Today we are releasing a maintenance update for Codebook, version 1.5.4. There are no feature updates, it provides fixes for crashes related to syncing with Dropbox, particularly after a user resets her password and attempts to sync with the remote replica.

Note: Version 1.5.4 will be the last version of Codebook to support iOS 3, unless any bad bugs turn up between now and the release of Codebook 1.6.0.

With Codebook for iOS 1.6.0 we will be requiring our customers to have iOS 4.0 or greater installed on their devices. We realize this will be painful for a small number of some of our customers, but it’s important that we prepare Codebook to adopt new technologies in iOS 4 and iOS 5 while shedding the weight of deprecated APIs. Being that iPhone 3G devices and later support iOS 4, and that these all appear to run more efficiently with iOS 4, this new platform requirement shouldn’t keep many from upgrading, and will allow us to add features to Codebook more quickly in the future. We have big changes planned for the future, and we expect we’ll be requiring iOS 5 once we get around to releasing Codebook 2.0.

This Wednesday night, September 21st at 10pm EDT, Tempo and our other web systems will be temporarily unavailable while we perform critical system updates to ensure the stability of our services. This includes the Tempo API, the purchase site for Strip for Windows, the Connect website, our support site for Codebook, and zetetic.net, hosting this blog.

Down time could last up to an hour, but we do not expect this to be the case. If you need to get in touch with us for any reason, please don’t hesitate.

Wow, you can’t ask for a better review than this one below by our customer Chris Ostmo in the Mac App Store, reviewing Strip for OS X. We don’t normally highlight reviews, but this one is exceptional, especially the contrast he draws between Strip and our competition. We’re a stubborn shop—we do things at our own pace, we try not to be everything to everyone right out of the gate, and that means we’re not a perfect fit for everyone. Thanks, Chris!

If you care about the security of your information, this [is] THE password manager to get. Period.I was a die-hard user of STRIP for Palm, but had been more or less forced to settle for other options in the transition to Windows mobile, and then iOS. I had not switched back to STRIP until very recently due to the lack of a Mac Desktop application. I probably wouldn't have switched back if it weren't for the fact that the competition -- although prettier to look at -- is riddled with bugs and various annoyances. Besides that, the other companies seem to be very arrogant and give off an attitude that tells me that they view their customers as a nuisance. SplashID and 1Password are the solutions that I gave a serious run at being my password manager of choice -- having purchased and used each on my desktop and iOS devices for many months. If there is any negative in switching to STRIP, it's that it isn't quite as pretty as the others. Putting that aside, Zetetic writes killer software. What they write, it is obvious that they write well, and their passion for the finer details of what it takes to have the ultimate in function is apparent in their writing about the details of the technology that their programs use in their company literature and blogs.Case in point: The "Shake-N-Make" password generator in [STRIP for] iOS uses your device accelerometer to add environmental variables for entropy to the random number generator when passwords are generated. In short, if you want anything that approaches real randomness from a computing device, this is it.If your primary concern is eye candy, this may not be the one for you. If you want great software written by a company that has an expressed passion for having the most secure and functional password manager, look no further -- STRIP is for you.

To the very many of you who’ve taken the time to leave us ratings and reviews for Strip in the iTunes and Mac App Stores, we really appreciate it. It means a lot to us, as the reviews not only help us to see how well (or not) the apps are doing, but they also help to increase the number of people who are willing to give Strip a shot and that helps to further fund development of Strip for Windows, OS X, and iOS.

For those of you who made it this far down the post, a bit of insider info: we’ve begun development of the Android port of Strip in earnest! We’ve no more info about it at this point in time, but we’re working on it.

Some exciting news! Our colleague Mr. Bret Morgan, a talented developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Cowerks and BandsOnABudget.com has been hard at work trying to foster a vibrant tech and developer community on the New Jersey shore, and is now working on Asbury Agile, a one-day, single-track conference in Asbury Park, NJ “for makers and doers in the web industry.”

Featuring user interface experts, tech investors, start-up captains, experienced web gurus, it’s chock full of people who know how to start a business on the web. The kind of people you want to meet: folks who have real-world experience building software platforms. We’re quite excited to hear what they have to say, so Zetetic will be attending.

We’re sponsoring the event, and we’re offering free copies of Strip for iOS and OS X to attendees, as well as 3 free months use of our time-tracking web app, Tempo. Other sponsors include Forrst and A Book Apart. Rosenfeld Media and A Book Apart will be raffling off books on the day of the conference, and offering a 20% discount on their titles at the conf.

On a personal note, I grew up in suburbs outside of the City of Asbury Park, and back then it was the only place on the shore to go to see some punk rock. My friends and I would get into trouble breaking into the old decaying amusement palaces on the boardwalk to take photographs of the Summer sun streaming through a broken roof onto indoor vegetation. The former beach resort city had been plagued since the seventies by a depressed economy and violence, but has since made a remarkable turn-around. Fifteen years later Asbury Park is in many ways unrecognizable, with a vibrant and safe downtown, a growing community of successful entrepreneurs and artists, and hip spots to grab a beer and some greasy food with good tunes on the Hi-Fi (I highly recommend Bond St. Bar). I’m very excited to see Asbury Agile happening, it would have been unthinkable when I was fifteen playing terrible punk-metal at the Stone Pony.

We hope you’ll join us, and say hello at the conference! We’d love to talk business or tech and make some new friends.

We’ve released some free code for LDAP and Active Directory hackers in the past, Zetetic.Ldap, but now we’ve got something for the Windows and AD sysadmins out there: Zetetic.Events Shell.

The Zetetic.Events Shell is a free, fast, and efficient tool to extract Event Log data for Active Directory and Windows computers (Server 2008, Vista, Windows 7, or newer), allowing you to find out where and when important things happened.

Sounds simple, but it’s a really dynamic instrument that’s particularly handy for security auditing, e.g. when you need to know who has changed a particular security group and when. Conceived and implemented by our identity guru Steve Kradel, we’ve found Zetetic.Events Shell to be pretty handy in the identity work we do for our clients and we think you will, too. You can download it here and see a more complete example of how it works.

Let us know what you think, if you find any bugs, or have feature requests. We’re providing the Zetetic.Events Shell at no charge in the hopes that it will be useful to the community, and as a preview of our industrial-strength, realtime auditing package, coming in late Q3 2011. Key features of the full Zetetic.Events Pro package will include:

• Near real-time streaming of event data
• Agent-less, durable event monitoring of dozens to hundreds of hosts
• Pre-built, customizable capture templates for various server roles (domain controllers, file servers, web application servers)
• Deep inspection of audit trails; view by user activity or by targets of that activity
• Automatic topology discovery
• Event ID library and assistant
• Web-based management and reporting

You can join the mailing list on the download form for Zetetic.Events Shell and we’ll let you know when the Pro version becomes available.