I tend to like to write on my keyboard on my lap or on a lap bench... 

If you are interested in our Flash code, we'd be happy to share it with you. Just contact us or email David.

To see a full screen version, click here. 

To view the Tombola part of the aplication, click on the program and press the space bar.

Everybody's heard the buzz, but most people I talk to are confused about how to understand "The Cloud." Even for many that understand the buzz or work with Cloud computers, explaining The Cloud can be daunting.

Cloud Explanations and Illustrations

I usually explain it using a napkin network diagram of the internet which is ...

As I wrote about a while back, we were subjected to a script kiddie attack. Fortunately they were not successful in breaking in to our systems, but, due to some bugs in how we handled some of the requests, they did end up causing a denial-of-service attack on our database server. Normally, this would just mean the website was down for a while, but, due to several other bugs we ended up showing a screen that should only be shown to developers that included our database password and other information needed to connect to our database. Oh #@$%^ is really the only thing to say then (particularly because when we first realized this, we had no idea how long this problem existed). After having visions of user email addresses suddenly ending up in the hands of spammers, we realized we were much better off than we thought. Our database is set to be accessible only from our web server. So, unless someone could break into our web server, they still couldnt access our database (and if they can break into our web server, we have bigger problems).

Thankfully for us, even though several layers of protection failed we had bugs in our search mechanism, we had bugs in our debugging code and some secret information was revealed are database was still protected.

With locations in  New York, Pittsburg, Chicago, Florida, Virginia and the UK, our hosted services are managed, secure, distributed and redundant to protect your data and provide peace of mind. 

We are proud to announce our latest hosting partnership with HostWay^® Global Web Solutions at their new state-of-the-art Boeing Data Center.

Located at 100 North Riverside Plaza, in Boeing Internationals modern skyscraper, the facility is in the heart of downtown Chicago. With 36 stories and almost 1 million square feet of office space, the building is home to Boeing Internationals world headquarters. The data center will occupy a space originally built out for $200 million. Hostway is investing an additional $10 million to ensure the data center meets the leading industry standards for security, network availability, fire suppression and power capacity.

Take a tour! 

Reliable 

I'm told by my friends at some more popular sites that this type of thing is standard for them. I guess that means we've become popular.

I investigated and found the email in his outbox.  I also found that it was over 4MB and the end recipient's email box would not accept it.  I thought it important to highlight some key email tips in the current world of spam blocking email inbox overload:

We offer best in class email solutions for you.  Its simply the nature of email now (versus 5 years ago) that with so much spam and in turn spam software email is not as reliable as it once was.  Almost 90% of email out there is spam!

A few good measures to follow to ensure your message gets across are:

*       never send large files through email.  Always send them as a zip file

*       if you send a mission critical message, be sure to call to follow up that it has been received

*       if you send a file to have on hand at a business meeting, bring a copy of it on thumb drive as well to be safe

Weve always said that Managed Services for IT is usually a flawed business model.  Pretty much the better job you do the less you make.  Kinda like lawyers, I guess, except at least we talk about it!

13 hours to reformat and upgrade a client laptop is the perfect example of providing GREAT service at a TERRIBLE value.  I worked over a long day and night replacing the hard drive of this particular laptop.  Theres no question the client got a lot of benefit.   3.5x more storage space, 3x improvement in speed.  And almost no worries he handed me the laptop in the morning and came back for it the next day fully upgraded.  I couldnt save him from a couple headaches, though he had to hunt down passwords that needed to be reached in his browser .... and he had to see my 13 hour bill!  Which points to the value problem the work took 13 hours, but no one wants to pay labor of 13 hours for 3.5x space and  3x speed.  Think of it this way the 320GB drive cost less than $100 and the 3x speed was just getting the computer back to the speed it was the day he bought it.  Who wants to pay almost the cost of the computer to simply set (or in this case reset) it up?

Ill tell you: nobody.  But whats the alternative?  It takes hours and hours to set these things up so we as a Managed Services Provider are stuck either provide poor value by charging for our time or give ...

Ive been thinking a lot about backups recently for a variety of reasons.

First, Ive been involved in setting up a fund to honor the high school teacher who first taught me the importance of good backups. He hired me to help with the high school mini-computers and one of my major jobs was to backup the system every day to magnetic tape. When we lost a hard disk (lighting and computers just dont mix well) we always could recover with a recent tape. I learned a lot of lessons from that first job and one that particularly stuck in my mind was the importance of regular backups and taking backups off-site. Because of that job, I can be a bit maniacal about backups and archives.

Second, I had to recreate a website we worked on a couple of years ago. We had archived the source when we decommissioned our source control server just a few months ago. But when we shut down the website, wed not remembered to download a copy of the database. In my development work, however, I knew Id had at least one copy of the database on my development machine while we were working on it, but Id deleted it a year or two ago. However, I make it a practice to burn an archive DVD of my work at the end of each year before I clean off files that are no longer needed so I had a good feeling that I had some reasonable version of the database archived. I pulled out my archive from a couple of years ago and found the database pretty easily. With that and the source code, we were ...

For SureTech employees, the script is saved away in my user directory on the backup domain controller. You'd want to run this by typing: 

cscript wupdate.vbs

That's pretty much the price of excellent service these days.  If you outsource your service to a place that doesn't care about your customers ...  - view comments

 SureTech.com Invites You to OurFirst Holiday  Potluck SupperDecember 20 3:00 p.m. 87 Royce Brook Road  Hillsborough, New JerseyThe frivolity starts at 3:00 and potluck supper at 4:00 Please let Bonnie or Dana know what you plan to bring!     We are planning ...

Thankfully, I do keep the CF cards in their plastic case, but I was dubious about whether the card would make it through. I looked the card over and it didn't look damaged. So, I plugged it in to my card reader thinking that it might actually work and - surprise, surprise - it did. The audio looks just fine and I'll get it edited shortly.

Using Google to search for "Compact Flash cards in water" turned up this story about a much more abused card than mine. Guess I didn't really have any reason to worry about it working.

The FSUTIL utility requires that you have administrative privileges.

At which point I wanted to scream - But I Am an Administrator.

So, I looked around to make sure. Yes, I was in the Domain Admins group which was in the Administrators group. Looked like I was good to go. I had logged in with my admin account rather than my normal user accout. Hmm, what was up?

I searched on Google and thankfully came across a comment in this post that reminded me that Windows 2008 requires you to explicitly run the command window as an administrator. I right-clicked on the cmd icon, selected Run as Administrator, and voila! the fsutil command ran. Not that it gave me the information I wanted, but it ran.

While I have over two decades of experience with computers, I am a novice with networks and I appreciated the chapters on switches, VLANs, routing and Quality of Service. It was written well enough that I could understand the basics and the graphics he used helped me understand the concepts.

Donahue has some great comments in the back about how to sell your ideas to management and how to be more professional (instead of just a techie).

Overall it was certainly worth my time reading this. If you are interested in a better understanding of how networks and network transports work, this would be a useful read. If you're a network expert and don't need to deal with Cisco equipment, it's probably a waste of time.

I was installing a new VPN client on my main machine and, foolishly I will add, had two different VPN clients (one using IPSec and one using SSL) connected already. When I installed the new VPN client, about halfway through the install both of my current connections were severed and my machine went into an automatic shutdown. No problem I thought, I'll either uninstall and reinstall the VPN or just continue the VPN install and I'll be fine. Well, this install leaves something around to let it know an install was in process. Perhaps I could have figured out what that was and cleared it, but I figured it was a safer bet just to restore the system to the point before the install. Sure enough, there was the restore point waiting for me. I restored back to that point in time and re-ran the install (not connected through the VPN this time!) and everything worked out nicely.

By Alan Cohen from Law.com
Corporate Counsel
October 31, 2008

If there's one tried-and-true way to tackle a problem, it's to make it someone else's problem. It's the strategy that's given us plumbers, fluff-and-fold laundry and lawn services. Yet for a long time, corporate computing didn't really lend itself to the pass-the-predicament model. Sure, you could hire consultants to troubleshoot your hardware, patch your software and get all the PCs and servers talking to one another. But at the end of the day, it was your system -- and your headache.

Delegators take note: The times are changing. An increasingly popular software model tries to make things simple by -- get this -- literally making things simple. Known as Software as a Service or cloud computing, the idea boils down to this: Instead of running an application yourself, using your own equipment and IT staff (not to mention ...

Organizations are increasingly looking to next-generation social networking tools to conduct sophisticated business intelligence and analytics. In many cases, they are mining data and looking for trends and patterns, such as which salesperson has the relationships to pull off a deal or which customers seem to have the biggest influence with others online.

Cloud computing environments will contribute to the expansion of SaaS into areas beyond ERP, CRM and HR management systems. Rob DeSisto, analyst for Gartner, says organizations increasingly see the benefits of moving large-scale software expenses from the capital budget to the operating budget.

Saavy IT managers are now looking for ways to automate and embed security and compliance processes across the value chain, including on mobile devices. Surprisingly, a key challenge is one of perception, not technology. Companies must get over the idea that security and compliance systems are simply insurance against problems, and that they dont improve the business in ...

It's powered by Postini, so the back end looks good. But, I like to try these things out before rolling them out to customers. So, I decided I'd sign up my business domain for the service. I get a little bit of spam, generally it's caught by the filters in Outlook or on my server. I was using StartLogic, which I'd been signed up with for about five years. To make a long story short, after much gnashing of teeth and trying different things, it turns out that StartLogic's mail servers can't handle the Google Message Filtering service. I believe it has to do with the way the MX records are described and how StartLogic figures out which domain the mail belongs to, but I'm not sure.

So, I decided ...

I have nothing against corporations or even republican conservatism. But neither the means nor the end ever seemed as important to me as the manner of the journey; and love, equality and justice have always felt like better principles for a manner than achievement, winning and owning for their sake alone. These fundamentals that ring so true in every heart seemed absent often from the rhetoric of success Id often hear.

But sometimes getting out into the sun reveals more scenery than you guess. I met two brothers yesterday, who described themselves as the original LinkedIn. Though they sold insurance, most of their day was connecting people and businesses to each other and to funding. Their courting of VCs and VC target companies was strategic, to be sure, but a complete indirection to selling insurance. The direction was to expand their network, to participate in community and thereby simply by being known, succeed at insurance.

Almost be existing they are flourishing, Sum Ergo Sum.  This strikes me as a lot more productive than fighting to convince a client of my value. By sharing it is easier to receive, and we get to more malt syrup or is it? Its easier to believe in love and sharing when everybody with ...

Sanitizing Input Strings

Most developers are aware of SQL Injection attacks and know how important it is to sanitize input strings such as names, email addresses and any other content. (kxcd has a very funny cartoon about such exploits). Steve Friedl has a good article on how attackers find such holes in your applications. It's critical for web application security that you make sure inputs are properly escaped before using them in database queries. Perhaps in a future post I'll talk about some strategies for doing that more effectively. And remember that you must sanitize all input, not just strings. Sure, you have a <select> list to allow the user to pick which type of pizza they want and you've given them numbers (1 = cheese, 2 = sausage, 3 = veggie combo, etc.) but that doesn't stop someone from sending you a request where the pizza type is a string with instructions to change the admin email address to their own.

Preventing Problematic Output

But it's not just SQL Injection attacks we must be concerned about with sanitizing user input. What happens to your application if a user can put HTML in their ...

I know that many people run their code and if it looks like it works they figure - Great, I'm done! But while seeing that it performs as expected is one test of your code, seeing your code in action gives you a much better sense of what's happening and whether it's going to do the right in every case.

Let's take a look at a contrived example in code. I'll use PHP since its what I'm using for most of my work these days, and I'll simplify the code so it's clear what's going on.

function getItemFromDBOrCache()
{
	$fInCache = false;

	$fINCache = foundInCache($row);

	if (!$fInCache) {	
		$row = fetchFromDB();
	}

	return $row;
}

If you run this code, your program should work fine. Yes, the cache isn't used, but if you don't have an easy way of checking that, you'll never notice the uppercase typo on the $fINCache line. But, if you set a breakpoint on this function and step through each line, you're very likely to notice the problem (even if there are several lines between the pieces of code in the example). You'd see the cache return the item and then the code still fetch the item from the database. Doing a good code review would probably also uncover this problem, but usually that's later in the development process. I suggest stepping through all new code when ...

Join me June 23, 2008 for a very interesting discussion on society, business and technology:

Topic:       Thriving in the New Social Internet

Speakers:  Dr. Charles Kreitzberg. Alberto Molina, Anne Kreitzberg
Location:  Sante Fe Grille Upstairs private dining room
Date:       Monday June 23, 2008
Time:       6:00 8:00 PM
Suggested Contribution:  $15 per person for room, appetizers, beer, soft drinks, tax + tip* 

Overview:

The new social world of the internet represents far more than finding a friend on Facebook or keeping a diary online for anyone to see. New Web technology, also referred to as social media or Web 2.0, is unstoppably shifting the way we communicate and interact with each other for business. The question is not if this affects you, but how will you fit in?  Will you be a wallflower or the center of the party? The panel will discuss new opportunities and challenges for companies in this dynamic environment.   Our focus will be presenting ways your business can understand, approach and thrive in this new social and communications landscape.  Don't miss out on this opportunity to leverage your understanding of web social architecture and how you can make this changing landscape work for you and your organization!

This morning, we experienced a service outage starting at 8:42 AM EDT. Service to most customers  was restored by 9:55 AM, with all customers having full service by 10:10 AM. 

The outage was initially caused by a primary power outage at our Saratoga Springs data center (the result of a severe thunderstorm):

This was followed by issues with some of the UPS ((Usually!) Uninterruptible Power Supply) units being unable to continue providing power until the data center backup power became available. This resulted in server shutdowns which caused the service outage. 

You may be thinking:

Why didn't your redundant datacenter in San Francisco kick in?  Why didn't your 4000 kilowatt diesel generators kick in?  The answer is, we don't have them. 

What we do have is our "Guaranteed Availability with 24/7 monitoring of server systems and a 99.9% Service Level Agreement" which is satisfied year after year.  We continually strive to offer you the very best prices with the highest level of support and reliability.  We are constantly upgrading our infrastructure striving for 100% uptime for all of our systems.

We have taken the following two measures immediately following this morning's power failure:

1. greatly reduce the likelihood of server shutdowns caused by power outage

a.  Implementing additional monitoring of our UPS battery packs, with 'deep-discharge' activities to be scheduled as necessary

b.  Adding additional UPS's in our racks to increase the amount of time we can run on battery power before server shutdowns occur

     2.    greatly speed the restoration of ...

My main audience at this point is the development staff at Topaz Group. We are separated both by space and time. By space, because we are spread out and do not share offices or even the same area code. By time because I know there will be new developers coming after me, some of whom may join only after I leave. And while there will be development documents and design documents that may be private, I also want to write about how one does a good job of developing software.

Obviously, by making this public, I also hope that there will eventually be other readers (and, once we advance the tool some, we'll even turn on comments so you can make yourselves known). As with the Topaz Group developers, I would hope that I have some words of wisdom to new developers.

I've been in the business of developing software for over twenty years now (and "writing computer programs" for over thirty years if you take a broad definition of that phrase. Perhaps later I'll write down some of my early experiences for historical sake) and I've had the opportunity to learn from some remarkable people and make some mistakes, which helps the learning process. So, I'd like to pass on that learning to whomever is interested. Hopefully you'll find some of it useful and you'll come back to read more.

Last time I reviewed one of two books on security that I had recently read. This time I'll review the other book - Secure Coding: Princeiples & Practices by Mark G. Graff and Kenneth R. van Wyk (and published by O'Reilly which puts out excellent books in general).

This is a great book which I would recommend developers, testers and managers read. Even operations folks could get something out of this book. It's a different book from the Security Development Lifecycle in many ways. It's shorter and doesn't provide the step-by-step methods that SDL does. It is very easy reading, with just a few coding samples. It provides some great real-life examples of security flaws and some creative solutions.

Graff and van Wyk give you a lot of things to think about and some problems to avoid and ways to do things right.

One of their better suggestions is to come up with a metaphor of your application (or a particular feature) when you are designing the architecture. Rather than thinking about people making seat reservations (for an on-line ticketing system, for example) come up with a different model and think about how someone might attack that. Because, they point out, someone attacking you isn't necessarily following your model and architectural security flaws are the most difficult to solve.

This is another book I'd suggest you read and have on your shelf.

Last month we promised a party and we're delivering TWO.  My Luu's Spring Fling is sold out, and the very next day, Amanda Taffy has been working hard on a Best Buddies benefit at Plumm.  The Events  calendar is full of excuses to get together.

Your participation is THE KEY to this and many many thanks are due to the 50 Alums and friends who took a couple days out last week to work on the strategic planning retreat for YAAMNY.

In addition to the several key initiatives coming out of that retreat I'd like to specifically highlight Doreen Oliver's new leadership of the Arts and Entertainment group  and Amanda Taffy's continuing work in the Public Service group - details below.  If you would like to work on other important events, such as professional development events and talks, please get in touch with us!

Last but not least please have a look at Jaradoa Theatre's new production: The Small of Her Back which opens tomorrow and ...]]> Alberto Molina massmind Thu, 08 May 2008 23:17:19 -0400 http://www.massmind.com/7100/Editor_s_Note_May_2008 http://www.massmind.com/7087/Book_Review_The_Security_Development_Lifecycle Security is something that is very important in all kinds of applications today. I have many more articles I want to write about security (particularly since we fixed a recent security hole). I'm going to start, however, with a review of one of two books I read recently on security. The book - The Security Development Lifecycle, by Michael Howard and Steve Lipner - steps you through the Microsoft process of creating more secure software. I used to work at Microsoft, but left shortly before the SDL process was instituted, so I haven't seen how this process worked there. But, as the authors point out, if you look at how Microsoft has improved its reputation for security issues over time, this process has some real value.

The meat of the book (Part II)  is an explanation of the stages of the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) process. The authors do a good job of explaining these steps and how you can implement them in your own project. I think the SDL is a great process for improving the security of a software project and would suggest anyone who is concerned about the security of their software project (which should be just about everyone working on a significant software project) should read this book.

I would recommend this book for managers and developers (even though the authors point out it is not a book with code samples and examples of how to write better code). I believe if developers know more about the how security issues crop up and can be handled, they will be better equipped to write solid code.

Nicole Possin '94 attended a reception last March 31 where we were discussing some of the ideas of what YAAMNY should be and she stood up and described YAAMNY as a potential "Do-ocracy."  An institution, I gathered, dedicated to enabling other people to "DO" and organize around whatever came to mind.

Her example was Burning Man New York, an offshoot of the famous Burning Man new day hippie style creative arts party desert love fest that comes together every year.

The Do-ocracy theme made sense to me.  I'm a fan of desert love festing generally, I am by nature a doer and most importantly I've seen this very website filled to brimming with the amazing doings of Yalies for several years.

Retreats, Plans and Strategies

Which admiration for "Doing" makes me instinctively skeptical of the Politicians and Bureaucrats that often come together to run institutions and end up defending old and tired structures to the exclusion of the very doers who want to participate and could refresh those institutions.

I certainly do not want to be a calcified old president atop a guilt old club catering to tired old members reminiscing of long gone old spring days.  But the truth is no one ever sets out to be calcified and irrelevant. 

I've found time and again, that individuals make great parties and events.  And can even do so for extended periods.  But it is Politicians and Bureaucrats that make organizations that outlast individuals.

The beauty of great political savvy in my mind is the politics of inclusion.  If we start with the premise that our community is smart and worthy then the goal of managing the group is always improved by the participation of the group and ...

View Comments

Fellow Yale alums -- I'm working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, about the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages and the current scientific studies about how to be happier -- I report on what works and what doesn't.

Come check out my daily blog, www.happiness-project.com, where I post about my adventures as I try to be happier. It would make me very HAPPY to have a lot of Yalies visiting!

 Gretchen Rubin, grubin@gretchenrubin.com

I spent this morning working with Jenny on formulating the goal and deliverables for the weekend.  It's incredibly interesting to work on figuring out how to adapt our currently completely virtual organization at yaamny.net into a sustainable volunteer organization that is capable of its own programs.

Here's the agenda we're working on.

When Barak Obama said recently that we cannot only talk to our friends but must also be willing sometimes to talk with our enemies, when he implied that talking could prevent increased conflict and when he explained that additional personal intervention in diplomatic dialog would be required of the next president to repair the damage done by the arrogance of George Bush; I felt light had come again to a room long gone dark.

George Bush's election in 2000 came near the conclusion of over a decade of near Utopia in American.  In the 90s when we read Churchill's "the history of civilization is one of war interspersed with short periods of peace" we were convinced we were heirs to a new history.  It had been said before that the age of War was over, and we believed we were living it.
Ronald Reagan frightened us as children when we heard him call the Soviet Union an evil empire.  We knew America was not evil, and was probably a better place to live than Russia, but that made us feel sorry for the Russians, and we didn't want to go to War.  With our children's eyes, we saw Russian children with the same hopes, dreams and feelings we had.   We had no stake in geopolitics or economics or ideology to defend.  We were simply human like they were.

And then the Evil Empire fell like a dark room opening on a spring morning.  As far as we could see safely in California, there was no blood and the tears were mostly of joy.  There had been no campaign ...

One evening in 2002 a friend of mine was home in New York form his job at the Department of Justice and we met for a drink at the Four Seasons.  The DOJ is in one of these buildings that embodies mega institution.  You can feel the weight of its Presence with a capital P and my friend was naturally proud to be part of such Big doings.

He had always been a lover of ideas and intellect and at the DOJ he felt he was contributing to the big ideas of our time.  The drums of war were sounding in America, and the DOJ was promulgating the Doctrine of Preemptive Strike.  I felt like a lucky anthropologist.  To my mind any half-wit or 5 year old or Christian could see the wrongness of that Doctrine and I was eager to have insight into the type of persons and minds, heretofore unknown to me, that would develop and actually believe such a miscarriage.

Or had he had a hand in it himself? Had he fought to temper some wrong?  I knew it would be a good story.  I had no idea he would be thesis of the doctrine himself, however.  That he had drunk the kool-aid and argued with conviction on the goodness of the doctrine and the necessary right of it.

I was flabbergasted.  I had been prepared to understand the supporters of this doctrine to have gills, or five arms or to be breathers of freon.  I had expected to understand those believers as "them" and here was my friend espousing those views as "us".

I actually couldn't believe I understood him correctly and I proposed a ...

Module 3: Good to Great and Metrics for Success

What is your hedgehog? How do we measure success in Yale Clubs?

• Alumni in the region
• Students oCommunity members
• $ raised
• ASC-related outreach
• how many schools
• New programs (# and type)
• Sustainable success of programs and retention of new participants (do they keep coming back?)
• # of volunteers (active & effective) Yale Clubs place in the community is it seen as a resource Active partnerships with other alumni or community groups Clear expectations for board members & volunteers Effect on community

Module 3: Volunteer Motivation and Management

Why do people volunteer?

AYA LEADERSHIP FORUM

January 24 26, 2008

Session Notes

 Module 3: Volunteer Motivation and Management

Why do people volunteer?

In this time of war, I feel I now have to stand aside, Romney said. If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

Hopefully it is obvious to all that the organization of the Republicans is something to be admired.  They do an incredibly good job of being coherent in their message.  The concept of "conservatism" has been shaped into something easily identifiable with an action plan.  It is apparent that the incentives within the Republican organization teach Mitt that his rewards are greater by towing the line than by fighting for his individual ideas or change.

The Democrats will try no doubt in the coming weeks to contain or eliminate a fractious fight.  Everyone sees unity is strength.  Ralph Nader's presidential campaign against Al Gore 8 years ago was literally all the nails in the coffin of his campaign.  It is clear from the perspectives of Coherence of message and success in battle that unity wins.

The Democrats must absolutely learn and observe the Republicans and aspire to unity for the sake of winning.  This must be done, however, from a root in the Democrat core values, and not from a desire to emulate the Republicans.   Some part of the Rebublican organization has created a fundamental moral corruption in its position and this in itself cannot be overlooked in admiring ...

Rather than a mass customer base, advertising on these blogs gives lobbyists unbridled access to an extremely valuable audience: Britains political elite

<font style="margin:0px; margin-bottom: 9px; padding:0px; font-size:16px; color: #990000; font-weight:normal; line-height: 23px;">&lsquo;Rather than a mass customer base, advertising on these blogs gives lobbyists unbridled access to an extremely valuable audience: Britain&rsquo;s political elite&rsquo;</font>

Every time I hit the "clear" button, which is the apple equivalent of Num Lock, I got a little squat sound like the fart of a beetle.

This is the apple system sounds equivalent of "Doh," congratulations you are blocked.

I searched Dr. Google and apple help and this is what they had to say: "to turn on and off num lock, hit the num lock key."

In other words, thanks but no thanks, come back again another day ... nada amigos.

Well if you're thinking of pulling out your hair try this first:

NUM LOCK can be deactivated on the mac by hitting option FIVE TIMES.

This is a setting controlled in Universal Access. Hitting the option key FIVE TIMES enables keyboard control of the mouse, in the event you neglect to plug in your rechargeable or get some other bunk mouse situation.

The only indication is that when you hit the 4, 8, 9 and 2 keys on the num pad, the mouse pointer moves a smidgen.   BUT THE NUMBERS DON'T WORK, as if the devil himself were laughing as you try to give someone your phone number on IM.

So try hitting that option button FIVE TIMES to deactivate universal access and see if that's the solution you'r looking for.

Here ...

When we think of hosting we think of having guests at our house.  We think of music to play and finger food.

Our business is taking the time to understand the equivalent of tea time in the digital age.  Our business is communication, the kind of effective and enjoyable communication we look for at the homes of our friends and relations.

Just because so much transacts online now, does not mean the rules of courtesy, attention and mood have gone away.  Online communication with living breathing and valuable associations is our specialty.

To do this well we have a discipline of understanding technology, the tools of our trade.  Just as washing dishes isn't the point of tea, servers aren't the point of hosting - you are.

writes Amanda Hesser: that lover of Mr. Latte

and mocks brie,

for some friskier Freds

named Stichelton and Garrotxa

-- now there are names

i could give my kid

For daily reflections visit my Blog

For articles from the past several years, see Articles

Dread Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsytem

See the screengrab below  and the discussion on Anders.com

Solution

I lived with this error for a couple of weeks and resorted, ridiculously, to submitting work to the server via ftp.

It finally occurred to me maybe I should try repairing file permissions.  Read, Write and execute permissions often get fouled up for some reason on the Mac OSX when new programs are installed.  I've been told many times to repair them regularly using Apple's Disk Utility, which makes this a snap.  But I always forget and of course hadn't run it in some time - frankly in several months.  The last time I ran it was after having headaches due to unexpected behavior in some application or other.

So finally I put together the concept of unexplaiened behavior with Cisco VPN and file permissions.  It took me about 45 seconds to open Disk Utility and hit repair and wait for it to complete.  I then rebooted the computer and voila - Cisco VPN loaded like it always had before, no Error 51!

Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem