It seems that the folks at GraffitiCMS, who make a competitor to WordPress, are aligning with Presidential hopefuls and slinging mud to promote their product even though it isn’t out of beta yet. I found the article here, I am not going to give them the satisfaction of linking to the original. Let’s take a walk though their arguments, shall we?

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Although you can read the Monty Python skit here, I am talking about email spam. Lately I have been inundated with spam, and it’s aggravating me. I use MailWasher which I recommend to people for filtering spam at the user level, and it does a superb job. However, I really want to stop spam at the server level. I am now on a quest, or mission if you will, to figure out how to stop spam (at least as much as I can) from passing through my server and even getting to the user level. So, as I go forth on my spam fighting quest, I will bring you along with me and share what I find. Maybe we can all move a step forward in overcoming the spam epidemic.

More to come …

I am sure that any game playing geek out there has heard of, if not played America’s Army.  This was the FPS put out by the Army about five years ago.  It has been so popular that it seems the Army is looking to use video games even more for training and other purposes.  It’s about time someone decided to tap this gold mine!

Read more at Wired.

I found an article today that I thought might be worth mentioning. It’s an interesting, if not scary read to say the least, but mainly I wanted to use it’s content as an example or reason for some of the stuff I preach here. The article is from ars technica, a great site, and it provides some sobering information about data loss. In fact, they tally up some numbers to find that in under three years, 159 million personal records have left the building. Yep, you read that right. Where am I going with this? Well, this is exactly why you would want to follow good system administration practice and secure your servers, you know actually manage them. Keep your data safe, use common sense, follow the rules and don’t break the rules just because it’s more convenient to leave telnet running and have a root password of dog. You for sure don’t want your own data captured by the nasties, and when you take hold of some customer’s data, you are taking the responsibility to keep their data safe too, as if it were your own. Don’t wind up a statistic, secure those servers, and in the words of “Madeye” Moody, practice constant vigilance!

Here is a tip that may help some of you out there that are working with Windows and Internet Explorer, which can get kind of quirky at times. I don’t know about any of you, but I have found it rather annoying that I can’t download Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft’s website, other than the online installer that downloads as part of the install. Well, here is a way to use that installer to download the source files so you can perform an off-line installation, which has been useful for me sometimes.

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Here is an interesting article that I ran across. It’s in response to another article comparing Windows and Linux and attempting to show why Windows is so much the better. The article I am linking to is a rebuttal, yes, but more of a take on the comparison of Linux (which is open source and free) to Windows (which is not free, or maybe it is in some respects). It’s a good article, and he has some valid points I think. All in all I thought it was worth the read, so I decided to share it. Enjoy!