Navigation

You are here: Home › MSCD › 2006 › October

Archive | October, 2006

MerriLUG: Rob Lebree on What's Inside a Mobile Phone

By on October 18, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The monthly meeting of the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group takes place on Thursday, the 19th of October at Martha's Exchange in Nashua, NH. Dinner is at 6 PM and the main meeting (upstairs) at 7:30 PM. Driving directions can be found here

From the group's announcement:

“Rob Lembree from JumpShift, LLC [Edit: fixed broken link] will discuss the components and processes involved in the development of a modern mobile phone, from the processors and radios to the operating system technology, middleware and applications that bring the package together. He will also discuss the peculiarities of the mobile industry that make bringing a handset to market a unique challenge.”

“Rob will bring lots of mobile platforms with him in various states of completion for show and tell. Rob has two decades of experience in operating system technology, many of it in the embedded computing space, with three and a half years applying this experience to the mobile platform industry. When Rob grows up, he'd like to start a research and development company, hire smart people, and develop cool stuff that scares the heck out of big companies.”

Hope to see you there!

Web 2.0 Smackdown

By on October 17, 2006 in Technology

Jeffrey Zeldman smacks down the hype well in his Web 2.0 Thinking Game: “Clearly “Web 2.0″ means different things to different journalists on different days. Mostly it means nothing — except a bigger paycheck. But let’s simplify what The Economist is saying… (more)

From my perspective, we're slipping into another avalanche of unrealistic expectations, VCs throwing money at silly ideas, slick hucksters talking their way into CxO jobs, burn rates, burnouts and, perhaps, if we're lucky, a little bit of advancement of the art of getting computers to be more useful. Enjoy the ride.

How Bad Can It Be?

By on October 16, 2006 in Technology
War story: A client Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken hired me to “fix a few little things” on an application that was used as a transient and trivial application — on 28,000 in-house desktops in ~100 countries. The language was one they were not familiar with – VFP. The database (it was a centralized C/S app, running over their WAN) was one they were not familiar with. They hired a company that offered the application they wanted on a different database and paid them to write a custom version that ran against what was their database of choice at that time. This turned out to be the only app ever deployed in the company against that database backend. The database server was HUGE. The company that wrote the app was out of business. The “source code” they had (after legal pursuits) was a single CD with all of the files in the root: a half dozen projects named test1, test2, etc. and the worst code I have witnessed in nearly 30 years of software development. This app started in dBASE II and was moved without conversion all the way up to VFP 5. The client-server implementation was awful beyond imagining. Every connection setting which could be set wrong, was. Saving a record involved a half-dozen TableUpdates() without checking the return result, followed by a delete, followed by a tableupdate, followed by an insert. That this system ran at all was a tribute to how badly you could write code.

 

Sometimes It Just Works…. Doesn't

By on October 16, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Technology

I had a client very unhappy last week when I failed to respond in a timely manner to his emails. The problem was simple enough: I hadn't received them! It seems that my iMac's Mail.app was having some serious problems, but didn't let anyone know. After shutting down Mail.app, then forcing it to shutdown, checking the disk integrity, and restarting mail, it's discovering all sorts of email out there it forgot to tell me about. It's been running for about ten minutes and is still finding email, up to 342 unread messages so far. So, if you think I'm ignoring your email, it's possible that I just haven't seen it yet.

Yet another PowerPoint security exploit

By on October 14, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

InfoWorld: Application development reports: “Microsoft warns of new PowerPoint attack. Just days after patching four bugs in PowerPoint, Microsoft is warning of a new attack targeting its presentation software.”

Boy, Microsoft is just not catching a break this month! Don't open untrusted PowerPoints. Don't run as an admin – configure your day-to-day user account as a Least-Priviledged-User.

MS Patch Tuesday: 10 patches, 3 critical, all important

By on October 10, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green does a far more thorough job than I can of summarizing Microsoft patch tuesday – October 2006 STATUS, (Tue, Oct 10th). “Overview of the October 2006 Microsoft patches and their status.”

A really quick summary: exploits in asp.net, in an IE “safe” ActiveX control, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, MSXML, Office, Publisher, the Server service, IPv6 and the Object Packager (wow! Haven't used that since OLE 1.0!). MS06-056-065. Get Patching! Try OpenOffice.org. Try FireFox. Think Differently. Good luck.

Baystar exec says MSFT behind high-burn-rate funding of SCO

By on October 10, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

OSNews is pointing to the story that Microsoft's SCO Involvement Revealed. “A declaration by SCO's backer, BayStar has revealed that the software Giant Microsoft had more links to the anti-Linux bad-boy. The declaration made by from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb has turned up as part of IBM's evidence to the court. Goldfarb says that Baystar had been chucking USD 50 million at SCO despite concerns that it had a high cash burn rate. He also claims that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed “a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop', or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment”.

I don't think it's really a surprise that MSFT and SUN are behind the funding of SCO to take a poke at IBM and slow the adoption of Linux through FUD. If you'd like to learn more about this incredibly complex case, GrokLaw is the place to visit. But be warned: it's easy to be dragged into all the fascinating nooks and crannies of the case.

The real question for me is whether MSFT and SUN succeeded in their ventures. SUN has done a turn-around and is re-inventing themselves as the green company with better price/power/performance for the internet. MSFT has… almost shipped Vista. Linux, meanwhile, has moved, up, out and around, scaling to greater multi-CPU architectures, developing a better virtualization story, making huge progress in hardware compatibility, and fielding several worthy desktop competitors. LAMP is not a risky choice for IT; it's a question of which commercially-supported distributions and stacks to choose and ensuring the eager technicians in house get the training they need. If the SCO case cooled enthusiasm and take-up any, it gave FOSS advocates time to get their act together and pay a little closer attention to governance and provenance and licensing terms, cleaning up their houses and getting their story straight. Meanwhile, Microsoft… almost shipped Vista.

If SCO/Baystar/Microsoft/SUN thought that IBM would roll over and settle out of court, they badly miscalculated.

Is your mail server part of the problem?

By on October 9, 2006 in Security, Technology

SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green is discussing Spam Backscatter, (Mon, Oct 9th). “Over the weekend I dealt with the rather massive after effects of a spam campaign spoofing a domain” …(more)

I'll second that! As the article goes on to indicate, many innocent mail administrators are a part of the problem by not changing naive settings of their servers. We need to encourage all the mail server software authors to change their default behaviors to fail to deliver mail silently: bounces from non-existant mail addresses are clogging the internet's pipes with replies to spoofed senders. “No such postbox” and “mailbox filled” are courteous, but since your server likely doesn't really know the sender, it's not just a waste of effort, but a an imposition on others to read your counter-spam. Let's all be a little quieter and learn more from listening than responding.

Older posts Newer posts

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes

This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.