Work Journal
For Week of July 26, 1999
Page Updated Wednesday, December 22, 1999 10:01 PM
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Busy....
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Busy...
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Been a very busy week with work and visiting with my parents. I have lots of unchecked email and not keeping up with my daily reading.
I have ordered a Compaq Armada 1750 notebook for my mother and hope to spend sometime checking it out before handing it over to her.
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Today I got my mothers old NEC laptop which I have to get the data off of to put on the Armada when it comes in. I get to keep the NEC which is great. There are times when it would be nice to sit on the porch or in the kitchen and do some work. Now with a laptop of my own I can do these things.
One of the major reasons for replacing the NEC laptop is that it is getting a bit unreliable. I hope that it will remain operational for some time to come with the occasional use I will have for it.
I have a few notes about things I have come across at work. I'll put them altogether and post them in the next few days.
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I find I miss my Logitech wheel mouse at work. I constantly move my middle finger to scroll through web pages and documents, but there is no wheel on the mouse to turn. I have had to learn how to use scroll bars and the keyboard again when working with large documents and web surfing. It is amazing how much you can do with a good mouse and never touch the keyboard. Then when you have to use an plain mouse you learn how quickly you have been spoiled by a simple wheel on a mouse.
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I have found that my favorites page on my web site is very useful when I am web browsing away from home. It is convenient to be able to use the links on it to find information and not have to rely on my memory to locate sites I like to visit frequently. I may have to expand it's contents to hold more of my favorite links which I can use from work or at a friends
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I was setting up some new Compaq En 400s and found that the 64 MB Dimm that came installed the computers was not 100% compatible with the Compaq upgrade kits which were supplied to me. Both were labeled as PC100 RAM but the PC would not boot with both Dimms installed unless the upgrade Dimm was in slot 1. In the past I have never encountered anything like this while working with Compaq hardware, which I have always found to be trouble free to work with and upgrade till now.
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I just learned that Compaq en series computers have a built in case lock system. A pin powered by a servo/solenoid type device inside the case goes up into the case lid which prevents anyone from opening the case. The pin is software controlled and a password is required to unlock the case. Though there is a tool which allows you to remove the fasteners which hold the servo unit while the case is closed. When the fasteners are removed, the pin and the servo unit which controls it fall away from the case lid allowing the case lid to be removed.
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I was upgrading some old Digital PCs and came across some oddities. I opened the case on one machine to find the heat sink sitting on CPU with no strap on it. Only the cooling gel/grease between the CPU and heat sink held them together. I also found that the hard drive was not secured in the case. What responsible technician would leave a computer in this state without putting a note on it. The worst thing is that the PC had just come off someone's desk and not the workbench.
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I stumbled upon a WinNT ( may also work in Win95/98 ) key stroke short cut to day. If you have explorer set so each time you click on a folder a new window opens ( this is the default setting ) you can close them all at once by holding the shift key and clicking on the X in the upper right of the explorer window. This closes the child and parent explorer windows. I find this very useful when working on a new install and I don't want to alter the default settings so the user who will receive the PC does not have to inherit my preferred settings for explorer.
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I have just had my first session in the Silicon Patch to do some fun personal computing. I have been so busy this week that the only time I have spent at my computer was to see if there was any mail that needed immediate attention. Everything else has been ignored.
I downloaded and installed an evaluation copy of PGP Personal Privacy Version
6.5.1
encryption software. At first the install brought my PC to a crawl but after rebooting,
the second installation of the software was successful. PGP adds a plug-in to
Outlook which allows PGP to used within Outlook. You have to create a key pair
made up of a private and a public key. The public key can be stored on a public
certificate server on the Internet.
When you receive an encrypted message you select Decrypt/Verify from the PGP menu. PGP tells you what public key encrypted the message and you must supply the Passphrase for your private key to decrypt the message ( if you forget your Passphrase there is NO way to recover it ). In Outlook 2000 when you close the message you have the option to save the changes so you will not have to decrypt the message the next time you want to read it. If you do not save the changes you must decrypt the message each time you want to read it. If you go to read the unsaved version during the same Outlook session, the Passphrase can be cached for a period of time so you will not have to supply the Passphrase each time you open the message. The cache can also be disabled or have a time limit as to when to clear the cache. The next time you open Outlook you will have to supply the Passphrase because the cache will have been cleared when Outlook was closed.
The software is configurable to automatically encrypt all sent messages or you can choose to encrypt a message on demand or when the message is sent.
Public and private key, you share the public key with others, can mail it to them or store it on a key server.
Plug-ins allow you to use PGP within an application such as Outlook or Eudora mail. Applications with out a plug-in can still use PGP through PGPtools. Other supported ways to decrypt email and files is to copy the data to the Clipboard and use PGPtools to decrypt the file or use Windows Explorer.
PGP also has a wipe file utility which helps to ensure that a deleted file is unrecoverable by overwriting it. How well this works I am not sure, but it has to be better than just deleting a file in Windows Explorer. Deleting a file using Windows Explorer or DEL at a DOS Prompt basically just removes the pointer to the stored data and leaves the file on the hard drive, and accessible to someone with the right tools.
Even formatting a hard drive or floppy disk does not truly delete data. It takes a very skilled person to recover the data from a formatted drive.
It was interesting how during the flooding in the Red River Valley a few years ago how much data could recovered by data recovery experts. Businesses and government offices who's computers had been under water for days had a very good chance of having data recovered from a water logged hard drive. A soggy hard drive would be opened and put in a solution to remove any contaminates. Then the hard drive would be put in a clean room to dry and a technician would careful take the drive apart, check the components, reassemble it and the drive would work. This is a very expensive procedure but the cost of lost data can put a business out of business.
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I have setup the NEC in the Silicon Patch and connect my external parallel ZIP drive to it. I have to copy data off the laptop to put on the new Armada laptop which I should have Tuesday or Wednesday.
I have been trying to get a new driver for the glidepad expanded and on a floppy. The driver comes as an auto expanding exe file which does weird things when run on an NT machine. Once I put the exe file on the laptop and ran it in Windows 98 it worked properly. Then the installation failed as the driver which was labled for Windows 95/98 is only for DOS and Windows 3.11.
Download a newer driver and the install program failed. I then tried Add New Hardware which found the correct files among those on the driver disk I made. The Glidepad now operates properly again.
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As an experiment I have created a new page called bookmarks. I exported my Favorites from Internet Explorer which created a file called bookmarks. I cut and pasted links from the bookmarks file into several new web pages roughly divided into subjects. I then created a new set of frames to contain an index of web link pages, and to display the links pages. By clicking on an item in the index a page containing a list on links on that subject is opened.
The bookmarks page only contains a fraction of my favorites, but contains enough of them for me to experiment with as a way to access my most commonly used links when I am web surfing away from home.
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The Bookmarks pages I made yesterday seems to be working out pretty well. I did all my morning surfing from them and all went well. The current links I have put on them has everything I need to do 90% of my daily web surfing.
What a mess my inbox was. It's amazing what a week of neglect can leave you with. I had a pile of junk mail to delete and several news letters which I though I may have not received till I dung