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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Thursday, September 30, 2004 |
Congratulations to Andrew MacNeill for not one, not two, but six posts on the Visual DevCon keynote presentation, given tonight in Las Vegas:
2:53:36 AM 
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Tuesday, September 28, 2004 |
The Doc Searls Weblog points to an article by David Sifry, listing their cascading troubles that started with a fire at their colocation facility. I went through a similar learning experience while I was at BugCentral.com and we had our servers hosted by USDataCenters. Short answer: you should have a local UPS on your machine with 'soft shutdown' software in place so that your box doesn't get corrupted when the rest of the facility goes down.
There's a Mr. Murphy here, and he's got a torch. David Sifry: The colo fire has led to a cascade of failures...
2:38:39 PM
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A special issue of CoDE magazine, called CoDE Focus, has been released for VFP 9. I know in the past, Microsoft underwrote these issues, though I don't know if it is true for this one. Great articles by Doug Hennig, Cathy Pountney, Rod Paddock, David T. Anderson, and more!
http://www.code-magazine.com/downloads/VFP9Focus.pdf
1:53:34 PM
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Thursday, September 23, 2004 |
CNET News.com reports Microsoft to secure IE for XP only.
Microsoft this week reiterated that it would keep the new version of Microsoft's IE Web browser available only as part of the recently released Windows XP operating system, Service Pack 2
Hello? Is anyone at Microsoft listening? What a great strategy! Let's abandon the 200 million customers who chose not to upgrade and leave them with software known to be defective. Of course, Microsoft will backport its Avalon and Indigo subsystems from Longhorn to Windows XP because they see the uptake of Longhorn as too slow. Maybe it's time for them to re-examine their business model and consider enticing customers to upgrade with carrots (like features!) instead of sticks (like abandoning them with buggy software).
It's your choice. Upgrade for $99 to Windows XP, a new version of the operating system that may or may not work with your existing hardware and software. Or abandon the "free" browser and run something more secure. Microsoft has claimed the IE will always be "free," so how can they demand $99 for the most recent version?
Take a look at Opera, Mozilla, FoxFire or Camino (for the Mac). These vendors haven't abandoned Windows 2000.
8:51:23 AM
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Alex Feldstein links to Rick Strahl's "Browser wars? Maybe not, but..." and Alex adds "Rick writes an opinion about the browser wars... I completely agree with what he says. I use IE at work (corporate standard) and the latest Firefox version at home. Although I personally like Firefox, I try to make my websites compatible with both... IE and Firefox both have some security problems, but IE's are worse. There are many issues that Microsoft has to address, security being just one of them. Read the full blog at "Browser wars? Maybe not, but..."
I'm surprised by the strength of Rick's writings, but agree whole-heartedly. IE is my last choice for browsing, after Camino, Safari, FireFox and Opera...
8:31:48 AM
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Monday, September 20, 2004 |
Television seems to be poised on the brink of making itself completely irrelevant, or reinventing itself into a fantastic new medium with the power of Tivo-NetFlix-RSS: thousands of hours of video-on-demand streamed from in-house servers could make TV as exciting as you want, rather than being stuck with a slow night of re-runs. Dan Gillmor writes:
TV and the Net. (This is also my Sunday column in the San Jose Mercury News.)
Media junkies have felt a small shiver of anticipation from recent press reports pointing to a linkup between NetFlix, the mail-order video-rental company, and TiVo, the hard-disk home video system. Maybe we'll soon see the NetFlix catalog made available via the Internet.
The idea definitely has some allure. Anything that lets us avoid a trip to the video-rental store, while simultaneously offering more choices of movies, sounds good at first glance. In some ways, it's the future of home entertainment.
If such a service ever does take shape, however, it'll likely include severe restrictions on what customers can do with what they've rented. The copyright wars ensure that.
More... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
4:02:20 PM
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With the Preview Release of version 1.0, FireFox developers and promoters set a goal of one million downloads in 10 days. They smashed through the one million mark in less that half of that - 100 hours! Join in the fun:
10:32:35 AM
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On Ed Leafe's ProFox mailing list, member Bill Anderson pointed out a PC World blog posting that in turn links to their German publication with an article that says that under certain circumstances, having Windows File and Print Sharing opened for your local network can also open it for your Internet connection, exposing your files to the world. Oops.
It provides a step-by-step to ensure your are not exposed. Take a minute and check your settings!
[UPDATE]
If I understand the bug correctly, the problem is that the firewall settings are universal for all of your network connections, and the settings are applied to "my subnet" rather than explicit IP addresses. When you're at home on your 192.168.1.* network, life is fine. But if you take your machine on the road and dial in via CompuServe, a T-Moble wireless access point, or a client's network, you are now sharing all of your file shares with everyone on that subnet. That's not a smart design. Each network connection should have it's own settings, so you can open File and Print shares in trusted settings and have them blocked in others. And PC Welt's solution of assigning IP addresses only fixes those situations where the other connection doesn't have the same IP addresses, so if your client also has 192.168.1.* addresses, everyone on their network could read your files. Unacceptable.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the WinXP firewall is only a one-way blocker and you should really look for a better product like Kerio, ZoneAlarm or Tiny.
9:06:10 AM
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Saturday, September 18, 2004 |
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Friday, September 17, 2004 |
Along with bug fixes and security updates, the new versions of the Mozilla tools include the "Preview Release" of version 1.0 of FireFox, still my favorite browser.
The InfoWorld: Application development RSS feed reports:
Mozilla fixes browser bugs. The Mozilla Foundation has fixed 10 security bugs in its open-source Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox browsers and Thunderbird e-mail reader, with the release of new versions of all three products this week. Some of the vulnerabilities could allow attackers to run malicious code on a user's PC via a malicious e-mail, a specially crafted vCard or a malformed graphic on a Web site, project leaders said.
12:01:32 PM
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I missed it when it first came out, but Rex Willis wrote a very positive review of my "Essential SourceSafe" book. You can find the review at http://www.utmag.com/September2001/Page8.asp. I'm always pleased when I hear that folks find worthwhile snippets in my books.
11:49:10 AM
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Friday, September 10, 2004 |
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Wednesday, September 8, 2004 |
Accelerating the Delivery of Longhorn?. In an interview with ActiveWin, Microsoft Group VP Jim Allchin said: "We recently announced that we're going to accelerate the delivery of Longhorn by removing dependences on things like the new file system." Just goes to show one man's delivery by the stated due date (2006) is another man's "accelerated" delivery date. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]
The epitome of chutzpah is spinning the decision to cut major features from Longhorn to meet pre-announced shipping date as 'accelerated delivery!' That is, it is accelerated over the slipping date that they were not going to tell us! Wow!
5:28:14 PM
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Monday, September 6, 2004 |
OSS torpedoed: Royal Navy will run on Windows for Warships. "Combat management contractor opts for Win2k as base OS." from The Register
Deeply disurbing. I don't think that Windows was ever developed for, and carries a warranty forbidding, operations in such sensitive environments as nuclear plants, life support or warship command & control centers. While the stability and reliability of the system has improved vastly over the past few versions, it doesn't touch Unix and real time OSes for reliability. How long will it be before someone hooks up their laptop for diagnostics, forgetting they have a wireless connection to the Internet, and popups invade these systems? "Mission-critical" in this case means lives are on the line, and Windows is for home and office machines, not warships.
1:41:42 PM
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Hurricane Frances. G'bye and good ridance!. Alex Feldstein reports: "Hurricane Frances is almost past us (Miami). It is such a huge storm and so slow that it takes almost 3 days to pass. Fortunately for us in the North Miami area, we did not get the brunt of the storm and only saw plenty of rain and wind but only of tropical storm force (under 75 mph). We did not lose power and, although bored and tired of being cooped up inside for three days, are safe and sound with no property damage. Thank you to all the well wishers."
[Alex Feldstein]
12:27:40 PM
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