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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Sunday, April 30, 2006 |
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Friday, April 28, 2006 |
On the DLSLUG mailing list, Bill McGonigle announces: "The next regular monthly meeting of the DLSLUG will be held Thursday, May 4th, 7-9PM, at Dartmouth College, Carson Hall Room L01. All are welcome, free of charge.
Agenda:
7:00 Sign-in, networking
7:15 Introductory remarks
7:20 Resara Enterprise Linux
The guys from Resara Networks will be presenting their product, Resara Enterprise Linux. "Resara Networks is a leader in Linux thin-client technology. Resara Enterprise Linux has bridged the gap between thin clients and PCs by providing centralized administration, but not sacrificing the standard capabilities of PCs. With Plug-and-Play installation, customers do not require prior Linux experience or new training to easily deploy Linux on their network."
8:30 Roundtable Exchange - where the attendees can make announcements or ask a linux question of the group.
Please see the website for links to directions.
10:16:07 AM 
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Netcraft notes that "Apache has overtaken Microsoft as the leading developer of secure web servers. Apache now runs on 44.0% of secure web sites, compared to 43.8% for Microsoft." Yet another sign of the tide turning. Interesting article with several trends explaining the shift, and a great graph. Read the entire article here
9:34:29 AM
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Thursday, April 27, 2006 |
For years, I've endorsed the idea that using a simple low-level protocol was far easier to troubleshoot and maintain than the high-level, proprietary and hidden-from-view COM interfaces that were all the rage in the Windows world, hence, "SMTP Good, MAPI Bad."
Laura and I support a vertical-niche application in use around the country. Each of the installations runs Visual FoxPro 7 as a LAN-based application and sends faxes via email using MaxEmail, rather than supporting their own in-house faxing system. On a regular basis, one of our clients will change email providers, so the settings for email are stored in a separate file for easy update.
"Easy," though, is a relative term. More email providers are requiring authentication before allowing outgoing emails, a reasonable precaution against spam. However, each installation of SMTP AUTH we have run up against has a slightly different variation on how authentication is done, and invariably, email stops until we analyze, debug and modify our code to support the new variation.
I've used the free BLAT command-line tool with it's -debug switch to allow me to witness the actual conversation that takes place between email client and server to determine the details of where the conversation is breaking down and how to fix it. Open Source rocks! BLAT rocks!
In this last case, the new email provider's SMTP AUTH required a user name ("bob") and not an email address ("bob@example.com") as the user name. The previous SMTP AUTH interfaces were comfortable with the same name for email address and user name. Laura tweaked the code and we got the client back up and running.
UPDATE: Thanks to Alex Feldstein for the pointer. In fact, we too are using Rick Strahl's wwIPStuff, now renamed West Wind Client Tools as the machanism within the application to send SMTP mails. We've just used the standalone BLAT for its great low-level debugging facilities and ease of use from the commandline to figure out what to tell wwIPStuff to do.
9:15:35 AM
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006 |
On the Python announcement list, Bill Sconce posts: "The next meeting of the Greater New Hampshire Python & Milk/ Cookies SIG will be tomorrow night -- Thursday, April 27th, at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, 7:00 P.M. (the usual place, the usual time)."
"Also, we have a special program. Paul Koning, who had never used Python until recently, will tell us about his first, "getting to know Python" programming experience. Something just a little bit challenging: rewriting PDP-11 TECO."
"It should be an interesting evening, especially to hear about what went well (or not) in learning a new language in such an environment. Can you imagine writing TECO as your exercise to learn C++? (And of course, now we have TECO for Linux. And for the Mac. And for everything else wherever Python runs.)"
"We'll also have our usual Q&A, and Python trivia. Because several people asked us about Python at LinuxWorld last week we'll include some material for newbies. (Please be thinking about that - should we have a newbies segment EVERY meeting?)"
WHO: New Hampshire Python Special Interest Group
WHERE: Amoskeag Business Incubator, 33 South Commercial Street, Manchester, NH
Travel directions
WHEN: The fourth Thursday of each month at 7 PM, holidays allowing
WHAT: Paul Koning, TECO in Python, General Python Q&A
Hope to see you there!
3:15:12 PM
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In a fairly unusual move, Microsoft has re-released MS06-015, Vulnerability in Windows Explorer Could Allow Remote Code Execution (908531). Microsoft sent out an email to let folks know about that. Amazingly, while explaining why they were re-issuing the patch, they never mention what the patch is, nor specifically what went wrong, nor who should apply the new patch:
This bulletin has been re-released to
advise customers that revised versions of the security update
are available for all products listed in the "Affected Software"
section. Customers who have already applied the MS06-015 update
who are not experiencing the problem need take no action.
Here's the quick scoop: Windows Explorer (the desktop, not the browser) has fundamentally changed the way it launches programs, and some programs that hooked into that behavior, including Hewlett-Packard's "Share-to-Web", older NVIDIA graphics drivers, Kerio firewall, and others, would fail to operate properly, lock up, or freeze after files are saved, especially to "My Documents" or other special folders. This patch allegedly fixes the problem.
Get Patching! Good Luck!
8:24:41 AM
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Saturday, April 22, 2006 |
Slashdot post: Microsoft to Patch Problem Patch. slowroller writes to mention an eWeek article about a new patch to fix issues raised in their most recent release. From the article: "The company's plan is to target the rerelease only to Windows users who are affected. In a blog entry, Toulouse said the company's patch deployment technologies will have "detection logic" built into them to only offer the revised update to customers who don't have MS06-015 or are having the problem. The glitches, which Microsoft claims affect only a tiny fraction of the 120 million installations of the patch, stem from a new binary called VERCLSID.EXE that validates shell extensions before they are instantiated by the Windows Shell or Windows Explorer. On systems running Hewlett-Packard's Share-to-Web software, Sunbelt's Kerio Personal Firewall and some NVIDIA Drivers, users complained that the new binary stopped responding."
3:55:46 PM
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I spent Thursday evening in Nashua, New Hampshire listening to a presentation at the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group (MerriLUG) by Eric Eldred, a Director at Creative Commons and plaintif in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft decision rendered by the Supreme Court. Eric has a very low-key, well thought-out and persuasive presentation on the use of the Creative Commons license (the license used for this blog as well as millions of others). Great presentation! Based on discussions at that meeting, I'll likely be dropping the "-nc" portion of the license. Paraphrasing what Eric said, "if you can figure out a way to make a million dollars off what I wrote, go to it!"
Friday morning involved a long scenic drive north through Franconia Notch to meet with hostmaster Jason Kern of KernBuilt and confer with a potential new client on an interesting social software application. Jason and I lunched at Miller's Cafe and Bakery in Littleton, NH.
Accompanying me north via the wonders of podcasts was Doc Searls interviewing Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun MicroSystems, at the Syndicate 2005 conference. Jonathan had a slew of interesting insights and statistics. Sun has apparently woken from their slumbers of the late nineties, completely revised their product line, "Open Sourced" their OS (devil's in the details, I'll need to dig into this one a bit - what license, what terms, etc.) and are offering some pretty interesting machines - very low power, very high performance. Two great tidbits: who's the number one camera manufacturer? What's Google's number two expense (People's number one)? Very entertaining; made the trip go swiftly.
3:22:25 PM
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Wednesday, April 19, 2006 |
From Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley: Is Microsoft's Silent Treatment Appropriate for Patches?. "Microsoft says it is withholding certain details on security vulnerabilities to protect customers from bad guys. But critics say Microsoft's cone of security silence only increases the risk for everyone."
An interesting article. It claims that Microsoft is keeping its bug count artificially low by silently slipstreaming multiple bug fixes into the patches and, worse, not disclosing the details even to their "trusted partners." The bad guys know what's patched. Why shouldn't we? Shouldn't "Trustworthy Computing" require more transparency than this?
10:33:02 PM
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Tuesday, April 18, 2006 |
InfoWorld: Top News reports Open source goes big time with Red Hat-JBoss Deal. (InfoWorld) - "Red Hat’s surprise announcement that it’s acquiring JBoss could upend accepted wisdom about both the size and function of open source software companies. Still, some customers are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the deal."
I wonder if this is a new bubble of irrational exuberance, or the ongoing business as usual. Red Hat's not the only one making news...
Slashdot post: MySQL to Adopt Solid Storage Engine. hmart writes "As seen on ZDNet's Open Source Blog MySQL is taking another step to defend from Oracle's recent acquisitions of InnoBase and Sleepycat. From the article: 'MySQL responds by getting Solid Information Technology, a proprietary database vendor, to take its solidDB Storage Engine for MySQL open source, under the GPL, starting in June.'
3:25:03 PM
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Monday, April 17, 2006 |
CentraLUG next meets on Monday, May 1, 2006 7pm at NHTI
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. This month, we'll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as "I" on that map. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
This month's meeting will feature GNHLUG members who attended the recent LinuxWorld conference and expo in Boston in an informal panel discussion "What We Saw at LinuxWorld." Members of all GNHLUG chapters (as well as the general public) are encouraged to attend. As always, we'll have some time to network and to ask that FOSS question that's been bothering you. Tell your friends! Tell your co-workers! More details about the group are available at http://www.gnhlug.org. Hope to see you there!
12:27:50 PM
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Happy Patriot's Day!
LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year...
Read the rest at The Paul Revere House website.
9:00:43 AM
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Sunday, April 16, 2006 |
"They won't learn the language, they're not assimilating, they don't look like us." What to do? Here's a solution.
8:13:46 PM
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Joel Spolsky: "Management's primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that's what programmers do." Yet another insightful essay. Man, can this guy write!
5:34:34 PM
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Windows running funny today? How can you tell? The SANS Internet Storm Center notes that the latest Microsoft patches are causing some trouble in the real world, including machines with a common Hewlett-Packard Share-to-Web utility installed: "Patch Tuesday Fallout, (Sun, Apr 16th). Microsoft published a knowledge base article about issues with MS06-015. The two main culprits ... (more)"
9:50:17 AM
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Wednesday, April 12, 2006 |
Joho the Blog writes "Microsoft writes bill for Oklahoma authorizing wholesale spying. According to the Oklahoma Gazette, the state legislature has passed a bill that Microsoft helped write that gives vendors of software the right to check around you computer, delete files they consider unauthorized, and turn you into the local authorities if they don't like the way your computer smells. This is all being done to keep you secure. Yes, you can refuse to agree to the end user license agreement, but more likely you'll just click on it without reading the fine print. And if you refuse to sign the EULA, you don't get to use the software. OK not OK..."
5:56:25 PM
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Tuesday, April 11, 2006 |
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Monday, April 10, 2006 |
A recent LUG posting pointed out the Magic SysRq keys to rescue a locked Linux system. Cool.
10:40:04 PM
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OSNews: Traditional DNS Howto. "Linux system administrators should learn traditional DNS." It's a time-honored tradition in education: first, you must master the basics.
10:37:36 PM
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Sunday, April 9, 2006 |
A fellow LUG member points out a cool FOSS product: DocVert allows you to set up a web service that accepts documents in proprietary MS Office format and returns them in Open Document Format. Very cool!
11:42:12 AM
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Saturday, April 8, 2006 |
Slashdot: Bruce Perens on the Status of Open Source. Lars Lehtonen writes to tell us that Bruce Perens has posted the text of his LinuxWorld press conference. In his talk he takes a look at many of the hot topics surrounding the open source community including ODF, NTP vs RIM, and GPLv3." Very interesting. I'm not sure I follow the Abramoff-Delay-Gates-ODF scheme, but Peren's covers a lot of interesting legal ground.
5:57:25 PM
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The surprise earlier this week was the Boot Camp software to dual boot Intel Mac machines into Windows XP. I knew there were already hacks out there to do it, but didn't expect official support. But Apple and Microsoft seem to be behind it. The problem with dual-boot (or treble-boot: my ThinkPad offers WinXP, Kubuntu {dapper drake rocks!} and CentOS) is that it seems you're never in the OS you want to be. Need to switch to Kubuntu to print some labels in gLabels? Shut down Windows (3 minutes), boot Kubuntu (2 minutes), load the labels and print. The next thing you need to do? Probably in one of the other OSes. The right answer is to run all of the OSes as Virtual Machines - all running and idling, or able to start and stop as needed without losing the already booted OS. VMWare is one of several companies doing this.
Linux also has a real contender in Xen, a native virtualization engine.
At LinuxWorld Boston this week, I visited the very low-key Apple booth and heard that something similar is on its way for the Mac: Parallels for Mac OS X is in beta and will allow simultaneous VMs running Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris or other OSes run on top of the host OS on the Intel Macs. That's the ticket! Toggling between the OSes sounds like the right solution. Looking forward to seeing these products mature.
3:02:44 PM
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Friday, April 7, 2006 |
Slashdot: Ambidextrous Linux/Windows Virus. Lam1969 writes "Kaspersky Labs has reported a new proof-of-concept virus that can infect both Windows and Linux systems. It's called Virus.Linux.Bi.a/Virus.Win32.Bi.a and affects ELF binaries and .exe's from windows. SANS has a brief item on the cross-platform virus as well, but no information about a patch or signature yet."
4:21:34 PM
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Computerworld News reports Microsoft set to patch IE, Windows, Office. "Microsoft is set to release five security patches for its products Tuesday, including an Internet Explorer fix that will address a bug that hackers have been exploiting over the past two weeks."
Gee, is it that time again already?
12:57:22 PM
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Wednesday, April 5, 2006 |
Apple announces "More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today."
Stunning. I didn't see this one coming at all.
11:02:43 AM
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Tuesday, April 4, 2006 |
From Garrett Fitzgerald's Blog: "VMWars. Microsoft announces that it will give away Virtual Server. VMWare's response? Not only are they giving away VMWare Player and VMWare Server Beta free, but they just opened up the specs for their Virtual Machine Disk format. *rubs hands gleefully* Ooh, this is gonna be good... hope VMWare's smarter than Netscape was. :-) (Thanks to the /. folks for the pointer.)"
Over at Linux Watch: "One of the ironies of Microsoft's PR move (giving away Virtual
Server) is that it really makes no sense to run a virtual machine on
top of Windows. Windows, as the forthcoming bloatware called Vista
shows to an extreme, takes up a lot of resource. As David Berlind
points out on his ZDNet blog, "One of the great advantages of Linux is
how, when you're setting up a system, you can strip all of the bloat
except for only those components that you need to support whatever you
plan to run on the box."
Looking forward to meeting the Xen folks at their booth at LinuxWorld this week!
12:52:46 PM
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Slashdot post: Apple Begins Fixing MacBook Pro Issues. Hack Jandy writes "For those of you who bought one of the first generation Macbook Pros, a new replacement may be in your future. Flickering LCDs, overheating and intermittent WiFi connections are all common place for many of these first generation machines, but apparently Apple is fixing the problem. The article claims 'According to Apple, it has begun replacing the mainboard inside its MacBook Pros with a new revision. It calls the updated product "revision D," which is identifiable by product serial number.' If you have a reservation at an Apple Store, they may even replace your MBP with a new one."
Good for Apple! Shipping innovative hardware is risky business - hardware in the field will always show problems that don't come up in testing. Apple (and Dell and Toshiba and everyone else) has had their fair share of leaking capacitors, overheating power supplies and faulty LCD panels. Good to see they are aggressively rewarding the early adoptors with support!
11:47:06 AM
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OSNews post: MacOS 10.4.6 Released. "The 10.4.6 Update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for the following applications and technologies: login and authentication in a variety of network environments; file access and byte range locking with AFP file sharing; network access when using proxy server automatic configuration files; searching iWork '06 and Microsoft Office documents with Spotlight; creating Automator workflows for iPhoto 6; synchronizing contacts and calendars to .Mac and mobile phones; and much more." There's a delta update for 10.4.5, and a combo update for 10.4.0-10.4.5. Easiest method is to just use Software Update."
11:36:04 AM
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Sunday, April 2, 2006 |
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes in The LinuxWorld Rumor Mill: "I could tell you what you will see at LinuxWorld Boston this coming week, but what's the fun in that? Instead, here are some of the rumors I've been hearing about that may come up at the show."
Don't miss Booth #1035 where the Greater New Hampshire Linux Group will be back-to-back with the Boston Linux-Unix Group and across the aisle from Linux Journal, Wyse, and Apress in the midst of the conference floor. Here's a detailed PDF of the expo floor. Lots to see, lots of folks to meet. Hope to see you there!
11:08:54 AM
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Saturday, April 1, 2006 |
SlashDot linked to a story that Sony More Trustworthy Than Microsoft that linked to an article on joystiq.com on Sony trounces MSFT & Nintendo in brand trust survey There's an interesting graph on that second link. As best as I can see, this is a survey of customer's impressions, and not a reflection on actual performance, reliability, features, nor quality of real products. It's surprising to me that Sony scores so high. Their rootkit outrage is one that many people didn't understand. They've tried as many proprietary attempts with MD disks and BetaMax(tm) as other vendors. Some folks think that Sony, Bose, Dell and Apple, all high scorers, sell over-priced, under-featured products. So, what does the graph tell us? Does marketing, advertising and branding trump reality?
7:59:04 PM
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