Many Shaw Cable-modem customers are having problems connecting to website at the University of Alberta using Internet Explorer. It is not clear what the problem is however there is a work around. One common symptom is that when attempt to visit a website that ends in “.ualberta.ca” you get a message that says “gateway error.” It is not known if this affects all of Alberta or just Edmonton.

If you are a Shaw Cable-modem subscriber, are using Internet Explorer, and are having difficulties access websites that end in “.ualberta.ca” or “.talonline.ca” try these steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. From the Tools menu select “Internet Options”
3. Click the “LAN Settings ” button
4. Remove the check mark next to “Automatically Detect Settings”
5. Click the “OK” button
6. Click the “OK” button

These instructions were provided by James Woodward at the UofA.

If you are experiencing this problem but are NOT using Internet Explorer, or are NOT a Shaw cable-modem customer, I would like to hear about it. Please post a follow-up comment here.

CaSTA 2005: The Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis will be at the University of Alberta (in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) this year. The conference will last for five days with one day each dedicated to technology and tools for linguistics, anthropology, digital editing, information science, and slavic studies.

The price is dirt cheap. $50 for the conference and $70 per workshop/day. If you want to attend for just a single day, they only charge for a day but let you go to the other conference events on that day as well.

I am hoping to clear my calendar to go to either the linguistics workshop on XML corpus construction or the information science workshop. See the program for details.

Tim Bray, co-inventor XML will be there and give a talk about the future of the Internet.

It is 9:07 AM MST and Wikipedia is down! There are two interesting things about this outage. First, I’m amazed at how important wikipedia has become to my day-to-day activities. Second, all sysadmins can learn a lesson in good service from Wikipedia; they have a robust network design that allows users to understand the status of the system even during outages.

I used to use google all the time. But google is time-consuming and sometimes yields no good answer. In the past long while I have used wikipedia more and more as my “first search.” Wikipedia typically gives me a good general answer. I go to google second in the hope of finding specific answers. Google isn’t good enough on its own because sometimes I want an answer not the opportunity to search for and evaluate answers. Wikipedia is like a librarian. Google is like asking an oracle. Librarians are professional information agents. Oracles are… freaky but cool. You can have a certain level of trust in the former but must constantly question the latter. There is a place for both but my current thinking is wikipedia first and google second.

Now, I have already mentioned that wikipedia is down at the moment. How do it know that? Well, when I go to wikipedia’s site, it tells me so. That in itself is quite unusual. Most sites, when they are down, result in a message of “could not connect to server” from your browser. In this case, it is a wikipedia system telling me that wikipedia is down? How can the system be down and yet be “up enough” to tell me how down it is?

Wikipedia has servers all over the world. When you connect to wikipedia, you are not talking directly to a webserver but to a proxy: a server that talks to wikipedia’s servers on your behalf. It works like this. You ask for a page on “wireless networks.” Your browser connects to the wikipedia proxy and asks for the page. The proxy picks one of many wikipedia servers and requests the page on “wireless networks.” If everything goes well, the wikipedia server gives the page to the proxy and the proxy gives the page to your browser.

If things go wrong, the proxy can tell you about it. That is the case today. Something has gone wrong. Since the proxy is still working, it can tell me why it cannot give me wikipedia pages. Not only that it tells me where I can check the status of the wikipedia system and where I can chat with others about the problem.

There is a lesson here for all sysadmins. It is similar to the “defense in depth” strategy in security. Reliability in layers is the general lesson. In this case there is not simply one layer (the web server). There are several. There is the proxy, the web server(s), offsite status pages, and out-of-band communication channels for communicating problems promptly.

Wireless ethernet (WI-FI) makes Internet access convenient, easy, and more pervasive. However, the nature of WI-FI exposes users to dramatically increased security risk compared to traditional ethernet connections. Wireless connections can be intercepted and “sniffed” by any party within range of the signal. An attacker need not have physical access to a victim’s computer or LAN and could even be mobile (wardriving). One way to mitigate the risk associated with wireless Internet access is to encrypt the WI-FI connection. There are several commonly supported methods for WI-FI encryption. WPA2 (aka 802.11i) is the latest method but you must download and install special software to enable WPA2 support in Windows XP.

Prior to WPA2 there were WEP and WPA. WEP has many known weaknesses. WPA is improved but it is widely reported that WPA is only secure “if you do it right.” WPA2 is the latest standard and offers improvements over WPA that make it easier to “get it right.”

WPA2 support is available under Windows XP but only if you download an install special software from Microsoft. Microsoft Support has an article that explains the process. You will need to prove that your version of Windows XP is “genuine” before you are allowed to download the WPA2 software. And how do you prove that? You need the Microsoft Genuine Advantage thingy that they recently started forcing users to install in order to get updates.

When I tried to the download the WPA2 software I was asked to copy a code from a windows dialog box into the download page. It was not at all clear what that code meant or what generated it. The bizarre public-relations-speak wording on the download page made me guess that it had something to do with the recent “windows genuine advantage” campaign and the activex control that all Microsoft customers must have in order to get software updates.

After copying the code, I was able to download the WPA2 software and install it. The install went smoothly and after a reboot I was able to switch my laptop and Linksys WRT54G wireless access point over to using WPA2.

One question that comes to mind is: why isn’t the WPA2 software available through windows/microsoft update?! The genuine advantage software seems like a genuine disadvantage if I am going to be required to manually download all software updates myself.

One final note, beyond implementing WPA2 there are others steps you can take. You can enable MAC address filtering, disable SSID broadcasting, change your pre-shared key often, and run an encrypted VPN over your encrypted wireless connection.

In a paragraph that spans two or more lines of text, a hanging indent causes all lines after the first to be indented. This is the opposite of a normal indent, where the first line of the paragraph is indented. A hanging indent is especially useful where the text is short, such as in a list of items.

Recently, I noticed that many of the items that appear on the side-bar of my website were hard to distinguish from one another. For example, in the menu of recent articles, long article titles gave a confusing appearance. It was hard to tell if a title was long, and thus wrapped to a second line, or if there were two separate titles one each per line. One solution to this problem of confusion is to add a hanging indent to all lists in the side-bar.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) provides an easy way to implement a hanging-indent. While there is no built-in hanging indent style, it is easily implement in lists with a combination of indent and padding specifications. The trick is to pad the list itself by a positive amount and then indent the list items by an equivalent but negative amount. For example, in my sidebar, I have padded all unordered lists by 1em (1 character width) and then indented all list items by -1em.

The CSS code looks something like this:


ul {
padding-left: 1em;
}
ul li {
text-indent: -1em;
}