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I just finished setting up dovecot this morning to aggregate my various email boxes and make them available via a single server.  Dovecot seems to be a server from the new golden age of Unix services.  It’s easy to set up and has reasonable defaults for getting a server up-and-running without much effort.  Note that this is in contrast to sendmail configuration, which is as cryptic as could possibly be.

Are people finally waking up to Microsoft’s attempts to get their fingers in every pie?  A few months back, Microsoft managed to kill the IETF Marid working group’s attempts to build a common spam filtering framework by refusing to license their technology openly.  This leaves room for SPF to take over, already with the backing of a large number of mail server operators.

Just recently adoption of the WMV9 codec, slated for inclusion in the sequel techology to DVD, is hitting some roadblocks:

While upgrading my Linksys router through the upgrade page, I somehow managed to kill the thing.  Having spoken with others that have tried to upgrade the firmware, I don’t seem to be alone.

Luckily, the Linksys-modified TFTP program saves the day.  It seems that the hobbled router comes up in a crippled mode on 192.168.1.1 with a password of “admin”.  Once you re-upload the firmware, it comes back up with the proper settings.

I think the trick is not using the HTML-version of the upgrade page.  Stick with TFTP!

Networked printing is really cool in Fedora!  You can configure CUPS to automatically browse the network and discover other printers by using the Printer Configuration tool and, under the “Sharing…” menu, choose “Automatically find remote shared queues”.

You can even use this to set up a remote print queue for Windows.  Install the generic Adobe postscript printer driver and point it to your CUPS printer share when it asks for the URL.  The CUPS URLs are generally of the form:  http://servername:631/printers/printer-name.

You’ll find the printer URL by browsing the CUPS webpages and selecting the printer under “manage printers”.

I decided to pave over my Windows 2000 box with a brand new install of Fedora Core 2.  The network install is awesome - burn the 4MB boot.iso to a CD, select “HTTP” install, point it any Fedora mirror and go!

It took about 30 minutes to get the installation completed on my old PII-400.  Your time may vary based on CPU hugeness and mirror fastness.

I’ve been using my Linksys firewall for managing internal DHCP, but it doesn’t really give you much flexibility to assign static IPs that I’d like.  I hope to get a quick and dirty DHCP server up and running with brand-new DHCP-managed static IP addresses for all of my networked devices (including my Xbox). 

I tried out Google Desktop Search today and I decided to take a deeper look at how it works and how it integrates into your daily experiences.  This information all comes from reverse-engineering and file/registry observation.  None of it is guaranteed to be correct.

From looking at some of the PDB file references, I think the internal name of this Google search engine is “Total Recall”.  This fits with the replacement string returned from Google (“”) and the port number registry key “trs_port”.

The search utility consists of three main applications and a number of “information provider” plugins.  The main applications are:

Has anyone noticed that Microsoft is willing to admit to that “a bug in ASP.NET canonicalization exists”, but refuses to divulge any more information?  Considering that the information is easily available and being distributed by bloggers between themselves, you should have all of the information at your fingertips to protect yourself.

Basically, the bug involves subverting Windows or Forms authentication by modifying your URL slightly.  By replacing traditional URL slashes with backslashes, you can fool ASP.NET into serving files that should be protected.

Neat Image is a tool for automatically reducing digital camera noise.  I tried it out last night on a few photos - it manages to clear up a lot of random noise you see when zooming in on most digital pictures.  Best of all - it’s free for personal use!

I managed to get results that were pretty good, but not as striking as their examples.  I suppose the developers of the tool would understand how to get the most out of it.  You’ll notice a subtle difference in the shots that you’ve processed with the tool. 

It’s a bit of extra work for each shot, but I think it pays off to clean up the pictures you really like.

After reading the full-disclosure list for more ASP.NET vulnerability information, I came across a report of spyware installing on fully-patched XP SP2 IE instances.

The thread is here.  Basically, a site is forcing a CAB file down user’s throats without any sort notification.  If you want to try it out in VMWare or some other safe environment, jump to the URL http://www.themexp.org/about_wrap.php.

I can’t repeat it enough: Install Firefox today.