Jon Udell talks about the promise of power and freedom in this entry: “To have a multitasking and multithreaded operating system, right on my desktop, for my own personal use, seemed an incredible luxury.” Good points. Pre-emptive multi-tasking would be so much cooler if it was the user who could preempt whatever the machine is doing that it thinks is so important that it’s ignoring our clicks!
Archive | March, 2003
Road Rage
Road Rage.
“Neither United nor Air Canada appears to have any idea where my bag is, because they have no record, other than the tag they gave me when I checked the bag in Santa Barbara, of its existence.” Poor Doc. Travel nightmares seem more the norm than the exception these days. Last time I travelled, luggage handlers in Detroit misplaced my bag, but fortunately I have such hideous tastes in colors that I could pick it out at 50 yards. I think travel is not as much fun as it used to be.[The Doc Searls Weblog]
VFUG March Newsletter
VFUG March Newsletter Now Available. VFUG (the Virtual FoxPro User Group) just released the March issue of its monthly newsletter. Articles in this issue include one by regular contributor Les Pinter, Email VFP Reports by Phil Bartow, Understanding Structured Exception Handling in Visual FoxPro 8.0 by Mike Helland, Part 4 of A Basic Introduction to Automation using MS Visual FoxPro by Matt Jarvis, We Are All Visual FoxPro Beginners by Carl Warner, Wireless Devices, Part 3: SMTP > SMS > MMS by Tom O’Hare, tidbits on conferences, what’s new for Spanish members, assorted URL resources, tips including Using the Registry Class, End of File Gotcha, Extended Characters Showing Incorrectly, Office Menus – Prevent the Automatic Collapse, Paste from the Clipboard and then call a specific keypress, and more. As usual, you can view this monthly newsletter online or download its text version and all other back issues free at the VFUG site. Not a member? Join VFUG for free at the site. [FoxCentral.Net]
Latest CodeRed variant, Day Two
Latest CodeRed variant lacks built in obsolescence. Same old tricks with moderate-to-low risk worm [The Register] Saw a couple hits in the web server log yesterday: GET /default.ida followed by a slew of NNNNNNN’s. If you didn’t see hits in your logs (you do read your logs daily, don’t you?), perhaps you’d better check to make sure you’re not infected.
62.212.113.49 – France, ADSL
61.222.207.187 – Taiwan
64.35.166.213 – Digital Solutions, San Jose
and on the second day,
64.106.162.220 – a customer of DataPipe of Hoboken, NJ
64.229.11.167 – a customer of HSE, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
64.35.166.213 – a repeat, from above. Five times.
64.35.112.148 – XO Communications, seven times.
64.231.108.158 – Bell Nexxia, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
64.252.199.131 – SBC Internet of Meriden, CT
So, I went from three to sixteen attacks in a single day. Hysterial media would predict the end of the world by the end of the week. Me, I think I’ll just send email to the abuse aliases for the clients I can find.
Thanks to the ARIN WhoIs for the lookups.
L.A. FoxPro Boot Camp
Los Angeles County Foxpro Boot Camp. 03/22/2003 VFP basics like you have never seen before! An all day Saturday Boot Camp NCR building — 100 N. Sepulveda Blvd., El Segundo, CA Two Tracks:Visual FoxPro Basics for Windows Data! Data! Data! – Data Conversions, SQL Select tricks and much more. http://www.lafox.org/Bootcamp.page.fox Posted, albeit really badly, at FoxCentral.Net
Now that all the hard problems are solved…
VFP Etch A Sketch. Dave Aring’s VFP Etch A Sketch combines the nostalgia of the classic childhood toy with the modern computer. Created using only Microsoft Visual FoxPro, the VFP Etch A Sketch demonstrates just a small portion of this powerful software development tool’s versatility. [FoxCentral.Net]
Urban Legends
In the past few days, I’ve had well-meaning friends and strangers forward on messages and postings from Andy Rooney, George Carlin and John Cleese. None of them were really from those authors. Check out http://www.snopes.com before sending along such silly stuff.
Far more seriously, an associates spouse sent on a warning and instructions on how to remove a virus that had somehow infected his computer. It was also a hoax, but a destructive one, with bogus instructions that removed the Java debugging manager from the machine. Folks, if you get a warning telling you to do something to your machine that you don’t really understand, here’s what you should do: check it out. Search Google for it. Check out the virus sites (http://www.symantec.com, http://www.antivirus.com, http://www.mcafee.com) for it. Call a knowledgable friend. Don’t just blindly pass on instructions you don’t understand. If you got an anonymous call telling you to shake up a seltzer bottle and unload it into your fuse box, you probably wouldn’t blindly obey. THINK.
Radio News Aggregator Rocks!
I love the Radio News Aggregator as a way to collect the news of the day, but the only thing it doesn’t give me is more hours in the day. I’ve got 11 tabs open in Mozilla with articles I want to read, and by the time I’ve gotten around to finishing an article, and deciding if I want to blog it, it’s rolled off the end of the 100 articles in the aggregator. Not a big problem for Radio fans, you simply reset the number of articles here (Note: link only works if you run Radio). However, there are still too many articles for my brain to capture, even if my computer can. Here are a couple I missed blogging before they scrolled:
- CNN discovers blogging: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/03/10/bloggers.ap/index.html
- Clay Shirky on Social Software: http://shirky.com/writings/group_politics.html
- Google and Branding by Mark Hurst: http://www.goodexperience.com/columns/03/0305.brand.html
- Essay on the Mozilla site on browser innovation: http://www.mozilla.org/browser-innovation.html
- Massachusetts Department of Revenue considers Linux: http://www.masshightech.com/displayarticledetail.asp?art_id=62051&cat_id=3
- David Weinberger continues to blog the SxSW conference: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/001283.html
Whew! Drinking from a fire hose!
Postscript: And did I mention that Radio rocks? Having changed my settings from 100 to 300 articles, all of those articles above that had scrolled now appeared. No time delay waiting for the queue to fill up. What a well thought-out piece of software!
TIA used to stand for ‘Thanks In Advance…’
Software Pioneer Quits Board of Groove. “Mitchell D. Kapor, a software pioneer, resigned from the board of Groove Networks after learning the company’s software was being used by the Pentagon for surveillance.” By John Markoff. [New York Times: Technology]
Dave Winer’s Excellent Adventure Heads East
Dave Winer’s last post from his former home, heading East: 10:23AM. Logging off from California. Not sure when the next update will be. Seeya soooon! “;->” [Scripting News] Godspeed, Dave