In an effort to remain compatible with Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel supports "leading characters" -- for example, the apostrophe ('), which signals a text field. In Excel these "leading characters" are not actually characters at all, even though they appear in the formula bar. They can be activated automatically via the Transition Navigation Keys setting (under Options | Advanced), which exposes the full set of possible values: apostrophe (left-justified text), quote mark (right-justified text), carat (centered text), backslash (repeated text), or blank (non-text).

This note applies to an FDCC-hardened instance of Windows Vista.

It seems that Vista requires elevated permissions in order to process a domain logon for the first time. If the user account in question is not a local Administrator on the box, the following error message is generated: "The User Profile Service service failed the logon. User Profile cannot be loaded."

Attachment	Size
Logon Notice.JPG	19.28 KB

NIST 800-53 AC-9, "Previous Logon Notification", states "The information system notifies the user, upon successful logon, of the date and time of the last logon, and the number of unsuccessful logon attempts since the last successful logon."

So a piece of software I was installing required either SQL2K5, or the redistributable version of MSDE 2000. So whereas most software that lets you use the MSDE also installs and configures it for you, this software package does not -- although they were thoughtful enough to include a copy of MSDE2KSP3 with the software. Turns out that there are a few gotchas.

OK, so although I wouldn't dream of using Microsoft's Virtual PC over VMWare in "real life," I thought it would be fun to get Linux (CentOS 5.2) running in a Microsoft virtual machine. I'm just a glutton for punishment, I suppose...here are my lessons learned:

So I was working a bit with Symantec Endpoint Protection 11. First of all, I have to take my hat off to the marketing geniuses that decided on a name that most admins will abreviate "SEP11" -- but that's neither here nor there. What's really a shame is how bad the software is. The documentation is terrible, the software itself is confusing and capricious, and I have to say that I'm baffled how such awful software can wind up with such a large share of the enterprise antivirus protection market.