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Garrett’s got a new job!

By on January 31, 2004 in Home Page

Congratulations to Garrett Fitzgerald who blogs… Stop the world, I want to get off…. “My head is still spinning a bit. On Tuesday, a local employer was referred to me. I interviewed with him on Wednesday, and started work Thursday.

MailMovers is a local mailing house. During my interview, I found that the mail industry, to a large extent, runs on FoxPro data. This has put me in an interesting position. For years, I have have been writing code that would be used by other people. Some of this was when I worked with software houses such as MicroKnowledge (in Bangor) and UNICOM (in Providence), and some of it was writing snippets for customers when I worked in Microsoft’s Product Support Services. For the first time, I’m using VFP as a tool, rather than a programming enviroment. And I’m loving it. :-)” Best of luck, Garrett!

KBAlertz.com goes RSS!

By on January 31, 2004 in Home Page

An announcement by email this morning that KBAlertz is now available as an RSS feed by product. Some curiousities in the feed: each item has a

paragraph marker and advertisement for KBAlertz at the end of the item, but they don’t show up in Radio Userland. Also, the usual XML processing instruction is missing from the top of the file – I thought that was a required element. Nonetheless, they test out fine at http://www.feedvalidator.org and in Radio Userland, so I’m likely to drop my email subscription and get postings by RSS.

UPDATE: And they’re gone again. You blink, and a decade later, the web is different. Read VFP 8 and VFP 9 KBAlerz on their website.

Yet More IE Confusion

By on January 30, 2004 in Home Page

Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley says “It’s getting tougher and tougher to figure out exactly what Microsoft is doing with Internet Explorer (IE)” in Yet More IE Confusion.

Outsourcing

By on January 30, 2004 in Home Page

I expect that outsourcing will be the hot topic of the early 90’s, with advocates claiming it is good business, and opponents claiming it is the destruction of America as we know it. I’m afraid they are both right. Wired has an article with a different perspective – from the outsourcers – and Cringely weighs in with his always entertaining perspective.

Best Viewed Without Internet Explorer, Part II…

By on January 30, 2004 in Home Page

Hysterical! Slashdot reports Microsoft Advises to Type in URLs Rather than Click The KnowledgeBase article says, in part:

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

Apple offers repairs for iBooks, customers unhappy

By on January 29, 2004 in Home Page

Ars Technica posts: Apple announces iBook repair program. “Apple today launched a repair program that will cover some iBooks which have suffered from the widespread logic board and display problems.” A little too late for this fellow, an Apple OS X to Linux switchback, who reports on OSDir “Having Bitten the Forbidden Fruit, it Bit Me Back. Six Times” linked via OSNews: ”
I simply can’t bear the pain of the hardware vendor lock-in anymore.”

Microsoft-Funded Linux Studies Benefit … Microsoft

By on January 28, 2004 in Home Page

Slashdot references a Seattle PI newspaper article concluding… Microsoft-Funded Linux Studies Benefit … Microsoft

I think the real crime here, and all computer companies do it, is not the sponsoring of the studies. It’s the setup: carefully crafting a comparison so it looks fair to those not carefully analyzing it, and then trumpeting the results as if they apply to all situations. Slashdot poster cite one of the silliest ones: that a cluster of Windows machines is a cheaper web server than a Linux-based mainframe. Well, duh. C’mon, guys, you can do a better job of appearing to play fairly than that! That’s pitiful.

.NET reality check

By on January 27, 2004 in Home Page

Jon’s Radio Jon Udell’s blog at InfoWorld has the interesting beginning of an article comparing the promise of DotNet to the current reality… .NET reality check. “There’s been some pushback recently, in the .NET blogging community, about Microsoft’s habit of living in the future. For example:…”

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