Coty's Radio Weblog

	Thursday, April 17, 2003

RSS quickies [Ted Leung on the air]

Greg Reinacker's making the Windows Event Log available as RSS.

Jon Udell describes how targeted RSS feeds could help corporate PR flacks.

Chad Osgood describes Extensible Data Transform (XDT), a mechanism for converting wild data to RSS / XML. Think of it as XSLT that can use regexps to extract data from wonky (not-quite XML documents)
[Ted Leung on the air]

Thanks to Ted for these pointers. I'm definitely going to have our server's event log available via RSS soon. The implementation above requires ASP.NET, though. We don't have that on production servers, so I need to decide whether to install or rewrite without .NET libraries.
comment [] trackback [] 10:29:03 PM

OS X and SMS messaging

I paired my T68i mobile phone with my PowerBook today so iSync will auto-sync (via bluetooth) my contacts with the phone, my Mac and my online .Mac account. Neat.

After just replacing my mobile for the 3rd time this year due to me loosing them in taxis, this is a nice feature.

I've been playing with the bluetooth SMS support in OS X which is very nice; one click to send an SMS from a contact in your address book & incoming SMSs popup on the screen. Nice. [James Strachan's Radio Weblog]

I have a T68i and Bluetooth for my TiBook, as well, and it just rocks. I've used the SMS feature that James describes above quite a bit recently. I don't know whether James has mentions this, but when your phone is connected to your Mac, you also get an alert whenever a call comes in. From that dialog, you have the option of answering, sending the call to voice mail, or replying to the call via SMS.

I haven't heard of anything like this level of Bluetooth integration for Windows, yet. I admit I don't really track activity in that space aggressively, but I think I would have heard of something.
comment [] trackback [] 10:18:10 PM

Inside the World of Secure Operating Systems

Anyone who has been following the operating system market for long has probably heard about secure operating systems. But what exactly does this term mean? Do these offerings really deliver on their promises, or is "secure operating system" just another vendor buzzword? [osOpinion]

I've had some experience with trusted operating systems, having worked on HP's Virtualvault for several years. (In fact, the company where I used to work evolved out of the company that developed HP's Compartmented Mode Workstation--the foundation for Virtualvault.) I noticed recently that FreeBSD 5.0 includes experimental support for Mandatory Access Control (MAC), which is one of the critical features of a trusted OS. Many have inferred from Jordan Hubbard's oblique answer in his recent OSNews interview that MacOS X 10.3 will get some features from FreeBSD 5.x.

Now, I doubt that an experimental feature in 5.x is going to make it into Panther. Moreover, I can tell you from experience that a trusted OS does not mean a user-friendly OS. I do think it is interesting to consider, though, how MacOS X could evolve into an even more secure OS as this technology matures. Particularly on the server side, this could be a compelling message when compared with Microsoft's offerings.

comment [] trackback [] 10:08:44 PM