17 January 2002

Woah!! What happened to Blairnet? If you've come to www.blairnet.com expecting the familiar old Matthew's Portal, that's been here for such a long time, it's here, and you'll always find a permanent link at the top right of the page. For that matter, if you've come here expecting the familiar old Matthew's Portal, I'm curious as to who you might be? Richard or Juliet? Jordan or Steve? I'd love to hear from you, whoever you are, so email me already! 7:21:08 PM

Yes! It worked. Radio is speaking via ftp to the static server at Blairnet. Praise be! This is what I've be trying to get Radio to do for a week - this weblog is now published on the root of on my home on the web for three years, http://www.blairnet.com 7:10:26 PM

Why is this broken? I cranked up a Radio 8.0 weblog a day or so after it was released, installing it over a previous 7.x version. Prior to upgrading, I'd downloaded a Manila hosted weblog, throb.edithispage.com. Sure enough, the old posts from Throb got published to the Radio 8 host servers and to the static site I was ftping the weblog to, but none of the fresh posts were getting published, although they appeared in the browser page Radio uses on the host machine to manage the weblog, http://127.0.0.1:5335/ So, I backed up, and did a completely fresh install of Radio 8. The first post went out to the Radio 8 host server, http://radio.weblogs.com/0101514/, but was not ftp'd to my static server. Since then, nothing has made it to either server. The events log always says: Upstream Can't upstream because "Can't open named stream because TCP/IP error code 11001 - Host not found. (DNS error)." I've just turned off the Check this box to Upstream files through FTP option, to see if I can't at least eliminate this error and get my posts to appear on the Radio 8 host server. 3:12:53 PM

Microsoft security fixed You have to wonder. On his Better Living Through Software weblog, the bright and prolific Microsoftee x, talks about how all Microsoft's security woes are going to get fixed, because Bill Gates has appointed a heavyweight to address the problem internally. I have to quote at some length: "Serious - I reported a while ago that Brian Valentine has beassigned to head up efforts to improve security across all Microsoft products and the rest of the industry. Brian is famous internally for being a "hammer guy". That is, he is the 50,000 pound daisycutter bomb that gets dropped when you absolutely cannot afford to miss. It's understandable, though, that some people externally might not have realized the significance of this assignment and what it says about the company's seriousness in wanting to make a difference. But now that Bill Gates memo on the topic has leaked, it should be really clear how serious this issue is for Microsoft. The cynics and haters will spin this a million different ways, but at the end of the day, this is a perfect example of why Microsoft is so strong and why most Microsoft employees don't shop at despair.com for office decorations. Instead of promising the impossible, and instead of playing three billy goats gruff ("his security flaws are much bigger than mine, Mr. Troll"), Gates and Valentine are promising simply to make security be the top priority. And the promise has teeth; this reorientation is already being felt throughout the company. Nobody in the company has to feel conflicted about whether or not they should trade-off security for some other objective; the priorities are clear. This is the right thing to do, and more importantly, the right way to do it. And needless to say, Microsoft's focus on this will have impact far across the industry. If that is not what good leadership is about, I don't know what is." But security isn't a feature you bolt onto a piece of software as an afterthought. If it isn't a priority consideration from the very start of the design process, the product will be seriously flawed. Let's suppose for a moment that Bill G has had a genuine Road to Damascus change of heart, and that security will be more important than early shipping (!?), or more features (?!), or ease of use (and none of these suppositions is really credible). Even if all of these were true, we would still have to wait for ground up new versions of each product before security were significantly improved. Sorry, but not convinced. 12:36:25 PM