Girl Geekette

Internet Explorer

As the War of the browsers moves on at the end of 2008, big plans are in store for 2009 for IE8 and Google’s Chrome. For what seems normal for Microsoft, they have once again put a delay on IE8.

According to the MS Blog, the release of the final candidate of IE8 has been delayed now until 2009. An exact date is unknown.

We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that up with the final release.

No surprise there eh?

The call to action now for the technical community is to download beta 2 (if you haven’t already) and let us know about your experience. Next, please prepare for final testing with public update so you can let us know – quickly, loudly, and clearly – if you find absolutely critical issues with it before the release of the final product.

   

SlurpConfirm404

Another of my daily bad habits (yes, amonsgt many) is the continious monitering of my logs. At any given time I am watching the logs of my websites. Beleive it or not, sometimes this pays off! And other times, it brings more questions to mind which.. yes, I am going to search, read and learn until my questions are satisfied.

This time, I happen to be watching my logs and noticed that Yahoo’s Slurp engine was searching for pages that did not exist on my site. I had to stop and think about it for a minute, but I realized that the pages it was searching for were not only ones that did not exist, but they never had existed!

Now, through the various versions of my sites, of course pages have moved. And when this happens, search engines still might be looking for the old and outdated ones. But in this case, /SlurpConfirm404/Schultz/HSchorus.htm (see the image above) brought a big HUH?? to my lips.

*Update* Nov 21, 2008

The newer version of Microsoft Word had a problem opening these older files and the .doc format was noted as corrupt. I was able to open it in Open Office (A free alternative to MS Office) and resave the files as *.pdf files. The files have been updated on the server and are now available for download again.

• Erica’s CWNA Study Guide PWO-100
• Erica’s Linux+ Stury Guide (XK0-002)
• Erica’s Security+ Study Guide

These files are now *.pdf files 

Adobe Acrobat to maybe download to view the *.pdf files (A free download)

No Spam

As a Wordpress lover, I also fight my share of Spam. When I was able to drop my daily comment spam rate from over 400 comment spam a day to less than 30 a day, I was ecstatic!

Although Akismet does its job by seperating the Spam Comments from the Non Spam comments, I still had to go through and make sure that the ones caught truely are spam.

Using Akismet and a few other great tools, not only am I able to cut tons of comment spam out, I am also helping out to catch spammers.

No, I am not trying to sell you anything, I just want to pass on how I was able to do this.

Since late 2005, I have been a member of Project Honeypot. It is a great way to set up a honeypot to attract spammers. The best part is, all of the spammers caught there are documented.