Monday, October 21, 2002
A month into fall. The birdbath was frozen this morning. Brrr.
Post dated 2002-10-21 00:00:00
A month into fall. The birdbath was frozen this morning. Brrr.
Archive | October, 2002
A month into fall. The birdbath was frozen this morning. Brrr.
Post dated 2002-10-20 00:00:00
Sunday, October 20, 2002
I spent yesterday working hard on the house, in hopes that I could spend today catching up on some computer-related stuff.
Found a few interesting articles. “The Secret Life of Markup” does a good job of explaing the various aspects. “Linux development tools” gave me some idea of what the alternatives are.
Post dated 2002-10-19 00:00:00
Saturday, October 19, 2002
Saturday. Spent most of the day working on the front picture window. After removing the storms this spring, we discovered that the main window frame had lost a lot of paint, and the wood strips that held the pane in place were not in good shape. As I couldnt’ find an exact match for the wood strips, I improvised something out of quarter-round wood and got it painted and in place yesterday. There were no glazier points holding the pane in, and it had bowed out in the middle. The inner surface had been caulked, but the caulk had turned to debris. I dug out all the old stuff, gently pushed the window back into place and nailed in the new wood strip, and then filled the inside gap with silicon caulk. Fingers crossed – hope it works!
Post dated 2002-10-18 00:00:00
Friday, October 18, 2002
TGIF! Just picked up a new client – my publisher! I’m doing some work reformatting some of the PDFs, adding bookmarks and thumnails, setting up the proper page size and that sort of thing. He’s been so hard-pressed for help on the production side, I’m glad I’m getting a chance to step in.
Post dated 2002-10-17 00:00:00
Thursday, October 17, 2002
Microsoft issued security bulletins 02-59, -60 and -61 last night, including the HTML Upload and Delete exploit in Windows XP, and the Word/Excel Hidden Fields exploit that Woody Leonhard has been ranting about for weeks.
Post dated 2002-10-16 00:00:00
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
I’ve been looking for development platforms for Linux. While it seems to have some pretty good tools for server-based applications, software development still all seems to be text-based. So I went looking for GUI IDEs. There are lots of them, of varied maturity and features.
Kylix is promising: C++ and Delphi/Pascal.
“Komodo is optimized for Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl, and XSLT, and runs on Windows and Linux. ” according to http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/index.plex. [URL updated, 16 years later, to a very different IDE]
Metroworks has ported their popular CodeWarrior to Linux: C++ and Java.
And there are some home-grown categories, too, such as Code Crusader.
Joe Barr had an interesting column about IDEs in June 1999 Linux Journal:
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-06/lw-06-vcontrol_1.html
I’d really like to see VB/Access/VFP type GUIs, with toolbars, palettes, drag-drop and snippets, but that may still be a ways off.
Post dated 2002-10-15 00:00:00
Tuesday, October 15, 2002
Orion has been reinstalled. Went slick, but not fast – most of Sunday afternoon while I cleaned the cellar.
Tim O’Reilly did some interesting analysis here of who and why folks are switching to Apple’s OS X. The surprising conclusion may be that OS X is attracting more UNIX desktop switchers than Windows. A followup column is here.
Microsoft fielded a “switch” page yesterday, too, but, well, there were a few problems with it. The picture was a fake. The article was a fake, paid for by Microsoft. And the copy was bad. More from John Gruber.
Post dated 2002-10-14 00:00:00
Monday, October 14, 2002
I find it fascinating that some of the best scholars, lawyers and judges can debate complex issues of intellectual property, copyright and digital rights based on the few words of guidance put down by a group of revolutionaries over two centuries ago, and extract such wisdom from the documents. The document is the U.S. Constitution, the court case, Eldred v. Ashcroft. Here are the http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2002_10.shtml#000531[thoughts] of Lawrence Lessig, attorney and Stanford law professor who argued for Eldred.
Microsoft Fails to Change Buying Habits talks about the end of the pilot program Microsoft rolled out for Office By Subscription. Few bought into the idea. RIP.
The Gaileo spacecraft continues to send back great information as it loops around Jupitor. Its next major event is a Flyby of Amalthea, a Jovian moon that puts out more energy than it receives.
Just in case you thought they were just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck, here’s Microsoft’s Roadmap for the next three releases of Visual Studio. Let’s see how well they can stick to plan…
Post dated 2002-10-13 00:00:00
Watched Blues Brothers 2000 last night. I missed the frenetic energy that John Belucci brought to the original, but I thought the movie was still fun. Cameo appearances by everyone in blues were fun.
Listed to Ira Glass’ This American Life yesterday. As usual, an off-the-wall, unusual and riveting experience, one where you will just stay sitting in your chair, just to hear how the story comes out. I loved the Rocketman song.
Tom’s Hardware features a review of a Micro PC that looks like a great replacement for the big ugly boxes most people use.
Post dated 2002-10-12 00:00:00
Saturday, October 12, 2002
“Microsoft Announces Ads for BSOD” is this tongue-in-cheek article on BBSpot.