We use Symantec Antivirus where we work, and somehow I got put in charge of it. It's not my favorite product, but I'm not sure what would be better. So we live with it.
Recently I had two systems that decided they didn't want to be managed anymore, and my usual fix, copying the server's certificate file and grc.dat back into place, didn't work. The official solution? Uninstall and reinstall.
I saw a story on Digg talking about why MS Office is so much better than OpenOffice. The argument was pretty shallow--pretty much everything it said was either untrue or could be simplified to "because it is" or "because it costs money."
I've used both. I have both installed on a couple of machines. I generally use MS Office. Here's why.
I know a lot of people keep notebooks pertaining to their hobbies. Any time they find something good on a discussion forum or elsewhere, they made a copy, print it out, punch holes in it, and put it in the notebook. Some people even put their own notes, from experience or discussions, in there.
These notebooks are a good way to learn a lot and retain it--you may forget some things over the years, but reading through the notebook again will refresh your memory.
There's just one problem with notebooks--finding the information buried within.
In what little free time I've had the past few days (we have a project that has us in the midst of a death march at work), I've been messing around with LyX, a typesetting program for Windows, Unix, and most other operating sytems. I remember messing with it about six years ago, when there wasn't much else resembling a word processor available for Linux, but this time, I'm more impressed with what I see.
This week the usual sources were flooded with stories about how slow and bloated Openoffice is. I guess this came on the heels of the release of version 2.0; it's never been much of a secret that Openoffice was big and slow. It's descended from Staroffice, after all, and it was big and slow too.
This is cool. Steve DeLassus finds stuff and I blog it. If you like Tinyurl, there's a Firefox extension that's going to make you like it a lot more. If you don't know what Tinyurl is, read on and you'll be using it almost every day.
In case you haven't read it elsewhere, Flash and other plugins allow popups in Firefox, even if you have popups disabled. Here's how to disable popups from plugins.
I made the change (it takes 30 seconds) and the sites that had been getting popups through to me aren't anymore.
So Symantec is saying that IE is more secure than Mozilla-based browsers because there were 25 security vulnerabilities disclosed in the first half of 2005 for Mozilla, as opposed to 13 for IE.
Such reports are fine for Clueless Information Officers. Let's analyze this like someone who actually knows what to do with that thing that sits between your ears.
