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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Tuesday, November 30, 2004 |
KIVILCIM Hindistan opines that his favorite distribution is Debian: "My workstation OS: Debian." An interesting and brief introduction to another distribution. Link via OSNews
3:49:16 PM 
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InfoWorld reports "Linux server sales top $1 billion in Q3." Pretty impressive for a free operating system! The article is filled with statistics, many of which are interesting. Linux appears to be shipping on nine percent of new servers sold.
2:41:02 PM
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Andrew Coates blogs that Ken Levy announced the scheduled release of VFP 9.0 for the 15th of December. Congratulations to the Fox Team!
10:15:53 AM
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Wednesday, November 24, 2004 |
"The antitrust settlement between Microsoft and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) announced earlier this month included a payment of $9.75 million to the CCIA's president, according to a report published Wednesday." Read the full article on the InfoWorld site.
2:08:57 PM
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XML-RPC is the remote procedure call protocol using XML for transferring small amounts of data back and forth using XML as the dta encoding. XML-RPC preceded Web Services and WSDLs and all of the standards committees, and it Just Works. For a view of what blogging aggregators and directories use for updates, check out Robin Good's article "Increase Visibility in Blog and RSS Directories: XML-RPC Pings." Realize if you are using one of the commercial blogging tools like Blogger or Radio, it is already performing the XML-RPCs in the background.
1:53:19 PM
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Tuesday, November 23, 2004 |
Joi Ito points to an article on "How News Travels on the Internet." It's an interesting view of the universe, but a bit self-centered, I suspect, and probably better titled "How News Travels through the Blogosphere." For the few of us active participants, there are millions of folks going about their daily livves unaware of blog's existence, save an odd reference in the news once in a while.
1:23:41 PM
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Meant to update last week's posting, but it slipped through. In eWeek on Saturday, the author of the original study on Linux and possible patent violations took Microsoft to task for misrepresenting the findings of that study:
"Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does."
10:37:51 AM
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 The web site of NoSoftwarePatents.com presents strong arguments why patents will badly damage the software industry. Copyrights are an appropriate mechanism to protect source code. Patents are for unique inventions, not the evolutionary progress that characterizes the progress of software.
Slashdot highlights the appeal from three of the key leaders of the Free and Open Software movement: Linus Torvalds of Linux, Monty Widenius of MySQL and Rasmus Lerdorf of PHP. Patents prevent progress.
10:08:11 AM
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Did you know that some color printers embed the printer serial number in every printout? I'm astounded that this intrusion on our privacy wasn't ever brought to light before. While I don't intend to use my printer for ransom notes (at least not now!), this could have a chilling effect on whistleblowers and on protesters trying to avoid oppresive governments. Disturbing...
9:14:40 AM
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Monday, November 22, 2004 |
Register: "Early on Saturday morning some banner advertising served for The Register by third party ad serving company Falk AG became infected with the Bofra/IFrame exploit. The Register suspended ad serving by this company on discovery of the problem." Posted via Scripting News
Ouch. Bofra is an unpatched Internet Explorer exploit for any Windows machine not running Windows XP SP2. Follow the link above for suggestions on decontaminating your machine if you think you may be affected by this.
1:25:04 PM
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Sunday, November 21, 2004 |
As part of learning about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and to encourage the Fox community to take up RSS news aggregation, I developed and hosted four feeds of interest to the Visual FoxPro community: both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds for the http://www.foxcentral.net and FoxForum Wiki (http://fox.wikis.com). These served as the basis for my presentations in 2003 and 2004 on RSS (see http://www.tedroche.com/papers.html).
As both of the sites have now created native feeds for RSS, I've turned off the applications that generate the feeds on this site, and redirected requests for those feeds that hit my web server to their updated sites. If you are having problems with your news aggregator picking up the new feed, please visit the sites directly and follow the links there to resubscribe. Thanks for your patronage. Glad I was able to give back a bit to the community that has been so supportive.
12:22:27 PM
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Friday, November 19, 2004 |
Study finds e-voting irregularities in Florida. Voting irregularities in three Florida counties that used electronic voting machines may have awarded as many as 260,000 votes to President George Bush in this month's election, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Posted atInfoWorld: Top News
Voter-Verifiable Paper Ballots are an essential way to ensure that electronic voting is not flawed. In this case, there are no recounts possible, because there is no audit trail. While these discrepancies probably would not have changed the election results, they undermine people's confidence is the one person, one vote system. Non-auditable systems should never have been implemented and must be replaced.
10:26:14 AM
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Thursday, November 18, 2004 |
Did Ballmer Drop the Linux Patent-Violation Bomb?. "Did Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer say that Microsoft believes Linux violates 200-plus software patents? Or was Ballmer simply citing a study claiming that same fact? In either case, Ballmer found himself on the Linux hot seat for remarks he made to a group of Asian government leaders in Singapore on Thursday." From Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley
The irony is that Microsoft is likely to violate just as many patents, if not orders of magnitude more, but that's a lot tougher to determine with closed-source software.
Microsoft claims they will indemnify their customers, but the limitations of that indemnification make it look pretty flimsy to me. Big tip of the hat to http://www.groklaw.net for the insight into this one and many other legal issues.
First, Microsoft dissed Linux as amateurish. Then, Linux was "viral" and "un-American." Next, Microsoft twists studies to "get the facts." Now, they have resorted to threatening their customers. I find this trend disturbing. What's next?
2:24:59 PM
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"Burst.com says Microsoft destroyed evidence. In court documents made public this week, Burst.com accused Microsoft managers of telling employees in 2000 to destroy evidence contained in old e-mails." From Computerworld News
Robert X. Cringely wrote about this case back in October:
One huge issue in Burst v. Microsoft is missing e-mails that should have appeared in the discovery portion of the case, but didn't. Burst knows there are lost messages because many of them were to and from Burst, itself, so they have their copies. But not only are the known messages lost from Microsoft's e-mail archive, so are any messages on the same subject that may have been sent between the Microsoft people, themselves, and not shared with Burst -- messages that Burst only believes to exist, but it's a pretty fair assumption that some such mail did happen. I have written about this before, and it plays back to a haphazard corporate e-mail retention policy at Microsoft that seems to conveniently lose any damning evidence.
2:13:56 PM
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Novell has posted a web page "Unbending the Truth: Things Microsoft Hopes You Won't Notice" to counter Microsoft's "Get the Facts" campaign, which I've ridiculed before. Microsoft's campaign includes paid research that uncovers such startling facts as "five Dell servers cost less than a mainframe" to argue for Microsoft's advantage in the Windows vs. Linux debate.
10:45:29 AM
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Wednesday, November 17, 2004 |
Congress wants to outlaw fast-forwarding through commercials. From Endgaget:We thought we lucked out when Senator Orrin Hatch stopped pushing the INDUCE Act, but the RIAA and MPAA are at again, and are trying to push another copyright bill through Congress that does a lot of the same things, like criminalizing copyright infringing file-sharing and punishing anyone who brings a video camera into a movie theatre for recording purposes with up to three years in prison. But there's another part of the Intellectual Property Protection Act that should perk up your ears (assuming they aren't already suitably perky). They want to make it illegal to use software or hardware to skip all of those commercials and previews that the studios are placing before the beginnings of movies on DVDs, something which is freaking ridiculous since it's your DVD playing on your DVD player in your home. How about making it illegal to not pay attention, too? Link [Alex Feldstein]
Hit http://www.publicknowledge.org/ for more information on this and to write to your senator protesting this poorly thought out bill.
3:29:26 PM
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Polish rejection may derail EU patent directive. The future of the controversial European Union (E.U.) software patent directive was thrown into doubt Wednesday after the Polish government indicated it could no longer support the legislation in its current form. [InfoWorld: Top News]
Software patents are an abomination: licensing an idea, instead of the implementation of an idea (the latter is what copyrights are). Patents will chill the software development marketplace and reserve software development for the big companies that can afford patent lawyers. Stealing another programmers copywritten code is theft; building on another programmers code is progress.
3:26:28 PM
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Thursday, November 11, 2004 |
Let us never forget those who have gone before us and made the ultimate sacrifice so that we might be free. Bless you all.
11:59:36 AM
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Tuesday, November 9, 2004 |
New MyDoom variant exploits IE flaw. "A new variant of the MyDoom worm that exploits an unpatched flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) browser is in the wild and posing particular risk to home and small business users, security experts warned this week." Posted at InfoWorld: Top News.
Yet another good reason to look at FireFox.
2:54:26 PM
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Mozilla launches Firefox 1.0 browser. "The Mozilla Foundation has released Version 1.0 of its Firefox browser, an open-source product that has generated lofty expectations that it will offer real competition to Microsoft Corp.'s ubiquitous Internet Explorer." Posted at InfoWorld: Top News.
Use BitTorrent, if you can, and the download goes faster than greased lightening.
2:52:35 PM
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Saturday, November 6, 2004 |
Dan Gillmor's eJournal blogs Another Kind of Election Map.  "Barry Ritholtz has compiled a great collection of election maps. The most important message: Land area does not equate to people. At left, for example, is a reduced version of another useful way to look at the polling results. The Republicans won, but this is more evenly divided nation than the geographic county and state maps suggest. Barry has collected links to lots of other informative maps as well. It's useful to have perspective."
Several very cool perspectives here. I liked the purple map. We're just not all red or blue.
John Perry Barlow muses "At least we might try to listen as though the other side might have a point. I truly think we all owe one another an apology."
9:06:36 PM
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Chad Dickerson, columnist of InfoWorld's CTO Connection, asks "Is Wiki under your radar?" For those of us in the FoxPro world, we've had the benefit of the FoxForum Wiki for several years, an excellent resource and knowledgebase for all things FoxPro related.
For those of you not in the know, you've got to try a wiki! A wiki is an interactive web site where readers can add, edit, modify, comment, attach and build web pages. I've used wikis for knowledgebases, project tracking, Honey-Dew lists, curriculum development and even blogging. Wikis are available in nearly every programming language, every OS. You can make it as secure and restrictive or open as you want. Many are free and open source.
7:20:49 PM
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Wednesday, November 3, 2004 |
Internet Explorer loses market share. "Although Microsoft Corp. still dominates the Web browser space, its Internet Explorer continues to lose market share to open-source rival Mozilla." From InfoWorld: Top News.
Funny thing about a monopoly - it's likely the only change in popularity could be downward. For Microsoft and IE, the change may seem rather insignificant, tenths of percentage points. But for the FireFox promoters, this means over seven million downloads!. Wow. It's a pretty slick browser, and I'm using it pretty much exclusively, occasionally resorting to Safari on the Mac. Check it out.
9:54:38 AM
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