In the summer of 1979, I was 12 years old, I had the rest of my life to look forward to, and I lived in constant fear of being vapourized. The SALT-II treaty was signed in Vienna that year in June and being the overly inquisitive child that I was, I tried to learn everything……

I recently had a discussion with a person who presumed that since I knew how to write code for computers, that I was a programmer. I guess this is true at a very high level, but I prefer the term hacker for what I do. So what’s the difference? Programmers will use a $50 brand……

Whether you call it “Fat Tuesday”, “Mardi Gras”, “Carnival”, or “Day before Ash Wednesday”, today is the last day before the fasting and penitential season of Lent. It is also Pancake Day! The later may be more significant to many these days, but there was a time when the known universe operated in fear of,……

They are getting smarter, so you need to be even smarterer. You are probably used to seeing bogus emails and web pop-ups telling you that your computer is infected and you need to download and install an antivirus program. Conveniently they always have one attached that is perfect for your computer. If you are not……

As a follow up to my last post on scripting firewall changes to drop spammer addresses…. here is a current list of all the IP addresses I have identified as spam sources. Feel free to use these in what ever way you like to block these evil bastards. All of the following addresses have been……

I manage a network of servers that include mail servers, web services, and file sharing and I have been doing so for a number of years. One of the most prevalent maintenance issues for me has always been dealing with spammers. These guys have no respect for the general rules and will insist on sending……

On December 7th 1972, I was only 6 years old, but I have a vivid memory in my head to this day of Apollo 17 heading to the Moon in what would be the last of our visits to the lunar surface. 37 years ago Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt stepped off the lunar surface……

Protect and Serve Got kids? Yeah? So… you have a firewall and antivirus and some kind of content filter on their PC so they can be safe right? Good luck with that. Here’s a dose of reality for you – every 10 year old, yes even yours, knows how to bypass ALL that protection, and……

My “Life with Vista” series ends here with a “good bye” and some helpful instructions for anyone else feeling like abandoning the Vista ship. I’ve written two how-to documents giving step by step instructions for replacing Vista with Windows XP or Ubuntu, a Linux distribution intended for desktop users. These are available at http://mairs.ca/tom/papers/VistatoXP.html and……

I recently had an opportunity to travel to San Francisco on business. Well, I flew into San Francisco Airport, but that’s about as close as I got to SF Proper. I did, however get to visit pretty much every other place between there and San Jose in three days. If you’ve never been there, the……

So, I’m sitting here in the Air Canada wing at Boston Logan Airport and just had to write about it. My flight was supposed to leave Boston at 6:25PM, so being the intrepid traveler that I am, I made sure I was at the airport in plenty of time. Actually my afternoon appointments cancelled so……

Life with Vista (part 3) It’s been three months since my last “Vista” post [La vida con Vista (part 2)] and I can tell you things have not gotten much better. I thought products were supposed to get better with each new version, like when each new book from an author gets better because the……

This is still a question, but not as big a one as it used to be. Five years ago I was building web sites with a combination of PERL, PHP, HTML, and JavaScript. Today they are almost entirely PHP. Over the last few years, the PHP language has developed into a powerful, flexible language that……

Life with Vista (part 2) OK… One of the things I have learned in this whole process with Vista is that Microsoft obviously names their products based on price points, not functionality. Vista Home is priced for the person who won’t pay more than $99 for any OS. Home premium is for the guy who……

(Life with Vista)My PC is an 8 year old box that I put together myself (because that is what I am good at) containing a P4 – 1.7Mhz processor, 640Mb of RAM, 60Gb Hard Drive and a 32Mb Video Card. This probably seems archaic to some, but it was well built and has served me……

Hello …… For any one out there who has been waiting patiently for me to return to the blog-o-sphere… I’m BACK! Ya – I know – It’s been 4 years! The last post to my old-style “blog” was July 2004 [ http://mairs.ca/tom/writing.php ] – it seems like yesterday. Well, enough of this working for a……