22 March 2005

World Wind by NASA

NASA has open source software called World Wind, the newest version of which is now available. Not only can you glimpse every corner of the globe from incredibly close or incredibly far away - but it's easily navigable and you can execute screen captures and download them to your computer as JPEGs. It's a lot of fun, and best of all - it's free.

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

"World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.

Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara."

21 March 2005

Hurricane Warnings

This is an excellent article about building for hurricanes. It refers to the mistakes found after Hurricane Andrew.'

Also take a look at "Venting". You do need a place for the air to escape (old school wins this one).

AND, for those who have generators, there is a safety tip to avoid backwash to power workers.

The article appears in The Taunton Press: Hurricane Warnings

05 March 2005

A Small Warning...

The following is shared with the kind permission of Anne Docwras:
Watch out for this one...
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Hi folks,

I've just intercepted two mails on two different mailboxes purportedly coming from Microsoft and claiming to be a patch to keep you safe from Trojans. The messages are *very* small, only 4kb so you may be fooled into thinking they're safe - they aren't! They have a small self-extracting executable file called update_3032005.exe attached.

From the file name this looks like something *very* new - and the fact that it sailed straight passed the my mailbox's server a/v scanner without so much as raising an eyebrow, never mind a virus alert, makes me think it'll catch a few folks unawares. :(

The "From" address on both these is @microsoft.com but they aren't. If you see one *don't* download it if you can avoid doing so - as it's a self-extracting executable you may not even have to click to open the attachment to be infected. Please be
careful! (Now may be a good time to download and install Mailwasher if you don't already use it!)
UPDATE: I have sent a copy of the file to my a/v people (NOD32) and they have identified it as the Win32/TrojanDownloader.Small.DC trojan so the a/v definitions should include it soon.

--
Cheers,

Anne