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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Monday, September 26, 2005 |
Linux-Watch.com points to an IT manager's Journal article, Avoiding some common Linux admin mistakes, that point to IT problems that happen in all shops: failing to document, failing to plan on problems and having to react to them, failing to properly evaluate the build vs. buy, host vs. rent calculations, depending on silver bullets, too much - too fast, and not giving security its due.
11:45:16 AM 
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Saturday, September 24, 2005 |
Alex Feldstein reports Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9 Pulic Beta released. "Microsoft announced that the public Beta of SP1 for Visual FoxPro 9.0 is now available
for free download on msdn.com. The download page has a text file
download with the bug fix list contained in the SP1 beta. Refer to the
download page on msdn.com for more details... As always, being a Beta you should not install it in your production box but in a test unit, although having worked with it for a while I found it to be very stable... Note: If you have one of the community produced VFP9 IDE translations (German, Spanish, Czech, etc.), these translations do not yet work with SP1. We will have to make some minor changes for these when SP1 is released around December 2005."
10:23:03 AM
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Wednesday, September 21, 2005 |
Two related Computerworld News postsL Allchin says farewell in e-mail to co-workers. "On the same day it unveiled a major reorganization, Microsoft Corp. also announced that Jim Allchin, group vice president of platforms at the software company, would retire at the end of 2006."
Analysis: Microsoft reorganization needed to end internal 'turf wars'. "Microsoft Corp.'s decision to consolidate six divisions into three -- each of them run by presidents who report to CEO Steve Ballmer -- makes sense for the company, industry analysts said today."
Re-orgs at Microsoft are a regular item, as they play musical chairs above the glass ceiling. Whether or not this will actually trickle down to mean anything to the average Microsoft line worker is something only time will tell.
"The new Platform Products & Services group will comprise the current Windows Client, Server and Tools division and the MSN online services division. The business group will consist of the current Microsoft Information Worker group, including Microsoft Office, and the Business Solutions group, which includes CRM and ERP applications. And the new entertainment division will oversee the development of entertainment and digital devices, such as IP television, Xbox and other consumer-oriented digital lifestyle products."
So now there are three: OS, Apps and Toys. Sounds like the split the Justice Department suggested a long time ago. I wonder if this might give the Apps group incentive to deploy on different OSes. There's still the unnatural combination of the Operating Systems with the Servers that run on them - Exchange, SQL Server, BizTalk, etc., when those should be business applications rather than operating system extensions.
My call: little will change. A few less executives to perk. A few kicked upstairs, a few kicked around, a few kicked out. Same-o, same-o.
3:38:46 PM
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Tuesday, September 20, 2005 |
In InfoWorld: Application development, Ephraim Schwartz editorializes The end of 'one throat to choke'?. "OK, first let's dispel two myths foisted on us by big-name software industry personalities."
Instead of one throat to choke, one stack to manage, Benioff would have us believe that large companies want to go out and link dozens of smaller applications together, some of them untried and untested. That's what componentization is all about, I suppose. But I tell you, this idea runs completely counter to the real world, where companies are trying mightily to reduce the number of applications they need to manage.
When I talked with Greenbaum about this, however, he called me naïve. The idea of one throat to choke is overhyped, he says. While he agrees that no major enterprise is going to put its apps on a "dinky little infrastructure" -- AppExchange, that is -- he says no one vendor meets all of the requirements. If Greenbaum is right, then we end up with a lot of battlegrounds. And that is exactly what Evan Quinn, vice president of applications research at IDC, believes will happen.
Success comes from managing change, not trying to stop it. Software is not a commodity item where the goal is to reduce the number in stock. Reducing the number of interchangeable items in your business streamlines the inventory management and control, but softwares are not interchangeable. New versions offer new features. New software platforms offer new ways to manage your business. Companies that really innovate beat the competition.
The "one throat to choke" idea has never worked. Companies that invested big in projects with IBM, Anderson, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft or any of the others never really had that much leverage against the big boys. You might be able to put up a fuss and kick them in the shins, and they might even settle out of court after costing you millions, but the companies went on, leaving a little trail of disasters behind them. Like all investments, diversification is the strategy to minimizing the "all eggs in one basket" risk factors.
Hmm. Diversification is good. Like interoperability. Competition breeds innovation. Monopolies breed stagnation. Working Well With Others is Good. Now, where have I read that before?
11:25:19 AM
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Alex Feldstein blogs New Bagle worm is making rounds?. SANS Internet Storm Center reports that a new Bagle worm variant is making rounds. Make sure that your antivirus is up-to-date and enabled.
Preliminary information is:
- The file arrives as a zipped attachment with a filename including
the word "price" (price.zip, price2.zip newprice.zip, 09_price.zip,
etc...).
- Creates two files: C:WINDOWSsystem32winshost.exe and C:WINDOWSsystem32wiwshost.exe
- Launches winshost.exe from the HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun key
- This has been classified (by at least one AV vendor) as: TROJ/BAGLEDL-U
Be aware.
My Inbox (running on a Mac) is already filling up with these. One more time, let's remember the rules: NEVER open an attachment from an untrusted source. There are no trusted sources. NEVER EVER open an unexpected attachment without verifying with the sender that they did intend to send you that attachment. If you have some confidence you know what you're doing, save it to disk, scan it and test it. If you aren't confident of your abilities to detect a problem, contact your IT support person. Don't have any of those? Don't open the attachment.
11:11:42 AM
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Monday, September 19, 2005 |
The FoxPro Advisor web site carries this touching remembrance of Drew and Brent written by my co-author for the Hacker's Guide series, Tamar E. Granor.
8:17:53 PM
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Sunday, September 18, 2005 |
If you've sent a message and I haven't responded, it's possible I haven't seen it. Please contact me directly. My upstream mail forwarding service has become really slow on relaying traffic. Witness this nine day (Ow!) delay:
Received: from m1.dnsix.com ([63.251.171.164])
by sccrmxc11.comcast.net (sccrmxc11) with ESMTP
id <20050918222325s1100netare>; Sun, 18 Sep 2005 22:23:25 +0000
X-Originating-IP: [63.251.171.164]
Received: from [66.67.5.58] (helo=marge.leafe.com)
by m1.dnsix.com with esmtp (Exim 4.44)
id 1EDp8B-0001U4-Sk
for tedroche@tedroche.com; Fri, 09 Sep 2005 13:05:52 -0700
6:41:48 PM
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 Very sad news: Drew Speedie (third from left) and his son, Brent Speedie (right) passed away while on vacation in Yellowstone.
Drew was a very talented man. He worked as the technical editor of "Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro 3" and he helped Tamar and I make the book far better. Drew went on to develop the MaxFrame Professional framework. I used MaxFrame on a number of applications quite successfully. Drew was a contributing editor at FoxPro Advisor magazine where he wrote a number of insightful articles. Drew spoke at many FoxPro conferences around the world, always entertaining, always informative. He often attended the conferences in the company of son Brent and wife Irene.
He will be missed. My condolences to his family.
3:26:40 PM
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OSNews posts Firefox vs. IE security: Is Two Greater Than Five?. "A recent blog post on ZDNet contends that Firefox is not as secure as promised by counting exploits. Joseph Huang contends that severity and the number of unpatched vulnerabilites matters, not just the number of exploits discovered."
Lies, damned lies and statistics, indeed! Here's Joseph's portrayal:
| IE | FireFox | |
| Extremely Critical | 10 | Zero |
| Highly Critical | 20 | 3 |
| Moderately Critical | 14 | 4 |
| Less / Not Critical | 25 | 15 |
2:11:50 PM
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Saturday, September 17, 2005 |
OSNews notes IDG Pulls Plug on Macworld Boston. "Two years after the East Coast version of the Macworld Expo made a controversial move to Boston, IDG World Expo is pulling the plug on the event. IDG announced plans in October 2002 to move the show from New York to Boston, with Apple Computer immediately announcing that it would not join IDG in the move. With Apple gone, attendance dropped substantially, prompting a move this year to the smaller Hynes Convention Center."
As I posted back in July, charging $15 to tour the Expo floor and let vendors try out their pitch on you is not going to boost attendance, either. Apple's decision to not support IDG cut of its oxygen, but this doesn't help, either. Less attendees means vendors won't be inclined to pay the exorbitant costs of exhibiting. Less exhibitors means attendees pay more, driving them away. Death Spiral.
Note that CMP's Software Development conference in Boston is doing something similar: "Unlimited access to two days (Sept 27-28, 2005) of the SD Best Practices Expo. Plus attend all Keynotes, Tech Sessions, the Expo floor party and selected special events (as noted online and in program guide)... Register online by Sept 22, 2005, 4:00pm for your complimentary Expo Pass. A fee of $50 will be charged after this date." Fifty bucks! That will drive casual visitors away! Get those registrations in soon!
10:28:25 AM
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Friday, September 16, 2005 |
Over at Scripting News. Dave Winer points out that "BusinessWeek profiles anonymous blogger Mini-Microsoft." M-M is the most valuable employee Microsoft has, someone unfraid to point out that the system is broken. Microsoft ought to pay more attention to him/her if they aren't already. It could just be a plot by Microsoft Research, of course.
3:44:20 PM
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Thursday, September 15, 2005 |
LLoyd Kvam of Venix Corporation will host a discussion and demonstration on Functional Programming at the next Python SIG meeting, held the fourth Thursday of each month at 7 PM at the Amoskeag Business Incubator.
3:54:08 PM
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From Ed Foster's column today: "Microsoft's Software Assurance licensing program has always stood out among software maintenance plans for the unique value proposition it offers customers. You pay nearly twice as much as other vendors charge for half of what other vendors give you, and that's if you're lucky."
This is somewhere between "Would you like a service plan with that?" and your local mobster coming around to offer "insurance." The quotes in the articles from irate IT customers, who paid 25% to 33% annually in licensing fees for essentially nothing, are priceless. Apparently, the "Vista Enterprise Version" will require an Assurance Plan, but that is something that only a few of the F500 should even be considering. If you're that big, and really need 5-Nines reliability and want a 4-hour guaranteed response from their vendor, perhaps this is for you (note that is is a licensing payment plan, not a service contract). The rest of us would do better to hire a couple of qualified techs and keep them educated and up-to-date.
2:33:31 PM
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The Merrimack Valley Linux User Group, one of the five LUGs that makes up the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the third Thursday of each month at Martha's Exchange in Nashua. Meetings commence at 7 PM, but members often gather for dinner before the meeting at 6 PM. The presenters tonight will be from WindRiver, manufacturers of VxWorks and a number of fascinating industrial products. Wind River will be presenting their build system, "which automates building the Linux kernel, and automatically generates the Linux filesystem from pristine source with needed patches applied automatically." There ought to be good time for a Q&A as always on generally Linux topics, too. Hope to see you there.
1:55:07 PM
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Over at OSNews, Thom Holwerda posts Getting serious about the Linux Desktop. "In his latest column, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that Microsoft Vista is going to be so expensive that it's going to make users think hard about switching to Linux instead. [S.J.V-N says:] "Desktop Linux is never going to have a better chance than it will in the next eighteen months," he says. [Thom says:] My take: He forgets two important factors: Vista can run with all the flashy graphics turned off, and seven editions of Vista? How many Linux distributions are there to choose from?"
Choice is Good, not bad, Thom. Many distributions serve many different audiences. We have choice in our appliances, in our automobiles, in our TV shows.
Vaughn-Nichols cites some interesting numbers about W2K being more popular than XP, despite not being officially "supported." I have a lot of clients who have clerical staff who would be well-served with Linux as the OS, Thunderbird for mail, FireFox for browsing and OpenOffice.org for office documents. The Microsoft Vista launch could start the "Year of the Linux Desktop."
11:48:43 AM
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Wednesday, September 14, 2005 |
David Wheeler has an in-depth essay on Why OpenDocument Won and presents a pretty persuasive argument for OpenDocument.
I still maintain that this is a fantastic opportunity for Microsoft to show that they can develop the best office package for reading and writing the new format. Microsoft went too far in encumbering their Office XML with patents and threats of future licensing, rather than taking the initiative to build the next generation standard.
10:45:34 AM
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Despite the fanfare that greeted Microsoft's announcement that they had no patches ready to ship on their regular Tuesday, slipping due to a quality flaw again, Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft Reissues Windows 2000 Rollup. "Microsoft on Tuesday reissued the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Update Rollup that has been causing problems for myriad Windows 2000 customers for the past few months."
UPDATE: More information. The "re-release," named "Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 SP4 - v2" fixes four issues with the original Update Rollup One for Windows Two Thousand Service Pack Four:
- Installation of the wrong MSXML3.DLL resulting in errors like "MSXML3.DLL File Not Found," "Error 0x80244001," and "Error 0x800700C1"
- BSOD Stop 0x000001E on older non-PNP, ISA or MCA boards with SCSI controllers
- Two system drives appear on systems with dynamic disks
- MS Office programs can't save to floppy disks (did you know MS Office uses its own fastfat.sys driver? Why?
Problems remain even with version 2 of the Update Rollup One for Windows Two Thousand Service Pack Four. Read this KnowledgeBase article before installing the patch/update/rollup/whatever if you have systems that:
- connects to a Citrix server using ICA sessions
- uses an Exchange 5.5 MTA and X.400
- uses Sophos Anti-Virus
- uses Internet Security Systems BlackICE products
If you have clients with any of these components and automatic updates turned on, you may need to act quickly. Good luck.
It's the 38th week of 2005, and Microsoft has issued 43 security bulletins, not counting the multiple re-releases and "update rollup patches." When should we be expecting Trustworthy Computing to kick in?
9:24:01 AM
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Tuesday, September 13, 2005 |
Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems was given a paper of "talking points" used by some lobbyists in campaigning against Massachusetts' proposal to adopt the OASIS OpenDocument 1.0 as a standard document format. He reviews the document and points out many distortions, fallacies and, well, cow dung.
Once the world has converted to a common file format so everyone has to compete on features and quality, this will still be a good business to be in, but nobody will be reporting 72% operating profits, which in this particular case means less money going from Massachusetts to Redmond, year after year, forever.
Good reading and thoughtful points.
12:12:11 PM
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Monday, September 12, 2005 |
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Saturday, September 10, 2005 |
Slashdot post: Patch & Workaround for Firefox Flaw Available. mcc writes "Yesterday Slashdot reported on a Firefox vulnerability which could allow remote code execution. Today Firefox has a patch and a configuration workaround, both of which immunize against the bug. If you are using Firefox you should immediately go to the URL 'about:config:', type 'network.enableIDN' into the box, and verify that 'network.enableIDN' is set to 'false'."
3:54:41 PM
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Software Freedom Day is September 10th. Check the link for an activity going on near you. If you're in New Hampshire, swing by the Milford village green and say hi to the volunteers who've set up a booth there for the day. Anywhere in the world, you can check out the OpenCD offered by the Software Freedom Day folks. Inserted into a Windows machine, it offers quite a bit of information about Open Source software, including the text of several books, including "Free as in Freedom," "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Open Sources". Also on the disk is a catalog of Open Source saoftware that runs in Windows, with the ability to install it right off the disk. Software includes 7-Zip, AbiWord, Audacity, Battle for Wesnoth, FireFox, Gaim, GIMP, Notepad2, OpenOffice.org, PDFCreator, Really Slick Screensavers, NVU, Sokoban, Thunderbird, and TuxPaint. Reboot with the disk in your CD-ROM and you'll get to test-drive the LiveCD version of Ubuntu. It's a great disk to pass along to friends considering Open Source, or just looking for some quality software.
The press is picking up on the event, too. Here's an Infoworld article.
9:46:19 AM
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Friday, September 9, 2005 |
Computerworld News reports Firefox flaw found: Remote exploit possible. "Computers running the Firefox Web browser could be open to remote attack as a result of a buffer overflow vulnerability reported today by a security researcher."
In what sounds like a pretty irresponsible act, MozillaZine reports According to the News.com article, Ferris reported the flaw to the Mozilla Foundation on Sunday, in line with the Mozilla security bugs policy. However, he decided to make the vulnerability public "after a run-in with Mozilla staff".
A description of how to disable the flaw is described in the article (also in the comments) and a patch will be forthcoming soon. Note that the flaw the same researcher reported to Microsoft last month (and did not disclose publicly) has still not been patched.
5:48:51 PM
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Thursday, September 8, 2005 |
Saw a great presentation by Tim Lind at the Peterborough/Monadnock LUG this evening comparing four Open Source firewalls: Smoothwall, IPCOP, Sentry and M0N0Wall.Each comes as a bootable CD-ROM, some install to a hard drive, m0n0wall runs off the CD-ROM with settings stored on a floppy (or, optionally, a Compact Flash or USB storage). Each supports a variety of tools, including DCHP, DNS, some varieties of VPN, intrusion detection, logging, NTP, ssh, and a couple of acronyms that flew right past me. Tim uses these to set up clients with internet access, re-using an old clunker PII-350 they clients have laying around, and getting a statefull firewall with some pretty impressive tools.
10:45:01 PM
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Wednesday, September 7, 2005 |
I spent yesterday afternoon recovering from a hard drive failure on my ThinkPad A31p. The internal drive, running Windows XP, got flaky in the middle of working on some documents. Explorer.exe "failed to initialize with error 0xc000006," networked drives disappeared. I had used SpinRite 6 to repair this drive at the end of August, and suspected it was approaching end-of-life. What I didn't realize is how much information the drive could supply.
On SourceForge, you'll find SmartMon Tools, a set of utilities available for Windows, OS X and Linux, that communicate with the S.M.A.R.T. interfaces available on most modern hard drives. I had not appreciated the capabilities of the interface: it stores recent errors, performs short and long self-tests, and displays logs of tests. Details on using SmartMonTools are available on the SourceForge site as well as this Linux Journal article.
Running tests on the drives confirmed my worst fears. Multiple read errors were scattered over the drive. With 19k run hours, it was in pretty bad shape. Luckily, I had anticipated this. Using Norton Ghost 2002 and the Open Source equivalent g4U, I had backed up and now restored the partition images to a spare hard drive. Swapping the new hard drive to the internal slot and the bad drive to the expansion slot, I rebooted into Knoppix to read the recently changed files off the bad drive and onto a USB tab. Rebooting into Windows, I copied the files from the USB tab onto the new drive. Why two-step? I'm a bit shy of writing to an NTFS partition within anything other than Windows, as the file system format is proprietary and not completely documented. Back up and running!
Check out the SmartMonTools, though. It looks like you can set them up to run tests in the background and on a regular schedule. Catch the hard drive failures before they become real trouble.
8:40:18 AM
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Tuesday, September 6, 2005 |
Over at The Doc Searls Weblog, Doc has a heavily-hyperlinked article on Katrina, its causes and effects and how we can do better in the future, Power from the people. When you have a few hours to read through the assembled documents, I'm certain it will be worth your while. That's why I'm bookmarking it here.
10:13:24 AM
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Slashdot post: Massachusetts Explains Legal Concerns for Open Documents. Tontoman writes "ZDNet is running a story that sheds new light on the decision by Massachusetts to switch to open formats for the commonwealth's official documents. This issue has previously been discussed on Slashdot, first The Massachusetts Office Party and then Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision . From the article: 'Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, told CRN on Friday that Massachusetts had concerns about the openness of Microsoft XML schemas as well as with potential patent issues that could arise in the future.' The article also quotes a Microsoft executive on further reason that Microsoft's upcoming Office 12 will not support OpenDocument."
9:23:06 AM
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Monday, September 5, 2005 |
OSNews notes OpenOffice.org Goes LGPL. "On 2nd September 2005 Sun announced the retirement of the Sun Industry Standard Source License. As a consequence, no future Sun open-source project will use the SISSL. Projects currently using the SISSL under a dual-license scheme, such as OpenOffice.org, are dropping the SISSL and thus simplifying their license scheme as soon as the development cycle allows. Effectie with the announcement that Sun is retiring the SISSL, OpenOffice.org will in the future only be licensed under the LGPL (.pdf). A FAQ is also available."
Kudos to Sun MicroSystems for dropping their license and making Open Source that much simpler.
1:45:49 PM
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My brother spent the Labor Day weekend working with Boston-area hospitals to ensure there was complete coverage over the weekend while he was rounding up members of a FEMA medical assistance team. Joe and the team flew out yesterday to help establish a field hospital. Godspeed, ladies and gentleman. You make us all proud.
12:23:03 PM
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Saturday morning, the announcements at the Hopkinton State Fair asked attendees to thank the New Hampshire National Guard members they might see scrambling about the fair grounds. Just after setting up a recruiting display for the weekend, they received their 36-hour notice to deploy to assist in the cleanup of Katrina. Five hundred troops flew out yesterday. Godspeed, guys and gals.
8:38:08 AM
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Sunday, September 4, 2005 |
Slashdot post: Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision. scoop writes "Infoweek is reporting that the plan to eliminate the use of Office by the Massachusetts state government (previously covered on Slashdot) has not gone over well with Microsoft. Microsoft's Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to "public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies." Microsoft also states they will not support the OpenDocument format. Looks to me Microsoft is scared their biggest cash cow is in danger from a free alternative. Soon I'm sure we'll see a Microsoft funded comparison between Office and OpenOffice."
A FUD attack! After all this time, I am still surprised when Microsoft refuses to adopt an industry standard. I should know better, but I keep hoping the Microsoft will come around and start acting as an industry leader instead of a greedy monopoly. The OASIS open standard is a marvelous opportunity for Microsoft to shine and show off what it can do. It's non-trivial, but certainly possible, for Microsoft to read and write this format and be the best office package in that format. Instead, they refuse to compete on a level plain. Let's hope it is their loss. The only message Microsoft can understand is the one you deliver with your wallet. Support those who support the OASIS standard, and Microsoft will come around.
9:02:37 AM
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Saturday, September 3, 2005 |
Slashdot notes The View from the Top of Husband Hill. chriscrick writes "After 14 months of climbing, the Mars rover Spirit has reached the summit of Husband Hill, 269 feet above the edge of the Martian plain. The panoramic view from the top is spectacular. According to lead scientist Steve Squyres, 'What field geologists typically do - and Spirit is a robotic field geologist - is you climb to the top of the nearest hill and take a look around so you get the lay of the land and figure out where you want to go.'"
8:35:23 AM
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Friday, September 2, 2005 |
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes Microsoft SFU: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. Microsoft is shelving the standalone version of its Services for Unix (SFU) product, with no plans to do future enhancements." Portions of Services For Unix will be integrated into Microsoft's new operating systems. For those trying to maintain a stable environment, don't look for any significant updates, although Microsoft promised some support through 2011 or 2014.
The complaint that Open Source doesn't have a roadmap that can be depended upon is turned upside down when you look at vendors swapping, switching, renaming, pruning and just plain dropping features that are likely mission-critical for some of their customers. Customers have no control over commercial software. If you don't like what's happening with an Open Source project, you own the code. You can rewrite it in the direction you want it to go, pay a developer to do it for you, or foment a split or branch to encourage developers to follow your roadmap. Try doing that with your commercial vendors.
5:02:28 PM
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7:45:20 AM
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Thursday, September 1, 2005 |
This is a bit of a miracle... The State of Massachusetts is backing OpenDocument v. 1.0 as the standard for office applications, text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings and presentations, and all agencies are expected to migrate by January 1, 2007.
Awesome!
10:36:05 PM
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FoxProWiki notes FoxTeam. Editor comments: Randy Brown - retired September 2005.
Congratulations, Randy! For those new(er) to Foxpro, Randy led a successful and remarkable life as a consultant before joining Microsoft as a Fox/Mac expert and author (Pros Talk Fox 2.5: FoxPro OLE and DDE, FoxPro Machete with Lisa Slater (now Nicholls), Doc Livingston and Andy Griebel.)
Best of luck in your future ventures, Randy!
4:40:10 PM
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Years ago, I posted slides and white papers from many Visual FoxPro conferences, and I've been adding to this as time allows. Recently, I've noticed that a number of the older slides from the years 1997-2001 cannot by viewed from most browsers. Attempting to open the link here, for example results in an error message "This presentation contains content that your browser may not be able to show properly. This presentation was optimized for more recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer... If you would like to proceed anyway, click here. "
This "error" occurs in Safari 2.01, FireFox 1.06, and Camino 0.8. Opera 8.02 attempts to open the files, but ends up with a set of black-background frames with slide titles and broken graphic links but no content. IE6/Win opens and displays the content, with handy little widgets.
Looking under the hood, these are former PowerPoint presentations converted using a version of Microsoft Office. As time allows, I'll reload the original presentations in OpenOffice.org and repost the slides in a format that all can use.
1:32:20 PM
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Computerworld News posts Apple's new 14-in. iBook; Mostly iLike. "Faster and more feature-laden, the newest iteration of Apple's popular iBook line offers a lot for the casual user, says Computerworld.com's Ken Mingis. But a brighter screen and better keyboard wouldn't hurt."
Ken nails the two big flaws - the LCD and keyboard: "But when I buy an Apple product -- any Apple product -- I don't want adequate. I want superb."
1:28:48 PM
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