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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Monday, March 31, 2003 |
 After some sweet weather in the 60s in the past week, a little reminder that we're still in New England. Cold and windy in the 30s today, with a fresh dusting of snow last night.
1:57:26 PM 
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And I still didn't make the list, bummer. The list is available for free browsing here, but the in-depth articles and back-stories are for paying customers.
Some interesting changes. Wal-mart's number one. It used to be the Fortune 500 list was held by companies that made things.
Many familiar names on the list, a few former clients and employers, too.
11:10:04 AM
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Sunday, March 30, 2003 |
Amazing! First day I missed this month, first day since Januray, too. There just didn't seem to be anything that interesting to relay. My own time was spent putting the finishing touches on speaker's notes and slides for the upcoming Essential Fox conference, and puttering about the house doing Saturday-in-Spring things.
9:18:18 AM
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Friday, March 28, 2003 |
Tim Bray wrote recently that XML was too hard for programmers, and many people (most didn't read the article, I suspect) turned that into "XML Sucks." Tim, one of the co-inventors of XML, needed to clarify that it isn't XML that's the problem, in this article.
5:45:21 PM
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Dave Winer had mentioned an interview on NPR for blogging. I couldn't find that one on-line yet, but I did find these two on the NPR web site:
- Omar Wasow interviewed by Alison Keys on the Tavis Smiley Show, 13-Feb-2003, and
- Linguist Geoff Nunberg explains the phemomenon of blogs: personal websites that function as public diaries on Terri Gross's awesome Fresh Air, 10-Dec-2001
And, of course, NPR points to the requisite Iraq blogs.
It looks like Chris Lydon had a blogging show on WBUR's The Connection on May 5, 2000.
5:24:05 PM
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Big salute to Andrew Coates of Civil Solutions, Australia, for taking my hacked-together code to generate XML-formated date-time strings from FoxPro for RSS feeds, and he turned the code into a nice, clean, timezone-aware snippet. Both of the feeds I am generating, FoxCentral.net and FoxForum wiki (available for syndication at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html) now use his technique for cleaner datetime information. Still in beta, still needs more work in the parsing and error-handling sections, but coming along well. (from FoxForum Wiki
10:04:23 AM
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Thursday, March 27, 2003 |
Publishing a project weblog.
Configuring Movable Type
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A couple of years ago I predicted that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
... [Jon's Radio]
1:33:27 PM
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Gartner's opinion of Microsoft's strategies against the open source movement are in this ZDNet article. Bear in mind that Gartner does not have a 100% batting record. Of course, neither do I :). Enterprises will see major changes in Microsoftís competitive strategy as Linux and other open-source software continue to erode Microsoft's traditional sources of income. Don't expect Microsoft's bundling strategies to continue as before, and don't expect it to support Linux before 2006 at least -- if ever.
10:24:46 AM
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A great meeting last night! Guy Pardoe wrapped up the year-long early session discussions on "Application Development Strategies." If you didn't attend, you missed a great series, which we will be repeating, with variation. The idea behing the early evening sessions (6 - 7 PM) was to discuss all of the aspects of application development, from initial contact with the client, through contract negotiations, specifications, choices of tools, assembly, construction, project management, quality assurance, final acceptance, and on-going maintenance. Whew! Needless to say, volumes have been written on the subject, and we could only gloss the surface in one-hour sessions, but there was a lively give-and-take and sharing of ideas at each of the sessions. Notes of what went on at each session are kept in a Yahoo! group for the BAFUG. Should we make these publicly available? We'll have to consider if there are other issues that might prevent it.
Next month we consider where to take the early evening meetings from here. A brainstorming session on what the members of the group want next. Should be a hopping session!
10:06:02 AM
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Wednesday, March 26, 2003 |
 Just got email and a FedEx tracking number that VFP 8.0 was on it's way to me. Yahoo! (™)
10:38:24 AM
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... I'm looking at using Rick Strahl's free wwXML classes as the basis for the next revision of RSS feeds for FoxCentral.net. Rick's classes are clean and offer simple high-level interfaces for doing a lot of the processing I have been doing the hard way. Looking forward to seeing the results!
10:17:24 AM
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... meeting tonight. Details at http://www.bostonusergroups.com/vfpboston. Guy Pardoe will be continuing his excellent "Application Development Strategies" roundtable discussions from 6 to 7 PM. AppDevStrat discussions are highly interactive, well-moderated, and produce a lot of interesting information. We're archiving the discussion transcripts on the web, using the http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bafug group collaboration software. Apply for membership there if you're interested.
Guy also takes the podium for the main meeting, where he will demonstrate moving FoxPro data over the web using WebConnection.
Should be an informative and entertaining evening.
10:15:29 AM
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Tuesday, March 25, 2003 |
Ed Leafe has opened up the OpenTech forum so that new posts appear in an RSS file located here: http://leafe.com/opentech.xml. Let's see if we can avoid drowning in FoxPro forum posts...
8:53:19 PM
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This technology stuff is hard. The deeper and more complex it gets, the less people are going to be able to follow you. Sean has a great illustration here: Sean McGrath: "By the time you hit the RDF triples, all but four people in the room are tidying the hard disks of their laptops or updating their blogs." Source: Scripting News
3:49:02 PM
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Monday, March 24, 2003 |
That's the last dime Office Depot gets from me. Forcing their vendors to raise their costs by signing up for a logo certification! It's not only outrageous, I suspect that it's collusion, too. Well, Staples and Best Buy will get more of my business from here on out. Lets' see.... we've got six machines in the home office, and only one runs XP. Hmmm.
Why Not to Shop at Office Depot. The Inquirer: Microsoft logo scheme means Office Depot won't sell non-compliant XP products. Only products that conform to Microsoft's Designed... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
8:53:08 PM
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Like our word processors, our stereos, our video cameras, there are so many features of Radio that I doubt I use 10% of them. Here's a helpful link to access a few more: "One year ago today, a text editing cheat sheet for Radio." from Scripting News
9:41:47 AM
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Sunday, March 23, 2003 |
Extensive testing by Paul McNett seems to indicate that:
- VFP running under Wine locks tables and records properly,
- Multiple instances of VFP or other applications under the same instance of Wine respect each other's locks,
- VFP clients on Windows can properly lock records and files on a Samba share or a native Windows share,
- VFP clients under Wine do respect locking when sharing files via NFS,
- VFP clients running under Wine will not see locks on SMB (Samba or Windows) shares because the outgoing SMBClient does not understand locks.
So, all is not lost, nor is it won, just yet. Wine is doing it's thing properly. Samba needs to learn the Windows Way of locking. So, if you are looking at transitioning existing Windows systems to Linux:
- Consider moving to client-server, which eliminates all the locking issues, and gives you increased scalability, reliability and other - ilities, OR:
- Put the DBF files on a Samba share, and access them via SMB (the native networking) from Windows clients, and via NFS from the Linux clients.
With the rich assortment of data servers available for Linux, I'm inclined to strategy #1 for new systems, but strategy #2 for existing DBF-based systems, to simplify the transition. Once the existing systems were working without a hitch under plan #2, I'd propose plan #1 for the next major upgrade of the system.
8:50:14 PM
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Ars Technica features a discussion that Microsoft server release schedule uncertain (from Ars Technica). I attended a Windows User Group meeting last month where Steve Carbone, a local Microsoft rep, explained that Windows server OSes needed to change on a longer cycle to accomodate admins in large shops with muilt-year rollout plans, while client OSes could change more rapidly. With Win NT, they rolled them out separately, and people complained they got one without the other. With Win2K, they released them together, and people complained there was too much to change at once, Win XP, they released the workstation separate from Windows Server 2003, and people complained. What's the constant here? You're not going to satisfy all of the people all of the time.
1:30:36 PM
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Saturday, March 22, 2003 |
 Paul McNett has been leading the charge to get VFP working on Linux. Here's his website, and here's an article he recently published in FoxTalk. There are still some limitations, like the locking issues in the last post, but there are work-arounds to those, too (using client-server data rather than local files), but the Wine project is still in alpha and the progress is exciting.
Click the little picture on the right for a large (1600x1200, 320kb) screen shot of VFP running on the Linux desktop.
6:30:18 PM
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Looks like we may have celebrated a bit too soon. The Wine project, an environment (not a slow emulator!) that lets Win32 programs run on non-Windows OSes (Linux, primarily), announced support for file locking that *should have* meant that Visual FoxPro, Access, Delphi, Office, and many other applications that depend on file locking would have another chunk of functionality working. Unfortunately, the problem is fixed but not fixed, and I'm still trying to sort out the details. It seems that Wine is doing it's part - two VFP applications running on the same Wine session will respect each other's file locks, but Samba, the SMB/CIFS emulator that lets Linux present network shares in Windows Neighborhood, does not support those locks over the network. Locking does seem to work on NFS shares. More as I figure it out...
6:15:23 PM
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Friday, March 21, 2003 |
Steve and I try to catch a movie at the theater at least once a month. The trailers are an important part of the preparation and of the experience. Tease, Thrill or Scare 'Em, You Have to Snare 'Em. "Movie trailers embody the great promise of modern consumerist entertainment: that there will always be more." By A. O. Scott. at the New York Times: Business
9:30:28 AM
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Thursday, March 20, 2003 |
 The "What's New in VFP8 book is following right behind the product, with an expected shipping date of March 24th. Friends and collaborators Doug Henning and Tamar Granor have written this one. Looking forward to it!
9:03:36 PM
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News.com on RSS traction. "News.com ran this piece about growth in the use of RSS as a non-news format. This is a theme many of us are tracking. What will be the first truly broad killer app to use this?" from Jeremy Allaire's Radio
The news.com piece makes the good point that RSS has nothing to do with blogs. It is a generic mechanism for pushing notices onto the web in a publish-and-subscribe metaphor. With a standardized format (okay, four), sites can easily be written to gather and process many of these RSS notices. There's an opportunity there, folks. Wish I could work it out.
8:44:55 PM
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If you're still looking for a great opportunity in the rapidly expanding blogosphere, consider the area of searching and cataloging. In this entry, Dave Aiello compares rssSearch and Feedster for features (Hint: try searching for "FoxPro" in both of them.)
8:12:14 PM
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Just got word from http://www.foxtoolbox.com that they have shipping confirmation that Visual FoxPro boxes are on their way. FTB seems like a good company, run by a couple of FoxPro guys I've met, and they are offering very competitive prices on VFP upgrades and full versions. In addition, they promise to contribute 3% of their sales to VFP user groups. If you haven't placed your order yet, jump on it! This is an upgrade worth getting.
6:08:19 PM
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According to the Boston Globe, Cisco is acquiring Linksys for a cool half-billion dollars. Our home office and home is black-and-purple LinkSys routers, wireless Access Points, and network cards. I hope this doesn't negatively impact the quality of hardware and support. I've been very happy with LinkSys, and Cisco is new to the consumer market.
LinkSys is a remarkable company: privately-held, with 308 employees, and sales of $429 million last year, according to the article. That's pretty impressive $/people.
11:58:38 AM
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In what could be considered a major compatibility milestone for the Wine project, support for file locking was introduced into the product. File locking is essential for ISAM-style database applications like Access, Visual FoxPro, dBASE and Paradox, and is also used in products like Microsoft Office. This vastly increases the utility of those tools on the Wine platform. Exciting progress!
10:15:17 AM
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If you're like me, you probably have a box of 12" vinyl LPs around somewhere, even though you may not have the ability to play with them - for me, the cover art and memories are worth the space they take up. One of these days, I promise myself, I'll get around to digitizing them. And the photo albums. And the cassettes. And the video tapes, VHS and 8 mm. Ya, right. Well, onto that list you can now add The Ars Technica Guide to Video Capturing (from Ars Technica)
10:09:31 AM
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Garrett's found a news aggregator that integrates into IE in this blog entry: "The Simple News Aggregator for RSS Feeds opens up a news aggregator on the left of your screen, borrowing the Search Companion sidebar in IE. Cool idea. Got some problems, but I'm sure they'll go away as snarf's author develops it."
9:30:34 AM
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Wednesday, March 19, 2003 |
DAFUG - March 2003 Meeting. The Detroit Area Fox User Group (DAFUG) is proud to announce that Whil Hentzen of Hentzenwerke Publishing, will be presenting "New tools that will provide additional business opportunities for Fox developers" on Thursday March 20, 2003. This will be Whil's third stop during his "Fox Is Everywhere" user group tour. Afterwards we will be discussing other FoxPro and developer topics at a local eatery. Directions, maps, email contacts, future meeting dates and topics, and other details can be found on our website www.dafug.org. [FoxCentral.Net]
5:06:11 PM
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Jon Udell says the Secrets of the XML Gods are that they are cobbling together XML by hand. He cites Sean McGrath's blog and Tim Bray's XML Is Too Hard for Programmers essays. Dave Winer retorts that his tool of choice has a good XML compiler built in.
I'm stuck with a similar conundrum, only I am just starting out. Up until this point, I've cobbled together XML using the CursorToXML() function built in to Visual FoxPro, but that's only suitable for flat, repetitious XML. With the FoxCentral RSS File, I just manually wrapped header and footer elements around transformed XML. But with some other projects, like SMBMeta, I need to create truly hierarchical, multiple one-to-zero-or-many structures, and CursorToXML isn't built for that. I'm looking for a simple "Hello, World" example of creating a document with XMLDOM or another tool, adding attributes, elements and nodes to it. Anyone got one handy?
2:22:28 PM
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I've mentioned before I love the tabbed browsing feature in Mozilla. I often skim a hundred article extracts in my News Aggregator, rigt-mouse-click and "Open in New Tab" all of those of interest. As a few seconds allows during the day, I peruse those articles, and right-mouse-click and create new tabs in turn, closing old or irrelevant ones along the way. At this point, I have eleven tabs opened.
The problem comes with the close box. That dratted little "X" in the upper right corner will irrevocably, irretrievably close everything. I usually just mean to close a tab, or minimize the window. But, no, *whoosh* and it's all gone. Solutions I'd welcome:
- An "Are you sure (Y/N)?" messagebox. Normally, I detest these, but I'd welcome the option in this case.
- An option to restore all tabs when I next start Mozilla. In this version (1.3b), it can open the one last site opened, but not the contents of all the tabs
- Disabling the close button altogether, forcing me to select File|Close or Alt-F4 to close the main window
I regularly lose my work through my own clumsiness. It sure would be nice to have the computer help me help myself.
10:49:58 AM
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Tuesday, March 18, 2003 |
U.S. Army Web servers hacked. The incident occurred last week, when an undisclosed number of U.S. Army Web servers were hit in a so-called "0-day" exploit, one that takes advantage of a flaw nobody knew of and for which there was no available patch. [Computerworld News]
5:56:21 PM
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Woo-hoo! With transaction support, replication, speed, scalability, and a low cost of entrance, this should give the other database manufacturers incentive to innovate. MySQL 4 Declared Production-Ready from Slashdot
4:02:05 PM
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Happy anniversary to my blog. I started a year ago today. I've only used Radio since January 1st, but the older blogs have been scraped off that web site and are archived here in month-to-month format, as the Twiki Blog Archives 2002 link over to the right.
I've enjoyed this outlet for my writing, although I hope to start doing some more in-depth essays. On to Year Two!
3:59:34 PM
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 Blogging is a bit light this week, with some work keeping me busy, and my evenings absorbed with the SciFi Channel's "Children of Dune" mini-series. I really indulged my geek self this weekend and sat and watched the entire 3-part, six-hour original on Sunday, and I've caught the two hour episodes each night. It wraps up tonight.
Frank Herbert's "Dune" is one of the finest pieces of science fiction written, with complex ecological, scientific, political, religious and philosophical threads running through it. It is one of my favorite science fiction novels. The follow-on books were never as bright and sharp and innovative as the original, but the entire bunch were well worth reading. It's a good adventure plot, too. Cute chicks and lots of explosions, too. Fun for the whole family.
2:28:38 PM
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Monday, March 17, 2003 |
User 10,000 at PortalFox - Usuario Numero 10,000. It is our Pleasure to say that Didac Royo from Sant Cugat, Spain. It is our PortalFox Register User 10,000
Nos es grato informar que DÌdac Royo de Sant Cugat, EspaÒa, es el usuario 10.000 de PortalFox.
Thank you very much for all your support at 3 years of the creation of PortalFox Web Site
Muchas gracias a todos por permitirnos llegar a este n[dot accent]mero a 3 (TRES) aÒos de la creaciÛn de PortalFox
PortalFox Team
Equipo de PortalFox [FoxCentral.Net]
10:45:42 AM
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Sunday, March 16, 2003 |
64.35.112.148 - 3 days after I have sent them notice. I'll just block their address from the server.
150.183.190.4 - The Korea Institute of Science and Technology
64.136.144.62 - Dock.net, Camarillo, California
64.110.98.80 - Ichinet, Chittagong, BD
64.119.79.88 - TXKNet, Texarkana, Texas
66.255.146.107 - Connexsys, Atlantic Beach, Florida
Only six unique attacks today. What do other people do with these? Put the IP address on a permanent black list? Ignore them?
10:07:59 AM
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Saturday, March 15, 2003 |
So, we need a spare machine as a file and print server to let us straddle the transition of existing machines and make an on-disk backup of essential systems. (Current backup strategy is CD-Rs, ZIP disks, and duplicated spindles). The problem is that the machine with all of the hard disk space to store the backups is also the one getting the overhaul (including a DAT tape backup) so we can make the industrial-strength backups that we need. So, Steve and I hit the web, scouting OEM sites for a cheap, simple server. It needs a CPU, a NIC and a hard disk. Most everything else is optional.
So, here's what we ended up with:
- Biostar M7VKQ w/Duron 1300 CPU, integrated sound, video and NIC, $96 at Tom's Computer Warehouse
- Generic case with 300W power supply
- Generic CD-R (56x), floppy, 256 Mb RAM
- 100 Gb 7200 RPM Maxtor HD on sale at the local big box for $89
Total damages, with shipping $400. We'll dig a 14" VGA monitor, keyboard and mouse out of the cellar for the time needed to set it up, and then operate it remotely after that. Quite a good deal!
8:16:28 PM
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... and your stuff always expands infinitely to fill your space. A few years ago, when Steve and I assembled my last desktop tower development workstation (Athlon Thunderbird 800, 512 Mb RAM - woo-hoo!), we installed a 40 Gb boot disk and striped two 30 Gb drives on the built-in Highpoint RAID controller (KT7-RAID motherboard, for those of you into those things). So who's ever going to need that much space?
After several years of faithful service, the machine is getting re-assigned as a file and intranet server. Re-deployed and re-tasked, as the PHB in me would like to say. And I have to clean up the mess. And what a mess it is. With an infinite amount of disk space, you hardly ever have to clean up after yourself :). I'm a faily well-organized guy, so lots of the software is just where it should be. My 4-CD collection of movie trailers and their backups, my Install directory, with all the files I've installed on the machines. Backups of those machines which have gone before us.
But some of the little junk is amazing. The Install directory was 11 gigabytes in size. Something's wrong there. It turned out that I had full RTM ISOs of VFP 7, VFP 8, Mandrake 8.1, RedHat 7.3 and 8.0 and lots of other treasured little goodies lying around. Figuring out what to burn to CD for posterity and what to dump is going to take a while...
8:06:24 PM
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"There are only twenty-three problems in computing and we solve them again and again." I heard the quote from Larry Barnes, then of the "Bob and Larry Show" at the local Microsoft office, now with Accenture, last I checked. He didn't claim the quote as original and I, as well as he, may have paraphrased it. Does anyone know the original source?
It does certainly ring true. I have coded the linked lists, the tree traversal, the parent-child-grandchild, the move-the-program-pointer and pop-the-stack, etcetera, etcetera. There only only a finite catalog of problem patterns and we solve them over and over again. But I would like to give the original author some credit. Any leads?
10:19:58 AM
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Friday, March 14, 2003 |
Up and running. Seems like I had to add the MSXML4 and SOAP SDK files in order to get the web service to run correctly. So, now I have the first VFP 8 driven RSS subscription. Pretty cool!
The documentation was abyssmal. The VFP 8 help file stated that "If your application accesses only existing XML Web services, you must include only the SOAP Client merge module." There is no such module, or at least no module with a name or description even close to that. Much as I dislike installing unneeded glorp on a production server, I tried MSXML4, the SOAP Toolkit 3.0 redistributables and finally the MSXML4 MSM module from the InstallShield package that came with VFP8. The latter seems to have done it, although we all know that the former bits probably left parts of their "upgrade" behind, so I can't be sure it will always work with just the last step. It seems like there should be a better way to identify and resolve these dependencies.
The RSS file for FoxCentral.net is available for those who like to subscribe at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html. Feedback would be welcomed!
4:10:05 PM
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NCSA Mosaic was first released ten years ago today. The Web is ten years old. How much it's changed, and how much it's still the same. Interesting commentary as always at SlashDot
3:06:02 PM
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So, I'm plodding through the SOAP 3.0 Toolkit, looking for the clue on what component needs to be installed on a machine with the VFP 8.0 runtime in order for it to consume web services, and I come across this pearl of wisdom in the readme:
If you are first time user of SOAP, read the documentation.
Words of wisdom we should all live by. RTFM.
And if you are technical writer for Microsoft, spelling and grammar checker help lots!
11:41:51 AM
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Thursday, March 13, 2003 |
... and falls back to VFP7. It seems that the Web Service support in VFP is not only accessed differently, it also works differently than its VFP7 counterpart. Plan on re-coding your Web Service calls: ffc\_webservices.vcx is no more, and the new VFP 8 IntelliSense script uses ffc\_ws3client.vcx. The good news is that you can use TRY... CATCH, the bad news is that you'll have to, while you iron out the bugs. While alpha tests on a development workstation worked fine, deploying to the production machine failed, presumably because of a dependency with new Web Service DLLs. Out of time for testing tonight; hope to get back to this over the weekend.
8:50:28 PM
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Part of the process of rearranging the home office is moving a mini-tower system out to the server room (aka cellar) so that there are no more noisy machines in the office. Here's a machine I'll gladly check out: Hush ushers in silent PC [CNET News.com]
6:58:34 PM
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Klings's Korollaries. Suits and Geeks is Arnold Kling's latest, and a complement to World of Ends. Arnold lists Five Clues for Geeks: - Intermediaries add value
- Property is not evil
- Computer animation is not a killer application
- Bashing Microsoft does not make you smart
- Markets are not exploitative
Lots to talk about there. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
5:52:46 PM
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Wednesday, March 12, 2003 |
Chunking and scanning RSS feeds. "I've been somewhat surprised to find myself preferring the Radio UserLand aggregator to the others I also use: NetNewsWire and NewsGator. Last night I realized why: it's a matter of chunking and scanning. In RU, I scan and dismiss batches of 100 items. On a typical day, when I receive a few hundred items, that's just a couple of clicks -- modulo any additional effort to save or respond to an item. In NetNewsWire and NewsGator, it's more of an item-by-item thing. There are consolidated views available, but they display headlines (or truncated previews) only. Processing a lot of feeds feels like more work."
... [Jon's Radio]
8:55:14 PM
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SQL and XPath. V.S. Babu wrote to ask what product was executing the XPath-enabled SQL query I showed yesterday. It's a beta of the new version 3.0 of OpenLink's Virtuoso. I've refined the query a bit, so that it also picks up RSS 1.0 feeds:
... [Jon's Radio] Very cool. I checked out the site. I thought the killer graphic was here. Isn't this every protocol you ever wanted to connect? Wow.
8:05:26 PM
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Jon Udell talks about the promise of power and freedom in this entry: "To have a multitasking and multithreaded operating system, right on my desktop, for my own personal use, seemed an incredible luxury." Good points. Pre-emptive multi-tasking would be so much cooler if it was the user who could preempt whatever the machine is doing that it thinks is so important that it's ignoring our clicks!
5:20:25 PM
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Road Rage. "Neither United nor Air Canada appears to have any idea where my bag is, because they have no record, other than the tag they gave me when I checked the bag in Santa Barbara, of its existence." Poor Doc. Travel nightmares seem more the norm than the exception these days. Last time I travelled, luggage handlers in Detroit misplaced my bag, but fortunately I have such hideous tastes in colors that I could pick it out at 50 yards. I think travel is not as much fun as it used to be.[The Doc Searls Weblog]
11:29:27 AM
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VFUG March Newsletter Now Available. VFUG (the Virtual FoxPro User Group) just released the March issue of its monthly newsletter. Articles in this issue include one by regular contributor Les Pinter, Email VFP Reports by Phil Bartow, Understanding Structured Exception Handling in Visual FoxPro 8.0 by Mike Helland, Part 4 of A Basic Introduction to Automation using MS Visual FoxPro by Matt Jarvis, We Are All Visual FoxPro Beginners by Carl Warner, Wireless Devices, Part 3: SMTP > SMS > MMS by Tom O'Hare, tidbits on conferences, what's new for Spanish members, assorted URL resources, tips including Using the Registry Class, End of File Gotcha, Extended Characters Showing Incorrectly, Office Menus - Prevent the Automatic Collapse, Paste from the Clipboard and then call a specific keypress, and more. As usual, you can view this monthly newsletter online or download its text version and all other back issues free at the VFUG site. Not a member? Join VFUG for free at the site. [FoxCentral.Net]
10:32:58 AM
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Latest CodeRed variant lacks built in obsolescence. Same old tricks with moderate-to-low risk worm [The Register] Saw a couple hits in the web server log yesterday: GET /default.ida followed by a slew of NNNNNNN's. If you didn't see hits in your logs (you do read your logs daily, don't you?), perhaps you'd better check to make sure you're not infected.
62.212.113.49 - France, ADSL
61.222.207.187 - Taiwan
64.35.166.213 - Digital Solutions, San Jose
and on the second day,
64.106.162.220 - a customer of DataPipe of Hoboken, NJ
64.229.11.167 - a customer of HSE, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
64.35.166.213 - a repeat, from above. Five times.
64.35.112.148 - XO Communications, seven times.
64.231.108.158 - Bell Nexxia, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
64.252.199.131 - SBC Internet of Meriden, CT
So, I went from three to sixteen attacks in a single day. Hysterial media would predict the end of the world by the end of the week. Me, I think I'll just send email to the abuse aliases for the clients I can find.
Thanks to the ARIN WhoIs for the lookups.
9:48:22 AM
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Tuesday, March 11, 2003 |
VFP Etch A Sketch. Dave Aring's VFP Etch A Sketch combines the nostalgia of the classic childhood toy with the modern computer. Created using only Microsoft Visual FoxPro, the VFP Etch A Sketch demonstrates just a small portion of this powerful software development tool's versatility. [FoxCentral.Net]
8:14:39 PM
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In the past few days, I've had well-meaning friends and strangers forward on messages and postings from Andy Rooney, George Carlin and John Cleese. None of them were really from those authors. Check out http://www.snopes.com before sending along such silly stuff.
Far more seriously, an associates spouse sent on a warning and instructions on how to remove a virus that had somehow infected his computer. It was also a hoax, but a destructive one, with bogus instructions that removed the Java debugging manager from the machine. Folks, if you get a warning telling you to do something to your machine that you don't really understand, here's what you should do: check it out. Search Google for it. Check out the virus sites (http://www.symantec.com, http://www.antivirus.com, http://www.mcafee.com) for it. Call a knowledgable friend. Don't just blindly pass on instructions you don't understand. If you got an anonymous call telling you to shake up a seltzer bottle and unload it into your fuse box, you probably wouldn't blindly obey. THINK.
10:12:41 AM
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I love the Radio News Aggregator as a way to collect the news of the day, but the only thing it doesn't give me is more hours in the day. I've got 11 tabs open in Mozilla with articles I want to read, and by the time I've gotten around to finishing an article, and deciding if I want to blog it, it's rolled off the end of the 100 articles in the aggregator. Not a big problem for Radio fans, you simply reset the number of articles here (Note: link only works if you run Radio). However, there are still too many articles for my brain to capture, even if my computer can. Here are a couple I missed blogging before they scrolled:
Whew! Drinking from a fire hose!
Postscript: And did I mention that Radio rocks? Having changed my settings from 100 to 300 articles, all of those articles above that had scrolled now appeared. No time delay waiting for the queue to fill up. What a well thought-out piece of software!
7:06:26 AM
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Monday, March 10, 2003 |
Dave Winer's last post from his former home, heading East: 10:23AM. Logging off from California. Not sure when the next update will be. Seeya soooon! ";->" [Scripting News] Godspeed, Dave
4:57:04 PM | |
