ask-mark.com

If you’re a geek (and since you’re reading this blog, you must be), then you’re probably at least somewhat interested in the upcoming Windows 7 release from Microsoft. I have been testing Windows 7 Beta and RC for the past few months, and I have to say that it is a lot better than Vista was when it was released a couple of years ago. My main computers still have Windows XP on them because of how bad I thought Vista was. When I return from DC, I have plans to upgrade my desktop at home with Windows 7 RC, now that I finally have everything backed up to a Western Digital Elements 1 TB external HDD.

That being said, if you will be in the market to upgrade your Windows operating system, but not your hardware, Microsoft has a great deal on Windows 7 upgrade licenses. For a limited time, you can pre-order and get 50% or more off of Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade and Windows 7 Professional Upgrade. The offer is good until July 11. Unfortunately, the discount does not apply to Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade. To get more information and to see which version is right for you, you can check out Amazon.com’s Windows 7 Resources page. Of course, you can always ask me, too.

And as an added bonus, if you purchase Windows 7 through any of the links here, you will be supporting ask-mark.com. Doesn’t that thought make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? I thought so.

Once again I was notified that ask-mark.com was triggering virus/malware alerts for visitors. My preliminary investigation at work showed that I had some sort of script injected into my files again. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get cygwin and ssh to connect to my host through the proxy server.

When I got home, I connected to my host and poked around, investigating how my site got hacked again. Not finding any obvious evidence other than file modify dates from yesterday, I decided to restore from one of my snapshots. I found that a snapshot from last week was not affected by whatever hacked my site. I wanted to restore the snapshot without first deleting the entire contents of my site. So, I tried using cp -rf ..., but I found that I was still being prompted to overwrite files. A little searching, and I found that my .bashrc file had an alias for cp = 'cp -i' so that it always ran in interactive mode. Commenting out that alias prevented the overwrite prompts, and now my site is back. I went back and restored the alias to ensure I don’t accidentally overwrite a critical folder in the future.

I just found out that the website for another organization with which I work is facing a similar hack. Does anyone know how all of these websites are getting hacked? Are the CMS packages (WordPress, .NET Nuke) insecure? Or are hackers gaining access some other way?

Also, never underestimate the usefulness of backups.

We’ve all used Microsoft Office at least once. I came across a great tip today detailing how to edit the My Places list in the Open and Save as dialog windows in Microsoft Office applications. You can add or remove places from the list with just a few Registry tweaks.

With changing school districts, I need to export my 1.5+ GB of e-mail out of Lotus Notes and into something useful to me. Since I have been working on consolidating my many e-mail accounts into just a few Gmail-enabled accounts, Gmail seemed like the natural choice for the export. After all, both Gmail and Lotus Notes support IMAP with SSL. It can’t be that hard, can it?

It was. After about an hour of trying to configure IMAP connections to Gmail using two versions of Lotus Notes, I was finally able to get a connection to work with Lotus Notes 8. Here is what you have to do to get it to work.