Digital certificates

I’ve been taking an interest in computer security recently, and as part of that I’ve been investigating digital certificates, primarily in the context of code signing (e.g. applications/macros/plugins).

There seem to be two main misconceptions here (at opposite ends of the scale), which are worth addressing:

1. “If something has been signed then it’s safe.”

2. “Just because something’s been signed, that’s no guarantee of safety, therefore signing is pointless, and it’s just a way for Microsoft to extort money from people while spreading FUD.” (FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.)

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Event Viewer problems

I’m currently spending an exciting Friday night in the office. Specifically, I’ve been fixing a Windows 2000 PC that’s been running extremely slowly for the past few days. I’ve got that problem solved now (I’m just sticking around to do general maintenance on it), and I thought it was worth documenting here, in case anyone else encounters it.

Problem:
PC running Windows 2000 Pro with SP4 is extremely slow.

Symptoms:
services.exe taking 99% or 100% of CPU time.
Can’t run Event Viewer.
In Admin Tools | Services, the “Event Log” service says “Starting”.

Cause:
One or more of the event viewer log files was corrupt, so the service couldn’t start, and therefore the application couldn’t run. But the service didn’t fail either, it just kept retrying, which meant that it was tying up the whole CPU.

Solution:
Change the startup type of that service to “Manual”, then reboot the computer. After rebooting, delete *.evt from
C:\WinNT\system32\config
(or just move them to a spare folder), and start the service manually. If this works (which it did in this case), it will recreate the three files, and then you should change the service’s startup type back to “Automatic”.

Further info:
In this case, two of the three files had a size of 512kb. When the service had restarted, I ran Event Viewer, and looked at the properties for each of the logs. They all had a maximum size of 512kb, and they were also configured to overwrite events after 7 days. I’ve changed this setting to be “Override events as needed”. My theory is that the files got corrupted because Windows tried to add new events, but it had run out of space, and it couldn’t delete the old entries because they were less than 7 days old. Normally this would just give an error message on the screen, but I think it’s best to avoid this configuration in general (I really don’t know why Microsoft made this the default). So, if you’re working on any other machines, take a minute to change this setting over.

LaTeX formatting

I’m currently doing an MSc; this includes a project, and there are regulations about how to write up the final report. In particular:

“The project report must also contain listings of all source code. The source code listings must be contained in an appendix, and do not count towards the 40 page limit for the project report. The code listings must be presented in a compact format (printed double-sided, and with two pages to a side).”
[..]
“It is strongly recommended that the document typesetting system TEX or LATEX is used.”

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Configuring a Palm Vx for WAP access

Introduction

I have a Palm Vx, and a Nokia 6310i mobile phone on an Orange account. A while back, I set up my account for WAP access and GPRS, and I was then able to view WAP pages on the mobile phone. I then wanted to be able to view these pages on my Palm Vx, using an infra-red connection between the two, and this proved to be quite a challenge.

I am documenting the process here, for anyone else who wants to achieve the same thing. If you are using different equipment, then this may still be of some use to you, but it probably won’t work in exactly the same way. In particular, I haven’t used BlueTooth, but I’d imagine that the configuration is quite similar.

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70-165: Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Programming

Introduction

I recently decided to become a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), starting with the VB 5 exam. I passed it with a score of 898/1000, which I’m pleased about. I can tell you what I did to prepare for this exam, although I can’t guarantee that the same thing will work for you. I should mention that I’ve been using VB since August 1994 (I taught myself version 3 by reading the supplied manuals), so I wasn’t starting from scratch here. Essentially, I already knew how to use VB (it’s what I do for a living), so I just wanted to know how to pass the exam.

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