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July 16, 2004
Building Models
I was writing my monthly column for Connect Magazine today and as part of that effort reread several times my recent post on Alan Kaye. As I thought about his statements about the real power of computing being their ability to do simulations, I started thinking about Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science and his theory that real world processes are, essentially, just computations. One of the things I need to add to my list of things programming teaches you is "modeling." People who learn to program learn to build models.
02:20 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Rock Regan Resigns
Rock Regan has resigned as Connecticut CIO effective Aug 1 due to "an administration change." Rock's a great guy and was a good CIO. He was CT's CIO for seven years. I wish him well.
02:02 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Cert Says Stop Using IE
A recent CERT advisory has recommended that users stop using IE as their browser.
Use a different web browser
There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites. Such a decision may, however, reduce the functionality of sites that require IE-specific features such as DHTML, VBScript, and ActiveX. Note that using a different web browser will not remove IE from a Windows system, and other programs may invoke IE, the WebBrowser ActiveX control, or the HTML rendering engine (MSHTML).From US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#713878
Referenced Fri Jul 16 2004 09:01:05 GMT-0600
If you're a Mac user, of course, you've already done that since IE on the Mac is far behind Safari or Firefox. If you're a Windows user, you can try Mozilla if you want a full featured browser with built-in email and address book, or Firefox for a fast browser-only solution.
Oliver Rist at InfoWorld has a column on the pros and cons or switching at the enterprise level. The summary is that you have to give up ActiveX, but you gain in security without giving up anything in general usability or user productivity.
If you haven't stopped using IE in your enterprise, now might be a very good time to give it serious consideration.
09:04 AM | Recommend This | Print This
iSync Problems
I recently got a new phone, a Sony Ericsson T637. The phone is small, has some good features, including a crappy camera and, most importantly, Bluetooth. It had been a few months since I'd had a phone with Bluetooth, so I hadn't used iSync to sync my phone and Address Book contacts for a while. I added the phone as an iSync device and clicked "Sync Now" but I couldn't get syncing to work. It had worked flawlessly on my old T68i. Now it would sometimes sync "All Contacts" and sometimes not and it would never sync a group. I've got over 2000 cards in my Address Book, so All Contacts was not a good way to go--the phone ran out of memory and I ended up with too many contacts in the phone for the primitive navigation features it provides. So I've been trying various things for the last few days, but this morning I solved it. The solution was to completely reinstall iSync. Here's how I did it:
- Delete "iSync*" from /Library/Receipts/
- Delete the iSync application from /Applications/
- Delete "com.apple.isync.*" from ~Library/Preferences/
- Delete /Library/Application Support/SyncService/
- Delete ~/Library/Application Support/SyncService/
- Delete /Library/Receipts/iSync_Palm.pkg (I'm not using this anymore)
- Delete Ê/Library/Application Support/Palm HotSync/Conduits/Apple Ê
Then I downloaded iSync 1.4 again from Apple and reinstalled it. After adding my phone as a device in iSync, everything worked like a charm.