Computerworld News reports After flap, Symantec adjusts browser bug count. “A report issued today by Symantec Corp. features two different ways of counting browser bugs: one that finds IE has the most vulnerabilities, another that indicates Firefox is the bug-leader.”
So, there! That ought to settle the issue once and for all. Lies, damned lies, statistics and bug counts.
Linux-Watch.com asks: “Is OpenOffice really ten years behind MS Office?” A better question might be if that’s a bad thing. The 2nd edition of “Hacker’s Guide to Word for Windows” printed in 1995 claims to cover WinWord 6. How many more features did we really need? Toolbars that transmogrified into palettes? Menus that went 3-D when the mouse was over them? The words came out the same.
I don’t agree that OpenOffice.org is “ten years behind.” I still can’t get it to run the Melissa virus. But I’m not sure “ten years behind” or even better “ten years on a different path” is a bad thing.
InfoWorld: Top News is reporting Researcher hacks Microsoft Fingerprint Reader.
(InfoWorld) – “Never mind worrying about hackers stealing your password. A security researcher with the Finnish military has shown how they could steal your fingerprint, by taking advantage of an omission in Microsoft’s Fingerprint Reader, a PC authentication device that Microsoft has been shipping since September 2004.”
When you lose your password, you can get it reset. When your credit card shows suspicious activity, you can get a new and different one. What happens when your fingerprints are stolen?
Over at leafe.com, Ed Leafe posts:
“Last week at PyCon I gave a session on The State of Dabo, and we recorded it with a video camera located in the back of the room. So yeah, we have a recording, but both the video and audio are less than optimal. Still, if you’d like to see it, I’m making the video available.”
“Due to the large file size, I won’t be serving it directly from my servers. I’ve created BitTorrent files that will allow everyone to share the bandwidth and make things go much more smoothly. The session is broken up into 3 parts, so here are the URLs for each of the torrents:”
http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1580&name=pycon2006-dabo1.mov.torrent
http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1581&name=pycon2006-dabo2.mov.torrent
http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1582&name=pycon2006-dabo3.mov.torrent
“If you’re not familiar with the way that BitTorrent works, keep in mind that once you have the complete file, *don’t* close your torrent client. Instead, leave it running, which will help speed up downloading for others. The more people connected to these torrents,
the faster everyone gets a copy!”
I’ll be hosting a couple of BitTorrent seeds here over the weekend, so grab it while you can!
Stephen J. Vaughn-Nicholls responds to the recent “Why Vista Won’t Suck” with — what else? — Why Windows Vista will suck. The article is on Desktop Linux linked via Linux-Watch.com.
Guy Pardoe, MonadLUG Coordinator, announces their March 9th meeting:
The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be Thursday, March 9th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough.
SSH Operations and Techniques – Bill Stearns
SSH is a program to log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from one machine to another. It provides strong authentication and secure communications over insecure channels. It is a replacement for rlogin, rsh, rcp, and rdist. It protects a network from attacks such as IP spoofing, IP source routing, and DNS spoofing.
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Directions: The SAU 1 Superintendant of Schools office is directly behind the South Meadow School. From downtown Peterborough, travel north on route 202 approximately 2 & 1/2 miles. Look for a white sign on the left “SAU 1 Superintendant of Schools Office.” The entrance is on the left, just before South Meadow school, and across the street from Sims Press. Follow the drive up towards dumpsters where there is ample parking. Come down the stairs to the set of doors on your right. Enter thru double set of doors and turn left…straight into the board room.
Or check the link to Google maps to see our location:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/OurChapters#monadlug
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf , marked as “I” on that map. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
This month’s meeting will feature Steve Amsden, Network Administrator for the Merrimack Valley School District, showing off LTSP, the Linux Terminal Server Project. From Steve:
“LTSP is an add-on package for Linux that allows you to connect lots of low-powered thin client terminals to a Linux server. Applications typically run on the server, and accept input and display their output on the thin client display. The power and flexibility of this platform have far reaching implications, particularly for K12 school districts who have been educated and brave enough to seek other solutions than the cost of systems and applications software. But more specifically, being locked into a treadmill of constant upgrades, licensing problems, and unsupportable client-server nework environments that have been the Achille’s heel of technology education. Merrimack Valley School District has five LTSP server environments in various states of implementation, and
uses e-Smith Linux server for gateway, DHCP, content filtering, firewall, and Windows 2000 emulation using SAMBA. Exeter School District, as well as Salem, are too using combinations of e-Smith and LTSP. Though LTSP has made in-roads into the schools, it will be some time before the full impact is realized, and others convinced that there is a better way than the Microsoft Way.”
Should be an awesome presentation! Hope to see you there!
On Tuesday, Dave Winer teased us with “My own teaser. First there was RSS 2.0. Then Web 2.0. Tomorrow, the next 2.0. “;->” On Wednesday, Dave pointed to the public review of OPML 2.0 specification. Outline Processor Markup Languages lets you create, validate, communicate, exchange, link outlines with others. There’s a lot of power in that simple concept, and a well-thought out specification by a man who’s been thinking outlines for a long time. Check it out and think about how you could use it in your systems.
The SANS Institute Internet Storm Center points out Apple’s Monthly OS X Security Patch with goodies for everyone, including patches that address recent Safari issues and the flaw in Launch Services that allowed “safe” file types to launch unsafe executables. Get patching!
On the ProFox mailing list on 2/24/06, Dave Bernard wrote: > > For every person on this planet planning or executing a complete rewrite of > a working line of business VFP system (not a developer tool) into > .NET/J2EE/anything, I want to ask a simple question: > > “What were the business reason(s) for doing so?” >
1. Scale. Client wanted to move to gigabytes of data, and their internal programming staff and consultants they brought in could not develop a satisfactory app. Client invested millions in DotNet and SQL Server, and went bankrupt. Remants of the company are back to megabytes and back to VFP.
2. Inability to find good consultants. Having gone through a dozen VFP developers who were dBASE refugees and should not have been developers, company went for the magic pixie dust of Java. After millions of dollars of development (sounding familiar?), company was bought for hundreds of millions of dollars and entire app was scrapped in favor of the purchasing company’s existing system.
(There are a lot of developers out there who write junk for code. I don’t think VFP attracts them, especially, perhaps it’s just had a longer time to accumulate them? I’ve seen some pretty awful stuff out there.)
3. Painted too deeply into the corner: I supported a client for nearly a decade who had a legacy system written by a well-known developer early in the VFP 3.0 days. There were no best practices then, so there were some fairly complex work-arounds. The system was very large and very complex, and the micro-managing, penny-pinching boss would never authorize an hour spent to rewrite something that worked, no matter how arcanely. After a decade of making serious money out of this application, he got caught up with a young guy who could show him spiffy little tricks in *Delphi* of all things (out of the frying pan, into the fire) and, not understanding the differences between superficial GUI tricks and the deep functionality of his application, put his existing development into maintenance mode to go on a wild goose chase with Delphi. He was too cheap and too wily to lose his business to this, but his best developers quit, his customer base moved on, and when he sells out in a few years, he’ll get a lot less than he could have.
4. Slightly off-topic from the VFP re-write question, but an answer to why not FoxPto: Corporate standards: I tried to pitch a WebConnect app to a Very Large Insurance Company. They had standardized on: Macs on the desktop, Novell for their network, Oracle for their database and Netscape Enterprise for their intra-, extra- and inter-nets. I fought this one all the way up to a one-on-one with the CIO, who tried to explain to me that Microsoft was “going the wrong way,” a view I’ve come to agree with, but for different reasons and with a differnt new direction. IT evolution slowed to a crawl in this company, and the CIO has taken an early retirement to “pursue other interests.”
5. Cost savings: Tired of paying experienced senior developers with decades of experience in the business niche and this particular application, PHB thought it would make sense to employ cheap VB developers to rewrite the app in the para-dig-m of the day, VB and SQL Server. Experienced developers moved on, weaker devs stayed on for free training. New apps took forever to deliver, cost gazillions, and lacked the functionality of the original. Customers wouldn’t upgrade for fewer features. Company foundered, bought up by BigCompany for 1/10th of peak worth, for customer base. Old code and new code discarded.
In summary: incompetence, incompetence, incompetence, incompetence, incompetence. Hmm. Guess there is a pattern .
So, Dave, you were looking for GOOD business reasons to switch? I have run into few of them:
Good apps need to be rewritten every once in a while, as cruft builds up, and the model of the business encapsulated in the code doesn’t always evolve as fast as the business does. Software tends towards rigidity and/or fragility. Refactoring and other advanced techniques are designed to extend the longevity of an application, but refactoring a gnarly old app can be more costly than rebuilding.
When rewriting, you have the glory of starting with a clean slate, and re-examining your assumptions. New business models (software rental, software as a service, application service provider) may be available since the original app was conceived (probably back when we used floppies). ACID compliance, disaster recovery, HIPAA and SOX compliance can make new architectures a requirement. New component models, loose coupling, multi-phase commits, heterogenous backends are all designs to consider.
Security is a huge concern with ever-increasing connectedness, portability and liabilities.
So, ultimately, the business decisions come down to:
1. What business(es) do you want to be in? 2. What architectures enable that? 3. What tools enable those architectures? 4. What resources do you have available to execute those designs?
When faced with a clean slate project, new languages and tools are always a siren song. “There are no silver bullets” is a 30-year-old quote.
However, given the specs of a couple of apps lately, I couldn’t find a justification for writing them in FoxPro. While we have a mature language (well-debugged, well-documented and lots of support), some great frameworks and lots of programming talent, there were concerns I could not address: Microsoft has handed out BILLIONs in legal settlements in the last couple of years. Microsoft has made it clear VFP9 is the end-of-the-road for the binaries, with some xBase decorations extending VFP9 into Sedna. 64-bit is out and support for NX bits mean some loss of functionality. Bottom line: a single vendor who is end-of-lifing the product. Competing languages with rich features included Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby had no proprietary vendor lockin, no preferred data source and the flexibility to deploy on many platforms. VFP Web deployment is a chain of SPOFs (Single Point of Failure): W2K3, IIS, COM. In comparison, if a mod_perl app has a problem on Apache/Linux, redeploy on OS X or on Zeus or via CGI. Options. Choice. That’s what it came down to. The VFP solution was climbing out onto a limb with a vendor renowned for orphaning its products.
Orphaning: In the late 80s, I sat in a room back at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston while Microsoft announced the rollout of the NT platform. During the Q&A session, a fellow came up to the microphone and explained that he was a Microsoft “partner,” had subscribed to their products and had spent years with a staff of programmers developing an app not far from release, but targeted at OS/2. What, he asked, was Microsoft going to do for him? His voice was unsteady, and it was apparent that he was facing a disastrous failure. There was an awkward silence when he finished as the crowd fell silent. There was no noise but an occasional clink of crystal against silverware. A Microsoftie finally managed to speak up, trying to deflect the comment into a pitch for their new development tools. The spell ended, but the impression remains to this day.
I can’t lead another client down that path. THAT’s the business reason.