Boxee is a media center software and/or hardware solution that allows you to place music, video’s and online content.

Boxee supports a wide range of multimedia formats and includes features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an expanding array of third-party plugins. As a media center, Boxee can play most audio and video file formats, as well as display images from many sources, including CD/DVD-ROM drives, USB flash drives, the Internet, and local area network shares.

Through the processing power of modern PC hardware, Boxee is able to decode high-definition video up to 1080p. Boxee is able to use Nvidia’s VDPAU on Linux-based operating-systems, and DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) on Windows Vista and newer Microsoft operating-systems to utilize GPU accelerated video decoding to assist with process of video decoding of high-definition videos.

With its Python plugin system, Boxee includes incorporated addon features such as Apple movie trailer support and subtitle downloading, on-demand video streaming services Netflix and VUDU, as well as online internet content channels like Jamendo, Last.fm, NPR, SHOUTcast internet audio plugins, ABC, BBC iPlayer, Blip.TV, CNET, CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, Joost, MTV Music (music videos), MySpaceTV, Revision3, YouTube, The WB Television Network internet video plugins, and Flickr and PicasaWeb picture viewing plugins. All are available as media sources available alongside the local library. Some of these are specialized connections to services (e.g., YouTube), while the rest are a preselected list of podcast channels for streaming using generic RSS web feeds (e.g., BBC News). Boxee also supported NBC Universal’s Hulu quite early on, but in February 2009, was asked by Hulu to remove the service at the request of Hulu’s content partners. Boxee later reinstated the feature using Hulu’s RSS feeds, but Hulu once again blocked access. – Wikipedia

The software is available for free on the Boxee website:

http://www.boxee.tv/

D-Link a Boxee hardware box to connect directly to your tv without a need for a computer:

http://www.dlink.com/boxee/

InformationWeek magazine goes green as well.  The online version will be available for free.  Only requirement is that you have to subscribe on their website.

Content of this issue:

• Our Annual Strategic Security Survey: The cyberattack on Google this year was a wake-up call to the risk that companies face from a targeted attack. Our Strategic Security Survey analysis looks at how well companies are addressing that threat, and many others.
• 7 Steps To Identity Management: Identity management lets IT better understand who users are and what they have access to, leading to better security and more efficient employee access. We walk through how to get there.
• Continuous Data Protection: How and when to move from a tape-based disaster recovery plan to one using replication or continuous data protection.
• SharePoint 2010, Office 2010: As companies strive for better collaboration platforms, here’s how the newest versions of SharePoint and Office fit in.
• Bob Evans: 10 factors behind SAP’s turnaround.
• Art Wittmann: One size doesn’t fit all. From servers to cloud computing, midmarket IT pros have a very different view of what they need.
• Rob Preston: CA CEO Bill McCracken gets cracking.

http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/

XBMC is a  free and open source software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. XBMC is available for Linux, OSX, Windows, and the original Xbox. Created in 2003 by a group of like minded programmers, XBMC is a non-profit project run and developed by volunteers located around the world. More than 50 software developers have contributed to XBMC, and 100-plus translators have worked to expand its reach, making it available in more than 30 languages.

While XBMC functions very well as a standard media player application for your computer, it has been designed to be the perfect companion for your Home Theatre PC.  Almost endless range of remote controls, and combined with its beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine, XBMC feels very natural to use from the couch and is the ideal solution for your home theater.

Currently XBMC can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available. Use your media as-is: XBMC can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox.

http://xbmc.org/

OpenNebula is an open and flexible tool that fits into existing data center environments to build any type of Cloud deployment. OpenNebula can be primarily used as a virtualization tool to manage your virtual infrastructure in the data-center or cluster, which is usually referred as Private Cloud. OpenNebula supports Hybrid Cloud to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, enabling highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports Public Clouds by providing Cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.

http://www.opennebula.org/

A nice tool by IBM available for free: The IBM Tivoli Unified Process Tool illustrates different ITIL processes.

The official description from the IBM website:

“IBM® Tivoli® Unified Process (ITUP) is a Web-based tool that provides detailed documentation of service management processes based on industry best practices, including the recently released ITIL® V3 best practices. ITUP enables organizations to significantly improve IT efficiency and effectiveness by enabling users to easily understand processes, the relationships between processes, and the roles and tools involved in an efficient process implementation. ITUP represents the collective experience of IBM experts based on thousands of customer engagements. With more than 17,000 registered users, ITUP is a leading source of service management information.”

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/governance/servicemanagement/itup/tool.html

I recently encountered problems with registering and activating legit Windows XP copies that I have.  Some computers come with Windows XP OEM, some with have the Retail version installed.  For companies there is also the Volume License edition.  Each of these versions have a specific CD and keys from other versions are not accepted.  Having some official self-burned CDR disks of Windows XP disks in my possession which were downloaded from MSDN, but badly labeled (not indicating OEM, Retail or Volume License) this caused some problems for me not accepting the correct serial when I tried to reinstall Windows XP.  If you have the same problem, here are 2 tricks how to change a live version, and how to change your installation files.

Change the version of your existing XP installation:

1. Boot your computer using the CD of the Windows XP edition you want to upgrade your current edition to
   
2. When Windows Setup asks you to setup Windows XP, press enter (Do not choose the option To repair a Windows XP installation using the Recovery Console, press R)
3. Accept the License Agreement
4. Now select the Windows XP installation you want to repair from the list and press R to start the repair
5. Next setup will copy some files and reboot
6. Voila, your active Windows XP installation is changed from OEM/Retail?Volume License
   

Change the version of your existing XP CD

1. Copy the content of your Windows XP CD to your harddrive
2. Open the file \i386\setupp.ini in your favorite text editor (mine being Notepad++)
3. The Pid variable is the parameter that needs to be modified next. The variable consists out of 2 parts.  The first 5 digits determine the verion of Windows XP that will be installed, the last 3 digits determine which CD-keys the installation wizard will accept.
4. The following are the standard combinations:

Retail = 51882 335   (Retail edition accepting Retail keys)

Volume License = 51883 270 (Volume License edition accepting Volume License keys)

OEM = 82503 OEM (OEM edition accepting OEM keys)

The Pepperweed Process model is a reference which can be used as a starting point if you are looking to improve IT processes.  This model includes 20+processes and is available for free (after registration).  Each of the processes illustrate a Process Diagram, Benefits, Controls, Goals, Metrics, Policies, Process Team, Resources, Roles, Scope and Specifications details. The following processes are currently illustrated in the model:

Govern
Asset Management
Financial Management
Program and Project Management
Portfolio Management

Operate
Event Management
Incident Management
Request Management
Problem Management
Knowledge Management

Manage
Availability Management
Capacity Management
IT Service Continuity Management
Continuity Operations
Service Catalog
Service Level Management

Control
Change Management
Configuration Management
Release Management

Secure
Access Management
Information Security Management
Security Operations

http://www.pepperweed.com/

Do you ever read the license agreements that are presented when registering on a website or before you install software?  If you are like most people you probably did not.  With EULAlyzer you can scan those license agreements for keywords that might be interesting and the application will highlight these for you.

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/eulalyzer.html

UNetbootin  is a cross-platform utility that can create Live systems to partitions or USB drives and can load a variety of system utilities or install various Linux distributions and other operating systems without a CD.

Build-in supported distro’s:

* Ubuntu (and official derivatives)
* Debian
* Linux Mint
* openSUSE
* Arch Linux
* Damn Small Linux
* SliTaz
* Puppy Linux
* FreeBSD
* NetBSD
* Fedora
* PCLinuxOS
* Gentoo
* Zenwalk
* Slax
* Dreamlinux
* Elive
* CentOS
* Mandriva
* FaunOS
* Frugalware Linux

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Below I grouped a few links to networking and security related cheat sheets which I find usefull from time to time to use as a reference:

TCP/IP and tcpdump Cheat Sheet – SANS.org

Google Hacking and Defense Cheat Sheet – SANS.org

Intrusion Discovery Cheat Sheet Windows – SANS.org

Intrusion Discovery Cheat Sheet Linux – SANS.org

SQL Injection Cheat Sheet - ha.ckers.org

Cross Site Scripting Cheat Sheet – ha.ckers.org

Web application Cheat Sheet – secguru.com

Linux Security Quick Reference Guide – Linuxsecurity.com

LINUX Administrator’s Quick Reference Card – cheat-sheets.org

Oracle Security Cheat Sheet – red-database-security.com

Nmap & Nessus Cheat Sheet – secguru.com

update: Here are some additional ones:

Security Incident Survey Cheat Sheet – zeltser.com

Initial Security Incident Questionnaire for Responder - zeltser.com

BGP, EIGRP, First Hop Redundancy, 802.1X, IPsec, IPv4 Multicast, IPv6, IS-IS, OSPF , STP, tcpdump, Wireshark, Common Ports, IP Access Lists, Subnetting, Markdown, MediaWiki, MPLS,
QoS, VLANs, Cisco IOS, Physical Terminations Cheat Sheets – packetlife.net

WPKG is open source software for automated software deployment, upgrade and removal program for Windows.It can be used to push/pull software packages, such as Service Packs, hotfixes, or program installations from a central server (for example, Samba or Active Directory) to a number of workstations.

It can run as a service to install software in the background (silent install), without user interaction and can install MSI, InstallShield, PackagefortheWeb, Inno Setup, Nullsoft, other software installers or .exe packages, .bat and .cmd scripts and similar: no more repackaging to perform software installation.

.

http://wpkg.org/

MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC in a very advanced Multi-Media Center / HTPC. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch your video’s and DVD’s, view, schedule and record live TV and much more.

As Open Source software licensed under the GNU/GPL agreement, you get MediaPortal for free. This means anyone can contribute to MediaPortal or customize for their own needs!

MediaPortal is built on the Microsoft .NET framework using C# and currently has a growing international community of over 10,000 users.

http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

People who use Microsoft Word occasionally might find the following information usefull.  It is a guide to configure a keyboard shortcut in Microsoft Word to paste text without formatting. I use this feature quite alot myself.  Normally you have to click ‘edit’ – ‘paste special’ – ‘paste without formatting’ – ‘ok’, but this guide will simply show you how to record it as a macro and bind it to a keyboard shortcut so you can copy&paste-without-formatting with a simple keyboard shortcut.  Simple, but verry efficient!

http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=128

After playing a bit with Funambol for synchronising email, contacts and calendars I checked which other services are available which allow you to synchronise contactlists and calendar data across different services and devices.

For me the disadvantages of Funambol are that the iPhone version of Funambol currently only supports the synchronisation of contacts data.  Support for calendar data is currently not avaiable yet.  Also, the synchronisation has to be performed manually, meaning that whenever you want to synchronise your contacts you have to run the application and press the ‘synchronise’ button.

Nuevasync is a service that allows over the air synchronisation of contacts, calendar, email and task lists. It works transparantly, meaning that it doesn’t require the installation of software and runs completely in the background and over the air.

After registering an account on their website, you can configure the different services.

Calendar: synchronisation with Google Calendar

Contacts:  synchronisation with Plaxo or your Google contacts

On the iphone you configure the Nuevasync service as a Microsoft Exchange server connection.  Using this type of connection it will automatically perform the synchronisation in the background and over the air with the Nuevasync server.

Having configured Nuevasync to configure my iphone calendar with Google Calendar, I am now also able to synchronise my Lotus Notes calendar with my iphone.  I use Companionlink for Google on my computer to synchronise Lotus Notes with Google Calendar, and my iphone transparantly synchronises my Google Calendar to my phone using the Nuevasync service.

Another advantage would be if you change phone (for example to a Windows Mobile device) you can easily synchronise this device with your Nuevasync account to transfer all your contacts and calendar data.

After succeeding in synchronising my iPhone contacts with my Plaxo contacts, I also added the Plaxo addon on some other client software such as Thunderbird to have access to my contacts. Plaxo offers software for Mozilla Thunderbird, PocketPC, Outlook, Outlook Express, and MacOS to keep your Plaxo address book in sync with each of these applications.  On the Plaxo site itself, you have the possibility to synchronise your Plaxo address book with Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo, Outlook, Thunderbird. The disadvantage is that it only syncs on 1 direction, being towards Plaxo.

Paglo is a tool that can be used to discover IT systems and data and monitor and solve computer, network, and other IT related problems.  To use it you need to register an account and download and install a client, which is able to crawl your network.  Paglo supports different plugins that allow you to grab data from your IT systems:

-Directory Server (requires Windows credentials and IP of Directory server)
-Microsoft Exchange Information (requires Windows credentials)
-SNMP Interface Statistics (requires SNMP credentials and IP of devices)
-Registry Information (requires Windows credentials)
-Remote Commands (requires SSH credentials)
-Rescan Hosts (requires IP address of hosts to rescan, and frequency)
-Switch Harvester (requires SNMP, SSH, and/or Telnet credentials)
-SNMP Harvester (requires SNMP credentials)
-Searchable Folder (requires path to folder)
-WMI Information (requires Windows credentials)
Paglo runs as software as a service (SaaS) so if you plan using it, make sure you have no objections against all your IT related data that Paglo crawls is transmitted and stored on the Paglo server. I contacted the vendor and the response I received is the following:

Thanks for taking the time to respond. We appreciate the fact that you signed up for Paglo. And we understand that SaaS is not for everyone, but I want to make sure one thing is clear. The credentials that you provide the Crawler never leave your network. They are only stored in the Crawler behind your firewall.

No matter, we respect your position.

If you want to give it out a try yourself, register an account and download the clientfrom the official website:

http://www.paglo.com/