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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Sunday, November 30, 2003 |
Steve Gillmor predicts "Look Out, Outlook: RSS Ahead in 2004" in his eWeek column:
This is a game at which Microsoft excelsóthe waiting game. Clone, wait, collaborate, extend, wait, repeat, rinse, dry. But now comes RSSóand the rules may have changed. First, the enemy is now scattered, behind rocks, in startups, open source, virtual coalitions that pop up on IM and videoconferencing, and a myriad loosely coupled evolutionary steps forward.
I'd not count Microsoft out of the game. Despite their "Windows Everywhere" and Windows Any Way tactics, they do have the advantage of being able to place their solution onto 100 million desktops and then enhance, embrace, extend and extinguish until they get it right or discredit the underlying technology.
Check out Gillmor's predictions for future technologies. There's some opportunities there, if he's right.
2:22:44 PM 
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I'm looking at republishing much of the white paper and slide material available at my site as PDF. Why? The format is "Portable" readable in many browsers and platforms consistently. It's easier to print out in readable format. It doesn't take significantly more space or bandwidth than the bloated HTML of Word or StarOffice documents. And it looks better.
I'd really be interested in feedback on whether you would find the PDF more or less convenient, accessible or useful. Hit the comments link below and share your opinion, please.
1:10:41 PM
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Saturday, November 29, 2003 |
RSS doesn't have to just be about news, or blogs. It can also serve as a good source of information on what's new on a web site. At http://www.tedroche.com/trweb.rdf, I've just started an RSS feed where I will post changes to the web site as they are made. There are a substantial number of white papers and sample code snippets on the site, but many are not well-organized or presented. I hope to punch each sample up, and as I do I'll post it to the RSS feed.
The feed is maintained with some simple Visual FoxPro code I demonstrated at the 2003 Great Lakes Great Database Workshop, and I'll be glad to pass it on to any Fox developer interested in doing the same to his or her site.
1:20:15 PM
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Scott Dierdorf writes a great column in the Baltimore Sun this week, picked up by my local paper -- haven't found a link online yet. In it Scott bemoans the machine that takes more to maintain than it gives us back. In part, he says:
Would John Steinbeck have finished The Grapes of Wrath if he had to spend his time ferretting out the spyware from his computer? Would Ernest Hemingway have even started The Old Man and the Sea if he had been occupied with critical Windows security patches every two weeks?
Very good stuff. Check it out, if you can, and send along a link if you find one.
9:46:08 AM
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Friday was "Buy Nothing Day," but unfortunately, I didn't stick with it this year, the first in a decade or two. At 5 AM, I could be found outside the local Best Buy with Laura, shivering in the cold. We bought a laptop that's the graduation present for my son. What a miserable experience! An hour of standing around outside followed by a mad and completely disorganized crush into the store, and an hour-and-a-half of standing around to purchase the one item.
I hope it will be two decades before I shop again on madness day.
9:40:34 AM
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Friday, November 28, 2003 |
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke recently at a panel discussion of a Gartner-sponsored conference, and was fascinating to watch. He blundered and spouted and was nearly incoherent. The one allegation he said that stuck with me was the claim that, in the first 150 days of release, one version of Windows had less security flaws than Red Hat Linux 6 during its first 150 days. It sounded fishy and artificial and contrived.
"Ballmer Says Commercial Software is Better Because Someone's Rear End is on the Line" is an article in response.
12:19:25 PM
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A caution to those of you who might have deployed Exchange Server 2003: it appears that the Outlook Web Access interface may provide a security hole, not the first time this component has done that. It appears to be related to the disabling of Kerberos security. Here's one article on the problem.
I saw another article while browsing last night that linked the disabling of Kerberos to the installation of Portal Server or Services on the server machine, but I neglected to bookmark the link, sorry.
11:18:47 AM
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Brother Joe made it to Seattle on his humanitarian mission to Yap in Micronesia before being told to stand down, and then scrambling for a way back east on the busiest travel week of the year. Fortunately, he made it and got to visit for Thanksgiving yesterday. Much to give thanks for.
He also sent on this great column, "Gertrude Stein was right," bemoaning the monotonous uniformity of America. A good read.
11:09:19 AM
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Wednesday, November 26, 2003 |
Ars Technica has a quick overview of SUSE 9 that sounds pretty positive. They say: echo $TITLE|grep Linux.Ars. "SUSE LINUX 9 is out, and Linux.Ars has one of their surprisingly thorough capsule reviews."
7:07:18 PM
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David Weinberger, Joho the Blog blogs: Skim, Not Aggregate. "I don't want an aggregator. I want a skimmer. Functionally, the two are quite alike. But while an aggregator pulls together the stuff I want to read, the point of a skimmer is to let me figure out what not to read. I'm not looking to read automatic summaries because, well, they suck (see the next blog entry). Once I've decided to read something, the skimmer lets me read it in full. I just want help in knowing what not to read. (As far as aggregators go, I'm continuing to like Bloglines.com.)..."
Rather than skimming, I want an aggregator that will let me discriminate, in the proper use of that word, separating wheat from chaff. Perhaps based on a Bayesian filter, take all the feeds I like to read (and perhaps all the feeds they link to, and so on, spidering), and filter them for keywords, scoring highest those most like my past preferences. Even my favorite bloggers blog the non-sequitors of their lives, and while I like to read those occasionally, I want their dead-on, killer pieces to float to the top of my reading list.
10:07:02 AM
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Tuesday, November 25, 2003 |
Some good commentary on the (liberal) view of the music sharing issue and, as it says, links to slews of legal downloads.
6:53:17 PM
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Once again, Advisor hosts their conference at an expensive facility that doubles the cost of attending DevCon vs. the other conferences. I think Advisor is still marketing to a corporate, expense account clientele that don't patronize DevCon any more. Conference Attendance over the years shows a pretty clear trend. Well, this should have a postive effect on the Essential Fox and Great Lakes Great Database Workshop conferences.
VFP DevCon Hotel. "I just got my December FoxPro Advisor. DevCon will be at the JW Marriott Las Vegas Resort & Spa. Again, the dates are Sept. 29-Oct 2, 2004." From Craig Berntson's FoxBlog
5:44:33 PM
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For those who prefer the RDF-enhanced RSS 1.0 feed to an RSS 2.0 feed, both are now once again available for the FoxForum Wiki at the site of my RSS feeds, http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html. Steven Black, owner of Fox Wiki, had to rebuild the server that serves wiki content, and for some reason my little hack couldn't connect to his web service, although other developers didn't seem to have any trouble. I finally got around to rebuilding the application and RDF once again pours forth from http://www.tedroche.com/FoxWikiRSS/foxwiki.rdf. Enjoy!
3:10:11 PM
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It's annoying that every time I open Windows Explorer, I have to wait for it to render the 60 sub-folders and 65 documents of "My Documents," even though I know I want to browse immediately to some folder on my C: drive. Here's one solution: change the default location in the command line of Explorer.exe. Details here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/tips/august/bertleff1.asp
This will change the default page to the root of "My Computer," which at least on my computer, opens significantly faster. An explanation of the command line options can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;152457&
10:04:35 AM
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 Brother Joe has an annoying habit of flying off to some remote country when family holidays approach. I think it's just his excuse so he isn't volunteered to bring the olives. Seriously, Joe is a Registered Nurse volunteering to fly where medical attention is needed. He managed to do this last Christmas, too, although miraculously arrived home at the last minute from Guam. This year, Micronesia was just hit with a Category 5 hurricane, and off he goes. Godspeed and good luck, brother. Take care of yourself.
8:48:22 AM
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Monday, November 24, 2003 |
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Sunday, November 23, 2003 |
What a road trip! Knoxville through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and 50 miles of Pennsylvania on Friday. The rest of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and finally New Hampshire on Saturday. Good to be back home!
3:27:27 PM
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Friday, November 21, 2003 |
... begins with your foot on the accelerator. Heading home from a long-term gig. Driving for most of the weekend, so expect the posting to be light to non-existant...
11:18:30 AM
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Thursday, November 20, 2003 |
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Wednesday, November 19, 2003 |
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in
a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great
battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of
that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their
lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and
proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot
dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated
it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will
little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here
have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these
honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which
they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this
nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people shall
not perish from the earth.
7:28:50 AM
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Those of you living where the city lights don't hide the glory of the universe have a special treat the week: the annual Leonid meteor shower. One of my fondest memories growing up is sitting on my uncle's front lawn, overlooking a black lake, and watching the wonders of dozens of shooting stars. Enjoy the magic!
7:00:30 AM
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Tuesday, November 18, 2003 |
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Monday, November 17, 2003 |
Does anyone else see irony in Gates speaking at a casino on Microsoft's solutions for security and spam?
Seattle Times: Gates armed with Microsoft arsenal against spam. "Gates announced new spam-filtering technology called SmartScreen. Developed by Microsoft's research division, it will be included in all of the company's e-mail products. The technology uses new ways to scan and detect junk e-mail before it hits a customer's inbox." Link courtesy Tomalak's Realm
5:51:42 PM
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Sunday, November 16, 2003 |
Some of my posts do not seem to be making it to the server. I don't know why. Time to investigate some Radio support sites...
10:54:11 AM
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I've always had a special fondness for date math and trivia and supporting date and time data. I've implemented custom solutions for clients on various groupware packages. The Open Source Development Lab recently did some research on finding an optimal server that would run on Linux and support calendaring and meeting processing across several client platforms. A perfect solution was not found (when is one?), but they chose to publish their results to help others in their search, posted here: Cross Compatible Calendaring
10:22:49 AM
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Saturday, November 15, 2003 |
As all the other FoxPro bloggers have noted, Ken Levy posted his monthly "Letter from the Editor" on Microsoft's MSDN page for Visual FoxPro. The feature list matches pretty closely with that reported from Alan Griver's keynote session at the Frankfurt conference last week, and expands on the information previously released.
7:30:55 PM
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Scott Simon on the NPR Weekend Edition program used his editorial time to talk about blogs. He started with "Blogs... blah. Two days don't go by that a friend doesn't send me a link to a blog" and ended with "Plato taught us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Blogs remind us that the over-examined life is not worth reading."
Theodore Sturgeon summed it up years ago in Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." Most AOL Home pages are banal. So is most literature. Recently, in a bookstore, I was astounded to scan two bookshelves full of audio tapes to discover there was little I really wanted to read.
But consider it from a different angle. Few of us sit down and take the time to write a letter, longhand, in pen and ink and post it via mail to our close correspondents. Blogging is the new letter writing, the new journalling, the new diaries. And, yes, 90% of them are crud, but 10% are not. And while much of what we have to say is pretty dull, there are the jewels to find, if not the comfort in reading that the lives of others are not that much different from our own.
12:23:28 PM
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Friday, November 14, 2003 |
Some interesting conclusions that patching doesn't work. Not convinced that I agree. Patching may not work if the underlying operating system is insecure enough, perhaps. But an interesting read.
CIO: FrankenPatch. "Those looking to cast blame--and there were many--cried a familiar refrain: If everyone had just patched his system in the first place, Slammer wouldn't have happened. But that's not true. And therein lies our story. Slammer was unstoppable. Which points to a bigger issue: Patching no longer works." Link from Tomalak's Realm
7:42:09 AM
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Thursday, November 13, 2003 |
Due to differences in the way the RSS feeds are implemented, the FoxForum Wiki RSS 1.0 feed is broken until the wiki web is able to support Web Services again. Unfortunately, the site suffered a hardware meltdown and is being rebuilt, but it will take a while... Meanwhile, subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed for up-to-date wiki topics. There's quite an entertaining mix of information and opinion, one of the best sites on the web for things FoxPro.
2:56:34 PM
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Wednesday, November 12, 2003 |
O'Reilly Network: PTO Director Orders Re-Exam for '906 Patent. "In what could be good news for the Web, the Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examination of the '906 patent, which was the subject of a patent infringement lawsuit this summer brought by Eolas against Microsoft." Linked from Tomalak's Realm
Good news, I think. A patent restriction could be really damaging for many browser manufacturers, and the claim appears to be dubious.
8:02:10 PM
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It's the first Wednesday of the month, and that means more security bulletins from Microsoft. This month's come in two emails titled "Microsoft Windows Security Bulletin Summary for November 2003" and "Microsoft Office Security Bulletin Summary for November 2003" and consist of
- MS03-048 - Cumulative Update for Internet Explorer (824145)
- MS03-049 - Buffer Overrun in the Workstation Service Could Allow
Code Execution (828749)
- MS03-050 - Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word and Microsoft
Excel Could Allow Arbitrary Code to run (831527)
- MS03-051 - Buffer Overrun in Microsoft FrontPage Server
Extensions Could Allow Code Execution (813360)
All result in "Remote Code Execution" which certainly sounds like a bad thing to me.
You'll find copies of the bulletins at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/winnov03.asp and http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/offnov03.asp.
It's the 46th week of the year.
8:56:19 AM
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Tuesday, November 11, 2003 |
News.Com: Internet Explorer to stomp pop-ups. "Darin Linnman, a Microsoft spokesman, said that the company plans to add the pop-up blocking feature to an updated version of Explorer with Service Pack 2 when it's released in the first half of next year." Link from Tomalak's Realm
Now there's innovation! I wonder if they'll use the Mozilla model or the Opera model, the two browsers I use instead of IE.
6:49:30 AM
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Monday, November 10, 2003 |
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Sunday, November 9, 2003 |
Laura and I held off seeing Matrix: Revolutions until the Saturday matinee. I'm glad we had a long car ride home, so I could try to explain some of what I *think* I had figured out. Animatrix supplied a lot of clues that other folks didn't get. That said, the opinions on Slashdot are all over the place, in the posting "The Matrix: Resolutions" While reading Slashdot, I recommend raising the threshold to 4 or 5 to cut down on the amount of reading.
10:17:16 AM
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Saturday, November 8, 2003 |
Wired has an article on Wallop, Microsoft Research's experiments in blogging. Link via Scripting News.
12:38:11 PM
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In Doc's latest SuitWatch column, he collects an intriguing variety of opinions on the Novell - SuSE acquisition. In summary, this is not the Novell of past decades and they have their work cut out for them, finding the successful path from proprietary NOS vendor to OSS supporter. Let's wish them luck. Competition is good for the marketplace and good for innovation.
11:50:13 AM
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First, I found that I was misinformed in thinking that Fedora could not be installed as an upgrade over RedHat 8 or 9. It appears that that is not a problem.
I've successfully download all three binary and three source CD-ROM images for Fedora via BitTorrent, while simultaneously passing them on to others, acting as part of the solution to the problem. I plan to install them on the test workstation laptop this coming week, and then the in-house intranet server should that go well.
Fedora is getting a good reception, so far. Ars Technica said nice things about it here. I'll give it a try and tell you my experiences.
11:47:10 AM
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Friday, November 7, 2003 |
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Thursday, November 6, 2003 |
Check out the coverage of the Frankfurt, Germany confence by Hans-Otto Lochman and Armin Neudert posted here.
11:07:52 AM
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DevCon Announced. From FoxBlog via [Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions]
Thanks to Craig for monitoring for this.
Advisor has announced the next VFP DevCon to be held Sept. 29 - Oct 2 in Las Vegas. No announcement of the hotel. I think Vegas is a great location. I can drive there in about six hours. The hotels are cheap, food is cheap, rooms are cheap, airfare for others is cheap. Kudos to Advisor!
On a related note, Ken Levy has publically hinted that DevCon will be the official launch for VFP9. Let's look at the calendar and see how accurate this could be for release dates. VFP 8 was released in February. Typically, VFP has been on an 18 month schedule. That would put release at sometime around July. Ken also recently stated on the Universal Thread that the Fox team added three months to the schedule to allow for additional testing and QA. Now we're looking at October. The dates look about right to me for release about the same time as DevCon."
I would have posted Craig's original posting, but the links to his blog are still broken in his RSS feed, and I couldn't figure out a way to permalink to his posting.
Looks like if you're planning to go to the FoxPro DevCon, you could go a few days earlier and see what Novell is up to at Advisor's Novell DevCon, too.
11:04:06 AM
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Wednesday, November 5, 2003 |
Chris Stone, Vice Chairman of Novell, is interviewed here on the SuSE acquisition by Novell.
9:01:05 AM
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Tuesday, November 4, 2003 |
Swapped around a hub and a switch in the home office today, and one of the W2K servers refused to connect to the network. Flickering lights on the switch, solid link lights on the NIC, both LinkSys. Cold shutdown and examination revealed the card was older than the version of the driver; reverting to the older, proper driver brought on the Full Microsoft Experience: machine locked up, lost it's entire driver database, refused to load, refused to recognize hardware, melted down. Okay, not the full eXPerience: I didn't blue screen. But near enough. A few hours later and the original, incorrect driver is in place, and I'm backing up the few items on the machine not duplicated elsewhere prior to meling it down for slag. Or Mandrake, SuSE, something. Grrrr. I hate hardware.
8:03:30 PM
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CNET News.com - Front Door leads off with a story that Novell to acquire SuSE Linux. "The longtime Microsoft foe signs an agreement to acquire SuSE Linux for $210 million in cash, while IBM will take a $50 million investment in Novell." I'm sceptical that this will be a good move for any of them. Novell does not have a history of successes. SuSE was popular in Europe, with a reputation as a top distribution, but also a positive attribute of *NOT* being an "American distribution," despite the fact that contributions come from all over the world.
Yesterday, RedHat sent out notices that 'free' RedHat would be no more, with a renamed (and possibly incompatible?) Fedora taking over the "enthusiast" market and a "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" raising the price point for a supported, business-grade Linux.
To me, it sounds like the #1 and #2 leading distributions have shot themselves in their respective feet. This is the kind of behavior that a marketing company like Microsoft can take advantage of. Let's hope in the coming weeks that spin and damage control minimize the FUD sure to develop from these moves.
9:46:42 AM
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"In a Nutshell: All About Longhorn" John Carroll submits a special report summarizing Microsoft's recent Professional Developer Conference, which seemed to focus on "Longhorn," Microsoft's next major client operating system, supposedly due in 2003. It sounds like a completely rewritten OS, with legacy Win32 APIs as well as all new .NET interfaces. On the bright side, Microsoft is finally replacing all the groady old interfaces that drove us crazy. On the downside, what will the compatibility issue be like? Shades of the Win32s mess revisited. Let's hope they've learned from that. Linked from OSNews
9:03:40 AM
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Saturday, November 1, 2003 |
After an extended downtime due to misbehaving hardware and software, the FoxForum Wiki is back up and running. The FoxForum wiki is the place I go first when looking for an in-depth answer to a technical question on FoxPro.
5:37:57 PM
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