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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Sunday, October 31, 2004 |
If you're tracking Steve Gilmor's postings, his address has moved: As I was saying. "The last time I posted, some four months ago, it was to my blog over on eWEEK.com. Podcasting was a gleam in Adam Curry's eye, Scoble had read 8,248 fewer posts, and John Dvorak was just months away from being totally clueless once again." Posted at blogs.zdnet.com | Steve Gillmor's Inforouter. Attitude seems to have remained the same... good to see.
12:32:15 PM 
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Saturday, October 30, 2004 |
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Friday, October 29, 2004 |
ComputerWorld reports "Apple Computer yesterday posted Security Update 2004-10-27, which includes an updated version of Apple Remote Desktop v1.2.4 running on Mac OS X v10.3." Article at http://www.computerworld.com/newsletter/0,4902,97020,00.html?nlid=MAC
The major fix seems to be for the Apple Remote Desktop Client. There's also an update for QuickTime on the Windows platform - Check Help | Update on the QuickTime player menu to ensure you have the latest version. More details at the Apple site, http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798
10:29:08 AM
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Wednesday, October 27, 2004 |
MySQL Version 4.1 Certified as Production-Ready. "MySQL announced the general availability of MySQL 4.1. Certified by the company as production-ready for large-scale enterprise deployment, this significant upgrade to the MySQL database server features advanced querying capabilities through subqueries, faster and more secure client-server communication, new installation and configuration tools, and support for international character sets and geographic data."
Posted from OSNews
11:58:25 AM
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Sunday, October 24, 2004 |
Operating System Security, a Clear Winner. Nicholas Petreley (The Register): Windows v Linux security: the real facts. "Reliance on a single metrics is a major feature of Microsoft's Get the Facts campaign, and this is perhaps understandable if we consider what the campaign is. It is essentially a marketing-driven campaign intended to 'get the message across' with data used to back up the message (note that Microsoft would not necessarily disagree with us here). However, by their nature marketing campaigns push specific, favourable headline items and magnify their significance. They do not necessarily (even usually) accurately reflect the underlying data, and frequently outrun it by some distance. And this process is actually easily illustrated by the Forrester report we linked to earlier on. Get the Facts pulls out the 100 per cent fix and fewest vulnerabilities bullets, while the report itself talks of its use of three metrics and (if we're doing headline items) also says: "ICAT classified 67% of Microsoft's vulnerabilities as high severity, placing Microsoft dead last among the platform maintainers in this [high severity] metric."
From Dan Gillmor's eJournal
9:43:38 PM
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Saturday, October 23, 2004 |
Joel Speaks. Microsoft Listens.. "Joel Spolsky, as in the Joel of "Joel on Software" fame, recently chatted with Microsoft Watch about his now-infamous essay "How Microsoft Lost the API War," as well as on lots of other items of interest to those in the Microsoft ecosystem." Link from Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley
I've quoted Joel on this blog and in other forums more than a few times. It looks like an interesting interview...
11:11:34 AM
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Thursday, October 21, 2004 |
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Sunday, October 17, 2004 |
Want to bite your nails right until the last minute? This is the closest race I can recall, even more volatile than the disaster of 2000. Watch daily as the site updates with the most recent survey results, and converts them into the only units that matter: Electoral College votes. http://www.electoral-vote.com/
7:17:13 PM
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Wednesday, October 13, 2004 |
Yes, it's that time of month again, the second Tuesday, when Microsoft releases their monthly list of patches. Quite a bunch this month, with several patches rated "Critical" with a threat of "Remote Code Execution" ("all your base belong to us.") Get patching!. Microsoft releases fixes for seven 'critical' vulnerabilities. Windows users need to prepare for 'patch Tuesday,' analyst says. [Computerworld News]
10:21:37 AM
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Saturday, October 9, 2004 |
A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective. A die-hard PC user's perspective on Macs, by AndandTech. [OSNews]
You can't find a more die-hard PC user than Anand Lal Shimpi, proprietor of the very popular hardware review website AnandTech. In the interests of fairness, Anand tried switching, and he was pretty impressed with what he saw on the Apple side of the fence. It's a long article, but worth the read if you're considered a walk on the wild side. His conclusions are difficult to sum up fairly, but he does think that more people should consider the platform. With Office (or OpenOffice.org) and Safari (or Camino), great mail clients and a lot of available software, the Mac should certainly be considered as a second home machine if you *really* require PC compatibility for something like FoxPro.
11:23:12 AM
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Friday, October 8, 2004 |
Doc Searls asks "Did the air traffic control center really have a "Microsoft server crash"?. This looks like an incredible use of a 32-bit counter of milliseconds that overflows every 49.7 days, without a built-in feature to reset it. The "neglected maintenance" is likely a reboot of the system. Now ask yourself: Do you really want to be at 35,000 feet when they reboot the air traffic control system?
The list of Microsoft Knowledge base articles that refer to various (or the same) incarnation of this bug are scary:
SNMP SysUpTime Counter Resets After 49.7 Days
Computer Hangs After 49.7 Days
"PING -T" Stops Timing Out After 50 Days
Print Spooler Stops Scheduling Print Jobs
The Rpcss.exe process consumes 60 percent of CPU time and performance is affected
X-Duration Values Are Larger Than Expected in Windows Media Server Log
Windows 2000 Terminal Services Time-Out Setting Limits
Contents of the Microsoft Windows 98 System Update
List of Bugs Fixed in Windows NT 4.0 and Terminal Server Edition Service Pack 4 (Part 1)
You might be able to spot Microsoft the Windows 95 and 98 systems; who would have ever expected 50-day reliability out of those systems? NT 4.0 is a little more worrisome, as the bug had been documented for some time before the release of NT 4.0, I think. But for Windows 2000? The RPCSS and print spooler bugs are not documented as fixed in a later service pack, but only a hot fix, although this may be a documentation issue. That is truly disturbing if such a known issue is still sitting around to bite programmers.
I'd really like to know how and why Harris Corporation was allowed to replace UNIX machines that did not have these problems with Windows machines where this was a known issue, and roll them out into the FAA's production systems, no less. That this was a documented issue is not an acceptable excuse, as the incident last month demonstrated, fortunately without the loss of life.
2:48:28 PM
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[CNET News.com]
is reporting Flaw found in older Office versions.
"A security company warned Thursday that a flaw in Microsoft Office could allow a denial-of-service attack to be executed on systems running somewhat older versions of the popular productivity suite.
Secunia issued an advisory saying a buffer overrun flaw has been found in Office 2000, and potentially also in Office XP, that could allow hackers to take over a user's system. The company rated the flaw as "highly critical."
The security firm said that vulnerability is caused by an error in the way Microsoft Word manages input when parsing document files. It said the flaw could be exploited through a specially-crafted document and recommends that, until a fix is found, users only open trusted Word documents. "
Reminder: only open trusted attachments. Reminder 2: there are no trusted attachments.
Never open a document you are not expecting. Confirm all unexpected documents with the sender before opening.
Better yet, send documents as text or RTF if the recipient really doesn't need all the features of a word processing document.
I wonder how OpenOffice.org would work with one of these broken documents...
11:38:46 AM
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Tuesday, October 5, 2004 |
Great blog entry here demonstrating how the London bus ticket machines were designed to thwart anyone from using them.
Link from Lance Knobel's Davos Newbies from Dave Winer's Scripting News
2:19:13 PM
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Monday, October 4, 2004 |
'iPod users are music thieves' says Ballmer according to this article. What a charming man.
12:43:10 PM
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Sunday, October 3, 2004 |
Dan Bricklin's updated his free ListGarden product to version 1.02, adding a couple of nice features and fixing a bug with the latest version of FireFox hanging. ListGarden is a cool little tool for generating an RSS feed using a simple web-based interface, ideal for a site with low volume and complexity.
6:12:19 PM
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LinkSys manufactures a router-switch-wireless access point that's a spiffy little computer on top of being a cute computer peripheral. The machine sports a 200 MHz ARM processor, 4 Mb of Flash RAM and 8 Mb or RAM. (Their new GS models doubles both of these). It is managed via a web interface. Not surprisingly, the device runs Linux. Since they base their code on Linux, the GNU Public License requires them to publish the source code as well. Naturally, this leads to third parties offering enhancements and replacements. Cool stuff includes:
- Sveasoft offers a replacement with the BusyBox command shell, DropBear SSH server and dozens of other tools, as well as many bug fixes.
- BatBox is a set of add-on tools for the standard LinkSys firmware
- Folks at SeattleWireless.net document the router on their wiki and have a fascinating website about creating community wireless nets. They also highlight NoCatSplash, an "Open Public Network Gateway Daemon" in case you plan to offer a community site with a sign-on or "I Agree" click-through.
- OpenWrt takes a different tack, offering a base distribution on top of which you can customize your own tools
- Portless Networks offer their eWrt distribution, a fork from an earlier version of the Sveasoft software, with a goal of developing a stable distribution for ISPs and other network providers.
- HyperWRT focuses on boosting the broadcast power, a great idea if you are not in a dense urban environment and want maximum broadcast range
So, why would you hack a working appliance just to put your own custom software on it? 1) It's cool. 2) Bug fixes 3) More features 4) Why not?
1:48:03 PM
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Friday, October 1, 2004 |
Why I dumped Internet Explorer. "CNET News.com's Charles Cooper confesses that he's a Firefox convert and not at all nostalgic for the old days." From CNET News.com. Great quotes from the article:
"After months waiting for Microsoft to give me a reason to remain loyal, I finally dumped Internet Explorer for the Firefox Web browser last week."
"There is one major change you can ascribe to Internet Explorer: The PC browser world is in much worse shape. Because management took so long to tackle Internet Explorer's security woes, Microsoft allowed virus writers to exploit vulnerabilities in the browser and wreak untold havoc on unsuspecting computer users."
11:06:44 AM
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