Saturday, March 20, 2004

Use JavaScript to Create a Scrolling Grid - WebReference.com-:
"A problem often encountered in web design is condensing large tables of data into a standard 800x600 web page. If the table is too big, the user will need to scroll the browser window to see all of the data, which means that the surrounding text and any row or header columns cannot be seen."

http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column4/index.html

Friday, March 19, 2004

Experts Debate Danger of Phatbot Worm:
"Security discussion lists and reports were abuzz Wednesday with talk of a new worm, named 'Phatbot,' that had spread to as many as hundreds of thousands of systems. But not all security experts agreed that the worm was widespread.

As of late Wednesday afternoon, no major antivirus company had listed the worm as more than a 'low' risk. "

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1550393,00.asp?kc=EWNWS031804DTX1K0000599
New Bagle Worm Variant Can Run Without Launching Attachment:
"A series of new variants of the prolific Bagle worm has raised alarms in the security community through an innovative infection mechanism: The e-mail message in which the variants arrive may have no file attachment, and it's possible for a user to become infected without having to launch one. "

The message includes a Windows ActiveX control and uses a vulnerability announced and patched by Microsoft Corp. in August and another problem from last October. The most recent Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer also includes a fix for the more recently discovered flaw.

The ActiveX control does not contain the actual worm, according to McAfee Security. Instead, it creates and runs a VBScript on the system, which downloads and executes the worm from one of a list of IP addresses. According to McAfee, as of 06:45 PST on March 18, "The majority of the 590 IP addresses seen have been closed down. At the time of writing, 39 were still responding."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1550835,00.asp?kc=EWNWS031804DTX1K0000599

Thursday, March 18, 2004

New Homeland Security Guidelines Called Vendor-Driven:
"A task force formed by the Department of Homeland Security is set to unveil a set of security recommendations this week for both enterprises and home users, but many industry observers say the guidelines are too little, too late. "

The guidelines are the work of the Awareness for Home Users and Small Businesses task force, formed late last year by DHS and private industry at the National Cybersecurity Summit. The group and several others formed at the same event are designed to help foster better cooperation between government and industry and to tackle topics such as creating early warning systems, writing secure software and bolstering security in corporate governance.

The groups mainly comprise executives from security and software vendors such as Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp., RSA Security Inc. and Internet Security Systems Inc., as well as government officials and security experts in academia.

The recommendations, scheduled to be released Thursday, are intended as a follow-up to the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, released in early 2003 and widely panned in the industry for being long on platitudes and short on definitive action. The new offering reportedly centers on increasing users' awareness about security issues through education and communication.

"Because this is driven mainly by the vendors, it will be about blaming the users," said Alan Paller, research director at The SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md. "Private industry isn't doing its part to fix the problems we have with software and processes. It's like telling drivers to drive safely and not fixing the bumpers and the seat belts."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1549954,00.asp?kc=EWNWS031704DTX1K0000599
Microsoft Renews Its Commitment to Security Education:
"If you lead customers to the security trough, will they drink?

Microsoft seems convinced they will. And the company is pulling out all the stops to continue to educate its users, reasoning that a more educated customer base will be a more secure customer base.…"

Microsoft will release for download on Wednesday, March 17, a new scripting capability for its Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 1.2, a product which performs scans of Windows systems for security misconfigurations. The new scripting tool will allow users to scan an unlimited number of computers or IP addresses from a single input file.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1549876,00.a

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Help Yourself:
"Although it's easy to pick up the phone and call that friend who always has an answer, or post a message to your favorite tech forum, you might want to take a few steps to try to solve the problem on your own—or at least be prepared with the information your geek in shining armor will need to troubleshoot the problem for you. Here are ten steps that can help you solve your problems faster."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1544176,00.asp
Java(TM) Boutique - Using FOP with Java:
"In data-centric applications, you are often required to produce reports and documents in various formats. One of the challenges facing the developer world is to find a generic and consistent way of manipulating a structurally diverse data set to produce formatted reports. For example, if you write a program to accept a certain data set and produce a PDF formatted report, than in order to produce an HTML report on the same data set you might have to write a different program. In this article, we will see a relatively new technology involving W3C standard named XSL-FO. FOP gives us the flexibility to operate on XML structured data, apply an XSL Stylesheet, do the XSLT transformation and publish the data in various formats such as PDF, PCL, SVG, TXT and many other…"

http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/FOP/

Tuesday, March 16, 2004

The Hidden Power of Photoshop CS: Chapter 2: Color Separations. Pt. 2. By Sybex - WebReference.com-:
"A second way to achieve manual duotoning is to create the effect using spot color channels. This creates an image with the spot color built in, and essentially it will be press ready as a separation. In the following techniques you will use both the manual layer method just described in the previous section and Photoshop’s duotone interface to create duotone results."

http://www.webreference.com/graphics/ps2/
Office update clogs spam filters - News - ZDNet:
"A recent update for Microsoft's Office software is blocking several popular spam filters, and software makers are scrambling to find a fix to the fixes.

The problems have occurred since the release earlier this week of Service Pack 3 for Office XP and 2000, which are recent versions of Microsoft's widespread productivity package. The patches and big fixes in SP3 included a number of security fixes for Office's widely used e-mail client, Outlook.

Shortly after SP3 was released, users started reporting problems to the makers of several popular products for filtering out junk e-mail. They said every time their spam filter tried to intercept a message, Outlook would pop up a warning message that another application was trying to access Outlook's address book. …"

"If they were to click, 'yes,' 'yes,' 'yes' (in Outlook), it would work for them," Fahey said. "It's just a pain."

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5172968.html

Monday, March 15, 2004

Building ASP.NET Applications with C#Builder for Microsoft .NET:
"Among the many features of C#Builder is an ASP.NET application development environment. With full support for WYSIWYG design and access to HTML and C# code, C#Builder is an excellent tool for building entire Web sites."

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=169672