Oh Brian!

I came across an interesting article this morning on digg that describes Google's information inheritence policies. Things that I noticed right away were that Google has defined separate policies for minors and adults. The adult policy requires that the survivor have power of attorney over the GMail account. This is a link to a Google groups discussion of the inheritence problem.

My son's PC has been giving him fits as of late. He uses the PC for school work but also plays a number of online games. When he started having problems and asked me to take a look the first thing that I noticed was that the Trend Micro anti virus solution that I had installed was not running. After much angst and discussion of what sites he'd been to and what software he had downloaded and installed we discovered that the problem was simple. He ran out of disk space on the system volume.

I was able to free up about 400 MB and get the PC running again. We are looking at some quality father - son bonding time as we back up the hard drive, scrape it clean and then install XP all over again. This time we'll make sure the system volume partition is larger than 8 GB (seemed OK when he was 9 playing Tonka).

Before you can re-install you need to have the XP product key. I make a label for each my OS CDs and DVDs and then p[lace that label on a case (with another label that has the OS name and version). I don;t have one of these for my son's PC. We found the product key easily enough (My Computer, right click, Properties, it's the 20 digit number below the owners name). How to find the original installation product key?

I learned of this program years ago. I have it on a USB key I use for disasters. I never wrote down a we link to where I got it. Now I have. It's Magical Jell Bean Software's Key Finder. Great stuff.

Preston Gralla wrote this article for ComputerWorld on how to speed up your web browsing by hacking your DNS. He features OpenDNS, which is a small company out of San francisco that run a series of DNS servers. So rather than using the DNS from your service provider the suggestion is to use this DNS other service.

One of the (other ComputerWorld) articles referenced at end of this peice was "Is your DNS server configured wrong?". This is a short and very interesting 2006 article about the DNS Report Card, a report on DNS by The Measurement Factory. If you have any interest in DNS check out their DNS Expertise page.

Microsoft Network Monitor. A "sniffer" from Microsoft? Where have I been?

After five attempts last night I have still not been able to make this work.

I found these instructions for installing Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn v7.04 under Parallels on my MacBook Pro to be helpful. After two failed install attempts I found this earlier article on that same site.

No matter what I tried I was not able to get the Ubuntu install to finish. When using a burned DVD image it would hang when copying files. When I downloaded the iso image and used that it generally seems to hang around the point of installing the Intel network adapter. I was initially using wireless but Unbuntu showed no network connectivity when I booted a Live image under Parallels so I switched over to a wired connection. No change in connectivity and it hangs in the same place during the install.

Last I heard at Microsoft across America workshop (March 2007) "Longhorn" is going to be released as Vista Server.

The Cable Guy article 'Next Generation TCP/IP Stack in Windows Vista and Windows Server "Longhorn" ' from Technet September 2005.

From the article:

"Across the United States, many cities are finding their Wi-Fi projects costing more and drawing less interest than expected, leading to worries that a number will fail, resulting in millions of dollars in wasted tax dollars or grants when there had been roads to build and crime to fight.

More than $230 million was spent in the United States last year, and the industry Web site MuniWireless projects $460 million will be spent in 2007.

Without revenues they had counted on to offset that spending, elected officials might have to break promises or find money in already-tight budgets to subsidize the systems for the low-income families and city workers who depend on the access. Cities might end up running the systems if companies abandon networks they had built."

From their about page... "Meraki’s mission is to bring affordable Internet access to the next billion people. Meraki’s new approach to wireless networking empowers individuals and groups to bring access to local communities, anywhere in the world.

Meraki has focused on changing the economics of access since its beginning as a MIT Ph.D. research project that provided wireless access to graduate students.

Using their research, Meraki got its start at a low-income housing community in the US. News about Meraki’s products spread by word of mouth into over 25 countries around the world. Every day, new Meraki networks bring access to locations ranging from urban apartment complexes in London to villages in India.

Meraki is based in Mountain View, California, and is backed in part by Google and Sequoia Capital."

Shinkuro's interests and expertise lie in secure Internet capabilities, and the company provides leadership in community activities such as the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) deployment initiative.