In “Dabo Part I: The AppWizard,” Andrew Ross MacNeill interviewed Ed Leafe in a videocast demonstrating the Python n-tier framework dabo. Ed was so impressed with the power of video presentations that he’s tried his hand at it himself. Check it out at http://leafe.com/screencasts/codedemo.html. Ed used dabo on a Fedora Core 2 workstation and recorded it using pyvnc2swf and Sound Studio on the Mac. Very cool!
Tag Archives | PHP
Nut-Graph: visualize blackouts
And once you have NUT monitoring your UPS serving multiple servers, consider adding Nut-Graph to give you a visual display of incoming voltage, load and battery status. Requires NUT, mod_php, MySQL 4.1 and Perl and jpgraph. Very slick!
Intel says AMD/MIT $100 laptops won’t succeed
OSNews reports Intel Chairman Derides USD100 Laptop. Intel’s chairman chided plans by rival AMD and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a $100 laptop for the developing world. At a press conference in Sri Lanka on Friday, Craig Barrett said that potential computer users would scoff at the computer’s lack of features. Barrett also said the device isn’t worthy of being called a laptop. “I think a more realistic title should be ‘the $100 gadget’,” he mused. “The problem is that gadgets have not been successful.”
I wonder how many of the six billion earthlings have had a chance to try one of these?
Apache 2.2 ships with virtual host https support
From Resigned to the Bittersweet Truth, Apache 2.2 is Out. The earth-shattering feature of Apache 2.2 is RFC 2817 SSL Upgrade. Basically, any HTTP connection can upgrade itself to HTTPS without reestablishing.”
“This means you can do SSL on virtual hosts without a dedicated IP address. This will greatly increase the penetration of SSL (plus free certs like CaCert) …”
Awesome! SSL on virtual hosts opens up the world of secure web transactions for inexpensive shared hosts. Way cool.
Unpatched IE Javascript exploit published.
InfoWorld: Top News: Hackers publish code for critical IE bug. InfoWorld) – Security experts are warning Internet users to be careful where they click, thanks to a nasty unpatched bug in the way Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser handles the JavaScript computer language. The bug is of particular concern because security researchers in the U.K. have now published “proof of concept” code showing how hackers could exploit the problem and possibly take over a Windows system.By Robert_McMillan@idg.com (Robert McMillan).
Just to review: never browse with an untrustworthy browser.
UPDATE: Details at the Internet Storm Center, raising their InfoCon level from green to yellow. ISC is labeling it a zero-day exploit. It’s certainly the potential for one.
Viewing OpenDocument Files in FireFox
OSNews posts an exclusive article, *Why Browsers Should Be Able to Display OpenDocument*. “OpenDocument got a lot of publicity lately. StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 finally arrived, and all the other makers of office suites (with the notable exception of Microsoft) have started implementing the new standard into their programs. Massachusetts recently decided to use OpenDocument as the standard file format, effectively locking out MS Office as soon as January 1st, 2007. Other countries are on their way to do the same. Also, OpenDocument recently got submitted to become an ISO standard.”
An interesting tidbit I picked up from the article: you can view OpenDocument files in FireFox! If you have both FireFox and OpenOffice.org 2 installed on your machine, start OpenOffice.org and navigate the usual menu/dialog/treeview to Tools | Options, Internet, Mozilla Plug-In, and check the Enable checkbox. Shut down and restart Firefox. Now, you can open OpenDocument documents for viewing in the browser! A toolbar appears that allows editing (opening the doc in OpenOffice.org), direct printing, direct export to PDF, searching and more. Pretty cool stuff.
Gates, Windows, Web 2.0
John Batelle posts Gates, Microsoft Ponder the Future of … Microsoft with great links to a recent Bill Gates memo on Web 2.0 and a related CNet article. John’s reaction: “Microsoft truly does face the second coming of the Web, and this time it’s not conveniently packaged as one killable company a la Netscape (Google notwithstanding).”
Apple switchers growing
OSNews links to an Apple Insider article that can’t have been well thought through: Over 1 Million Windows to Mac Converts So Far in 2005?. “The momentum generated by Apple’s iPod digital music players and related products continues to translate into new Macintosh sales according to one Wall Street analyst who estimates that over one million Windows users have purchased a Mac in the first three quarters of 2005.”
Great news! I’m a switcher, though in 2004. But, digging into the article,
“If we assume that all of the growth in Mac shipments during the past three quarters resulted from Windows users purchasing a Mac, then purchases by Windows users exceeded one million,” the analyst said.
Well, that’s silly. No current Mac user bought a new Mac in the past three quarters? If so, Apple is doomed. Apple users often keep their machines running for years, as they don’t have the rapid decline-to-obsolesence of WinTel boxes, but I’d guesstimate a 4-year-lifecycle on average and so a rough estimate of 20% of sales to current Apple users still yields a respectable 800,000 switchers this year and projects around a million by the end of the calendar year. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. Let’s leave the exaggeration to the other guys.
Microsoft: It’s Alive!!!!
It seems Microsoft was a day late with their Halloween horror story called Microsoft Live! and Microsoft Office Live! Whether these are truly “a Microsoft bet” (boy, is that line getting tired) or just a tired rebranding of next-gen Hotmail, MSN and bCentral services to respond to all the good press Google, Yahoo! and other rich AJAX apps are getting remains to be seen.
Dave Winer attended and called it “the worst demo ever.” Mini-Microsoft links to dozens of links. Mary Jo Foley has thorough coverage. Dan Farber questions what’s live – that it’s on the web? Niall Kennedy has some intriguing photographs.
Maybe Microsoft Live 3.0 will be better…
Apple issues Halloween Security Update: OS X 10.4.3
The SANS Internet Storm Center notes that Apple has issued their monthly security update, a whopping 97 megabytes that, according the the Apple site, includes:
– AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS and FTP network and file services
– AirPort and Bluetooth wireless access
– Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, and RAW camera support
– disc recording when creating and burning media
– .Mac sync services
– Spotlight indexing and searching
– Dashboard widgets: Dictionary, Flight Tracker, Stickies, and Unit Converter
– Address Book, AppleScript, Automator, Dictionary, Font Book, iCal, iSync, Mail, and Safari applications
– Disk Utility, Keychain Access, Migration Assistant, and Software Update
– compatibility with third party applications and devices
– previous standalone security updates
Get patching!