Steve’s Stuff

Ed Bury, our PR guy, asked me to set up website for podcasting presentations from our Annual Meetings. After Googling for a while and grasping at some straws, I came right back here to WordPress, discovering it has all of the necessary RSS stuff built right in. I installed the PodPress plugin to add a flash player and iTunes Music Store syndication. All in all, about an hour of research, 5 minutes of downloading, and 10 minutes to implement.

Visit our new podcast site.

podcast, PodPress, iTunes

Time to update:

From the HELP menu, use “Check for Updates”.

Read the Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.2 Release Notes. There are Notable Bug Fixes and security-related patches.

Firefox

John Dvorak argues that market forces (”we on the market, so we’ll force you to do…”) will doom free the free municiapl WiFi services that are springing up around the country. Chicago is evaluating running its own. Dvoark assumes that a combination of telephone carriers, cable companies, and cell phone companies (oh, wait, they’re all the same company!) will either block the creation of free services or force them to shut down.

Enjoy free municipal Wi-Fi while you can - MarketWatch

[T]here is no way that any cash-strapped city — a category that appears to comprise all of them — will not succumb to the financial benefit of pulling the plug on this free service, if it’s ever implemented in the first place.
So if you get free municipal Wi-Fi, use it and enjoy it while you can.

Well, good. I wouldn’t want the city of Chicago to be my telephone company. I don’t want them to be my internet company. If they run my internet, they can read my email, without subpoena and without warrants. They can bury how much I pay for it in my taxes, and I’ll bet the “free” service costs more than what I current pay Earthlink. And, perhaps, the person appointed to run it might get that position based more on clout than competence. Things like that have been rumored to happen here.

municipal wifi, Dvorak

Google Calendar is now available to anyone with a Gmail account. We run Exchange in-house, but this will let us set up shared calendars with anyone. Cool!

Google Calendar, Gmail

The Register has a story, linking to this website about a replacement for the standard captcha, test to separate humans from robots. We’re all familiar with captchas: They’re a series of numbers and letters produced as a slightly obscured graphic that we have to decode and enter into a field on a form. This test has a picture of 9 cute animals in a grid and you have to click on the three pictures of kittens.

Yet another one. A flaw in IE allows a website to display content with an incorrect location in the address bar. Thus, a phisher can display his own content but set the address bar to http://yourbank.com. Check to see if your browser is vulnerable with the Secunia Spoofing Vulnerability Test

phishing, Internet Explorer, Secunia