Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

This weeks GGB has a very interesting job, and although she isn’t a frequent blogger on her personal website, perhaps being featured in the GGB series has inspired her to use her blog more often. Not that I, Amanda, have done any better. My personal blog is pretty much un-used… I still only have intentions to use it. But when I do, I’ll probably end up writing this article about my own survey! Anyhow, today we have the lovely Sarah Katz:

Name: Sarah Katz
Screen Name: @katzsarah (Twitter)
Personal Blog: http://katzsarah.blogspot.com/
Social Networks: Twitter (@katzsarah), Facebook (Sarah Emily Katz), LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahemilykatz)
Current Employment: Lisa P. Maxwell (www.lisapmaxwell.com)
Location/country: Chicago, IL

What is your reason/motivation for blogging?

I usually like to post interesting links that I have found online or little blurbs about what I’m up to.

What is it that you find yourself blogging about, mostly the same stuff or does it vary?

I mostly write about the same variety of things. (Cool links, funny stories, what I’m doing during the day)

The atmosphere was buzzing as I stepped into the Verve Café. It was the second Brisbane Geek Girl Dinner, and it has grown since the last one! There were many familiar faces, and a sea of new ones. My friend Dani and I were  greeted by Bronwen when we arrived, and instinctively made our way to the bar. $5 fire engines? Who can go wrong with that? There were two long tables dedicated to Geek Girls, and the group filled both :). So we parked ourselves beside Jenine – Jenine and I go way back.

The round function enables you to truncate values to the number of decimal places you desire. This could be in fractions of a whole value e.g. hundredths and thousandths of whole number, or as large numbers, e.g. rounding to the closest million or billion.

There are some very similar functions, ROUNDUP, ROUNDDOWN and MROUND. In addition there are some complimentary functions such as FLOOR and CEILING.

These functions all perform the same way with specific variations. Round follows the 4/5 round principle. That is if the number ends in 4 or lower it rounds down, and if it ends in 5 or higher it rounds up.

Microsoft released an extraordinary security patch yesterday.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

Vulnerability in Server Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (958644)

Published: October 23, 2008

Seeing as Microsoft only release patches once a month, this is totally unexpected, and indicates the critical nature of the flaw. One surmises that there are already hackers and other criminals already exploiting this flaw.

There are lots of details in the MS08-067 bulletin and there is starting to be a fair bit of chatter on the tubes about it – see this from Nick MacKechnie for example where he points to the Security Vulnerability Research and Defense blog.

We emailed all our clients and suggested they patch immediately, or invite us to remotely connect to them and manage that for them.