Terry's Computer Tips - Newsletter
July 11, 2005

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Terry's Computer Tips Newsletter
http://www.terryscomputertips.com
A computer tips newsletter for users of PC's.

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Volume 1, Number 4 -- Monday, July 11, 2005
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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4.  Keeping spam out of your mailbox

Now, how can I ignore those spam emails?  How can I keep them out of my Inbox?

We've all tried the old way - using a "block the sender" function.  Basically, this is a specific filter (called a "rule" by some programs) that says "if an email comes from him, put it in the spam folder."  Whether you use Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora (like I do), Mozilla Thunderbird, or some other email program, they almost all provide a way to block or trash emails from specific individuals or domains.  But, that doesn't work any more...

Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have some form of optional anti-spam software on their mailservers.  Note that I said optional -- sometimes they make you turn the function on.  Almost all ISPs will let you turn the function off.  This anti-spam system is not meant to catch out-going spam (they use other tricks for that) -- it is designed to identify incoming emails by their characteristics and classify them as spam if appropriate.

You may have to look around to find the "preferences" settings location at your ISP's web site.  At Cox.net, the settings are in the section "Customer Tool Box" on the right-hand side of the local cox.net homepage.  The ISP systems do a pretty good job, but no system is perfect.

You should have alternatives to "label it as spam" or "identify spam and delete it."  While many people have told me that they let their ISP delete the spam emails, I recommend that you use the "label it" option and allow it to come to your computer.  Then, use the "filters" or "rules" capability of your email program to put these in a folder you call spam.

You can also use a third-party anti-spam program to pre-screen the emails before they get to your computer.  Most of these you have to purchase, although some are free.

Occasionally. you should review the subjects and senders of the spam you have received.  No anti-spam system is perfect.  Unfortunately, they make errors both ways.  Sometimes, hey fail to identify spam as being spam.  Other times, they mis-identify good emails as spam.  If you let your ISP delete them, or if you delete them without checking, you'll miss some important emails.

My number one rule of email is:  if I am expecting an important email, check the spam folder.  It might be there.  Murphy's Law of Email says "the more important the email is, the more likely it is to be classified as spam."

You can read an expanded version of this article at my TerrysComputerTips.com site, including comments and recommendations about various programs to use for spam control.

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5.  Shareware/Freeware Pick of the Week

Program:   Mozilla Firefox — "Firefox"
Category:  Web Browser

My Shareware/Freeware Pick of the Week is Mozilla Firefox.  I find it hard to believe that I did not pick Firefox in one of the earlier issues.

Firefox is a much newer web browser than Internet Explorer, which has received little other than security fixes over the last three years.

Firefox is compliant with the web browser standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), including CSS and CSS2.  It has some very valuable improvements in the user experience.

The most significant of its new features, to me, is tabbed browsing.  While I could open all web pages in the same window or create a new independent window (File / New / Window), as in I.E., Firefox lets me have multiple tabs (think of the tabs on file folders) to switch between web pages.

A cool feature of this tab interface is that you can have not just one "home page," but you can have a set of pages that open in tabs when you start Firefox or click on the Home icon.

Firefox is free -- free to download, free to use, free to share.  You can not beat that price - and you can't beat the improvements over I.E., either.

Security is a big one.  Part of that is being a less prominent web browser.  That means that less of the bad guys are gunning for you.  However, a big part is that Firefox does not use Active-X.  Active-X is a proprietary Microsoft technology.  It enables web developers to create Active-X "controls" -- yes, that's the innocuous word that Microsoft dreamed up for these automatically-downloading programs that can do anything the programmers wanted to do on your computer.  Until Windows XP's Service Pack 2, I.E. would download an Active-X control without any warning when you visited a website.  If you haven't upgraded to SP2, or if you are running any other version of Windows, you are still vulnerable to that automatic downloading.  Want to get some adware, trojans and spyware?

That is one of the main reasons that I have stayed with non-Microsoft web browseres and non-Microsoft email programs.  They are the big targets.  Simply by not running I.E. and Outlook or Outlook Express, I'm less likely to run into a security hole that affects me.

In the non-MS web browser world, I've used Netscape, Opera and now Firefox.  In my opinion, Firefox is the best browser alternative out there.

You do not have to give up on I.E., if you don't want to.  Firefox (as well as Netscape, Opera, the Mozilla suite and other browsers) will co-exist peacefully with I.E. on your system.  You can even have all of them running at the same time.  I often do when I'm working on my web site, just so I can view the changes in various browsers.  Firefox will import your I.E. favorites, cookies, history, etc. when you first start it.  At any later time, you can import them again from the File menu.

Give Mozilla Firefox a try.  You'll be glad you did.

Future Pick:  One of these days, soon I hope, the Shareware/Freeware Pick of the Week will be the free office suite OpenOffice.org version 2.0, from the website of the same name.  Look for the review in the future.  If you want, you can go ahead and download version 1.04 or try the 2.0 beta now.

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6.  CentOS - A Clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux

A few days ago, I installed CentOS 4.1 on my in-house Linux box.  [Aside:  in Linux-speak, we talk of "boxes," not "computers"]  This box functions, in part, as a web development tool for me.  Its main use is "networked attached storage" for my home network.

Using the standard Samba program that comes with almost every Linux distribution, and which is designed to make Linux file and printer sharing compatible with "Windows File and Printer Sharing," I can do daily data backups from my Windows computers to the Linux box.  I have a 160 GB hard drive on the Linux computer dedicated to the backups.

I noticed a couple weeks ago that my two small hard drives that were connected to an internal PCI hard drive controller card (I had 4 hard drives in the computer) were not being recognized.  They were tiny, so it was an aggravation but not a real issue.

The real issue came when I replaced the small drives with a large 160 GB hard drive that I found for $40 after rebates.  This hard drive wasn't being recognized either.  That's when I found that the hard drive controller wasn't being recognized and handled by the SimplyMEPIS Linux installation.  After a few days fighting the issue, I decided to try CentOS, which is a free, open-source clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux, RedHat's flagship product.

Installation was straight forward, almost as easy as the Mepis installation had been.  My hard drive controller card was recognized automatically, too.  One of my negatives about Mepis was that it was based on the Debian distribution.  There's nothing wrong with that and a lot of people prefer Debian;  however, all the Linux versions I had used until that had been RedHat or used the "RedHat Package Manager" (RPM) package system.  I'm just more comfortable with the RPM system.

CentOS was a pleasure to install.  It has a few cool games, too.  I had some difficulties getting the file-sharing working and the web server files moved to another directory, though.  The problems were related to advanced security measures built into CentOS -- these were SELinux features.

SELinux, Security-Enhanced Linux, is a set of modifications to Linux that were released last year by the National Security Agency -- the NSA of all people.  It shocked the community.  Normally, information goes into the NSA, but nothing comes back out.  Here, the NSA gave everyone a huge step towards better system security by releasing a set of modifications to allow extremely fine, granular access control.

This same fine control was blocking my file-sharing.  It was also protecting the webserver by controlling which directories could be used.  Once I recognized this, as the system administrator "root," I turned off the SELinux features using a menu selection and fixed my file-sharing settings.  I also learned that, when SELinux issues are the problem, the error messages can't quite be trusted and may be misleading.  Similarly, I solved the issue with my webserver modification -- the webserver as installed worked perfectly -- the problem was that SELinux was configured to require a specific directory which wasn't the one I wanted to use.

This was yet another case where "Google is my friend."  I Googled for the Apache web server error message and found the hint that SELinux configuration was the issue.  As soon as I set up the SELinux parameters for my desired directory, all was well.

CentOS 4.1 is a "keeper."  I have a "virtual network computing" server program running on my Linux box.  I can log in from my Windows notebook in the den and see and do almost anything that I could do if I was using the Linux box's keyboard.  I still have SimplyMEPIS set up in another partition, so I can dual boot between it and CentOS for experimentation and play.

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7.  JUST FOR FUN

My Just for Fun choice of the week is "Cactus Bruce and the Corporate Monkeys" from Blue Tea Games.

This fun arcade game will challenge you with varying levels of difficulty.  The demo/trial version provides a limited number of levels but that's plenty to get a good feel for the fun.  The paid version ($20) gives you a lot more levels, options and variations on the game.

How do you play the game?  You are Cactus Bruce.  Your assignment is to build a project on a tropical island.  Unfortunately, there is an active monkey population that wants you to leave them alone.  The monkeys pop up from behind  brick stuctures to throw coconuts at you.  Get hit and you die.  Your tool is a long-handled grabber which can block the coconuts; grab a monkey, bananas or whatever; and throw the grabbed object at the blocks and monkeys.  Clear a screen and you go to the next level.  Get hit by a coconut and you lose a life.

Of course, there are the usual falling or floating things you can grab or activate for extra power, better weapons, shields or such.

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Copyright © 2005 Terry A. Stockdale  All rights reserved.

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Terry Stockdale
TerrysComputerTips.com for my computer tips, articles and newsletter archives
TerryStockdale.com -- my main website: home theater pc, coffee articles and more
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Back to Part 1   Part 2

Volume 1, Number 4 -- Monday, July 11, 2005
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Copyright © 2005 Terry A. Stockdale.  All rights reserved.