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.
You are here: Home
Sparkline test
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
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
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…
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
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…
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
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.”
SANS – Internet Storm Center – Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System
In the SANS – Internet Storm Center Handler’s Diary on December 29th 2006 they describe the troubles that can occur when a user innocently chooses a likely search result from a popular search engine in “Pain reliever with serious side effects.” A chilling story. The moral of the story: anti-virus and anti-malware and firewalls aren’t sufficient. You must also stay up to date on all the latest patches. What if the patch isn’t out yet?
In related news, Microsoft will unprotect millions of Windows 2000 users tonight as their version of “Windows Defender” expires, with no update planned for the “unsupported” operating system. If you’ve been a depender on defender, it’s time to be a decider and a finder and find another product. Good luck, and happy new year!