c|Net features a story, “Army to Gates: Halt the free software” reporting that Microsoft is giving software away to government officials which “places our employees and soldiers in jeopardy of unknowingly committing a violation of the ethics rules and regulations to which they have taken an oath to uphold.” So, is Microsoft committing bribery?
Maybe we should all send them disks of Mandrake and OpenOffice.org instead.
Heads-up to programmers trying to automate SourceSafe: [kbAlertz – Visual SourceSafe] points to a new Microsoft KnowledgeBase article indicating the Get command is no longer recursive in the latest 6.0d version of SourceSafe: FIX: The Get method behaves differently with VSSVersion and with VSSItem when you use OLE Automation in Visual SourceSafe 6.0d. (837417) – When you create a program that uses Microsoft Visual SourceSafe OLE Automation, the behavior of the Get method with a VSSVersion object and with a VSSItem object in Visual SourceSafe 6.0d is different from the behavior of the Get method with these…
Microsoft Said to Encourage Big Investment in SCO Group. More evidence emerged about Microsoft’s role in encouraging the anti-Linux campaign being waged by the SCO Group, a small Utah company. By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Technology]
So, after four phone calls and nearly an hour on hold, I finally got the straight scoop from my ISP. The DSL they’ve been selling me for the past year is *NOT* a static IP address, as they’d claimed, it’s dynamic. Just lucky it hadn’t changed in 14 months. (They’re refunding the money I’ve paid for a static IP address they didn’t have to sell me.) They’re pretty much in a tizzy in the local office, as they have a number of clients to provision, and no IP addresses to give them. Since they’ve been bought out by a BigCo, they have to wait for the BigCo to deign to let them have a few measly IP addresses so they can pass them out again. In the meantime, I’m stuck with a dynamic IP address, and I’ll have to jury-rig something to keep the website and RSS feeds online as I can. What a pain in the neck.
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal points to a Security Focus article hosted on the Register with some good tips on avoiding publishing every document on your web server onto Google, like the budget spreadsheet or your password files. Worth reading for anyone running a web server. Sometimes Google Knows Too Much. “Security Focus: The perils of Googling. Google is in many ways most dangerous website on the Internet for thousands of individuals and organisations. Most computers users still have no idea that they may be revealing far more to the world than they would want.
Everyone with a Website should read this soberly written but fairly alarming piece. It shows how much we may be exposing, often inadvertantly, on our websites.”
Seven thousand Orange County voters were given incorrect ballots, and the efficient electronics system can’t even tell who’s voted was miscounted! I voted yesterday, too, in a local election. I gave my name to the person checking registered voters upon entering the poll, and a second upon leaving. Supervisors monitored both transactions. I was given one and only one ballot, and I feed it through the mark-sense machine myself. The paper ballots were retained in a locked and sealed container. The results were printed in the local paper this morning. I just don’t see anything about this system that needs to be more automated and made less secure!
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal reports ‘Ballots’ Lost in California: Voting Officials Blase. “A registrar of voters who seems more concerned about ducking his responsibilities is saying, essentially, that everything is fine because the margin was lopsided enough to make this screwup meaningless. Oh, that’s a relief.”
… is the caption of one of my favorite Dilbert comic strips, with Catbert seen walking away, carrying a baseball bat.
http://www.tedroche.com is down today, as my DSL company (http://www.tdstelecom.com) has misplaced my static IP address. Just what is it about static they don’t understand? If it comes back, you should see tedroche.com re-appear. If not, and you’re really desparate, you can surf to http://64.35.197.147, where it’s hanging out today. Hope to be back tomorrow.
From OSNews: *The Command Line – The Best Newbie Interface?*. “This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them…”.
I’ve been in the book and publishing business for a while. I take advantage of the fact that there are local retailers by buying from them whenever possible. Perhaps I could use an Amazon or a BookPool or another online service, but if I’ve used the local bookstore to browse the stacks, look through possible purchases, I’ve used their services, what they pay rent for, and I owe them fair compensation. Tim O’Reilly notes similar thoughts here, and my thoughts were spurred on by receipt of my monthly email newsletter from SoftPro. The folks at SoftPro are great – they know their titles, they can order what you need. They’re working hard to make it through this “jobless recovery” when the joblessness is hitting hard in the IT sector.
Their “Regular Reader” program is a great deal – a percentage off list price in exchange for an email address for monthly newsletters. In addition, they sponsor the discounts sent on by their publishers, like O’Reilly’s “Buy Five, Get One Free” promotion. And to top it off, they throw in their own promotions of T-shirts and coffee cups.
And SoftPro is a cool store, the geek equivalent of a kid in a candy store. Wall-to-wall books, and they’re all computer books. O’Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Prentice-Hall, APress, No Starch Press, Microsoft, sometimes even Hentzenwerke. I was sad to hear they were closing the Marlborough, Mass, store, although the Waltham store (recently relocated from Burlington) is my favorite. Check them out if you’re in the area (or near Denver, where their other two stores are).
Great article over at DevShed on connecting to a MySQL database using the Python language. Folks familiar with ADO or with SQL Pass-through and the VFP way of manipulating cursors will be comfortable with code like this:
#!/usr/bin/python
# import MySQL module
import MySQLdb
# connect
db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost",
user="joe", passwd="secret",db="db56a")
# create a cursor
cursor = db.cursor()
# execute SQL statement
cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM animals")
# get the resultset as a tuple
result = cursor.fetchall()
# iterate through resultset
for record in result:
print record[0] , "-->", record[1]