The National Security Agency (NSA) has developed and distributed configuration guidance for operating systems. These guides are currently being used throughout the government and by numerous entities as a security baseline. Very detailed instructions how to do it on your system. Instructions in PDF.

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A very thorough and highly relevant article about why different browsers (and browser versions) render HTML differently.

This is a common question in the CSS forums and one I encounter almost on a daily basis. Therefore I am going to go right back to basics for this article and explain the fundamental reason why your site may look slightly different in various browsers.

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Lately when I’ve paid my favourite discussion boards a visit they all seam to be flooded with SPAM. As a result I’ve now more or less stopped visiting them and most certainly lost interest due to the fact that they appear messy and that proper information is hard to find/get.

Earlier when you got notified about a response there would actually be someone trying to help, or give a related comment. Now all you get is highly irrelevant information about some obscure stock or a pill for specific purposes.

Turning the discussion boards (forums) to “members only” with insane security measures doesn’t quiet work as intended in my mind as information no longer are shared with the public. Therefore it puzzles me that the developers haven’t come up with something similar to the comment filtering in WordPress (Akismet). I for one can sit back and relax while my comment feature is wide open knowing that SPAM will be treated as SPAM and never displayed.

Web 2.0 and the websites that came out of it has also provided new ways of forwarding/sharing information and displaying it much nicer, leaving the rest left way behind. As a consequence I believe that without some drastic measures the good old discussion board are digging its grave faster and faster.

I had a look at the Alexa ratings for the 2 most popular software developers, but there’s no obvious trend except that they both seam to have fallen slightly during the first quarter this year (phpBB, vbulletin).

I would very much like to get your opinion on this as I’m currently seriously thinking of removing my old phpBB support forum off the site for good.

This article explains how to configure and run multiple MySQL installations under Microsoft Windows.

I’ve now MySQL 5.0.37 and MySQL 5.2.3-falcon-alpha set up on my PC. I could easily add more versions but for my testing purposes this does the job. The installation procedure is explained in detail in my post about how to install MySQL5 on Windows.

NOTE! During set-up the installer asks you if you would like to Install As Windows Service, and in case you are planning multiple installations you should provide a unique name for each service corresponding to the version number. My default service (MySQL 5.0.37) is named “MySQL5” and my test installation (MySQL 5.2.3) is named “MySQL52” - you get the picture. For any installation that you don’t want Windows to initiate during start-up, uncheck the “Launch the MySQL Server automatically”.

I’ve made it part of my Friday routine at the office to create a backup of my Outlook Express profile. This backup includes ALL my emails, folders and contacts. However it doesn’t include the forwarding rules, but I don’t consider them invaluable as they are just rules not personal data.