From the Bash Reference Manual, available online for Free, of course:
A Unix shell is both a command interpreter and a programming language…
While executing commands is essential, most of the power (and complexity) of shells is due to their embedded programming languages. Like any high-level language, the shell provides variables, flow control constructs, quoting, and functions.
These are not your forefather’s DOS batch files.
A security update 2005-003 for Mac OS X 10.3.8 is available for download from the Apple site, or from the automated software update. Details can be read at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301061. Updated packages include: AFP Server, Bluetooth Setup Assistance, Core Foundation, Cyrus IMAP, Cyrus SASL, Folder permissions, Mailman, Safari (addresses the IDN exploits), Samba and SquirrelMail.
Dan Bricklin’s Log: A theory about extreme fear of the GPL. “I’m putting my material that is legalistic and narrowly related to Open Source and copyright that comes out of my work on my video on the Software Garden Training Video Blog. I’ll try to also mention here some of the more general interest stuff I put there. I just posted an observation I made after attending a conference on best practices in standards setting… Read “A theory about extreme fear of the GPL“.“
Scripting News points out a funny Britt Blaser post: Why FedEx calls it 2 Day Service.
CompuServe is running a survey. You don’t need to be a member:
http://go.compuserve.com/MSDevApps?LOC=us
John Koziol of Microsoft responds, “Excuse me for saying so, but that’s a dumb-ass survey.”
I couldn’t say it better myself. Let’s put VFP over the top!
OSNews reports “Microsoft funding of security report decried. Two researchers surprised the audience at a computer-security convention last month with their finding that a version of Microsoft Windows was more secure than a competing Linux operating system. This week, the researchers released their finished report, and it included another surprise: Microsoft was funding the project all along.”
I heard about the report and I was really pleased that Microsoft may have finally started catching on with Windows Server 2003 in shipping a product that’s reasonably secure out of the box. To say it is about time is a vast understatement. To claim that redeems Microsoft, or has any effect on the 500 million insecure Windows installations out there is wrong. From my limited experience with W2K3, it’s a lot more difficult to work with, since lots of features are disabled by default, and turning them on is far from intuitive. It’s pretty much too late for me. I’ve taken my business elsewhere.
Two interesting articles from Doc Searls’ IT Garage: Doc has been banging the drum for a while on the theme of Do It Yourself Information Technology: DIY-IT. In Nonfriction, he ridicules the ‘Vendor Sports’ attitude of much of the information technology press: it’s not Novell vs. WordPerfect, MS vs. Sun, it’s ‘how do I get this stupid document to print’ out in the field. Andrew, you’ll like this piece, as he quotes Guy Kawasaki as well as others. His second piece, Non-Profit Use of Open Source is an interesting story of how FOSS can fit in the the non-profit segment. Some good references to look into here, too. If you’re not subscribed to Doc’s feed, I encourage it. There are some potent ideas brewing here.
What a bizarre idea! The Boston Area Windows Server User Group has announced a Malware UnloadFest, an all-day lecture and lab, taking place on Saturday, April 9th at the Microsoft Offices in Waltham, Massachusetts. They are chargine $30.00 admission. I wonder if there’s a money-back guarantee. What’s Microsoft’s liability on this? I can’t believe the User Group members are going to try to “clean” (their word) compromised machines. How can you tell a compromised machine is cured? You can’t. Clean? Dust ’em out, fine. Then FDISK them. Boot them with Knoppix if you have to, to rescue files for which you haven’t a backup (tsk, tsk), but the OS is history and none of the files can be trusted. What a dangerous idea.
The FoxProWiki notes that FireFox 1.0.2 is released
Tools | Options | Software Update | Check Now
should start the download. (It doesn’t appear that the Mac version is ready yet, but use FireFox | Preferences instead of Tools | Options ). If you don’t already have it installed, start at http://www.mozilla.org to check out all the cool products: FireFox, Thunderbird, the Mozilla Suite, Camino and more.
Note that you will need to restart FireFox to complete the re-install. This patch addresses a GIF buffer-overflow security problem, not yet exploited in the wild, supposedly.
Eric Sink, lead benevolent dictator at SourceGear maintains Eric.Weblog() and regularly posts interesting materials, including the draft chapters of a source code control book he’s writing. In Comments on the pricing of Team System, Eric writes:
“I observe that most MSDN Universal subscribers have an expectation which looks something like this:
As an MSDN Universal subscriber, I get everything Microsoft sells.
Given this expectation, it is easy to understand why people are upset. For these people, the world is about to change.”