Computer Tips -Tech Info

There seems to be a 0-day exploit involving WMF (Windows Meta File’s) according to SANS. Here’s their lead-in Just when we thought that this will be another slow day, a link to a working unpatched exploit in, what looks like Windows Graphics Rendering Engine, has been posted to Bugtraq.    Send article as PDF   

F-Secure is warning about ads for a “leaked version” of Windows Messenger 8 beta. There is no public beta of this and it is a virus…. If you download and run BETA8WEBINSTALL.EXE from that site, you won’t get a new chat client. Instead, your existing MSN Messenger will start to send download links to everyone […]

I saw an article at Barrapunto that WordPress 2.0 is now available. I went over to the WordPress site and found indeed it is released. (No mention in their blog yet of it.) Here’s the Gaceta Digital Article that Barrapunto “found”…    Send article as PDF   

Ok – I was thinking I might have been a bit too dismissive of flightgear. So, I took a second look (and a third and fourth.) In fact, I found a source rpm of the 0.99 version and rebuilt it for Mandriva 2006 and installed. And went in search of scenery for the local area. […]

Linux systems give you many possibilities and one of them is good scheduling (cron), another is good scripting capabilities. I’ve done things with linux fairly easily that with Windows would have been next to impossible and required me to download several other things to make it happen. Anyway, I recently saw mention of a linux, […]

I remember many years ago watching a Dr. Who episode where a very important key was “hidden” in a display of many other keys. Kind of like hiding a tree in a forest. This concept is “security by obscurity”. Generally this is considered a bad approach to security. It is a bad approach if this […]

Let me start by saying I am FAR from being an expert on the subject of building rpm’s… RPM’s are binary packages for use in red-hat based distributions. They are used (*in my case on Mandriva) with urpmi to install. Urpmi is a “wrapper” around the rpm utility that figures out what dependencies a program […]

I remember back when I was running Windows as my primary OS, one of my favorite diversions was Microsoft Flight Simulator (2000?) In fact, I clearly remember circumnavigating the globe in a Cessna in that program (landing at a small strip in Icelend, the old Hong Kong International airport and some airstrip in the Himalayas […]

Ok – so now post upgrade to Mandriva 2006 I sit down to try something out. Put a dvd in the drive and see what happens. I rarely sit and watch dvd’s on the desktop, but it’s always been a possibility… So, when I pop the disc in, kaffeine pops up with it’s “install” sequence […]

I’m going to do a few articles on building RPM’s as much for my own reference as anyone elses. I’m not an expert on the subject by any means… I do this from time to time, rebuild an rpm for an older system (or even a newer system that doesn’t have an official rpm for.) […]