I keep coming up against this, and I keep forgetting it, so I figured I'd write it down here for all of our benefit.

Exchange 2003 allowed us to easily mail enable public folders, so something sent to info@domain.invalid would go to a public folder where any number of staff could monitor the mailbox.

However, by default, the mail is stored in the Public Folder as a NOTE and not an E-MAIL (for the geeks in the audience IPM.POST vs. IPM.NOTE)

To make the public folder store incoming mail as emails, we need to make a quick registry change. This is all outlined in MS KB 817809.

Go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\<ServerName>\Public-<GUID>

And create (or edit) the key:

Value name: Incoming defaults to IPM.Note
Value type: DWORD
Value data: 1

Setting the value to 1 (true) stores things as IPM.NOTE (which is what we want). Setting the value to 0 sets it back to saving things as a post.

So, I'm not a gigantic app person -- my iPod Touch has the essentials for what I need, a few cutsey show-off things or games for the kids, so I figured I'd do the same with my Droid... yes and no. Here's a rundown of whats on my Droid right now, and what I think:

Alarmed Light - Used it because it has a feature where you're forced to answer math questions to turn the alarm off. Kinda forces you to shake the cobwebs out and get started.

Aloqa - Cool app that uses your GPS to let you know what's around. It's integrated with Yelp for food ratings. It has icons on its main screen for "Hot" (whatever that means), Yelp Restaurants, Coffee, last.fm, Music (showing me concerts in Denmark?!?), Playing Tonight (movies), Yelp Bars & Clubs, Real Estate, Wikipedia, ATMs, Pizza, Aloqa, Yelp Fast Food and then "Add more channels." It more or less does what it is supposed to; it's nice to look at.

BeamReader - a PDF viewer. I should uninstall since I bought "Documents to Go"

Bubble Burst Lite -- Windows Mobile Jawbreaker for the Droid.

ConnectFour - decent enough implementation. AI seems a little stupid sometimes.

Documents to Go - open Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF. Does good job at rendering PDFs.

Flashlight - turns your screen white. Doesn't seem to adjust for maximum brightness. Passable.

Flickr Droid - Droid needs a good Flickr app. This isn't it, but the best one I could find that uses the Flickr API to let me at my stuff, since a lot of my photostream is friends/family only.

FlightStats Lite - haven't had a chance to play with this. Will in January as I head to CES.

Goggles - Google's latest toy. Varies from wildly successful to "how did you not recognize the Pepsi logo?!?"

GPS Status - essentially a digital compass. Used when I was troubleshooting GPS on the phone.

Flixter Movies - quick and easy to get to where we have to go for Friday Morning Movie Club.

NYC Bus and Subway Map - not as interactive as I'd like. Literally a HiDef graphic of the map, and you can click thru to the MTA website for further details on the lines.

OpenTable - online restaurant reservations from opentable.com . Decent.

Pandora - works well over 3G, tho I imagine it eats thru the quota pretty quick.

PicSay Lite - dopey photo editing thing. Makes speech baloons. Don't know why I downloaded this.

Poke a Mole - whack-a-mole for the phone. Fun game with a Giant Downside - even when phone is muted annoying background music plays. Have to go into game menu to mute it.

Remote RDP Demo - eventually I'll need to really use function keys when I Remote Desktop into a machine from my phone, but until then, the demo version does the trick.

Robo Defense FREE - I do enjoy the tower defense genre of casual gaming... so why not have it on my phone? (Hardly never play it. Seemed like a good idea.)

Shazam - this app still amazes me. Where did they get that song database???

Stopwatch - straightforward.

Sudoku Free - seeing it in my list makes me feel smart until I play it, thenI feel dumb.

The Weather Channel - it has a widget so I can glance at the home screen to see what it's going to be like... or rather I can look at the home screen and tell my wife what it's going to be like... (I had a weather widget on the Treo and missed it.)

TivoRemote - control the Tivo over WiFi. Nice, especially for text entry. The iPhone's version is better.

TRAFFIC! - A test app for me. Not in love.

Trap! - Another game, but its "draw a line" technology gets in the way of gameplay. Fun when it does what you want.

Tunes Remote - Control iTunes from the Droid. YAY! One of the big reasons I got the iPhone touch was to control the iTunes machine hooked to the outdoor speakers.

Twidroid Pro - From what I understand, the best Twitter client for the Droid. I'm happy with it. Does everything I need, but I am far from a Twitter power user, so some might find it lacking. They constantly update it which seems like they're interested developers.

US Traffic - Another traffic app that I tried before I realized Google Maps had a Traffic layer...

wpToGo - Allows me to post to WordPress from the phone... tho I have not had the need to do so.

What have I missed?

A client has an oldish Dell Dimension 8400 with an Intel RAID card that requires you to "Press F6 to add Storage Drivers" when trying to repair Windows. This also means that UBCD4Win (my preferred repair tool) also doesn't recognize the drives.

Happily, Dell has a set of the drivers available.

Sadly, they're part of a floppy image.

Grrr!

Enter Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1, a cool piece of shareware that can be glommed from http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

This operates along the same line as Microsoft's Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP, which mounts an ISO image and has it appear as a drive letter.

VFD does the same thing, it mounts an image file (or just creates a small chunk of RAM and treats it like a blank floppy) and you assign it a drive letter.

I loaded the application up -- it's pretty self-explanatory -- assigned to Drive B: and then launched Dell's Floppy making utility, told it to write to Drive B and bingo! I had my extracted files.

From there, it was trivial to copy them to the appropriate install media and we were off to the races.

(I finally searched for a virtual solution, when the one floppy disk I could find was throwing errors. How happy are we that those things have (mostly) gone the way of the dinosaur?)

There are times when Microsoft makes me wonder. You develop this cool technology, ClearType, which helps reduce eyestrain, you put checkboxes all over the Remote desktop client allowing me to choose to use or not use it, you have it active in the shell... but then you casually ignore it and withhold it from me. What gives?

Oh, a KB article sheds some light:

The option to enable theFont smoothing feature is not available in the version of RDC that was released with Windows Server 2003. By default, Windows Server 2003 disables theFont smoothing feature in all remote connections. These connections include the connections that are established through RDC 6.0.

Happily, MS's dictatorship is matched only by its benevolence, because there's a "hotfix" available for this problem:

KB946633:The "Font smoothing" feature has no effect in Windows Server 2003 terminal sessions

It kinda cracks me up...

"We'll put the feature in."

"But it doesn't work. We should disable the checkboxes"

"Why would we do that?"

I bring this up because we just migrated a client over to a terminal server environment, and the number one complaint was "My fonts aren't fuzzy!"

Since I actually prefer the crispness of an LCD display, I didn't really notice, or care, but since I wasn't signing the check, I did my best to comply. I used bing to google the issue, and found the hotfix.

Of course, since it's a hotfix, it requires a reboot... so here I am at 5:30 AM, having just rebooted the server.

This hotfix is available via draconian download -- you fill out a form, they send an email with the link - however, they put the link in parentheses, so Outlook botches the conversion and breaks the link, resulting in the need for you to copy and paste the URL into your browser. From there, it's a Start > Next > Finish install and a reboot seals the deal.

As a side note: ClearType increases the bandwidth requirements, and is only available if you're running in "High Bandwidth" mode in the RDP 6.0 (or better) client. It also needs to be turned on in the desktop session.

In the RDP client:

Click Options > Experience tab

The check off the "font smoothing" box.

On the Windows 2003 Desktop:

Right click on the desktop > Properties >Appearance tab > Effects button

That should do it!

I've gotten two calls from clients (OK, one was a client, the other my mother-in-law) saying they visited the NYTimes website and were attacked by malware.

This is true, they were. My MIL said she was trying to read Maureen Dowd and got hit with a rogue anti-spyware application. I was able to CoPilot in and clean things up. (There didn't seem much to clean up, I killed a running process of IE (she uses Chrome) and the scare-screen went away.

I sparked up an unpatchedWinXP Virtual Machine running IE6 and went to the NYT website, and was prompted immediately to install flash. I opted not to and surfed around the site, fighting the information bar's insistence that I install an ActiveX Control.

So, I gave in and voila!

So, no matter how you answer, you're already stung.

Of course, your instinct is to click "Cancel" and you do, and then you're scared out of your wits when confronted with this page from protection-check07.com (don't go there!) and proceeds to make you think you're infected.

But, if we take a second to look at the scare box, we see something is amiss...

We don't have an E: drive ... and the optical drive we have is a CD-Rom, not a DVD-RAM drive...

The page that pops up is meant to scare you. The infections it reports are false -- the only infection you have (at the moment) is the webpage. If you go into taskmanager and find iexplorer.exe (or firefox.exe if you use Mozilla Firefox) and right-click on it and choose "End Process" that should make the pop-up go away.

If you click ANYWHERE on the page, it will prompt you to download a program:

Seems reasonable -- you got a warning you were infected, and you want to download a file called "Scanner-75f_2015.exe" seems legit.

IT'S NOT.

(But you knew that by now, right?)

However, this is a clear indication of how a fully patched system gets compromised. Some buys ad space on a major website. They probably serve a lot of legit ads, but in a few instances, they serve illegitmate ads. In this case, they seem to be using Flash as an attack vector. Flash movie loads and redirects your browser to a rogue site, and they're off to the races.

Since I'm a professional, I downloaded the file -- I didn't run it -- and I submitted it to http://virscan.org an online file scanner which tests a file against 37 of the leading anti-virus vendors.

Somewhat sadly, only 5 out of 37 scanners picked this up as malware:

I also ran the file thru VirusTotal.com which tests against 41 scanners, and 7 scanners turned up a positive on our file:

You can see the full report over on VirusTotal's site: http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/7bda9187e26b5a185501874b201731f12e3604c078408500abda83c35ef2fbe1-1252857630

The one thing that surprised me on the results was Microsoft's detection, trumping McAfee, Symantec, AVG and Clam-AV among many others. I've never considered MS a true player in the anti-malware landscape, but perhaps I will re-evaluate.

Kaspersky, and most othersecurity vendors, offers an online scan of your system (requires Java). If you don't have an anti-virus product installed -- or even if you do -- you might want to visit a different security vendor site than the one you have to do a check. Belt and suspenders and all that.

(This piece of spyware also eluded my trustyMalwarebytes Anti-Malware (www.malwarebytes.org) which should reinforce that no one piece of software can provide 100% protection.

There is no strong defense for this, as nothing you overtly do can cause it. Make sure your anti-virus is up to date, do regular scans of your computer -- but MOST importantly --keep backups.

As for the clients, one of them uses Norton GoBACK (since superceded in the marketplace by Ghost 14) , so they restored their machine back an hour before the infection occurred, went back to the NY Times site, got re-infected, restored AGAIN using GoBack, and then stayed away from the NY Times site. And my Mother-in-Law has been trained well and as soon as the box popped up, she called me and I was able to CoPilot into her machine and close IE before it did any damage... may you all be as lucky.

Further Info:

http://ask.metafilter.com/132707/nytimes-spyware

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10197120&tstart=0

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1481195

[UPDATE: 1:30 PM, Sunday Sept 13 - the NY Times site seems to have stopped serving the ad. Further attempts to get infected have proven unsuccessful.]