BinaryWolf

Orchids

Orchids, originally uploaded by binarywolf.

These flowers are outdoors in the shade -no greenhouse- in January. We’ve had temperatures in the 70s and 80s this month. A little rain for a couple of days, but overall, very nice weather for blooming.

Virtual Machine Secure Browser

VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine ( a self-contained operating environment that behaves as if it is a separate computer) on a Windows or Linux PC. The Player can run any previously configured virtual machine.

One is called the Browser Appliance and offers users a safe way of browsing the internet within a virtual machine using the Firefox web browser:

Protect Against Adware and Spyware: Users protect their PCs against adware, spyware and other malware while browsing the Internet with Firefox in a virtual machine. The Browser Appliance leverages virtual machine isolation capabilities to prevent malware downloaded in the browser from propagating to the normal desktop.
Safeguard Personal Information: The Browser Appliance can be configured to automatically reset itself after each use so personal information is never stored permanently.

They also offer a few versions of Linux virtual machines which can be run on Windows for people who are thinking of moving to Linux. The community-built virtual machines are, in essence, a complete, fully-set-up PC, emulated entirely in software, that runs inside your current operating system.

IPCop is a Linux firewall that is designed to be stable, secure, highly configurable, and easily maintained. Contains IPCop with several add-ons. 40MB zipped; 112MB unzipped.
m0n0wall is a popular open source firewall package, and makes a nice firewall or router for testing purposes in VMware. 7MB zipped; 8MB unzipped.
Sguil is the Analyst Console for Network Security Monitoring. Its main component is an intuitive GUI that provides realtime events from snort/barnyard. 88MB zipped; 280MB unzipped.

Nofollow Attribute For Links

I’m a little late to the use of the “nofollow” attribute in links. I’ve used in in nofollow in the robots META tag before, but having recently discovered the links version, I’m posting about their use.

The new link attribute is called “nofollow” with rel=”nofollow” being the format inserted within an anchor tag. When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner.

For example, this is how the HTML markup for an ordinary link might look:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html">Visit My Page</a>

This is how the link would look after the nofollow attribute has been added, with the attribute portion shown in bold

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel=”nofollow” >Visit My Page</a>

This would also be acceptable, as order of elements within the anchor tag makes no difference:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.site.com/page.html”>Visit My Page</a>

Once added, the search engines supporting the attribute will understand that the link has not been vetted in some way by the site owner. Think of it as a way to flag to them, “I didn’t post this link — someone else did.” Use it wherever it means that another person placed a link on your site.

If Google sees nofollow as part of a link, it will:

1. NOT follow through to that page.
2. NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
3. NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for.

If you need to link to a site but are worried that a search engine might consider it a “bad neighborhood,” , nofollow could offer peace of mind.

Those who are swapping links with other sites now have a whole new thing to look out for. If someone offers to link to you, you’ll want to make sure they don’t make use of the nofollow tag — at least if you were hoping for some search engine gain. Otherwise, the link’s not going to count.

Robots.txt - Where no Blog has Gone Before?

Brett Tabke, the founder of WebmasterWorld (the huge webmaster forum), is writing an humorous blog in his robots.txt file. As he says, “It has a cool retro BBS feel to it”.

I love the Steven Wright (he misspells it Stephen) quotes at the end of some of his posts. His first post from last month:

# As I was messing with the robots.txt for the 1000th time over the last week,
# I had a conversation with myself, that went something like this:
#
# me: Self, can you publish a blog in a robots.txt file?
# self: Sure you can. Robots would just ignore the commented lines.
#
# me: What would be the point?
# self: Fun and merriment. Who knows, you could find world peace in here.
#
# me: Would people still read it?
# self: Probably. If they will read blogger - they’ll read anything
#
# me: Any downside? Any problems with a regularly updated robots.txt?
# self: This is another fine SEO test you’ve gotten us into.
#
# me: But don’t you need to enable comments?
# self: Posting an article and then taking comments? Hey Dufus, it is called
# a FORUM - and everyone knows we already have one of those!
#
# me: I love the idea. It has a cool retro BBS feel to it. I almost want to
# break out my trusty old 64, fire up a copy of Cnet BBS, and start posting
# some zeroday warez dude. lol!
# self: I’m going to try it for awhile. Seems like fun for a change.
#
# The rest is left as an excersize to the reader.
#
# - bt

Create an Indestructible Shared PC

Need to put a PC in a public place? A free Microsoft tool makes it easy to lock down.

Schools, libraries, and other organizations often want to make computers available in public places. These can become tempting targets for hackers. Even well-intentioned users can wreak havoc by deleting important files or accidentally installing malware.

Microsoft’s free Shared Computer Toolkit lets you configure a PC that can be used to search the Internet, look up resources, and run approved programs; it also stops users from making permanent system changes, running arbitrary programs, or introducing malware. Administrators on domain-based PCs have long been able to do this; the toolkit offers a similar level for any PC. You don’t need an IT degree—the kit leads an administrator through the steps of locking down a system.

More at PC Magazine.

Goosing the Traffic by Gaming the System

Weblogs Inc’s Jason Calacanis’s interview/podcast over at The Web 2.o Show is well worth a listen. I laughed out loud at Jason’s tonque-in-cheek suggestions to use technorati bombs (all compacted no spaces keywords searching ten times each by ten different people from ten different IP addresses at the same time) and cutting and pasting to show notes entire blogroll’s from well known blogs while claiming that all members of the blogroll were discussed so they would check back to see what was posted about themselves. Like the ovaltine comedian in Seinfeld says, it’s gold, Jason, gold.

Y!Q Link Generator

Posted about Y!Q previously back in July 2005. Jeremy Zawodny writes about updating the template for his individual post pages to include Y!Q.

Here’s a WordPress Y!Q plugin.

Here’s a Y!Q Link Generator.