Archive for September, 2009

So you don’t like spam

Lets face it, if you have an email address, you’re going to get spam. If you are running your email on a server platform , then your IT should be on top of it. And if not, give us a call. Anti-spam solutions running on server can be expensive and taxing to the server. If you are not a huge company , or would like a personalized solution, SpamBayes might just be for you.

Spam Bayes uses bayesian analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference ,which in a nutshell can predict outcomes based on evidence. As the information changes so does the hypotheses , reflecting one probability as likely and another as unlikely.

So lets get to the actual program, This will run on multiple operating systems ( thought in linux and OSX you will probably need to compile it from source code). It can either run as a standalone program or as a plugin for certain programs. You can find the download section here http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ .

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Ok, we’re just adding in the voting system today so you can give us feedback on the posts that we put here but we have two options, thumbs up/down or a star rating system. Right now they’re both active so you can look at them, but which do you like better? Hit the “Read more” link and leave us a comment below about which you think should stay and which should go.

So, which should stay? Stars or Thumbs?

For the longest time I used to use NERO burning rom, I used to be able to edit music , burn cd’s of all types of formats. It was my goto app for when I needed to place data on cd’s and dvd’s. Things started to go wrong around version 7.5. It was no longer the sleek fast and all around awesome application I had grown to love. It was re-coded to look shiny and nice, and started using microsoft .net libraries. So I started looking for alternatives , and the best that I have found is imgburn.com.

http://www.imgburn.com/

ImgBurn supports multiple formats (bin, cue, iso, nrg), multiple audio formats (AAC, APE, FLAC, M4A, MP3, OGG, PCM, WAV), and the new version will even let you burn HD DVD’s and BlueRay Video disks if you have the capable hardware.

It will run on all these platforms: Windows 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008 and 7 (including the 64 bit versions)

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If you’re running WordPress on your site, please, please update to the latest version.  There is a virus going around that is using a vulnerability in older versions of WordPress that allows a remote attacker to add spam links to your blog, insert a malicious user administrator account into your site and other nasty things.

Please upload from wordpress.org or use the auto update link within your WordPress administration panel.

Read a full report at Techcrunch

Iso files are much like archive files. They can have multiple files and folders inside of them. I find they can be a clean way of housing many files. Of course, once you have them, you need a way to mount them in windows ( linux and osx have built-in ways of mounting them)

So the very first ( and free) way to mount iso’s
winxpvirtual

This one takes a bit of work to setup:

1. Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder.
2. Execute VCdControlTool.exe
3. Click “Driver control”
4. If the “Install Driver” button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.
5. Click “Start”
6. Click OK
7. Click “Add Drive” to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click “Add Drive” until an unused drive letter is available.
8. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click “Mount”.
9. Navigate to the image file, select it, and click “OK”. UNC naming conventions should not be used, however mapped network drives should be OK.

The second is Called Clone Drive(free)
http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html

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Password protected , encrypted disk images

There are times when you may want to keep files away from prying eyes. A great way to do this straight in OSX is to make an encrypted image that you can mount and write to. So first open up disk utility. I am going to create an image on a usb drive so that I can take it with me.

As you can see I have made a partition called test. Highlight the partition then goto File –> New –> Blank Disc Image

Select the Save as and give it a name, You may also give the volume a name but it is not necessary.

Choose volume size and select custom, enter a size smaller than what the volume in question can hold ( as you see in the video I choose 1.8 GB). Select the encryption type, the partition should be changed to harddrive and the image format should be changed to sparse image.

Click create, it will ask you for a password. When you hit create it will start the process and automount the image for you. It will not ask you for a password because it will have saved it to your keychain.

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