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Jeff Gannon, who are you?

By on February 9, 2005 in Home Page

Laura and I heard about this on Emily Rooney’s “Beat the Press” edition of Greater Boston last Friday, but the implications are deeply disturbing. Some man, using a pseudonym, was not only posing as a journalist with approval of the White House but (follow the links) was likely not the person he was claiming to be. What is going on in the White House?

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc. reports:

‘Reporter’ Gannon is Gone. The “Jeff Gannon” saga took an ugly turn. Gannon, you may recall, was the White House “reporter” of questionable bona fides — apparently a Republican operative whose main role was to ask friendly questions of the president and his spokespeople, a countervailing force to what the Bush administration plainly believes is an overwhelmingly liberal White House press corps. (That view of the suck-up brigade is laughable, in my view, given the half-baked, credulous coverage the administration has enjoyed.)

“Various bloggers have been investigating Gannon, and one of them turned up some news that led him to silence himself.”

“Timothy Karr has some details. See also Daniel Conover’s analysis, in which he notes: “It must be clear now that blogs and websites are providing the bulk of significant real-time reporting on MSM matters. Those of us who work in the MSM and care about these issues turn to these “non-official” sources to get the scoop on our industry, and I don’t expect that to change any time soon.”

“Fair enough. But this episode should give people a queasy feeling. The scandal is the administration’s contempt for the public, and the lack of journalistic credibility this person demonstrated, not whatever he was doing on the side.”

MSM = Mainstream Media, for those not up on the latest TLA — Ted

Microsoft kills another word: interoperable joins innovation

By on February 9, 2005 in Home Page

Computerworld News reports “Microsoft’s Gates vows ‘interoperable’ software. In a lengthy letter to customers yesterday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates spelled out a new mission for his company’s software: better interoperability. ”

That’s just silly. Microsoft got into the market interoperating with IBM LAN Manager, then Novell networking. Until Microsoft actually shows they are acting differently, this is just a rehash of “Embrace, Enhance, Extend, Extinguish.” Microsoft is using their marketing machine to kill the meaning of another word, just as they distorted the “right to innovate” to mean “using monopolistic practices to dominate a marketplace and crush competition,” they are trying to redefine “interoperate” to mean “Microsoft can access everything but no one can access them.”

Recently, Microsoft was embroiled in a controversy over the “openness” of their Office XML. (HINT: Don’t bother, go with OpenOffice.org’s soon-to-be-OASIS-standard format. Tools are out there.) The resolution was for Microsoft to issue a new license for their XML that effectively limits others to read and not write the format, and also a poison-pill requirement that software contain a clause specifying the technologies are licensed from Microsoft, a requirement which prevents the formats from being used in GPL software.

It is interesting to note that Microsoft is trying this tactic. Let’s see what happens next.

Podcasting De-Mythologized

By on February 8, 2005 in Home Page

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc. posts “Podcasting De-Mythologized. Lisa Williams has done a smart, 4-minute video explainer about podcasting… Now, if we could only give the genre a more accurate name. It’s about sending MP3s to devices of various kinds, not solely the iPod. Watch Williams’ piece anyway. ”

I’m a big fan of The Gillmor Gang, which is a weekly talking heads program featuring some sharp IT analysts. The last show, with guest Dan Bricklin, was excellent. I fear it may be their last, though, as IT Conversations host Doug Kaye is off on vacation for two weeks, and Doc Searls points out that Steve Gillmor left this rather vague “be back later” message. Hope they return soon.

While they call it “POD-casting,” it’s just audio; non-iPodders like myself can listen on their Macs and PCs, their MP3 Players, or do like I do and burn the MP3 to CD and listen in the car. Someone on a recent Gillmor Gang made fun of the idea of making a CD, but it’s actually pretty easy, simple and pretty cheap. I get CDs at five cents a piece on sale in bulk spindles from Staples or the big box electronics stores and I can listen pretty much anywhere. No batteries to buy or recharge, no FM transmitters or earbuds to fumble with. Dan Gillmor is right that the name is misleading. It might be better to talk about them as “talk shows” or “internet radio shows” or something. Optionally using RSS as a distribution mechanism, podcasting is like TIVO®-for-audio: it records all by itself in the background and just shows up. A great idea.

HWP: Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org

By on January 29, 2005 in Home Page

Hentzenwerke Publishing ships Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org. This sounds like a great little book. Looking forward to checking it out. I’ve been using OpenOffice.org for a couple of years now, on Windows, Linux and OS X, and I’m really pleased with it. I just installed the NeoOffice/J version, a native UI version for the Mac, and I’m enjoying it a lot more than the X11 version I had been using.

Via the RSS feed at Hentzenwerke Moving From Windows to Linux

MySQL on Windows under attack

By on January 28, 2005 in Home Page

If you’re running a MySQL server on Windows, ensure that you have a rock-solid, hard-to-crack root password or, smarter yet, turn off remote root access. The Internet Storm Center logs a nasty bot that’s taking over Windows machines (an easy task, let’s admit it) using MySQL servers with weak root passwords.

Like any application exposed to the internet, it’s wise to disable the standard built-in user name and/or beef up the passwords to ones very difficult to crack.

Mini Madness?

By on January 20, 2005 in Home Page

No, not the Cooper Mini, although Laura and I would love to play with one. The Mac Mini. Steve Jobs brought his portable Reality Distortion Field to MacWorld last week and put on an as-always great keynote, his first since a scare with pancreatic cancer last year, and the crowd went wild, and the press went wild and Slashdot went wild. Inevitably, a few naysayers trotted out the usual tired arguments against Apple. Reviews were either Apple Fan-tastic or Apple hater-mean. Let’s get real.

Laura asked me at lunch just who they were trying to sell to. Great question! The Mac Mini is a little too mini for those of us who push our machines really hard: the CPU, RAM and disk aren’t much upgradable. the video too weak for gamers. If you buy into the all-Apple thing, and buy the Apple keybaord and mouse, Apple Airport card, RAM and HD upgrade and a 21″ Cinema display, the price comes out pretty close to what I paid last year for a loaded iMac (the “Luxo Lamp” model). However, this can make an ideal office desktop machine for someone who needs mail, web browsing and routine office work (using Apple Works, OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J or Apple’s new iWork).

For those who already have the peripherals (or can buy them at a bargain), I suspect the Mac Mini can make a great desktop machine or second machine. But beware! Once you’ve experienced the Apple trademark “It Just Works!” experience, don’t be surprised at finding yourself pricing out a dual-proc PowerMac or a slick PowerBook.

Tim Bray thinks about whether a “Mini for Mom” is a good choice.

OSNews has an interesting article comparing a home-brew mini-PC vs. the Mac Mini.

If you’ve got the time and you’re really intrigued by the entire Apple phenomenon (I am!), Daring Fireball has an insightful Mac Mini analysis with an interesting conclusion.

Building your Linux apps from source, part 2

By on January 19, 2005 in Home Page

When you build apps from source, you get to configure, tune and install them just the way you want. But with great power comes great responsibility, right? Now that you have taken control, you are responsible for maintaining the applications as well. No distribution package manager is going to automatically try to update files you created yourself — you have to do it. For that reason, stick with the package manager’s version when you can. Make sure to sign up for the product’s mailing lists or announcements as well as the general security mailings lists so you’ll know when an update is needed.

Leave adequate time to do the install and configure, especially if it is a complex product or you’re not familiar with all of the steps. I mean, how hard can “./configure;make;make install” be, right? Figure two weeks for your first attempt, and maybe an hour or two after that. Okay, two weeks may be a little high, but it never hurts to score some points by coming in under your estimate, right? Start with a few little and non-critical items and build up your debugging and troubleshooting skills. Keep resources like your local Linux User Group and product’s mailing lists and Google handy.

Configure doesn’t always tell you if it doesn’t recognize the parameters you pass. I spent days trying to add the mysqli module to PHP version 4.3.10 before I finally realized that I could issue a ./configure –help and have it tell me there was no such option. Doh.

Patience, grasshopper.

Building your Linux apps from source

By on January 19, 2005 in Home Page

The idea of building applications from source is foreign to Windows and commercial software users, but it is really not as scary as it sounds. Recently, I was called upon to install and configure Apache, MySQl and PHP on a client’s RedHat 9 installation. They were keeping their Redhat 9 machine up to date using the yum legacy program, but the legacy repositories are not always up on the latest editions. After all, volunteers maintain these, too.

As the client’s requirements included a need for transactions, the InnoDb database engine was a good choice. PHP supports a new MySQL interface in PHP 5.0.3 which takes full advantage of the new features in MySQL 4.1.x, so I chose to build Apache, MySQL and PHP from source. A little Googling came across several useful sites, where other developers had posted the commands they used to do this. Two I found especially useful:

  • http://dan.drydog.com/apache2php.html
  • http://hulan.info/blog/item/compile-from-source-apache-2-0-52-with-ssl-php-5-0-2-and-mysql-4-1-6-on-linux

Building from source involves a few steps:

  1. Download the source, typically from the main project web site or a trusted mirror. A good place to store all the files is /usr/local/src.
  2. Unpack the files into their own directories, typically with tar -zxvf for a tar.gz (“tarball”).
  3. Hop into that directory and take a quick read through INSTALL, README, LICENSE and CONFIGURE files to see if there are any gotchas.
  4. Build the script that does the compile (a “makefile”) with ./configure. If you followed the links above, you can see ./configure may have many options. Adding –help after ./configure will list them, and a little research can tell you the ones you want. If you get errors during this step, it’s back to the forums, Google or the instructions to determin if there’s more you need to do.
  5. Now that you’ve created the makefile, you invoke it with the command ‘make.’
  6. Install your application with ‘make install.’

It still sounds like a chore, but the end result is a working application that you have tuned to your system and needs, up to date with the latest source you could obtain, and installed where you want.

Why NOT to Upgrade Your Linux System

By on December 19, 2004 in Home Page

Why NOT to Upgrade Your Linux System. Nathan Willis writes, over on NewsForge, “I’m not upgrading my Fedora Core 2 machine to Core 3, even though the new version has been out for a couple of months. There’s not anything wrong with FC3 itself, it’s just that system upgrades are both a blessing and a curse.” Link via OSNews

True of every operating system out there, machines tend to build up cruft over a period of time, and a clean wipe-and-reinstall are called for. However, the incremental difference between FC2 and FC3 can be addressed by careful upgrades of only those applications you need, rather than a haphazard upgrade from one distribution to another, I think

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