Today I just learned the fascinating story of how the S.E.C. got started; this is a must-read! ;)

Dang, just in time for my next pen-test: the BackTrack Linux distro v2.0-final has been released. Downloading now.

If you're not familiar with BackTrack, it's the merger of two older/expired LiveCD security auditing distros, Whax\Whoppix and Auditor Security Collection. I always have a copy in my laptop bag.

Even better than my occasional "Spam Subject Line of the Day" posts here: www.spam-poetry.com: poems made entirely of spam subject lines. Beautiful! Inspiring! Disturbing!

No, not irony like Alanis Morrisette asks "Isn't It Ironic"; as my college buddy Tyler used to say, that song just listed a bunch of things that "just plain suck".

No, today's irony is that the blizzard that swooped across the Midwest has arrived here in Maine, so it's snowing like a bugger out there, and I'm sitting inside watching a movie called The Long, Hot Summer. Heh.

I resisted for a long time... Yes, I know there are a billion reasons to upgrade to IE7, starting with some reasonable CSS support, and maybe ending with Micro$oft's promise that IE7 has "more" security, but you've gotta understand I support so many small businesses that have been too scared to upgrade yet. And, admittedly, I hadn't come to grips with the interface changes yet... (every time I used someone else's PC with IE7, I couldn't find the menus!).

So anyway, now I have IE7 on my office PC, and it's okay. But of course there's always the need to test things with IE6. For web development, you should of course have virtual machine images and services like BrowserCam on hand, but for more casual support, what do you do?

Microsoft's recommendation, of course, was to download their time-limited virtual image. Nice, but the expiry date sucks, and I prefer VMware Player images.

But dig down in the comments and you find a better solution: you can run IE6 as a standalone program, even when IE7 is installed. Since XP supports the .local files to solve the DLL Hell problem, it works more-or-less cleanly, even sharing components with IE7. Can't complain for a quickie solution. Recommended!

Yesterday I attended Micro$oft's dog-and-pony show about the release of Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007—more on that later. However, one of the most fun parts of the deal was that I got to see a lot of former colleagues and co-workers (note that I refuse to spell that without the hyphen, as in "coworkers", because then it could easily be read as "cow-orkers").

So, anyway, this ones for you, Fred-o: Here's how to extend the Windows Vista evaluation period for up to 4 months.

Oh, and for the guy who with the questions about trying to help a user with the Vista Upgrade: here's a great explanation of the loophole that allows you to "upgrade" to Vista with no OS prerequisite. And interesting news that, so far, it doesn't look like Microsoft is going to patch the loophole anytime soon, either.

I think I've gotten some sort of new phobia: the fear of sneezing. (Would that be called "sternutaphobia"?) Err, specifically, it's sneezing while driving that I'm afraid of.

It all started at Christmastime, when Zach, my brother-in-law, casually mentioned nearly totaling his car in an accident caused by his sneezing. The conversation followed the path of "What-happened-to-the-car?" instead of "How-did-you-sneeze-and-have-an-accident?!" So, I never remembered to get back to the topic of "How-did-you-sneeze-and-have-an-accident?!" and now—needless to say—every time I'm about to sneeze while driving I'm nearly terrified.

Yeah. I try to see if I can keep my eyes open during the sneeze... but then come the visions of eyeballs-popping-from-my-head. So then I try to concentrate really extra hard on keeping the steering wheel straight during the oncoming quake.

Then I sneeze.

...and I realize there was nothing to be worried about.

Still: Zach, if you read this, um... fill me in sometime, okay?

I'm excited for the new movie Breach to be released, ever since I heard about it on NPR's Fresh Air the other night ("Eric O'Neill and Billy Ray Discuss 'Breach'"). That's good, because I haven't been interested in a new film for a while (what's with the schlock they've been putting out these days?).

Director Billy Ray's last based-on-a-true-story office "thriller", Shattered Glass, was pretty darn good. You remember that? It's the one about Stephen Glass, the journalist who fabricated his stories, and fooled a lot of people... for a while. Breach follows along the same lines of digging into the psyche of deception. Seems like a topic we'll never get to the bottom of.

If you can read this, you're seeing the new server. That's good, I think.

Um, sorry if it's slow. We'll see about that right away... Sheesh!

Wowsers... take a listen to the song "Hide and Seek" from Imogen Heap's latest disc, Speak for Yourself. She really makes that voicebox hum.

And speaking of hiding, this website might hide for a day or two next time you seek it out, as I think I will be switching hosts again. Long story, but I'm sure this will be the last time. (Ever?)