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Blog Notes-December 2008

Vista game fix

Michael has problems running Sid Meier's Railroads! in Vista. Regular program crashes seem to be the issue. Here is my initial solution - see what happens.

  1. check for latest patch 1.1
  2. Searching for solutions: nVidia graphics card forum for gaming - appears the most promising, and has several steps well documented
    1. Obtain and load NTCore's Explorer Suite ( http://www.ntcore.com/exsuite.php ) Designed to make PE editing as easy as possible, but without losing sight on the portable executable's internal structure.
    2. Find the Executable for the game: Program Files \ 2K Games \ Firaxis Games \ Sid Meier's Railroads! \ RailRoads.exe and make a backup of the exe file|
    3. Start CFF Explorer
      1. Open RailRoads.exe
      2. On the left side you will find "NT Header/File Header". Click on File Header.
      3. On the right side click on "click here" & enable "App can handle> 2gb adress space" and save.
        1. Step by step pictures are available at http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=89138
    4. Successfully completed the patch to the EXE but it did not solve the problem.
    5. Found a reference to a Vista update, but it was already on the system (part of Service Pack 1)
    6. Another idea is to use a USB drive as additional memory (Ready Boost)
      1. still crashes! Del? December 14, 2008, at 08:47 PM

Del? December 04, 2008, at 08:14 PM

Security Breach report

2008 Data Breach Investigations report (29 pages) from Verizon's Business Risk Team - summarizes data from 500 data breach investigations over 4 years, 2003-2007. These incidents resulted in more than 230 million records being lost or stolen.

An InfoWorld article,Lessons from the Verizon 2008 data breach investigations report , by Roger A Grimes in June 2008 nicely summarizes the report.

  • 73 percent of data breaches were caused by external parties [fighting the idea that your biggest threat is from insiders]
  • 39 percent of cases implicated business partners [Who can you trust? What is your security policy regarding B-to-B, and does it adequately protect you?]
  • 30 percent involved multiple parties
  • [Only] 15 percent were due to physical [attacks]
  • Most breaches resulted from a combination of events rather than a single action
  • Some form of error often directly or indirectly contributed to the compromise [this means it was preventable]
  • 90 percent of known vulnerabilities exploited by these attacks had patches available for at least six months prior to the breach [this is a tremendous finding]
  • 66 percent involved data the victim did not know was on the system
  • 75 percent of breaches were not discovered by the victim
  • 83 percent of attacks were not highly difficult
  • 85 percent of breaches were the result of opportunistic attacks
  • 87 percent were considered avoidable through reasonable controls

The report's summary ends with three recommendations:

  • Ensure essential controls are met
  • Find, track, and assess data
  • Monitor event logs

The data breach report was presented at the 2008 Fall Security Summit. Speaker info and PPT slides are available. eWeek interviewed Peter Tippett from Verizon at the Summit, published on Nov 24, 2008, Economics of Security.

Del? December 05, 2008, at 01:46 PM

Dashboards

http://dashboardspy.com/

Email Overload

The bins are full and I'm tired of cleaning them out! Actually, my email was at zero and under control in early Oct. Life happens and it is difficult to get it back in check. A couple of thoughts

  • ActionBasedEmail2008-03 from earlier this year
  • Email to Zero by Merlin Mann
  • by Michael Hyatt at Thomas Nelson Publishers
    • Taking control of your inbox means changing your behavior.
    • Empty your mailbox every day (of course!)
    • Use keyboard shortcuts see Outlook Keyboard Shortcuts
    • Let email rules filter the low-priority stuff
    • and the new idea for the day: use a Bacn folder for email newsletters, receipts, and other automatically-generated reading material. “Bacn” is solicited bulk email vs unsolicited "SPAM".

Del? December 07, 2008, at 12:04 PM

Vista notes

  1. Revising weekly backup to a separate internal hard drive - filled up a 300GB drive after 1.5 years. My method was to simply delete the old backups, but first I had to take ownership of the folder and files (SYSTEM was the owner). Ownership is explained nicely in a tutorial.
  2. Defrag from the command line. Important to remember to run as Adminstrator. Switches and info:
    1. Start the Command Prompt as administrator - Click the Windows button and select --- All Programs --- Accessories --- and Right click "Command Prompt" and select "Run as administrator".
    2. Analysis only
      defrag c: -a -v
      where -a = analysis and -v = verbose. Even with verbose reporting, on NTFS partitions, defrag does not consider fragmented files with fragments greater than 64 MB as fragmented.
    3. To defragment C:
      defrag c: -v -r
      -r treats files that are fragmented with 64 MB fragments or larger as though they are not fragmented. Also the GUI defrag default in Vista
    4. To force defrag of everything, including fragments > 64MB
      defrag c: -v -w
      where -w = full defragmentation.

Wonderful Photographs

National Geographic Daily Dozen

Photography ideas

FlipClips - individually crafted flipbooks from a digital video (less than 30 seconds).

Video clips -

Inspirational Speeches - 40 very short clips. Inspirational!

More music

Last.FM and that's all I know for now! UK origin, now owned by CBS

imeem another music site, independent

Task management in Gmail

The video at ReadWriteWeb doesn't give much comfort in Gmail being up to speed to handle it! But the app has rolled out recently. And used Jing to create the video!

Historical Market data

Looking for historical PE data last night and today. Best source is economist Robert Shiller at Yale, his hand crafted spreadsheet (XLS)from the late 1800's through August 2008. Data set consists of monthly stock price, dividends, and earnings data and the consumer price index (to allow conversion to real values), all starting January 1871. This LONG time series includes very interesting chart of PE ratios - including spikes! Del? December 14, 2008, at 01:44 AM

Problems with USB drives

Having a problem with a USB drive under Vista - the drive doesn't show up in the list of attached drives. I think that the problem is a driver issue - went looking for my little utility to clean up the USB drivers. USBDeview from Nirsoft (huge catalog of freeware utilities, a veritable swiss army knife of single purpose applications)

USBDeview is a small utility that lists all USB devices that currently connected to your computer, as well as all USB devices that you previously used. For each USB device, exteneded information is displayed: Device name/description, device type, serial number (for mass storage devices), the date/time that device was added, VendorID, ProductID, and more... USBDeview also allows you to uninstall USB devices that you previously used, and disconnect USB devices that are currently connected to your computer.

The application consists of a single EXE. Under Vista, run the EXE as administrator to avoid the UAC prompts. (right click on USBDeview and choose 'Run As Administrator')

  • NOTE - a good reboot is sometimes a solution as well!

Del? December 14, 2008, at 08:41 PM

Changing MP3 tags

This is a problem with some podcasts - missing, bad or poorly formed tags. TagScanner appears to be a good solution.

TagScanner is a multifunction program for organizing and managing your music collection. It can edit tags of mostly state-of-the-art audio formats, rename files based on the tag information, generate tag information from filenames, and perform any transformations of the text from tags and filenames. Also you may get album info via online databases like freedb or Amazon.

Answers From Within

Answers from Within: Spiritual Guidelines Well written summary of the book published in Spiritual Life (2000). The daily checklist for the Pauline Virtues is available at Welcoming the Spirit Every Day. Pauline Criteria - A Personal Checklist

Prayer of St Francis of Assisi

Presentation ideas from Amber Mac

Amber Mac has some good presentation ideas gleaned from your keynote speeches this year. Seem relevant to my teaching.

  1. THE DECK - Keep it fresh. Find ways to relate to the specific audience
  2. THE CONTENT - Keep it moving. Ideas from Tony Robbins -- it's critical to keep your energy up on stage. It's also important to engage an audience, which often means bringing people up on stage ... Tony also uses a lot of music and videos during his events ... Just like people are opting to shift away from passive television viewing to active Internet participation, I believe event audiences want to actively taking part in each presentation they attend.
  3. QUESTION PERIOD - Be prepared. valuable time to really connect with your audience.
  4. BEFORE AND AFTER - Be present. in order to teach you must also listen

Del? December 17, 2008, at 01:02 PM

Computer Maintenance

Editing the hosts file. Windows Secrets article with background information.

  • A regularly maintained hosts file blocking ad servers and other undesirable addresses. Last update 2008-11-25 (written 12-23).
  • Vista has UAC to protect system files so there are a couple of extra steps to consider. Vista changes to hosts file, specifically
    1. Start up your editor (NotePad2) in Administrator mode (right click on the icon - Run As Administrator)
    2. open the hosts file from Windows\System32\drivers\etc
    3. Make your changes, for example a single line may be (without the quotes): "127.0.0.1 adserver.com"
    4. Save the file. Note that this only works if you started the editor in Admin mode
  • Possibly a better solution with FireFox is NoScripts which allows page control and disabled scripts by default for non-white listed sites.

Of Interest

Keener Living Blog - interesting ideas on combining GtD and Covey's Seven Habits. Good approach with numerous articles written over the past couple of years. Bottom line summary:

  • Keep a simple capture system
  • Remember your big roles and priorities

Bush Is a Book Lover - A glimpse of what the president has been reading. An opinion piece by Karl Rove. I'm impressed by the President's ability to focus on what is important. In his position, keeping a stream of reading going (2006=95, 2007=51, 2008=40) is an amazing example.

Each year, the president also read the Bible from cover to cover, along with a daily devotional.
The reading competition reveals Mr. Bush's focus on goals. It's not about winning. A good-natured competition helps keep him centered and makes possible a clear mind and a high level of energy. He reads instead of watching TV. He reads on Air Force One and to relax and because he's curious. He reads about the tasks at hand, often picking volumes because of the relevance to his challenges. And he's right: I've won because he has a real job with enormous responsibilities.
In the 35 years I've known George W. Bush, he's always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol' boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don't make it through either unless you are a reader.

Bruce Keener's blog entry on The Noise in Our Lives presents a similar powerful reminder to focus on what is important. His title, "The Noise in Our Lives", is very appropriate!

Flickr Search

Compfight - Flickr search tool

Writing Tools

The Beans Top 10 Pen, Ink, and Paper review of 2008 is a great combination of photos and text of writing tools. Nice to see some new ideas.

Trackbacks

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

James Thurber

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