The UltraTech Zone

Marion Jones, who confessed last year to doping and was stripped of her medals, has left even more victims in her wake because of her participation in various relays. Because of her absolutely stupid actions, and her disregard for fairness and professionalism, many, many people have been impacted.  I always wonder, in these situations, of ...

I just finished reading an article on Windows Vista from InfoWorld, and it makes several really good points. Windows Vista brings a lot to the table that gets de-emphasized by the masses.  It's funny that when Microsoft releases a product that is primarily a refinement of the previous version (XP vs 2000), there are complaints about having ...

One of the things that annoys me about Microsoft (and this is true, to some extent, of any large company) is that there are too many times where it seems that one hand is not talking to the other.  Sometimes, it seems like one hand doesn't even know that there's another hand. Some of the most recent examples of this silliness are as ...

I don't say this too often, but words cannot express how worthless they are.   If I were to summarize the ways in which they failed to provide useful service, I could take all month.  In short, they were lacking in a number of areas, including: Poor customer service Unstable systems Utter lack of communication (95% of the time) ...

It's been a long time coming, but I finally got rid of my previous hosting company.  Their sins are too numerous to mention in this post, but rest assured, I will address them in the next couple weeks. I also need to upgrade my site to Community Server 2007, which I have not had time to do in recent months.  Part of the reason is that ...

So, I sort of completed the migration to Exchange 2007 that I had decided to do this weekend.  Sort of. The mailbox moves were flawless.  Total time for this part of the migration was about 15 minutes, with my mailbox being the longest at 6 minutes.  Unfortunately for me, that was just the tip of the iceberg.  I have a ton of ...

This week is a period of transition for me.  I'm in the midst of a brief transition between employers, and also some lengthier transitions on the home network. (I really need to shore up some aspects of my home network, and provide a new network diagram.  And I have to finish up some loose ends with technology migrations that I began ...

I'm trying to decide whether this title is more reflective of this post in particular, or the subject matter itself...  Over the years, while participating in various technology forums, mailing lists and newsgroups, I have observed a frequent and disturbing phenomenon.  It generally occurs when someone makes a request for information ...

Otherwise known as Vista vs the EU and the World: Part Three... Here's a follow-up to my earlier Vista vs the World and Vista vs the Security Vendors posts, where I noted I greatly preferred a stronger, more secure base OS, even if that inhibited some functionality for third-party security tools. As seen in the following articles, Microsoft is ...

Otherwise known as Vista vs the Selfish Security Vendors: Part Two... Here's a follow-up to my earlier Vista vs the World post, where I noted I greatly preferred a stronger, more secure base OS, even if that inhibited some functionality for third-party security tools. This morning, I came across the following post by Larry Seltzer of eWeek where ...

I've been using Microsoft Outlook for a long time -- since the OL97 days, in fact -- and I've gone through all the different incarnations of the nefarious Outlook/Inbox Rules Wizards.  Currently, I'm using Outlook 2003 at home and work, with one test system running Outlook 2007 at home. While a number of improvements have been made in the ...

Or, perhaps I should say Microsoft vs Security providers in the Windows space? What I'm talking about eWeek's report that discloses McAfee's complaint that Microsoft has made it hard for them (and other security vendors) to integrate their products into Vista.  Presumably, this would be so that Microsoft can take advantage of the OS in ...

There is no universal standard of what the acceptable boundaries of privacy are.  The European Union tends to have a more stringent view of what constitutes personal privacy, while the United States seems to favor corporations vs people when it comes to control of user data. Now, the boundaries are being pushed even further by a company ...

Five years ago, I wrote an article on the challenges of implementing Information Security in an enterprise.  Sad to say, even in the post-911 era, not a whole lot has changed there.  Sometime in the next couple weeks, I'll write an updated document on what challenges I see today for an IT Security Professional.  Don't get me wrong ...