Posts Tagged: security

0Wordpress LogoWebsite testing tools

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

I am con­stantly work­ing on both my web­sites and my web serv­er stack with the aim of it being fast, reli­able and secure. New tech­no­lo­gies and new vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies mean a con­stanyl mov­ing tar­get and some­times things that have been pre­vi­ously fixed can recur. As well as main­tain­ing art­icles about many fixes, and a site updates log, I use a range of web­site test­ing tools. As this list has grown it has reached a point where I felt the need to doc­u­ment the ser­vices I use
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0MS Office LogoBatch convert old MS Office documents

Posted by & filed under Misc Software.

I’ve been try­ing to sort out an enorm­ous (100+GB) or teach­ing resources that I’ve built-up over the years. After the obvi­ous steps (delet­ing empty, temp and duplic­ated files) and sort­ing the big files (e.g. videos, applic­a­tion installers) I was left with a large num­ber of office doc­u­ments. I am slowly work­ing through these, but many of them are 2003 or even older format doc­u­ments — some as old as Word 6!  Every time I open one of these files I am promp­ted with vari­ous secur­ity warn­ings. Whist these can be turned off (see below) it is more secure to leave them on, and I wanted to con­vert all the files to office 2007 (docx, xlsx etc) formats. Batch con­ver­sion was def­in­itely the way to go.

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0PC Hardware CPU RAM UpgradeSimple ways to make your PC much faster

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

There are lots of tips and advice out there on the inter­net about how to tweak the per­form­ance of your PC. Some of them have some use­ful tips, but the vast major­ity are of very little use, either because they are for the wrong oper­at­ing sys­tem, or they don’t apply to your setup, or because they’re just plain wrong. When someone brings a PC to me and says its too slow, before I advise them to upgrade it (and that is always an option) I have a quick look for sev­er­al things that are the lead­ing cause of slow PC per­form­ance. Over 90% of the time car­ry­ing out the vari­ous steps detailed below res­ults in a sub­stan­tial improve­ment and a happy PC user.
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0NoScript logoImprove your browsing security without crippling lots of sites

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I always recom­mend that people install an altern­at­ive browser to Inter­net Explorer. Per­son­ally I prefer Fire­fox to the oth­er altern­at­ives (Chrome, Opera, Safari) as I find the huge num­ber of addons on offer give it an unas­sail­able advant­age. I’ve recently exper­i­mented with the NoScript addon, which enhances secur­ity by block­ing act­ive objects and scripts unless expli­citly approved. How­ever I found that I was forever hav­ing to grant per­mis­sion to every site I vis­ited for it to work correctly.
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0Internet Explorer 9 LogoHow to launch HTML based programs fullscreen

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I was asked recently if I could copy a teach­ing resource from a CD-ROM onto a laptop com­puter. This par­tic­u­lar pro­gram is mostly HTML with some embed­ded videos. There were 2 prob­lems with run­ning it from a loc­al shortcut.
1. Inter­net Explorer secur­ity warnings
2. The full-screen win­dow is launched by a par­ent browser win­dow which then sits on top of the full screen win­dow and has to be closed when the full screen win­dow is exited
Both of these are only annoy­ances rather than crit­ic­al fail­ures, but a com­plete solu­tion involves fix­ing these kind of things. Find­ing a solu­tion was a little tricky, but once the solu­tion presen­ted itself it was very simple.

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