… but really cold. The forecast for northern New Hampshire is thirty degrees below zero this evening. That’s Fahrenheit, mercury. None of this wimpy windchill stuff. Brrr!
Archive | February, 2003
Advice to Microsoft regarding commodity software
Dave Stutz posts “a sanitized version of retirement email written when I left Microsoft.” Thanks for the pointer from Dan Gillmor’s eJournal
OpenFox.org
Paul McNett has established a site at http://www.openfox.org with the mission to “help Visual FoxPro developers evaulate and integrate various open source products into their solutions.” Looking forward to watching the site develop. Paul’s had a great deal of influence in getting some issues resolved with Wine so that it will run Visual FoxPro.
Running Linux via VNC via SSH on WinXP
Next step was to get access to the Linux box on the DSL from my WinXP laptop, and hopefully, secure access from the rest of the world. SSH is the right answer for that, and I set up PuTTY as my SSH client on the WinXP box. Connected in without a problem – pretty slick. The next step was to use VNC to connect graphically (as a newbie, a GUI is easier to fumble around in than a terminal). I’d already set up the VNC server on the Linux box when it was on the same LAN (there’s a bit of a glitch with RedHat 8.0 and Gnome with VNC, solved by a web search of ancient messages), but now I need a secure way to use it over the Internet (VNC does not encrypt its stream). The VNC site does include instructions for using SSH, but it’s not entirely clear how they translate to the PuTTY GUI. The Answers Are Out There. One Google search later, I find the answers at http://freesco.no-ip.org/VNC/, the first of 2030 hits Google provides.
Happy Birthday, President Lincoln
A few hours of cursing and tweaking and digging around in obscure dialogs got ftp back up and running on the old W2K box on the DSL. Punching the hole in the router was no problem (good tips at http://www.linksysftp.org), nor forwarding to the correct machine. Had Terminal Services running on the server, and finally thought to check ftp properties. Still bound to the old IP address. Doh.
Happy Birthday, President Lincoln
Chris Pirillo, Mr. LockerGnome, is passing the hat for Doc Searls, who lost a laptop this week. C’mon, throw in a coupla bucks.
About Mission:Interoperable
Mission:Interoperable is the quest to get Microsoft-only shops to recognize that there are other solutions out there. I’ve been a big advocate of Microsoft solutions for years (former MVP, Certified Solution Developer and System Engineer, former Solution Partner, all that stuff). I wasn’t a crazed zealot – I have never turned down a client because they needed a solution to run on other software, too. Novell, WordPerfect and Oracle have all been parts of past solutions.
Now, the times have changed a little. Open Source software is a viable solution for many of the customers I work with. Databases are my primary concern, but file and print servers, firewalls, mail and web servers have to be part of the offering as well. And Open Source offers all of those. This blog is a journal of my experiments in the Open Source arena, and my attempts to bring Open Source into the solutions I provide for my customers.
So here’s a rough sketch of what I want to learn and be able to share with others:
Install and configure: RedHat 8.0 makes this too easy!
Select the services you want/need to install. Attractive ones for my audience are:
- – Samba for file and print sharing
- – CVS for version control
- – MySQL for database work
Happy Birthday, President Lincoln
President Abraham Lincoln, carrying the weight of the Civil War on his shoulders, is reputed to have scribbled these words on the back of an envelope. I think these are some of the best words ever written.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as the final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that case for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg Address
November 19, 1863
Happy Birthday, Mr. President.
Clue Smackdown
In Clue smackdown, is Doc heralding the end of consumerism as we know it? I hope so. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
Right On!
Some of you may be asking if we belong in space.. [Scripting News]