The U.S. Navy Blue Book Online
A tool sometimes used by officers in the Navy is the "Blue Book", which is the informal name for the Naval Register or lineal list. The Naval Register lists every officer in the Navy and his rank relative to every other officer. There are actually three Blue Books: NAVPERS 15018, Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the Active Duty List; NAVPERS 15009, Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Naval Reserve; and
NAVPERS 15939, Register of Retired Commissioned and Warrant Officers, Regular and Reserve, of the USN. The Navy has now posted these lists as PDF files online, where they can be viewed in alphabetical, lineal number or designator order. Pretty cool and very useful for many purposes. This is part of the online version of the Bureau of Personnel (BUPERS) CD, a document full of of staggering ugliness, bad Web design and really useful information.

Secure FTP Clients
I came back from vacation and read the minutes of the IT Security Committee here at Illinois Institute of Technology, and it seems they adopted some new security standards. One says "No clear-text passwords are allowed on the network (this means no telnet or ftp, use ssh and sftp instead)". I started urging use of SSH instead of telnet about...oh...six years ago! I have long since removed telnet from any servers I run, requiring the use of SSH instead, but we have not made the switch to Secure FTP. Secure FTP comes in several flavors: the most common are SFTP,which uses SSH to secure the login and commands, and SSL FTP, which uses Secure Sockets Layer to encrypt both login and data transfer. I have investigated Secure FTP clients and have already found one that looks pretty good: Filezilla, an open source SFTP project (I much prefer use of open source products, if you haven't noticed yet..). Others look promising: WinSCP (SFTP and SCP), Secure FTP (a Java-based SSL FTP client). My favorite FTP client, Smart FTP, only supports SSL FTP. I guess I'll have to look at getting SSL for the FTPD on the servers I support. I am already running vsftpd (Very Secure FTPD) so this should not be much of a stretch. We also need to find out how to run SFTP on Windows machines that run FTP. It is possible to use SSH clients to provide SSH tunneling for FTP clients, and SSH tunneling using PuTTY and PLink can be integrated into Dreamweaver, which is pretty important to the way I do business around here. So I guess we now go to Secure FTP: looks like a real End User Education challenge.