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Common sense regarding web security is to never use the same password on multiple sites. That way, when one password gets compromised, not all of them are.

I usually generate passwords for every single web site that requires a login. For some of them, I even generate the username. There is no way I can remember all of them by heart, it is simply impossible. However, I use a combination of Firefox, Truecrypt, and KeyPass to store my passwords in a secure way. The whole hard drive is encrypted with Truecrypt, low-security site passwords are stored in Firefox, and the important ones are stored in KeyPass, which is also encrypted.

The reason for KeyPass is that you can’t rely on Firefox to keep your passwords safe, it’s not meant to do that. It does fine for my Slashdot password though, as long as the hard drive is encrypted.

With the release of the latest round of Smartphones, more and more people are using an iPhone, an Android phone, and Windows mobiles phones too. Now, these phones often come with nice data plans and decent browsers that didn’t exist just a few years ago. Before using Opera Mini and Safari mobile, going to Slashdot on a mobile phone to post a few comments did not feel like an interesting way to waste 10 minutes at all. Now, it is doable in a comfortable way.

Except typing passwords. That is definitely a pain. I don’t want to remember that 16char. password every time I post a retarded comment on Fark. Yet, I don’t really want to save cookies and authenticated sessions either, because the iPhone is not very secure (understatement of the year). I am convinced that a lot of people who use mobile phones will set a lot of their online passwords to something short, simple, and sometimes maybe even numeric only.

What is the solution? Secure mobile devices and certificates? Possibly. Fingerprint protected certificates could be nice as well, leveraged by some kind of “OpenID” infrastructure maybe.

I guess with the latest iPhone firmware, it takes more than clicking emergency call or receiving a call to unlock it, at least.

Powerpoint.

Sharepoint.

Mappoint.

Performancepoint (what the hell!).

Makes about as much sense as commercials with Seinfeld and Bill Gates.

Here is another post I had on my Wiki that I think is still useful.

Purpose of this article

A lot of people encounter problems using Entourage 2004 on Exchange 2007 system. Errors with little detail such as “error 170″ happen when trying to receive or send email.

Solution

A few things need to be checked on the OWA side of things and a special way to enter the URL in entourage.

How to do it

On your Exchange Outlook web access server:

Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager

Open the web site containing your owa application. At the same level as the owa application, you should have folders called Exchange and Exchweb. Those are used for legacy applications.

Fig1: Checking if the legacy OWA folders exist

If you do not have these folders, use this command, posted by Mike Willis on http://benskelton.blogs.com/ben_skeltons_blog/2007/01/entourage_and_e.html (It is a simple command but I saw it there first, hence the credits) :

New-OwaVirtualDirectory -name exchange -OWAVersion Exchange2003or2000 -VirtualDirectoryType mailboxes

Then go in the Web Service Extensions at the bottom left of the IIS manager. Right click WebDav in the list, and enable it. After all of this, you might want to reset or restart IIS.

Fig2: Enabling WebDav

In your Entourage Exchange connection settings

Open Entourage. With a bit of luck, it will connect with your old settings. If not, go edit the Exchange Server field in your configuration, and set it like this:

https://exchange.server.blah/exchange/user@host.com

User@host being your default email address, not your local domain account, unless they are the same of course.

It should then connect properly. If not, feel free to post in the talk pages and I will try to help you out!

A lot of people running ESX 3.5 Update 2 have been experiencing a slight bug where you can’t start or restart VMs starting August 12th 2008. Well, that could be a problem.

Here’s a thread about the issue with some workarounds which involve messing with the host’s time. (Watch out not to sync your Domain controllers with the wrong time, or bye bye Kerberos!).

Also, today is patch Tuesday by Microsoft and I’m sure a lot of people will be installing critical security patches and rebooting Virtual Machines. That should be interesting…but hey, people will learn not to patch stuff too fast.

The real issue with this is that VMware, an enterprise solution, has built-in license management. How can companies not realize that schemes such as this always hurt the honest customer? The dishonest ones are probably running cracked versions that weren’t affected by this.

Vmware

When I use Windows virtual machines, sometimes the system beep gets annoying to my neighbors.

When I use Linux virtual machines, it goes through my laptop’s PC Speaker, which makes me have a heart attack, and annoys my neighbor.

Find your Vmware preferences file

Windows: Application Data\VMware\preferences.ini

Linux: ~/vmware/preferences (you could possibly do it in the system wide config as well)

Add this line:

mks.noBeep = TRUE

All beeps should be gone.

Windows itself

If for some reason you use some other Virtualization product that does not allow you to disable beeps, just create a Group Policy on your test domain (you could do it local as well). Configure any non critical service in the GPO to be DISABLED. (I use the print spooler).

Once that is done, browse to the sysvol, find the GPO’s folder, and edit the security policy text file. Replace the name of the service you disabled with “beep”.

The reason we have to do that is because you don’t see the beep service in the list of the GPO editor. But this effectively disables the beep service that Windows uses, well, to beep ! I deploy this on test domains where I “beep” often.