Ed Leafe posts: "Some of you have seen the Dabo AppWizard before, but for those who haven't, here's a screencast that shows what you can do..."
11:29:09 AM comment []
Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system.
--- Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living.
cited, in turn, in the GNU tar manual
11:52:46 AM comment []
Over at Ars Technica, Nate Anderson asks "Global software piracy losses: US$3- or $34-billion?" The BSA doesn't make their case any better by making outrageous claims. Software piracy is an issue, but it is not a world-shaking crisis. 87% of the people with a pirated version of PhotoShop have no idea what to do with it. 63% of the people with an illegal copy of Adobe Acrobat would likely switch to a free product like PDFCreator if they knew of the product and had some motivation not to pirate. Use of the software by others does not correspond 1:1 to lost sales. And 73% of statistics are made up on the spot.
10:02:06 AM comment []
LinuxWatch notes U.S. PTO smashes JPEG patent. The US PTO is far too eager to grant patents for bogus, vague, overly-broad "inventions." We need to seriously reconsider whether most computer algorithms, file formats, business processes or genes qualify for patent status - a complete monopoly on the use of a design. The idea of a patent is to improve society with new inventions while ensuring the inventor can recoup the investment of building and manufacturing an invention, at the cost of slowing innovation.
8:41:50 AM comment []
Computerworld Breaking News notes PostgreSQL fix could break applications. "PostgreSQL users have been put in a potentially sticky situation by a security flaw made public this week. The hole allows for SQL injection attacks, and affects all unpatched versions of PostgreSQL. The fix breaks many users' applications." Ouch. A cure worse than the disease?
8:34:58 AM comment []
Slashdot post: AT&T Accidentally Leaks NSA Suit Information. op12 writes "CNET has an article describing how AT&T accidentally leaked sensitive information involving the NSA lawsuit. From the article: 'AT&T's attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable. But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple's OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11."
The article goes on to say, "The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class action lawsuit in January, alleges that room is used by an unlawful National Security Agency surveillance program."
Laura and I are sad to announce that Jazper left us on May 18th after many years of faithful service. Jaz was a handful, but a happy, energetic, enthusiastic dog.
Jaz had lymphosarcoma and had been under treatment for the last year. He was comfortable right up until the end, and I'm grateful I had the extra time the treatment gave me to appreciate my friend. Jaz will be remembered and missed.
5:42:07 PM comment []
(InfoWorld) - IBM chose the Deutsche Notes User Group conference in Germany this week to make a significant announcement about its adoption of the ODF (OpenDocument Format) in the next version of Lotus Notes.
Awesome! Document interchange needs to have better options than PDF and RTF! Compressed, XML, documented, hackable -- what's not to like?
8:24:44 AM comment []
Over at Ars Technica, Clint Ecker notes Apple debuts Intel-based MacBooks. "Intel CPUs make their way into another segment of Apple's product lineup with today's introduction of the new MacBook. New to Apple's consumer portable are integrated graphics, a choice in case colors, and true support for dual displays."
Sweet. If you're looking for a smaller portable machine, these take the place of the iBooks. It appears that Apple is merging its iBook and PowerBook lines into the MacBook brand with "Pro" designating the bigger, beefier models. For around ~ $1100, there's a lot of laptop in there to love. Maxxed out at twice that and you've got a pretty powerful machine.
Laura and I were disappointed when the 17" MacBook Pro came out and lacked a numeric keypad. I know it would take away from the smooth sleek surface, but we're more inclined towards an HP 17" just to get the number keys back.
8:28:49 PM comment []
New Hampshire's in a state of emergency this morning. Over 600 roads are closed due to flooding. Towns have reported over 10" of rain since the storm began last week, and it's still dripping. Stay safe, stay dry, stay high. Keep off the roads if you can. WMUR Television has a spectacular photo gallery on their website.
11:16:17 AM comment []
OSNews: Things You Should Know Before Switching to Mac. "Macs 'just work' so often, and so well, that I'd rather just use my computer than spend all my time maintaining it. There are already scores of religious fanboy zealots who are going to tell you how great the Mac is, and why you should switch. I'm not going to. I'll let them convince you. But beware. Just because the Mac is an excellent computer, that doesn't mean it's panacea. Here are some things you're going to want to pay attention to as you switch."
Good article. I am a "user" on the Mac: mail, web browsing, blogging, and terminal into other machines where I work. I've made little effort to learn more than I needed to know to get my mail and make backups. The machine is elegantly easy for that
4:23:07 PM comment []
SaveTheIntenet.com is pushing the concept of "net neutrality," the idea that our Internet Service Providers need to be required to provide us with an open pipe to the internet and not restrict services such as Skype or Asterisk VOIP that might compete with their own premium services.
My representative in Congress, Charles F. Bass II, is flagged as "voted against net neutrality." I've written regularly to Representative Bass and we disagree on most technical issues, like the broadcast flag. Charlie seems to have bought what Big Media is pitching with a recent response of his talking about "closing the analog hole." There is no analog hole. It's a Big Media myth. Just because kids record their favorite songs to tape off the FM radio and make their own degraded 2nd-generation party tapes doesn't mean the Bg Media have lost any sales. On the contrary, they have enthusiasts promoting their music. Walking out of a show singing a tune is not piracy, nor public performance. The analog holes are in our heads -- they're called ears. But I digress...
If you're in New Hampshire, call Rep. Bass II now at 202-225-5206 and say: "I was disappointed in your vote against the Markey amendment to the COPE Act. Please keep the Internet free and open by voting for enforceable network neutrality requirements in the future. Thank you." If you're not in New Hampshire, check the web site above and find out where your Congressperson stands. Let them know what you think.
Subversion is a source code control system designed as a replacement for the Concurrent Version System (CVS). Subversion is platform-agnostic and has clients available on Windows, OS X and Linux and supports access locally via the file:// protocol or remotely via svn:// or svn+ssh:// protocols, WebDav via http:// or https://. Very cool. There's a free book also available in print from O'Reilly. In addition, there are a bunch of add-on tools or links to other tools, like:
On his home page, Chris Schmidt announces, "I'm going to be giving a lightning talk called 'Geolocation with GSM Cells' at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, on June 14th, 2006." Chris is a regular at GNHLUG's Nashua and PySIG chapters.
Don Tennant, editor in chief of Computerworld, writes
"It's bad enough when Microsoft strong-arms other software vendors into submission as a means of thwarting competition. But when it engages in underhanded tactics to intimidate users in order to land a software deal, we have a very disturbing situation on our hands. And someone needs to have the guts to speak out about it."
Read the whole story here. Thanks to Bill Anderson for the pointer
10:50:34 PM comment []
InfoWorld reports "Microsoft released one critical security update for its Exchange messaging server and two security updates for Windows on Tuesday, one of which was critical... In Microsoft's rating system, a critical vulnerability means it could allow unauthorized software to be installed without user action... The third patch released Tuesday fixes two vulnerabilities in Windows rated as "moderate," Microsoft said... More information and Microsoft's monthly security bulletin can be found at its Web site".
Funny, I would not have thought that Adobe Flash was a product MSFT would be responsible for patching, but it appears they shipped it in some of their components. Watch out for the Exchange patch - SANS Internet Storm Center is reporting it cripples Blackberries using the Blackberry Enterprise Server.
OSNews reports KDE to Become Better Supported on the Ubuntu Platform. "At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt."
Good deal. I've been using KDE with Ubuntu for the last couple of versions and I like its responsiveness, especially on some of the slower hardware (PII-266 and -366 laptops) I'm using.
10:52:44 AM comment []
WinSCP (Secure Copy) lets you copy, move or synchronize files and folders between two machines over a secure (ssh) tunnel. It offers a simple two-panel local-remote file explorer supporting drag-and-drop, a toolbar of utilities (rename, move, copy, etc.) and intuitive operation. I use WinSCP all the time to keep remote Linux machines up to date with local Windows machines while doing development. (Actually, the "local Windows machine" is almost always using files on a networked share via SMB that's actually a Linux file server running Samba, so I'm really just using Windows as the pretty GUI to synch two Linux machines, but I digress.)
WinSCP has just released a new version, v. 3.8.1, with a significant list of changes, improvements and bug fixes. SCP (really ssh) servers are available for most platforms and interoperate between different OSes. Check out WinSCP.
10:33:52 AM comment []
Garrett Fitzgerald blogs: "I noticed that Aaron Margosis had stopped blogging, but I missed that he had started back up. He has a list of ways to fix or work around bugs involving not running as Admin starting here and going forward for a couple of posts. Aaron is the creator of MakeMeAdmin, which is a little script that makes it easier to run with limited access."
With the rampant security problems Windows has been experiencing, I reconfigured my development machine into an Least Privileged User configuration over a year ago. It's a pain, and some applications just fall apart, especially with installing modules or updates. "Run As..." solves the problem in some cases, but others are a lot more difficult. The Linux/Unix/OSX model of security rights seem to map more easily into these situations than the "only one user is logged on" mentality of Windows. I'll have to check out Aaron's utilities to see if they can help bridge the gap.
9:36:37 AM comment []
What a great idea! I wish more of the conferences would offer their proceedings in electronic format! There is so much knowledge in those conference notes. While it's nowhere near as good as attending the conference in person, these notes can be treasure troves of clever code and solutions.
7:31:26 PM comment []
I've added a sidebar to the blog showing off some interesting books from my library. LibraryThing.com has an interesting proposition: post your library online and share your book lists with others, tagging included. The Dartmouth/Lake Sunapee Linux User Group is maintaining their list of library books for loan on Library Thing, so I thought I'd try it with a barcode scanner/keyboard wedge I picked up at Hosstraders over the weekend. Looks like Library Thing is a cool application. I see Rick Borup is already posting FoxPro books up there, and I added my Hentzenwerke collection as well. Check out their tag cloud and the ability to subscribe (via RSS, of course) to tags, other people's lists, topics, etc. Looks like fun.
2:11:35 PM comment []
OSNews reports RSA: Microsoft To Shelve Token Support in Vista. "Microsoft has shelved plans to include built-in support for RSA Security's tokens in Windows Vista, even though the company has been testing out the authentication technology for almost two years. In February 2004, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said that Windows would be able to support easy integration with RSA's popular SecurID tokens. That meant businesses would find it far easier to deploy a two-factor authentication system for logging on to networks and applications. However, almost two years after the SecurID beta-testing program kicked off, RSA's chief executive, Art Coviello, disclosed that Windows Vista will not natively support the technology."
So, there were features left in Vista! Good thing Microsoft found them and removed them before shipping!
3:45:24 PM comment []
