Best practices for maintaining your computer at work

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of years back, I worked as a Project Manager in the IT department for a major fashion design, marketing and retail company. My main project provided a standard desktop operating environment, along with replacement mail and directory services, across Europe, vastly improving the overall reliability of the IT platform and the resultant user experience.

Being a retailer, our IT infrastructure budget was not huge, and it seemed that I was forever explaining why we “locked down” the desktop, and why we could not support users’ own devices on our network, be they notebooks, PDAs, or mobile phones (synchronising with our PCs). We had corporate standards, and they were set for good reasons (mainly supportability and reliability). It really didn’t help when senior executives started to buy Blackberry devices and expected them to work with our e-mail servers (and when the IT Director’s view was one of “just make it work”… but without an associated budget). Another bugbear was educating users not to open suspicious e-mails and attachments. On top of that, our users were spread across Europe, and there were cultural and legal differences which affected the way in which users considered “ownership” of their PCs and associated data (whether work PCs should be available for personal use, etc.).

Now Microsoft has published a document which would have been a really useful summary for my users (8 ways to help maintain your computer and devices at work). It may be a bit “high level”, but it is written for end users and it raises some valid points.

Actually, I think that the whole Microsoft At Work section of the Microsoft website is worth a look, with articles including:

I recommend that anyone who uses a computer at home or work, or who is responsible for supporting users in their daily IT activities should take a look.

Quality tips for webmasters

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’m no web site designer, but anyone who has seen my main website recently will have noticed that it is undergoing a few changes. I hope to extend the new style to my other websites soon (including this blog), but time is not on my side.

During my code validation with the W3C Markup Validation Service and the CSS Validation Service I came across the W3C’s Quality Tips for Webmasters. There is some useful stuff there to help novice (and experienced) developers to produce better websites. Worth a look.

Your e-mail: anytime, anyplace, anywhere

Posted on By Mark Wilson

For some time now, I’ve been using the mail2web.com web service for reading my e-mail when I’m away from home.

The basic service doesn’t require registration (no details are stored as it is basically an HTTP wrapper for POP3 and IMAP4 servers), but registered users can use a customised mail2web site with multiple e-mail accounts, favourite newsgroups, frequently used links and even their own image.

Now the guys at mail2web have made the service even better, with WAP and PDA versions of the website. In an earlier post, I gave details for connecting a PDA to the Internet using the Vodafone GPRS service (the principle is the same whoever your mobile carrier). Now I can access my e-mail on a page that is formatted to suit the PDA screen.

Finding that elusive control character code

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I use Blogger to create and update this blog (because it’s quick and easy, whilst still giving me a level of control over layout etc.).

Unfortunately, the graphical interface in Blogger strips out some non-alphanumeric characters, such as the pipe symbol (|) meaning that a little bit of HTML massage is needed from time to time.

Whilst editing such a post today I came across a collection of useful tables for ASCII codes, HTML codes, control codes and conversion.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete is a verb!

Posted on By Mark Wilson

“Ctrl-Alt-Delete (kun.trohl-awlt-duh.LEET) idiom. A metaphoric mechanism with which one can reset, restart, or rethink something. -v.”

This, and many more definitions of both everyday and obscure terms may be found at the Word Spy website, which describes itself as:

“Devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases. These aren’t stunt words or sniglets, but new terms that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources.”

For us computer-types (or geeks as the site often refers to us), there is the Tech Word Spy website.

Spam-proof your website

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I found an interesting article on the OutFront (FrontPage support) website which gives some practical advice on how to prevent your e-mail address from being harvested and then abused by spammers. Basically, it involves converting e-mail addresses displayed on websites to unicode (for which a unicode converter may be useful). Let’s see if it works…

Useful TCP and UDP port numbers

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Having spent the afternoon configuring Windows Firewall exceptions, I thought I’d post some links to useful port number information.

Of course, %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\services contains port numbers for well-known services defined by IANA, but this is an incomplete list and the up-to-date version is on the IANA website.

Although now out of date (superseded by the RFC 3232 online database), the missing table of contents for RFC 1700 (assigned numbers) provides links to a pile of useful information that doesn’t seem to be covered in RFC 3232. This information is not just from the RFC and includes links to items such as country codes from ISO 3166, although a more up-to-date list of country codes is available on the ISO website (note that the ISO country codes do not necessarily equate to the top level domain codes, e.g. United Kingdom is GB in ISO 3166, but both GB and UK on the IANA website).

Finally, the ISS website has details of commonly used ports (along with some descriptive information) for Microsoft services as well as other vendors.

Monthly columns on the Microsoft TechNet website

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Microsoft publishes a number of monthly columns on it’s TechNet website, all of which provide interesting reading, and are useful information sources:

Although not strictly a monthly column, there is also a section called the 5 Minute Security Advisor.

Microsoft event resources

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I recently missed a webcast that I had pre-registered for (hmm… attend a project review with a client who doesn’t heed any advice or listen to a Microsoft speaker with a monotone American accent… tough choice that one) – you may be interested to know that Microsoft UK publish the event resources for many of their events on their website so if you miss an event, you can listen offline later.