Archive | 2005

Spring Equinox and Belated Blog Birthday

By Ted Roche on March 20, 2005 in Home Page

Welcome, spring, and a belated happy anniversary for the blog!

Spring sprung in Contoocook this morning. Temperature’s above 40 for the first time this year. There’s still a couple of feet of snow on the ground, but it’s starting to warm up. Still waiting for the other shoe to drop – there’s snow in the forecast for tonight.

Three years ago Friday I started blogging and my Spring equinox entry included a picture of our humble abode buried in white stuff:

UPDATE: Fixed the link to the picture above.

Eighteen hundred blog postings later, …

Yet Another Tale of Dot Com Arrogance

By Ted Roche on March 19, 2005 in Home Page

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc. blogs “A Bubble Tale to Make You Angry. The Seattle Times should get a Pulitzer for the series called “Dot-Con Job” — a deep and scathing look at the sleaze that permeates a company called InfoSpace as it rose to prominence during the Internet bubble and then plummeted to almost nothing… I came away infuriated, and convinced that some people should go to jail.”

Don’t read it unless you, too, want to get miffed.

EU not happy with Microsoft protocol licensing

By Ted Roche on March 18, 2005 in Home Page

Eric Bangeman (eric@arstechnica.com) of Ars Technica reports EU not happy with Microsoft antitrust compliance. “According to the European Commission, Microsoft is not fully complying with terms of the EC’s antitrust remedies… According to the EC, the royalty and license terms offered by Microsoft are unreasonable and unfairly exclude vendors of open source software”

Obviously, Microsoft still needs to learn the meaning of the word interoperability. Competing on features and support could make Microsoft such an industry leader.

UPDATE: If you enjoy dry British humour, OSNews points to a UK ZDNet column: “Microsoft’s Windows Communications Protocol Licence Explained. Microsoft is guilty of breaking EU competition law, and has come up with a way to make amends. ZDNet dissects the resulting licence and find a very peculiar world indeed.”

Microsoft and Sun recommend… their products!

By Ted Roche on March 16, 2005 in Home Page

OSNews points to EDS: Linux is insecure, unscalable. Large enterprises should not use Linux because it is not secure enough, has scalability problems and could fork into many different flavours, according to the Agility Alliance, which includes IT heavyweights EDS, Fuji Xerox, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, Dell and EMC.”

And what exactly is the purpose of this “alliance?” According to the article, to compete with IBM and HP. What a surprise. And what software do they favor? Theirs, of course. What nonsense!

All OSes likely have an appropriate place in a well planned enterprise.

Apple may release 2-button mouse, can ergonomic keyboards be far behind?

By Ted Roche on March 16, 2005 in Home Page

OSNews points to the story making the rounds that “Apple May Release Two Button Mouse. According to AppleInsider Apple is working on a two button mouse to further assist people switching from Windows.” Isn’t it a bit early for April Fool’s columns to be hitting the internet?

I’ve been running my iMac for a year with a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse Blue. Just plugged it in, and the right mouse button pops open context menus, the scrollwheel scrolls and the middle click pastes in terminal windows. It Just Works.

Mad Penguin interviews PostGreSQL PR Lead

By Ted Roche on March 15, 2005 in Home Page, PostgreSQL

OSNews points to an Interview with Josh Berkus of PostgreSQL. “The PostgreSQL database project has recently released Version 8.0, which was received with quite some fanfare, mostly due to its first-ever Windows port. Mad Penguin talked with Josh Berkus, one of the core team members, to find out how 8.0 has fared since its official release on January 17, 2005.” Interesting and brief reading for those curious about the project. While MySQL has gotten the lion’s share of the attention in the Free/Open Source Software market so far, PostgreSQL is a worthy and feature-packed competitor.

OSNews and ZDNet: lies, damned lies and statistics

By Ted Roche on March 15, 2005 in Home Page

OSNews echoes ZDNet’s lead paragraph: Fedora takes off as Red Hat declines. “Latest statistics for the Web server market show that Fedora, Red Hat’s free Linux operating system, is growing in popularity. But the picture isn’t quite so rosy for its enterprise offering.”

But Read the Fine Article (RTFA) and you find out that 400,000 web sites are now running Fedora, placing it at number 5. And 20,000 less sites are running RedHat, which still leaves it in the top spot with 1.61 million deployments. That represents a 122% increase in the hobbyist/experimental distribution of Fedora, and a 1.2%, yes, One-Point-Two percent decrease in RedHat.

The survey cites only 4 million web sites in this survey, so this is not the same study as the March Netcraft study I pointed to earlier with sixty million sites surveyed. So what’s the subset here? The article is unclear.

Fedora had a new major release in the last year, and it is attracting attention, while RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 has just been released, after the date of the survey. RedHat is facing stiff competition with Novell/SuSE and other commercially supported versions of Linux, but still seems to be holding its own or slipping ever so slightly, though not increasing its market share. Competition is Good.

While the analysis isn’t a gross misrepresentation, if I were RedHat, with 1.6 million customers @ $349 a year (or more) each, I would see the picture as more rosy. That’s likely not the case. The original Netcraft article isn’t clear what “RedHat” is it talking about: my suspicion is that that number is a summary of RedHat 7, 8, 9 and two versions of Enterprise Linux. It would be interesting to see what the uptake of RHEL is, and whether it is RH 7.0 and 8.0 boxes that are being sent out to pasture.

To add a USB port to your notebook, all you need is a USB port…

By Ted Roche on March 14, 2005 in Home Page

Recently, the USB ports on my ThinkPad stopped working. My suspicion is that I probably zapped them with static electricity, as we’d had some dry and bitterly cold weather, and I’m usually running around in a couple layers of fleece this time of year.

At Best Buy, I picked up a Dynex 2-port USB 2.0 card so that I could plug in mice, keyboards, and the essential USB data drives. Imagine my surprise when I unpacked the box and found a funny little power cord, with a T-connector of male and female USB connectors on one end, and a small round power plug on the other. I guess that the PCMCIA bus doesn’t supply enough power for USB peripherals, as they would not work without the cord plugged in. Much to my relief, it appears that the dead USB connectors in my laptop can still supply power, even though USB devices aren’t recognized. Just a warning , though: if you need to add USB ports to your notebook, you’ll need to already have USB ports on your notebook to power the new ones. Go figure.

Despite the fact that the card is listed as supporting only Windows operating systems (the blister pack also listed Max OS X 10.1 or later), the card came right up and was detected properly in Linux Fedora Core 3, too.

Crossing Jordan enters the blogosphere

By Ted Roche on March 13, 2005 in Home Page

Andrew MacNeill – AKSEL Solutions blogs Nigel’s Blog – interesting TV /blogging cross-promotion. “NBC’s Crossing Jordan has an interesting concept going on right now. It seems it was started a while ago but one of their forensic characters, Nigel,(played by Steve Valentine) is “blogging”… Yes, doesn’t that sound fake? But what’s neat about this is that it’s all in line with a case being done on the series and the actual blog is broken up with all bits and pieces of what’s going on in the case. (check out the files area for interesting links) Nigel’s Blog”

Laura and I enjoy watching Crossing Jordan. The mysteries are fun, the ensemble cast has some good long story arcs, and there are dead bodies. What more could you ask?

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