The capital of Austria is a beautiful city lying in the center of the European continent, with shining examples of classic architecture beside huge green parks. Boasting the cleanest air of any city around the world, they also enjoy delicious spring water piped in straight from mountain springs.

Vienna lies on the beautiful Danube river and to the traveller, offers so much to see and do. Cultural presentation and performances galore, feature top artists, lavish musicals are staged year round.

Indeed, the land of Johann Strauss and waltz, of wine, silk, love and majestic Lippizauner horses enchants visitors indeed.

Vienna is also a safe city, where one can stroll unmolested down the streets. There are no slums to speak of. The National Health Service offers excellent medical facilities to all.

For visitors, there is so much to do. Just imagine, where else in the world can you in summer bathe with impunity in the city’s river, then drive 20 minutes up to the hills and sip the indigenous wine while watching the city lights twinkle below? Or in winter take your children skiing on the back of those selfsame slopes? Walk for hours through thick rolling forests? Take a thermal bath? Play golf, cricket, skate, row, sail, go to the racetrack, the funfair, all within the city limits? Where else can you walk your dog after dark in any of the numerous parks? Ride the public transport system with no sense of dread? And all this in addition to the usual cultural and sightseeing splendours every self-respecting big city offers its visitors.

The only downside remains the driving. Drivers are aggressive, parking in the city is scarce and expensive, and the maze of one way streets can be daunting to someone unfamiliar with the city.

However, public transport is convenient, safe and fast. The 60-km-long ultramodern subway is clean, safe, spacious and fast, the traditional tramway plies all corners of the city and the surface ‘S-Bahn’ railway the outlying districts, a fleet of emission-free LPG-driven buses is in service round the clock. Taxis do not usually cruise and are best summoned by phone. Clearly marked cycle tracks around and out of the city also make it a tempting choice to cycle and enjoy the sights and sounds of Vienna.

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First off, it’s not as hard as you think! These directions are for the popular Apache web browser but odds are pretty darn good that’s what server you have anyway! if not, then a quick google of “adding a 404 error page” coupled with the name of your web server will probably do the trick!

Step One: Modify the httpd.conf file

The first step, and perhaps the most challenging, is to find your Web server configuration file – often called httpd.conf – and find the block of statements that define the location and behavior of your particular site. This file is commonly found at /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, /usr/local/www/conf/httpd.conf or a similar location: if you can’t find it, ask your system administrator. On a typical server configuration, it might look like this:

<VirtualHost www.example.com>
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAdmin admin@example.com
DocumentRoot /usr/local/www/example.com
ErrorLog logs/example/error_log
TransferLog logs/example/access_log
</VirtualHost>

Your server might have dozens (or more) of these VirtualHost blocks in the configuration file: make sure you find the one for your exact domain name before you make any modifications. Now that you’ve found this section, you need to add an ErrorDocument handler that specifies the exact numeric code and the name of the file to serve up (or CGI script to run) when that error is encountered. Here’s how that might well look:

ErrorDocument 404 /errordoc-404.shtml

In this case, when error 404 is encountered – page or file not found – then the file errordoc-404.shtml will be served up (and notice that you can have server-side includes (SSI) in error documents if you’d like. One trick, though, is to remember that error pages can pop up anywhere in your site heirarchy, so make sure all your graphic references, links to other areas on the site, etc, are absolute references, that they start with ‘/’ or, in extreme cases, ‘http:’.

Note: There’s another way you can hook a custom 404 error page into your site too, using a .htaccess file, as explained in How to use .htaccess to create a custom 404 error page .

Step Two: Create the 404 Error Page

There are lots of different error 404 pages you can create, ranging from the succinct and dry to the peculiar, to the witty, to the super-helpful (for example, you can easily add a google search for only pages from your site to your 404 error page ).

Whichever path you choose, you’ll find people appreciate if you at least offer a link to your home page and some method whereby they can contact you if they are insistent that certain material should be present but isn’t.

Also, most people agree that not insulting them is a good strategy, but, perhaps surprisingly, this varies and there are definitely some 404 error pages out there that are quite blunt.

It depends on the style of your site, your sense of humor, and whether you want to err on the side of “useful” or on the side of “amusing”.

Step Three: Restart the Web Server

To get the change to the configuration file accepted, you’ll probably need to restart or otherwise nudge your Apache Web server so it knows that you’ve added a custom 404 error page (otherwise it’ll continue to blithly serve up the generic error page instead).

There are a couple of basic commands to accomplish this task:

1. apachectl is most common,
2. or you might need to revert to a custom script like restart_apache,
3. or tools like Webmin have a restart option,
4. or, if this all seems like too much work, just ask a sysadmin to restart the server.

Regardless of which you choose, it’s always a good idea to also check the log files for the Web server to ensure that everything was accepted and parsed without any errors. On a typical Linux/Unix configuration, the log file would be at

/var/log/messages

because Apache (almost always) is configured to use the standard syslog mechanism.

Once that happens, type in a URL that you know isn’t present on your site and see what happens! If everything is correct, you should see the new 404 error page pop up.

If it doesn’t work, go back to your httpd.conf file, identify where errors are logged (probably an entry ErrorLog) then look in that file to see what’s wrong.

Most likely you have a naming error where it’s called one thing in the configuration file but something else on the actual server.

If everything is working fine, try a second 404 error by requesting a page that’s a few subdirectories into the site, so while for your first test you may have used something like http://www.example.com/badpage this time try something more like http://www.example.com/some/subdir/badpage

If all the graphics are displayed properly and the links to elsewhere on your site are all correct, congratulations! You’ve done it! You’re now the proud owner of a custom 404 error page.

If not, step through this tutorial again, keeping an eye on the error log file, and you should have this figured out in no time.

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We hear a lot about “Web 2.0″ these days. It sounds neat and it’s trendy to talk about blogging and social media. But does it really affect our businesses? Is Web 2.0 just for kids and tech-hipsters or is it something we business owners should use to help promote our businesses?

I can’t tell you if Web 2.0 is right for your business but I can tell you it’s something to be aware of Ignoring it means ignoring a possible tool that could be valuable in helping you get more customers.

So, to help you get started in thinking about Web 2.0 for your business, here are some things for you to consider.

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How can users be persuaded to access their social networks twenty-four hours a day, without ever stopping, using a mobile device? That was the question at the Mobile Social Networking Conference in San Francisco Thursday. So with the assumption that everyone wants to socially network online while, er, socially networking, carriers, manufacturers, and developers met for the two-day conference on Thursday.

“In the future, the phone will do everything,” said Stephen Johnson, senior manager for the corporate strategy group at Nokia. “Social networking itself is becoming more mobile friendly but we’ve got a lot to do to take the Web and make it accessible for mobile.”

And what constitutes socially networking on your phone? Does sending a text message count, or accessing a mobile version of MySpace? According the conference agenda, mobile socially networking can include mobile video, audio, SMS, MMS, picture sharing and publishing, and even voice conversations because, if nothing else, your phone started out as a social device.

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Web Crossing on Wednesday introduced WebCrossing Neighbors 2, a new version of its private-label social networking software. WebCrossing Neighbors is a hosted system priced starting at $195 per month.

WebCrossing Neighbors is intended to provide companies and organizations with their own personalized social networking system for interacting with customers and colleagues. Based on a dynamic tagging engine, the software supports “degrees of friendship” to help build social networks. WebCrossing Neighbors includes features like common areas for interest groups, personal user areas, blog pages, discussion forums, photo, video and file sharing, and more. It’s customizable and extensible, as well.

New to WebCrossing Neighbors 2 are multilingual support areas, so sites can feature multiple language support. A new “IP Address to Country Mapping” feature helps the system automatically detect the country that a user is from — this can be used for security or marketing functions.

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“Does anyone have the ability to speak better than Caesar?”

Want to know more about the life of Julius Caesar? Read the life history and biography of Julius Caesar, Rome’s greatest military politician… Julius Caesar Biography: Early Life Gaius Julius Caesar was born …

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Using marijuana seems to increase the risk of a psychotic illness such as schizophrenia, according to a stuy in media reports Friday.
The researchers found that marijuana users had a 41 percent increased chance of developing psychosis marked by symptoms of hallucinations or delusions later in life than those who never used the drug. The risk rose with heavier consumption.
Marijuana is one the most commonly used illegal substances in many countries with up to 20 percent of young people in places like Britain reporting either some use or heavy use, British researchers said, citing government statistics.

Many consider it on par with alcohol or tobacco but the results show marijuana poses a danger many smokers underestimate, said Stanley Zammit, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol in UK, who worked on the study.

“If you compare other substances like alcohol or tobacco it may not be as harmful, but what we are saying is neither is it completely safe,” Zammit said in a telephone interview.

Other findings have highlighted the link between marijuana use and the risk of schizophrenia-like symptoms such as paranoia, hearing voices and seeing things that are not there.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA astronauts at least twice were permitted to fly in spacecraft despite signs they were drunk, according to a report released on Friday by the U.S. space agency.

NASA said it intends to investigate the allegations.

“Interviews with both flight surgeons and astronauts identified some episodes of heavy use of alcohol by astronauts in the immediate preflight period, which has led to flight safety concerns,” said the report from a panel assessing astronaut health matters.

“Alcohol is freely used in crew quarters. Two specific instances were described where astronauts had been so intoxicated prior to flight that flight surgeons and/or fellow astronauts raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety,” the report added.

“However, the individuals were still permitted to fly. The medical certification of astronauts for flight duty is not structured to detect such episodes, nor is any medical surveillance program by itself likely to detect them or change the pattern of alcohol use,” the report stated.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin ordered the report as well as another also released on Friday after February’s arrest of then-astronaut Lisa Nowak. She is scheduled to be tried on September 24 on charges of attempted kidnapping, battery and burglary.

Read the original story

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Recent news coverage of the Greek cell phone wiretapping scandal should put to rest some of the fears that people have over illegal wiretapping. Renewed interest in this story was sparked by an extensive analysis in the IEEE’s online magazine Spectrum (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul07/5280 ). The article describes in detail how an illegal wiretapping operation existed in Greece, at cell phone carrier Vodaphone, for over nine months. In reading the news coverage and the IEEE article “The Athens Affair “ by Vassilis Prevelakis and Diomidis Spinellis, one can’t help but be amazed at the significant effort it took to illegally take advantage of the lawful intercept capabilities that existed on the phone switches.

For a long time now, skeptics have claimed that having an automated, centralized, standardized platform for performing lawful intercept, at carrier locations, actually creates a security risk rather than reducing it. The argument concludes that if a lawful intercept system is easy to use by the phone carriers, then surely the bad guys out there will be able to easily defeat the system and manipulate it to their own ends. On first glance the Greek incident seems to support this concern.

In fact, a report last year from the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) raised that very issue: “Designing wiretapping into the communication system raises a fundamental security issue: can the capability be controlled so that only authorized parties can employ it?” However, the report concluded that for traditional wired and wireless telephony, such as the Greek Vodaphone system, it wasn’t a problem. The ITAA study even referenced the Greek incident and concluded that information available at the time pointed to an inside job instead of a malicious outside hacker.

The IEEE report carefully and fully reveals the lengths taken to achieve this feat, and justifies the assertion that this was not a trivial or easy thing to do. Through this revelation it becomes obvious just how much time, commitment, expertise and undetected access had to be garnered in order to defeat a system like this.

The experts will tell you there is no such thing as an absolutely impregnable system; rather, security is really a matter of making a system sufficiently difficult to breach. Hacking the Vodaphone system was certainly no cakewalk and it would be very difficult to replicate. Consider these four factors:

Time – significant time planning, designing and writing software went into this effort. This wasn’t an afternoon or weekend project someone thought they would throw together.

Commitment – since the software development work had to have gone on for weeks, if not months, surely this was a very committed effort and not an amateur’s hobby or prank

Expertise – the software used in the Ericsson switches is not a common programming language that the average software developer off the street can be successful with. In fact very few people know the language or the design of the system well enough to write code that will work, never mind secret code that is undetectable.

Undetected Access – again this is not something readily available to the public, it took the right person in the right position to gain access to the systems.

Even just looking at these factors quickly, the argument about how secure these solutions are becomes self-evident. Clearly this is not the stuff that the average bad guy or even organized crime could pull off. Based on this evidence the general public in Greece, the rest of Europe, North America, Asia or any where else in the world where these systems are used, should be reassured that they are secure and when used properly, can certainly benefit them.

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EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. (AP) — A college fraternity president and aspiring rapper who had a history of trying to buy and sell guns online pleaded not guilty Wednesday to making a terrorist threat after a note found in his car threatened a “murderous rampage” similar to April’s deadly shooting spree at Virginia Tech.

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