On his home page, Chris Schmidt announces, “I’m going to be giving a lightning talk called ‘Geolocation with GSM Cells’ at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, on June 14th, 2006.” Chris is a regular at GNHLUG’s Nashua and PySIG chapters.
Congratulations!
Don Tennant, editor in chief of Computerworld, writes
“It’s bad enough when Microsoft strong-arms other software vendors into submission as a means of thwarting competition. But when it engages in underhanded tactics to intimidate users in order to land a software deal, we have a very disturbing situation on our hands. And someone needs to have the guts to speak out about it.”
Read the whole story here. Thanks to Bill Anderson for the pointer
InfoWorld reports “Microsoft released one critical security update for its Exchange messaging server and two security updates for Windows on Tuesday, one of which was critical… In Microsoft’s rating system, a critical vulnerability means it could allow unauthorized software to be installed without user action… The third patch released Tuesday fixes two vulnerabilities in Windows rated as “moderate,” Microsoft said… More information and Microsoft’s monthly security bulletin can be found at its Web site“.
Funny, I would not have thought that Adobe Flash was a product MSFT would be responsible for patching, but it appears they shipped it in some of their components. Watch out for the Exchange patch – SANS Internet Storm Center is reporting it cripples Blackberries using the Blackberry Enterprise Server.
MS06-018, 019 and 020 ship this week. It’s the 19th week of the year.
OSNews reports KDE to Become Better Supported on the Ubuntu Platform. “At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.”
Good deal. I’ve been using KDE with Ubuntu for the last couple of versions and I like its responsiveness, especially on some of the slower hardware (PII-266 and -366 laptops) I’m using.
WinSCP (Secure Copy) lets you copy, move or synchronize files and folders between two machines over a secure (ssh) tunnel. It offers a simple two-panel local-remote file explorer supporting drag-and-drop, a toolbar of utilities (rename, move, copy, etc.) and intuitive operation. I use WinSCP all the time to keep remote Linux machines up to date with local Windows machines while doing development. (Actually, the “local Windows machine” is almost always using files on a networked share via SMB that’s actually a Linux file server running Samba, so I’m really just using Windows as the pretty GUI to synch two Linux machines, but I digress.)
WinSCP has just released a new version, v. 3.8.1, with a significant list of changes, improvements and bug fixes. SCP (really ssh) servers are available for most platforms and interoperate between different OSes. Check out WinSCP.
Garrett Fitzgerald blogs: “I noticed that Aaron Margosis had stopped blogging, but I missed that he had started back up. He has a list of ways to fix or work around bugs involving not running as Admin starting here and going forward for a couple of posts. Aaron is the creator of MakeMeAdmin, which is a little script that makes it easier to run with limited access.”
With the rampant security problems Windows has been experiencing, I reconfigured my development machine into an Least Privileged User configuration over a year ago. It’s a pain, and some applications just fall apart, especially with installing modules or updates. “Run As…” solves the problem in some cases, but others are a lot more difficult. The Linux/Unix/OSX model of security rights seem to map more easily into these situations than the “only one user is logged on” mentality of Windows. I’ll have to check out Aaron’s utilities to see if they can help bridge the gap.
Over at Shedding Some Light, Rick Schummer blogs VFP Best Practices E-book Available “Have you read some of the blog or forum posts touting the sessions at GLGDW 2006, and kicked yourself for not attending? Wish you had a second chance? Well Whil is giving you a second chance by releasing the session whitepapers as a new e-book: Visual FoxPro Best Practices for the Next Ten Years”
What a great idea! I wish more of the conferences would offer their proceedings in electronic format! There is so much knowledge in those conference notes. While it’s nowhere near as good as attending the conference in person, these notes can be treasure troves of clever code and solutions.
I’ve added a sidebar to the blog showing off some interesting books from my library. LibraryThing.com has an interesting proposition: post your library online and share your book lists with others, tagging included. The Dartmouth/Lake Sunapee Linux User Group is maintaining their list of library books for loan on Library Thing, so I thought I’d try it with a barcode scanner/keyboard wedge I picked up at Hosstraders over the weekend. Looks like Library Thing is a cool application. I see Rick Borup is already posting FoxPro books up there, and I added my Hentzenwerke collection as well. Check out their tag cloud and the ability to subscribe (via RSS, of course) to tags, other people’s lists, topics, etc. Looks like fun.
OSNews reports RSA: Microsoft To Shelve Token Support in Vista. “Microsoft has shelved plans to include built-in support for RSA Security’s tokens in Windows Vista, even though the company has been testing out the authentication technology for almost two years. In February 2004, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said that Windows would be able to support easy integration with RSA’s popular SecurID tokens. That meant businesses would find it far easier to deploy a two-factor authentication system for logging on to networks and applications. However, almost two years after the SecurID beta-testing program kicked off, RSA’s chief executive, Art Coviello, disclosed that Windows Vista will not natively support the technology.”
So, there were features left in Vista! Good thing Microsoft found them and removed them before shipping!