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As I was building a new laptop and begin to work with Office 2007 apps, I missed the little customizable toolbar. When I started looking for it I didn’t even know what it was called. I found out it is the “Quick Access Toolbar.” Also, the toolbar settings are stored in a file for each application, “Word.qat, Excel.qat, PowerPoint.qat (These are the apps I tested, maybe other Office 2007 apps too. OneNote does not have the Quick Access Toolbar.).”

If you save or can recover the *.qat files from your previous work environment you can save them to your new system and be good to go. Here are the file locations.

• For XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Setting\Application Data\Microsoft\Office
• For Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office

The FFIEC released the new Business Continuity Planning (BCP) IT Examination Handbook this month.  The prior BCP IT Examination Handbook was released in March, 2003.  A few new key areas include:

• Pandemic Planning
• More emphasis on:
  • Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
  • Risk Assessment
  • Testing

The new BCP IT Examination Handbook has been greatly expanded - to give you an idea, the old BCP booklet (March 2003) was only 57 pages, and the new booklet (March 2008) is 132 pages - more than twice the size - this should also give us an indication of the new importance & emphasis placed on Business Continuity.  

To view the new BCP IT Examination Handbook, go to http://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/it-booklets/business-continuity-planning.aspx.  You can also check out our BCP Software offering.

A friend of mine called me concerning an issue with Outlook Express 6.  He told me he was trying to spell check an e-mail but the built in spell checker was showing words in another language.  He had a new Dell computer with Office 2007 installed.  Doing some Google searching, I found out that OE 6’s spell checker only has the French language installed with no additional language support.  I also found a free program on the web called “Spell Checker for OE”.  I had my friend install it and viola! English spell checking was available.

Another option I found was to install the proofing tools for Office 2003.  This also is supposed to fix it.

 It would appear that a missing dll file, csapi3t1.dll is the root cause of this option.

An East Cost supermarket chain (Hannaford) announced on Monday that a computer network compromise resulted in the theft of 4.2 million credit & debit card account numbers which has led to 1,800 cases of fraud.  Hannaford became aware of the breach Feb. 27th.  [more]

For the full story, see the following:

• http://www.hannaford.com/Contents/News_Events/News/News.shtml
• http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/704
• http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ipET-mkUFMHvZNMr5WJkcg82NHIwD8VFDD0O0

The security vendor Trend Micro announced Thursday that the company's website had been hacked earlier in week.  Mike Sweeny, a Trend Micro spokesman said "We took the pages down overnight Tuesday night - and took corrective action." [more]

On Thursday security vendor McAfee reported that more than 20,000 Web pages have been affected by the attack.  The pages are infected with malicious code that tries to install password-stealing software on the PCs of people who visit the sites.

Researchers are still not sure how the attackers are managing to hack these Web pages, but the pages all seem to use Microsoft's Active Server Page (ASP) technology, which is used by many Web development programs to create dynamic HTML pages.  A software bug in any of those programs is all the attackers need to install their malicious code.  The infected Web pages are not obviously malicious, but the attackers have added a small bit of JavaScript code that redirects visitors' browsers to an invisible attack launched from servers based in China.  The JavaScript attack code hosted on these infected Web sites takes advantage of bugs that have already been patched, so users whose software is up-to-date are not at risk.  However, McAfee warns that some of the exploits are for obscure programs such as ActiveX controls for online games, which users may not think to patch.

For more information visit http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/031408-trend-micro-hit-by-massive.html?fsrc=rss-security or http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/14/Trend-Micro-hit-by-massive-Web-hack_1.html

When setting up a Cisco Express 500, the instructions strongly recommend that you use the Smartport feature for each of the ports. I enabled the port that was an uplink port as a “Switch Port” as recommended. However, I could not get any traffic to pass through to the uplinked switch. There were NO errors or any indication on the Catalyst Express that anything was wrong. I finally saw this small blurb in the setup manual: [more]

The Smartport role Switch automatically enables 802.1Q trunking on the port. If a remote switch does not support 802.1Q trunking or the trunking is manually turned off, the spanning tree state of the port on the remote switch goes to blocking for type inconsistency. If the remote switch is the root bridge, the switch port does not go to blocking mode. In this case, the switch port trunk status is ON at both ends of the switches, but there is not any communication between the switches through these ports. There are no diagnostic messages displayed on the Catalyst Express 500 device.

I removed the Smartport feature on this port and traffic immediately started flowing.

We have been having trouble with a SCSI card that was attached to a tape drive that was installed on a CommVault Media Agent server. The card was brand new and the drivers were Windows 2k3 certified. We started having issues with this server during the CommVault install. The server would just spontaneously reboot leaving the CommVault backups in disarray. Troubleshooting led us to update the firmware on the card, the tape library firmware & driver, and the tape drive firmware & driver. This fixed the problem for a few days and it would happen again. It would only happen when doing an auxiliary copy from disk to tape. After some deep-dive troubleshooting on the SCSI I/O bus, we were able to get some logs during the time immediately before one of the spontaneous reboots/failures. From the logs we were able to find that the card actually had some type of problem that caused extended I/O latencies during periods of high traffic (aux copies). We ordered an Adaptec card and installed it. Now, not only are copies to tape 2x faster, it hasn’t crashed . . . yet.

Google offers a service called "Google Alerts" alowing you to monitor what is being posted on the Internet about your company or even yourselft.  [more]

Simply go to http://www.google.com/alerts, to Create a Google Alert (see options below):

• Search terms - enter your choice of query or topic
• Type - options include, News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive, Video, and Groups - in most cases you will want to choose Comprehensive
• How often - options include once a day, as-it-happens, and once a week
• Your email - you will be sent a verification e-mail before you begin receiving alerts

You can also sign up for a Google account and manage your alerts within your account - to sign up for a Google account go to https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

For more information about Google alerts, visit their FAQs at http://www.google.com/support/alerts/bin/static.py?page=faq.html&hl=en

Hackers calling themselves the iPhone Dev Team got ahold of the new firmware that ships with the SDK (version 1.2 as beta, but is to be released as 2.0 to the public) and reported they had "already decrypted the disk image and jailbroken the firmware." The "Jailbreak" apparently only works with hacked activiation, meaning it currently doesn't work with AT&T iPhone's. [more]

To read more, visit http://www.modmyifone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62591 or http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206903250