Axis Computer Consulting Services, Inc.

For anyone setting up a WPA or WPA2 network using a pre-shared key (WPA-PSK) the good folks over at Gibson Research have created a high quality key generator. WPA can be cracked if a low quality (aka dictionary word) is used in the pre-shared key, by using a 63 character random value, you will be same for the time being against any dictionary attacks on your wireless access point. If you are still using WEP, turn it off now and save yourself, see Bruce Schneier on the 60 second WEP crack.

We are in the process of upgrading the web site software to the latest version. Most of the data has been moved over to the new software we are just in the process of moving over the user database which will be completed by the end of the day.

If you have any questions, comments, or issues, please let us know, thanks.

Thanks to all the stupid script kiddies out there who this it is fun to post stupid comments with a bunch of dumb links I have turned off the voting and comment ability for non-logged in users.

Here is a great little product, TrueCrypt [here], that offers you top shelf on-the-fly data encryption to an encrypted disk. The software works on Windows XP/2000/2003 and Linux, so you can have an encrypted container on removable media and mount it just about anywhere. This is an excellent little program for data protection, fully integrating into the OS so that your encrypted container looks like just another disk when it is unlocked.

Read full article: 'TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source Disk Encryption'

The good folks over at Scooter Software [here] have just released version 2.4 of their excellent Beyond Compare software. One of the best pieces of "utility" software that I have found (from a programmer/system analyst perspective) for Windows based work. It is a free upgrade if you have a version 2.x license and it is of course free to try.

While working on a problem for a client I found that most version of SQR do not support UTF-8 character sets directly, some of the newest version can do this. I wrote a handy little SQC to handle the conversion of string between UTF-8 and ASCII [here].

The Mozilla Foundation [here] has released an update to the Firefox Web Browser [here]. An article on this release and some of what it fixes is up a eWeek [here].

After the server rebuild, the download links were all broken, these have now all been fixed, sorry for any issues.

I have added the latest version of the SQR Analyzer to the Perl Library [here]. This version now handles the path names correctly when running under ActivePerl on a Windows Environment (I tested it with ActivePerl 5.8.4 under Windows 2000).

A big thanks to Peter Mroz for finding this problem.

Every once in a while, there has been a need for using random numbers in an SQR, unfortunately, SQR does not have such a procedure. To compound the problem, most good PRNG need to use bit level operations, also which SQR does not support very well. I had already built a binary math library (accsl004) so I added a few more procedures to this and created a new library (accsl011) (see the source code library for the files). This library implements the TT800 PRNG originally written by M. Matsumoto,

Read full article: 'SQR Linear Pseudorandom Number Generator'