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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Thursday, June 30, 2005 |
And another from InfoWorld: Top News: Fake Microsoft security alert includes Trojan patch. "A new wave of spam that disguises itself as a Microsoft security bulletin contains a link to malicious software that gives attackers complete access to the infected machine, security researchers are reporting." Just a reminder folks: Never, EVER, run code from an untrusted source. There are no trusted sources.
4:55:17 PM 
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InfoWorld: Top News reports IE bug can crash browser. "Security researchers have discovered a bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser that can cause the software to crash, and which could possibly be used to let an attacker run unauthorized software on the IE user's machine." Translation: slow news day before American and Canadian holiday weekend. Nothing to see here, folks, move along...
4:53:23 PM
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Building on the work covered in Essential SourceSafe, here's some code that will generate two text files of the activity that your SourceSafe database has recorded in the past week. This can be a handy way to keep track with what's going on in a busy project.
(Changing the text output into an RSS feed is an exercise left to the reader. Cool idea, eh?)
I used Visual FoxPro to generate the commands for SourceSafe, as I couldn't figure out a way to generate a date less seven days in a DOS command shell. In my next post, you'll see a slick way to generate the current date, but that didn't help me here.
Save this program into a Visual FoxPro project, and optionally add a CONFIG.FPW with RESOURCE=OFF, SCREEN=OFF and build it into an EXE. Place the WeekHist.exe in the root of your SourceSafe install (or change the paths in the code below to match) and you can run the exe manually or set the .exe to run on a weekly scheduler using the OS' scheduler tools.
*==============================================================================
* Program.............: WEEKHIST.PRG
* Purpose.............: Generate a weekly history file from SourceSafe
* Author..............: Ted Roche
* Copyright...........: 2000-2005 by Ted Roche, licensed under the Creative
* ....................: Commons Attribution Share-Alike License,
* ....................: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/
* ....................: Please fix and pass along - Ted
* Last revision.......: 2005-June-30
* Parameters..........: None
* Returns.............: Nothing, outputs History.txt, .lst or .err
* Environment in......: Must run in root of VSS install, ASSuMEs that the
* ....................: data directory and win32 directories are below
* Environment out.....: History.txt is brief, History.Lst is verbose
*==============================================================================
* Format is:
* win32ss history $/ -R -vd07/02/05~06/26/05 -O@History.lst
* Try...Catch would be nice, but this supports any VFP runtimes
#DEFINE CRLF CHR(13)+CHR(10)
ON ERROR do errhand with ERROR(), MESSAGE(), MESSAGE(1), LINENO()
lcCommand = "win32\ss history $/ -R -vd" + ;
DTOC(DATE()) + "~" + ;
DTOC(DATE()-7) + ;
" -B -O@History.txt"
RUN &lcCommand
lcCommand = "win32\ss history $/ -R -vd" + ;
DTOC(DATE()) + "~" + ;
DTOC(DATE()-7) + ;
" -O@History.lst"
RUN &lcCommand
RETURN
PROCEDURE errhand(tnError, tcMessage, tcMessage1, tnLineno)
STRTOFILE(TTOC(DATETIME()) + " Error " + TRANSFORM(tnError) + CRLF + ;
" Message " + tcMessage + CRLF + ;
" Message1 " + tcMessage1 + CRLF + ;
" Line " + TRANSFORM(tnLineNo)+ CRLF , "History.err", .t.)
ENDPROC && errhand
[UPDATED]: See newer posts for updates: here and here.
12:08:45 PM
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Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes The Downside of Embedding RSS in Longhorn. "Microsoft watchers are thinking through the security implications of Microsoft's plan to embed RSS in Longhorn."
The upside is that Microsoft bundling a feature in with their OS means that developers can count on the feature being available (although uptake of recent versions of windows may mean that's only 20% of all Windows users). The downside is that it means malicious developers can count on it being available. While Microsoft is getting better at shipping software less exposed to exploit, it still enlarged the exposed surface for exploit.
9:09:43 AM
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Wednesday, June 29, 2005 |
A reader flamed me recently for commenting that Microsoft was on a "death spiral." That wasn't just vindictive thinking because they're killing my favorite product or because their insecure OS allows malicious software to splatter my Dad's computer. That was a real live professional opinion from a computer consultant who's spent 20+ years in the industry and seen 'em come and go. 8" floppies, paper tape, Winchester drives, Business Basic, Data General, WANG, Digital, blah, blah, blah, ones and zeros? You had zeroes? Now, bear in mind I was also a big Amiga and GEOS fan, so vision is not what I sell to clients. I deliver working code.
Otoh, Mitch Kapor has a lot of experience shipping code, delivering product, selling into the Fortune 100, reviewing business plans, and working venture capital deals. He's got some of that vision thing too. He had a profile in the Boston Globe recently (sadly, it disappears behind a paywall soon) that talked about his work with EFF and the exciting Open Source product called Chandler, which promises to be a well-thought-out PIM. The killer quote at the end of the article:
''Chandler could fail totally," he said. ''But open source as a movement is something that Microsoft cannot defeat. . . .Their style of triumph and of dominance is part of an era whose time is passing."
1:54:05 PM
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Tuesday, June 28, 2005 |
Scripting News points to Silicon Beat: "Behold, the new Yahoo Mail."
Looks cool. I've used GMail for a while, and I want folders. Maybe I just don't grok labels, but with a couple of high-volume email lists, my Google inbox just turns to chaos.
5:33:17 PM
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OSNews links to a ZDNet Australia piece that makes Ballmer sound like a punch-drunk fighter past his prime: Ballmer Confident, But Admits Failings. "Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has confessed the software giant's .Net strategy has come to a standstill, says he's accepted SQL Server's shortcomings and vowed to keep fighting search giant Google."
4:18:09 PM
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Slashdot hosts an interesting question: What is the Best Firewall for Servers?. Sushant Bhatia asks: "I maintain a bunch of servers (Win 2003/XP Pro) at our labs in the university. Of late, the number of attacks on the computers has been more noticeable. The university provides firewall software (Kerio) but that doesn't work with Win 2003 (works with XP). And so we keep getting hit by zombie machines taken over in the Education Department or from Liberal Arts :-). So what does the Slashdot crowd use when they need to secure their Linux and Windows servers? Does it cost less than US$100?"
Slashdot is filled with trolls, so setting your threshold around 4 raises the level of discussion and lowers the number of responses to read (although the rebar and concrete answer was a keeper). Interesting that the responses were pretty strongly "FreeBSD." An answer near the bottom points out the latest W2K3 service pack provides the WinXP firewall to W2K3 servers. Another posting argues that each Windows machine needs its own firewall in addition to the perimeter. The perimeter defense was proven to have some serious flaws in the fall of Troy. Amazing that it is still considered.
11:12:31 AM
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Doc Searls' IT Garage - blogs Grokking Grokster. "When I heard about the Grokster decision this morning (in which the Supremes decided unanimously in favor of MGM, et. al. in its suit against Grokster, et. al.), I knew many, in the blogosphere as well as the mass media, would play the story as a victory by Hollywood over Technology. That may be right, but to what does the metaphor blind us? Take away the war and sports framing, and what have you got?"
Doc writes a balanced piece, with links and quotations from both sides: illegal file sharing is, well, illegal, but banning basic technologies for peer-to-peer work has a potentially chilling effect on American technological innovation.
The basic system is screwed up. Most consumers don't have a problem with the idea that authors and musicians and inventors ought to be paid for their work. What technology has brought to many other venues is disintermediation - the elimination of the middle-man from the exchange between the consumer and the artist. Amazon attempts to bridge the gap between publisher and reader, skipping distributors and local bookstores. eBay and Craig's List attempts to link buyer and seller without second-hand shops. Record-company labels used to provide a service by finding talented musicians, renting high-end studio space and production skills, manufacturing vinyl records and distributing them to record stores in the hinterlands. Now that the artists can put audio tracks on their websites and artists can burn CDs with the help of some technical friends, the need for record labels ought to go the way of the buggy whip. Musicians need to take back ownership of their music, and their audience will pay.
11:07:01 AM
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Monday, June 27, 2005 |
Linus Torvalds is interviewed in the "Good Morning Silicon Valley" blog. I found his perception of Open Source filling in the commodity layer and providing an opportunity for proprietary software to "move up the stack" an intriguing idea.
10:54:49 AM
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Saturday, June 25, 2005 |
Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions says: MS at Gnomedex: I Don't Want to Wait for Longhorn to see you "get" something. Too True: Microsoft has become the slowest moving beast in the jungle. Other vendors are shipping betas now, or have been shipping live products for years. Andrew notes "There's a lot to be said about taking the time to get it done right." Yes, that's true, but in the immortal words of Susan Graham "Shipping is a feature." Contrast this attitude with the Open Source idea of "ship early, ship often." Agile organizations can cobble together a prototype, pass it around to interested parties, build a beta-quality product, circulate it amongst a large audience, use the feed back to add/drop/modify features, then Version 1.0 can kick butt, instead of just being a platform for delivering Service Pack One. Perhaps Microsoft does this within their closed, NDA-enshrouded beta process, but few products (with Visual FoxPro a notable exception) appear to benefit from the vetting. Either the testers aren't giving MSFT good enough feedback, or MSFT is failing to act on it.
Microsoft has been this route already once with Active Desktop and Channel Description Format (CDF). Any bets that second time will be the charm?
4:28:29 PM
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Friday, June 24, 2005 |
InfoWorld: Top News reports IBM ruffles workers by expanding India staff. "As one of the IT industry's largest and most storied employers, IBM faces constant scrutiny of its workforce shifts and reductions. With The New York Times reporting Friday on IBM's plans to significantly expand its staff in India while cutting jobs elsewhere, the company once again found itself balanced at the delicate intersection of global business realities and U.S. politics."
Back in the days of white shirts and blue suits, IBMers used to joke that IBM stood for "I've Been Moved."
3:39:49 PM
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Thursday, June 23, 2005 |
Dave Winer posts on Scripting News: "In April I visited Microsoft to hear about some interesting ideas they had about RSS. On Friday they will explain these ideas publicly. Today, with their permission, I have a preview of part of what they will talk about. I hope everyone who's interested in RSS listens carefully. I know I will. "
Looking forward to seeing what Microsoft announces!
1:41:18 PM
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Wednesday, June 22, 2005 |
David Weinberger blogs:
No, I'm not keeping up with your blog.
I would like to. I really would. I like it and I like you.
But we're now well past the point where any of us can keep up with all the blogs worth reading from the people worth keeping up with. Even with an aggregator.
I just can't do it any more.
And that goes double for those Fox bloggers who changed the address of their RSS feeds and expect me to notice I'm not seeing any postings from them showing up in a news aggregator. You know who you are.
4:16:56 PM
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OSNews tries to ignite a controversy with Microsoft Puts OSS Roadblock on Avalon and Indigo. "Novell's Mono open-source group had been successful in porting Microsoft's .Net Framework, but Microsoft is insisting its Avalon and Indigo intellectual property rights requires that any attempt to produce open-source versions of these two will require licensing."
I'm surprised this is news. Microsoft was pretty clear, I thought, in making their common runtime environment a standard (that's what Mono has been building, if I understand correctly), and pushing C# out to a standards body for more support. But to suppose that meant Microsoft was giving away the whole tool chain, or even all of the layers of software needed to generate a Windows-style app on a competing platform, was näive at best. Microsoft is not out to lead by example, set industry standards and then beat its competition by having the best product.
I'd welcome hearing from other people who were expecting something else.
4:03:23 PM
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Slashdot notes At Long Last, NeoOffice/J 1.1 Released. VValdo writes "After nearly five years of development, NeoOffice/J has made it to its first stable release. NeoOffice/J 1.1 is a Mac OS X-integrated office suite based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 that includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing applications. Key Macintosh features include a standard Mac OS X installer, a native Aqua menu bar, use of the native printing system, full clipboard support, drag-and-drop, Mac "command" key shortcuts, mouse scrolling, integration with major Mac email clients and native support for Mac fonts. "
As I've mentioned previously, I've been using the NeoOffice/J since January, and I've been really pleased with it. The functionality of OpenOffice.org meets my needs - basic spreadsheet, word processing and presentations - and the more advanced features, like Draw and PDF output, make it a world-class competitor.
2:21:29 PM
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Tuesday, June 21, 2005 |
The Electronic Freedom Foundation reports "Rumor is afoot that Hollywood is taking another crack at the Broadcast Flag on Capitol Hill, this time by sneaking a Flag provision into an appropriations bill before the Senate." Contact your senator to say you want this issue carefully considered, not tacked on the end of a piece of legislation without debate.
Read more here.
10:11:56 AM
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Monday, June 20, 2005 |
In case you were going to let other folks find out if the last week's batch of Microsoft patches were naughty or nice, it's time to patch. The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center Daily Handler's Diary notes that the HTML Help exploit described in MS05-026 is out in the wild and coming in as spam to an unsuspecting mailbox near you.
3:58:35 PM
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Saturday, June 18, 2005 |
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Friday, June 17, 2005 |
OSNews says Meet Fedora Core 4. "The latest issue of Red Hat Magazine includes an interesting overview of the new Fedora Core 4 among other things, released earlier this week."
I can't believe I missed the announcement. Must have had a case of the Mondays. Hop over to the Fedora site and join the BitTorrent - share the bandwidth and speed everyone's download. DVD and CD isos of source and binary are available for i386, x64 and PPC.
1:33:42 PM
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WebObjects Now Free With Tiger. Reverberant writes "Macworld reports that has Apple released WebObjects as a free application. From $50,000 to free, the software used to build the iTunes Music Store and Dell's original online store is now available for free to Tiger users via Xcode 2.1." From the article: " The software has historical importance to Apple-watchers: it was originally released in March 1996 - but not by Apple. In fact, WebObjects was developed by NeXT Computer and became Apple's software only when that company acquired Steve Jobs' second computer company later that year. While not software on the tip of every Mac users tongue, WebObjects sits behind several significant implementations - the most famous current example being Apple's iTunes Music Store." [Slashdot]
1:28:39 PM
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Wednesday, June 15, 2005 |
InfoWorld: Application development reports Microsoft patches critical bugs in IE, Windows. "Microsoft released 10 security patches, including three deemed "critical," for bugs in a variety of the company's products. Released Tuesday as part of the company's monthly updates, the critical patches repair flaws in Windows and Internet Explorer that could allow attackers to take complete control of a computer, Microsoft said."
Affected software includes Internet Explorer (an integral part of the OS which can't be removed or disabled, according to Microsoft), HTML Help (see IE), Microsoft's sharing protocol called SMB, Exchange 5.5, Outlook Express, ISA Server and more. Three "Critical" flaws allow a remote user to assume complete control of your machine. Affected versions of Windows include Windows 98, 98 SE, Millenium Edition ("ME"), Windows 2000 SP 3 and SP4, Windows XP SP1 and SP2, Windows XP 64-Bit Edition SP1 and Version 2003, and Windows Server 2003 original, SP1, Itanium original and SP1 and x64 Edition. (Microsoft no longer supports nor offers updates for Win95 nor NT editions, but you can presume these are likely affected, too.)
Windows Security Bulletins MS05-025 through MS05-034 are described on the TechNet web site. It is the 25th week of the year.
11:28:44 AM
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Tuesday, June 14, 2005 |
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Monday, June 13, 2005 |
In Jon Udell's Strategic Developer column:
"We've learned this before and will again when the next wave of business process modelers arrives: Visual programming tools don't turn civilians into programmers. Nor is that an appropriate goal."
4:30:57 PM
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Alex Feldstein blogs Visual FoxPro Devcon: Keynote. "VFP Devcon's Keynote in Las Vegas was well attended. Present from Microsoft were Y. Alan Griver, Ken Levy, Randy Brown, John Koziol and Richard Stanton." Read lots more on his blog.
For the stereoscopic view, David Stevenson heard the same keynote, a few seats away. In David Stevenson's Talking Fox, he blogs:
DEVCON keynote shows early Sedna ideas. "At the opening keynote session at the Visual FoxPro DevCon in Las Vegas Sunday night, Ken Levy and Randy Brown of the Microsoft Visual FoxPro team showed several early prototypes of features that might be included in the Sedna release in 2007. Ken emphasized throughout the session much of the same information that has been posted publicly so far, including the fact that Sedna will be focused on making Visual FoxPro 9.0 work better with the Longhorn operating system, .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and other upcoming technologies."
1:43:25 PM
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Sunday, June 12, 2005 |
 InfoWorld: Top News notes that Firefox keeps chipping away at IE's share. The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox managed to slightly increase its usage share in the Web browser market in May, as it continues to compete against the market's Goliath: Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE).
Firefox's market share reached 8 percent in May, up from 7.38 percent in April, while IE's slice of the pie shrunk a bit to 87.23 percent, down 0.77 percent, according to a statement released Wednesday by NetApplications.com, an Aliso Viejo, California, maker of applications for monitoring and measuring Web site usage.
Although IE's share is colossal, Firefox is consistently increasing its share by between 0.5 percent and 1 percent from month to month.
1:16:40 PM
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Saturday, June 11, 2005 |
Bill McGonigle of BFC Computing in his comment to my previous post "Maybe it wasn't about the Mac Mini After All" that Cringely sees a vast conspiracy behind the Apple-Intel switch. I've heard a lot of discussion, including some pretty wild speculation on Slashdot (this one was a favorite. Warning: this one uses the "shit" word, so stay away if easily offended.)
A fellow member challenged me on the ProFox list on whether I thought the Apple switch was bad for Microsoft. No, I think the Apple switch is good for Apple. As far as Microsoft goes, I think they are on a self-destructive death spiral that they brought on themselves. It isn't going to be Beauty that kills the Beast. In this case, the Beast needs no help.
12:55:38 PM
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From the Financial Times: Microsoft bans "democracy" for China web users: "Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors."
10:05:31 AM
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Friday, June 10, 2005 |
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Thursday, June 9, 2005 |
Guy Pardoe did a great presentation of the Kuro Boxes, using the US-branded Buffalo Tech LinkStation. Fourteen attendees got into the hardware and the discussions were far-ranging and intriguing.
8:33:12 PM
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Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports that 'Monad' Scripting Shell Unlikely to Debut in Longhorn. "However, Microsoft is planning to make its alternative to Unix and Linux command-line scripting available as part of Exchange 12, due next year."
One complaint I hear about Open Source software is the lack of a "roadmap" - a plan with features and ship dates. On the closed source side, no one can claim to know anything about which feature will or will not make it into Longhorn (WinFS? Monad?) but the ship date of "end of 2006" seems pretty firm. However, what value is committing to a ship date without a similar commitment to a feature set?
P.S. If you're really looking for a bash-like scripting shell for Windows, why not install CygWin and use Bash and an entire UNIX-like environment? Or you might prefer Ruby, if you're interested in some of the object-oriented features that might (or might not) be in Monad. Both are shipping now, supported now, free, and don't require you to use Exchange 12. Waiting on Monad is likely to be, well, monadonous.
11:53:52 AM
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Interesting post from InfoWorld: Top News stating the IBM seems reticent to talk about using Wine in-house, perhaps out of concern for potential liability. The article that the threat is likely to come from Microsoft's vast patent portfolio, and the thought that a Wine developer could be unknowingly infringing on a patented process. This is yet another example of why software patents are inherently a bad idea. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, so that someone cannot lift your source code without your permission. But patents protect the very idea itself. In the physical world of patents, an invention physically identical to someone else's is unlikely to happen by chance. But in computer software source code, there are only so many ways to make a process happen, to click, drag and drop, and there are common and "best practices" guidelines on how code should work. Software development should be a commons of ideas building on other ideas, not a wasteland of locked-up, owned, restricted ideas.
IBM a reluctant user of Wine software. "IBM's effort to promote Linux as a viable alternative on the company's 350,000 corporate desktops took a step forward last month, when the company's IT organization began supporting the open-source Firefox browser. However, while the move to support a browser that runs on Linux may provide a boost for both Firefox and IBM's internal Linux effort, Big Blue hasn't been nearly so eager to promote a lesser-known piece of software, called Wine, that it has used to advance Linux on the desktop."
11:30:49 AM
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Wednesday, June 8, 2005 |
The Monadnock Linux User Group meets the second Thursday of most months at the SAU 1 office in Peterborough. This month, there will be a demonstration of "The Kuro Box" a PowerPC-based box costing $160 that needs a hard drive to run. Tom's Hardware reviews it here, another from Penguin PPC. and IBM DeveloperWorks. Looking forward to seeing the presentation.
9:36:39 PM
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Tuesday, June 7, 2005 |
Despite a lightning strike taking out power at our regular meeting place, the CentraLUG finally got to see Scribus presented by Ed Lawson. Ed had tried twice before to do the presentation and was thwarted first by hardware and next month by a family emergency. This time, we made a quick move to member Bruce Dawson's, and got to see a great presentation. One of our regulars, Luke, is an experienced graphics designer, using Quark and the other top-of-the-line tools, and he was impressed with what Scribus could do.
10:02:19 PM
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Monday, June 6, 2005 |
OSNews posts Confirmed: Apple to use Intel Chips. "Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life. There have been rumors to this effect... We've had teams working on the 'just in case' scenario." said Steve Jobs. Apple will ship a Mac with Intel processors by June 6th, 2006, as reports said. It should be complete by June 2007. Says that Intel offers a better roadmap for the markets that Apple services. Jobs talked about IBM missing the 3 GHz mark for the G5, and in not being able to put one in a PowerBook. Today's WWDC keynote demonstration has been done entirely on an Intel Mac. Developers applauded Steve when he said that both processors would be supported for a long time and the core to this will be universal binaries (as I predicted yesterday)."
I'm following along on Brian Jepson's blog. If the keynote was simulcast, I couldn't find the link. Bummer. Perhaps Apple will post the keynote later.
I find the idea of OS X on Intel intriguing. I wonder if it will run on anything other than Apple-branded hardware.
Apple Press Release
MacMerc is also posting the keynote, although their server seems to be melting...
Apple stock is rising (disclosure: I am a minority stockholder, a tiny minority), but how long will it be before investors realize that PowerPC sales are likely to tank with new Intel models a year away? The Rosetta technology Apple is using promises full binary compatibility between the two machines, but buyers tend to be shy...
2:00:40 PM
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Saturday, June 4, 2005 |
Welcome David Stevenson to the blogosphere! Hop in, David, the Internet still has plenty of room!
David is editor of FoxTalk 2.0.
6:51:25 PM
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Friday, June 3, 2005 |
Back (although at a new venue, it appears) after a long hiatus, the Gillmor Gang (Steve Gillmor, John Udell, Dana Garner, Mike Vizard and Doc Searls) are a formidable bunch on their own, and they chat with Adam Curry this week. Excellent thought-provoking materials touching on topics of podcasting, directories, SOA, screencasting, Apple's ITunes RSS announcement, Open Source agility and much, much more.
I burn the audiocast to CD (I know, how analog!) and play it in the car CD player on the way to a client. This one was so good that I played it again on the way back.
The big issue I have with most podcasts is the one-to-one nature of input and output: it takes me as long to listen to it as it took them to say it. A half-hour broadcast takes me half an hour to listen to. Compare that to an RSS reader, where I can skim 300 articles, picking out facts as I go, digging deeper into intriguing ones, noting general headlines on others. Even though it may have taken each of those authors hours to write a piece, in my half-hour, I can grab 300 times that. It's all about data density.
Most audiocasts just can't pack enough info in for me. These six guys did, though.
OTOH, I was driving, so that's where I spent my concentration. And it was good enough to listen to twice. And I'll listen again. Five stars.
3:50:03 PM
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Tune in Monday at 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern, for Steve Job's keynote Presentation at the World Wide Developer Conference, http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/. I always find Jobs' presentations entertaining. Buy your developers lunch and set up a projector in the lunch room to watch along. With any luck, you'll have a good idea on what Microsoft will be announcing next month, Of course, it won't ship until Longhorn. In 2007.
3:26:06 PM
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OSNews is reporting that Red Hat lets go of Fedora Linux. "Red Hat is changing course again with its free Fedora version of Linux, announcing Friday that it will turn over copyrights and development work to an outside entity called the Fedora Foundation."
Unlike the news out of Seattle, which has been a pretty grim bunch of product delays, end-of-life announcements and news on which products they will no longer be supporting, the Linux community is hopping with activity. Look to Fedora Core 4 to ship on Monday. And keep an eye on Ubuntu as it rapidly becomes the desktop of choice.
3:08:36 PM
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Thursday, June 2, 2005 |
Off to DLSLUG tonight, where Jeff Woodward will be demonstrating OpenAFS:
OpenAFS is a distributed filesystem product, pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University and supported and developed as a product by Transarc Corporation (now IBM Pittsburgh Labs). It offers a client-server architecture for file sharing, providing location independence, scalability and transparent migration capabilities for data. IBM branched the source of the AFS product, and made a copy of the source available for community development and maintenance. They called the release OpenAFS.
4:14:54 PM
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Wednesday, June 1, 2005 |
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 Technical Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. (Note that we're likely to reschedule the July meeting as it falls on the Fourth.)
This month, we'll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf, marked as "I" on that map. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, with Ed Lawson presenting Scribus, an open desktop publishing system. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
Scribus is available from http://www.scribus.org.uk and is not just another pretentious word processor, but an entire pre-press system for producing high-quality documents suitable for publication. It will generate PDF files. It has a new "Scriptor" API for scripting in Python. Imports and exports SVG. Bells! Whistles! It runs natively under Linux and under X11 on Mac OS X and (in theory, anyway) CygWin on Windows. Scribus is distributed under the GPL.
More details at about this meeting and the group are available at http://www.centralug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org.
Hope to see you there!
3:13:21 PM
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Ken Levy's monthly letter is out and points to a revised VFP Roadmap, most of which has been leaked by Ken over the past month on the UT. No surprises here. The project code-named "Sedna" - how harsh! - is officially announced.
There's a great plug for the Hentzenwerke "New in Nine" book.
2:48:25 PM
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Happy