William E. Huber Jr.: My Profession

Mon, 17 May 2004 13:23:05 GMT

Ted Leung is a thoughtful and not flamboyant blogger. He uses his weblog well to think out loud, and by seeing the map of his thought processes, I learn more than just about his conclusions, I also learn how he got them. This was a point that Larry Lessig made on Saturday in the great free-wheeling discussion we had at the end of the iLaw conference. He said even if no one reads your blog, you get something out of writing publicly that you can't get otherwise. Writing makes you smarter, I said, when other people expressed disbelief. But I read Ted, every time he updates, because he's a smart guy who get smarter, and helps me do that too. He makes me say Bing a lot. And then Bing Bing. And even occasionally a Bing Bing Bing.

Anyway, I can see this is going to be a rambler, because Ted's piece is the fulcrum I'm going to use to announce something important, because I want you to think about this announcement in the context of his current piece, because it exactly reflects my thinking.

As you may know, I have left UserLand. It's been almost two years, and while in some ways I wish I were there to drive the products and compete with the great companies in the blogging space, I know that I can't do it. I don't think a lot of people know that I left for health reasons, but I did.

Anyway, these days UserLand is largely a company that markets and develops Manila and Radio. My concern was when will UserLand get around to enhancing and improving the "kernel" -- the large base of C code that runs Manila and Radio -- the scripting language, object database, verb set, server, multi-threaded runtime, content management framework. It's been several years since there was a meaningful update of that code.

Products that Manila and Radio compete with don't have their own kernels, they build off development environments created by others. For example, Movable Type is written in Perl. WordPress is PHP. Blogger is Java. UserLand's products are different because they build on a private platform. For a long time we saw this as an advantage, the UserLand runtime is very rich and powerful, and offered performance benefits. When a new layer came on, for example the CMS, when it got stable and mature, we'd "kernelize" it, so it would be super-fast. But experience in the market said that, to succeed, UserLand didn't need to own its kernel. In fact, that it was the only developer using this kernel may well have been a liability for UserLand.

Here's another angle. In 1987 we sold Living Videotext to Symantec, and along with it, sold them our products, ThinkTank, Ready and MORE. I appreciate what Symantec did for us, I'm still living off the money I made in the public stock offering, but the products died inside Symantec. I'm not blaming them for that, because it's very likely they would have died inside Living Videotext had we not been acquired. But some good products disappeared. To this day people ask me what became of MORE, and tell me how advanced it was, and how nothing has replaced it. It's a sad story, and a shame, that the art of outlining took such a hit. I swore this would never happen again. There are a lot of good ideas in that base of software that you won't find elsewhere. If it disappeared it would be a loss like the MORE loss.

To fans of UserLand Software it must seem inevitable that the kernel will go this way, it sure did to me. But I am on the board of directors of the company, and I persuaded my fellow board members that it would be in the company's interest to let the kernel develop separately from the products that build on it. And that's what I want to announce today. At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Not sure what license it'll use. There won't be any grand expectations of what kind of community will develop. Even if no bugs get fixed, if no features get added, if no new OSes are supported, it will be worth it, because its future will be assured. That's the point Ted makes, and that's my reasoning behind this.

We decided this quite some time ago, but waited for the right moment to start discussing it publicly. It seems now is the right time, or as good a time as any.

[Scripting News] I have to say I expected this to happen. I have enjoyed Radio but desired a few more features. Templates are easy to modify but hard to get right. Using CSS, creating valid xhtml, and scripting should be alot easier. Maybe if there is sufficient interest open source will save it from extinction. ---bill

RE: Battelle on Google’s S-1

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 14:01:34 GMT

John Battelle’s analysis of Google’s S-1 filing -- and particularily, the charming-but-stilted founders’ letter -- is fascinating and insightful:

The letter states, among other things, that

We don’t need to do this for the money

We have no plans to run our business to satisfy Wall Street’s need for smooth earnings predictability
We plan to give no earnings guidance, not at least as it’s understood on Wall St.
Don’t ask us to do so, we’ll simply decline the request
We’ll do odd things that you won’ t understand
We will make big bets on things that may not work out
We run the company as a triumvirate, so there will not be clear leadership from one person like most other companies
We bridge the media and tech industries (interesting), which are in flux, so we’ve chosen a two-class stock structure similar to the NYT, WashPost, and NYT that helps us avoid being taken over by those forces
We plan using an auction model, as it feels fairer and we understand auctions from AdWords
Don’t invest in us if this scares you at all, or the price feels too high
Don’t even think about asking us to cut expenses with regard to our employees
We believe in the idea of Don’t Be Evil
It’s evil to pay for placement or inclusion (a swipe at Yahoo)
We hope to bridge the digital divide through Gmail type free services and a foundation with at least 1% of profits and equity to help make the world a better place
Betting on Google is a bet on Sergey and Larry (this was said multiple times, making me wonder if there wasn’t some odd future blame being assigned here by the VCs or bankers)
This letter is our way of answering the questions we can’t answer in the coming months due to the IPO quiet period.

John Batelle’s Link [Via Boing Boing]

Bloggar Test

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 20:04:52 GMT

I finally got Bloggar to work with Radio. The hard part was figuring out the page to use since all my searches came up empty. So here is what I configured to make it work:

Host: 127.0.0.1
Page: /RPC2
Port: 5335
Posts: metaWeblog API
Categories: metaWeblog API - Multi

Earlier I had set up phpAdmin and Wordpress on my local Fedora box and bloggar on my XP box. I then configured Bloggar to post to Wordpress. Bloggar is now configured to post to two different weblogs. As you can probably surmise I plan on migrating away from Radio Userland to probably Wordpress. I am now going to look into updating phpwebsite using bloggar.

Wordpress

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 11:43:12 GMT

During a long lunch break from repairing the driveway I did a little catching up with my Rss reader and found a reference to another sourceforge project, Wordpress. It looks real interesting so I downloaded a copy. I have looked at Movable Type several times but have backed off for minor reasons. Radio works for me most of the time and is cost effective. However, customizing the css or pages is a pain and there are some MT features I would like to see.

Awstats and changing web host providers

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 16:40:51 GMT

I installed awstats on the fedora box to test it out. I am planning to move a couple websites over to godaddy.com and I have been trying to figure out web site statistics. I have a love-hate relationship with webtrends. Its fine when it works. Last year I am missing about a months worth of data on one of my websites. I asked the web host provider to generate the month again but I still got nothing. After a couple more tries a gave up. I am not sure whether the data is missing but I would like better control.

My plan on changing my web host provider is to add features and lower cost. I think I can get away with $3.95 a month for a low volume LAMP site. At the worst I may need to spend $7.95. My present provider, Interland, provides me LA service for $19.95. Time to move on!

The good news is I got it to work. The bad news is the statistics for phpwebsite does not tell me much about which pages people are visiting. I guess I need to read the FAQ and manual.

Gftp is fixed!

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 13:04:16 GMT

I forgot another tibbit I fixed yesterday and the day before. I have been using ssh to communicate with my W2K3 server and the fedora box while I am still working out my problems with Samba. The command line utilities, scp and sftp, worked fine but the gui ftp program, gftp, did not. A couple of days ago I figured out that I needed to check the sftp subsystem box in the gftp's SSH configuration to get it to work. Then I saw that a few directories were displayed incorrectly and inaccessible. The screwed up directory just happened to be the one I wanted to transfer. Now that is a real bummer. Then yesterday I noticed that Fedora had a new updated version of gftp available. I checked the release notes and noticed they had changed the default setting to on for the sftp subsystem. Better yet the new version fixed the directory problem.

More hacking with htmlarea

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 00:17:21 GMT

Some of the things I have learned already is that htmlarea and the Yahoo popup blocker do not get along. The popup blocker gets in the way of inserting images, colors, links, etc.

My hack screws up the Urls to ping textarea since I cannot be selective. If Radio had used an id for their textarea I could be selective. Oh well! I have never used the urls to ping feature anyway.

Hacking with htmlarea

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 23:54:42 GMT

Today I got a lot of stuff done. I have been chasing down problems with using htmlarea on phpwebsite. It didn't work as expected but I have it working now. The instructions just didn't work for me. Along the way I ended up retrieving the latest version using Tortoisecvs. To accomplish that task I had to figure out how to open up port 2401 through the firewall. Finally I hacked up my Radio installation to take advantage of htmlarea. This post is being composed in htmlarea. That is pretty cool.

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 13:09:58 GMT

On Monday Nancy told me they were going to get her cousin to fix our local Habitat affiliate's website. There are a variety of problems with the site but old data is the most prominent. It is basically useless. My guess is that about half the board sees no value in having a website. That got me thinking. Yesterday I created a mockup of the website using my favorite no-cost cms, phpwebsite. Phpwebsite is one of the most popular low cost content management systems. It is a sourceforge project that is primarily maintained by Applachian State University. Since I think I will use it elsewhere I viewed this as a training exercise. I had previously installed it on my fedora box so it was ready for customization. I spent a couple of hours grafting the best ideas I saw from local Habitat affiliate sites onto the menu for the new site. Then I customized the "clean" theme to add a new logo and copyright. I was finished. Although the site is workable as I have designed it, I consider it a prototype which demonstrates the major content and function requirements I consider to be important for the new website. It should be interesting if her cousin sees what I have done. It would be nice if we could have several people add content to the site but I think that he will create a static site. Ultimately the lack of consensus on the priority of the site by the board will doom it to being stale again.

GIAC: Global Information Assurance Certification - GCWN (Windows Security Administrator )

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 13:05:34 GMT

"To be listed as a GIAC Certified Windows Security Administrator, a candidate must complete a written research paper (practical assignment) to demonstrate their knowledge of the subject matter."

Wow! I found this web page by accident but it contains a treasure trove of configuration hints in the research papers. I ended up downloading and printing Jorge Ortiz-Fuentes's paper on "Does Windows 2000 security model get along with my Linux?" so I could learn more about ldap troubleshooting and how I could possibly fulfill my universal login quest between my Fedora box and my W2K3 server. One of the first things I noticed was that my ldap.conf on the Fedora box indicates that there have been some recent changes since he wrote the article and I probably will not have to recompile nss_ldap.

Shutting down SFU services I am not using

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 20:44:35 GMT

I installed Services for Unix a little while ago and things have been somewhat okay. My server locked up once or twice but I blamed those shutdowns on myself even though I could not see that I did anything wrong. Today I tried to scan a document into CorelDraw that I have on my server. I use CorelDraw infrequently and this has worked for me in the past on W2K and now on W2K3. Today the server locked up. I rebooted and tried again. It locked up. Now I am pissed off! After some research and a few more reboots I finally located the culprit, nissvc, or otherwise known as Server for NIS. Task Manager showed it was consuming 30% to 100% of the cpu. I tried changing the settings back to the default settings but I could not seem to get rid of the problem. So I shut it down. Actually I shut down Server for NIS, Server for NFS, and the rest of servers in Services for Unix console. I don't use any of them except sftp and it is not listed.

Msnbc webparts

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 01:17:07 GMT

I added two MSNBC webparts, weather & news, to the intranet site. We were running out of water in our cistern and rain has been forecast for the last couple of days. I typically check the weather at least once a day so this will save me some clicks. While I was at it I added the news webpart and a page viewer webpart for the Google search. My first choice for the Google search was the form webpart but I couldn't get it to work.

837849 - How to add an icon to Windows SharePoint Services to represent Adobe PDF documents that are stored in document libraries

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 15:00:58 GMT

"This article describes how to specify the icon that Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services uses to represent Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents that are stored in document libraries."

SQLAgent is not allowed to run

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 03:25:54 GMT

I couldn't get the sqlagent for sharepoint to run so I went searching for the answer again. This time I am writing it down, http://www.dbforums.com/t768589.html. Delete the guid and it is happy.

SSH for Power Users

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 13:45:36 GMT

SBS creates a group called Power Users. The default SBS installation puts all users into this group. I could not log in to ssh with a normal userid but I could log in with the Administrator userid. I finally found that power users were denied "local log in" in the default Domain controllers policy.

Samba & W2K3 Problem

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 00:49:36 GMT

I did not have this problem with Samba when I was running W2K but evidently I cannot use Samba's version of SMB with Windows 2003 server. I get the following message:

cli_negprot: SMB signing is mandatory and we have disabled it.
26595: protocol negotiation failed
SMB connection failed

Evidently Andrew feels this is a problem with SMBFS, http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2003-December/076388.html, and we should move to CIFS. The bad news is that CIFS is supported in the 2.4 kernel via a patch. The 2.6 kernel supports CIFS. I guess I will put this project off until Fedora Core 2 is released. I have other options if this becomes an issue.

NIS and Samba

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 02:50:46 GMT

Today I spent a lot of time playing with NIS and Samba. I am trying to finalize my connectivity between Fedora and W2K3. I have Unix Services installed on the Windows Server and it offers NIS. After playing with it and learning a lot more about it, I have decided not to use it. The key is Samba and Kerberos. If I get Samba and Kerberos correctly configured, then NIS would be redundant. The best resource I have found is http://www.wlug.org.nz/ActiveDirectorySamba but I do not have it working yet. The login and mount is not working even though I have joined the computer to the domain and modified the login pam. I am still researching the problem(s).

Installing SFU 3.5 on SBS2K3

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 01:54:04 GMT

I installed Services for Unix 3.5 today. The idea is to use authenticate my Redhat box against the Active Directory. I spent most of the time downloading and testing the tools from http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/. Those nice folks have ported over a nice set of open source tools. I downloaded Bash and ssh. I was very pleased to find they had ported over ssh and even more pleased to find that it works. I have been reading the ssh mailing list for almost a year so I have seen a lot of problems with the cygwin version of ssh on 2003. I believe I have NIS set up correctly on the server but I won't get around to setting up the Redhat box until tomorrow.

Sig Weber's Playground

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 16:54:55 GMT

Today I found Sig Weber's Playground and his xslt files for reading and formating a RSS feed using a XML webpart. This is pretty simple stuff except for the XSLT stuff and is equivalent to Leadit's version. I prefer the format of Leadit's version but would prefer to have ability to customize the feed display with xslt. Hmm...

My Firewall Policy

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 16:23:04 GMT

I decided to write a description of my firewall policy today. I have been tweaking it again to get the RSS Reader webpart to work. I think if I write it out I will better be able to see any logic errors.

General Firewall Policy Description

Allow computers in the local domain complete access to other computers in the local domain.
Deny inbound access from the internet.
Allow computers in the local domain anonymous outbound access to the internet with the following protocols:
1. HTTP
2. HTTPS
3. FTP
4. POP3
5. SMTP
6. NTP(UDP)
Authenticate the user using Windows integrated authentication for IP protocols other than the ones listed above.
Minimize the downloading of advertising and sexual content.

Firewall Rules and Implementation

Direct Access Rule – Direct access to computers in the local domain is granted via the proxy client configuration for the web browser.
Default Inbound Access Rule - Inbound access from the Internet is denied by the ISA firewall by default.
Protocol rule #1 – If the client is from the local domain, anonymous outbound access is granted to the Internet for the normal protocol set, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, POP3, SMTP, and NTP. Almost all internet access will go through this rule.
Protocol rule #2 – If a client requires access to an IP protocol outside of the normal protocol set, that client must be authenticated using windows integrated authentication.
Site and content rule #1 - Deny content from known advertising websites listed in the “No Ads” destination set and redirect the link to a local web page. This rule increases bandwidth by reducing the amount of unnecessary content being downloaded from the internet.
Site and content rule #2 - Deny content from known sexual websites listed in the “No Sex” destination set and redirect the link to a local policy web page.
Site and content rule #3 – Allow clients from the local domain access to all domains that have not been explicitly denied.
Do not authenticate outbound listener. I think this is a temporary fix to get the RSS reader webpart to work and requires that the web.config have a <defaultproxy> statement. This is opposite of what the folks at www.isaserver.org recommend but their recommendation does not work for my server. All http connections end up being anonymous but I don't care.

Getting Jan's RSS Reader webpart to work

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 00:42:43 GMT

I got an email from Jan asking me to comment on his Essentials webparts on his weblog. I really like them because they show what I have been working on. I set up a quick and dirty homepage to use them as a simple status report. I used a default template and just dropped the Navigation webpart, the Whats New webpart, and the RSSReader webpart on to the left side. Simple but satisfying!

Since I had recently reinstalled Sharepoint to fix an unrelated problem, I had to reinstall the webparts. So I made sure I had the latest versions and started off with the RSSReader. It looked easy. It had an installer! The bad news is that it finishs with an error.

========= WPPackager install log started 3/26/2004 11:18:39 AM =========
3/26/2004 11:18:58 AM: Error: Config file: 'd:inetpubwwwrootweb.config' for virtual server 'http://companyweb/' is missing or appears invalid. Could not apply required CAS settings to this server.
3/26/2004 11:18:58 AM: Error: Could not apply required CAS settings to virtual server 'http://companyweb/' during installation of 'Lead-it SharePoint RSSReader Webpart'
3/26/2004 11:18:59 AM: Success: Installation Successfully Completed

The good news is that the error does not matter!? The dll is in the GAC. The web.config is configured. The webpart is in the wpcatalog. Once you figure out how to configure your firewall you are set. That was actually quite hard. I decided to put my findings in a second post on my weblog since it is specific to ISA.

The installation of Essentials was quite easy if you knew the locations of your wpcatalog, web.config, and GAC. I found that I only needed to restart the sharepoint server to start using them.

More Spam Protection

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 21:20:48 GMT

Yesterday I renewed my mail account on Yahoo and upgraded to Mail Plus. This adds more disk space, a spam learning feature, and virus protection. Today I installed the latest version of Mailwasher Pro and turned on its spam learning feature. Both these products show a remarkable amount of agreement on which mail is spam. I am hoping these two products will help me get rid of spam and avoid false positive mishaps. I think the use of Yahoo and other web mail providers is a viable strategy for small businesses. Although my setup is probably overkill it is not costly or time consuming. Email that makes it to my PC probably goes through three or four spam detectors and at least two virus checkers. I averaged 156 deleted emails per day with MailWasher. The bulk of these obviously were spam. It is interesting to note that the latest average for the week is only 126. Maybe this is a trend.

Re-Installing Sharepoint on SBS

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 20:43:10 GMT

Today I finally got Sharepoint installed and working. Here was the plan.

Stop the Sharepoint database with NET STOP mssql$sharepoint.
From the Add or Remove Programs, remove Sharepoint.
From the Add or Remove Programs, remove the MSDE instance of sharepoint.
Reboot.
Install a new instance of SQL Server called SHAREPOINT using the Premium cdrom. When it asks, change the default disk location. Ignore warning message about SQL and Windows 2003.
Apply SQL Service Pack 3a to the new instance.
Start the database.
Run STSV2 and pick the server farm option. It tells you that you will have to manually extend the site after the installation completes. I got an error at the end complaining about FrontPage extensions on the default server.
Go into Sharepoint Central Administration and extend the companyweb site. I used the DefaultAppPool with Network Service.
Pick a site template.

I verified my installation by saving a document into Sharepoint and then bringing it back up. It knew who I was and did not ask me for a logon.

Re-installing Sharepoint

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 00:27:17 GMT

I finally gave up on trying to tweak Sharepoint to work and starting the process of re-installing. Guess what! The reinstall fails. It doesn't create the two databases. Maybe I am missing something? So I have downloaded STSV2. I think I will try to stuff it directly into a new SQL Server instance rather than go through MSDE first. I want to put the sharepoint databases on a seperate partition.

Along the way I downloaded the web version of SQL Enterprise manager. To get it to not ask me for my userid I had to give NETWORK SERVICE full access to the Microsoft.NetFrameworkv1.1.4322 directory. I was trying to view my MSDE instances. It didn't help. My problem was that I was entering the server name incorrectly.

Leadit.Sharepoint.Essentials

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 02:21:11 GMT

I modified my Sharepoint intranet site to use a couple of webparts from Leadit.SharePoint.Essentials. Jan Tielens did a nice job on everything except the instructions on how to install it. I think the Whatsnew and Navigation webparts on my main page are really handy. My intranet site is getting a little more useful than the ordinary file system it replaces.