Clemens Vasters had his blog ripped in full and reproduced elsewhere. He has updated his copyright notice accordingly. As long as the DMCA stays out of his copyright notice, I don’t mind at all. 🙂 Here’s something for the community:
Quoting and commenting is a good thing, plain theft of intellectual property isn’t.
Amen to that.
Wired: insecure 802.11b access points are a threat to national security. Secure yourself or you’ll get smacked down by the Department of Homeland Security.
OSNews has a full-length article about Autopackage:
If you’ve used Linux for more than ten minutes, you’ve almost certainly come across the nightmare that is package management. You know what I mean – dependancy hell has become legendary and it’s no exagguration to say that one of the most offputting aspects of Linux for a new user is the lack of InstallShield type 3 click installs. This article looks at how we ended up in the quagmire of RPM and dependancy hell, and then moves on to talk about a possible solution in the form of autopackage. It takes a high level overview of how autopackage works and what it’s capable of. If you want more technical details, check out the website. Finally, this article assumes only that you’re interested, not that you have any Linux experience.
Hmm. The conclusion among many is that RPM is not an ideal solution, but RPM alternatives like .tgzs, apt-get, gentoo emerge, and others also tend to have their quirks. I read somewhere that Red Hat is working on a next generation RPM. What problems will it solve? What problems will it cause? I don’t know.
This week alone five state CIO’s have left the service of their states: myself, Richard Varn of Iowa, Larry Singer of Georgia, Judy Teller of New Jersey, and Rebecca Heidepriem of Wisconson. I think that three of those are due to Governor changes. I expect more in the coming weeks. These changes are likely to bring some changes to the complexion of eGovernment across the states. Tom Davies writes about this in the latest issue of Governing Magazine.
Wow. That seems like quite a shakeup.
LWN has a good summary of the current state of open source forks of the sourceforge codebase. It also announces GForge, a cleaned up version of the last beta that VA Software. GForge is forked from alexandria 2.61pre4. Here’s a good summary of the current state of things:
The Debian project’s Debian-SF package is based on alexandria 2.5, the last full release before VA Software withdrew development code and removed the CVS repository. The “Savannah” fork (http://savannah.gnu.org/) is derived from the v. 2.0 alexandria release code. BeriOS Developer (http://developer.berlios.de/) forked a codebase from a very early alexandria release, maybe v. 1.5. The sf-genericinst and X-Forge projects seem to have died. XoopsForge and GBorg/GBSite are clones, but otherwise unrelated.
Dustin Puryear at O’Reilly’s Linux DevCenter covers some new features in Samba 2.2 and upcoming features in 3.0. I’m excited about 3.0 supporting Active Directory.
Daniel Solin at ONLamp has a cool little PHP tutorial up about creating one-time URLs. The concepts and code are clear, but I think the best part of the article is the Summary/what to do for a live implementation:
This article has presented a quick tip of how you could generate URLs that only can be used one time. It should be said, however, that for a real implementation of this function in a business environment, there are a few additional considerations to take. When the number of active keys grows past a few hundred, is it a good idea to read the whole file directly into memory? Is it wise even to store them in a plain-text file in the first place? Maybe a MySQL database would be a better choice? Additionally, consider the possibility of getting tokens “hijacked” directly from the
urls.txtfile. For getting this 100 percent secure, you either need to protect the file by setting very restrictive permission on it, only allowing the user executing your PHP scripts to read it. Or, you can simply dump the plain-text solution, and convert to a SQL-database instead.
AEleen Frisch at OnLamp covers her #2 open source sysadmin program: Nagios. (It used to be called Netsaint for those of you, who like me, were confused). Here’s a little overview, but read the whole article if you are interested:
The second place in my top five tools list goes to Nagios, written by Ethan Galstad. Nagios is a feature-rich network monitoring package. Its displays provide current information about system or resource status across an entire network. In addition, it can also be configured to send alerts and perform other actions when problems are detected. This week, we’ll look at the sort of monitoring that Nagios provides and also briefly discuss configuring the package.
I looked into installing Netsaint a while ago, and decided that it was a bit of overkill for what I was doing. Now that I have several *nix machines running various stuffs, I might give Nagios a try. My prediction for her #1 open source sysadmin program is Webmin. If it’s not, something is wrong.
Sam Gentile points to a new book about OpenVMS:
Gee, now this is a bestseller waiting to happen-)
The sad thing is (I’m a geek) I wouldn’t mind reading it, though I shouldn’t spend any more money on books and I don’t have the time to read it…
Here’s a super cool use of WebServices…an Outlook 2000/XP AddIn that interfaces with the BabelFish Translation SOAP APIs…and it’s free!
Peter Merholz has caught the United States of Whatever bug:
Jen‘s little brother Liam used to best be known as one of the hands on America’s favorite stoner sock puppet program, The Sifl and Olly Show. But thanks to the release of his song “The United States of Whatever” in the UK, he’s becoming a pop star in his own right.
Liam’s produced a video perfect for the song, so you should click on this link and watch it an enjoy it (RealPlayer required). (My favorite scene is when he’s “wearing his leather”…
That song still gets stuck in my head every once in awhile. I heard the song back in the S’nO days and it stays with me still. “Calls calls calls, calls from the public…”
I’ve been looking into WML lately for a proof of concept I’m getting ready to whip together. I’d love to work with Struts-wml, but I think it’s way-overkill for my ghetto proof of concept. I’m thinking about using PHP, as it’s easy, I know my way around it, and it can be more widely deployed (most shared hosting environments have PHP but not a JSP/Servlet container). I’m playing around with the WML that is supported by my cel phone, which is UP.Browser 4.1 I think. It’s not cutting edge, but that’s okay.
So here’s a list of tutorials, references, and other cool stuff that I’ve found:
Ed Cone is writing by the fire:
We have electricity, which puts us ahead of about two million of our neighbors. The storm dumped enough snow to cover the grass and then coated it with ice, so the sledding has been good all day. No school of course–one of the nice things about a North Carolina childhood is missing school on the mere suggestion of snow–and Guilford County Schools have already announced they’ll be closed tomorrow. I could have driven to my office, but why bother, I’m on deadline anyway, so I wrote in front of the fire for a while, and now I’ve hidden myself away in the bedroom.
CNet:
Hewlett-Packard in January plans to release the last major update to its Alpha chip, the EV7, paving the way for the retirement of the storied high-end processor.
An updated version of that chip, the EV79 will follow about 12 months later, HP executives said at a meeting this week with financial analysts. At that point, HP plans to shift Alpha into what it calls “maintenance mode,” a move that will save the company hundreds of millions of dollars.
Project Rainbow announced as Cometa: AT&T, IBM, Intel: The rumored collection of companies planning to offer wireless hot spot service with the code nam Project Rainbow have announced themselves — with fewer members and under the name Cometa. AT&T, IBM, and Intel are the partners in this operation which will deploy wireless hot spots into hotels, universities, and other venues through partnerships. More news as it emerges.
MacSlash reports that Macworld Tokyo has been cancelled.
Slashdot notes that eGovOS is putting together a conference:
The Center for Open Source in Government is proud to present a conference on “Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU” held in Washington, DC, USA, March. 17 – 19, 2003.
I’ll do my best to attend as long as I remember to go back and register. (I wasn’t able to find any registration as of yet.)
NIST draft goes final: The report on wireless network security that NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) was circulating over the summer went final last month without any fanfare. You can retrieve document 800-48 directly as a PDF or as a zipped PDF.
GLUE 3.3 beta 1 is due for release tomorrow. it has so many features, we could easily have called it GLUE 4.0. so why didn’t we? the main reason is that we reserve major releases for features that are allowed to break backwards API compatibility. GLUE 3.3 maintains compatibility, so we’ll keep 4.0 in our hip pocket for next year.
Excellent work. I agree with Graham that a major release should include major new features and/or major/minor API breakage. Congrats on the new release.