russinovich’ rss
November 5th, 2006
Despite my previous post claiming that my thoughts are now with research rather than computers, my attention today was briefly distracted by some posts on an interesting blog I am subscribed to. Mark Russinovich has is transferring his old blog to a new blog on Microsoft’s servers now that he has been hired by that company. He is one of the founders of Sysinternals, an interesting company that produces tools to help manage a computer with Windows installed. I often use their software when I’m on a Windows computer, for example to figure out which programs are run on boot time. His blog is very interesting to read, often containing detective stories on Windows systems. It’s also nice to read a geek-style blog by a fan of Windows systems, as a counter balance to all the anti-Microsoft stuff I read for example on Slashdot. After all, despite the fact that Microsoft’s marketing and market penetration strategies are disgusting, their software is actually quite good and of course ubiquitous. An interesting thing I read today on his blog is about personal computer security. Most people run as ‘administrator’ on their system, because it makes installing software so much easier. It also means, however, that if you get spyware or virusses via email or web surfing, that software also runs as administrator, and can thus do much more damage to your system. His blog entry describes how you can run particularly risky software, like Internet Explorer or Outlook, as a limited user, while still running other applications as administrator. Seems like a smart thing to do!
The whole reason I’m suddenly reading all this is that he decided to move old blog entries to his new blog, which creates events in his RSS feed which I get in my email. Recently I’ve been subscribing myself to a whole series of blogs through RSS and I’m quite happy with this. RSS feeds are systems to keep you up-to-date on new posts, and for myself I installed it in such a way that the RSS feeds go directly to my email. So I do not have to check out numerous sites - just checking my email keeps me informed of blogs related to Linux, Sysinternals, and social science statistics. In fact, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog and easily stay informed of my posts. If you have problems doing so, ask me, and I’ll help.
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