As arrogant as my domain name is "Guy Ellis Rocks Dot Com", I only chose it because Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants Dot Com was already taken. I've always attributed this quote to Sir Isaac Newton but just learned that it was originally coined by Bernard of Chartres.
I take a moment to be humble and acknowledge that almost everything that you see on this blog is the synthesis of giants who have helped me and who's work I have read.
I'm trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 onto Server 2008 Enterprise and I'm getting this error:
Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 (x64) (CBS): [2] Error: Installation failed for component Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 (x64) (CBS). MSI returned error code 1
On inspection of the folders it appears that .NET 3.0 is already installed C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/ here. Mystery still not solved...
I regularly hear Scott Hanselman refer to a Rube Goldberg Machine on his Hansel Minutes podcast and once you hear something repeated enough times you need to look it up. From wikipedia: A Rube Goldberg machine is a deliberately over-engineered apparatus that performs a very simple task in very indirect and convoluted fashion.
Now I understand why he often compares a software project to a Rube Goldberg Machine.
The first Phoenix Startup Weekend will be 17-19 October 2008. It looks intense (54 hours work over a weekend) but also very interesting. I've marked this on my calendar but haven't booked yet. I'm very keen on doing this although I'm guessing that I'll be shattered by the time Monday comes around and will need to go back to work to have a break.
I regularly backup my databases and transfer them from the server to a local machine. My strategy is to use the 7-Zip compression utility to compress the database first and then transfer it. A smaller file will obviously transfer faster and locally I'm going to zip it anyway to save space if I'm not using it.
Today I had a situation where I was going to use the DB once I'd transfered it so it was a matter of zipping, transferring, and then unzipping. While I watched the file zip I was surprised at how long it was taking to zip and wondered if I was gaining or losing by doing the zip-transfer-unzip steps rather than just do the transfer. So I measured what I was doing.
The file size unzipped is 47Mb and zipped is 6Mb. The transfer rate is around 12 MBS (Cox Cable).
Method 1: zip - transfer - unzip:
zip: 95 seconds
transfer: 27 seconds
unzip: 3 seconds
Total: 125 seconds
Method 2: transfer
transfer: 192 seconds
Contrary to what I thought, the zip-transfer-unzip method is about 35% faster. This would obviously scale to better performance if your connection speed is slower.
Something else that you should consider is being a good net-citizen and use less bandwidth than you need to which fits in with the results of this experiment. In fact, I think if we were charged (even partially) on the bandwidth we use instead of paying a fixed amount for an unlimited amount it would have a great impact on the web's availability.
I subscribe to a Google Service called Google Alerts. Anytime certain keywords that I want to watch for are indexed by Google I get an email from them telling me about the new pages on the web that have those keywords.
The email address that these alerts get sent to is my Gmail email address which has the spam filter switch on. It's the best spam filter I've seen and so I trust it but I often glance over the spam list before I "delete all" to make sure that it's doing a good job.
Today I saw a Google Alert in the spam box. The email came from googlealerts-noreply@google.com and I checked the IP it came from and it wasn't spoofed. It also contained the regular alert content.
What amazes me is that Google's own email is getting put in the spam bucket by it's own filters. At the very least I would have thought that they would have white listed their own IP. Apparently not.
I thought that the following short story from Inspired eLearning was very interesting. I you found a USB drive without an owner would you plug it into your computer? Before reading this story I think that I would have. Now I'm more inclined to put it under the car's tire and run over it.
Social Engineering with USB Drives
A network security organization was hired to assess the strength of a credit union's security. They were asked to focus on social engineering because of past problems with employees giving up passwords or other information easily.
Because the credit union indicated that USB drives were a concern, since they make it easy to steal information or bring in potential vulnerabilities such as viruses and Trojans, an experiment using USB drives was implemented.
The security group planted 20 Trojan laced USB drives throughout the parking lot and other areas frequented by employees designed to collect passwords, logins and other information and to email the collected information back to the security group.
The experiment, which worked based on peoples' innate curiosity, resulted in 15 of 20 drives being found by employees and all of those being plugged into and infecting workplace computers.
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