Computer Tips -Tech Info

I’m quite frustrated this evening. Another long day of computer problems and tonight I come in to around the tenth call from a collection agency. The kicker in this case is that it’s not for me, but for someone I’ve never heard of. Over the years we’ve had a fair amount of credit card debt and have worked our way to within about one payment of being out from under. All with no defaults, no collection agencies, etc. We’ve followed the rules in other words. And the last 2 weeks we’ve been harrassed by a collection agency looking for someone that we’ve never met that I can only assume gave our phone number. The collection agency is….

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The new Docsis 3.0 standard has been finalized and it allows for 160Mbps or more downstream and 120Mbps upstream. It also will support IPv6. Of course, in order to support those speeds cable system hardware will need to be upgraded (and cable modems…) so don’t expect those speeds next month. But, perhaps by ~2008?

Our local cable just started advertising 10Mbps as their fastest speed (previous was 5Mbps). I’d personally love to see those upstream speeds upped as well.

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It looks as though Ubuntu has released the first maintenance release in the Dapper Drake life cycle. So, now 6.06.1 can be downloaded. (In analagous terms this might be considered the first service pack). Many updates have been incorporated into the bootable install cds which should cut the amount of download updates a new install would need right out of the box. http://releases.ubuntu.com/6.06.1/ (Ubuntu), http://releases.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/6.06.1/ (Kubuntu), http://releases.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/6.06.1/ (Edubuntu), http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/6.06.1/release.1/ (Xubuntu).

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Security vulnerability.

Download page

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A new version of Ruby on Rails has been released in response to a critical security vulnerability. The link will take you to information at incidents.org. 1.1.5 is the new version and should be compatible with 1.1.4 all previous versions appear to be vulnerable.

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The big computer security news of the day is the release of exploit code publicly for MS06-040. The patch of course was released Tuesday and it is fairly critical to get the update installed. This is “wormable” It CURRENTLY affects all Windows 2000 systems and XP (with no service pack) as well as SP1. It currently doesn’t seem to work with SP2 of Win XP, or with Windows 2003 or NT4. A bit more information is at the incidents.org link above.

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I’m such a sucker for technology sometimes…. I’m into too many things it seems. I do computer repair which can keep things fairly busy, I keep up with this and a slew of other websites which is another job in itself. (Not to mention the genealogy hobby (or addiction/affliction?)) We’re fairly involved at Church… and then there is piano and music. I’ve been teaching piano now for about 9 years which is hard to believe in itself and over that time other obligations have taken their share of time, but now the pendulum is swinging back where I’m really getting in more time to try to improve my playing in one particular area. Towards that end I wanted to get some recordings of a few other pianists to dissect their approaches….. well, that’s taken me to another place – audio hardware.

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I finally got the Mandriva 2006 rpms rebuilt for Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6. I ‘ve been running it for a bit and it and all seems well. Of course, this is always at your own risk. http://www.averyjparker.com/wp-content/downloads/firefox/mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.6/

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You can find updated rpms for Mandrake 10.0 of the recent clamantivirus update at http://www.averyjparker.com/wp-content/downloads/clamav-0.88.4/.

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Yahoo has launched an update to their siteexplorer. Site Explorer is an interface for website operators/designers to log in to yahoo and authenticate their “ownership” over the site sot hat you can find more information over and control the ways the site is indexed. It’s fairly analogous to the Google Sitemaps feature that’s available in Google’s webmaster tools area. It’s good to see search companies letting users “peek behind the curtain” a bit, although I’m still wondering how effective these tools are.

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