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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Sunday, August 31, 2003 |
Forty three degrees is glorious after weeks of hot, humid August
weather. The Hopkinton State Fair is going on next store, with wafting
smells of grease and cooking and farm animals., announcements from 8 AM
until late into the evening, mooing and baas and music at all hours of
the day and night. A wonderful ritual to end the summer. Hope your
weekend is going as well.
9:00:29 AM 
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Friday, August 29, 2003 |
Happy Birthday, Joe. My little brother's made me proud time and time again. Quite a great guy.
6:05:15 AM
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Thursday, August 28, 2003 |
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Wednesday, August 27, 2003 |
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Tuesday, August 26, 2003 |
Jake Savin:
"I'm writing in my browser, and loving it all over again. Writing this
post feels a lot like writing in Manila for the first time, and that
feels really good." [Scripting News]
2:54:45 PM
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Monday, August 25, 2003 |
No doubt, some will think "There goes the neighborhood." Not
surprisingly, signal-to-noise could get to be a problem if the
blogosphere has a new wave of immigrants. OTOH, though, with the
immigrants come money and opportunities and the need for new and
innovative services. Bring 'em on. News.Com: AOL launches blogging service. [Scripting News]
7:52:21 PM
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Dave Winer: "Tuesday morning I'm going to take the Do Not Deploy caveat off the MetaWeblog API spec. If there are any deal-stoppers, please let me know about them in the next couple of days." [Scripting News]
7:36:18 AM
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I've enjoyed his fictional writing. Haven't got to read this piece yet,
but wanted to link before it disappeared: "Cory Doctorow Boston Globe op-ed on Net politics." from Scripting News
7:03:00 AM
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Sunday, August 24, 2003 |
Back in Knoxville this evening. Lucked out and had my order from
O'Reilly at home when I got there. Three books: RSS, Essential Blogging
and RDF. Spent the flights powering through Ben Hammersley's Content Syndication with RSS from O'Reilly Press. Overall, I agree with the review posted
on SlashDot: great book, few weaknesses, eminently readable. Helped me
understand more of the technology and more of the politcal landscape.
Can't wait to develop some killer RSS stuff to show off at GLGDW.
P.S. If you're interested in RSS technologies, don't miss the O'Reilly search results for RSS. Good stuff!
10:08:32 PM
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Friday, August 22, 2003 |
Blogging wirelessly from the T-Mobile wireless connection at TYS. See y'all soon...
5:29:16 PM
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I've seen the rumor, the denial, the confirmation,... Now InfoWorld has
this headline on their page, but clicking on the link leads to a "Page
Not Found..." perhaps it's a conspiracy.
Microsoft pledges allegiance to Outlook Express.
Microsoft never ditched Outlook Express, the company said Thursday,
hoping to end speculation about the future of its free e-mail client. [InfoWorld: Top News]
5:28:26 PM
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Chris Brumme's blog. Microsoft senior developer Chris Brumme doesn't post often to his weblog
often, but every one of his essays is a lengthy, authoritative, and
candidly self-critical exploration of .NET and CLR arcana, the sort of
thing you might expect to read on MSDN (minus the self-criticism, that
is). And in fact, the absence of this material from MSDN is
controversial. Back in June, Dare Obasanjo complained about that. Robert Scoble's response was:
... [Jon's Radio]
2:10:33 PM
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 Logging
onto Radio this morning and picking a topic to post brought up a
graphical editor! Up to this point, I've been hand-coding all my HTML
in a plain edit box (I use Mozilla as my primary browser). Please forgive my trespasses as I play with fonts, styles and colors today....
6:20:06 AM
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The Ottawa-based software maker will be acquired by venture capital
firm Vector Capital, subject to final approval by a court in Ontario. [Computerworld News]
6:08:10 AM
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Longhorn Evangelist Debunks Professed 'Aero' Shots [OSNews]
Robert Scoble, technology evangelist for Longhorn at Microsoft, has called into question several purported screenshots of the next-generation Longhorn interface code-named "Aero." "These look like early demonstration screens, and not how Longhorn will eventually look," Scoble wrote in his Web log. "The
real "Aero" is one of Longhorn's biggest secrets -- I've seen it, but
can't load it on my own machine and am locked out of the server where
it's kept," says Microsoft's Scoble. "I am not even sure they'll show it off at the PDC."
Indeed, the screenshots are using icons from all over the place
(including a BeOS icon), which proves that these are just early
concepts/mockups and not the real/finished thing.
6:02:44 AM
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Thursday, August 21, 2003 |
An interesting essay linking railroad gauges, the Great Blackout of 2003, Sobig and MSBlast.
NY Times: In Frayed Networks, Common Threads. Taken together, the blackout and the worm underscore a far-reaching challenge in managing modern technological societies: the difficulty of reaping the benefits of networks - railroad networks, airline networks, telephone networks, power networks and computer networks, among others - while minimizing their vulnerabilities. [Tomalak's Realm]
4:51:00 PM
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A first cut of the FoxCentral.net RSS 1.0 feed is available for download and subscription at (where else?) http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html. It's the last one on the list, called FoxCentral.rdf.
Let me know if you have any problems with it, or suggestions for improvement.
6:40:48 AM
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Wednesday, August 20, 2003 |
Linux advocate: More SCO evidence flawed. "The SCO Group is zero for two in its efforts to prove that its Unix software was illegally copied into the Linux operating system, according to Linux advocate Bruce Perens, who on Wednesday said he traced a second example of SCO's disputed code and that it was lawfully included in Linux." [InfoWorld: Top News]
7:23:19 PM
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WIRED: PowerPoint Is Evil. Edward Tufte. At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple. [Tomalak's Realm]
2:52:30 PM
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The FoxForum Wiki RSS 1.0 feed is ready for more beta testing. It failed when there were no changes to process, a RETURN within a TRY...CATCH generating an error. Patched. The RSS 1.0 feed is the last set of links on http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html.
7:16:40 AM
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Tuesday, August 19, 2003 |
The FoxForum Wiki RSS 1.0 feed is ready for beta testing. Let me know if you see any weirdnesses. It's the last set of links on http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html. It validates. It looks okay. We'll rattle it around and see how it works.
10:05:10 PM
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News.Com: Microsoft's in-house sociologist. Q&A with Marc Smith. Microsoft has a big investment in online communities, and has not had until recently many tools to enhance that investment. What Microsoft wants around communities is what every enterprise does, which is a peer-support, knowledge-management application. [Tomalak's Realm]
7:29:02 PM
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The headline doesn't seem justified by the body text. A software supplier to the federal government will use Borland's tools rather than IBM's in bids on federal contracts. Whether it wins any or not is another matter..."Borland edges out IBM for federal bids" [CNET News.com]
7:28:04 PM
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Monday, August 18, 2003 |
Worked out a proof-of-concept design and got them past the Feed Validator this evening for an RSS 1.0 feed for the FoxForum Wiki and the FoxCentral.net new sites to complement the 2.0 feeds I already have running at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html. An intermediate (read: kludge) design will get the feeds going, so I can get more Fox content into the blogosphere's search engines. A new, sleeker, 2.0 design is my goal for unveiling at the Great Lakes Great Database Conference. It's in the napkin-drawing stage now, but I've got some cool ideas for a multi-object collaborative design. More on that later. I'll try to get beta 1.0 feeds up and running this week.
10:02:29 PM
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Dennis J. Kucinich traces some of the problems in the electric industries deregulation and how they relate both to the current events and to his career history. Interesting reading.
5:59:48 PM
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I wondered last week if Microsoft could deflect a DDOS attack. They couldn't deflect it, but they could sidestep it -- by moving the target. "Blaster worm attack a bust. A scheduled denial of service attack against Microsoft's main software update Web site did not materialize Saturday, as computers infected with the W32.Blaster worm failed to find their target." from InfoWorld: Top News
4:10:41 PM
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Sunday, August 17, 2003 |
Dan Gillmor notes that Microsoft is looking for several employees with blogging experience. My guess is that MSN, AOL and Google will all have blogging within the next six months. Who else? How about Yahoo! and Lycos? Easy guesses. From Dan Gillmor's eJournal
10:38:38 PM
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On my way back to Knoxville via Detroit. Check in later.
12:20:58 PM
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I've been trying to delete the PRE-formatted code I was foolish enough to add to my blog for two days, and it won't go away, even when I edit and save the message. So, I've deleted the message, and I'm reposting it here:
Keep reading those web logs. When's the last time you read your weblogs? Besides for the daily default.ida exploits, I recently saw the far more colorful NULL.IDA exploit described here. Keep those machines patched and keep a close lookout, friends!
12:20:06 PM
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Friday, August 15, 2003 |
Answering earlier comments on Ken's presentation, the XML/XSL editor he demoed was pretty impressive. Arnold Bilansky, who attended the day's training, said Ken spent an (CORRECTION: half-)hour demonstrating it to them, but he only had 10 minutes at the end of a whirling two hour demonstration for us. (Ken had to get back to Boston for a 9 PM .NET User Group Meeting. Good thing he was on West Coast time!). Here's what I recall:
- Color coded editor
- Support XSD, DTD and validates on the fly (little red squiggles under bad attributes and elements)
- Intellisense prompting based on XSD/DTD
- Tooltip prompts
- Preview window to view resultant XML/HTML from transform
- He also demonstrated a 3rd party SVG viewer (emphasizing that it wouldn't ship with the package) and edited XML and showed the resulting SVG. Impressive.
- XSLT debugging using F5 and tracing line-by-line through the process.
- Expected to ship in "Whidbey" (VS.NET.Next) second half of next year.
- Possibly available as a standalone download in the first half of next year, but no promises. (CLARIFICATION: possibly available as a separate download, but still an add-on to the VS.NET IDE, not a stand-alone product - tr 18-Aug-2003 17:08 ET)
More as I recall it and check with others.
I purchased both Sonic Software's Stylus Studio and Dave's WebSite's XMLEditPro a few weeks ago. It seems to do most of the functionality, in terms of running XML through XSL into a result, and showing how lines of transforms affect the output, but it doesn't have the slick Intellisense or tooltips, or at least I haven't found them yet. But it may be a good interim solution to look at while we wait for Microsoft to catch up.
11:20:33 AM
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Wednesday, August 13, 2003 |
Ken Levy is Product Manager for Microsoft's VS Data Tools. Ken's presentation covered much of the material presented at the FoxPro DevCon, blogged here and here. Here's the agenda:
- Road to VFP 8
- Goals/Overview of VFP 8
- Visual FoxPro 8.0 demos
- Visual Studio .NET 2003 overview
- Demos: VFP 8.0 with VS.NET 2003
- VFP 8.0 news and announcements
- Europa demos
- XML Tools for VS.NET demos
The last bullet point was the new one, but each of the points was enhanced with feedback Ken's received over the summer.
6:43:49 PM
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Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes You can imagine the SlashDot response to Microsoft's claim that half of all Windows crashes are the fault of third-party code.
Flamester writes "In a ZDNet Australia story, Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own. That is, according to Dr. Watson. The article also goes into the 'rigor in which MS tests their products before release'. "
I am not a technical wizard at the details of the Windows architecture, but my understanding is that there are levels of protection you can develop between the layers of code to prevent a wayward application from crashing the system. In a compromise of performance vs. stability, Microsoft has lowered that protection, and that's the source of a lot of these problems.
[Slashdot]
12:26:44 PM
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Ken Levy, Product Manager for Microsoft's VS Data Tools division, will be presenting tonight to the Boston Area FoxPro User Group, a last-minute change due to travel re-scheduling. Looking forward to hearing what Ken has to say on the state of Visual FoxPro 8, the recently announced Service Pack for VFP8, and the future version, code-named 'Europa.' In addition, Ken will be talking about Visual Studio .NET and a new XMl/XSL editor he's managing, scheduled to be included in the next version of VS.NET, code-named Whidbey, and possibly available as an add-on for the current version.
Details at http://www.bostonusergroups.com/vfpboston
10:49:10 AM
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Tuesday, August 12, 2003 |
A More User-Friendly Direction
Are you waiting for a usable interface? The Renaissance integration of disciplines that Leonardo da Vinci exemplified could be our new guide.
Reprinted by permission of MIT Press. Excerpt from Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies. Copyright 2002, by Ben Shneiderman; All Rights Reserved.
Link from Tomalak's Realm
8:32:46 PM
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Ars Technica posts Killing the music: who's the real enemy here? with a pointer to an equally good BBC article. Bottom line: sharing a party mix with friends, or letting a friend check out a new album is not the same as selling mass-duplicated copies on the street corner. But you already knew that.
7:52:38 PM
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Jeremy Zawodny nails it with The 10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers. I am guilty of #2 and #8, but that's because that's how I chose to blog. Mine is an aggregator and ny editorial choices reflect the voice behind them. Most of my audience reads few, if any, other blogs. Link courtesy of Garrett Fitzgerald
7:33:51 PM
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"There was a story in the news a couple weeks ago about how IBM was planning to move thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of technical positions to India. This isn't just IBM, though. Nearly every big company that is in the IT outsourcing or software development business is doing or getting ready to do the same thing. They call this "offshoring," and its goal is to save a lot of money for the companies involved because India is a very cheap place to do business. And it will accomplish that objective for awhile. In the long run, though, IT is going to have the same problems in India that it has here. The only real result of all this job-shifting will be tens of thousands of older engineers in the U.S. who will find themselves working at Home Depot. You see, "offshoring" is another word for age discrimination. " Read the rest of the column.
7:23:30 PM
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A new worm exploiting an older Microsoft flaw. Read the story at http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5062532.html?tag=fdfeed
More details here: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5062524.html?tag=fdfeed
A friend called me yesterday to say the Internet was falling down around him (he also said it was a buffer overflow in an RPC call to DCOM, so maybe he knew what he was talking about). Another complained the user group boards were down and the ISP wasn't too responsive. It will be interesting to see what happens Saturday. With this much warning, can a DDOS be deflected?
9:38:30 AM
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Five posts in a few days puts Craig Berntsen back in the blogoshere, and on my blogroll at right. Keep 'em coming, Craig!
And how 'bout an RSS feed, to complete the circuit?
9:36:57 AM
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Great column by Robert X. Cringely at his PBS haunts on why SCO is doomed to fail in its persecution of IBM, and what may be really motivating the suit. In addition, a bit on Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, J.D. Edwards, IBM and DB2. And if that's not enough for you, a little history of Ashton-Tate, JPL, Wayne Ratliff and Jeb Long. All in 1700 words. Cringely rocks. Link courtesy of Craig Berntsen
9:06:23 AM
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Monday, August 11, 2003 |
One of the world's largest consumer database companies "hacked" "Acxiom Corp has suffered data theft (a kind of quasi-hack) that exposed consumer data on millions of people, according to this AP report. Acxion manages consumer databases for a huge number of companies, including the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Sears, AT&T, General Electric and Bank of America." Read more at Ars Technica
3:51:11 PM
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Cool! Moz is my browser of choice, but hand-coding all the HTML in my posts is tiresome. Looking forward to this update! "mozilla editing. Jake's got wizzy-mozilla working in Radio under OS X. Watch how quick I change from Safari. Incredible that apple and microsoft don't see the opportunity of browser based writing." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
10:40:52 AM
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Great weekend. Spent Sunday on a Boston Harbor Historical Cruise that was scenic, informative and fun. Despite a little sprinkle when we were starting out, weather was pleasant. Saw Castle Island, the Constitution (Old Ironsides, not the document), the piers of South and East Boston, Spectacle Island, Deer Island, Pier Park, and the great Boston skyline. Wrapped it up with lunch and desserts in Quincy Market. A fun trip.
8:18:17 AM
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Sunday, August 10, 2003 |
A good friend is in town and I have an excuse to play tourist. Gone for the day.
8:26:09 AM
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Saturday, August 9, 2003 |
Not a news flash to some, but perhaps others: the 802.11g spec, poorly referred to as "54 mbps" is really a measure of best possible radio speed, and not real data throughput in a real situation. Follow the link for Slashdot's like to an O'Reilly article with the details. Like "56k" modems, althought perhaps even more overhyped. The good thing is that the 'g' components are competitively priced with 'b' components. When 54 Mbps isn't 54 Mbps: 802.11g's Real Speed [Slashdot]
6:02:43 PM
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Interesting conversation going on at Jason Kottke's site on RSS 1.0 and 2.0. As a feed provider, my primary concern is shipping out content to the most consumers, and if I need to use two formats to do that, that's fine. My use of RSS 1.0 will be pretty limited to cutting and pasting similar fields from 2.0, I guess, until I find some better documentation on how to manipulate it.
I've found a few of the aggregator sites prefer or require one format over the other, so providing both is pretty much required. Looking forward to finding out if more advanced tool can be built with the more complex format.
5:57:13 PM
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Back in New Hampshire, gaining yet another travel story. Not the horror stories of 18 hours trapped in Buffalo or others I've heard, just the minor, dragging out annoyance of thunderstorms and delays and uncertainty and waiting and waiting. Arriving at midnight is just so much more late, psychologically, than 10:30 PM. Glad to be home.
A cart out on the tarmac stuck the jetway and ripped out their power cords. We were forbidden from boarding the plane on an unpowered jetway, so had to wait 90 minutes while they moved the jet and set everything back up again. A fully packed flight and a few testy infants didn't help the mood. Like I said, glad to be home.
5:37:34 PM
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Friday, August 8, 2003 |
Novell Not Dumping Netware "jerel writes "eWeek describes how Novell will still develop and support NetWare. The eWeek article quotes Bruce Lowry, a top spokesman for Novell as saying, 'The bottom line is no. The whole thing with Linux is an additive thing. We're not dumping NetWare, we're adding Linux.' NetWare 7.0 will allow users to either upgrade to the latest version of the NetWare kernel or move to Linux." I guess this answers any lingering doubts going around." [Slashdot]
9:30:01 AM
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Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Visual FoxPro 8.0. The Visual FoxPro OLE DB Provider (VfpOleDB.dll) exposes OLE DB interfaces that you can use to access Visual FoxPro databases and tables from other programming languages and applications. The Visual FoxPro OLE DB Provider is supported by OLE DB System Components as provided by MDAC 2.6 or later. The requirements to run the Visual FoxPro OLE DB Provider are the same as for Visual FoxPro 8.0. This free download version of the Visual FoxPro OLE DB Provider is a updated version from the one included in Visual FoxPro 8.0. [FoxCentral.Net]
8:31:57 AM
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Thursday, August 7, 2003 |
Following the purchase of Ximian announced earlier this week, Novell execs are floating trial balloons about moving all of the Netware services to a Linux base, off their proprietary OS. Sounds like a win-win to me: Novell gets a larger base of customers to sell their services to, and customers can get support for the underlying OS from a wider array of service providers. See the link to the article and commentary on Slashdot: Novell To Cease NetWare Development?
8:41:39 AM
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Wednesday, August 6, 2003 |
Way back when when I was on submarines, we didn't have no fancy com-pu-ters. 'Course, they hadn't invented Macs yet... Navy to draft Linux-powered Macs. A company that specializes in running Linux on Macs says it has landed a deal to supply the U.S. Navy with 260 Apple Xserve servers. [CNET News.com]
9:07:24 PM
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