802.11b News:

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.

What’s wrong with CNet lately?  Today I see a story about Microsoft releasing .NET Server 2003 RC2 today.  This strikes me as odd, seeing how I registered to download RC2 shortly after I blogged about it being announced by OSNews on December 2.

Graham Glass:

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.

There’s light snow out my window right now.  It is supposed to pick up later tonight and keep snowing or mixing with sleet/rain/freezing rain tomorrow afternoon.  We might get 4 to 8 inches.  Nothing major, though it’s enough to make already bad DC drivers worse.

Morning Update: several inches, looks like we’ll be getting 6-9 inches by the time this is done.  No school.

Neo-Portal is an interesting project.  It seems clean and mature in some way, and rough and childish in others.  Here’s a blurb from it’s freshmeat page:

neo-Portal is a data presentation and delivery system. When data is output in DHTML, it behaves like a portal. It features full i18n localization support, OS, Web server, and database independence, support for WSDL Web services, and output in XHTML, PDF, RSS, TXT, RTF, WML, and more.

It’s interesting.  It looks like it has a plugin interface that can do some cool things, but it doesn’t look like every other portal/CMS, which is a good thing.  I haven’t installed it, so I don’t know how customizable it is, but if it lives up to its specs, it could be quite useful.  There is also a lot of information on the project’s SourceForge page.

Linux Security notes that the source to PGP 8.0 has been released under a crippling license:

Newly formed PGP Corp. took a big step Monday toward endearing itself to cryptography enthusiasts and privacy advocates by releasing the source code for its flagship line of encryption products. The code for the entire PGP 8.0 line–which was also introduced Monday–is available on the company’s Web site for free download. This move is a resurrection of the policy of openness and freedom that led to the creation of the original Pretty Good Privacy software more than 10 years ago and was a hallmark of the now-defunct PGP Inc.

Users can download and review the code for free but cannot reuse or modify it.

The article that prompted the Linux Security story is at eweek.

Hack the Planet:

OS X IP over FireWire Preview Release. LocalTalk is back!

I had thought that IP over Firewire (and other exotic/esoteric media) would be really cool, but never got off my butt to play around with it.  Excellent idea, I hope that it makes it into the mainstream.

CNet is a little slow to pick this one up.  Worse than Slashdot even.  Their coverage of the new (7.0) release of Intel’s C++ compiler brings a question to mind.  I know that the Intel compilers are highly regarded as being very compliant to the specs and are also pretty zippy.  My question is: does anyone use these compilers outside of an academic or research setting?  It’s not cheap (but not outrageously expensive either at $399), but from what I’ve heard it’s a great compiler.  I’m sure that most of the win32 GUI apps out there are being authored in some language with some version of Visual Studio.  What exaclty does the Intel compiler excel in?  It used to blow GCC out of the water.  With recent releases, GCC has made up some ground, but Intel still outperforms it.

Blog it or email me, I’d love to know.  Did I ever tell you that I was a big picture kinda guy?

Jeremy Zawodny has the scoop on the Yahoo Messenger for Linux:

It’s unofficial and unsupported. Use at your own risk. It’s version 0.99.21. It’s here. It fixes some very annoying bugs that users of 0.99.19 are likely seeing.

If you’d rather wait for the next official one (rumored to be 0.99.22) hang on a week or two. It’ll probably appear on im.yahoo.com.

O’Reilly OnJava:

I have examined the latest version of Castor JDO; it is very different from the Java Data Objects (JDO) standard. It uses Exolab’s OQL query language implementation, which uses ODMG’s query language name, yet it is not compliant with ODMG’s OQL. JDO has its own query facility, called the Java Data Objects Query Language (JDOQL). The JDOQL and OQL languages are very different, offering different capabilities. There are many fundamental differences between Castor JDO and the JDO standard.

I’m a little confused, being an all around blogger and not a java.blogger, with my Java experience being 1.1/1.2/J2SE1.3/1.4.  The article alleges that Castor is not JDO (Java Data Objects) compliant.  This strikes me as odd, as David Johnson has been using it in a possibly pluggable manner for persistence in Roller.  I don’t think it really matters a whole ton, as long as Castor is useful in some way or another, as it appears there are no free (beer, lunch, etc) JDO implementations:

If you are considering the use of the Castor JDO product, you are now aware that it does not support the JDO standard. You would have access to a free object-relational mapping tool, but one with a proprietary API. However, if you would like to build your applications using the JDO standard, you should consider one of the many commercial implementations now available.

So as long as I’m getting my information correctly, horray for Exolab for creating a very cool (free) product, Castor.  At the same time, it’d be nice if they made it a little clearer that they were doing their own thing and not implementing the JSR-12 JDO.  It confuses the bloggers, for one thing.

Sam Ruby:

# Original version by Sam Ruby, written in Python.
# Ported to Perl, and enhanced by Jim Jagielski
# Enhanced to have links to personal pages by Sam Ruby.
# Enhanced to have the code suck less by Ask Bjoern Hansen.

The latest article posted at Advogato:

In recent years, computer science has become more of an applied science than a pure discipline. It is true that much of the driving force behind proliferation of computing devices is commercial. However, over-commercialization has begun cultivating products that give rise to ethical issues.

In this brief article, I shall mention two such areas which require our immediate attention in both making the public aware and warning the future researchers of the implications.

The first issue of php|architect is out.  It is priced reasonably too.  $1.99 per issue or 12 issues for $18.99.  Lots of good stuff seems to be in there. [via NewsForge]

It looks like Ed Cone is getting the snow and freezing rain that is headed my way.

Doc Searls (Skywave):

Mark my blog: Ogg is going to seriously kick ass in the long run.

Wow.  Phil Windley is resigning as CIO for the state of Utah:

I submitted my resignation as CIO for the State of Utah this morning.  It is effective December 31, 2002.  I have many mixed emotions: anger, sadness, excitement, and relief, among others.

File that under things that catch you by suprise.  The rest of his blog entry goes into a little detail, and he plans to get into it a little more down the road.  Good luck, Phil!

Diego goes into making a pretty and functional UI with Java/Swing in a little more detail.

OSNews:

A new study predicts that Linux will take over low-end servers and share the spotlight with .Net in high-end servers. Plus, hardware heavyweights HP, IBM and Sun–will lose out.

OSNews:

As the open-source movement is gains momentum, the debate over its future heats up. Can this loosely-formed coalition be able to withstand the pressure of Microsoft and other big companies that live off proprietary software? Read about it at ZDNet.

OSNews points to an article at Coyote Gulch:

“The latest gcc holds it own against Intel C++, winning some benchmarks it lost previously. There are still applications where Intel shines, but the differences between the compilers have narrowed. So which compiler is better? Like Einstein, I have to say the answer is relative.” Read the article here.