Clint Laskowski, CISSP

Rumors are that Microsoft might include a version of Virtual PC and a fully licensed image of a Windows XP system with Windows 7 to provide backwards compatibility.

Here’s a comment I posted on the DaniWeb IT Discussion Community about this idea:

Microsoft would do well to go one step further … and that is to ensure everyone that Windows XP will continue to be available and supported until a wide range of non-affiliated users (i.e. the blogosphere) agrees that the new operating system(s) (i.e., Windows 7, Windows 8, etc.) are better than Windows XP in terms of performance, security, features, usability, etc.

This would make it safe for everyone to either move or start exploring Windows 7.

They could even guarantee this “wide range of non-affiliated users” that they are going to do the right things with Windows 7 by including a fully functional Virtual PC image of Ubuntu … saying, in effect, we promise to do the right thing, and if we don’t we won’t blame you for switching to a better OS (obviously, I don’t expect this will happen, but it would show enormous intent to do the right thing).

You can find the DaniWeb story and read more comments at: http://tinyurl.com/d3hccz

The user interface in Windows 7 seems faster than Vista, but transferring files from physical HDD to physical HDD seems very slow. Of course, there are many factors that can impact transfer speed, but on a system I’m very familiar with (i.e., I’ve done similar transfers on this system many, many times), Windows 7 is taking much longer than I’d expect.

Anyone else having similar problems?

Update: I’ve noticed this is especially true (the slowness) when moving hierarchies of folders (even relatively simple ones). The speed when moving a file or a group of individual files seems to be more more acceptable.

Take Care When Adding to an Employee’s Responsibilities

During a down economy, management may temporarily move employees from one role to another, or have one employee cover two or more roles. This can be an important step in reducing costs and keeping a business viable. However, as roles and responsibilities change, it is not uncommon for employees to gain new information systems privileges while still keeping their old privileges. This can create situations where employees have excessive privileges and can therefore easily commit fraud or conduct other malicious activities. When an employee is transferred to a new role or takes on new responsibilities – even temporarily – it is important to ask questions such as:

Which of the employee’s information systems privileges can be reduced or eliminated because they are no longer needed to fulfill his/her job duties?

These should be immediately reduced or eliminated.

These should be immediately segregated by transferring incompatible responsibilities and activities to other employees (but be sure to ask these same questions about those employees before transferring).

Of course, these questions should be asked when ever an employee changes roles or has changes in his/her responsibilities or his/her systems privileges.

Watch for another Security in a Down Economy tip soon!

Jason Mirra has a nice article on Fast and Effective GUI Building in Java using NetBeans.

And, Igor pointed to some Visio stencils at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuiPrototypingTools.

For future reference:

• http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups#
• http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/
• http://www.mockupscreens.com/
• http://visualwx.altervista.org/
• http://wxglade.sourceforge.net/
• http://www.projectspace.nl/
• http://tof2k.com/ext/formbuilder/
• http://dub.washington.edu/denim/
• http://www.serena.com/products/prototype-composer/home.html
• http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/
• http://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net/
• Microsoft Visio, PowerPoint, Visual Studio WinForms,
• http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071018/powerpoint-prototype-toolkit-01/
• http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/09/07/10-minute-mock-prototyping-tips-for-powerpoint/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjbeCkn0bJg
• Article by Eric Burke at http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/07/26/balsamiq-mockups/
• http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/wireframes/
• http://nickfinck.com/stencils/
• http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks/
• http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/gallery_mockup_print.html
• http://glade.gnome.org/ 
• Qt Designer
• NetBeans Gui Builder
• Py4Qt
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged?tagnames=gui

If Google could make GTasks (Google Tasks) a “first class citizen” and add the following features, it would be an ideal GTD application:

• Add ability to:
• add columns to the outline
• sort on any column
• go back to the outline sort with a single mouse click
• color or add tags (like in Gmail) to any row in the outline manually or based on a user-defined rule
• access Google Tasks using a URL without the word “mail” in it, since so many corporate firewalls block those URLs (for example, at work I can access Google Calendar, but not Google Mail)
• Make GTasks available from all Google applications (i.e., Calendar, Reader, etc.)
• It’d be nice if the columns could be defined as dates, numbers, drop down choices, etc.
• Any column accepting text should convert URLs into clickable links
• Add the ability to turn any email into a row or “to do” on the Task outline (granted, this is a change to GMail)

What do you think? What else would GTasks need to be an ideal GTD Platform? Add your comments below.

Here’s a list of the 10 biggest (known) security breaches from lost or stolen laptops, where government agencies, corporations and colleges failed to safeguard the names, Social Security numbers and other personal info of their customers. Encryption software – which costs as little as $10 per laptop – could have prevented most of these incidents.

read more | digg story

It’s all fun and games, until someone looses the decryption key.

Are you a programmer? A hacker? Do you dream in Lisp and write in Emacs? Do you have more than two computers at home? Do you know who the first president of Netscape was? Are you looking for some rocking tunes?

Then, this song is for you:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/musical-geek-friday-code-monkey/

Not to mention, it’s a nicely designed site.

I just posted a message to Spreeder, my favorite speed reading site, with a few recommendations. Here they are for those who might be interested:

1) It would be great, if over the course of reading an article, Spreeder automatically increased its display rate by 5% from the start to the finish. That way, a reader (a spreeder?) would always be pushed to improve his/her reading speed.

2) It would also be great if there was a link or icon a person could put on their blog postings – like the ones you see for Digg or Del.icio.us, etc. – so a person’s blog entry could automatically be sent to Spreeder for reading. If I make a long blog posting, other people will be encouraged to use Spreeder to read it (or at least it will be more convenient for them).

3) I’d like to see an option to hide everything on the screen – or at least in the browser window – and only display the text (word, chunk, etc.) I’m trying to speed read.

4) An option for black text on white, or white text on black (or green, or yellow, etc.) would also be nice.

If Spreeder doesn’t take advantage of these ideas, maybe another speed reading site will.

Perhaps, these features are already available, with Spreeder or another speed reading site, and I just am not aware of them?

Related: Overclock Your Reading Speed (Zen Habits)