Surely you mean Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC)? (Probably just a typo; I'm not actively pursuing a career as an Acronym Stickler, honest!)
The merits of using a (R)DBMS's features or not, such as stored procedures, views, triggers, subselects, user management and security, was discussed fairly recently in the Slashdot topic Stored Procedures - Good or Bad? (though obviously it mostly concerns SPs). There are a good few interesting and insightful posts in there, and it's well worth checking out.
My personal opinion is that if portability is not a definite requirement/design constraint then it's a waste not to use features that are designed to make your life easier. Most projects will *never* switch from the "Big Three" (Oracle, DB2, MS-SQL) once they've chosen one, so if there's no explicit *need* for DBMS portability then why expend the time & effort (and therefore money) programming it in, ignoring the features that make your life easier and improve security, data integrity, code quality, abstraction, performance, etc. striving for a base compatibility level between databases using "vendor-neutral SQL" (if that even exists?) chasing a "what if..."? Of course, every project is different and there are other ways to achieve similar effects, but the vast majority would be better off just using the features of their chosen DBMS!
(Note that I'm not disagreeing with you as such, merely providing another, somewhat differing, opinion on application design.)
Or Delphi (Object Pascal), C# (Delphi v2 - Microsoft poached Anders Hjelsberg from Borland), Python, Ruby, and several other languages that handle strings in a more sensible way (though the overheads are higher so, as always, it's a tradeoff).
If you're having troubles stopping a process through the Task Manager, try the amazingly useful (and free!) Process Explorer from SysInternals. Be careful though, killing SMSS for instance is not a good idea!
Check out their other tools too, they rock e.g. TCPView is a nice graphical netstat, and FileMon & RegMon allow you to see what files/registry entries are being accessed. Very cool.
He has a point. It's all about trust: if you don't trust any of the posters that say, "I've downloaded the original and its MD5 hash is the same as that of the torrent" then, no matter how many me too's there are, you should steer clear and get the file from a trusted source. Simple as that.
Personally, I check MD5s and GPG/PGP signatures of the binary tools I use whereever possible, but not all of them are supplied with these so it's a little impractical. It doesn't hurt to be cautious though: do you really, absolutely, positively need it [whatever it is] RIGHT NOW, or would you rather wait for a guaranteed source that doesn't stand a chance of being the latest German beta/trojan/Goatse.cx vs. Tubgirl animated Flash EXE?*
Considering that installing a Service Pack (or equivalent OS update) should NEVER be taken lightly, I'd rather spend a few hours ghosting the machine and/or making sure that everything important was backed-up and verified, rather than rush to "be the first", especially in light of the previous Slashdot XP-SP2 coverage (as unscientific and unproved as the linked article was for that topic). Besides, wouldn't you rather that Microsoft paid for the bandwidth?;)
*(Of course all of this is hypothetical; I haven't checked the torrent or its source or tried to confirm the hash with a trusted source. It may very well be the real thing, and from the amount of news coverage starting to spread SP2-final does appear to be out.)
None of the stuff you've said is an argument against a helmet or gun-mounted flashlight. Instead, everything you've said is an argument that any helmet- or gun-mounted flashlight
should have an off switch.
Indeed. Back when I used to have both the time (and inclination) to play airsoft/BB, several players used to have gun-mounted Maglites with special "trigger-style" switches for night games. These replaced the end caps of a standard mini AA Mag and had a lead that terminated in a pressure switch, usually rigged to fall under the 3rd or pinky finger on the gun's grip. As a result, you had really quick and easy control of when you wanted it on or off, and using a red filter over the lens they didn't draw much attention otherwise (other than the head reflecting other lights shined at you, which caused some people to make little scope-style flip covers for when they wanted to snipe). I'm not sure whether you can buy these switches as a standard accessory or whether they were jury-rigged, but they seem like something that Mag would sell.
Of course, it was pretty much useless against the guys with night-vision, but they also tended to be the ones lacking in skill so they were still easy enough targets; when you're camo'd up, hidden in undergrowth and not moving then night-vision doesn't help until it's too late;)
Just to correct myself quickly: that should, of course, be George A. Romero; not John Romero, the famous game programmer involved in the creation of several milestones such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Hexen, Heretic, Quake, etc. Sorry 'bout that, I've got Doom on the brain at the moment as it [Doom 3] still hasn't been released in the UK yet; the 13th, apparently...
Actually, digging a bit deeper (I personally had just assumed copyright must've expired on it as I found it on archive.org) the story is not quite as clear-cut. In some ways, you're actually more correct than your rebuker: the copyright never actually expired, because it never actually existed. For more details, see here: http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/0 02627.h tml
and here: http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/23/night_ of_the_ living_.html (remove extra spaces added by Slashcode if necc.)
Seems as though John Romero left the copyright notice off the original which, due to the laws of the time, meant that it was never actually enforceable (at least that's how I read it). Pretty interesting stuff, really.
This one immediately sprang to mind (props to SimpsonsMath where Google found the quote):
In the future, the second-graders are stacked in desks three-high, watching an interactive television program titled 'Pepsi Presents Addition And Subtraction', starring aged actor Troy McClure wearing a Star Trek uniform.
Troy: Now, turn to the next problem. If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you? You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?
Girl [her face appears picture-in-picture]: Pepsi?
Indeed, that's the point: it's an experience rather than just an evening at home in front of a (comparatively) tiny screen and stereo. One of the last times I went to the cinema - there are only two screens here with a very limited choice so we don't go very often - it was a great laugh, not because of the film (which was very good, but not a comedy) but because of a certain incident...
We'd gone to see "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"; the cinema was packed and the five of us got settled, munchies and drinks at the ready. The only problem was, there were the usual couple of kids who'd not been able to get into anything else, so were sat right on the front row and were doing their best to be annoying.
Throughout the film they got more and more irritating. One of them, in particular, had managed to find a seat that was squeaky, so was taking great enjoyment in pissing off the entire cinema by rocking loudly backwards and forwards. It got to the point where one of our group, Toots, said quietly, "Right, I've had enough of that little bastard, I'm going to shut him up." He'd finished his small stashed bottle of whiskey and was getting ready to lob it at the kid's head, when Smeg, another of the lads, put his arm out and said, "it's OK, I'll deal with this."
In a fluke of timing, the film was just coming up to the love scene between Xiou Long and Xiao Hu. Sure enough, through the silence of the cinema came the squeaking of the chair: eewwwwkk, eeek, eeekkk, eeek. Smeg chose his moment well, and spoke out in a loud, clear voice, so the entire audience could hear.
"Excuse me. Are you masturbating down there?"
The entire place erupted with laughter. Needless to say, we didn't hear one peep from those kids through the rest of the film:)
It was a contest to redesign Neilson's site using CSS. Here's the list of contestants (with small screenshots and links). I've got to say, they've all done pretty good jobs of making his site "prettier";)
...And for those that are interested and would like to learn more, but are finding it hard to get started, check out these excellent CLI for Noobies articles by Joe Barr. (Scroll to the bottom, start at "CLI for noobies: alias cat and pipe meet grep " and work your way up.)
Re:The city was being reasonable, not Smirnoff
on
Reverse Graffiti
·
· Score: 1
Another good rootkit checker, which seems to have a more active development cycle, is Rootkit Hunter. Here's a Newsforge article on it, with a few more details.
A few other comments:
Virus scanners won't help on jot against a custom hack (as Valve found out, for instance). They can be helpful, but don't put full reliance on them.
Running an Intrustion Detection/Prevention System such as Snort, Samhain, Prelude, etc. will help you manage the monitoring side of things; more than a few machines becomes a pain without additional help. Also take a look centralising all your logs on a syslogng server or something similar, if you don't already (note that there are various solutions out there to get Windows boxes to log to a syslog server).
A honeypot may distract the hacker from your production servers for long enough for you to identify that there's a problem.
Also take a look at "HoneyTokens": specifically created database records that trigger alarms if they're accessed - usually high profile fictious targets that would make excellent trophy hacks - there's more info on this over at SecurityFocus.
If you suspect that a machine has been compromised, as other have said, the ONLY WAY TO BE SURE is to rebuild the box from scratch. While this may be a real pain, hopefully it'll help you get the procedures in place to make this as painless as possible, so it's not all bad.
Remember that security is a PROCESS, so be thorough; get an entire plan together and cover all the bases that you can, taking special care to identify and cover the weak points. Your company's security is only as good as its weakest link; for instance, priviledge escalation of weak user account passwords is a good one.
Read SecurityFocus, PacketStorm, CERT and the like, and try to get involved in their communities; they can be invaluable! They're also got a lot of good tutorials, such as how to lock down Apache, IIS; securing PHP, ASP; etc.
Re:Someone please explain this to me.
on
Mozilla 1.7 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Indeed, the developer tools for Mozilla rock. The best dev toolbar I've seen has to be the Web Developer Extension by Chris Spederick. It's AMAZING. I've been using the PNHToolbar for ages, but this one blows it away. The "View Style Information" targeting, where you then hover the mouse over any element and it displays the CSS heirarcy in the statusbar, makes it invaluable just for that feature alone.
(Props to glwtta for plugging it in the Firebird v0.9 story.)
Well, personally, my upgrade went completely smoothly, and this was with mail originally exported from multiple Mozilla suite profiles into one Thunderbird profile (by hex editing the %AppData%\Thunderbird\registry.dat file, and prefs.js inside the actual profile dir). No tweaking or manual hacking required AT ALL. With that said, here's a more in-depth upgrade guide, with profile troubleshooting hints:
You *must make sure* that Thunderbird, Firefox and Mozilla are *all not running* (for instance, when I just upgraded I noticed that the Thunderbird MapiProxy.dll was locked by Mozilla). Double-check in the Task Manager and kill as necessary.
Delete the contents of the Thunderbird application directory (or copy/backup, then delete). This is important! (And has been mentioned by others in this topic already.)
Install Thunderbird.
Start Thunderbird. Note that the first time it starts it does take an age (esp. if it's a fresh install and it's creating a new profile - 30 seconds or so for me on an old Athlon 800). Be patient.
From the looks of things they're now moved away from the binary %AppData%\Thunderbird\registry.dat file, which is a *very good* thing (no more hex editing!). If you look in %appdata%\Thunderbird (where %appdata% is typically "c:\documents and settings\your username\application data") you should find two files - registry.dat and profiles.ini Rename registry.dat (to.old or something, it's no longer used). Open the profiles.ini file. Make sure that your profile path is correct; if it doesn't match with your files, fix it;) In my case it's:
[Profile0] Name=Stef IsRelative=0 Path=C:\Doc uments and Settings\Stef\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\Stef Default=1
Open up this path. If you are still having troubles starting with a profile (after deleting and reinstalling the entire app) then this is the place to start trimming. Make a backup of the entire dir first!! Then you can fairly safely delete:
[extensions] [chrome] compreg.dat mailViews.d at panacea.dat (get rid of this one, esp. if you've moved the profile from Mozilla) persdict.dat (personal dictionary additions) training.dat (spam training data) xpti.dat compatibility.ini components.ini XUL.mfl mimeTypes.rdf localstore.rdf
Gemal.dk has a good description of what most of these files do (though it's an out-dated list compared to Thunderbird): http://gemal.dk/mozilla/files.html
The absolutely essential ones to keep are: The entire "mail" and "imapmail" subdirectories prefs.js (which contains all the account details and paths to their data files in the above dirs) *.mab (your address books)
There are more porting and profile details here: http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/faq.html# q2.2
Note that you have to fix any paths in prefs.js - think they may now allow relative paths, but they used to have to be absolute.
Hope that helps, at least a bit? Remember that it *is* still sub v1.0, but they're getting better with each release. It's still always been easier than dealing with Outlook Express: http://support.microsoft.com/default.asp x?scid=kb; EN-US;q263837
Ouch!;) (you may need to need to trim Slashcode-inserted spaces from URLs)
There is NO reason that I can possibly think of for switching from Mozilla [SeaMonkey] to Firefox+Thunderbird
When you're halfway through writing an e-mail and the browser decides to hang, or vice versa? (Which used to happen a bit to me if I was tunnelling mail accounts through SSH and the connection died: Moz mail would hang everything.)
I've been using Mozilla fulltime since v1.0 and I've recently moved all the mail from my Moz profile to Thunderbird, and I have to say it's a good thing - it feels more responsive, and the separation alone just makes dealing with mail seem better and easier.
In general most people want isolated apps, they do not want a massive, bloated monolith that does everything (including stuff they never need); and they don't care, or even notice, that more system resources are used. Don't get me wrong, I still love the Mozilla suite, but I agree with some of Scott Collins's comments in his recent arsTechnica interview: namely that the Mozilla team should've used native controls long ago, and by inferrence that it also should've been split into more nimble, singular applications like Firefox and Thunderbird long ago, too. Now that it has, I feel a lot more confident deploying them on standard home user machines (parents, family friends, etc.) - not only 'cause they're more polished, but because people *want* one app for "the internet" (web) and one app for mail.
Can't really help on that, but you may want to try creating a new test profile and installing them both on that. The easiest way to bring up the profile manager is to add -p switch to the end of the shortcut's target, then create a new profile using this dialog. Make sure you click OK when installing the XPIs, not Cancel: Cancel tends to make them install in Firefox's main "chrome" directory, thereby making them global.
If it works fine in the new profile then at least you've narrowed it down to your original profile, and can move your bookmarks, etc. over to a new one (see Gemal.dk's excellent articles on sharing/messing with Moz profiles). If the problems persist in both, try uninstalling Firefox, then find the original directory (default is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox) and delete this. This'll make sure any globally-installed XPIs and their associated config files should be wiped - note that you're profiles should be fine as they're stored in %appdata%\phoenix\profiles.
Awesome. I've been using Checky and the PNHToolbar for a while but this one is just so much nicer (indeed, the author, Chris Pederick, cites the PNH bar as the original source of inspiration). Thanks for bringing it to my attention, much appreciated!:)
Don't suppose you have any info or resources on how to deploy Mozilla Firefox in a standard Windows Active Directory network do you? I've been thinking about doing this myself for a while, but just haven't had the time to research it and gather all the info together (and then write the proposal to management).
Does anyone provide Firefox in a pre-made.MSI package that can be deployed through Group Policy? Also, d'you know if it supports Group Policies in a similar way to IE (gpedit.msc - User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Internet Explorer). It'd be essential that Firefox could be restricted in a similar way to IE.
These issues seem, to me, to be the major factors holding Firefox back from enterprise deployment. If admins *knew they could replace IE by rolling Firefox out through AD and customise/lock it down through GPs* then I'm sure a lot more people would switch; I know I would.
Has anyone written a guide to do this, if, indeed, it's possible? I'm sure a lot of admins would love to see it...
There are several problems with that. Firstly, anyone with a clue would just take the disk out and mount it on another system - problem solved. Secondly, even if they're stupid enough to turn this machine on without taking the drive out first, secure deletion takes AGES (as in hours for a 40GB disk in a fast machine using DoD standards, I've tested this myself using DB&N) so it'd be easy to just pull the plug/battery out and recover what's left; a fully-charged laptop battery would probably run out before it'd finished wiping, anyway!
Even physical damage to disks (such as shooting an HDD with an AK47) isn't guaranteed to get rid of all the data - I'm sure that there are people capable of recovering info off fragments of platters, for instance. (E.G. The larger professional data recovery places have spare drive electronics, casings, heads, etc. of pretty much every drive ever made - everything you need to reassemble an HDD from scratch, so if it was important enough I'm sure they'd be able to do something with partial/damaged platters).
The only way to be sure is complete destruction (as others have already said), be it by furnace, grinding, acid or whatever. Watching it disintegrate in front of your own eyes is the best way to be sure:)
Slashdot Mirror
Surely you mean Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC)? (Probably just a typo; I'm not actively pursuing a career as an Acronym Stickler, honest!)
The merits of using a (R)DBMS's features or not, such as stored procedures, views, triggers, subselects, user management and security, was discussed fairly recently in the Slashdot topic Stored Procedures - Good or Bad? (though obviously it mostly concerns SPs). There are a good few interesting and insightful posts in there, and it's well worth checking out.
My personal opinion is that if portability is not a definite requirement/design constraint then it's a waste not to use features that are designed to make your life easier. Most projects will *never* switch from the "Big Three" (Oracle, DB2, MS-SQL) once they've chosen one, so if there's no explicit *need* for DBMS portability then why expend the time & effort (and therefore money) programming it in, ignoring the features that make your life easier and improve security, data integrity, code quality, abstraction, performance, etc. striving for a base compatibility level between databases using "vendor-neutral SQL" (if that even exists?) chasing a "what if..."? Of course, every project is different and there are other ways to achieve similar effects, but the vast majority would be better off just using the features of their chosen DBMS!
(Note that I'm not disagreeing with you as such, merely providing another, somewhat differing, opinion on application design.)Or Delphi (Object Pascal), C# (Delphi v2 - Microsoft poached Anders Hjelsberg from Borland), Python, Ruby, and several other languages that handle strings in a more sensible way (though the overheads are higher so, as always, it's a tradeoff).
If you're having troubles stopping a process through the Task Manager, try the amazingly useful (and free!) Process Explorer from SysInternals. Be careful though, killing SMSS for instance is not a good idea!
Check out their other tools too, they rock e.g. TCPView is a nice graphical netstat, and FileMon & RegMon allow you to see what files/registry entries are being accessed. Very cool.He has a point. It's all about trust: if you don't trust any of the posters that say, "I've downloaded the original and its MD5 hash is the same as that of the torrent" then, no matter how many me too's there are, you should steer clear and get the file from a trusted source. Simple as that.
;)
Personally, I check MD5s and GPG/PGP signatures of the binary tools I use whereever possible, but not all of them are supplied with these so it's a little impractical. It doesn't hurt to be cautious though: do you really, absolutely, positively need it [whatever it is] RIGHT NOW, or would you rather wait for a guaranteed source that doesn't stand a chance of being the latest German beta/trojan/Goatse.cx vs. Tubgirl animated Flash EXE?*
Considering that installing a Service Pack (or equivalent OS update) should NEVER be taken lightly, I'd rather spend a few hours ghosting the machine and/or making sure that everything important was backed-up and verified, rather than rush to "be the first", especially in light of the previous Slashdot XP-SP2 coverage (as unscientific and unproved as the linked article was for that topic). Besides, wouldn't you rather that Microsoft paid for the bandwidth?
*(Of course all of this is hypothetical; I haven't checked the torrent or its source or tried to confirm the hash with a trusted source. It may very well be the real thing, and from the amount of news coverage starting to spread SP2-final does appear to be out.)
Indeed. Back when I used to have both the time (and inclination) to play airsoft/BB, several players used to have gun-mounted Maglites with special "trigger-style" switches for night games. These replaced the end caps of a standard mini AA Mag and had a lead that terminated in a pressure switch, usually rigged to fall under the 3rd or pinky finger on the gun's grip. As a result, you had really quick and easy control of when you wanted it on or off, and using a red filter over the lens they didn't draw much attention otherwise (other than the head reflecting other lights shined at you, which caused some people to make little scope-style flip covers for when they wanted to snipe). I'm not sure whether you can buy these switches as a standard accessory or whether they were jury-rigged, but they seem like something that Mag would sell.
Of course, it was pretty much useless against the guys with night-vision, but they also tended to be the ones lacking in skill so they were still easy enough targets; when you're camo'd up, hidden in undergrowth and not moving then night-vision doesn't help until it's too lateJust to correct myself quickly: that should, of course, be George A. Romero; not John Romero, the famous game programmer involved in the creation of several milestones such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Hexen, Heretic, Quake, etc. Sorry 'bout that, I've got Doom on the brain at the moment as it [Doom 3] still hasn't been released in the UK yet; the 13th, apparently...
Actually, digging a bit deeper (I personally had just assumed copyright must've expired on it as I found it on archive.org) the story is not quite as clear-cut. In some ways, you're actually more correct than your rebuker: the copyright never actually expired, because it never actually existed. For more details, see here:0 02627.h tml
_ of_the_ living_.html
http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/
and here:
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/23/night
(remove extra spaces added by Slashcode if necc.)
Seems as though John Romero left the copyright notice off the original which, due to the laws of the time, meant that it was never actually enforceable (at least that's how I read it). Pretty interesting stuff, really.
In the future, the second-graders are stacked in desks three-high, watching an interactive television program titled 'Pepsi Presents Addition And Subtraction', starring aged actor Troy McClure wearing a Star Trek uniform.
Troy: Now, turn to the next problem. If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you? You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?
Girl [her face appears picture-in-picture]: Pepsi?
Troy: Partial credit!Indeed it has. Get it here:
Night of the Living Dead - (Creative Commons license: Public Domain)
Indeed, that's the point: it's an experience rather than just an evening at home in front of a (comparatively) tiny screen and stereo. One of the last times I went to the cinema - there are only two screens here with a very limited choice so we don't go very often - it was a great laugh, not because of the film (which was very good, but not a comedy) but because of a certain incident...
:)
We'd gone to see "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"; the cinema was packed and the five of us got settled, munchies and drinks at the ready. The only problem was, there were the usual couple of kids who'd not been able to get into anything else, so were sat right on the front row and were doing their best to be annoying.
Throughout the film they got more and more irritating. One of them, in particular, had managed to find a seat that was squeaky, so was taking great enjoyment in pissing off the entire cinema by rocking loudly backwards and forwards. It got to the point where one of our group, Toots, said quietly, "Right, I've had enough of that little bastard, I'm going to shut him up." He'd finished his small stashed bottle of whiskey and was getting ready to lob it at the kid's head, when Smeg, another of the lads, put his arm out and said, "it's OK, I'll deal with this."
In a fluke of timing, the film was just coming up to the love scene between Xiou Long and Xiao Hu. Sure enough, through the silence of the cinema came the squeaking of the chair: eewwwwkk, eeek, eeekkk, eeek. Smeg chose his moment well, and spoke out in a loud, clear voice, so the entire audience could hear.
"Excuse me. Are you masturbating down there?"
The entire place erupted with laughter. Needless to say, we didn't hear one peep from those kids through the rest of the film
You might want to take a look at this:
;)
Reuseit
It was a contest to redesign Neilson's site using CSS. Here's the list of contestants (with small screenshots and links). I've got to say, they've all done pretty good jobs of making his site "prettier"
...And for those that are interested and would like to learn more, but are finding it hard to get started, check out these excellent CLI for Noobies articles by Joe Barr. (Scroll to the bottom, start at "CLI for noobies: alias cat and pipe meet grep " and work your way up.)
Patent the idea? What the...!
Anyway, I call prior art.
Previous Slashdot comment
Another good rootkit checker, which seems to have a more active development cycle, is Rootkit Hunter. Here's a Newsforge article on it, with a few more details.
A few other comments:
Virus scanners won't help on jot against a custom hack (as Valve found out, for instance). They can be helpful, but don't put full reliance on them.
Running an Intrustion Detection/Prevention System such as Snort, Samhain, Prelude, etc. will help you manage the monitoring side of things; more than a few machines becomes a pain without additional help. Also take a look centralising all your logs on a syslogng server or something similar, if you don't already (note that there are various solutions out there to get Windows boxes to log to a syslog server).
A honeypot may distract the hacker from your production servers for long enough for you to identify that there's a problem.
Also take a look at "HoneyTokens": specifically created database records that trigger alarms if they're accessed - usually high profile fictious targets that would make excellent trophy hacks - there's more info on this over at SecurityFocus.
If you suspect that a machine has been compromised, as other have said, the ONLY WAY TO BE SURE is to rebuild the box from scratch. While this may be a real pain, hopefully it'll help you get the procedures in place to make this as painless as possible, so it's not all bad.
Perform security audits/pentests every now and again. Tools like Nessus help: here's a good series on using Nessus (part 2, part 3).
Get familiar with security tools such as the top 75 recommendations at Insecure.org (home of Nmap).
Remember that security is a PROCESS, so be thorough; get an entire plan together and cover all the bases that you can, taking special care to identify and cover the weak points. Your company's security is only as good as its weakest link; for instance, priviledge escalation of weak user account passwords is a good one.
Read SecurityFocus, PacketStorm, CERT and the like, and try to get involved in their communities; they can be invaluable! They're also got a lot of good tutorials, such as how to lock down Apache, IIS; securing PHP, ASP; etc.
Eek, Chris Pederick, even. Sorry, Chris!
Indeed, the developer tools for Mozilla rock. The best dev toolbar I've seen has to be the Web Developer Extension by Chris Spederick. It's AMAZING. I've been using the PNHToolbar for ages, but this one blows it away. The "View Style Information" targeting, where you then hover the mouse over any element and it displays the CSS heirarcy in the statusbar, makes it invaluable just for that feature alone.
(Props to glwtta for plugging it in the Firebird v0.9 story.)Oh, I almost forgot another useful tip: the "-p" switch makes the Thunderbird profile manager appear:
;)
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -p
Very handy
Well, personally, my upgrade went completely smoothly, and this was with mail originally exported from multiple Mozilla suite profiles into one Thunderbird profile (by hex editing the %AppData%\Thunderbird\registry.dat file, and prefs.js inside the actual profile dir). No tweaking or manual hacking required AT ALL. With that said, here's a more in-depth upgrade guide, with profile troubleshooting hints:
.old or something, it's no longer used). Open the profiles.ini file. Make sure that your profile path is correct; if it doesn't match with your files, fix it ;) In my case it's:
c uments and Settings\Stef\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\Stef
d ati
# q2.2
p x?scid=kb; EN-US;q263837
;)
You *must make sure* that Thunderbird, Firefox and Mozilla are *all not running* (for instance, when I just upgraded I noticed that the Thunderbird MapiProxy.dll was locked by Mozilla). Double-check in the Task Manager and kill as necessary.
Delete the contents of the Thunderbird application directory (or copy/backup, then delete). This is important! (And has been mentioned by others in this topic already.)
Install Thunderbird.
Start Thunderbird. Note that the first time it starts it does take an age (esp. if it's a fresh install and it's creating a new profile - 30 seconds or so for me on an old Athlon 800). Be patient.
From the looks of things they're now moved away from the binary %AppData%\Thunderbird\registry.dat file, which is a *very good* thing (no more hex editing!). If you look in %appdata%\Thunderbird (where %appdata% is typically "c:\documents and settings\your username\application data") you should find two files - registry.dat and profiles.ini
Rename registry.dat (to
[Profile0]
Name=Stef
IsRelative=0
Path=C:\Do
Default=1
Open up this path. If you are still having troubles starting with a profile (after deleting and reinstalling the entire app) then this is the place to start trimming. Make a backup of the entire dir first!! Then you can fairly safely delete:
[extensions]
[chrome]
compreg.dat
mailViews.
panacea.dat (get rid of this one, esp. if you've moved the profile from Mozilla)
persdict.dat (personal dictionary additions)
training.dat (spam training data)
xpti.dat
compatibility.ini
components.in
XUL.mfl
mimeTypes.rdf
localstore.rdf
Gemal.dk has a good description of what most of these files do (though it's an out-dated list compared to Thunderbird):
http://gemal.dk/mozilla/files.html
The absolutely essential ones to keep are:
The entire "mail" and "imapmail" subdirectories
prefs.js (which contains all the account details and paths to their data files in the above dirs)
*.mab (your address books)
There are more porting and profile details here:
http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/faq.html
Note that you have to fix any paths in prefs.js - think they may now allow relative paths, but they used to have to be absolute.
Hope that helps, at least a bit? Remember that it *is* still sub v1.0, but they're getting better with each release. It's still always been easier than dealing with Outlook Express:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.as
Ouch!
(you may need to need to trim Slashcode-inserted spaces from URLs)
When you're halfway through writing an e-mail and the browser decides to hang, or vice versa? (Which used to happen a bit to me if I was tunnelling mail accounts through SSH and the connection died: Moz mail would hang everything.)
I've been using Mozilla fulltime since v1.0 and I've recently moved all the mail from my Moz profile to Thunderbird, and I have to say it's a good thing - it feels more responsive, and the separation alone just makes dealing with mail seem better and easier.
In general most people want isolated apps, they do not want a massive, bloated monolith that does everything (including stuff they never need); and they don't care, or even notice, that more system resources are used. Don't get me wrong, I still love the Mozilla suite, but I agree with some of Scott Collins's comments in his recent arsTechnica interview: namely that the Mozilla team should've used native controls long ago, and by inferrence that it also should've been split into more nimble, singular applications like Firefox and Thunderbird long ago, too. Now that it has, I feel a lot more confident deploying them on standard home user machines (parents, family friends, etc.) - not only 'cause they're more polished, but because people *want* one app for "the internet" (web) and one app for mail.
Can't really help on that, but you may want to try creating a new test profile and installing them both on that. The easiest way to bring up the profile manager is to add -p switch to the end of the shortcut's target, then create a new profile using this dialog. Make sure you click OK when installing the XPIs, not Cancel: Cancel tends to make them install in Firefox's main "chrome" directory, thereby making them global.
If it works fine in the new profile then at least you've narrowed it down to your original profile, and can move your bookmarks, etc. over to a new one (see Gemal.dk's excellent articles on sharing/messing with Moz profiles). If the problems persist in both, try uninstalling Firefox, then find the original directory (default is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox) and delete this. This'll make sure any globally-installed XPIs and their associated config files should be wiped - note that you're profiles should be fine as they're stored in %appdata%\phoenix\profiles.
Good luck!
Awesome. I've been using Checky and the PNHToolbar for a while but this one is just so much nicer (indeed, the author, Chris Pederick, cites the PNH bar as the original source of inspiration). Thanks for bringing it to my attention, much appreciated! :)
Don't suppose you have any info or resources on how to deploy Mozilla Firefox in a standard Windows Active Directory network do you? I've been thinking about doing this myself for a while, but just haven't had the time to research it and gather all the info together (and then write the proposal to management).
.MSI package that can be deployed through Group Policy? Also, d'you know if it supports Group Policies in a similar way to IE (gpedit.msc - User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Internet Explorer). It'd be essential that Firefox could be restricted in a similar way to IE.
Does anyone provide Firefox in a pre-made
These issues seem, to me, to be the major factors holding Firefox back from enterprise deployment. If admins *knew they could replace IE by rolling Firefox out through AD and customise/lock it down through GPs* then I'm sure a lot more people would switch; I know I would.
Has anyone written a guide to do this, if, indeed, it's possible? I'm sure a lot of admins would love to see it...
Funny you should say that; I thought the blonde model looked somewhat familiar from, uh, somewhere. A quick Google later:
Heh, kudos to iRiver for realising where their main market lies!There are several problems with that. Firstly, anyone with a clue would just take the disk out and mount it on another system - problem solved. Secondly, even if they're stupid enough to turn this machine on without taking the drive out first, secure deletion takes AGES (as in hours for a 40GB disk in a fast machine using DoD standards, I've tested this myself using DB&N) so it'd be easy to just pull the plug/battery out and recover what's left; a fully-charged laptop battery would probably run out before it'd finished wiping, anyway!
:)
Even physical damage to disks (such as shooting an HDD with an AK47) isn't guaranteed to get rid of all the data - I'm sure that there are people capable of recovering info off fragments of platters, for instance. (E.G. The larger professional data recovery places have spare drive electronics, casings, heads, etc. of pretty much every drive ever made - everything you need to reassemble an HDD from scratch, so if it was important enough I'm sure they'd be able to do something with partial/damaged platters).
The only way to be sure is complete destruction (as others have already said), be it by furnace, grinding, acid or whatever. Watching it disintegrate in front of your own eyes is the best way to be sure