TheOpenCD 07.02 – “The OpenCD team is pleased to announce the release of OpenCD 07.02, which is now ready for download and purchase. 07.02 contains twelve updated versions including the milestone OpenOffice 2.1, along with latest releases of both Firefox and Thunderbird…”
A slew of good, freely distributable, Windows software. This is worth keeping two CDs in your bag: one for you and one to give to each needy client, customer, friend, neighbor or family member.
Bill McGonigle announces the March meeting of the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, featuring “50 Ways to Run Your Programs” presented by Bill Stearns. Sounds like a great meeting!
“At this meeting Bill will explore ways to change how programs run. He will cover ways to change a program’s priority, where it runs, when it runs, debug new and running applications, and much more. Attendees are welcome, and encouraged, to bring their own laptops and try new techniques that will help them tap the power of a Linux environment.”
“William Stearns is a network security researcher and instructor for the SANS Institute, teaching the Linux System Administration and Perimeter Security tracks. In his spare time he maintains a major antispam blacklist and assists the technical community as a volunteer incident handler for the Internet Storm Center. His articles and tools can be found in SysAdmin magazine, online journals, and at http://www.stearns.org.”
EC rebuffs Microsoft over open-source report – ZDNet UK“The European Commission has resisted efforts by Microsoft to make it abandon its report into open-source software, it was revealed this week. But the Commission was swayed into allowing a 10-day period for feedback before completing the report.”
“Harnessing the opportunity to provide feedback, Microsoft produced 20 pages of arguments as to why the report — which quantified the benefits of open source to European organisations — should be shelved. The software giant also commissioned a respected university academic to back its case and enlisted the help of a trade association, CompTIA. The academic produced 44 pages of evidence supporting Microsofts case, while CompTIA wrote a five-page submission.”
A direct link to the 287-page, 1.7Mb PDF report here. A tip of the fedora to Harish Pillay for blogging this.
It is reprehensible that the CompTIA-backed mis-named “Initiative for Software Choice” can be opposed to a discussion about choice. (CompTIA, in turn, is partially Microsoft-funded.) Both FOSS and proprietary software may have a place in the market, but it is the free market’s job to determine that. Who asked us to “Get The Facts?” The study, clearly marked as “not the opinion of the EU” offers information worthy of study. We have been living in a world of 90% proprietary and 10% free software; I suspect those proportions may invert soon, and a new balance be achieved. This is progress.
Bill McGonigle returns to blogging after a 300-day hiatus (welcome back, Bill!) with a great piece on the monthly meeting of the Upper Valley Computer Industry Association: The BFC Computing Weblog : Fairpoint and GCEDC at UVCIA, 2006-02-21. It was a meeting I really wanted to catch, but there are too many demands on my time at the moment and my little shady valley will not be touched directly from the potential switchover from Verizon to Fairpoint. I look forward to more discussion in the technical forums on the imact of the Verizon-Fairpoint deal.
Somehow in nearly 40 years of wresting with electrical, telephonic and electronic hardware, I had managed to avoid working with punchdown blocks. I’ve hand-soldered connectors, crimped connections, hand-wired telephones, soldered and de-soldered circuit boards, operated the electric plant of a nuclear-powered submarine, snaked cables through walls, voids and plenums, but somehow was always somewhere else when the punchdown tool was used. This weekend I had to fix an ethernet wall socket in the living room and found myself facing a punchdown connector. With the loan of a punchdown tool and a little internet research, the instructions are not that complex. The Structured Wiring site has a lot of handy tips on how to install home / home-office wiring.
Sad news, via Garrett Fitzgerald’s Blog and Scoble. Jim is a very special guy, as his Microsoft Research page noted, an ACM, NAE, NAS, and AAAS Fellow and an ACM Turing Award winner. He was a skilled sailor and his loss a bit of mystery. My heart goes out to his family and friends.
Originally, we had scheduled this presentation for November, but Andy Bair was called away at the last minute for a family emergency. He’ll be back in Concord New Hampshire to reprise his presentation, which has gotten rave reviews from several other local LUGs.
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of (most) month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. This month, we’ll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Tell your friends.
For this meeting, Andy Bair will present “Digital Forensic File Carving Techniques.” Data carving techniques are used during digital forensic investigations and existing file carving tools typically produce many false positives. This briefing describes new tools and techniques used by the winning team of the the 2006 File Carving Challenge held at the 6th Annual Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS). The current briefing is also located here.
Stay tuned for more information on future meetings: Bill Stearns will be presenting Logical Volume Management April 2nd and Seth Cohn will present Drupal on May 7th. More details on the group and directions to the meeting at http://www.centralug.org.
Bill Sconce announces the upcoming meeting of the Python SIG of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group (but Windows and OS X users are welcomed!): Dave Rowell of Appropriate Solutions will do a presentation on Django, Kent’s Korner will talk about the Module of the Month, lots of time for announcements, questions and answers, beginner’s time before the main meeting, and milk and cookies.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft fixes 20 security holes“Windows users are being urged to install Microsofts February security update which contains 12 patches for 20 vulnerabilities… The bumper package includes fixes for loopholes that malicious hackers are known to be already exploiting.”
An astounding list of “Remote Code Exploit” bugs includes HTML Help’s ActiveX control (who ever thought making the browser an “integral part of the operating system” was a good idea?), Word, MDAC, the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine (how’s that for irony?), and more. Security Bulletins MS07-06 through -016 detail the mess. (It’s the sixth week of 2007, for those keeping score.)
Windows users – get patching! http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security is a good place to start for more information.
What : MP3 file handling under Linux
Who : Robert E. Anderson
Day : Mon 12 Feb 2007
Time : 7:00 PM
Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH
This month’s meeting of the Seacoast Linux User Group will feature Robert E. Anderson talking about MP3 file handling under Linux. Talk to include:
Further details can be found at http://slug.gnhlug.org/slug/Members/rea/SLUG/slug-meetings/mp3-file-handling-under-linux/
For directions and related web links visit the http://slug.gnhlug.org website