Got Firewall?

I have been asking this question of anyone I know who has broadband, just switched to broadband, or is seriously considering boradband.

"Got Firewall?"

Okay, I usually ask it a little less abbreviated. But it is the basic idea.

The reason I ask is because you are a lot more vulnerable when you are on broadband, and it is very easy to make some assumption that make you think you are safe with broadband.

#1 Assuming that the XP firewall that worked great on dialup is protecting you on your broadband. With the XP firewall, you have to go in and activate it for each network device.

#2 Assuming that you are safe behind a router (or any other NAT device) and don't need any other firewall. You are probably behind a NAT device if you computer's IP address is 192.168.0.nnn, where nnn is a number between 1 and 254.
While you computer is normally safe behind a NAT router from probe attacks, there is a case when you are no longer safe. And that is when you run any kind of Tunneling software.
The most common type of tunnling is running a VPN connection to a work network. When you tunnel to another network, it is as if you had plugged the network card of you computer directly into the work network. That means if there are any beasties loose on the work network, your computer is now exposed directly to network attack.
Well, most work networks are policed pretty well, and beasties are usually cleaned out pretty quickly if the manage to get in. So that isn't a big concern.
What is a much bigger concern, in my opinion, is running tunnling software and not even knowing that you are tunnled past your NAT router.
Want to know the most common tunnel program on the internet?
The AOL client.
I found out a long time ago, for the short time when we had AOL and broadband. I had reciently installed a DSL/hub with NAT. But I still had firewall software running. I logged onto AOL, and a few minutes later, my firewall software told me someone wanted to connect to my port 80, for an IP address that was not in my LAN! Something was trying to see if I was running a web server that it could try to infect!
But I was behind my DSL/hub! How could someone get a port probe past my hub. It took me a few minutes before I realized that AOL had tunneled me past my DSL/hub, and that I was exposed to a much bigger network!

Section 1.1 details AOL's tunnel

So once again I ask: Got Firewall? :)

Need to convert a Palm PDB file?

I had need today to convert a file created for Palm OS and was in PDB format. It was just a text file but couldn't be read by Windows or PocketPC unless I could strip away all of the PDB "wrapper". Through some quick googling I found a few programs designed to do this but for one reason or another they didn't work. Then I found TL-PDB (which, by the way, stands for True Love - PDB). Its completely free and worked like a champ. If you need to convert a PDB give it a try.

RssReader - Bug or Feature?

As you may know from an early entry on my Recycled Electrons blog, I use the RSS Reader news reader.

It is fantastic for keeping up with updates to blogs. Oh yeah - and other news sources too :).
Most of my friend's blogs are in my RSS reader.

But for some reason, old entries kept popping up again on my RSS feed. I didn't understand why that happened. It was kinda bugging me. I was wondering if it was doing that because the authors were updating the posts. (And I hoped I wasn't driving people nuts with all the template changes, and occasional spelling fixes I put in.)

Then just today, it hit me! Yes, the entries were being updated. But the updates were when people added comments. DOH!!

RSS does show two dates: the original date, and the update date, so if you watch for changes in those two fields, you can tell it was an update, and likely due to a comment. At least I think this is true for blogger blogs. I don't think I've seen this on other sites.

Bug or feature? I thought it was a bug - but now I know to look for a new comment - Feature!

Software - IrfanView

My Casio Digital Camera has a hidden raw mode. I understand most digital cameras these days have raw mode. But the special combination of two buttons to press is a hidden feature. It is not documented by Casio. I found it on the web. The hidden key combination is SET and Flash buttons. You have to turn off the camera to get out of raw mode.

Most raw pictures are saved in TIFF format. Casio cameras save as TIFF files, but the use a special format for the TIFF files. Special, read: non-standard file. It is basically a TIFF file with some unneeded bits trimmed off the color of each pixel. That way each files is only 6M instead of the 9M it should be.

But being a special TIFF means that the file will not open in a lot of programs. But the site I re-found the shortcut keys, Steve's Digicams, also talks about a software product that can read these special TIFF files.

The software is IrfanView. It works very nicely to open and resave these files. It also has a lot of neat features. I like the full screen slide show with the file name.

The other thing you should know about this Casio camera and the raw TIFF files is that all the software from Casio completely ignores these files. That means they don't automatically download. They are created in a seperate directory on the CF card, called TIFF. You have to manually download the files. You have to manually delete the files, otherwise they will just continue taking up space on the card. The only way the camera can delete the files is if you reformat the card. But you can delete the files when you have the card connected (even in the camera by USB cable) to the computer. I suggest you do shift-delete in Wxindows, so Windows won't even think about trying to create an recycle bin on the card.