Data centres to off-centre opinion

There is no online schedule for Guilfest this year (at least that I could find), forcing everyone to spend £5 on a programme. To save you the hassle, I’ve listed the stages, acts and times for Sunday below. Enjoy.

Early reports that Google employees were tricked into installing malware which allowed the hackers to steal information have been corroborated by McAfee.

The attackers are alleged to have identified friends of the Google employees via social networks (like Facebook, LinkedIn etc) and then posed as those friends to trick the employees into installing the malware as they believed it was trustworthy. The industry is claiming this is a watershed in the sophistication of attacks, and undoubtedly it is very sophisticated, however it seems to me that its more evolutionary: for years spammers have been sending email which claims to be from someone else, indeed the most sophisticated spammers have obtained address lists from users (either via unpatched machines or more regularly now by tricking them into sharing their username/password for their email [see my post about Threadsy]) and send emails to all their contacts as if it came from that user. The clever (?) thing about this attack is the fact they used social networks specifically to get users to believe an IM was trustworthy.

There is no new lesson here, keep practicing the safe internet usage guidance which hasn’t changed for several years:

• Always install updates for your software (Windows/OS X, IE/Sarafi/Firefox, Flash etc)
• Run AV (AVG or Microsoft Security Essentials are good free versions)
• Enable the firewall
• Dont click on anything which looks suspicious or you’re not expecting, even if its from someone you know – always check the person sent it.

The guys over at downloadsquad.com have a good list of free Windows utilities; here. They include, CD/DVD burners, network synchronisation, file transfer, image editing etc.

They’ve also posted a list of Systems Admin utilities here.

A friend recently complained about how long his computer took to boot each time he switched it on. When I showed him the Sleep and Hibernate modes he immediately changed the default settings so his computer hibernated when he pressed the power button instead of shutting down.

This is exactly what I do with my work laptop, and indeed is what I’ve been doing since 2001. I also use Sleep when I’m only going to be away from my computer a short time (e.g. lunch, or walking to a meeting with my lapotp).

Both sleep and hibernate save the state of the computer so that when you next turn it on (or “resume”), the computer carries on where it left off; no need to start everything from scratch.

Hibernate saves the state to disk then turns the computer off, so it uses no power. Sleep saves the state in RAM which needs some power to work, so a small amount of power is consumed.

These features work irrespective of what Operating System you’re running (Windows XP, Vista, 7, Linux [e.g. Ubuntu] and Apple OSX ). Some boot more quickly than others (OSX vs Vista for example) but none are as fast as resuming from sleep or hibernate.

The only word of warning: reboot the computer once in a while (for me, thats a couple of times/month) to clear out garbage left from crashed programs.

I’m lucky enough to have received an invite to the beta of Threadsy. In their own words: threadsy is the world’s first integrated communications client! it combines your existing email, Facebook, and Twitter accounts into a unique, enjoyable experience.

Earlier this year I wrote a post asking for just such a thing, however now I’ve got it I’m faced with the question of trust. Do I trust Threadsy with my usernames and passwords for Twitter, Facebook, Live Mail etc? How do I know Threadsy is legitimate & secure? The answer is I don’t. I have to make up my own mind based on their privacy policy and reputation. The one thing they have going for them is the fact they were featured on Cnet – a site I do trust. In other words, trust by association, which is just like life: you build trust through recommendation/association and experience.

Error 0×80040154 indicates SelfSSL can’t open the metabase – which is to be expected on IIS 7 or IIS 7.5 by default as the metabase changed significantly from IIS6 to IIS7 (and SelfSSL is an IIS6 resource kit tool).

On IIS7 and IIS7.5, you need to install the IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility role service to be able to use SelfSSL. You don’t need any of the other IIS 6 role services installed.

Last weekend I added the final sensor to the Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station on the roof; a UV sensor. The software which reads the data has been updated to read UV value and calculate sunshine hours per day, both of which are automatically reflected in the Weather gadget. I have yet to update live weather page as this is quite a big job; like many things IT related its not as simple as adding a graph to the page – the software I use has been updated and now has an editor, but it will require a bit of work to migrate the existing page to the new version so I’ll save that for another day.

Create a bootable Windows Install on USB Stick

1. Clean, Partiton and Format the USB stick

Run CMD.EXE and type the following command. Note: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as “disk 1″. Double check that by doing a list of the disks (type “list disk”) before cleaning it).

• diskpart
• select disk 1
• clean
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=fat32
• assign
• exit

2. Copy Windows DVD ROM content to the USB Stick

Type the following command to copy the Windows DVD content to the USB stick.

• xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

3. Boot your computer from the USB stick & install Windows as normal

I recently got another Xbox but when I tried to stream music from my HomeServer it would throw the following error; “Can’t connect. Make sure you have activated this console on your computer”

The existing Xbox continued to stream without any problems so I knew streaming was working.

Windows HomeServer uses Windows Media Connect (not Windows Media Player) to stream, and whilst no config is exposed inside the WHS console you can still configure it via c:\program files\media connect\wmccfg.exe. I found I had a load of devices (including the 2nd Xbox) listed as denied – Media Connect only supports 10 devices. Removing some of the old devices (PCs which had been rebuilt for example) and changing the new Xbox to Allow fixed the problem.

General Shortcuts 

Taskbar Shortcuts

Windows Explorer

Obviously these are based on the beta build and may (albeit unlikely) be cut/change for the RTM.