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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Tuesday, October 31, 2006 |
Following my email implosion, I'm seriously considering dropping the native Mac Mail.app and using Thunderbird instead. Apples decision to go with a proprietary mail formal (emlx) rather than the standard mbox format (as an optimization for Spotlight searching) makes me a bit uncomfortable, and the serious Mail.app failure, hiding half my mail for two weeks, leaves me less confident that I can switch when I have to without losing information. Mail and its history is precious stuff.
MacOSXHints points to a converter to generate mbox files from the Apple emlx format.
6:55:04 PM 
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In response to recent question on the ProLinux list, Paul McNett pointed to his blog entry outlining how to configure Samba to act as a PDC, ideal for a small group of Windows workstations that need roaming profiles, personal and shared storage and centralized applications. Great post, Paul!
6:50:52 PM
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Over at O'Reilly's ONLamp site, Jeremy Jones noted last week the release of SQLAlchemy 0.30. Lloyd Kvam had mentioned in his TurboGears presentation last month that TurboGears was going to be expanding their current support for Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tools to include SQLAlchemy. I'm looking forward to playing around with this and trying to grok the difference beween ORMs and cursors and views. So much to learn...
6:48:25 PM
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The Free Software Foundation has a marvelous campaign against Digital Restriction Management, the "right" claimed by media companies to prevent you from exercising your fair-use rights to play your purchased music, audio, video on the player and in the format of your choice. Such software and hardware is:
Defective By Design. A great concept!
1:22:32 PM
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Monday, October 30, 2006 |
Bill McGonigle announces the November 2nd meeting of the Dartmouth-lake Sunapee Linux User Group meeting, at a different location than usual:
The next regular monthly meeting of the DLSLUG will be held Thursday, November 2nd, 7-9PM at Dartmouth College, Silsby Hall, Room 312. All are welcome, free of charge.
"Open Source in Schools" presented by Dave Clifton
Dave will be talking about the use of Free / Open Source Software in schools and will chronicle the growth of the infrastructure at the Plainfield Elementary School (NH SAU 32) since 2002. There will be an emphasis on choosing appropriate software, the real costs of going down the F/OSS path, and some potentially surprising stories about what the Plainfield School is doing today.
Dave is currently a Senior Systems Administrator for
Ansys (formerly Fluent) in Lebanon, NH. He holds a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins and spent ten years doing consulting work for various government agencies and Bell Atlantic before escaping from DC to the Upper Valley in 1998. He got his start as a sysadmin in the mid-1980s running Masscomp Real-Time Unix and SunOS 4.0.3 and has subsequently worked on more operating systems than he wants to remember.
2:00:08 PM
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Ben Scott announces a presentation on Google Earth by Rob Anderson at the upcoming Seacoast Linux User Group:
- What : Google Earth
- Who : Rob Anderson
- Day : Mon 13 Nov 2006
- Time : 7:00 PM
- Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH
This November's SLUG meeting will be on Google Earth, with Rob Anderson leading the discussion. We're hoping everyone will get involved for a group learning session.
What is Google Earth?
"It's a globe that sits inside your PC. You point and zoom to anyplace on the planet that you want to explore. Satellite images and local facts zoom into view. Tap into Google search to show local points of interest and facts. Zoom to a specific address to check out an apartment or hotel. View driving directions and even fly along your route."
-- from http://earth.google.com/earth.html
Google Earth is free for personal use, and is available for Linux,
Mac OS X, and something called "Windows".
About SLUG
SLUG is the Seacoast Linux User Group, and is a chapter of GNHLUG, the Greater NH Linux User Group. Rob Anderson is the SLUG coordinator. SLUG meets the second Monday of every month, same time, same place. You can find out more about SLUG and GNHLUG at the http://slug.gnhlug.org/ and http://www.gnhlug.org/ websites.
Meetings take place starting at 7:00 PM. Meetings are open to all. The meeting proper ends around 9ish, but it's not uncommon to find hangers-on there until 10 or later. They take place in Room 301 (the third floor conference room), of Morse Hall, at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham.
9:54:09 AM
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Saturday, October 28, 2006 |
Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer says, "A bunch of people say that this Mac update may fix the random shutdown problems. I have installed it on my MacBook, of course, but I had already had my computer repaired. Apple hasn't said anything that this relates this fix to the problems widely reported on the net. If it does fix the problem, Apple still gets an failing grade for communication with customers." Good to hear they may have a fix.
11:53:59 AM
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Friday, October 27, 2006 |
LXer points to Ubuntu 6.10 Released. "The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.10, codenamed "Edgy Eft". This release includes both installable Desktop CDs and alternate text-mode installation CDs for several architectures."
Just when you thought you had caught up! Now, unlike some other OS platforms, this doesn't mean you have to drop what you are doing and try to switch to a new OS. Edgy is evolutionary and not revolutionary. News GUIs are add-ons to existing ones. Most packages are updates that you can get for your existing OS. The Ubuntu folks have stated that the last version, 6.06, "Dapper Drake" is the "Long Term Support" version, so the intent is the next couple with be edgier, more beta-like versions. So, if you want to play with cutting edge stuff, Edgy Eft is for you. If you want the staid and stable version, stick with the Drake.
10:01:09 AM
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Thursday, October 26, 2006 |
LXer reports trixbox 2.0 released. "Trixbox 2.0 beta will be available for download on Wednesday. This release will be Fonality's first big contribution to the trixbox/Asterisk community after the recent Fonality acquisition of trixbox. which certainly caused a stir within the Asterisk community. I spoke with Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality, to find out more about this major new release of trixbox."
I've seen TrixBox 1.0 demoed at MonadLUG in June by Tim Lind and it was an impressive piece of software. Looking forward to seeing what improvements are available in the 2.0 version. Tim's doing an Asterisk presentation in December at CentraLUG; perhaps he'll show off 2.0 there.
11:02:03 AM
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An interesting development. Oracle has announced they will be selling and supporting their own distribution of Red Hat, with base prices lower than those offered by Red Hat. This is perfectly legal, of course, as long as they follow the rules respecting the trademarks and copyrights associated with Red Hat's logos and names. It's already done by CentOS, which offers an "upstream" version of a well-known branded distribution. This is one of the points of Open Source: building on the works of others. The licenses make it clear that while you can build, you can't steal; many licenses require you share back your improvements you make, improving the lot of everyone.
I'll be interested in hearing how this works out. I don't know if it will prove economically feasible to Oracle. I applaud their innovation.
Others don't see it this way. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols decries "Oracle's Red Hat rip-off: "Here's the truth of the matter. Red Hat does a darn good job of supporting its Linux, and charges a fair price for it." I think that's true, and I think it will be borne out by the marketplace: some big Oracle shops may switch to "Oracle Unbreakable Linux" (hah!), but most shops will be more comfortable staying with the Red Hat vendor they know. And trying to undersell Red Hat on price? Oracle customers are generally not thought to be too price-conscious.
Time will tell. I see it as another endorsement of Linux as a valid platform for mission-critical line-of-business applications. That's a win.
10:52:04 AM
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Wednesday, October 25, 2006 |
In MacBook Shutdowns: Case (Finally) Closed?, Harry McCracken documents his trials and tribulations with getting his MacBook fixed. Apple doesn't seem to have been very forthcoming in admitting there was a problem. It appears the problem was with a defective sensor in a heatsink, but initial repairs were replacing the heatsink and the motherboard. Thousands suffered. Rumor mills flourished. Even a class-action lawsuit was started. It's so much better to get ahead of the press in admitting you've discovered a problem than to leave users in the dark. Some people get cranky.
Apple shipped their new MacBookPros this week, with Core 2 Duo processors, right along with Lenovo showing the Core 2 Duo CPUs on their ThinkPads. Which to pick? The "Think Different" company that make beautiful machines, or the tried-and-true-Blue Thinkpads? Sure, both ThinkPads and Macs burst into flames. It's not how you fail that matters, it's how you recover. (Links via Dan Gillmor's Blog)
2:56:52 PM
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Instead of displaying an ugly and intimidating page of XML when visitors click on the RSS feed icon on your site, provide them with an easy to read page that tells them what RSS is, how to work with it, and display the posts in your RSS feed in readable form. It's relatively easy to do by using a little XSL to style the display of the RSS. In "Working XML: Serve friendlier RSS and Atom feeds, " Benoit Marchal shows how.
11:00:56 AM
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Tuesday, October 24, 2006 |
Byte.com features "The Ten Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online" from the folks at http://www.darkreading.com/. "Online" is kind of a funny thing to tack on the end of this article title. Reading email might occur on- or off-line, but for most of us, does it really apply any more?
3:44:28 PM
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Monday, October 23, 2006 |
As I'll eventually get tagged to present a "Man Page of the Month" at the MonadLUG meetings, I thought I'd study a bit in advance when I found one I needed. 'top' seemed like a good candidate. But the man page is extensive, exhaustive, cross-referenced and difficult to read. So, I thought I'd print it out to scratch some notes in the margin and see if I could boil it down to a simple one-page quick reference. But how to print a man page? Well, you Google it, of course. The answer I found gave me the links I needed, even though their page neglected to display the key pipe symbols. Here's the trick:
zcat is a synonym to gunzip to pull the man page out of the .gz where it's stored. groff -man -Tps formats a file using the 'man' macro and outputs Type PostScript. Open the .ps file with the editor of your choice, and print it, convert it to PDF or whatever. So the entire command is:
zcat /usr/share/man/man1/top.1.gz| groff -man -Tps>top.ps
3:04:35 PM
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The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of (most) month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM.
Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. This month, we'll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as "I" on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Tell your friends.
For November's meeting, Andy Bair will present "Digital Forensic File Carving Techniques." Data carving techniques are used during digital forensic investigations and existing file carving tools typically produce many false positives. This briefing describes new tools and techniques used by the winning team of the the 2006 File Carving Challenge held at the 6th Annual Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS). The current briefing is also located here.
In December, Tim Lind of Computerborough will present TrixBox, the Linux distro for running the Asterisk PBX software, formerly known as "Asterisk @ Home."
January's meeting falls on the first, so we'll likely skip the month's meeting. However, stay tuned for some exciting meetings coming up in 2007! More details on the group and directions to the meeting at http://www.gnhlug.org.
9:21:10 AM
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Saturday, October 21, 2006 |
On the FoxProWiki, it's noted that FoxProCommunityLifetimeAchievementAward. Editor comments: Doug Hennig gets FPCLAA, the FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award. Terrific pick! Doug deserves the award for all of his contributions: presentations, white papers, his Stonefield software, books, magazine columns, and the software that ships with VFP. Congratulations, Doug!
3:38:16 PM
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A little more study on the ThinkPad T40 leads to the great Linux On Laptops web site with some specific advice on the T40 models and a tremendous amount of details on setting up the millions of little devices - mouse buttons, touchpad, IR, video, sound, modem, ethernet, power management, volume control, wireless - whew! - that make a laptop such a pleasure to use.
After setting the hidden non-partition to "Secure" so that no application would attempt to overwrite it, I used an Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD to resize the WinXPPro NTFS partition down to 18 Gb and set up a boot, root, and swap partition and then install Ubuntu. I set up all the optional repositories that Ubuntu comes with, update the local machine with 200Mb of updates and reboot. Up and running and current. Pretty cool.
Restarting in Windows, WinXP started CHKDSK, since the partition size had changes and it completed and forced a reboot. On the second start, Windows cheerfully reported it had "installed new devices" and needed to restart. What new devices? Hmm. Restarted again. Sheesh.
2:12:13 PM
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Friday, October 20, 2006 |
I've been holding off on purchasing a new laptop until IBM/Lenovo had a Linux-compatible ThinkPad T61p with the Merom ("Core 2 Duo") CPU installed. "End of October" is the latest estimate, but knowing how long Real Soon Now can get to be, I elected to pick up a bench spare laptop Just In Case. My primary machine ("Lucky") had a dead LCD, fried USB ports and a flaky wireless card. My older beater laptops have about bit the dust. I shopped around the BigBox stores and they were selling consumer junk. I looked at the Apples; they're sweet machines, but the software's still proprietary. If I was going to go for an Apple, I'd want to pick up a monster machine, and the budget doesn't allow that. So, for a while I was stumped. Finally, Laura suggested I look at a lower-model ThinkPad to tide me over.
IBM/Lenovo has a site for refurbished machines. I shopped over a couple of days. Keep an eye on the site, as inventory is changing often. I finally selected a T40, Pentium-M 1.5GHz, 256 Mb RAM (with a free upgrade to 512), 40 Gb HDD, WinXPPro, 1024x768 and CD-RW/DVD for just under USD $700.
With UPS ground shipping, it took less than a week to get here. The Out of Box Experience was perfect. Clean and well-packaged, the machine looked new. Other than a couple scratches on the serial number label, you'd think this thing had been vacuum-packed since it was manufactured in June of 2003. The HDD was a clean install of WinXP, and the "preinstallation" process took about an hour to install XP, forty million patches, IBM custom tools and drivers. A couple onerous registration forms (Yes, I want to register, no, I don't want you to have your "partners" send me mail) and I was up and running. First, a trip to Windows Update. A "new version" of Windows Update (the dreaded Windows Genuine Advantage check -- I passed! Whew!) and I was up to date. I was surprised to find that Windows Firewall was not running -- I had forgotten is was off by default, and was glad I was within a reasonable safe network as I raised the shields.
Next, a backup before I broke things. Booting onto a Knoppix CD, I followed the same process I used in July to upgrade Laura's hard drive: with the machine off, plug in an external drive and Knoppix, boot, Ctrl-F2 to a root console,
mkdir /media/target
mount /dev/sda1 /media/target
partimage
I was suprised to see that the recovery partition isn't a partion at all, according to the machine, but unpartitioned space at the end of the drive. That makes it a bit more difficult to make a backup copy for the inevitable hard disk drive failure. IBM's help file tries to explain how this is a feature to keep you from mis-laying a Recovery CD (You'll have to order one from IBM when the hdd fails, it explains. Of course, it will be a little difficult to read the help file on the hdd to discover this once it's failed.) Google, of course, will point you to solutions that can work around pretty much any "feature" the vendor throws in there.
Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the machine, and it will work great as a stopgap between Lucky and the next machine, and at a good price. Now, off to tinker some more...
5:57:18 PM
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SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green is reporting New Internet Explorer and an old vulnerability, (Fri, Oct 20th). "As you probably know by now, Microsoft yesterday released the final version of Internet Explorer 7 ..."
There was a great flap as Secunia grabbed the headlines by claiming that they had found a vulnerability in IE7. Not so, claims Microsoft! The vulnerability is in Outlook Express, installed by default on all Windows installations. And the flaw is a known one, seven months old. And it's unpatched.
So, how does a newer "secure" browser supporting an older, unpatched vulnerability, unfixed for over 200 days, mean we're more secure now?
10:31:01 AM
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Microsoft reissues buggy patch for Windows 2000 users. (InfoWorld) - Microsoft has reissued a Windows security patch that it published last week because the software did not work properly on Windows 2000 systems.
Folks running Windows 2000 servers, take note! Your machines are still vulnerable until you install this patch.
10:12:08 AM
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Thursday, October 19, 2006 |
"Programmers should be tool builders. If you're not building tools to make your life easier, you're wasting time. "
-- Phil Windley
3:44:18 PM
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Bill Sconce announces:
The monthly meeting of PySIG, the New Hampshire Python Special Interest Group, happens on the fourth Thursday of the month, starting at 7:00 PM. Beginners' session starts at 6:30 PM. Bring a Python question!
At this meeting we'll begin the often-requested "Python development
series", with the specific topics of source-code differencing (using
meld - an excellent development tool in its own right, written in
Python!), how to integrate tools such as meld into the SciTE editor.
In other words, one way to start complementing and moving beyond the
interactive Python window. Time permitting, we'll demonstrate similar
integration of revision control: Subversion checkins and Subversion
diffs. Presented by Bill Sconce (recovering Eclipse user).
Kent's Korner (Module of the Month) will be lambda expressions, hosted
this month by Mr. Python, Lloyd Kvam of Venix Corp.
The full announcement can be found here
2:24:25 PM
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David Isenberg does a great job of reviewing the Bill Moyer's show, "The Net@Risk". The show brought out a lot of the problems with mass-ownership of media, the "duopoly" of cable and telephony vendors slowing the US's broadband capabilities (we've slipped below tenth in the world) and how an unbalanced Congress is handing Big Media whatever it wants in 1984-Speak "Net Neutrality" justifications. Congress and Big Media are hurting the US' ability to compete and are harming the Society they are supposed to protect. (Thanks to JOHO for the link.)
12:29:35 PM
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Over at Microsoft Watch, Jason Brooks opines on the efforts Microsoft has spent to bring "Windows Genuine Advantage" to its corporate customers:
"What's worse, it appears that Microsoft has been expending significant development resources to make these expanded controls a reality. It seems to me that there's been a rather important and rather delayed product in the works that could've benefited from the developer hours that Microsoft had to devote to building the self-hosted activation server and associated tools required to bring WPA to Microsoft's biggest customers."
There's an interesting challenge here: Microsoft may squeeze a few more licenses out of its corporate customers at the cost of alienating a few of them into switching to less difficult solutions.
9:14:43 AM
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Over at All about Microsoft, Mary Jo Foley reports Allchin: Vista won’t RTM next week. "Vista is not on track to be released to manufacturing on October 25, after all, according to Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's platforms and services division."
Whadyaknow. The CD-printing facilities that have to generate the bajillions of CDs and DVDs must cost a lot to leave idle.
9:07:17 AM
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Wednesday, October 18, 2006 |
From SaveTheInternet.com:
Tune in to PBS tonight to see the SavetheInternet.com Coalition featured in "The Net at Risk," a documentary produced by award-winning journalist Bill Moyers. Then join other SavetheInternet.com members in an online Web discussion at PBS.org. Bill Moyers' show airs at 9 p.m. in most cities (check local listings). Immediately following the East Coast broadcast, PBS.org will host a live Internet debate between Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott and phone industry flack Mike McCurry.
6:08:58 PM
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In a June column, InfoWorld's Oliver Rist wrote, "Vista may just mark an OS revolution." By September, the glitter of shiny things had worn off, and in "Vista's not so revolutionary after all."
"I just finished previewing Vista Release Candidate 1 for the Test Center, and I suddenly realized I[base ']m more underwhelmed than I anticipated. A few months ago, in this very column, I used the adjective revolutionary instead of evolutionary. I[base ']m changing my mind."
These positions are striking, and I wonder how much of that is due to the way Microsoft has spent millions positioning and repositioning the product. In the years (and years and years) before the product shipped, Microsoft regularly announced earth-shaking features that would make Longhorn/Vista the most incredible OS on the planet, keeping the buzz going among the techorati and tempting the early adopters. When the product finally (Finally!) is getting close to shipping (*exactly* on time, regardless of all of the press to the contrary), wouldn't it be in Microsoft's interest to make the new OS as harmless and uninteresting as possible, so that the vast majority of users just accepted it as an update and not a revolution? If the choice isn't revolutionary (read: risky), there's a lot less reason to consider alternatives like OS X or RedHat or SuSE.
It's the same disk file system, despite all the initial buzz over WinFS. It's the same AD-domain-group-user permission scheme, despite the fundamental security failings of that design. It's the same old desktop metaphor, albeit with outrageous demands for graphical processing power. (When the vast majority of business still gets by on black-and-white printouts of words and numbers in rows and columns, the point of enough GPU power to play video games at 10x7x32pp@120fps is baffling to me. What new information are they conveying in translucent dialog boxes?). It's the same old apps.
Where are the solutions to the hard problems? Where's universal and ubiquitous and secure access to your stuff? Where's immediate backup and recovery of all of your files, settings and gestures? Where's secure, unimpeachable, identification in a wallet where you control your personal information and can enforce iron-clad privacy? Where's simple wireless roaming? With five years in the making, thousands of employee's efforts and millions of dollars expended, where are the solutions that you can't download from any free Linux distribution? Where's the innovation?
Microsoft fought hard to be the dominant leader in the industry. It is sad to see them abdicate their leadership with yet another more-of-the-same product.
2:16:44 PM
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The monthly meeting of the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group takes place on Thursday, the 19th of October at Martha's Exchange in Nashua, NH. Dinner is at 6 PM and the main meeting (upstairs) at 7:30 PM. Driving directions can be found here
From the group's announcement:
"Rob Lembree from JumpShift, LLC will discuss the components and processes involved in the development of a modern mobile phone, from the processors and radios to the operating system technology, middleware and applications that bring the package together. He will also discuss the peculiarities of the mobile industry that make bringing a handset to market a unique challenge."
"Rob will bring lots of mobile platforms with him in various states of completion for show and tell. Rob has two decades of experience in operating system technology, many of it in the embedded computing space, with three and a half years applying this experience to the mobile platform industry. When Rob grows up, he'd like to start a research and development company, hire smart people, and develop cool stuff that scares the heck out of big companies."
Hope to see you there!
10:05:37 AM
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Tuesday, October 17, 2006 |
Jeffrey Zeldman smacks down the hype well in his Web 2.0 Thinking Game: "Clearly “Web 2.0″ means different things to different journalists on different days. Mostly it means nothing -- except a bigger paycheck. But let’s simplify what The Economist is saying... (more)
From my perspective, we're slipping into another avalanche of unrealistic expectations, VCs throwing money at silly ideas, slick hucksters talking their way into CxO jobs, burn rates, burnouts and, perhaps, if we're lucky, a little bit of advancement of the art of getting computers to be more useful. Enjoy the ride.
9:00:34 AM
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Monday, October 16, 2006 |
I had a client very unhappy last week when I failed to respond in a timely manner to his emails. The problem was simple enough: I hadn't received them! It seems that my iMac's Mail.app was having some serious problems, but didn't let anyone know. After shutting down Mail.app, then forcing it to shutdown, checking the disk integrity, and restarting mail, it's discovering all sorts of email out there it forgot to tell me about. It's been running for about ten minutes and is still finding email, up to 342 unread messages so far. So, if you think I'm ignoring your email, it's possible that I just haven't seen it yet.
3:12:00 PM
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In RedHat magazine, Rahul Sundaram
writes Inside Fedora Core 6: "Fedora Core 6 is about to be unleashed in a week and I decided to give our precious users an in-depth look and sneak peak at what we've been cooking up for this release."
Here's the official Fedora Core 6 Release Summary.
2:32:24 PM
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Friday, October 13, 2006 |
InfoWorld: Application development reports: "Microsoft warns of new PowerPoint attack. Just days after patching four bugs in PowerPoint, Microsoft is warning of a new attack targeting its presentation software."
Boy, Microsoft is just not catching a break this month! Don't open untrusted PowerPoints. Don't run as an admin - configure your day-to-day user account as a Least-Priviledged-User.
9:41:43 PM
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Tuesday, October 10, 2006 |
SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green does a far more thorough job than I can of summarizing Microsoft patch tuesday - October 2006 STATUS, (Tue, Oct 10th). "Overview of the October 2006 Microsoft patches and their status."
A really quick summary: exploits in asp.net, in an IE "safe" ActiveX control, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, MSXML, Office, Publisher, the Server service, IPv6 and the Object Packager (wow! Haven't used that since OLE 1.0!). MS06-056-065. Get Patching! Try OpenOffice.org. Try FireFox. Think Differently. Good luck.
5:26:09 PM
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OSNews is pointing to the story that Microsoft's SCO Involvement Revealed. "A declaration by SCO's backer, BayStar has revealed that the software Giant Microsoft had more links to the anti-Linux bad-boy. The declaration made by from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb has turned up as part of IBM's evidence to the court. Goldfarb says that Baystar had been chucking USD 50 million at SCO despite concerns that it had a high cash burn rate. He also claims that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed "a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop', or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment".
I don't think it's really a surprise that MSFT and SUN are behind the funding of SCO to take a poke at IBM and slow the adoption of Linux through FUD. If you'd like to learn more about this incredibly complex case, GrokLaw is the place to visit. But be warned: it's easy to be dragged into all the fascinating nooks and crannies of the case.
The real question for me is whether MSFT and SUN succeeded in their ventures. SUN has done a turn-around and is re-inventing themselves as the green company with better price/power/performance for the internet. MSFT has... almost shipped Vista. Linux, meanwhile, has moved, up, out and around, scaling to greater multi-CPU architectures, developing a better virtualization story, making huge progress in hardware compatibility, and fielding several worthy desktop competitors. LAMP is not a risky choice for IT; it's a question of which commercially-supported distributions and stacks to choose and ensuring the eager technicians in house get the training they need. If the SCO case cooled enthusiasm and take-up any, it gave FOSS advocates time to get their act together and pay a little closer attention to governance and provenance and licensing terms, cleaning up their houses and getting their story straight. Meanwhile, Microsoft... almost shipped Vista.
If SCO/Baystar/Microsoft/SUN thought that IBM would roll over and settle out of court, they badly miscalculated.
8:34:12 AM
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Monday, October 9, 2006 |
SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green is discussing Spam Backscatter, (Mon, Oct 9th). "Over the weekend I dealt with the rather massive after effects of a spam campaign spoofing a domain" ...(more)
I'll second that! As the article goes on to indicate, many innocent mail administrators are a part of the problem by not changing naive settings of their servers. We need to encourage all the mail server software authors to change their default behaviors to fail to deliver mail silently: bounces from non-existant mail addresses are clogging the internet's pipes with replies to spoofed senders. "No such postbox" and "mailbox filled" are courteous, but since your server likely doesn't really know the sender, it's not just a waste of effort, but a an imposition on others to read your counter-spam. Let's all be a little quieter and learn more from listening than responding.
9:45:08 AM
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Thursday, October 5, 2006 |
Swa Frantzen is manning the SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green desk today, and struggles to work out the exploit Microsoft documents without admitting in MS06-053 revisited ?, (Thu, Oct 5th). "When we first read MS06-053 we ended up discussing and not fully understanding what Microsoft was..." (more)... The article explores what appears to be an IE cross-site scripting exploit but with the character set UTF-7 (yes, seven! - who knew!) and some advice to webmasters to help avoid spreading the problem by echoing a bad URL back to the user.
9:54:58 AM
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Wednesday, October 4, 2006 |
Slashdot post: Fonality Acquires Trixbox. An anonymous reader writes "MySQL's Brian Aker has a good commentary on the big news in acquisitions today that Fonality has acquired Trixbox, the Linux Telephony distribution." From the article: "So why is this big news? Trixbox is the distribution for telephony on Linux today. They have put together a vertical Linux distribution dedicated to telephony. It combines Asterisk with a web based interface backed by MySQL, integrated into the SugarCRM solution. As Redhat today is the LAMP of the IT Enterprise and Web Framework, (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP), Trixbox is the LAMP stack of the Telephony market, Linux , Asterisk, MySQL, Perl/PHP."
Good news. I saw TrixBox (nee Asterisk @ Home) demonstrated at the MonadLUG group by Tim Lind, who's gone on to do a couple of very successful Asterisk installs, and it's on my "I'd really like to try that out if only I had more time" list.
7:51:25 PM
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Tuesday, October 3, 2006 |
Working on a new install of Ubuntu 6.06 and needed the functionality of printing to PDF out of a variety of applications. OpenOffice.org has it built-in, but other apps don't. There's lots of support in Linux for PostScript as the preferred output format, but the magic of invoking pstopdf is magick to me. Enter cups-pdf, a printer driver that generates PDF files. Following the instructions here (especially the hint in comment 15), I was up and running and generating PDFs in ten minutes. Way cool!
3:27:58 PM
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Bill McGonigle announces Thursday's Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group: "Protecting a Windows Server with a $50 Linux Box from Staples" presented by Lloyd Kvam:
"Lloyd will talk about OpenWRT, the open source linux distribution that targets small routers such as the Linksys WRT45GL. He recently used one to make a bridging firewall, where a Windows computer needed protection, but there was no access to the router."
"Lloyd will talk about hardware organization, installing packages, the layout of the default configuration, and how to customize the routing and firewall operations... Lloyd works at software development, preferably in Python."
Should be a fun meeting. Hope to see you there!
11:27:04 AM
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Monday, October 2, 2006 |
Apple has released OS X 10.4.8 as a no-cost download, but it does require a reboot. A summary of changes are here. Get patching!
They are running out of single digit version updates. I wonder when 10.5 is due?
9:22:32 AM
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Sunday, October 1, 2006 |
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