“This week, speaking at a Gartner conference in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said some fascinating things about Linux and about Open Source software in general. And thanks to those remarks and the blinding realization they caused for me, I finally understand exactly why Microsoft doesn’t understand Open Source.”
Cringely always makes interesting reading. Listen and watch Ballmer’s statements here.
Joe Average User Is In Trouble. Opinion Where’s my security blanket? [The Register]
A rare thing, a calm and reasoned opinion piece from The Register. A call to arms for computer professionals to help the computer helpless.
Amazon Offer Worries Authors. From David K. Kirkpatrick of New York Times: Technology: “Amazon.com has introduced a feature that lets users search for specific words or phrases in a database of the texts of 120,000 books, drawing skepticism from an authors’ group. ”
Amazon has offered to remove books whose authors do not want to participate. That’s even worse. Search on “Visual FoxPro SourceSafe” and you get a list of 48 books on Visual Basic, Visual InterDev, SQL Server, MSDE and even Dreamweaver. Hello? How about a book on SourceSafe? There are three, including my own, and mine has several pages on Visual FoxPro.
I suspect that Amazon hasn’t indexed the Hentzenwerke Publishing book, and hence we are sidelined. Indexing 120,000 books means marginalizing the great variety formerly available from Amazon. I am disappointed.
From Scripting News: “I’m at the Zap Your PRAM conference in Cavendish, PEI. ”
That sounds like quite the get-together. Several friends and collegues have kicked around the idea for years that we need to have a conference and not invite attendees, just speakers, or participants. Sounds like what these folks are doing. I’ll be interested in how they get the dynamics to work out. It can be difficult when everyone in the group is a Type A extrovert.
So, this weekend I’ve got some time to spare and dedicated it to restoring my Linux laptop to life. I foolishly tried to update to RedHat 9 from 8 without considering the limitations of a 6 Gb hard drive with 2 Gb already dedicated to another OS. I was surprised that RedHat crashed the machine, rather than gracefully declined, but it left the machine a mess, with two hard drive partitions full to overflowing, and an OS that would boot and then lock up attempting to start X Windows.
My first urge was to just blow away everything and start again. However, that really isn’t the way to learn anything. Instead, I took it as a learning experience. What if a client had a locked-up or corrupted machine, but needed to recover some precious files? Looked at in this light, I hadn’t encountered a problem, but rather an educational opportunity.
I used a Knoppix 3.3 CD to boot into a working Linux OS, and then followed the Repair FAQ on the Knoppix site to clean some space off each partition. I also used the RedHat 9 CDs in “repair” mode to clear off still more files, test the file systems for integrity, and get the system to restart.
There were a number of problems with my last set of installs, and I set off to fix them. First, I got a few of the basic services restarted. I reconfigured the networking software to use the docking station’s ethernet rather than the wireless card. Once I was satisfied that was working properly, I reconfigured TCP/IP for a static address and programmed the router to allow minimal services to be exposed to the outside world – port 8080 for Apache and 23 for SSH. Over Apache, I’m running Twiki, a wiki written in Perl, and I use port 23 for a secure tunnel for shell work and also to run a remote graphical session via VNC.
Next, I tried to set up Samba, and ran into some problems. The RedHat Network insists the latest Samba for my distribution is 2.2.7-5.8.0, while I had somehow installed a 2.2.8a on the system, I suspect by downloading the wrong version directly from the Samba site. The installer wanted the Redhat 8 CDs, which I had given away, so BitTorrent to the rescue, and I was able to download and burn a new set of disks from rpmfind.net. Uninstalling the wrong version and finally getting the correct version installed was an education in the Redhat Package Manager (RPM) command line, but I am up and running.
Today, the goal is to configure MySQL and the MyODBC software so that I can read and write MySQL data from my Windows workstation. Onward and upward!
I’ve been encountering a couple of problems with my Radio Userland blogging software, and I’ve changed a few things in hopes of fixing them:
1) Posts were not appearing in a timely manner. I had switched to the three-button “Post”, “Post and Publish”, “Publish” format, and it appears that some articles I _thought_ I published never appeared. Could be operator error, could be software problems.
2) Graphical stuff was all messed up. This probably isn’t me. The graphical editor in Mozilla is still flaky – displaying the cursor in one place and having keystrokes appear in another, mangling HTML and adding spurious break tags. Back to plain old text.
Let me know if you see improvement or not. Of course, if you aren’t seeing posts, how do you know they are not supposed to be there? Ask me.
What a great lead-in line to an article:
“The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be the $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog.”
The article, by Ed Cone in Baseline, goes on to describe the potential power of blogging for businesses. A good read, but a great opening. It certainly snagged me.
It sounds pretty obvious, but after you’ve gotten the machine installed
and flubbed around with it for a while (“Look, Mozilla is pretty cool!
Check out OpenOffice.org!”) the next thing to do is… figure out what
to do next. Everyone has their top priority… a print server, a file
server, a web server, a database server, an office workstation, a
kiosk, a router, a firewall. There a million different configurations
and permutations and combinations you can figure out for your new
machine. Pick one. Take your time and research it and configure it and
try it out. In the process you’ll learn lots about the command shells,
the security model, the different ways of packaging and installing
software. Here’s what I’ve tried so far:
And, not all of these experiements have to occur on the Linux box
alone. My MySQL experiments used the Linuxbox as the database server
and VFP on a Windows laptop. One of the several Perl and Twiki
installations I’ve made was also on a Windows server, using the CygWin DLL to provide command-line equivalents for RCS functionality in Windows.
I got to meet Kerry Neitz at the Great Lakes Great Database Workshop
and he’s a charming, intelligent and extremely shy guy who was brave
enough to stand up in front of 200 Fox developers and share his story.
The book, “FoxTales,” available from Hentzenwerke Publishing,
is an expansion on that story. I finished the book today, and enjoyed
it thoroughly. If you were a participant in the Fox world in those days
(1988-1992), you should enjoy the book as well.
Apple’s Knowledge Navigator revisited.
“During my session at BloggerCon I referred to Apple’s famous Knowledge Navigator concept video. I first saw that video in 1988. Today I tracked down a copy and watched it again. It stands the test of time rather well!
…” [Jon’s Radio]
The DynaBook demo was truly a vision at a time when color CRTs were a
novelty in the business world: a flat panel with sound and color and
animation, touch screen drag-and-drop and small memory cartridges with
large capacities. So much of the hardware has come true, and so little
of the software functionality is available! It seems we have once again
underestimated the complexity and resources required for software
development.