Rick Strahl joins the ranks of bloggers. “Rick Strahl, a long-time VFP and web development guru, has joined the ranks of bloggers“. From Garrett Fitzgerald’s Blog. Rick will likely be posting primarily on DotNet, but he’s a sharp guy with some great insight. Keep an eye on what he’s doing!
Archive | 2003
Greetings from Waltham!
Greetings from the Waltham offices of Microsoft, where I am demonstrating this for the Boston Area FoxPro Users Group.
Culture of UNIX and Windows Programmers
OSNews links to Joel Spolsky’s The Cultural Differences of UNIX and Windows on the JoelOnSoftware web site. Joel has a whole series of thoughtful essays on his site. I think there are some good points in the essay, although any argument that claims that all things can be divided into two categories tends to be a bit extreme to demonstrate the black-and-white divide:
This directly led to a schism in user interfaces; nobody has ever quite been able to agree on all the details of how the desktop UI should work, and they think this is OK, because their culture values this diversity, but for Aunt Marge it is very much not OK to have to use a different UI to cut and paste in one program than she uses in another.
Needless to say, Slashdot picked up on this essay and has the predictable discussion here and here.
Q and A on Microsoft’s XML-schema license
Hentzenwerke Intergalactic also points out Q and A on Microsoft’s XML-schema license: Gary Edwards on OpenOffice.org forum.
The decision by Microsoft to restrict the schema to their OfficeXP products XML within licensing and patent protection means that developers once again find themselves in legal trouble just trying to do their jobs. Can I use a third-party tool to manipulate the XML? To display it? To print it? To transform it into something else?
Here’s what the current Microsoft license looks like:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/format/xmlpatentlicense.asp
Windows to Linux? Check out the roadmap.
Hentzenwerke Intergalactic points out this 9-part series on the IBM DeveloperWorks called Windows to Linux Roadmap.
It’s the operating system, stupid
On CNET News.com – Front Door: It’s the operating system, stupid
Intranet Twiki up and running!
Finally, after a few weeks of occasional hacking, I’ve got a Twiki running on the Linux intranet server, running Fedora, Apache 2.0 and Perl 5.8.0. The intranet Twiki at Ted Roche & Associates is for note-taking, internal project tracking and experimentation.
If you haven’t worked with a wiki, you owe it to yourself to try it out. A wiki is a simple interface: a web site with an “Edit” button on each page. Any web user (or a secure, limited, logged-in user) can edit the page, and change whatever they are allowed by the webmaster. Voila! Community-maintained web sites! Most wikis I have worked with are set up as knowledgebases, although their use is only limited by your imagination. A superb example (though in FoxPro, not a Twiki) is the FoxForum wiki at http://fox.wikis.com.
Twiki is one of my favorites wikis: it is cross-platform (Windows and most Perl-supported web servers, Linux, OS X, IIS, Apache, etc.); the code is Open Source and fairly readable Perl. I have Twiki deployed on the internet on a W2k IIS configuration (using RedHat’s CygWin) for a private client wiki, and also deployed a temporary one on a Linux laptop for a small conference last year in Toledo.
The sticking point in getting this instance running was a name resolution problem and matching configuration. The Twiki web site provides copious documentation (in a Twiki, of course!), but because they support so many configurations (BSD, Linux, RedHat, Mandrake, Windows, IIS, Apache 1.3 and 2.0), that it can be tricky to separate out the current suggestions from other people’s troubleshooting issues from older issues. My “solution” was telling the twiki it was running on neresus.tedroche.com and then adding the IP address of the Neresus box to the HOSTS file of the client. This is a kludge, of course, that I should be able to remedy with a DNS in-house. I’ll add that project to the list… maybe on the Twiki!
Onward and upward! The next project for the intranet is a CVS configuration, and I’ll also be trying to convert the Twiki from interpreted, CGI-driven to a module mod_Perl (faster) configuration.
Cringely on Electronic Voting
Robert X. Cringely has a great suggestion on how to solve all the problems introduced by electronic voting: don’t do it. Right on.
Did Archimedes solve combinatorics problems thousands of years ago?
A fascinating story of the discovery of mathematician Archimedes lost manuscript, and the clever solution and translation. Archimedes has been a favorite figure of mine since grade school. Here’s an interesting story of coincidences and sleuthing, discovering that Archimedes was toying with the field of “combinatorics,” a field never really fleshed out until the dawn of computer science mathematics. In Archimedes’ Puzzle, a New Eureka Moment. “A historian of mathematics appears to have solved the mystery of a treatise written 2,200 years ago by Archimedes.” By Gina Kolata. in the New York Times: NYT HomePage
IE URL spoofing exploit
New considerable IE flaw allows dangerous URL spoofing. “Clint, one of the Masters of the Agora, gave heads up of a new and very dangerous exploit for Internet Explorer.” from Ars Technica
Simple solution: don’t use IE. Just say no.