August 31. 2003 by Del.

KnowledgeStorm - The Enterprise Software, Hardware, and Services Resource

Serves as a web resource for technology solutions - including enterprise systems, industry, web, infrastructure, etc.

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

August 31. 2003 by Del.

Interesting article in the Journal of Accountancy (September 2003) on choosing accouting software.

A Strategy for Finding the Right Accounting Software

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

August 25. 2003 by Del.

Financial Crimes Network

“DATABASE TO FIGHT FINANCIAL CRIME

Banks throughout the Midwest U.S. can make use of a computer database called FinCrime that allows financial institutions and law enforcement to share information about crimes and provide warnings. Once check fraud or some other financial crime is committed, bankers and law enforcement personnel can enter information about the crime and the suspect into the database. FinCrime looks for matching information. ‘Obviously the more participants we have, the more data we can gather in this electronic database, the more valuable it’s going to be for participants,’ said John Sorensen, president and chief executive of the Iowa Bankers Association. ‘We’re trying to expand it widely and keep the cost of participation at either nothing or very small costs… One of the unique things about our network is that it’s going to be owned by state banking associations and that it will be provided really as a service as members of these state banking associations,’ Sorensen said. (AP/USA Today 22 Aug 2003)”

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

August 20. 2003 by Del.

Palm CyberPoche : the collection of Jacques’posts

—> definitely fits under the Palm based time management approach. Although you might go even further and think of “Palm based life-style”!!

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

August 20. 2003 by Del.

New security newszine which is part of TechWeb / CMP. Seems to be a hot issue these days! hmm…..

Security Pipeline

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

August 19. 2003 by Del.

IHMC Concept Map Software: “The Theory Underlying Concept Maps

and How To Construct Them

Joseph D. Novak, Cornell University

Concept maps are tools for organizing and representing knowledge. They include concepts, usually enclosed in circles or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts or propositions, indicated by a connecting line between two concepts. Words on the line specify the relationship between the two concepts. We define concept as a perceived regularity in events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by a label. The label for most concepts is a word, although sometimes we use symbols such as + or %. Propositions are statements about some object or event in the universe, either naturally occurring or constructed. Propositions contain two or more concepts connected with other words to form a meaningful statement. Sometimes these are called semantic units,or units of meaning. Figure 1 shows an example of a concept map that describes the structure of concept maps and illustrates the above characteristics. “

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

August 18. 2003 by Del.

Byers 2003 Scalable Exploitation of, and Responses to Information Leakage Through Hidden Data in Published Documents

Abstract

In considering the leakage of information through hidden text mechanisms in commonly

used information interchange formats we demonstrate how to automate and scale the search for

hidden data inWord documents. The combination of this scaling with typical behaviour patterns

of Word users and the default settings of the Word program leads to an uncomfortable state of

affairs for Word users concerned about information security. We discuss some countermeasures

employable by users and note more general consequences of these effects.

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

August 18. 2003 by Del.

Back to the privacy questions of exposing metadata by passing on a file or publishing on the web. Microsoft is publishing documents such as the link below for various Office components / versions.

290945 - HOW TO: Minimize Metadata in Microsoft Word 2002

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

August 16. 2003 by Del.

JAlbum - web photo album software: “Free web photo album generator

Have you wished for a tool to help you getting your photos on the web? I did.

Have you found irritating shortcomings in existing gallery software? I have.

Are you simply annoyed by software fees on fairly simple programs? I am.

Wait no more! JAlbum does the tedious work for you - for free.

Drop a folder containing image and movie files onto JAlbum and press ‘Make album’. JAlbum will create thumbnails of your images and display them in html index pages. You can also have JAlbum produce a slide show of your images for easy navigation one at a time. The output may contain scaled-down versions of the original images. Clicking on these images may bring up the original image (for printing etc). JAlbum does not touch or modify your original images in any way. It just adds some files and folders to the image folder you specify during web creation. JAlbum can also create a web of a hierarchy of image folders. JAlbum supports jpeg, gif and png image files and popular movie formats like .avi, .mpg and .wmv”

——————–

Recommended by 8/15/2003 Scout Report:

JAlbum 3.5 [Macintosh and Windows Operating Systems]

http://www.datadosen.se/jalbum/

This latest version of this fine photo album program allows custom image and directory ordering, along with a feature that skips directories that do not contain valid images or media files. As with previous versions, users can modify the appearance of each album through the use of skins, add image filters, and add movie files with relative ease. Additionally, there is quite a bit of support available through the users forum and a FAQ section.

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

August 16. 2003 by Del.

This ties in very directly to what I found in early July 2003 relative to a University of Tennessee memo posted online!! Not surprising - interesting to think about going back to very simple ASCII documents, also relates to the clean HTML programs (HTML Tidy?).

New Scientist: “Online document search reveals secrets

WEALTH OF CORPORATE SECRETS ON THE WEB

Many documents posted online may contain sensitive corporate or personal information, according to AT&T researcher Simon Byers, who was able to unearth hidden information from thousands of Microsoft Word documents posted on the Web using an ordinary search engine and a random selection of keywords. Byers targeted Word documents because they’re so common, but he stressed that other document formats, such as Adobe PDF, may contain similar hidden information. After downloading the Word files, Byer used the free software tools “antiword” and “catdoc” to convert them to plain text. Then, using a simple script he wrote, Byers was able to locate text that had been deleted from the original Word files, including people’s names and other personal identifiers, e-mail headers, network paths and text from related documents. “The worst is erased text. This has bitten people surprisingly often,” says Bruce Schneier, a security expert with Counterpane. Microsoft Office UK marketing manager Neil Laver says the company is working on ways to better ensure sensitive information is not inadvertently leaked in files. The next version of Office 2003 will include tools that will allow users to remove personal information from documents as well as new “information rights management” software that will enable an author to determine who can read or forward a document. Meanwhile, Schneier recommends converting documents to plain ASCII before publishing online: “I don’t know of any programs that effectively clean out the extra text.” (New Scientist 15 Aug 2003)

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »