December 2005 bought us a one-day Internet blackout, which practically made my work impossible, so I launched Photoshop and drafted a new design for Vamsoft Insider in three hours. If I would have known that it will take 5 more days at home to make HTML/CSS from the graphics design and turn it into a WordPress template, you would still see the good old default WordPress template here.

Anyway, we welcome 2006 with a brand new, valid XHTML and CSS blog look. (ah, and please tell us what you think about the new design :)

This is a good link abount different presentation styles:
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/the_zen_estheti.html

The site itself contains good thoughts about how to held good presentations. Not that I has to do that very often, but if I have to then I would like to do my best.

This is posted mainly to keep the link in a safe place…

As Mark reports in his blog, Sony finally admitted that there are security problems with its DRM solution and promised to offer a rootkit-less CD version to customers who already purchased the DRM-protected CDs. Also Sony is going to recall these CDs from the stores (about 2 million items).

Battle won. Nice work.

I am in the middle of setting up a new server that will host our web sites (and other thins as mail, news etc). It is hosted in Hungary’s largest ISP, t-online. *

To ease the migration process I will have the same web configuration and file locations as it is on the current machine. I thought create the same settings will require a few hours.
Well, I was wrong. I am doing this for three days now. Point-and-click administration interfaces are a good thing for a beginner admin (or for someone not familiar with the actual software he/she tries to manage), but a real PITA when it comes to transferring the configuration to another computer. Instead of copying a few config files to the new server and restart the services, I have been clicking through wizards of all kind – DNS, web site, new virtual directories etc. The DNS was the most easier of all as the windows DNS service – for some reason – might store the zone information in a standard text file.

But the migration is coming to and end now. I have a few things left (will finish them today) and after the ECC ram modules arrive I will put it into the server room and forget about it for another 4 years…

* Surprisingly, having our server hosted in Hungary means no problems for our clients. The internet is a good thing, after all :)

Mark Russinovich, a Windows expert and author of the famous Sysinternals tools discovered that Sony’s latest copy protected CDs install a small rootkit to protect the media content. Bothering? Add that the rootkit cannot be uninstalled using the Add/Remote Programs Control Panel applet and even if you bypass the file protection of the rootkit, deleting the drivers will cause you to “lose” your CD drive. Also add that the rootkit drivers are poorly written: they may make your system instable and open an easily exploitable backdoor for viruses and other malware, because the “DRM protection” hides any folder containing the string “$sys$”. Driver bugs may also prevent to boot your system in Safe Mode.

If this is OK for Sony, I have great news for them: they just lost a customer. I will not buy any Sony CDs marked with “Copy Protection” and I will dissuade everyone around me from buying Sony CDs. No music is worth driving my system into crashes or making the system insecure. It is just not the way how copy protection should be implemented.