- Mobile asset recovery system (need data on yearly losses)
- Produce advisories on Red Hat Errata and Security Alerts
- Leverage Open Source IDS (Snort) along with Open Source Vulnerability
Assessment (Nessus) with the intention of creating an Open Source Security Event Management service - Open Source Log Management
- Investigate use of OSSIM
- Metrics on blocking (top domains, top categories, top users)
- Discuss possible use of SE Linux for securing systems
Month: December 2005
Performancing for Firefox
The Performancing extension for Firefox is awesome. Normally I log into my blog to do edits and posts. I expect that I should be able to do everything from within the browser especially now AJAX (aka Web 2.0) is built into most web applications. This extension frees the poster from the first navigating to the blogging site. At any point, I just click the little icon in the lower right of the Firefox window and start typing. Almost all blogging API are supported including my favourites Blogger and WordPress.
So what formatting options does Performancing for Firefox have?
- Quotes
- Underlines,Italics and Bold
- Resize Text (Small and Big)
- Insert Links
- Text Colour
- Text alignment (left, center, right, and justified)
One can also insert images by URL only and switch between a WYSIWYG type editor or HTML source. 
Their is also a preview feature so the user can see what the post would look like when complete. On the left of the editor window one can change the editors settings, such as how the editor displays in the browser and content styling. 
On the right of the edit window you can select the Blogs tab to the blog that you are posting to. When posting one can choose from the categories available for that post, assuming that one's blogging software supports that feature. WordPress does but Blogger does not.
Performancing keeps a list of the most recent posts. You can select one of these for editing. Images can be added to a post either by clicking the image linking icon and entering he image URL or simply dragging from the desktop to the image editor. I found Performancing for Firefox to be useful and I will be adding it to my bloggers toolbox.
What the Flock!
About a month ago I read about a new project called Flock whose apparent aim is to build a browser aimed at bloggers. They decided to use the existing Mozilla Firefox code base as a starting point and leverage XUL to integrate blogging, social tagging networks and RSS news readers. The project was still in beta but I downloaded and installed anyway. The feature set truly was useful. I found that tagging a web site to del.icio.us was as easy as a right click using the Star feature. Simply click the Star in the URL bar and you've flagged a page. The favourites manager doubles as an RSS reader.
Just like Firefox, Flock puts an icon in the URL bar when a site has one or more feeds. In Flock, you can click that icon to get a feed view of the page. Flock includes a blog editor that works with WordPress (and the new WordPress.com hosted service), Movable Type and Typepad (and shortly also Live Journal) and Blogger. Simplye Click the feather blog icon, enter the setup information for the blog, and enter the post into the text editor. Flock!also allows selecting and posting text from a web site with the "Blog This!" function available from the "right click" menu.
Flock also integrates Yahoo!'s Flickr photsharing application. One can drag and drop pictures from the Flickr topbar right into a blog post.
Most, but not all, of Flock's functionality is available from any of a number of Firefox extensions. In fact when Firefox 1.5 was release I found that I could do everything that Flock did with a combination of the Google Toolbar (for posting to Blogger), the del.icio.us Firefox extension, and Performancing for Firefox, a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. My Firefox extensions solutions may not be as slick or as well integrated as those in Flock but I did not find too much in Flock! to recommend my switching at this time. The Flock blogging function also supports more blog API than my Google Blogger only extension. The post from Flickr functionality also saves time by providing a view into the photostream directly from the blog post editor. Flock has promise despite what may seem to be a feature war with the Firefox development crew and extension developers. I'll keep Firefox as my blogging tool for now but I 'll keep a close eye on Flock as it develops.
