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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.

This weeks blogger is Kate Foy from Australia! Yeah!

Name: Kate Foy
Screen Name: Dramagirl
Personal Blog/s: http://katefoy.com - http://actorsgreenroom.net - http://expressiveplus.com/
Social Networks: 
Twitter (Dramagirl)
Facebook (Kate Foy)
Tumblr (Dramagirl)
Seesmic (Dramagirl)
Delicious (Dramagirl and Expressive Plus). I also play in other spots (Jaiku, use Digg and 12Seconds) but less so. The networks above seem to work just fine.
Current Employment: Freelance consultant and creative arts professional.
Location/country: Toowoomba, Australia.

Thursday night I went to my first Brisbane Drupal Meetup. It was great. There were 8 or 9 people there so most of the time was actually spend learning a little about each other (and kidding Mark about coding on reel tapes).

Jeff and Sheree and Josh from Marmalade Soul organised it. I also picked up cards from Mark, Chris, and Tony. Nick from Our Brisbane who I had already met because I am hosting and maintaining www.studybrisbane.com.au was there too. He is a real funny guy!

I had decided to present a summary of the tools and methodologies we employ here at Jethro in looking after something like 30 Drupal websites. As promised I have listed below the major tools and their uses below. This is a much bigger subject than the 10 minutes I gave to it on Thursday and I am really interested in seeing what others are doing.

Disclaimer: Yes I live in a Microsoft world. No I do not hate Macs or open source. and yes, sometimes Microsoft products are not the best products to use. On their own. But; most of the Microsoft tools that we do use are either because they are awesome or because of their integration and synchronisation with other MS tools. They are also generally easy for new staff to learn to use.

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.