Moose Views July/August 2007

Cover Story: Citrix iForum Is Back On The West Coast!
Doing Junk Mail Filtering And Virus Blocking On Your Servers And Workstations Is Good… Doing It Before It Gets To You Is Better!
Sam Walton’s 10 Rules for Building a Phenomenally Successful Business
ITEC 2007 Recap
Cool Google Search Features and Tips
How to Make Your Child a TAX-FREE Millionaire!
Funny Answers To Real Exams…
How To Be Pain Free At Your PC
Moose Logic Coming Events

(Moose Views is a monthly newsletter prepared by Moose Logic to bring you information and tips on maintaining a trouble-free network)

Citrix iForum Is Back On The West Coast!

The Citrix iForum conference is the annual conference on application delivery. You get the latest product information from Citrix as well as from the manufacturers of “Citrix-Ready” products. You get a look behind the curtain at what’s coming. You get to attend informative “how-to” sessions and hands-on labs. You get to mingle with your peers in the IT world and hear how they are addressing application delivery problems. Unfortunately, the conference is usually held in Orlando, FL, making it difficult for many of our Northwest customers to attend—it’s an expensive trip, because it takes a day to get there, and most of a day to get back.

Citrix has got the message: 2005 marked the first time iForum was held outside of Florida, and it looks like they’re going to be bringing it back to the Western states every other year. This year it will be held at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, October 22—25. If you’ve been wanting to go, but just couldn’t carve out the time to go all the way to Florida, don’t miss this chance to get the full story on application delivery (it’s not just about Presentation Server any more). You can get more information and register at http://www.citrixiforum.com. See you in Las Vegas!

Doing Junk Mail Filtering And Virus Blocking On Your Servers And Workstations Is Good… Doing It Before It Gets To You Is Better!

For the last three weeks or so, my “friends” out there in Internet-land have sent me an average of 80—100 viruses per week masquerading as e-greeting cards. The cool thing is, they never arrived, so I never had the opportunity of falling victim to them. In fact, they never even touched our mail server. In fact, they never even took up any of our Internet bandwidth! Why? Because they were blocked by our MooseGuardTM spam and virus filtering service, along with several hundred spam messages. (I’m not exaggerating, either. As I write this, I’ve had 413 spam messages blocked over the past 11 days.)

This service, powered by Postini, “scrubs” the email through a set of powerful filters before the email is allowed to flow on down to our email server. Setup is a snap. I get weekly email messages reminding me that I have messages in quarantine, so I can check to make sure that email I want to get isn’t being blocked, and, if necessary, add senders to my “safe senders” list. I also get an intuitive Web interface that allows me, if I choose not to simply accept the defaults, to granularly control how aggressively I want to filter the junk mail in four categories: sexually explicit messages, money-making offers, too-good-to-be-true offers, and hate-oriented topics.

We can also add outbound filtering if desired, to enforce corporate policies. This allows us to do things like:

Force a standardized footer onto all outbound email messages.
Apply rules-based content filtering that can scan the body, header, sender, recipient, or subject line of a message, and take a variety of actions, such as approving the message, bouncing it back to the sender with a configurable error message, redirecting the message to a quarantine mailbox without notifying the sender, or delivering the message while making a log entry.
Screen and block attachments.

We’re firm believers in a layered approach to network protection. Anti-virus/anti-spyware at the desktop, anti-virus at the server and mail server level, Outlook’s built-in junk mail filters, the Exchange Server’s Intelligent Message Filter, a good firewall at the network perimeter—all these are important components of a comprehensive protection scheme. But the more we can screen out before it even gets to us, the less hard the other components have to work!

For more information, give us a call at (206) 774-0619, or email info@mooselogic.com.

Sam Walton’s 10 Rules for Building a Phenomenally Successful Business

Sam Walton, the founder of the Wal-Mart chain, had 10 rules for building a business that he adamantly believed in. According to the Wal-Mart web site, the following are the principles that have enabled the company to experience more than 40 years of outrageous success:

Commit to your business. You have to believe in it more than anyone else. You have to have passion. Love your work and do it the best you can every day.
Share your profits with all your associates and treat them as partners. This will make the people who work for you perform beyond your wildest expectations. Behave as a servant leader.
Motivate your partners. You have to constantly think of new ways to motivate your partners.
Communicate everything you possibly can to your associates. The more they understand, the more they’ll care.
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.
Celebrate your successes. Have fun. Find humor in your failures. Loosen up.
Listen to everyone in your company. And more important, try to get them talking. The ones who really talk to the customers are the ones who really know what’s going on.
Exceed your customers’ expectations. Give them what they want-then give ‘em a little more.
Control your expenses better than your competitors. You can survive a lot of mistakes if you’re efficient.
Swim upstream. Ignore the conventional wisdom; find your niche by going another direction.

ITEC 2007 Recap

Thanks to all of you who visited us at the 2007 ITEC show. Lovely Rita (the 2002 Corvette driven by Team Moose Racing) made another appearance, and was once again the best “eye candy” on the show floor. If you weren’t there, you missed some cool stuff in addition to Rita. We had both Vista and XP Pro running in VMs on a XenSource platform, and were accessing them from Wyse Winterms via the Citrix Desktop Broker. The Citrix Desktop Streaming technology was also on display, showing how applications can be streamed to desktops on demand and are even self-healing—if a key file gets deleted, no problem, it just gets streamed down again! I’m convinced that desktop application streaming is going to be big. Why keep touching the desktops if you don’t have to? It’s the same value proposition that drove the growth of server-based computing, but applied to desktop apps!

Cool Google Search Features and Tips

If you want to avoid irrelevant results whenever you search on Google, use these tried and true tips:

Use double quotations around phrases to get an exact match. For example, if you want to find information on employee communications, type in “employee communications” and Google will return only those web sites that contain that exact phrase.
If you want to exclude a term from your search, put a minus sign ( - ) in front of the word. For instance, if you wanted to search on the word “inspirational” but wanted to exclude religious content, you would type in “inspirational –religion”.
If you want to look up web sites that contain two different phrases or words but not necessarily grouped together in a phrase, use the plus sign ( + ). For example, if you wanted to find a business that rents luxury cars in your city, you could type in “yourcity” + “luxury car rental”.

Here are some other cool things you can find with Google: How do you Search?

Want to find out the name of the person who called you when you only have the caller ID number? Type in phonebook:xxx-xxx-xxxx (with the x’s being the actual number) and it will look that person up.
If you want to know what city or state a person is located based on their area code, just type in the 3 digit number into Google.
If you want to look up the definition of a word, type in “define:someword” with “someword” being the word you want to look up. Google will return the definition.
If you want to calculate something, type the formula into Google. Example: 6*8

How to Make Your Child a TAX-FREE Millionaire!

If your teenaged child or grandchild is gainfully employed, they can contribute up to $2,000 a year to a Roth IRA. The contributions aren’t tax deductible, but at the child’s puny tax bracket it doesn’t matter.

Let’s say the child puts in $2,000 a year between the ages of 16 and 21, and then doesn’t contribute another dime. If the Roth IRA earns 10% per year, the child will have $1,022,521 at age 65...and the money will be completely TAX FREE!

Funny Answers To Real Exams…

These answers were actually submitted by students of Dr. Richard Lederer’s class at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire:

Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
Actually, Homer was not written by Homer, but by another man of that name.
Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java.
Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: “Tee hee, Brutus.”
Joan of Arc was burned to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw. Finally, Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offence.

How To Be Pain Free At Your PC

According to author, radio personality, and founder of the Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion, Pete Egoscue, chronic pain and conditions such as eyestrain, back pain, carpal tunnel, and repetitive stress injuries can all be alleviated—and cured—through proper alignment.

According to his book, Pain Free At Your PC, the cause of the pain is often incorrectly attributed to the activity that makes the pain happen. For example, many people attribute wrist pain to hours of typing or some other overuse injury, when the true cause is the position of the wrist due to poorly aligned shoulders or hips, not the wrist or the activity itself. According to Pete, if your body was in proper alignment, your wrist would be in the proper position to work pain-free.

“The true source of musculoskeletal pain is rarely the site of the pain. If your wrist hurts when pointing and clicking the mouse, the pain probably has nothing to do with the device,” says Pete.

To discover how you can eliminate chronic pain without drugs or surgery, visit Pete Egoscue’s website: www.egoscue.com or listen to his free podcast on iTunes, “Pain Free Radio.”

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