Other musings - wolves
An essay on wolves in Michigan (Edward Hoagland, "Howling Back at the Wolves", from Sports Illustrated, reprinted in "Red Wolves and Black Bears, Penguin, 1976/83) made me wonder... The most fearful stories of wolves I've seen in folklore seem to be Russian - throwing the babies over the back of the sleigh to save the rest of the family. The Russian culture embodies a deep fear of wolves, who have been extinct in England long enough that we can wonder if they were ever present.

Ask Jeeves dredges up the good news from CNN that a at least in late 2000, "officials in Moscow say there are still too many wolves in Russia: at last count, more than 44,000 of them across the country".

It's good to know there are still Russian wolves.
- posted by Jonathan Hutchins @ 9:58 PM 0 comments

 
Half Life
Around August 19th, SANS noted that

The information on the time it takes a computer connected to the internet comes from The SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute, a research and training organization for network security. They keep track of the "survival time" of new systems here: http://isc.sans.org/survivalhistory.php

According to this, the "survival time" is down to about 20 minutes, half of what it was a year ago. Scott Granneman of SecurityFocus discussed it in The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/19/infected_in20_minutes/, which is I think where I caught it.

About the same time there was an article in The Washington Post by Kathleen Day about what happened when she upgraded her computer from dial-up to a broadband connection without taking precautions such as installing a firewall: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64483-2004Aug14?language=printer

It's a good article, and mentions some of the strange symptoms that can indicate a complex multiple virus/trojan infection.

If you're upgrading to XP, SANS has a nice PDF guide on how to install it safely. It actually assumes a pre-installed system, but I'm sure you could use the checklist to secure a new installation as well. I've attached that.

Two Open Source projects I mention are working to provide office software. Open Office is a complete suite, like Microsoft Office: http://openoffice.org/

And ABI Word is a full-featured word-processor: http://www.abisource.com/

Both have versions availble for Windows.

It's also very easy with any modern Linux installation to install it on the same system as windows, and be able to boot to either one. Some software can then be run from Linux using "wine", which allows the software to access the Windows registry and shared DLL's.

Currently, I do almost everything in Linux with Open Source software, including sound recording and picture editing. I run Quicken in Linux under wine. The only things I need Windows for are my DeLorme Street Atlas and the software for my Garmin GPS. There is commercial software available that might let me run those without Windows but I haven't investigated it.
- posted by Jonathan Hutchins @ 1:53 PM 0 comments