Author: Dave Farquhar

Getting Firefox out of the doldrums

Dave Farquhar security, Software , ,

John C. Dvorak asks what’s wrong with Firefox, and suggests forking as a possible solution.

It sounds to me like one or more plugins he’s running is causing problems. I run Firefox on Vista (unfortunately), with as few plugins as possible, and I don’t have the issues he describes. Memory usage does spiral out of control if I go long enough between restarting the browser, but restarting the browser once a week keeps it tolerable.
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Doc, what security settings are you using on your network?

Dave Farquhar security ,

A reader who will remain anonymous (he can out himself if he wishes) sent me an interesting observation. He was in his doctor’s office last week, and out of curiosity, he ran a wifi scanner on his phone just to see what networks were available and how they were secured.

What he saw wasn’t pretty. Especially considering he was in a building full of doctors, lawyers, and financial advisors. Read more

Remove ghost device drivers from Windows 7

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

If you want a way to remove ghost device drivers from Windows 7, or other recent versions of Windows, it just got easier.

What’s a ghost device driver? When you change or remove hardware from a Windows system, Windows keeps the old device driver lingering. You don’t see it in Device Manager, but the time Windows spends chasing ghosts increases boot time, in addition to consuming some memory, registry space, and disk space.

It’s not as much of a problem as it used to be, but if you want your system to run as quickly and smoothly as possible, you don’t want it wasting time managing hardware you’ll never use again. (Don’t worry–if you change your mind and plug the hardware back in, Windows will reload the driver.) Read more

The difference that posting frequency makes when blogging

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

Some time ago, I gave the advice that it doesn’t really matter if you post every day or not.

I think my rationale was that quality matters more than quantity, or at least it should. And although I still believe that in an ideal world, quality should matter more than quantity, now I have around 18 months of data that I can look at.

Here are the trends that I see.
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Let’s import the Dutch Repair cafe idea

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

In Amsterdam, a couple of times a month volunteers meet up in community centers to fix things. Anyone can bring items that don’t work anymore to get it fixed. It reduces waste, people save money, they get to meet their neighbors, and it provides opportunity.

Opportunity? Hear me out.
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How to quickly find the differences between two Word documents

Dave Farquhar Office, Software , , ,

From time to time, I have to deal with new revisions of familiar implementation guides or other system documentation, and the authors rarely include a changelog in the document. And of course the first question anyone asks about the new guide is what’s changed. That means I have to find the differences between two Word documents.

This week I found myself collaborating on a long-ish document and needing to synchronize some changes. Word’s tracked changes and comments can help somewhat, but generally I find them clumsy and annoying.

If you have five minutes and a willingness to use a command prompt, you can find the differences easily, then work from there.
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How blogging helps my professional career

Dave Farquhar Writing

My boss’ boss (I think we’re just two levels of management removed now) spent half the day composing a long e-mail message containing a large number of questions. He sent it to my boss, who forwarded it to us. I read the 10 or so questions that pertain to me.

Then I took a walk. Walking to the bathroom and using the facilities always seems like a good idea before I start writing. Read more

Cleaning USB drives with Linux

Dave Farquhar security , , ,

A longtime reader sent me a really good question today. If I had a USB flash drive and I didn’t know where it’s been or what it’s done, how would I clean it to make it safe to use? He said using Linux was fair game, so that made the answer a lot easier.

Note that as of 2015, a knowledgeable attacker can make a USB drive that will survive this cleaning method, so I only recommend this 90% of the time, and the problem is, it’s impossible to know which 90%.

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School administrators need to focus on their hallways, not Facebook

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

In the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, a high school principal is resigning amid allegations that she posed as a student and friended 300 students on Facebook.  School administrators seem to be obsessed with what goes on on Facebook.

I suggest they should be paying more attention to what goes on in their own hallways.
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A reasonable explanation for why religious sites are more likely to be infected with malware

Dave Farquhar security ,

Last week, Symantec issued a surprising report stating that religious web sites are more likely to harbor malware than sites that offer dirty pictures and videos.

I’m pretty sure there’s a reasonable explanation. Read more