Archive | 2007

Five Things You Might Not Have Known About Me

By Ted Roche on January 12, 2007 in Personal

Andrew Ross MacNeill tagged me with the “Five Things” chain letter, also tagging Craig Bailey, Eric Den Doop, Kok Kiet (John Jones), Richard Base (FoxPro: Catalyst). In turn ARM was tagged by Rick Schummer, who was tagged by Alex Feldstein and Rick also nabbed Kevin Ragsdale, Kevin Cully, Mike Feltman, Randy Jean. Alex had tagged Rick along with Garrett Fitzgerald, Rick Borup, Doug Hennig, Craig Berntson. Alex, in turn was selected by Claudio Lassala. Claudio was tagged by Markus who was tagged by Rick who… well, you get the idea. Someone was bored over the holidays, probably someone who wasn’t incensed over Microsoft giving away Acer laptops for Christmas, and decided to double the volume of the internet with self-indulgent blogging bit. Folks, who cares?

I’ve followed the links back 27 times and still haven’t come across the first couple of A-List bloggers I’d seen playing this game only a few weeks ago, so my back-of-the-envelope math tells me that there’s no one left who has a blog, so I’m tempted to declare the game over. Well done.

But just in case there’s bad juju with breaking the chain, has anyone heard from Calvin Hsia, Christof Wollenhaupt, Paul McNett, Andy Kramek and John “Gonzo” Koziol? No? Tag, boys, you’re it!

For those into this six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game, there’s a list of blogs at Fox Wiki Blog Watch and, yes, a self-referential aggregator of the resulting feeds at Planet Fox.

I was saved from near-certain death aboard a submarine by a quick-thinking shipmate… and his clipboard. Really.
I sat next to Senator George McGovern at a political rally.
I earned three varsity letters in swimming. Butterfly was my specialty, though I wasn’t very good.
I’m Union and I Vote: UAW Local 1981, the National Writer’s Union, AFL-CIO.
I lived in a travel trailer over summer of 1980 in Orlando, Florida and the winter of 1981 in West Milton, New York, yards from the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory. Might explain a lot, eh?

Listening to…

By Ted Roche on January 12, 2007 in Home Page, Microsoft, Technology

IT Conversation‘s podcast pick-of-the-week: Phil Windley’s Technometria podcast. This week he, Scott Lemon and Matt Asay interview David Platt about his new book. “Why Software Sucks” Tell me what you really think. Ouch. Fun stuff.

Sparkline test

By Ted Roche on January 11, 2007 in Home Page, OpenSource, PHP, Technology

Here’s a test of sparklines: [spark][type line][size 20,90][series 14,27,31,30,31,30,30,31,30,31,92,79,118,103,59,67,49,98,57,58,61,53,55,49,52,28,45,54,46][dot 12,118,5,blue][/spark] . Sparklines were described in Edward Tufte’s books, implemented in PHP by James Byers and as a WordPress plug in by Graeme Pietersz. Cool stuff.

Survey of email servers shows Open Source still king

By Ted Roche on January 11, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Over on the O’Reilly site, Ken Simpson and Stas Bekman write of their adventures “Fingerprinting the World’s Mail Servers.” They report:

Of the 400,000 domains we surveyed, 31.2 percent of them (still) receive their email via open source mail server software. Of these, the most popular by far is still the old guard, Sendmail (12.3 percent), with Postfix a relatively close second (8.6 percent). Exim and qmail are roughly tied (5.3 and 5.0 percent, respectively) in third place.

Interesting.

Microsoft leaves Word zero-day holes unpatched

By Ted Roche on January 10, 2007 in Home Page, Microsoft, Security

CNET News.com is reporting Microsoft leaves Word zero-day holes unpatched. Hmmm… is it still a zero-day hole if it has been around for a while? I’m afraid the term has lost its punch. Nonetheless, Cnet goes on to say,

Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for vulnerabilities in its Windows and Office software, but left several known Word zero-day flaws without a patch.

As part of its monthly patch cycle, Microsoft published four security bulletins with fixes for 10 vulnerabilities. Three of the bulletins are deemed “critical,” the company’s most serious rating; the fourth is tagged “important,” a notch lower. All bulletins, however, address flaws that could allow an attacker to commandeer a PC.

Nasty stuff. It’s the second week of 2007, and Microsoft patches are already up to MS07-08, although four of the patches were pulled from this release. I wonder if they’ll still be “zero-day” next month?

Hit the Microsoft site at http://www.microsoft.com/security if you need more information on these patches. Get patching!

FoxTalk Death Throes Continue…

By Ted Roche on January 10, 2007 in FoxPro, Home Page

On the FoxPro wiki, Alex Feldstein documents the most recent of many problems with New Hill Services, aka Eli Research, the latest purchasers of the FoxTalk newsletter, originally from Pinnacle Publishing. (Disclosure: FoxTalk published several articles of mine, starting in 1992 and ending in 2004). These people are just incredibly clumsy in the way they have worked with the community that once supported the newsletters. Terminating the editor, dropping or antagonizing their top-notch contributing writers, harassing former subscribers and failing to engage the community have ruined any chances of FoxTalk’s recovery. I wish they would just terminate the paper and spare us all the embarassment.

Just this morning, I received an email announcing “Your latest FoxTalk 2.0 is Available Online!” Curious if they were giving away free online content or offering a trial, I navigated to http://osslogin.com/login/pin, which asked for a login and displayed the Pinnacle (not Eli, not New Hill) logos and no links — no “Who we are,” “Read our other publications,” nothing. Really suspicious. Examining the HTML source, there were no signs of foul play (it does look like a phishing expedition, doesn’t it?), so I tried the “forgot your password” link and supplied my email address (I already get and squash 500 spams a day, so one more wouldn’t hurt). I promptly got an email with my password, and attempted to log in. “Account Expired” it told me, again with no other information or links. How annoying! If it was expired, why send the email notice? And wouldn’t this be a killer opportunity to ask me to re-up? Nothing. Bozos.

The silent victory of Linux-as-geology at CES 2007 | Linux Journal

By Ted Roche on January 9, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

In his Linux Journal blog, Doc Searls observes “the silent victory of Linux-as-geology at CES 2007:” “But it becomes clearer with every show that the growing majority of Linux Stories are because effects. Meaning they are about what you can do because of Linux rather than with it.” Bingo!

Dabo rocks!

By Ted Roche on January 8, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, MySQL, OpenSource, PostgreSQL, Python, Technology

I’ve mentioned it before, but the dabo project rocks! dabo is intended to be a cross-platform (Mac/Linux/Windows/Everywhere) rich-client application (like FoxPro 2.5 before MS bought it) with the rich-client experience (grids, list boxes, checkboxes, pageframes, menus, multiple forms) in the appropriate widget-set for each OS. It supports a slew of backend data sources (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle, more) and is designed with a similar architecture (UI-BizObjects-Data) to many of the FoxPro frameworks. Best of all, it’s written in Python and available under an Open Source license.

I’ve spent a couple days downloading the source, watching the excellent screencast tutorials, browing the extensive mailing list archives and wiki, running the demos, generating an app with the App Wizard and reading the code. I’ve got an existing LAMP application that would benefit from a rich-client component with reporting capabilities, and dabo looks like a good choice. Hope to blog my progress as I get into it.

And boy, is that CD drive tired…

By Ted Roche on January 7, 2007 in Home Page, Linux

Max Spevack reports that the Fedora Core 6 installs have hit the one million users mark. That’s 9.4 installs per minute since the release!

Teaching Yourself to Program

By Ted Roche on January 3, 2007 in Home Page

Phil Windley’s Technometria | Teaching Yourself to Program: “This article from Peter Norvig on teaching yourself to program in 10 years has been around for a while, but it’s still worth reading. The basic points? Get interested in programming, pick an interactive language, and do it—for a long time.”

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