One of the things I will not miss about working for Nokia is all of the crap that the IT department loads on the company laptops. Aside from all the end-user apps, there were different programs for:
Firewall (it wasn’t the Windows firewall, either)
VPN
Anti-virus
Hard drive encryption
Needless to say, these programs (and many others) bogged down my laptop, making it slow.
When I got my Check Point laptop (or rather a hard drive from Check Point for my existing laptop), I was surprised to find all this functionality and a whole lot more in Check Point’s Endpoint Security client. A single icon in mytask bar shows me:
Firewall
VPN
Antivirus
Antispyware
Program Control (ability to restrict certain apps from running)
Full Disk and Media Encryption
The client is fairly unobtrustive and does its thing without too much hassle, aside from the occasional request for VPN authentication. My taskbar has many less icons than it did before. The machine is also significantly faster than it was with my Nokia image. All in all, I am very happy with this change!
I’m looking forward to learning more about Check Point’s Endpoint Security offerings, both on the enterprise side as well as on the consumer side (under the ZoneAlarm brand). I think there’s a compelling story there.
Not too long ago, my work machine started showing these error messages. I called our service desk and asked about them, they told me I should probably consider backing things up, but I could ignore the errors.
Yeah, right. I got out my copy of Spinrite. When I went to run Spinrite against my drive, I was presented with a RED screen with a warning about my drive being in imminent danger of failuer according to the SMART subsystem. The recomendation was to back up any data I could before running Spinrite as the process could push the drive over the edge.
Of course, I immediately rebooted back into Vista and started backing things up. During the process, I kept getting these error messages, but as far as I know, I got all the data off the drive before an imminent failure occured. Whew!
Those “drive failures” may explain why I had periodic BSODs under Windows XP on this same machine. It also demonstrates a useful feature in Vista. Good thing I didn’t ignore the warning.
In the evenings, I like to work downstairs on one of the kids computers. It’s nice to sit somewhere else and work. Keeps the mind fresh, and it also allows me to experiment a bit.
One problem with doing this is the web filters, which I’ve set up to prevent “accidental” exposure to the naughtiness of the Internet. I’m using K9WebProtection, which is a free Windows-based filter that only filters access via the web browser. It does not filter other programs.
The problem is, I have the settings set fairly stringent. The default setting blocks access to Flickr, YouTube, Share on Ovi, and others. Things I tend to look at while I’m blogging. Whitelisting those sites is possible, but not happening. Having to type in my password every 15 minutes is just annoying.
I stumbled upon a solution this evening with some Googling. It completely and utterly bypasses K9WebProtection and could easily be done by someone without user privileges.
How did I do it? I’m not going to say. For obvious reasons. However, search the Oracle of Google and you’ll find the answer. However, at least now I can do my work without disabling the Internet filter.
The latest from the Team Fusion blog is that VMware Fusion has rolled out version 1.1.2. This new version supports the upcoming XP SP3 on Boot Camp Partitions–something I’d be interested in. They are also squashing a couple of MacBook Air-related bugs, adding support for Apple’s Time Machine, and a few bugs.
Personally, I haven’t touched Parallels in a long time. For what I use it for–running XP and the occasional Linux thing–VMware has been rock solid. I see no compelling reason to go back to Parallels at this point.
When I was 11, which puts me in 6th grade, our school had a couple of Apple ][e’s in the library. There wasn’t any network connectivity to speak of, but I knew then I had a future in them.
Both my kids have been in front of computers ever since they had enough of an attention span. I don’t know that they will have any exceptional aptitude at this, but if they ever want to practice their IT skills, I’ve got the equipment here at home they can practice on.
The scary thing is, this will likely be the most useful part of Jon Penn’s education he will receive. Certainly was for me in college when I was one of a couple of students helping to maintain the main engineering computing lab. Hopefully, he will continue to hone his IT skills and become certified. I bet he’ll make a mint at it, too.
The term “iri-computing” is inspired by the term I’ve heard Ken Rutkowski say on World Tech Roundup: bi-computing. That means using both PC and Mac. Well, folks, I’m happy to say I’m tri-computing. I use Windows, Mac, and Linux.
I tried using the Mac Mini as a Synergy server. It did not work well, at all. The mouse was very jerky and jumpy over on the “client” machine. However, the Mac Mini works great as a Synergyclient.
Things have changed quite a bit since I did this last. Ubuntu is nearly releasing Gutsy Gibbon–and it looks pretty good. The Mac Mini hasn’t changed much, but the work PC certainly has. It means a small amount of reconfiguring of Synergy, but that’s par for the course.
Now I’ve got the best of all worlds: Linux for general web functions (works good, even on older hardware like this IBM T23 laptop), Mac for multimedia/iTunes, and Windows for the work stuff. And I get to dig into Gutsy Gibbon a little more while I’m at it. Not a bad way to work.
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When I was 11, which puts me in 6th grade, our school had a couple of Apple ][e’s in the library. There wasn’t any network connectivity to speak of, but I knew then I had a future in them.
