I thought I would check out to see what the latest Firefox has in store.  I downloaded the latest Firefox 3.03b beta 

A few things I have noticed after playing around -

• When I goto Google Email, it does not freeze and crash! Ya!! I have redownloaded, reinstalled, disabled all add ons and still could not get Firefox to quit crashing. Firefox 3 is not crashing!
• Disable CSS Quickly by clicking View | Page Style | No Stle - Great for Web Developers testing CSS and also disabling for accessibility issues. No need to download a seperate program to disable cssin a few clicks.
• It is titled "Minefield"
• When you close the browser and have tabs open, it asks you if you want to open the tabs on the next start
• Keyboard navigation of webpages via TAB broken (See link to bug)
• The new HTML 5 activeElement and hasFocus attributes are supported
• The display property’s inline-block and inline-table values are now implemented
• Firefox 3 offers JavaScript 1.8
• Supports the animated PNG (APNG) image format
• Unified bookmarks and history organizer
• You can now associate keywords with your bookmarks
• Opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs instead of replacing the existing ones
• Like IE, you can now use FULL Page view - greater than maximize (f11)
• Improved Download Manager
• Built In Antivirus
• Protection from pages that might have malware
• Memory usages reduced with "over 300 memory "leak" bugs fixed and new features to help automatically locate and dispose of leaked memory blocks"
• Improved speed (drawing and redrawing rates)

So far, so good. I like it! Time will tell how it holds up in the end and how it handles web development

Tags: firefox, minefield, beta

I had someone ask me what my New Year’s resolution is. As silly as it sounds, mine is to write more articles and work on my websites. Simple. Now, to see if I can stick to it!

Download these 2 files:

• Adobe.reg
• psicon.dll

1) Copy psicon.dll to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Shell if this folder doesn’t exist create it.
2) Run Adobe.reg (you may have to reboot)
3) You now can view PSD files in thumbnail view within explorer.

Tags: photoshop, thumbnails, view, explorer, psd

"This application has failed to start because MSVCRT10.dll was not found"

Tags: Adobe, Photoshop, CS3, msvcrt10.dll, application, error, photo

" While executing DW_Menu_Edit_paste Command in menus.xml, the following Javascript errors occurred: Type Error : MM.event has no properties. "

To solve the problem, I found this solution:

Find this file and delete it:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Macromedia\Dreamweaver
8\Configuration\WinFileCache-*.dat
In case these folders it is in are are normally hidden - you may have to use Explorer > Tools > Folder Options to unhide them.

Now, no more errors.

Tags: dreamweaver, error, DW_Menu_Edit_paste, copy, paste, menus.xml, javascript, mm.event, application, web, design

A few days ago, a 3rd party application called "Pets" was released for Facebook. To me, it reminds me of a cross between Tamagotchi and with a hint of World of Warcraft in it. The idea is to start out with a level 0 pet - a bunny (or a colorbit). You can pet it, feed it or poke it from your Facebook profile (as can others) to gain XP and health. (Poke seems to give higher XP than Pet from what I have seen).

You can check mine out at Erica’s Facebook Profile

Inside the game, you "fight monsters" to gain XP, health and Gold. You can then use the Gold to buy items of armor and clothing to increase you hit points, damage and health.  Pet me and Scavenging has been disabled from inside the game at this time. (Sorry! Scavenging (or petting) has been temporarily disabled due to high server load. We’re currently fixing this. Thanks for your patience!) The higher your XP, the tougher the monsters (Scorpian, Mantis, Spider, and an Ant) are to kill.

After you kill the monster, you loot the body for Gold and/or Equipment (weapons, armor, etc). You can sell the equipment for gold, carry it or equip it.

While playing it (mine has been alive for 10 hours - with a couple of hours of sleep being in the 10) I have noticed a few things.

• If you are up against an enemy and your health is running out faster than that one is.. instead of ‘run’ning at first , click on the My Pet button. You can go back, feed your pet, and go back to fighting with all of the health (hit points) on both you and the monster - but both of you with HP reset. It might not always save you, but there is a good chance it will the second or third time around.

• When you get around level 18 and level 22 monsters start appearing.. there is a level 22 Scorpion that barely damages you at all. Even at level 17 or 18, you can easily defeat this one and take little Hit Points (damage, loss of health) and gain a lot of XP and Gold (or even equipment). This has been fixed.
• I find myself cycling through (Evade) the monsters that are lower than me to fight monsters that are my level or above. In essence, it takes less mouse clicks to "evade" a lower level monster and get a higher level one to fight - taking less time to get more XP / Gold or Equipment.
• As of right now, the highest level to get new items is 16. The creater has said there will be some new equipment/items by the end of this week
• The levels where you can get new items right now are 2,7,10 and 16
• As far as items and colour goes.. what I have noticed are

• red items have more attack points
• gold things cost less
• green items have more hit points associated with them

Tags: facebook, pets, Tamagotchi, wow, social, networking

The five paragraphs that are in this article that deal with VOIP basically describe two ways which VOIP can be used to infect computers with malware and to initiate scams. I found this very intriguing. So much so.. I keep reading it over and over.

It seems to be common knowledge to many that VOIP software on a computer can be used to "Spoof" the caller’s origin number. For instance, on my cell phone, I received a call from a friend. I missed the call, so I called my friend back. My friend told me that he had not called me earlier. I found that very strange, so I double checked the number that the call was made from on caller ID. Sure enough, it was his number. Later that day, he received another call from me. He called me back to ask why I had hung up when he called. Strangely enough, I had not called him - even though his caller ID showed my number.

Later, it turns out, a mutual friend was playing around with VOIP software and "Spoofed" our numbers to call each other. A trick, but a well played one!. Our friend could even set the software to dial "from" 911, the Whitehouse, or any other number he chose to use - even a fictitious number.

While it was a joke, it now makes me realize that the same method is how many so-called-companies get around telemarketing schemes. Right now, as I look at my cell phone, I have gotten a stream of calls from 111-111-1111, 222-222-2222, 333-333-3333 and so forth.. one after the other. Also, I see on my call history I missed calls from 987-654-3210. As you can guess, I do not answer these calls.. but it makes me start to wonder who they are from and why they are calling.

A few months ago, I checked my caller ID and answering machine after a long day from work. The call was from a strange number similar to 887-654-3210. On the answering machine, it stated that "Thank you for your commitment to SunCom. Please hit the pound (#) button to continue this call and settle your billing account." I thought it was strange, since we did not have a SunCom cell account. So, the next time I saw this number come up, I answered, heard the recorded message and hit the pound button. I was going to explain to the operator that they had the wrong number, and to please remove the number from their dialing. But.. I had the good ole "hold until a representative is with you" music and I hung up.

 Net month, on our phone bill, I had a charge of almost $7.14  from some company is Las Vegas - OAN Services, Inc. Where I had dialed 10 15 15 800.

OAN Services, Inc. Credits and Charges
Call 1-800-713-9078 for billing inquiries

Long Distance services
Direct dial charges  5.49

Miscellaneous charges
CARRIER COST RECOVER FEE on Feb 6 1.65

Total CALLING 10 15 15 800 charges $7.14

Taxes
State Tax .48 §
Sales tax imposed by the state government.
Total OAN Services, Inc. Charges $7.62

 ————-And, beneath that ———————–

CALLING 10 15 15 800 itemized calls
Direct dial itemized calls
Date | Time | Place‘called‘ | Number‘called‘| Period | Minutes | Amount
1 Feb 6 9:21 P DIR ASST NV 702-555-1212 Day 1.0 5.49
Total direct dial charges $5.49

 ————————————————————

Needless to say, we use our cell phone for long distance calling. I checked my caller ID on the landline for that and it came up as the toll free number. I remembered hitting the pound sign and hanging up. So.. the scam was to think you were a SunCom customer whose bill was bad (or a wrong number) and hit #, call back and explain. But, when you call back, the # sign dials this directory service in Las Vegas - OAN Services - and you get billed out the wazoo.

Needless to say, I called the number on the bill to get credit.. and I did the next month. Now, I read this article once again and I see how they did it. I had not thought of it before. I should have, but did not.

So, as the Cert Mag article points out, people can "spoof" their number from VOIP software. Cases in point above. The article also details how a person would "spoof" to phish.. like using a bank number, call a "customer" and social engineer the account number "to verify" information - such as address, account numbers, social security numbers, etc.

Another hot point in the article is the discussion about how VOIP software can be used to receive a call that "introduces" malicious software to the computer the VOIP software (the receiver uses) runs on. Crashing the computer - locking it up and so forth…

The is defiantely food for thought - especially for those who receive phone calls - and those who run VOIP software on a computer.  

Tags: OAN, Services, malware, scam, certification, magazine, VOIP, spoof, callerID, caller, ID, phishing

I used to think the world of the people at TechExams.net. From what I have seen since I have been a member since 2003 was a forum devoted to helping others learn, answering questions and encouraging others for certifications.

I thought I would add my 2 cents for helping others as well. That IS what it is supossed to be all about.

Well evidentally it was not on that site. I posted 3 different links in their forums after some other posts congratulating other members on passing certifications.The links were to my study notes here on the site

• CWNA Study Guide PWO-100
  

• CompTIA’s Linux+ Cheat Sheet (XK0-002)

• Comp TIA’s Security+ Cheat Sheet

. I call them my cheat sheets. I made them when I was studying for various exams. They are pages of jotted down notes for quick reminders and reference cards. So many people have found them useful, I thought I would pass them on.

 What I got was a message from the CWNA moderator asking me if I posted them so I could drive traffic to my website to get hits and money from ads.

WHAT???

I have never even made any money off of this site. If I have - it has never been sent to me that I know of. My bank records and paypal can prove that I had only published the notes on my site because I have used them, they were helpful in studying and my persuit to learn, and others love them as well. 

I replied that was NOT my intention and my only intention was what I posted - to help others studying. I said that if there was a problem with me psoting something to help others learn, pelase let me know. There was even another person that replied after me that thanked me for posting the links.

I dont need more "traffic" to my site. This site gets enough traffic as it is. I do like it when people come here and find the answer to a question or they can read something and learn. That is what this site was all about.  And, I enjoy helping others when I get an email asking how to do something. If someone comes here in hopes of learning, or to find an answer, that is what this site is about - it was built on where I had a place to put my notes for reference while studying and learning. That is all it has ever been.

After I made the response (and I was very polite), I was rewarded with having all of my posts removed. I posted in another forum very politely asking why my posts had been removed when all I was trying to do was give others a chance for more study material to help them learn.

In return, I was rewarded yet again with a message saying I was BANNED from the forums.

WOW. Ok… that makes NO Sense at all! I thought the forum ws for people to help others to learn? I mean members raved about books, other materials for studying and all I did was post a link to the study notes - and I get accused to trying to drive traffic to my site to make money AND then I get banned.

Sounds Fishy to me. Could it be a jealousy thing? Maybe they wanted everyone for themselves and could not handle it that someone else was trying to help? way to go! how rude!

There was a message about writing the moderator blah blah blah.. It sure isn’t worth wasting my time over to do that. If that is how that place is going to be, I think I can think of better things to do and better places to write where you are not treated like that for trying to help someone. That is definately NOT a place I would recommend nor will I be returning to. I prefer to exchange messages with people who can act civil

Tags: Techexams.net, tech, exams

User ID

RID

Tags: RID, UserID, Windows

I have been using Mozilla’s Firefox for the last few years. I have seen it get better and better too. With the new Release Candidate available for download now, and the Beta about to become available at this week, I thought I would give the newest version a try.

My first reaction.. it seemed a little faster loading up WebPages. My second reaction? It is a LOT faster to load up WebPages.!

Move over IE, you have just been dropped.

My IE has been crashing more and more lately. So, I tried to download the latest IE. Considering my IE freezes up about every time I launch it, that made it sort of hard to download. I finally got it, but when I tried to install IE, I got a message saying that a newer version of IE was already installed and setup would discontinue.

HUH??

I know I did the IE 7.0 side by side with IE 6, but that was a few reformats ago. I have not updated IE for at least a couple of months.

So why do I get an error saying a newer version is installed? Oh well. Forget IE. Back to FireFox. I use it more than IE anyway.

So, I see today that Firefox RC3 is up for grabs. So, I download it. And, I LOVE it!

Not only does it load WebPages up super fast (Like it should be on a 5.0 DSL connection) It even has some new features in it. This time around, there is an anti-phishing tool. This is supposed to warn you when you are on a site that could possibly be a scam. It can check a local list or it can check Google.

So, I decided to try the Anti-phishing tool out. We all get enough of the emails that say they are from PayPal and to update your account right? Well, Firefox got put to the test. I clicked on one of the fake links and this is what I got:

Very nice! It worked! Let’s see IE do that!

Other things I have noticed are:

If you post online, it has a nice built in spell check. For me, that will come in a handy! Also, an interesting thing I have noticed. I went to my University’s website. Normally, I have to right click and open the pages in a new tab since the default is to open the links in a new browser. With this version, It automatically opens the links in a new tab instead of a new browser. I like it! Saved me even more time!

If this is just the preview, I am SO looking forward to seeing FireFox2. Mozilla - Keep up the good work!

Tags: firefox, mozilla, phishing, browser, IE