Ted Roche's weblog

Fedora Core 5 isos available – grab the BitTorrent while it flows!

By Ted Roche on March 21, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Slashdot post: Fedora Core 5 Available. Jan Slupski writes “New release day today. Fedora Core 5 CD images are now available for download (i386, ppc, x86_64) on the ftp servers or via the torrent page.” Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.”

Cranked up Azureus to download and share the ISOs for the FC5 DVD and 5-CD set(!) (plus rescue CD). If you like the Red Hat Way and like messing with some of the more experimental stuff out there, Fedora will show you what to expect in Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the next version. For workstations, I’m using a mix of Fedora and Ubuntu. For servers, I set clients up with one of the RHEL flavors. In-house, we’re pinching pennies with Fedora and CentOS.

Blog spammed

By Ted Roche on March 20, 2006 in Security, Technology

Found 18 new comments in my blog this morning – all spam. Shut down comments while I clean up the mess

Patch those patches!

By Ted Roche on March 19, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Security

Apple Issues Updated Security Fix. Apple released another version of the security patch it distributed on March 13 to users of its OS X operating system software, in order to address a problem reported with the update. The company said it distributed the new patch, dubbed Update 2006-002 v1.1, in order to fix an issue with Apple’s Safari Web browser that some users observed after installing its 2006-002 security update. According to a post on the company’s Web site, the previous update had caused some Safari users to have problems launching the browser. [OSNews]

Five years of blogging begins tomorrow

By Ted Roche on March 17, 2006 in Personal

On 18 March 2002, I remarked, “So much to learn!” How little some things change. ~~Five~~Four years and around 2500 posts so far. So much to learn!

End of an era

By Ted Roche on March 17, 2006 in Personal

On July 15, 1992, I signed up with a CompuServe account. $22.95 a month plus connection charges, if I recall correctly. TapCIS and WinCIM to connect, DOS and Windows. CIS has been my backup service once I got broadband, a dial-up connection when I’m on the road, and finally a spam collector after all my legitimate correspondents had moved along. With the prevalence of wireless and broadband, it was a relic. 13 years and 8 months is a long time to have an email address. I closed it yesterday.

Buzzterm alert! OPML Browsers in the red!

By Ted Roche on March 17, 2006 in Technology

Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer points to an opml.org post: Dan MacTough: “The buzz-o-meter on OPML browsers is off the charts right now.”

There is a geometric buzz building that will die off in a day or week or month or two, but there is a there there: a simple, standard way to express in XML a one-to-many relationship has been implicitly built in since the beginning. But the OPML 2.0 format proposes a couple of deceptively simple and powerful standard tags that could open up some cool innovation ala RSS: author (with a URL for a contact-me page, not an email in this spam-drowned world), a type (where you extend the content innovatively), and more. Read the spec at http://www.opml.org/spec2 and listen to Dave’s March 1 Audiocast (MP3) for more insights.

As database developers, we’ve been thinking one-to-many relationships for a long time. “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Hierarchical database designers were a generation ahead of us. Dick Bard showed how to browse a database by pivoting the point of reference around the table of interest and browsing in a hierarchical fashion from there — in DOS! It will be interesting if the maturation of OPML leads to new ways of visualizing and communication data.

Tests find DRM shortens player battery life by up to ~25%

By Ted Roche on March 17, 2006 in Technology

Doc Searls points to a cdfreak.com posting “…one feature that has a drastic affect [sic] on battery life is the infamous DRM.” Their link to a ZDNet review is broken, but it’s no surprise that asking a poor little battery-operated thing to decrypt sound as well as decompress it is going to be more costly in terms of power. So, DRM supports the energy cartel. No surprise there, eh?

Send the message with your wallet. Buy unencrypted music and rip it for yourself in your choice of formats and your choice of sampling rates for your choice of playback devices: home, car, player, whatever. It’s about choice.

Grazr-browsing OPML

By Ted Roche on March 16, 2006 in Technology

Neat new toy: an OPML browser. Dave Winer linked to Adam Green links to Grazr. Check out the effect:

initOPML=”http://radio.weblogs.com/0117767/gems/mySubscriptions.opml”;
grazrAPIkey = “ALPHA03”;

VS.NET is like a city in the desert…

By Ted Roche on March 16, 2006 in Microsoft

Postcard picture
Here’s a remarkably mixed message. What are the advertisers trying to tell me in this postcard I just received? Post your favorite theories in the comments!

Visual Studio.NET is a gamble?
VS.NET is trying to look like something it’s not?
It’s just like the City of Lost Wages! Bet your career!
“What happens in DotNet, stays in DotNet” — unbelievably, it actually says this on the back of the card! Amazing.
Your theory?

Go, Manchester! (both of them)