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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Friday, January 31, 2003 |
The Motley Fool: "The software king's embarrassing infection points to greater security issues."
3:39:14 PM 
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I took advantage of Radio's offer for a free 30-day trial, and have enjoyed the system. While I've still got a lot to learn, I can see that it will supply my needs for some time to come, so I paid up today.
3:35:40 PM
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Thursday, January 30, 2003 |
Wired News reports: Sneaky Toolbar Hijacks Browsers "Internet users are mystified by a tricky browser add-on that installs itself without permission and defies attempts to remove it. Some are calling the program the most insidious thing on the Web." By Michelle Delio. Slashdot follows up World's Most Annoying IE Toolbar. I still think this is an issue where we expect too much from consumers. The SlashDot crowd does its usual rants of "People ought to know better than to leave the IE default security settings in place" or "Mozilla is better" or "IE is a security nightmare" without facing the reality that people accept the machine they are given. Maybe the 'default' radio that comes with your car isn't the best, but you don't have to worry about it hijacking you.
8:06:39 AM
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Wednesday, January 29, 2003 |
Saw a SlashDot posting for The Tao of Programming. A printed copy of the book has an honored place on the bookshelf.
8:51:45 PM
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Tuesday, January 28, 2003 |
Son Steve, who's earning internship credits from NHTI working on connecting his dad's company to the Internet, spent a couple hours this weekend swapping out the cable's older LinkSys router to be used for the new DSL drop, and swapping in LinkSys' new WRT64G 802.11g router/WAP combo box. After a few false starts, we were up and running: 3 wireless laptops, one wireless desktop, three wired boxes, port forwarding, 128-bit WEP, MAC filtering, and the whole nine yards. The WRT54G doesn't have the ability to write out logs like the older BEFSR41 does, but I'm looking forward to testing out LinkLogger on the DSL line.
8:30:50 PM
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With phrases like "it's become clear that this one size fits all productization of open source technologes no longer addresses these markets effectively." and "As we worked on Red Hat Linux 8.0 we realized that Red Hat Linux's lifecycle no longer made much sense" I'm afraid this response from Jeremy Hogan of Red Hat may confuse and inflame rather than clarify. RH 7/x was a great leap forward, to coin a phrase, and 8.0 rocks - solid, simple, clean - but to assume from the last three data points that everyone is now going to abandon the Linux way and completely rev their machines each year is brain-dead.
8:19:19 PM
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Robert X. Cringely, the person not the trademark, reports that SBC is considering following up on a patent which claims to be the original concept of having a static element linked to dynamic content. Um, I suppose that isn't explcitly what a hyperlink is, but I can't believe there isn't prior art...
2:49:51 PM
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Monday, January 27, 2003 |
It's good to see Microsoft recognize that some of their customers choose, for whatever reason, to continue to maintain a six-year-old product. Microsoft extends NT's life. The software giant prolongs some support for its Windows NT 4 operating system, giving the aging server product another 12 months of patches and fixes. [CNET News.com]
4:09:36 PM
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How many wake-up calls do we need? Worm exposes laziness and Microsoft bugs. The Sapphire worm that hit servers running Microsoft SQL is a wake-up call for anyone who thought the Internet had become a safer place following increased attention by corporate and government leaders. [CNET News.com]
8:41:26 AM
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Sunday, January 26, 2003 |
The Beauty of the Worm. A posting from Peter Kaminski to a mailing list (with permission): It's a thing of terrorbeauty, this Slammer/Sapphire/W32.SQLExp.Worm. Weighing in at 376 bytes of assembly language code, it is shorter than some email signature blocks. Shorter than the next paragraph. It fits entirely within one UDP packet. The packet goes into a Microsoft SQL Server box, and boom, the machine turns into a zombie, spewing the same packet back out at random IP addresses, over and over and over and over, running in a tight 23-instruction loop, cycling fast enough to fill the network it's connected to with the... [Joho the Blog]
3:18:51 PM
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Saturday, January 25, 2003 |
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Friday, January 24, 2003 |
Sprint DSL's Gaping Security Hole. An easy-as-1-2-3 admin password on Sprint DSL modems puts users' e-mail logins at risk, a hacker finds. Security experts say Sprint's solution -- posting a notice on its support site -- doesn't do enough to solve the problem. By Brian McWilliams. [Wired News] Nonsense. Linksys wireless access points come with security turned off and a default site id of "linksys." Most of the other APs do the same. Software installs with blank or default passwords and the "READ ME FIRST!!!" packaging and files shown to the installer tell the owner to change the setup. OTOH, if you ship with a random password, how do you tell the user? A sticker attached to the device might work. But you can still anticipate the tech support calls will double, and you'll need a new script for your front line support people with "Okay, now look on the package for a bright yellow sticker labeled PASSWORD. You found it. Okay, now..." Reminds me of The Internet Help Desk from Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. *Sigh* There are no easy solutions.
12:05:20 PM
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Wednesday, January 22, 2003 |
Attempting to reduce costs and avoid Microsoft's "Software Assurance" plan, Houston opts for a web-based office software system called SimDesk. The interesting story of how they got there is written up in USA Today.
2:07:26 PM
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Tuesday, January 21, 2003 |
Thanks to the 802.11b News site, a couple of great links to what's happening in the 802.11g world. I'm getting a new DSL cable dropped in for the home office, so I'm working out how to rearrange the existing networking gear. I decided to swap the older Linksys router onto the DSL line, and replace it with the latest and greatest Linksys 802-11g gear. It would be nice to be able to wait until the hardware was a little more stable (this gear is based on a draft standard which won't be finalized until later this year), but unfortunately real-world timing issues make it a tough choice: go with standardized gear that's commodity-priced but bound to drop in value, or risk the cutting edge (at almost no price increase!) but with an increased risk of incompatibility. I'm usually a later-than-early adopter, not a lagging-edger, but this time I'm jumping in, with fingers crossed.Long, deep comparison of Linksys and Buffalo 802.11g gear: The results aren't surprising, but they're well documented with good methodology. Pure 802.11g equipment can top 20 Mbps, but once you add clients or mix in 802.11b or even other chipsets, you start seeing degradation that's asymmetrical. The article is long, but worth examining closely! [via The Shifted Librarian][via 80211b News]
10:49:09 AM
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Monday, January 20, 2003 |
An outrage to consider on MLK, Jr. Day: A judge rules the X-Men are not human!
5:29:41 PM
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Sunday, January 19, 2003 |
Got to see Bill Moyer's show this evening copyright issues, on New Hampshire Public TV. It was a good presentation on the issues brought out in Eldred,but not a clear call to action on what to do next. There was also a great piece on "Responsible Wealth" featuring Bill Gates, Sr, and Chuck Collins, campaigning for the reinstatement of the estate tax as the most reasonable and progressive tax we have, essential in these times of deficit federal spending.
6:52:55 PM
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Reuters: "A top music industry representative says Internet service providers will be asked to pay up for giving their customers access to free song-swapping sites." [Scripting News] Let's get gun manufacturers to start paying for the damage done by gun violence. And tobacco companies to pay for lung and heart diseases. I don't swap music. I rip my own CDs for my personal, fair-use clause enjoyment. But simply because people share files does not support the idea that the would otherwise buy them. They'd listen to the radio, borrow a tape, or do without. The record companies aren't losing sales to pirates. They're losing sales because they're selling crap. To expect the rest of the market to support them, particularly those who don't pirate their wares, is offensive.
9:53:03 AM
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Sixteen below zero this morning; it keeps getting colder!
9:13:26 AM
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Saturday, January 18, 2003 |
Prior to posting my blogs via Radio, I used the Twiki software to blog on my tedroche.com site, where I've also got a knowledgebase of SourceSafe stuff and a business card-sized web site. I've moved the contents over to this server, for safe keeping and archive. There are some missing pictures and broken links, but the jist of the materials is there, and I'll get around to updating it one of these days...
7:20:42 PM
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Comcast must feel that having two million inconvenienced, pissed-off customers is less painful than just adding a few MX records to their mail server. Anyone got an email address of the folks in charge of Comcast, so we can let them know our feelings on this?
3:13:58 PM
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Titles and permalinks are a neat feature of Radio, but it's not completely clear how to do it. I wish the tutorials on using the product were a little more accessible, but The Answers Are Out There, I just need to go find them...
2:17:38 PM
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Doc Searls points out Larry Lessig's New York Tome's op-ed column, "Protecting Mickey Mouse at Art's Expense" in Lessig is More and emphasizes a portion of the column where Lessig proposes a fee for extending a copyright, similar to the current patent system. That way, owners would be inclined to release items no longer earning their keep. Could this establish a new industry of copyrights for sale? Potentially a two-edged sword. But it could bring back these works in accessible form to our culture.
11:08:35 AM
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Eleven degrees below zero Fahrenheit this morning. Brrr. The dogs decided it was a good morning for a long walk. Thank goodness for Polartec®. (A non-compensated, unsolicited endorsement)
10:42:04 AM
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 Mickey Mouse Speaks - an interview with the mouse on the Supreme Court decision to not Free The Mouse.
9:37:10 AM
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Friday, January 17, 2003 |
Bruce Perens is on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" with Ira Flatow. Tune in if you get the chance.
2:33:46 PM
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Thursday, January 16, 2003 |
SJ Mercury: Copyright ruling is a ripoff of consumers. Dan Gillmor. Sometimes I worry that people are oblivious to anything but immediate gratification. But I also sense that the public is beginning to grasp the scale of corruption that has led to incessant copyright extensions -- and will see the risks in even more theft from what should belong to all of us. [Tomalak's Realm]
1:45:31 PM
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Judge gives Microsoft 120 days to ship Java. "When Microsoft has the will to achieve, the achievement is great, and when it has the will to obstruct, the obstruction is complete," says Judge. [InfoWorld: Top News] The best quote: "We're not trying to be obstructionist, but it's not in anyone's interest for us to install some code in our operating system that doesn't work," Holley said. Gee, that's never stopped them before...
8:43:52 AM
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Wednesday, January 15, 2003 |
SUV Owners and Terrorism. "I've come to admire Arianna Huffington for her passionately progressive politics. Once a tunnel-visioned right-winger, she opened her eyes to..." [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] Dan has a legitimate complaint that the SUV <-> terrorist connection is a weak one, but I love the commercials! First, they are a satire on the miserable "Moral Equivalent of War" (MEOW) commercials, and second, a take-off on what the auto industry is trying to sell us. The commercials win, on a number of levels. They make us talk about them - any PR is good PR, right? They make us think why what they are telling us isn't right. Thinking is good. And finally, they do deliver the message that SUVs are bad. I love them.
7:31:18 PM
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Forbes: "Somewhere in Burbank a mouse called Mickey is smiling."
7:16:02 PM
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Supreme Court Endorses Copyright Theft. That's one way to look at the abysmal decision, announced this morning, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]. Outrageous! So, the movie owners get to sit on rotting reels of movie film. Copyright is the right to make money from one's work for a limited time. I'm no Constitutional scholar, but I can follow that. This is a travesty. If you haven't signed up already, take a moment to visit the EFF or Digital Consumer web site and find out how you can be heard.
7:08:38 PM
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Tuesday, January 14, 2003 |
Cool. I got my first link, and from no less than Doc Searls . Peter Thomas argues that perhaps AOL could be serve as a bad example to us all. Doc hopes they melt like Greenland. Another possibility may be that AOL drifts rudderless for a bit, soaking in their $22.95 a month per household, and somehow manages to redefine itself. It could happen. Look at IBM. The IBM of the 21st century looks to be in pretty good shape.
But the AOL-TimeWarner things ("you have pixels - we do pixels!") was a dumb deal from day one, imho.
1:58:42 PM
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Monday, January 13, 2003 |
Cut Off The Head And The Body Dies says Doc Searls, talking about Steve Case stepping down from AOL. I'm not so sure. AOL is great for those who don't like computers, don't want to know about computers, and just want their email to work. I think he overestimates the saavy (or the technical desire) of many users. Despite AOL's missteps, I think the momentum of having however many bazillion subscribers can carry AOL fumbling into the future. Sure would nice to see them become an Internet leader, rather than an embarassment, though...
9:28:07 PM
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Graffiti's Dead and it may just take the Palm with it. Faced with the marketing prowess of the Pocket PC market, perceived slow-to-market color LCDs, new CPUs and new OS versions, the loss to Xerox of a key patent dispute on their handwriting software could be the last nail in the coffin. The Slashdot reaction: Palm Kills Off Graffiti [Slashdot]. And I still laugh at this:
Q: How many Newtons does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Faux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup!
9:20:49 PM
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Apple objects to Microsoft settlement. The Microsoft competitor says an antitrust settlement between California and the software giant is more beneficial than punitive. [CNET News.com] Looks like Microsoft's $40 billion in the bank may be just enough...
8:58:38 PM
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The home (cable) and SOHO (DSL) network are being divorced over the next few months, separating the recreation and movie trailer downloads from the serious work (web sites and development) bandwidths. The home office is going to get some hand-me-down hardware, so I'm shopping for new router/AP hardware for the home. The 802-11g hardware, even though it's based on a draft standard, looks promising. LinkSys claims to already have a model on the streets. As the home network is already 100% black-and-blue LinkSys, this looks like the way to go.
11:37:41 AM
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 We have had a special couple visiting us this year. A cardinal pair have been hanging around the yard. Invisble but for their high "Cheep-Cheep" in the months full of foliage, they bring a welcome spash of color to the winter months, when all the other birds have dull black, grey and white coats on.
9:01:32 AM
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Sunday, January 12, 2003 |
LawMeme: "Google claims that PageRank is commercial speech, protected by the First Amendment." [Scripting News] An interesting discussion of the meaning of commercial speech, contrary to Nike's absurb claim of it's right to lie to its customers.
8:49:25 PM
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 I received Small Pieces Loosely Joined last week from Amazon thanks to a holiday gift certificate and sat down and read half of the book last night. It is an interesting introspection into this thing we call The Web, exploring the dimensions of space and time and where "there" is.
6:31:23 PM
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 Farewell, Christmas Tree. Finally got around to taking down the Christmas Tree. The lights and glittering ornaments are so cheerful on a gloomy winter's night. We enjoyed our tree and our new life very much this year.
5:20:20 PM
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RIAA Comes to Its Senses. I.e., RIAA Is Hacked Again?. The RIAA site has been hacked at least twice recently. But is this page a hack? It announces a new policy for the RIAA that sounds like it was written by the EFF: Dropping copy protection, dropping lawsuits against file-sharing neworks. .. Way too good to be true. And the fact that we can't tell if it's truth or a parody indicates just how absurd the RIAA's position has been. (Thanks to Seth Johnson for the pointer.)... [Joho the Blog] Too funny. Catch it quickly; it won't last...
10:01:18 AM
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published "Unintended Consequences," a review of four years under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The results have been chilling, for legitimate press, research, and the fair-use rights of U.S. citizens. I'm a member of EFF, and support their actions.
9:58:20 AM
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Saturday, January 11, 2003 |
Tamar E. Granor, former Editor at FoxPro Advisor, has a great editorial piece here on the marketing challenges of Visual FoxPro and proposals to rename and repackage it.
9:45:13 PM
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A Novelist Who Walks the Walk. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, an outspoken advocate of the free publication and copying of digital works, is putting his money where his mouth is. He's giving away his first novel to anyone who wants it. By Paul Boutin. [Wired News]
4:43:10 PM
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Nailed the Twiki problem. It was a rights issue. Just took enough flailing with CHMOD and CHGRP and CHOWN to get the right combination of rights and ownership. Now to go back through and undo the ones I don't need, to keep the installation reasonably secure...
10:17:26 AM
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Friday, January 10, 2003 |
Twiki update: generating the view HTML locally from the Perl script creates the proper response, so this must have something to do with the rights of the Apache user. I'm such a newbie, I can't believe I'm even typing this, but let's see if I can get it to go...
6:13:41 PM
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What to Do With That Old, Slow PC. Don't throw away your old computer. Some manufacturers offer trade-ins and rebate programs so you can recycle what you no longer want to use. By Kendra Mayfield. [Wired News]
9:47:04 AM
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I've used Twiki web content management software several times for in-house knowledge bases, always running on Windows 2000 and IIS. Last night, I installed Apache 2.0 and Twiki onto a Linux workstation I'm learning to use. As I'm a Linux newbie, it took about two hours of flailing with the GUI and command-line commands to get it to 90% functionality. More hacking later this weekend should get it to come around. I hope to be able to publish this as a wireless wiki for a conference I'll be attending in February.
9:33:04 AM
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Last year on this day: "If you knew you were going to be stranded on a deserted island and could only take one website with you, which would it be?" [Scripting News]
9:22:45 AM
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Rick Strahl: "The two faces of .Net (or how I learned to live with Jeckyll and Hyde)" Word from the front lines of development.
9:15:26 AM
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Thursday, January 9, 2003 |
Everything I need to know (that's "news") I learned from my News Aggregator - [Ernie the Attorney]. It's true - the News Aggregator is a wonderful tool for having your bookmarks come to you.
1:53:50 PM
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News.com views Apple's endorsement of 802-11g as "There's no "a" in Wi-Fi". Nice shot. The 802-11a standard just got delivered too late. When I was searching for wireless stuff a year ago, the 'a' hardware was just coming on the market, while the 'b' hardware was a commodity. What did it have to sell? Speed. My internet connection's only 1.5 mbps, the 11 Mbps of the cheap stuff is adequate. Yes, copying a grunch of stuff from one machine to the other should be done with a more bandwidth. So, when I need to do that, I whip out a CAT5 cable. Or go have lunch. Nothing in 'a' was compelling, so it fell by the wayside. 802-11g, otoh, promises backward compatibility and increased speed, win-win. My SOHO network at various times has had network legs of coax, 10 base-T and 100 base-T, whatever I could cobble together cheaply. 802-11g sounds like the winner to me, and Apple's endorsement helps.
11:52:35 AM
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My bad. The new button's on this machine's 1.2.1 version of Mozilla as well. Now, I ought to go dig to see if the Save feature I want is in there somewhere, too...
11:06:44 AM
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Wednesday, January 8, 2003 |
Downloaded and installed the new Mozilla 1.3 Alpha browser today. A nice new feature: a little New button on the tab bar that lets you create a new tab without Ctrl-T or going to the menu. Tabbed browsing is the way to go. I love Opera's MDI interface, as browsing the web is a multiple-focus thing: one link leads to three others leads to... a whole bunch of windows. Tabbed interfaces are a great way to keep it under control. However, I hope the Moz team will consider a way to save a set of tabs on demand - I'd love the ability to save a "research set" of links all at once. They have the feature on startup to load a set of pages, but Opera' ability to "save a window set" still has them beat. I love innovation and competition in browsers for real features!!!
6:31:54 PM
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SUVs Deemed "Uncool". Consumers are finding several reasons to rethink these gas guzzlers. [The Motley Fool] SUVs are uncool. For people who transport bricks and tools, they're cool. A mob of soccer kids, even. But a solo commuter on a highway to work, uncool. It seems like most of the traffic accidents I see in New Hampshire involve difficult road conditions (rain, snow, fog), aggressive driving, high-speed, and SUVs. Three tons and four wheel drive mean nothing to black ice. Good riddance. People who guzzle gas support our dependence on the oil industry, foreign oil, instability of foreign countries, and perhaps terrorism. (Okay, terrorism is a reach, almost as bad as the current administration's anti-drug commercials. Nobody's buying them, either.) Not very All-American, is it?
3:54:53 PM
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Tina Gasperson's review of Mandrake 9.0 is interesting for the lack of technical detail. Are we becoming so inured to the challenges of installation, or is it that changing distributions has become as easy as changing desktop backgrounds? It's wonderful to see that many distributions (RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake) are easy to install and use. But the breadth and richness of the desktop has to be matched with depth as well. In several cases, I've been greeted with the equivalent of "I'm sorry, I can't do that, Dave" when trying to configure a NIC or Samba or users, and when the GUI tool stops, there isn't a lot of help available. The Answers Are Out There, and I'm not hesitant to Google an error message or RTFM the HOWTOs and FAQs, but I like to think my resourcefulness is beyond that of the "average" user. We still have a way to go to integrate the ease of the GUI with the depths of control Linux offers.
10:51:47 AM
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Tuesday, January 7, 2003 |
Great article from the Washington Post yesterday on James Yorke, most recent winner of the Japan Prize, for his work on chaos theory. Chaos theory has fascinated me since I first saw Mandelbrot sets, and was reinforced reading James Gleick's "Chaos."
5:18:45 PM
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Great summary of the Steve show here and, of course, at the Apple site. New toys: a 17" Powerbook, a 12" Powerbook, a PowerPoint-Killer for $99, a ripping-fast native browser, new "iLife" branded i* tools, energy, excitement and enthusiasm. I think the faithful will be renewed. Best quotes of the keynote: At Apple, explains Jobs, we like "Innovation" - saw the slide several times - and "We like Open Source," explaining the khtml origins of their new browser.
5:06:59 PM
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 Louis Cipher wonders if Weblogs.Com will survive the blogging frenzy during the Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld in San Francisco at 9AM today. It did last year. But the network is bigger this year. I guess the answer is we'll find out later today. [Scripting News]. Well, Steve's spinning the values of the integrated digital world with iPhoto2, iMovie3, iTunes3 and iDVD. Impressive stuff. And the Weblogs.com server seems to be holding up pretty well.
12:47:48 PM
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Monday, January 6, 2003 |
InfoWorld claims that MSN Messenger outage affects millions. Cause of worldwide service interruption unknown [InfoWorld: Top News]. Let's see, 6 hours means, at best, Microsoft can claim a 99.93% uptime for the year, not even four nines. And it's only January 6th. I wonder what operating system they're running. Trustworthy Computing strikes again.
9:46:20 PM
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Sunday, January 5, 2003 |
Microsoft's Passport service was partially inoperative for three hours Thursday. We all have hardware troubles. But we're not all trying to sell Trustworthy Computing.
3:24:42 PM
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This is the week to invest in Apple stock. With MacWorld next week, we'll see an inevitable bump in the stock price as Jobs announces... whatever. Price rises, charging for upgrades, dot-one versions, it doesn't matter. The man with the reality distortion field will have the crowd wild at his every demo. Great show to watch, too. Apple will be webcasting the keynote. The 7th at 9 PM PT.
1:28:50 PM
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An interesting copy of a handout from Microsoft Benelux here on their attitude towards the GPL. While generally factual, it's not surprising to see the Microsoft interpretation lean towards their commercial use of IP.
11:36:45 AM
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