all, it seems like prospects of the software being released on time are distant. And when it does, it will leave us all feelng mental.

Another week, another IT Haiku. This week's comes compliments of Robert Hill, who reminds us all just where we stand in the grand scheme of things:

When nothing else works

Let's replace the part between

The keyboard and chair

Thanks Robert. That gives me a warm feeling deep inside. Or that could just be my acid reflux.

Want to show us your poetic prowress? Send in an IT Haiku. And remember the 5-7-5 rule, 'kay?

Its hard to believe that it was about seven years ago when we were all emailing one another with a link to a wierd little website filled with a myriad of animated, dancing Hamsters. And of course there was that little tune that will haunt us for the rest of our lives -- "Dee da dee da dee da doo doo doo." You know what I'm talking about -- the infamous Hampsterdance (yes, spelled, or misspelled that way).

And while we're down this memory lane, who can forget the horror of the Dancing Baby -- so popular at one time it "Ugha Chacka'd" its way onto the set of Ally "For the Love of God, eat something will you?" McBeal

The fine folks at CNet haven't. As a matter of fact, you'll find the hamsters, the baby and eight other internet phenomena have taken up residence over there -- thanks to CNet's compilation of the top 10 Web Fads.

Enjoy. And Remember -- All your Base...well, you know.

This week's Friday Freebie, which you get a few hours early because I'm in meetings and on the road all day tomorrow, is a cool set of tools from Talkr.

Talkr is inviting all bloggers to convert text-only, English language blogs into podcasts using its free podcasting tool. Talkr takes text-only blogs and turns them into mp3 files and provides tools to bloggers to distribute the audio files as podcasts. Talkr has previously targeted only a select number of bloggers, but now invites everyone to join in the podcasting craze.

To sign up, visit Talkr and click on the 'Want a free podcast of your blog?' link. Talkr claims it will only take about 10 minutes to set up, with no maintenance necessary.

Continuing from yesterday, I was searching for a video adapter. Al took the initiative and called RadioShack before we left. They had a 6 foot S-video to RCA cable. Perfect! "That'll be $40, plus tax". Oh hell no (looking at their website, Radio Shack did sell what I wanted online, at competitive price, but that was discovered just a few minutes ago). Head into Circuit City. This is a store that's dedicates 40% of their floor space to televisions. Nope, they don't have what I need. They did have a $229.99 surge protector for home theaters. Yes, that's twenty thousand, nine hundred ninety nine pennies. I'll let you guess who makes it (I'll give you a hint, they sell a $1499.99 'voltage stabilizer' surge protector too).

How about CompUSA? Al picked up a cool external bus powered USB to laptop disk drive converter for only $20, but alas I was without my video converter. Finally the last option, BestBuy, 4 minutes before closing. They had it, and for only $24.99. This thing should cost $10 at most, and that's being generous. It's just a little bit of plastic and metal. It shouldn't cost that much to develop and manufacture. Still, I was in a bind, so I bought it. Video has become way to damn complex on the consumer side. Composite video, component video, 4 pin s-video, 7 pin s-video, HDML, DVI, HDCP, IEEE 1394, 780p, 1080i, 480p, 480i...

I got my hands on a video conferencing product which will appear in next month's sneak preview section. Actually I got two of them. This product (I can't say who makes it yet) is designed to be used in a conference room to room scenario, not on a desktop PC. I opened the box and looked at the AV connectors on the unit. I see a white RCA jack. That must be for the left audio channel. I see a red RCA jack. That's for the right audio channel. I see a jack with four pin holes and a bar. Oh yeah, that's an S-Video jack. Hmm. There isn't an RCA video jack. Well there goes my plan to connect one of the units to my 13" TV, which only has RCA jacks. I look on the back of my 30" TV. Surely that has S-video. Nope, just RCA as well. Maybe the surround sound receiver has an S-video jack. Nope, all RCA and optical ports there. I don't have any devices that can handle S-video? My digital camcorder has an S-video input jack, but I don't think video conferencing should be reviewed on a 3" LCD screen. I could configure the unit to output video via the VGA port. I only have a 17" VGA monitor. Damnit, I want to use this product on the biggest screen I have, and that's the one in the living room. Converter cable! I need an S-video to RCA converter. My PowerBook has an S-vid out port. I remember it came with an S-vid to RCA converter cable. Problem solved. Guess again. That was a 7-pin male S-video to female RCA connector. The video conferencing unit has only 4 pins. I'd have to rip 3 pins right out to plug it in, which isn't an option I want to consider at this time. I want to complete this review by Monday at the latest, since we have our yearly NWC editors meeting on Wednesday. It's 7pm on Friday. The vendor wouldn't be able to ship me any suitable parts until Monday at best. This will require a trip to the store. I call up my friend Al, and we head to the mall. Story continues on Tuesday.

Sorry for skipping the Haiku pick last week, but I was busy praying for the sweet embrace of death thanks to a lovely stomach bug my twin 17 months twin boys decided Daddy just had to have. Aren't they generous?

Now that I've passed on more information that you probably wanted -- let's pick this week's Haiku winner, shall we?

Congrats to Brad Wright, with his very thoughtful prose:

Of all inventions,
The computer is the best.
Just don't turn it on.

That's right, only one freebie this Friday. Considering I lost my stash of e-mail earlier this week, I'm surprised I managed to dig any up for you!

This week's Friday Freebie is from The Gecko Tribe. CaRP (Caching RSS Parser) is available as both a free (as in gratis) version (with some limitations on long term storage and ability to modify contents before display) and as commerial versions at pretty affordable prices.

CaRP GPL allows you to turn RSS feeds into HTML for display on your website or convert RSS into JavaScript for the more technically minded site designer.

Full documentation is available at the GeckoTribe site, so go on out and get it today and get some RSS feeds from your favorite sites integrated into your site.

If you have any suggestions for next week's Friday Freebies, drop me an e-mail.

The MugMouse Click to Enlarge

Chances are you won't find this sold at your local Starbucks or McDonalds -- they've had enough trouble with hot, cross customers ending up with coffee 'tween their legs. I daresay you probably have to sign some sort of waiver before using this mouse/coffee mug hybrid. But the folks at SLOWEB aren't out to intentionally give you a steaming lapful of hot joe -- Quite the opposite. Their thought is that life is too fast paced. Therefore by using The MugMouse -- filled with your double shot latte espresso Americano deluxe -- you'll have no choice but to slow things down a bit.

Of course one can only hope that this gizmo is plug 'n' play -- otherwise it would be a real pain to have to reboot every time you plugged it back in after a coffee run.

It's been a rough week. For some strange reason Outlook decided it couldn't write to my PST file (maybe because it was more than 1GB in size and I was keeping it on a removable drive) and destroyed the whole damn thing.

A quick download of Thunderbird and I'm back in business - except for the loss of nearly three years of correspondence and all my contacts.

I haven't made much use of Google's desktop search in the past, but I suddenly realized that the fact that it keeps copies of everything it's indexing is going to save my proverbial behind. While it isn't organized, as long as I have an idea of what or who I'm looking for, a quick search and WHAM! There it is, cached and ready for me to review.

While I'm certain Google didn't intend for its desktop search product to be used as a "disaster recovery" tool, I have to say that it's certainly doing a damn fine job of being one at the moment.

So thanks, Google, for saving three years worth of e-mail and, apparently, my sanity.

Well, we've managed to avoid being blown away by a hurricane or burnt to a crisp in the sun while on a roof, so I guess it's been a pretty good week. To top it all off, I had a very good conversation with Paul Henry, senior vice president of Cyberguard. We talked about a number of things, starting with the attitudes he's seeing from companies who are looking at application-layer security.

I've built a podcast on the interview. You can find it here and, as always, let me know what you think. Oh, one other thing; if you look over to the left, you'll find the link to subscribe to the Security Channel podcast. The folks who work behind the scenes here at nwc.com have done a super job making it possible for me to podcast, and I hope that you can take advantage of all their hard work.

The music in this podcast is "We Live as We Dream" from the album Secret Journey by NumberSix. They're an Internet-savvy group, and you can find their album here. Give them a listen.

When we talk about vendor leadership, we usually talk about the CEOs: Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, John Chambers. But if you've ever worked closely with a vendor, you know that the heavy lifting -- and often, the visionary thinking -- is often done by the less-familiar names on the top of the org chart. Cisco this week has done some rearranging at that level, and it's worth taking a look to see what it might mean for the router vendor.

Cisco has had three big retirements in the past week: senior vice presidents Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero, and chief development officer Mario Mazzola. (See details on the announcements here.)These three leaders had a profound effect on Cisco's success during more competitive days.

July is setting up to be an interesting month for the Syracuse NWC staff. I've almost completed my evaluation of IP accessible KVMs. They work decently well for people connected on T1 or Cable/DSL lines, although even at 100Mbps you can't get a true on-console feel. There is always a bit of a delay and lag with the screen redraws. I also have a ton of equipment shipped to me for this article. Approximately 17 appliances, 40 dongles, 20 KVM cables, 17 power cables and a couple of serial cables are sitting on racks and in boxes behind me. I'm getting ready to start a video conferencing review in a few weeks. It deals with hosted solutions, so fortunately I don't need to worry about setting anything up beyond a few client installs of Windows.

In two weeks I'll be heading to Chicago along with the rest of the staff. We try to do this every year, where we can all get together in a room and talk about the upcoming year, new initiatives, coverage areas and so forth. It's also the time to plan the editorial calendar for 2006. Some cover stories can take up to six months to complete from start to print date, which is why we plan far in advance. The edit cal isn't set in stone, and we've been known to dramatically change stories from what was previously planned based on the market and industry shifts. If you have any story suggestions, including reviews and workshops, feel free to email them to me or the other beat editors by next Tuesday. I have already gotten several story ideas from fellow readers, and they're all quite good.

We're preparing to move the lab too. Next week, my lab will move about 75 feet to the west and 20 feet up. We actually have two labs in Syracuse. I'm in the Machinery Hall lab along with Bruce Boardman and Secure Enterprise's Mike Fratto and Joanne VanAuken. The other is the SciTech lab, housing Ron Anderson, Sean Doherty, Dave Molta and Pete Morrissey. These two labs are in separate buildings located about 500 feet apart. We will be moving into a single, completely remodeled, unified lab next week. The best part is that there will be an attached enclosed machine room to house the computers and air conditioner. No longer will I need to hear the whir of fan blades and air compressors. Sean's automatic two pot caffeine coffee maker is the second best part.

In the wake of today's apparent terrorist bombings in London, it's appropriate to ask -- now almost four years after the attacks of Sept. 11 -- why there isn't yet a national first-responders network built in this country.

OK, it's been a week since the last podcast, with a holiday and many hours crawling around on office-building roofs thrown into the middle. Fortunately, this is a solid podcast, featuring an interview with Kevin Kernan, CEO of Secure Software. The interview covers a lot of territory about information and network security, and should be interesting regardless of the type of products or approach you use for your organization's security.

You'll find the podcast here. Leave a comment, or drop an e-mail to let me know what you think of the podcast.

Woo!! One of the most useless, pointless programs ever written, Conan The Librarian, has been ported to Mac OS X. Conan tells you to shut up when the sound from the computer's microphone reaches certain levels. Install this on a loud coworker's machine as a reminder that people need to work, not listen to personal conversations on speakerphone.

At least as a standalone OS X application instead of a system 7 extension, it's less likely to crash the Mac outright.

"Akonix has published its June Threat Watch for instant messaging networks, citing a 400% increase in IM attacks during Q2 2005 as compared to last quarter."

"The IMlogic Threat Center, the industry’s first global consortium to provide threat detection and protection for instant messaging (IM) and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, today issued its Second Quarter 2005 report on the rise of IM security threats. The report demonstrates a sharp increase of over 2700 percent in new IM threats including viruses, worms, spam over IM (SPIM), malware and phishing attacks."

Sounds like a good time to read our newest issue. We cover digital convergence, security and affordable IT in this feature on IM security.

The Microsoft SQL Server team announced the public beta availability of the SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver, a new and fully supported JDBC driver for SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. Available as a redistributable download for all SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 users at no additional charge, it features enhanced performance, security and support.

Microsoft encourages the Java community to download and test the beta and provide their feedback for incorporation into the product's development. The SQL Server 2005 JDBC driver is available for download here.

Go get it, because as a general rule it can't be distributed with J2EE ISV products so you'll want to have it on hand in the event you've got a J2EE deployment that will require access to a SQL Server 2000 or 2005 database.

It's that time again -- our weekly IT Haiku winner. Carefully chosen (read: at the last minute) from the hundreds (read: dozen or so) entries -- this week's winning poem comes from John Inscoe:

When email is down
We can't send you a notice
That says email's down

How true John. How true. Of course, that doesn't stop folks from getting upset, does it? Chances are these are the same folks in your company who also like to use that handy-dandy beverage holder that pops out of their computer from time to time. Am I right?

Want to show us your poetic prowress? Send in an IT Haiku. And remember the 5-7-5 rule, 'kay?

That's right, it's plural this week cause I have more than one freebie for you.

The first freebie is from an unlikely source. Microsoft is finally joining the rest of the world and offering up an express edition of Visual Studio for free (as in gratis). Express editions of Visual Studio and SQL Server are available for download now (in beta) and are expected to be fully released in November with the general availability of SQL Server 2005. Both products will be optimized for running on the average desktop.

The second Friday Freebie is from ThinkFree. ThinkFree is offering a free service that lets users create, access and edit any Word, Excel or PowerPoitn file without requiring client side software. The free service includes 30 MB of storage, blog embedding and PDF creation.

Users can purchase additional storage and services, but the core office applications will remain free.