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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Thursday, December 29, 2005 |
Business Week: "Looking back, 2005 will likely be viewed as a turning point. It was a year when CIOs signed off on open-source projects, a big change from previous years when that happened only after low-level engineers started such projects on their own initiative. It was a year when venture capitalists woke up to the new business opportunities of open source. It was a year when open source was the word on the lips of not just early adopters but of an early majority."
1:47:06 PM 
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Wednesday, December 28, 2005 |
InfoWorld: Application development reports "Update: Malicious hackers busy exploiting zero-day Windows flaw. Fully-patched systems running Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 can be successfully attacked by malicious hackers, various security firms warned Tuesday and Wednesday. By Juan_Carlos_Perez@idg.com (Juan Carlos Perez)."
Short form: IE seems to be subject to exploitation when navigating to a hostile site and received a Windows MetaFile (wmf). Site Admins should filter .wmf (and possibly .emf) files at the periphery. Limit IE use to a minimum, as always. FireFox users will receive a "what do I do with this file?" dialog. Doesn't seem to affect Linux or Macintosh users.
6:54:40 PM
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Just to clarify that last post. Mike Sullivan pointed out that Google is posting pages from Hentzenwerke books with the publisher's permission and/or cooperation. Google is not infringing on my copyright by doing this. I signed over the right to publish my books to Hentzenwerke, with some limitations, and I believe this is within those terms.
I've wanted to get Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro on to the web for the past couple of years, but the publisher and authors couldn't work out the mechanism. Google has solved that problem, at no cost to us. For some books, it's possible this will lead to new sales. For others, it can make the work more accessible, perhaps elevating the reputation of the authors, leading to new work, which is the motivation for many technical authors.
Technical books face some unique challenges. Frankly, Sturgeon's Law dictates that 90% of all technical books are crud. Technical books may even exceed that standard. But the grueling effort of assembling a complex technical book or reference book will have a challenging economic model: will publishers want to advance authors money to write a book that people will read for free on Google? You gotta read a novel from cover to cover, but you usually only need to read a single topic in a reference book. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the marketplace. For the moment, I'm not inclined to invest a lot of effort in another reference work.
4:57:21 PM
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Via Scripting News: "Steve Rubel discovers how to read O'Reilly books, in full, for free, thanks to Google Books."
It works the same way for Hentzenwerke books, too. Why lug around a 1300-page reference when you can just look it up on Google. Note that Google watermarks the page with "Copywritten Material" while publishing it for all the world to see for free.
1:10:36 PM
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Tuesday, December 27, 2005 |
There's been a recent flap about iTunes and iPods losing all their content and the ugliness of it all. The ugly underside of Digital Restriction Management is epitomized by this Apple support web page:
Otherwise, if your hard disk becomes damaged or you lose any of the music you've purchased, you'll have to buy any purchased music again to rebuild your library.
So, let's make this clear: the oxymoron Intellectual Property means their property, not yours, their rights to sell you the same thing multiple times, not your freedom to do what you wish with your purchases. Unacceptable terms for me. Digital Restriction Management that prevents a legitimate, innocent user from time-, space- or device-shifting content they have purchased must not be allowed to succeed. Pirates won't respect them. If Congress and the industry try to ban Fair Use, only criminals will enjoy the new digital freedoms. This is insane.
7:26:12 PM
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Monday, December 26, 2005 |
Slashdot asks Do LUGs Still Matter?, pointing to an article by Joe Barr, writing for NewsForge. The answer for all UGs hasn't changed: User Groups matter if they matter to you. If there's something you want out of a LUG and you're willing to put some effort into a LUG, amazing things can happen. Everyone knows of a LUG that's faded: there's a natural rhythm to LUGs like all organizations. A leader with fire in his/her belly drives the group to new heights, burns out or gets distracted, and the group declines. A new leader may emerge or the group may fade away like the Cheshire Cat, leaving nothing but an empty web page or two.
The Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group is on another power climb, not its first, nor hopefully its last. Active volunteers are running chapters in Nashua, Peterborough, Hanover, Concord and Durham. A Python Special Interest Group shares many of its members and the groups resources and gives us a presence in Manchester as well.
In the past year, member of the group were present at Linuxworld Boston, the Software Association of New Hampshire InfoeXchange annual conference, the Hosstraders ham radio swapfest, the McAuliffe annual teacher's conference, and Software Freedom Day.
LUGs can matter as much as you want them to.
3:56:17 PM
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Friday, December 23, 2005 |
Joho the Blog posts "Three models of the Internet. Grant McCracken blogs about three ways of taking the depth and seriousness of the Net's effect on culture. Here's a distillation, but you should read the whole thing: 1. Disintermediation - "The Internet is an efficiency machine. It removes the friction..." 2. Long Tail - "The Internet is a profusion machine. It allows small cultural producers to find small cultural consumers, and as a result, all hell is breaking lose..." 3. Reformation - "It change the units of analysis and the relationships between them. This reformation model says, in other words, that the coming changes will deeply cultural...and not merely..."
End of the year is a good time for some heavy thinking. The Internet has been through several phases. Like the blind men studying the elephant, each of us may have different perceptions of what it is and where it is. Tim O'Reilly loves to quote that "the future is here, just not evenly distributed." I think this is how it has always been.
3:55:19 PM
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Thursday, December 22, 2005 |
Over at Shedding Some Light, Rick Schummer posts: IIS Dead in the Water "Dead as a doornail. Less useful than a pet rock. Internet Information Services (IIS) v5.1 on my Windows XP Professional SP2 (all the latest patches) development box has decided to take a holiday break. Normally this would not be a big deal, but I use it every darn single day to access the OpenWiki running on my machine and Fog Creek's FogBugz for my bug tracking."
Bummer, Rick. Fastest solution is to make a good backup and/or image, blow it away and start again. Anything short of that just prolongs the agony.
UPDATE: Rick's up and running 18 hours later thanks to a pointer from Craig Boyd. Anyone tracking the Fox community on-line needs to be tkeeping an eye on Craig as well as Rick. These guys are doing some great stuff.
6:40:42 AM
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Wednesday, December 21, 2005 |
Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer notes, "Congratulations, you made it to the shortest day of the year. They all get longer from this point on."
9:39:57 AM
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Monday, December 19, 2005 |
Over at Linux Watch, Stephen J. Vaughn-Nicholls opines "You don't have to have a Linux certification to get a job working with Linux, but it can't hurt." I'm a big fan of certification, as I think eventually the vendor- and industry-level certification will be viewed as Continuing Education requirements for Licensed Software Practitioners. I've lectured about this years ago. I've also practiced what I've preached, earning a Novell CNA, Microsoft Certified Professional, Certified Solution Developer, Certified System Engineer and MySQL Core Certification through the years. I also worked as one of the lead authors for Microsoft's Visual FoxPro 6.0 Distributed Applications exam, so I appreciate the difficulty of creating a legitimate certification.
Like a diploma, some certificates may just be an attendance report crossed with a good deal of bulk memorization, but it also shows a willingness to work within the system. A four-year degree generally indicates a bit of patience, too. But on the flip side, remember what they call they guy who graduates at the bottom of his class in med school: "Doctor"
Certification can be what you make of it. An educational opportunity, a means of self-evaluation, and a chance to distinguish yourself in the marketplace.
4:20:26 PM
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Sunday, December 18, 2005 |
In "Dabo Part I: The AppWizard," Andrew Ross MacNeill interviewed Ed Leafe in a videocast demonstrating the Python n-tier framework dabo. Ed was so impressed with the power of video presentations that he's tried his hand at it himself. Check it out at http://leafe.com/screencasts/codedemo.html. Ed used dabo on a Fedora Core 2 workstation and recorded it using pyvnc2swf and Sound Studio on the Mac. Very cool!
12:33:49 PM
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Saturday, December 17, 2005 |
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Friday, December 16, 2005 |
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Wednesday, December 14, 2005 |
Microsoft issued two new patches and re-issued one other patch on their monthly patch Tuesday. MS05-054 is "Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer," yes, IE, that exploit delivery engine that also displays web pages. Get it patched, and use it only when absolutely necessary! MS05-055 is a very specific patch for Windows 2000 SP4 that patches an exploit which would allow an elevation of privileges. MS05-050, "Vulnerability in DirectShow Could Allow Remote Code Execution" was re-released to for a "revised version" of the security update for users of Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2003 - sounds like a patch to the patch.
Get patching!
9:24:16 AM
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Tuesday, December 13, 2005 |
Joho the Blog posts "[Berkman] Derek Slater. Derek, the first Student Fellow at the Berkman Center, is giving a lunch time talk. He's leaving next month to work for the EFF.org. He's going to talk about the study he just released, written with Mike McGuire of the Gartner Group. The key findings: 1. People like talking about the music they listen to. They want to make recommendations, sometimes by sharing the music. 2. We should embrace consumers wanting to share their tastes in these ways because it's good for both business and culture. But (Derek says) we shouldn't think of music sharing only as the sharing of...
4:53:13 PM
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And once you have NUT monitoring your UPS serving multiple servers, consider adding Nut-Graph to give you a visual display of incoming voltage, load and battery status. Requires NUT, mod_php, MySQL 4.1 and Perl and jpgraph. Very slick!
12:21:29 PM
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Saturday, December 10, 2005 |
OSNews reports Intel Chairman Derides USD100 Laptop. Intel's chairman chided plans by rival AMD and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a $100 laptop for the developing world. At a press conference in Sri Lanka on Friday, Craig Barrett said that potential computer users would scoff at the computer's lack of features. Barrett also said the device isn't worthy of being called a laptop. "I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget'," he mused. "The problem is that gadgets have not been successful."
I wonder how many of the six billion earthlings have had a chance to try one of these?
3:42:54 PM
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A client recently asked if we could add another server to their network without having to add another UPS -- they had a UPS with plenty of surplus capacity, but the serial cable from the UPS went to a Windows Server 2003 to provide for the (essential!) soft shutdown. However, I would be installing a Linux server. How to get the two to get along?
One solution is using the Network UPS Tools or NUT for short. On this page Jeremy Herr explains how he set up one Linux machine and two Windows machines off a single UPS. One machine connects to the UPS and monitors the UPS status. NUT is set up as a couple of modules: the server (daemon) monitors the UPS, client software talks to the server. Normally, the client software is on the same machine as the server, but multiple machines can run the client software and communicate over a network to the server, provided each of the components is configured properly. Cool architecture!
2:24:22 PM
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Friday, December 9, 2005 |
From Slashdot: Gmail Gets RSS. Everyone with a UID and Paul Stamatiou writes "Google's Gmail email service now sports a new feature for displaying RSS feeds, dubbed Web Clips. You might remember this name, as it is the same name Google Desktop refers to RSS feeds. Web Clips for Gmail were announced a long time ago sometime during the summer but they were finally stable enough to release to the general public. You can check out the what's new page for Gmail here. Essentially, you subscribe to a bunch of feeds and everytime you log into Gmail it loads the lastest title from each feed which you can scroll through with left/right arrows. Don't forget to check the actual post about Web Clips for Gmail on the Google Blog."
Google is doing evil. Why rename RSS? It seems like the same hubris that haunts Microsoft: they believe their users are idiots who can't handle a new term. Is RSS an obscure acronym that will cause the technology to be rejected? People didn't have a problem with "TV" or "ATMs" or "SUVs" "FM" radio works just fine, even if you're not sure what it stands for. "RADAR?" "LASER?" Seems OK to me. Call RSS what it is.
6:08:05 PM
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One of the alternatives to tags is trees. JOHO is also working on a book Everything is Miscellaneous which can certainly simplify the challenges a database designer runs into. Here's his progress report on Chapter 3.
5:03:56 PM
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At Joho the Blog, Dr. David Weinberger (author of the great "Small Pieces Loosely Joined") reports: "Yahoo buys Delicious - Good all around. The fact that the most visited site on the Net has bought the premier tagging site should confirm that tagging is going mainstream. Yahoo has profoundly not screwed up Flickr, so I have confidence that del.icio.us users are not going to feel betrayed or de-featured by Yahoo. Most important, Yahoo is now in a position to become a tag broker, adding value to the act of tagging, thus driving more tagging, thus increasing the Web's memetic value. With widespread tagging, the Web means more. Congratulations to Joshua Schachter and the rest of the Delicious folks."
What's the big deal with tags? Stay tuned. Tags could be the next big thing, the solution to everyone's problem, the magic pixie dust of 2005 (as Shirky below says of java, 'sprikle a little on your application and voila! you're app is better'). Or it could turn out to be a good idea that never really meets its initial promise, failing to scale or failing to work. Time will tell, but so far it's pretty promising.
Clay Shirky has a great presentation, well worth the listen, over at IT Conversations: "
4:53:58 PM
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At Scripting News, Dave Winer points to David Berlind: "Park's observations exactly mirror what's going on not just in my household."
9:42:21 AM
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Wednesday, December 7, 2005 |
 Doc Searls blogs, "The lessons live. December 7, 1941, FDR said, was "a day that will live in infamy". Now veterans who remember are filling the WWII Memorial at a rate greater than 1000 per day.Most of us who grew up in the 1950s, didn't know our parents were The Greatest Generation. We just wished they'd quit harping about growing up in the Depression. ("When I was your age, we walked ten miles to school in the snow...")... Those two subjects, The War and The Depression, gave our parents enormous moral authority, as well as a boundless supply of instructive stories at the dinner table. We didn't appreciate it much at the time. Now that so many of the old folks are going or gone, we do."
3:47:51 PM
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Guy Pardoe, the MonadLUG Coordinator-in-Chief, announces "The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be this Thursday, December 8th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent's Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough... Tim Lind discusses Anti-spam techniques - Using open source tools, how to build an anti-spam system that is self running, updating and allows your email users to configure their own whitelists/blacklists, etc..."
9:34:04 AM
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Monday, December 5, 2005 |
Computerworld News reports IBM Workplace client to support Open Document Format in '06. "In a move that could pit it against Microsoft, IBM plans to support the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) in a version of its Workplace Managed Client 2.6 due out early next year."
Great news! Interoperability and Working Well with Others is Good.
Competition breeds Innovation. "In a move that could pit it against Microsoft?" It seems that journalists have to set up simple Either-Or binary contests when the world is far more complex than that. It's not IBM vs. Microsoft any more than it is Novell vs. Sun: it's an ecology of competition, progress, cooperation and differences. Companies will cooperate and join together to advance some standards, and compete on other fronts. IBM is adding another file format to its office product. It's doubtful that IBM will drop ASCII, RTF, Word Perfect, AmiPro or MS Word format. More adoption of ODF is a welcome sign.
10:59:23 AM
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Saturday, December 3, 2005 |
From Resigned to the Bittersweet Truth, Apache 2.2 is Out. The earth-shattering feature of Apache 2.2 is RFC 2817 SSL Upgrade. Basically, any HTTP connection can upgrade itself to HTTPS without reestablishing."
"This means you can do SSL on virtual hosts without a dedicated IP address. This will greatly increase the penetration of SSL (plus free certs like CaCert) ..."
Awesome! SSL on virtual hosts opens up the world of secure web transactions for inexpensive shared hosts. Way cool.
9:26:28 AM
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Friday, December 2, 2005 |
Slashdot postL Linksys Adds Linux WRT54G Model Back. Glenn Fleishman writes "Last month, Slashdot and others wrote about how the Linksys WRT54G, a popular embedded Linux-based Wi-Fi gateway, had switched to VxWorks's OS for its v5 release. Because the WRT54G has become the standard as a cheap commodity device for building your own platform (like Sveasoft, Fon, and many others), this seemed like a big blow to hackers and developers. If you could still manage to flash the device--not sure if that was possible--it had half the RAM and flash of the v4 model. It turns out Linksys wasn't killing the Linux model. They've released it as the WRT54GL with v4.30.0(US) firmware and will sell it under that name for about $70 retail. It's already in stock and the new firmware is on their GPL software download page. Linux sales represent a few percentage points of their overall volume, based on the Linksys product director's remarks. The lesser quantity of RAM puts money back in their pockets on the mainstream model."
4:40:05 PM
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InfoWorld: Top News: "DRAM prices slump to all time lows. (InfoWorld) - The price of the most commonly used DRAM (dynamic RAM) computer memory chips have slumped to all time lows in the spot market, a great time for users to buy more."
Sounds like a great time to max out your machines, before a chip fab plant suffers an earthquake or other disaster.
10:31:25 AM
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Thursday, December 1, 2005 |
Over at Resigned to the Bittersweet Truth, Bill points out that "PresentationZen has an article on using Simplicity to enhance your projected presentations. To illustrate, they compare slides typical of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates." Excellent comparison!
12:48:14 PM
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Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports that Pundits Give Microsoft's Open XML Play Mixed Marks. "While the Massachusetts governor's office (and attorney Larry Rosen, an open-source specialist) may be upbeat about Microsoft's decision to push the Office 12 Open XML document format through the ECMA standards process, not everyone is equally bullish about Microsoft's move."
I was impressed with the positive tone of Larry Rosen's review. A fair playing field benefits all, and it looks like Microsoft has taken some good first steps. However, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' column cites several serious concerns. The best point in that article is the last: When the O-12 standard is a legitimate standards-body-approved standard, only then should it be considered as a peer to competing standards at that level. Before that, it's just another proprietary, encumbered under-documented binary file format.
8:32:59 AM
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