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LangaList 2003-11-06 Please visit our sponsors and help keep the LangaList S.E. free!
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 1) How NOT To Mess Up Stored CDRs!Be careful! Even little things--- including the glue on stick-on labels--- can
ruin your CDRs. All the info we have on unusual CDR failures and what you can do about them, appears in the new article live now at http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15800263 I'll also include links to other articles, from the general to the deeply technical, so you can explore this issue to whatever depth you want. If you burn CDs or CDRWs, please check out this important information, and then join in the discussion: Have you checked your old CDs? Have you discovered problems? If so, are there patterns to the failures? If you have no or few CD failures, what storage methods are you using; what tips can you share to help others achieve long storage life? See you at http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15800263 Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList S.E. Free! ) --- "Fred, I can't tell you the number of ways I have spent twelve bucks - but I can tell you the best twelve bucks I've spent in a long time was to upgrade to the Plus Edition of the LangaList. And so darn organized too, your operation that is. I've got another twelve just waiting for next year! ---John" The LangaList Plus!
Edition is ad-free, spam-proof, --------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 2) Major Headache: Langa Sites Must MoveI've mentioned "Murphy's Laws" several times in recent issues: Many of the outsourced suppliers I rely on to run parts of Langa.Com sites and this newsletter (web hosts, etc.) have become unreliable. This peaked with our recent beta test of Browsertune. BT itself mostly worked OK--- and I'll bring you preliminary results soon--- but the formatting of the detailed diagnostic report that BT can send you, if you want it to, inexplicably changed for the worse. Normally, when BT generates custom browser diagnosis and tune-up suggestions for you, it's produced in normal paragraph-by-paragraph fashion. But somehow, the report was getting munged in transmission and being sent as one, giant, unreadable paragraph, hundreds of lines long. This also happened on the older version of Browsertune--- not just the new beta. And then, it also happened on other sites, including Langa.Com, where things like the simple "Send To A Friend" forms also mysteriously lost their email formatting. The forms that send all these emails aren't fancy: They're based on "CGIemail," an ancient web standard for sending mail forms that was developed years ago at MIT. (See http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/cgiemail/ ) It turns out that HostWay, the web host for Langa.Com and BrowserTune, diddled with the
binaries and broke the code. Now, when you enter a form mail message as
something like When the CGIemail first started malfunctioning, I assumed it was something I'd done, and wasted time trying to see what was wrong in my code. (For example, there's a "wrap" tag in HTML forms that's used to control how messages are formatted.) Eventually, I realized that it had nothing to do with me, and that HostWay had made a deleterious and unasked-for change for their forms-mailer. Nothing I could do on my end of the process had any effect whatsoever on the final formatting of my form outputs. I worked with their tech support: The lower-grade techs had no clue what CGIemail was--- I even had to send one of them a link to the MIT site, above, so he'd know what I was talking about. Yup: He was "supporting" a technology he had no knowledge of. Eventually, a higher-level (ha!) tech told me that things were working just as they should be. No, they're not; CGIemail is supposed to be able to handle multi-line message-bodies. I complained again and got bounced to a still "higher" level tech. At least he knew what was going on. But his response was basically, "Tough. We had to change the code to foil spammers." It turns out there's a low-probability but real buffer-overrun type of problem in CGIemail, where a malicious hacker could deliberately malform a URL, using spurious line feeds, and possibly gain access to the CGIemail program for spamming. Of course, to send any mail, valid or not, you need access to a header that controls where the email goes--- the "To" and "From" or "CC" or "BCC" fields, for instance. Absent those fields, no mail goes anywhere, and there can be no issue with spamming. If the folks at HostWay had modified the code to protect those fields, it would have been a good thing, and I'd now be telling you how smart they are. Instead, they simply slapped in a crude patch that strips *all* line feeds out of all parts of forms. Even the message body--- which has nothing whatsoever to do with where or how email is sent--- is now stripped of all line feeds. This does close the door on the buffer overflow problem. Of course, it also makes HostWay's implementation of CGIemail virtually useless for the mailing of legitimate multi-line forms. Doh. Bottom line: All the above, and their "Tough luck, chump" attitude, convinced me that HostWay is no longer trustworthy, so I'll be pulling all my stuff off HostWay in the near future. It shouldn't affect you much, if at all; but I'm mentioning it because it's going to consume a fair chunk of time. Some other projects, including BrowserTune, now have to go to the back of the stove while I find and test new hosts, move the content, and activate the sites on the new hosts. But if you've been wondering why some form-generated mail from my sites has looked funky, now you know. And you also know NOT to use HostWay for any of your web hosting. I'll give you a further heads up when I actually switch the sites to new hosts, and tell you what potential problems to watch for. (Switching the Langa.Com mail especially worries me....) But with luck, we'll be live on a new site in a few weeks, supported by techs who actually know something about the technology they're supposed to be supporting, and who don't think it's OK to break basic functions simply because it's easier than finding a complete solution. Sigh. Click to email this item to a
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 3) File Association Tools & TipsWe've recently discussed how many tools want to change your file associations--- that is, to alter which programs open what file types (see http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-10-13.htm#3 ). It can be hard to undo file association changes, especially if you install software that changes a wide range of associations. Office suites, graphics tools and multimedia players are among the most aggressive software for changing *lots* of file associations at once. There are some tools that can help restore associations. For example:
Of course, manual methods are free, and also can work. We discussed some in http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-10-13.htm#3 , and Tom covers it on his site, above; but other readers are finding their own ways too, via targeted web searches:
Thanks, Tom and Dan! Click to email this item to a
friend 4) Simple Fix Prevents CD ShrapnelWe've previously discussed "CD Shrapnel"--- the dangerous shards that can blow out of a drive if a CD falls apart while spinning at high speed. (See http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=shrapnel&sp-a=0008002a-sp00000000 ) This reader found a simple fix:
Thanks, Marc. What a simple, elegant idea! Most breaks start at small stress cracks at the hub of a CD, so this could help a lot. It'd be important to get the tape squarely mounted so as not to induce more vibrations from an off-center mass, but once properly installed, this should work fine. Like taping window glass before a bad storm, the tape may prevent breakage altogether in some cases, and may at least keep some of the pieces from becoming projectiles in the worst cases. Nice! Click to email this item to a
friend 5) Tiny E-mail Client
Thanks, Andrew. It's indeed very compact (500K/easily fits on a floppy), but it's also self-contained: It doesn't need to be formally installed, so no DLLs need to be registered and such. You just unzip the file, and run the email client from where ever you unzipped it. When you're done, you can simply delete the files you previously unzipped, and everything's gone. No uninstall is needed, because nothing was installed in the first place. Simple! Click to email this item to a
friend 6) Is This Newsletter Interesting? Useful?If you think the LangaList is a worthwhile read, maybe a friend would find it useful too! Just use the following link to recommend the LangaList---your friend may find a new source of useful information and you just may win one of three FREE ONE YEAR SUBSCRIPTIONS to the LangaList Plus! edition given each month. (If your name is drawn and you're already a Plus! subscriber, your current subscription will be extended by a full year.) Check out the details at http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm . Thanks for recommending the LangaList--- and good luck! Click to email this item to a
friend 7) Red Hat Drops Free Linux!How do you make money from free software? Well, pretty much, you
don't;
There's more to the story--- Red Hat is pushing its non-paying customers to a new, untested free distro called "Fedora" ( http://www.fedora.us/index-main.html ). But Fedora isn't the same as Red Hat, and a lot of Red Hat users are now angry at being forced to pay or switch. We'll talk more about this later, but for now, if you're looking to experiment with Linux, Red Hat probably shouldn't be a top choice, as its current forms will soon go away.... Click to email this item to a
friend 8) They Loaded The CodeDo you have a home page or website? (It doesn't matter what size.) Please click over to http://www.langa.com/code.htm , and maybe you can join the hundreds and hundreds of LangaList readers who have "Loaded the Code!" (If you've already "Loaded The Code" and are wondering if your site will appear here or on the Langa.Com web site, please see http://www.langa.com/link.txt ) Speaking of which: Here's another eclectic sample of reader sites--- some professional, some very personal: View A Randomly-Chosen Reader Site Manually Browse All Posted-to-Date
Sites Starting At Office Letter PC Repair And System Creation Mill Hill Drama Arow Travel Photographs Australian Greyhounds rocklobsters.net PJ's Ilumination.Net WARTHOG Web Design (ZA) Virus Alerts for the Common Man Click to email this item to a
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 9) Samurize
Thank you, Andre. Lots more interesting stuff on that site, too! Click to email this item to a
friend 10) Just For Grins
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 11) Plus! Edition Highlights:
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