Koozie Notes

Windows SteadyState: XP Lockdown

While listening to Security Now, episode # 129 [Transcript], Steve and Leo provided an excellent and thorough review of Microsoft's SteadyState Software, a tool for locking down a computer running Windows XP.

Windows® SteadyState™ is now available. (Windows SteadyState was formerly known as Microsoft® Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.) Whether you manage computers in a school computer lab or an Internet café, a library, or even in your home, Windows SteadyState helps make it easy for you to keep your computers running the way you want them to, no matter who uses them. Windows SteadyState is easier to download, set up, use, and maintain than Shared Computer Toolkit.

Steve sums this up with the following.

So the beauty of this, instead of putting, like, a write lock on your hard drive - which Windows won't tolerate because it's constantly updating the registry, and there's all kinds of things going on with Windows, as we know, our hard drive light is flickering there even when we're not doing anything. So instead of write-locking the hard drive, it basically sequesters any writes. And when the administrator logs off, the administrator being a special user to Windows SteadyState, it will prompt you, saying do you want me to retain these changes or flush them? A normal user, a non-administrative user, does not have access to that. There's no choice that they're able to make.

So if you want to lock down your windows computers, Windows SteadyState might be a good solution.  To better understand the pros and cons of SteadyState, I would highly recommend listening to episode #129 or reading the transcipt from Steve Gibson's web site, grc.com.

-Chris

PDFtoTEXT: Font Encoding Issues

While working with PDFtoText, a great little command line program for extracting the TEXT from a PDF file, I ran into a text conversion/extraction problem while working from a client's PDF.  In the past, I've successfully used PDFtoText to dump mountains of text from internal PDF reports, which make it much easier to munge with Perl or your script language of choice.

When I ran PDFtoText on my client's PDF, I kept getting undecipherable ASCII text in my output file.   After searching a few forums and web sites, it appears that this problem can be caused by: (1) font subsetting, where only a portion of the embedded font is included with the PDF, and/or (2) custom encoding for the generated font subsets which depend on the sequence of the requested glyphs as they appear in the input stream.

Since I couldn't find a reliable method of extracting the text, I ended up going back to the client to get the data in a different format.

The URLs listed below do a pretty good job explaining why it can be difficult to extract text from a PDF document.

•  Perl Monk:  Problem with Searchable PDFs

• Code Comments:  Copy & Paste Issue with PDF

• Ruby PDF Blog: Converting PDF to XML

• Converting PDF to HTML with Publication-Specific Profiles

• PDF to HTML paper: [PDF]   

Outlook Express: Error Message

A user brought another interesting problem to my attention.  For E-mail, they used Outlook express on their Windows XP computer with Office 97 installed.  Whenever they click on the spell check button from within Outlook Express, they receive the following error message.

"Error occurred while the spelling was being checked"

After searching on Google, I came across a quick solution that required downloading and installing a single dll file [CSAPI3T1.dll]. 

1. Download the dll file from the web page listed above.
2. Copy CSAPIeT1.dll to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Proof.
3. Shutdown Outlook Express.
4. Start Outlook Express.

As soon as we restarted Outlook Express, spell checking was working fine.

-Chris

Mossberg Reviews Picnik: Online Photo Tool

Wall Street Journal columnist, Walt Mossberg, has a good piece in today's edition on Picnik, an online, web based photo editing tool.

One of the best examples of these slick new Web-based application is Picnik, a sophisticated, photo-editing application offered free of charge at picnik.com. I have been testing Picnik and I like it a lot. It's a fast and impressive program for tweaking and improving your photos, then posting them to popular photo Web sites, saving them to your own computer, emailing them, or even printing them.

Looks very promising for web based applications.

-Chris

Copilot: Easy Remote Admin Tool

Yesterday, I finally had a reason to try out Fog Creek's Copilot remote control service and I was pleased with the result.

I've been working from home the last few days and I needed to help out a user with their vexing computer problem.  I tried walking the user though their issue, from memory mind you, without much success.  I find it really hard trying to describe every single element on a GUI form and dialog box, so the user can follow along.  [For those of you with telephone tech support experience, you know this pain]

Like other desktop remote control products, Copilot provides remotely control of the user's computer and allows you to *See* their problem.  The service provides a pretty easy install method and $5.00 seemed like a good price point to pain threshold.  Once under remote control, I had their issue resolved in under five minutes, including spending some time on user training.

-Chris

1099 Printing and Filing

Now that the holiday season has past, I get to prepare myself, as do millions of other US businesses, for the annual printing, mailing and filing of 1099 tax forms.  In prior years, I used a few perl scripts to generate my "Copy B" 1099s prior to the January 31st deadline.  If you are new to 1099s, wikipedia has a descent overview on the subject.

We used to mail "Copy A" 1099s to the IRS, but for the last three years I've been filing them electronically with the IRS's FIRE system.  I prefer their electronic method of processing over the paper one, even on cases when I'm under the mandatory 250 form mark.  One of the best benefits for filing electronically with the IRS is that the deadline for filling is extended a full month (last day of March) instead of the last day of February.  Everything you ever wanted to know about filing 1099 electronically with the IRS can be gleaned from Publication 1220.

This year I discovered that the IRS rolled out a new application called "TIN Matching" under their e-services menu, which allows one to verify taxpayer names to their corresponding taxpayer identification number "TIN".  I'm hoping that by using this service, we will be able to cut down on exceptions.

-Chris

Prepare for Daylight Savings Time Changes

One of the newsletter I read this morning contained a link to a Microsoft product support page.  This web page listed all the Micorsoft products that might be affected by the changes in "Daylight Savings Time" that will go into effect this year.

In August of 2005 the United States Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which changes the dates of both the start and end of daylight saving time (DST). When this law goes into effect in 2007, DST will start three weeks earlier (2:00 A.M. on the second Sunday in March) and will end one week later (2:00 A.M. on the first Sunday in November) than what had traditionally occurred.

- Chris

LogMeIn & Error Code 4320

I ran across the following error message, while attempting a remote logon session with the free LogMeIn service, www.logmein.com.

The operator or administrator refused the request. (4320)

After a few google searches, I found out how to correct the problem.  If the remote windows user account doesn't have local admin rights, you will need to add the windows user account to the logmein service under Preferences-> Security Settings -> Access Control.

Errors Running SOAP::Lite with https

The last few days I've been trying to figure out why my perl script using the SOAP::Lite module keeps dying when I call https (SSL Encryption), but it works flawlessly when using plain http.  The uninformative error message I received when my perl script dies is listed below:

500 Can't locate object method "new" via package "LWP::Protocol::https::Socket"

I must admit I wasted a good bit of time following the poor links return from a Google search on this error message.  Most of the links were nothing more than a web page filled with error messages along with some marketing banner ads.  No solutions, no luck.

After numerous searches on multiple search engines, I *finally* came across the relevant information, which I will post below so I will never have to go through this again. Grin.

If you are running Active State's Perl 5.8.X release on windows and need to use an https call with SOAP::Lite, the links below should help you get on your way.

1)  Link to Active State's Web page stating that they will distribute the SSL modules with perl, but will provide different repositories.

    http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActivePerl/PPM/Repository

The Canadian Federal Government requires that companies and organizations that wish to distribute cryptographic software get a permit in order to do so. ActiveState does not have this permission.

....

The two popular crypto modules Crypt-SSLeay and Net_SSLeay can be found in other repositories, and can be installed using PPM as follows:

    ppm install http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/Crypt-SSLeay.ppd

The above command installs the Perl 5.8 PPM of Crypt-SSLeay from the University of Winnipeg's PPM repositories. For the Perl 5.6 PPM, use the following command:

    ppm install http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppmpackages/Crypt-SSLeay.ppd

2)  PPM command to fetch Crypt-SSLeay.ppd for Active State Perl 5.8

    ppm install http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/Crypt-SSLeay.ppd

   

3)  Excellent write up on how to use Active State's PPM utility from Perl Monks.

    http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=434813

    I found this link above by reading a question about Installing Net::SSLeay on Windows XP

4)  Link to the Win32 SSL dll file, which needs to be installed into your path, probably C:\perl\bin\

      http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/scripts/ssleay32.dll

So the short answer is open up your command prompt and run the following command.

   

ppm install http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/Crypt-SSLeay.ppd

timtowtdi

 

-Chris

Enterprise Ruby Article

I came across this article written by Brad Banister over at Open Source titled, "Bringing Ruby to the Entrprise." 

A primary selling point of Rails is the claim that its users gain a big productivity spike over standard Java in developing Web applications. This fact is attributed to both the simplicity of using the Rails framework, as well as the vastly reduced line-of-code count between Ruby and Java code when doing identical functions. Rails is also more productive than other frameworks because its templating language is itself Ruby, which obviates the need to learn a specialized framework language.

I recently picked up a copy of the pickaxe book, but haven't read further than chapter two.  I did enjoy reading the series of ruby articles published by Linux Journal in their July 2006 edition.

-Chris

Installing Office 97 on Windows XP

While trying to install MS Office 97 Pro on a new Windows XP box, I came across the following error message.

Setup couldn't create a SYSTEM.MDW file.  After Setup is completed, reboot your computer, then run the Workgroup Administrator before you run this application. (-1011)

Solution:

1. Download and install MS Office 97 service release 2 (SR-1) for MS Office 97.
2. Reboot
3. Download and install MS Office 97 service release 2 (SR-2b) for MS Office 97.
4. Reboot
5. Run the Workgroup Administrator.

-Chris

Other Solutions:

issociate.de
System.mdw file Info

List of Free OSX Applications

(via Digg) Found a pretty good list of free OSX applications to check out.

 

Must have Mac Software.

-Chris

Convert Web, Word, and Excel file to PDF for Free

(via Digg)  Express PDF is offering a web service where you can enter a URL or upload a .doc or .xls file.  They in turn will e-mail your PDF back to you.  This could come in handy if you find yourself using a computer that doesn't have native PDF conversion support.

-Chris

Windows WMF Exploit

While driving in to work this morning, I enjoyed another edition of the "Security Now" podcast.  Leo and Steve covered the a new hot topic, the Windows WMF exploit that effects the Windows platform.

Steve mentioned that you could download some software to fix this vulnerability [See Links Below].  This software works for Windows 2000, XP, 64-bit XP and 2003 server.

1. Download Ilfak's Temporary WMF Patch
2. Download Ilfak's WMF Vulnerability Checker (3.6 kb)

All of Steve's notes covering this exploit are located on his web site which are updated regularly.  You can also listen to this podcast which covers the exploit.

Chris

Groklaw Covers Sony's Root Kit

Looks like pj devoted a new 'SONY' section of her web site, groklaw, to cover the legal proceedings generated from Sony's decision to include DRM/Root Kit software on their audio CD's.

Mark Russinovich over at SysInternals wrote a piece covering the geeky technical details.

Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte covered this material in episode 12 of their podcast, "Security Now."  Review the transcript for details.

-Chris

Top 10 SysAdmin Tools

Over at Linux.com web site, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier opines on his top ten sysadmin tools.

So there you have it -- my top 10 in order of general usage. There are plenty of other useful tools for admins out there, and a number of other utilities that I use regularly. Maybe some of them are on your top 10 list. Let us know about your most valuable utilities (there need not be 10 of them), and if we publish your work, we'll pay you $100.

Nice to find another vim user. :-)

-Chris

AutoRuns Ver8.31 Released

Looks like the guys at Sysinternals have release an updated version of AutoRuns.

This utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor (A starting list of auto-run locations was obtained from David Solomon's "Windows Internals" seminar), shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows Me and XP.

This is a great tool to find and remove unwanted startup programs on your computer.

-Chris

OpenOffice 2.0 Released

I'm currently at the 12% mark trying to download the 2.0 release of OpenOffice.  This might take some time. :-)

OpenOffice.org

-Chris

Linux Rescue CDs

(via NewsForge) Aditya Nag wrote a quick review on three different CDs designed to help you rececovered a hosed computer.

This article reviews three open source rescue CDs: System Rescue CD, LNX-BBC, and CDlinux. These are all small downloads, ranging from 17 to 110MB, specifically designed to perform system rescue. To test the three, I used a recent AMD Athlon 2400+ machine with 256MB RAM, onboard LAN, and a Nvidia graphics card. The test machine had Windows XP Professional loaded on an NTFS partition on a SATA drive and Centos 4 on an ext3 partition on a PATA drive.

-Chris

Why You Should Code in Cocoa

(via MacSlash) Wil Shipley posted a PDF version of his slides from a talk he gave to a few Apple interns on why he thinks you should code in Cocoa. 

I should also mention that if you look at the slides you'll see another picture of my Ardent Red Lotus Elise. This bears mentioning because I actually agonized about whether to show off my car at all, ever. I decided that, in this context, it was OK, because essentially the whole talk is about how if you follow your dream you'll not only be happy, but you'll also be financially secure, and it's easier to believe that kind of advice when it's given to you by someone not LIVING IN A SHACK DOWN BY THE RIVER. I asked some of the students afterwards if they thought the car thing was totally pretentious and they said no, it came off the right way.

-Chris

AutoRuns Ver8.0 Released

Looks like the guys at Sysinternals have release an updated version of AutoRuns.

This major update to Autoruns separates autostart types onto different pages of the main window, shows more information about images, integrates with Process Explorer, and adds a couple more Explorer and Internet Explorer addon locations, and improves scanning performance.

-Chris

Laptop Review on Gentoo

James Turner authored a piece on why he thinks Gentoo is the best Linux disto for his laptop.

So what distro am I running on the laptop now? Gentoo, which is probably as far from an install-and-boot experience as you can imagine. For those who haven't experienced Gentoo, everything (including the kernel) comes in source form, and must be recompiled before use. What this means is that your initial install could take a couple of days (almost entirely unattended, luckily).

I tried to install Gentoo about a year ago on some old hardware, but I gave up because it tool to %$^# long to compile and install.

-Chris

Apple's New OS: Tiger

I've been following along this past weekend reading about problems, workarounds, and stories of joy regarding the installation of Apple's new OS, Tiger.  Macslash started an new thread where the Mac faithful can post their own tales on Tiger. 

I think I'm going to wait an month or two until most of the bugs are corrected by Apple and third party developers.

-Chris

AutoRuns Ver7.0 Released

The guys at SysInternals have updated their splendid tool, AutoRuns, to Version 7.0.

-Chris

iPod and Me

About two weekends ago, I purchased my first portable music player, Apple's 20gig iPod.  Since I finally got to use a $100 Best Buy gift card, I'm only out $200 plus tax.

I've been holding off on purchasing a music player for some time, because I never thought I would really have a compelling use for it.  I really don't listen to music very often and I prefer tuning into a good radio talk show while driving.

After two weeks of playing with my iPod, I came to realize that my assumption that the iPod was just for music lovers was completely wrong.  I just found a new tool for listening to wide range of talk radio programs, via podcasts and the iPodder software.

At first, I just manually downloaded mp3 files that I thought I would enjoy like the talk Steve Wozniak gave at Gnomdex 4.0 and Adam Curry's presentation at Bloggercon.  I just stuffed these mp3's into iTunes and sync'd my iPod.  After listening to Adam's talk, I installed iPodder and downloaded even more podcasts to sample. 

This is just plain cool. 

-Chris

Delphi Creates Fast Executables

Nick Bradbury, the lone developer behind FeedDemon, discusses the strengths of Delphi as his programming language of choice.

As some of you know, I used Delphi to create all of my shareware programs (HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon), and I've been very happy with it (although I will admit that I'm toying with C# as well). One of the main reasons I use Delphi is because it creates fast executables that don't require runtime DLLs.

-Chris

UltraEdit-32 Version 11 Released

While going through some e-mail this morning, I noticed that IDM released a new version of the popular text editor, UltraEdit-32, for under $40.
 

I've been using UE32 for a couple of years and I'm still running version 9.10.  One of my favorite features of UE32 is its ability to open large text files without barfing.  If you are in the market for slick text editor on windows, I would highly recommend giving UltraEdit a spin.

-Chris

Logfinder: Remove Unwanted Logs

(via BoingBoing)  Seth Schoen, EFF Staff Technologist, released a new tool named logfinder [tarball].

Logfinder was conceived by security consultant Ben Laurie and written by EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. It's intended to complement EFF's recent white paper, "Best Practices for Online Service Providers," in which the organization argues that administrators should remove as many logs as possible and delete all personally identifying data from them.

-Chris

Update: 9 FEB 2005
Logfinder covered on Slashdot.

maps.google.com

(via Jeremy & jr) Looks like Google's map service is up and running.  maps.google.com.

-Chris

New York Times Link Generator

BoingBoing posted a story about a new tool that will generate non-decaying URLs to New York Times articles.  Dave Winer also post a story about the NYT's RSS feeds.

Now, I need a similar tool that will generate links to WSJ articles.

-Chris

Review of OpenOffice.org's Database

Rob Reilly writes a first look review with screen shots on OpenOffice.org's new database application. 

The new OpenOffice.org Base product has a lot of potential. It will take some time to mature, although if it's anything like other OpenOffice applications, the fixes and enhancements will come swiftly.

I'm really interested to see how this database application compares with Microsoft's Access product when it gets released under the 2.0 banner.

-Chris

Clean Software

(via Slashdot) Jem Berkes puts together a new software download site, CleanSoftware.org, that contains 'spyware free' Windows software. This looks like a good place to start when searching for new Windows software.

TinyApps.org is another site that tracks non-bloated software available for download. I even found a link to the original VisiCalc application which came in at a whopping 27K.

-Chris

Update
Pricelessware.org - voted best of the best by alt.comp.freeware

AutoRuns Ver6.1 Released

SysInternals has updated their cool AutoRuns.exe utility to version 6.1.

This [Windows] utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes  them.

-Chris

OpenOffice.org 2.0

Inquirer posted a review of the preview 2.0 release of OpenOffice.org.  According to article, the 2.0 version will include a database program similar to Microsoft Access. 

I'm going to wait until the official 2.0 release becomes available, but I'm very interested to see how well the database application compares to Access.

-Chris

Mac Software

(via MacSlash) Mac Specialist posted a concise list of mac software.  Plenty of comments to shore up any loose ends.

-Chris

OS X Audio Recorder

(via BoingBoing) Looks like I found another candidate for audio recording on my powerbook.  Mark Frauenfelder also recommends Listen&Type for transcribing audio.  I might have to give both a try.

-Chris

When to Use Open Source

Infoworld has a short piece by Bruce Perens explaining some good uses of open source for business.

Contract or internal development is very good for your differentiating software because it lets you keep it all. Probably 10 percent of the software in your business is differentiating. Maybe you should consider open source for the rest.

Bruce Perens makes a compelling business case for using open source.  Apache and qmail are some of my favorites open source programs.

-Chris

Lost Windows Install Key?

Mark Gibbs writes about another cool tool called Magic Jelly Bean Keyfinder for locating install key codes on Windows .

[Magic Jelly Bean Keyfinder] works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP and Server 2003. Keyfinder also supports changing the key in an installed Windows 95, 98, ME or XP system.  Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder also is supposed to be able to display the CD keys for Office 97 and Office XP

This looks like another tool I need to store on my thumb drive before the holidays.  I just have that feeling  I will be working on someone's broken computer over Thanksgiving.

-Chris

Cross Platform Programming Editors

radiantmatrix asks the following loaded question on perlmonks, "I'm still left with a question: What's a good editor, with a consistent interface, that works across all those platforms?"  If you are fan of text editors, please read the entire thread.  I've posted some of the links below.

1. Vim for Perl developers
   "First of all, this document is for people who are already using Vim for their programming tasks. Those people who feel that there is something missing in Vim should definitely read this document. People who recently stopped using Vim due to the reason that something was not there should also read this document."
   
2. Komodo 3.0 Review
   "ActiveState Komodo is the award-winning, professional integrated development environment (IDE) for dynamic languages, providing a powerful workspace for editing, debugging and testing your programs. Komodo offers advanced support for Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl and XSLT, and runs on Linux, Solaris and Windows."
3. SciTE
   "SciTE is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. Originally built to demonstrate Scintilla, it has grown to be a generally useful editor with facilities for building and running programs. It is best used for jobs with simple configurations - I use it for building test and demonstration programs as well as SciTE and Scintilla, themselves."
4. jEdit
   " jEdit is a mature and well-designed programmer's text editor that has been in development for over 5 years.

-Chris

Mac Text Editors

Giles Turnbull writes a fun little piece on his love of text editors.

If, as I hope, you are just like me, and you have a strange fascination with text editors too, perhaps you might like to join me as I take you on a tour, line by line, character by character, into the wonderful plain text world I've explored.

I also have a fascination with text editors.  My favorites include UltraEdit, Vim, and BBEdit.

-Chris

Spyware Program Review

Matthew Fordahl writes about cleaning spyware, pop-ups, and adware from his brother-in-law's one year old computer.

Spy Sweeper and Ad-Aware had the most success of the programs I tested, with each reporting fewer and fewer problems after each scan. Though I was never able to run scans that came up with zero problems, the PC's behavior grew closer to normal. I also tried combining the two, and that helped rescue my home page.

One cool tool not mentioned in Fordahl's article is Autoruns.  I used it the other day to help track down a few spyware start-up programs that Adaware missed on an infected PC.

-Chris

Excel: Leading Zeros Hack

I wrote this little Excel hack for adding back leading zeros.  This comes in handy when someone sends you an Excel file and you notice that some of the fields are missing leading zeros.  SSNs and zip codes tend to be common culprits.

Fix SSNs - 9 Digits

= right$("0000000000" & [A1],9)

Fix Zip Codes - 5 Digits 

= right$("00000" & [A1],5)

-Chris

New Typepad Features

The Six Apart team added some new features to Typepad for composing your blog posts.  It  looks great and I really dig the spell checker.

-Chris

Autoruns: Find Those Pesky Startup Programs

The Nov '04 issue of Windows IT Pro contains an article by Mark Russinovich covering Sysinternals' tool, Autoruns.

This utility shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more.

I downloaded the zip archive and double clicked Autoruns.exe.  The program was up and running without a software install to endure.  In under two minutes, I had banned AOL's AIM instant messenger from running when my computers restarts.  This was a bit too easy, thanks Mark and Bryce.

 

-Chris

Update - 9 NOV 2004
SysInternals releases version 6.0 for Autoruns.

GNU Privacy Guard

While working on some perl scripts yesterday, I came across Brendan Kidwell's guide, "A Practical Introduction to GNU Privacy Guard in Windows." This guide has some good examples of using gpg on the commandline, which helped me to automate the encryption and signing of data files.

-Chris

PuTTY: Upgrade to Release 0.56

(via Slashdot) If you use PuTTY, a free ssh client, please take a few minutes to upgrade to 0.56.

PuTTY 0.56, released today, fixes a serious security hole which can allow a server to execute code of its choice on a PuTTY client connecting to it. In SSH2, the attack can be performed before host key verification, meaning that even if you trust the server you think you are connecting to, a different machine could be impersonating it and could launch the attack before you could tell the difference. We recommend everybody upgrade to 0.56 as soon as possible.

-Chris

Rounding Errors with Currency

A user questions a rounding issue on perl.

According to Perl, 100.10 - 100.00 = 0.0999999999999943
and not ".10" as I would have imagined from my early school days.
Try it yourself in your favorite shell (this happens in v5.83): perl -e "print (100.10-100);"
Can someone with supreme wisdom please explain to me why perl comes to this result from simple math with a non-whole number. This is causing thousands of calculations in my app to be off by .01 - .02 - but when money is involved it needs to be 100% correct.

The short answer is all fractions cannot be exactly represented in binary. A good decimal example of this problem is comparing the fraction one third (1/3) to its decimal representation (0.3333333333).

A better answer is given by BroswerUk.

For a simple explanation of why floating point doesn't give exact results, see Re: Re: Re: Bug? 1+1 != 2.

On some VBA apps I wrote, I dealt with this problem by converting my float to string and back to float.

-Chris

Friday at Linucon

Even though I only attended Linucon  on Friday, I had good time.  Rob Landley and crew put together a great show and I enjoyed listening to Rob's misfortunes about his laptop that had to be duct tape back together.

At 5:30 I caught a presentation by Mars Society member Jonathan Ribble  on the Mars Direct program.  According to Jonathan, the material he covered is also in  Dr. Robert Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars."

At 7:00 I sat in on a panel covering "Anime 101: What is This Anime Thing Anyway?"    The three panelists, Dr. Susan Napier, Chase Hoffman and Greg Simoes, provided a ton of information about Anime - prononuced "Anna-May."  All three appeared to be highly qualified to answer any question on Anime.  One audience member asked, "What would you recommend to someone who hasn't watch Anime before?"  Answers included, Cowboy BeBop and Spirited Away.

Next,  I followed the crowd to the Con Suite were I witnessed the making of ice cream by using liquid nitrogen.  Wil Wheaton was offered the first bowl because he had to leave to give his talk.  On a side note, Wil confessed that he prefers Vi over Emacs. Cool.

At 10:00, I listened to Jay Maynard, dressed in his Tron costume,  and Stu Green, founder of Austin Linux Group, discuss different Linux distros.  Most of the discussions dealt with the different package managers strengths: RPM, Apt-get, and Emerge from Gentoo. 

• IPCop - linux distro tailored for a firewall
• Knoppix - best hardware detection
• SuSE - best full blown distro for new user
• Debian - political distro, aka GNU Linux

At 11:30, I sat in on  "Intro to Python."  Rob Landley, who looked worn-out and tired, gave an introduction to Python focusing on the language's type system.  Rob also referred to the Python site for more information and  tutorials.

-Chris

Update 10 Oct 2004
Wil handed out audio CDs with excerpts from his book "Just a Geek" as read by Wil himself.  Since he released it under a creative commons license, I can legally rip it to MP3 for sharing.

• Track 1 [1 MB]
• Track 2 [10 MB]
• Track 3 [10 MB]
• Track 4 [7 MB]

TextMate: New Text Editor for Mac

(via Geek Notes) Wow another text editor for the mac. I'll tryout TextMate over the next few days, but BBEdit 7 is still working for me as my GUI editor of choice. On the command line, I'm a VIM junkie.

-Chris

Update 10 OCT 2004
Looks like TextMate has trouble opening large text files (99 MB). After waiting a few mintues watching the spinning wheel, I just killed the TextMate process. BBEdit 7.1.4 loads the same large file in about 13 seconds on my machine (12" powerbook, G4 processor on 10.3)

Update 11 Oct 2004
I received a quick and polite reply from Allan Odgaard on TextMate.

Yes, the priority for the first release was functionality. I'll improve/fix handling of large files as we go along :)

FeedDemon and Bloglines Link Up

(via Scoble) According to Scoble, Nick Bradbury will be providing a new version of FeedDemon that syncs with Bloglines.

The best part is items you read in FeedDemon don't show up as unread in Bloglines, and items you read through Bloglines don't show up in FeedDemon. In other words, feed state is synchronized so that you don't read the same item twice. This provides the best of both worlds, IMO - you get the easy synchronization between multiple systems found in a web-based app, with the rich UI of a Windows desktop app.

Very cool.

-Chris

pdftk: PDF Toolkit

Need to pull pages 2-4 out of PDF, but don't want to spend money on Adobe's Acrobat? Take a look at pdftk, a command line tool for manipulating PDFs.

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents.

Other cool tricks can be found in PDF Hacks.

-Chris

FireFox Pet Peeve

(via Jeremy)

The "close tab" button is in the wrong place. Seriously. Try Safari for a few days and then go back to Firefox. Tell me that it doesn't make more sense to have a "close tab" button on each tab. Heck, even Galeon had this years ago. Come to think of it, I think Galeon also had Emacs key bindings.

Agreed. Since I switch back and forth between Safari and Firefox, I caught myself clicking on a nonexistent "close button" with FireFox. :-)

-Chris

BBEdit 8.0

BareBones releases BBEdit 8.0 with the requirement that your are running Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later. Before I drop $50 for the upgrade, I'll wait and see what others have to say on the new version.

-Chris

Software Freedom Day

Looks like a local LUG will be participating in Software Freedom Day in Austin.

On August 28, 2004, we will celebrate the first annual Software Freedom Day. On that day, we will make the world aware of the virtues of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and encourage its widespread use. We will set up stations in public places to give away informational fliers and CDs with selected FOSS, including TheOpenCD and a Linux Live CD.

-Chris

WordPress Review

Linux Journal published an article on setting up WordPress, a blogging tool similar to MovableType.

Open-source applications often are criticized for their lack of a friendly user interface. This is largely because open-source programmers are writing the software for themselves and their colleagues, which means that anything other than core functionality is cast aside.
The authors of WordPress, to their credit, have spent a great deal of time on the user interface, trying to ensure that it is straightforward and unsurprising for nontechnical users.

Agreed. WordPress has a beautiful user interface for an open source project.

-Chris

Free?

Interesting thread on Groklaw about Rob Enderle's speech titled, "Free Software and the Idiots who Buy It." I agree with this comment:

I regret that I must say that some of the confusion comes from our own use of words.
The biggest part is the multiple meanings of the word 'free' in the English language. It has a lot of connotations that are objectionable or give the impression of 'cheap and tawdry', hence involving a lot of explaination to make our meaning clear.
With all due respect to RMS the term Open-Source gives a clearer idea of what's involved as an initial introduction to the concepts.
We really do need to find an English-language word that correctly (or more closely) represents the concepts of the French 'Libre'.
Despite the old saw about the best things in life being free most business people are very much imbued with the idea of 'you get what you pay for' and we have to dis-associate purchase price from the quality of software. I do not think that continued use of 'free' will allow us to do that.

When I first heard about linux and "Free Software," I remember thinking -- this sounds fishy. How can people write anything good and give it away? Well, Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" influenced me in accepting the notion that enterprise level software can be created and distributed under a GPL license. For example, my company uses HylaFAX software as a multi-line incoming fax server and we pay for support as needed.

-Chris

Update 13 AUG 2004
Looks like GrokLaw has an update on this thread.

PortQry.exe

In the August 2004 edition of Windows magazine, Mark Minasi wrote an article on PortQry.exe, a windows command line tool for port scanning. I've been using nmap for years on linux, so I thought I would give portqry.exe a spin, since Microsoft is already on version 2 with this utility.

Even though PortQry.exe does scan ports, I think nmap is a better tool. I visited the nmap site and it appears that they have a version for windows, but it looks like to be more difficult to install than PortQry.exe.

-Chris

Update 7 AUG 2004
Another article on portqry.exe.

Portqry isn't a unique tool. Nmap has been around for a while, and my Linux buddies like it. But the Windows versions of Nmap are cumbersome and involve lots of files and a necessary wizard for installations. In contrast, Portqry is just one 217KB file that takes up little space on my "useful tools" CD-ROM or my "stuff that's good to have around" USB keychain. Nmap performs a variety of tasks, but Portqry is just what I need, particularly when I want to find out whether an ISP's servers are up.

Popfile Security Advisory

(via absoblogginlutely) Popfile made a security announcement yesterday.

Just under one hour ago one of POPFile"s developers reported to me that they had discovered a flaw in the way in which we handle the delivery of GIF/PNG/ICO/CSS/HTML files through the internal web browser.
The good news is that people using the default stealth mode configuration are NOT affected, the bad news is that we have found a security flaw (the last (and first!) one was in May 2003).

Nice to know that the developers designed their software to default to stealth mode.

-Chris

Xandros: Linux for the SMB User?

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols thinks Xandros might be the answer for SMB users who want to ditch Windows in favor of Linux.

One reason I do that is that Xandros comes ready to work with both NT PDC (Primary Domain Controller) domains and W2K and Server 2003 AD (Active Directory) networks. This isn't just hype. I currently run Xandros on my main laptop and a secondary workstation on my hybrid Windows network, and I have no trouble working with NT, W2