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 Friday, August 29, 2003
I was thrilled when Userland's Jake Savin announced a WYSIWYG Radio and Manila in-browser editor for Mozilla. That was, until I realized "Mozilla" didn't include Safari, and I would have to use Firebird to really take advantage of it.
Don't get me wrong--I like Firebird. Or at least, I like Firebird
when it works. But Firebird on Mac OS X is a little flaky
sometimes, and doesn't behave like Safari in some important ways.
One of them is the last page cache--particularly in the case of the
WYSIWYG editor. In Safari, if I accidentally click on a link or
launch a new page in the window I'm typing in, I can back-button to it
and the content is still there where I left off. Not so in
Firebird. (Or at least in the WYSIWYG editor in Firebird.)
For instance--yesterday, while typing a fairly long post, I clicked on
an entry in my browser history to check for the URL. Whoops, it
went to the page. I arrowed back, and 20 minutes worth of typing
was gone.
Now I know why Dave always fixes his posts after he publishes them.
2:42:10 PM 
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Wednesday, August 27, 2003
So, I cut my last ties with Toadnet
yesterday, removing my last domains from hosting there. So far,
it hasn't been pretty; they deleted my email accounts there while DNS
was still mapped to them, so most of my inbound e-mail is
bouncing. The DNS change seems to have only partially rolled out
so far, so I'm still in the dead zone; I'm sure everybody on the
mailing lists I was subbed to are just loving me right now. I had
been hoping to keep things set up there until the transition was
complete--I had paid them for service through September 22, after
all--but now I've just shut the whole shebang down completely.
On the bright side, my spam has decreased drastically.
Meanwhile, I've had to do some cleaning up of the website heirarchy on my remaining web host, Powweb.
Since I now essentially have five domains pointed at the
same server, I had to reproduce the PHP magic I'd used on Toadnet to
host multiple domains with their own directory structures. That
meant moving the buzzword-compliant
weblog to a new directory and recoding the root home page; I preserved
a copy of the archived pages of the weblog in their original place in
the heirarchy so that permalinks would still work (as if anybody's
actually permalinked to that content); I'll probably deprecate that
configuration in a month or two when I decide I need the disk space for
something else.
1:12:54 PM
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Monday, August 25, 2003
Over the weekend, my disk quota on my hosting and mail account with Toadnet mysteriously exceeded its ceiling. And rather than just shutting down uploads to the site, the host overwrote any files that were already on the site that had been changed with blank pages. In other words, my weblogs on that host were essentially wiped from existence.
For this, and dial-up access from the road, I've been paying $50 a month.
So, the time has come to completely pull the plug. I just redirected my domains to a new domain name server at my bargain-basement hosting service, where my disk quota is larger by more than a factor of 10 and my hosting bill is $8 a month. I will no longer suffer in the name of supporting locals. As soon as the DNS refreshes, my move of all my weblogs (except for the one hosted by Userland) will be complete.
3:20:45 PM
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Friday, August 22, 2003
test again
10:52:16 PM
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...and that, apparently, is what SCO CEO Darl McBride is building his company's long term strategy on--rendered pig fat.
McBride, who a just a year ago was pimping for UnitedLinux and hoping to use SCO's installed base to push Linux into the small and medium business markets in earnest, is now claiming that all his former friends in the Linux community of being orchestrated by IBM in their attacks on his "poison pill" strategy for profits from Linux.
As the "evidence" presented by SCO of infringement on its intellectual property starts to fall apart slowly in the light of day, McBride has resorted to dumping piles of press clippings on stage at SCOForum to prove how relevant the lawsuit has made SCO. And rumor has it that some customers are considering filing racketeering charges against SCO for extortion of licensing fees prior to proof of their case.
So the question is, just who is going to have to use that lard that Darl's throwing around to grease up and bend over?
2:16:25 PM
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I was the victim of some bizarre spam yesterday directed at my work e-mail account. Someone used the neo-con spin site NewsMax' article-forwarding feature to send me an article about how the Democrats in California were assaulting the Constitution, with the message, "Spam this f**kboy." I'm guessing the sender meant the author of the artilce and not me...or maybe they were referring to my anti-spam column?
In any case, the return address the culprit used was the e-mail for The Randi Rhodes Show,a "liberal" talk-radio show on ClearChannel's WJNO in West Palm Beach, Florida. I somehow doubt Ms. Rhodes herself sent me the message...it smells more like someone who'd want to embarrass her. Or maybe she's that stupid? I don't know, really, or care.
What's more interesting, or disturbing, to me is the potential for abuse of sites like NewsMax for spam attacks. While this one was pretty much a blunt-force approach, as far as I could tell, it wouldn't take an amazing piece of coding to create a robot that could be pointed at a site like NewsMax's article forwarding feature to churn out e-mails using harvested e-mail addresses for both the sender and target address. Some script kiddie could wack out something like that in Visual Basic in fifteen minutes, I suspect.
Stopping attacks like that would require webmasters to be able to link the source IP addresses of the spam, and not the sending e-mail address. Some straightforward code could limit the damage--say, limiting article forward requests from a specific IP address within a single day. (Also, having user authentication as a gateway to using article forwarding would reduce the likelihood of a spam engine assault).
10:33:22 AM
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Thursday, August 21, 2003
It looks like the Packet Rat's ideas for dealing with Microsoft's continuing security problems from last year are still a good option.
2:26:12 PM
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Wednesday, August 20, 2003
Last night, as we were settling in from our trip home, I started applying the backload of patches to my eldest son's Windows XP PC that had accumulated during the month it sat idle. There were 9 "critical" updates, 16 "recommended" updates, and 7 updated device drivers.
Since everything else in my house (well, at least since the security patch reboots killed my Compaq server) runs on Mac OS X, the security patches on the single XP machine have become a disproportional administrative burden. So has the general upkeep of the machine--deleting off all the crap software my son inadvertently downloads, ferreting out spyware, and getting rid of the pre-loaded garbage that HP shipped on the hard drive have been an ongoing distraction.
And I'm a guy who's administered Windows and Unix networks. Imagine what it's like for Grandma when she gets a Windows XP PC and a cable modem for Christmas. The security patch feature has to be made more simple--and more automated--for home users, or every new vulnerability in Windows will turn Grandma's PC into a member of the legion of undead PCs trashing your network.
3:03:18 PM
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Monday, August 11, 2003
After following the drama of personalities that is the debate over weblog syndication strategies old and new (RSS 2.0 vs. RSS 1.0 vs. Atom/Pie/Echo/Whatever the hell they've decided to call it this week), I've decided that it's time for someone to launch a truly open and unfettered syndication standard. I've decided to call my, oops, our new effort in openness and semantic web goodness RASH (Really Awful Awsome Syndication, with Hypertext).
The great part about RASH will be that you can get a RASH feed without even subscribing to it. All you have to do is visit a RASH-inducing weblog, and you'll instantly "catch" its RASH content. In fact, anyone visiting the weblog of anyone who's visited a RASH-enabled weblog--or is just in their FOAF file-- will probably catch it too.
That's right--rather than being opt-in subscription-based syndication, RASH is opt-out syndication--you have to do something to get rid of it.
The result will be a boon to bloggers' log files--the hits to weblog.rash files will make any site's logfile look like Instapundit's. Inverviews with Chris Lydon, instant Internet fame, and power over the fate of nations will immediately follow launching syndication in the RASH format.
To opt out of a RASH feed, users will have to use a file similar to robots.txt, called "ointment.rash", with explicit refusals for each feed they do not want to receive--much as they must currently do with unsolicited e-mails. While this may seem to put an inordinate burden on those on the receiving end of a RASH, it guarantees the RASH source a rapid growth in readership--even if readers are only trying to figure out how the hell they caught the RASH in the first place.
Soon, the whole Web will break out in RASH.
Details to follow...
12:08:14 AM
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Friday, August 8, 2003
Once again, I wish Ray's guys would get around to porting their software over to Mac OS X. Perhaps that money they got from Microsoft hasn't run out yet.
11:24:08 PM
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I stumbled across an interesting site today: Eliyon Technologies' CorporateAlumni database. Apparently, Eliyon's spiders have crawled the web connecting people with their past and present employers, and the company has put the results for about 15.4 million people into a search engine accessible by previous employer.
It's just a little bit creepy.
Some of the results, however, are quite amusing.
Now, I figured, what with my bio out there on publication sites, there might be an entry for me. And there is--a little incomplete, with a few rough edges on the parsing of the data, but it's there. So is my boss. There are some glaring holes in their content based on the sites they've apparently scanned, so their AI is still a work in progress...but like I said, it's creepy.
As a journalist, I can see this being an interesting tool. But it also raises questions of privacy, and of copyrights (especially if they plan to sell this to people). How much of your life is public record? Punch in one of your former employers, and find out.
6:17:22 PM
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Thursday, August 7, 2003
 Apple just sent me an iSight--the video conferencing camera designed for use with Apple's iChat A/V, for evaluation. It's zero-configuration video conferencing for the masses (or, at least, the masses with iMacs, iBooks, PowerBooks and the like). And thus far, it's been great.
Except for the fact that I can't converse with anyone in the outside world by video, that is. At first, I thought this was a matter of horsepower; my two day-to-day Macs are powered by 450 MHz G4 processors. I managed to get up a link to my old partner in crime--a rabid iSight fan--from my wife's new 800 MHz G3 iBook without a problem.
But then, with the help of a second iSight camera, I established that I could get the two G4s to conference with each other over the household LAN (albeit with some latency). So now I'm wondering if it's a matter of bus speed, or if my problems are related to my Internet provider--I have a Comcast cable modem.
Sure enough, a quick check with a couple of bandwidth tests reveals that my available bandwidth is down to 400k -- less than half of what it was three months ago. Apparently, others in my neighborhood have signed up for Comcast's cable-modem service, and my share of the pipe is dwindling.
The hearbreak of shared broadband.
Still, there's the matter of the iSight working with the iBook. I don't get it. I'll have to do some more testing.
3:42:55 PM
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Wednesday, August 6, 2003
There's an interesting conversation going on over on the JavaSummit list on Yahoo! Groups, (which has spilled over to Sun tech evangelist Simon Phipp's weblog concerning Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's final judgement against Microsoft in its anti-trust trial.
The whole thing started when Noel Bergman noted that Microsoft has turned the loss into a winby turning interoperability with Windows into a poison pill. Microsoft can't claim all of CIFS or SMB as proprietary protocols, but it can add proprietary extensions to them--and charge a licensing fee for using those extensions, based on the final ruling.
Want to use Linux as a file server for Windows clients? Whoops--Microsoft ships a patch to its client-server protocols, and all of a sudden your file server dissapears. And only a commercial software package will fix the problem, since Microsoft has made the protocol proprietary in the process--and everybody has to cough up money to get access to it.
This is why I said in 1998 that the Justice Department was barking up the wrong tree--and that the server was where Microsoft had the greatest opportunity for anti-competitive behavior. The only way around this gambit, short of a new antitrust case, is to either take the war to the client( develop a freeware/shareware SMB driver that replaces/"enhances" the Microsoft client protocols on the client) or migrate to another network file sharing and directory stack.
12:05:25 PM
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Tuesday, August 5, 2003
My longest-serving workhorse, a Compaq Proliant 1600, died during Windows security patching last night. After installing one batch of Windows 2K updates, I rebooted it; it proved to be one reboot too many for the old server. Now it doesn't even make it to the power-on self test; the drives test OK at power-on, but no signal gets to the monitor or keyboard, so I figure the motherboard is toast.
For the most part, this is not a crisis. I had transferred most of what I work with on a daily basis over to the 120 gigabyte external Firewire drive plugged into my Apple G4 Cube a long time ago. The Compaq's usefulness as a software testing machine, given its horsepower, was limited.
But the Compaq was my last remaining wholly owned Windows server; I hardly ever shut it down other than to reboot after a bug patch (which, in recent months, has become almost a daily event). For a time, it was my household's primary digital asset store, with much of its RAID's 10 gigabyte storage capacity dedicated to digital photos and the shared family music library. And it hosted the household intranet.
So now I face a painful decision: do I take it down to the Little Shop of Hardware and attempt to have it resurrected? Or have its innards transferred to another machine? Or do I pay to have it put down? Or do I put it in the closet and wait for it to decompose?
Considering how decentralized my household IT architecture has become over the past two years, I'm not sure I want to do anything more than recover what little data I care about on the Compaq and consign its case to use as an artificial oyster reef or something (and, of course, the rest of its parts to some dignified and ecologically-correct rendering process). Once upon a time, I needed an in-house web, file, and print server; now it's all peer to peer file and print sharing, and everybody's got an e-mail address to send stuff to. It's less efficient storage-wise, sure--but all the client machines in the house have at least twice the storage capacity that the server had.
It makes me wonder if there's such a thing anymore as a workgroup server--outside, say, the media business. When software like Groove has "virtualized" shared storage, and even laptops now come with more than 80 Gb of storage, it takes some pretty serious file-sharing requirements to justify any sort of centralized storage. In fact, the only reason I can think of most people wanting a file server is for centralized data backups--a job served better by a network-attached DVD-R than a multi-processor server.
Over the operating life of my now-deceased Compaq server, I've outsourced my e-mail and web servers to my ISP, eliminated the need for any sort of local web caching by getting better and cheaper bandwidth. and shifted most of my storage burdens to the five other computers in the house.
I've ditched FrontPage and ASP for Dreamweaver and PHP; I've ditched Visual Basic for JavaScript and PHP, since what little software development I do now can be done for the most part for the web browser. I've (mostly) ditched Office in favor of OpenOffice and AppleWorks; in general, I interact with Windows only when I have to run a new security patch on my son's XP machine (Unfortunately, you still need Intel and Windows for most of the really cool games out there). My NT Admin muscles are atrophying.
And I think I'm happy they are.
So why exactly am I mourning the passing of my server? Maybe it's a co-dependency thing.
12:05:43 PM
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Monday, August 4, 2003
Mark Pilgrim: How to install Windows XP in 5 hours or less:
""Windows Update has found 39 critical updates and service packs." Install now.
"Service Pack 1 must be installed separately from other updates." OK.
Yes, I agree to bend over, grease up, and accept the End User License Agreement.
Wait. Time passes.
Wait. Time passes.
Wait. Time passes. It is getting dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Reboot.
Thanks to Simon for the heads-up.
4:07:29 PM
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Novell buys Ximian. Novell, fresh from embracing open source wholeheartedly this spring at Brainshare (where the company announced a Linux version of its NetWare server stack was in the works for the next major release cycle), has bought Miguel de Icaza's home of GNOME. The question is, for what?
Could it be in response to Lotus' introduction of a Linux client for Domino? Ximian's Evolution mail client, essentially an Outlook for Linux, is part of the "MadHatter" desktop strategy at Sun. Or (more likely), is this about Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's C# and .Net web services architecture?
Novell has already been pushing hard on the app server side with its acquisition of Silverstream last year. It got a Java application server and a web services integration platform out of the deal. It bought a commercial license for MySQL last year as well, adding a simple but powerful departmental database server to its NetWare application stack. With the addition of Mono, Novell could start to position NetWare as the Swiss Army Knife of network service platforms--it prints, it files, it connects your 3270 applications to your BizTalk workflows by way of Java...
What this means to the rest of the open source and Linux platform communities is, well, TBD. But Novell is certainly putting its money where its newfound open source religion is.
3:14:28 PM
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