Ted's Radio Weblog

Saturday, January 31, 2004

InfoWorld highlights the Linux 2.6 kernel, SuSe and RedHat strategies The King Kong metaphor is a stretch at best, and fortunately isn't taken to it's ultimate conclusion - "Twas Beauty killed the beast" - but rather just dropped in this editor's letter that introduces cover feature articles on Linux in this issue of InfoWorld: Linux as King Kong - Infoworld Staff. The Mydoom worm that raced across the Internet last week is only the latest -- and craziest -- evidence of the passion surrounding Linux. 11:22:05 AM    comment []

Garrett's got a new job! Congratulations to Garrett Fitzgerald who blogs... Stop the world, I want to get off.... "My head is still spinning a bit. On Tuesday, a local employer was referred to me. I interviewed with him on Wednesday, and started work Thursday. MailMovers is a local mailing house. During my interview, I found that the mail industry, to a large extent, runs on FoxPro data. This has put me in an interesting position. For years, I have have been writing code that would be used by other people. Some of this was when I worked with software houses such as MicroKnowledge (in Bangor) and UNICOM (in Providence), and some of it was writing snippets for customers when I worked in Microsoft's Product Support Services. For the first time, I'm using VFP as a tool, rather than a programming enviroment. And I'm loving it. :-)" Best of luck, Garrett! 9:39:38 AM    comment []

Saving Hubble Wired: "It appears their efforts to save Hubble, along with political pressure, may be paying off." Link via Scripting News 9:23:26 AM    comment []

KBAlertz.com goes RSS! An announcement by email this morning that KBAlertz is now available as an RSS feed by product (Visual FoxPro's feed is here). Some curiousities in the feed: each item has a < P > paragraph marker and advertisement for KBAlertz at the end of the item, but they don't show up in Radio Userland. Also, the usual XML processing instruction is missing from the top of the file - I thought that was a required element. Nonetheless, they test out fine at http://www.feedvalidator.org and in Radio Userland, so I'm likely to drop my email subscription and get postings by RSS. 9:01:30 AM    comment []

Friday, January 30, 2004

Yet More IE Confusion Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley says "It's getting tougher and tougher to figure out exactly what Microsoft is doing with Internet Explorer (IE)" in Yet More IE Confusion. 3:38:36 PM    comment []

Outsourcing I expect that outsourcing will be the hot topic of the early 90's, with advocates claiming it is good business, and opponents claiming it is the destruction of America as we know it. I'm afraid they are both right. Wired has an article with a different perspective - from the outsourcers - and Cringely weighs in with his always entertaining perspective. 2:28:20 PM    comment []

Best Viewed Without Internet Explorer, Part II... Hysterical! Slashdot reports Microsoft Advises to Type in URLs Rather than Click The KnowledgeBase article says, in part: The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER. 1:10:36 PM    comment []

Thursday, January 29, 2004

Apple offers repairs for iBooks, customers unhappy Ars Technica posts: Apple announces iBook repair program. "Apple today launched a repair program that will cover some iBooks which have suffered from the widespread logic board and display problems." A little too late for this fellow, an Apple OS X to Linux switchback, who reports on OSDir "Having Bitten the Forbidden Fruit, it Bit Me Back. Six Times" linked via OSNews: " I simply can't bear the pain of the hardware vendor lock-in anymore." 9:10:27 AM    comment []

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Microsoft-Funded Linux Studies Benefit ... Microsoft Slashdot references a Seattle PI newspaper article concluding... Microsoft-Funded Linux Studies Benefit ... Microsoft I think the real crime here, and all computer companies do it, is not the sponsoring of the studies. It's the setup: carefully crafting a comparison so it looks fair to those not carefully analyzing it, and then trumpeting the results as if they apply to all situations. Slashdot poster cite one of the silliest ones: that a cluster of Windows machines is a cheaper web server than a Linux-based mainframe. Well, duh. C'mon, guys, you can do a better job of appearing to play fairly than that! That's pitiful. 11:35:29 AM    comment []

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Bryan Bell on browser compatibility: Best Viewed Without IE Bryan Bell: "I am constantly looking over my shoulder at Win-IE just to make sure the my sensible decisions are not being overturned by that freaking-lunatic of a browser." [Scripting News] 10:06:54 PM    comment []

.NET reality check Jon's Radio Jon Udell's blog at InfoWorld has the interesting beginning of an article comparing the promise of DotNet to the current reality... .NET reality check. "There's been some pushback recently, in the .NET blogging community, about Microsoft's habit of living in the future. For example:..." 9:04:20 PM    comment []

Yet another windows trojan horse InfoWorld: Top News reports E-mail worm, Mydoom, spreading rapidly. A new e-mail worm has appeared on the Internet and is spreading rapidly, according to leading antivirus companies. Once again folks, this is not a worm, something that spreads by itself. It's a trojan horse, a file attachment that you have to launch in a permissive (Windows) environment. Don't click on attachments! Ever! Save to disk, scan with your (updated) virus scanner, confirm an attachment was intended with the sender, and open cautiously, if at all. 10:17:58 AM    comment []

Monday, January 26, 2004

NYT: That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News Good summary on the state of spam-blocking. NY Times: That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News. Earlier this month, when Internet experts met in Cambridge, Mass., for the 2004 Spam Conference, they showed just how far the science of spam fighting has come. For all the recent talk of suing spammers and compiling a national do-not-spam list, most speakers were putting their hopes in technological, not legal solutions. [Tomalak's Realm] 5:12:18 PM    comment []

OSNews link: Is Microsoft An Issue? Okay, skip the obvious "duh" response. An interesting perspective on Open Source Advocacy in 1999 and today. Free Software and Open Source Advocacy: Is Microsoft An Issue? Link via OSNews 2:07:17 PM    comment []

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Regular Expressions Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. --Jamie Zawinski 9:46:28 AM    comment []

Saturday, January 24, 2004

What a Scream! The Village Voice picks up on the latest craze: Howard Dean, the Internet Rock Star. What a hoot! Link courtesy of Scripting News 6:57:41 PM    comment []

Copyright, copy wrong or CopyLeft? Slashdot links to a New York Times Magazine article on The Tyranny of Copyright? with the usual assortment of blather, off-topic comments and the occasional dead-on remark (threshold of 4 or 5 recommended for Slashdot). The article picks up many of the facets of the on-going copyright issues. Just today, the National Writer's Union wrote to me, expressing their concern over Amazon's book searching feature that lets a site visitor read actual pages based on search criteria. Supposedly, this feature is limited to a certain number of pages, printing is disabled, although surely hackable. The union was concerned and offered information for those authors who want the feature turned off, while maintaining a fairly neutral status on the issue. I can understand and sympathize with both viewpoints. Someone who published a cookbook of barbecue recipes isn't going to sell the book if the recipe can be read off the website, even if it needs to be hand-transcribed. On the other hand, if they can't find your book, they can't buy it. I have sample chapters of my books available on the publisher's web site and have allowed liberal quoting of the book on websites such as the FoxForum Wiki, simply to let the readers know how valuable the book can be. If someone is determined to steal the book, they will. If they want to borrow it from their library, photocopy hundreds of pages and stitch a binding themselves, they will. They may gain, but I don't lose from their theft -- they would not have bought the book anyway. I prefer the models of the Baen Free Library or Janis Ian's website, where content is available for free download, but sales of the products continue. Why? Because most readers will do the right thing. And, even for those who don't, perhaps the authors can take comfort in having enriched the world a little, at no cost to them. 6:21:26 PM    comment []

Happy birthday, Mac "Happy birthday, Mac." From Hack the Planet. Click the link to watch the Ridley Scott commercial, aired January 24, 1984, during the Super Bowl. OSNews points to a collection of articles at MacMinute in Happy 20th Birthday, Macintosh 4:02:42 PM    comment []

KDE on Cygwin on Windows! KDE on Cygwin: KDE 3.1.4 Available From OSNews. Pretty neat! Run Linux apps under KDE/Cygwin on Windows. 2:14:20 PM    comment []

Microsoft opens up with XML and closes up with patents. Microsoft's Latest Competition-Stifling Move. "There was a brief moment when the company's adoption of XML had potential -- to be a breakthrough in interoperabilty, a move away from the proprietary file formats that have been one of the major lock-in devices of the past decade. And Microsoft assured us that it wouldn't pull the same tricks this time. " from Dan Gillmor's eJournal: "Once again, our favorite monopolist breaks a promise." 1:35:59 PM    comment []

Bob Keeshan, Captain Kangaroo, passes away Ping pong balls mysteriously falling up.... Garrett Fitzgerald's Blog notes "Bob Keeshan, Captain Kangaroo, left us today. Fark has a long thread with people sharing their memories of the Captain and other shows that were on when we were young." An interesting biography is available here. 10:15:27 AM    comment []

Friday, January 23, 2004

Saint Babbage After a long, virtuous life in which he never used a 2-digit field to represent the year, a programmer died and was met at the Pearly Gates by none other than Saint Babbage himself. As they walked down the hall in Programmer Heaven, they came to a door, and he looked inside to see lots of programmers busily working, and the walls were covered with user manuals, every one different. "Oh, that's Linux heaven," said Saint Babbage. "We gave them all the manuals they could possibly dream of, well formatted and professionally prepared, answering any possible question they might have." The programmer looked in the door to the next room, and it, too, was full of happy looking programmers typing and merrily computing away. The shelves on the walls were absolutely crammed full of boxes of commercial software. He looked Saint Babbage, and Saint Babbage said "That's OS/2 heaven. They finally get decent app support." "But we have to be quiet going past the next door, OK?" The programmer nodded, and the two tip-toed past another door. Yet another room filled with happy programmers. Once they were well away from the door, the programmer said, "What was that all about?" Saint Babbage nodded knowingly, and replied, "That's Macintosh Heaven. They think they're the only ones up here." Stephen C. Den Best at http://whining.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$24 5:23:30 PM    comment []

Dyne:bolic There are more Linux distributions than hours in the day to try them all, but here's an innovative one you might want to look at: Dyne:bolic is a single-CD bootable disk focused on multimedia applications - streaming sound, video processing, image rendering and manipulation. If multimedia is your thing and you've been thinking about checking out Linux, here's a free and painless way to give it a try. And check out the easy, fast and reliable BitTorrent link on the download page - I'll be one of many hosts for the weekend. 5:21:33 PM    comment []

There Must Be Fifty Ways to Leave Your Windows, by Scott Lazar Great parody here, from Groklaw 2:26:23 PM    comment []

Thursday, January 22, 2004

The one thing the matrix could not eliminate... Said Neo to The Architect. David Kirkpatrick in Fortune: What do these things have in common: the TV show American Idol, Howard Dean's presidential campaign, eBay, and the open-source Linux operating system? They're all manifestations of a key trend of our time: the shift in power away from centralized institutions and toward the individual — from the center to the edge. "I agree. But it's also from the few to the many, from supply to demand, from controlled to networked. And on the far side of each "to," autonomy. The ability to initiate, to form and join associations, to do for themselves. To have and make up their own minds." "Choice. This is about choice." -- The Doc Searls Weblog 7:55:14 PM    comment []

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Please stay tuned while we deal with technical difficulties... Radio Userland is doing some funny stuff, and conseqently, I haven't been able to post entries for a few days. It appears I came very close to running out of space (the account comes with 40Mb of space) and my attempts to fix it have aggravated the problem. Hang in there... 7:01:58 PM    comment []

Sunday, January 18, 2004

Yet another IP banned Noticed two interesting hits in the http://www.tedroche.com web server log today: 2004-01-18 13:05:56 203.177.113.121 - 192.168.1.98 80 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll UL=1&ACT=4&BUILD=2614&STRMVER=4&CAPREQ=0 404 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1) 2004-01-18 13:05:58 203.177.113.121 - 192.168.1.98 80 GET /MSOffice/cltreq.asp UL=1&ACT=4&BUILD=2614&STRMVER=4&CAPREQ=0|-|0|404_Object_Not_Found 404 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1) I'd guess that the first is a call to the Outlook Web Service for exchange, and the second a probe to see if there's an MSOffice or Office Web Parts installation on the machine, each presumably exploiting a Microsoft security problem. The address of the inquirer is located in the Phillipines. I don't really know enough to determine if that is a compromised machine, or if that is the location of the malicious attack. You'd presume they'd hide themselves, but this isn't my specialty. I just ban the IP addresses I see. 8:56:48 PM    comment []

Choosing an Open Source Database This article in eWeek points out some of the pros and cons in the PostGreSQL vs. MySQL debate. 1:40:41 PM    comment []

Review of Xandros OSNews links to a review entitled "Can a Geek Love Xandros?" reviewing the distribution formerly known as Corel Linux. Overall it sounds like it could make a user-friendly desktop replacement. Pretty impressive, considering it is based on Debian, a distribution with a reputation for solidity but not user-friendliness. 1:31:31 PM    comment []

Friday, January 16, 2004

How about signing your credit card "Help I've been abducted by aliens!" (Fun Stuff) Credit Card fun. Do they really look at your signature? One fellow's research into variations. Link from Hentzenwerke Intergalactic 5:09:34 PM    comment []

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Laptops taking over from desktop boxes? Study: Notebooks to push out PCs. "Within three years, less than half of corporate workers will use a desktop PC as their primary information device--moving to notebooks or thin clients, according to a report." Linked from CNET News.com - Front Door Laura and I do all of our desktop work on notebooks. And turning off the big iron in our office had a delightful, unanticipated side benefit - quiet. Ahhh! 5:26:17 PM    comment []

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

January Boston FoxPro User Group Meeting: Guy Pardoe and DBI Controls Boston Fox UG, Wednesday, January 28, Guy Pardoe and DBI Controls. Start time this month is 7pm. Guy Pardoe demonstrates the use of selected third party ActiveX controls (from www.DBI-Tech.com) for calendaring and scheduling. Solutions::Schedule 7.0 is an excellent component for applications where you need to handle scheduling of resources. We cover many of the different views and visual presentations of this control, the ability to work with XML data, and output to JPG images. We also take a look at Calendar Tools 3.0. Six easy to use, drop-in calendar components for presenting, selecting and managing dates and times. BONUS: Two door prize products provided by Microsoft. Location: Microsoft tegional offices, 6th floor, 201 Jones Road, Waltham, MA. For more UG information and directions, tune into http://www.bostonusergroups.com/vfpboston By Boston Area FoxPro User Group. [FoxCentral News] 10:26:14 AM    comment []

Microsoft warns of three flaws c|Net carries this article on three flaws Microsoft is documenting and patching: An ISA 2000 flaw in their ITU H.323 protocol is a danger for ISA and Small Business Server users, An MDAC flaw in Windows 2000 and XP is rated as "important" but not critical, explains the article, because the complex attack would require "successfully disguising the attacking computer as an SQL server" - anyone remember SQL Slammer? Hmmm. The last vulnerability is yet another exploit of Outlook Web Access to an Exchange 2003 server. When is Microsoft going to realize the OWA is a constant source of problems and scrap the thing? You can find details and links to the patches at http://www.microsoft.com/security/ I report from the article, as I haven't seen these in my inbox yet, although I was signed up for Microsoft security bulletins and I certainly got a lot of them last year. A link off the security site leads to this announcement which may mean they are no longer issuing the bulletins as MS04-01, MS04-02 and MS04-03 as they would have in previous years. It's the third week of 2004. 9:24:26 AM    comment []

MSNBC: Yahoo tests RSS for MyYahoo This MSNBC article indicates that Yahoo is experimenting with allowing users to customize their "MyYahoo" site with RSS feeds. Those who remember the past will recall that Netscape developed the original RSS and RDF for just such a purpose at the MyNetscape site. 9:13:29 AM    comment []

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Why tables for layout is stupid: problems defined, solutions offered An excellent presentation on the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to replace ugly and complex table layout in HTML. And here are some great follow-up notes on the Visual FoxPro FoxForum Wiki. 11:08:22 AM    comment []

Wind Chill of fifty degrees below zero! WIND CHILL WARNING - Merrimack (New Hampshire). ...THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED A WIND CHILL WARNING FOR ALL OF WEASTERN AND SOUTHERN MAINE AND ALL BUT SOUTHWEST NEW HAMPSHIRE TONIGHT THROUGH WEDNESDAY... Issued At: 2004-01-13T08:35:00 Expired At: 2004-01-13T16:00:00 Issuing Weather Forecast Office Homepage: http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/gyx/ [New Hampshire: Current Watches, Warnings and Advisories for New Hampshire Issued by the National Weather Service] THE COMBINATION OF STRONG NORTHWEST WINDS AND WELL BELOW ZERO TEMPERATURES WILL ALLOW WIND CHILLS TO FALL TO EXTREMELY DANGEROUS VALUES OF 30 TO 50 BELOW ZERO BY LATER TONIGHT AND CONTINUE THROUGH WEDNESDAY. Ow! Stay warm, folks! 10:59:30 AM    comment []

Confirmation: Win98 back from the grave Microsoft extends Windows 98, ME support to 2006. The high volume of support calls for the operating systems from users in small, emerging markets, including Kazakhstan, Kenya, Slovenia, Tunisia and Ivory Coast, drove the decision, Microsoft officials said. [Computerworld News] 9:40:30 AM    comment []

Monday, January 12, 2004

Tognazzini: "OS X, in the form of the Panther release, is more than ready." OSNews links to three stories: Reviews of Mac OS X Panther by Bruce Tognazzini: Panther: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", "Make Your Mac a Monster Machine" and "Top Ten Nine Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks." Bruce was Apple employee #66, and is a respected authority on human-computer interface design. 4:48:45 PM    comment []

Microsoft extends phone support for WIndows 98? Slashdot links to a UK ZDNet story reporting that Microsoft Extends Win98/SE Support, which in turn is linked to an Australian ZDnet story. I have yet to see confirmation on a major news feed, nor on the Microsoft site, where I could still find this announcement of support's imminent demise. Some of my clients (software developers) and many of their customers (end users, small businesses) still have machines with Windows 98 on them, and have no reason to want to upgrade. Microsoft has had the luxury during the Win95 and Win98 eras of dragging along most of their customer base onto a new platform, but it's hard for a lot of small businesses to see the ROI in an expensive upgrade likely to require matching hardware upgrades. It's good to see Microsoft recognizing the reality of the marketplace, and grudgingly continuing support. An interesting theory on SlashDot was that the U.S. government, afraid of exploits of Win98 machines turning into a cyberterror attack, may have encouraged Microsoft to consider the move. 1:42:07 PM    comment []

Amazon Easter Egg From Joho the Blog: Amazon Easter Egg. Type "old fart" (no quotes) into the search box at Amazon. Act now! (Thanks to Dan O'Neill for the info.) (If that doesn't work, try here.)... 11:10:12 AM    comment []

Saturday, January 10, 2004

Wired series on Mac In commemoration of MacWorld this week, Wired is running a series of articles on the Apple culture, it's well-known fanatical user base, and some of the glories and myths of Jobs and Macs and Apples. 9:19:40 PM    comment []

"I'm not going back." Simon Willison blogs his experience with getting to know OS X. 8:00:36 PM    comment []

Cringely: A new business model for WiFi Cringely posted his weekly column on PBS.org with a proposal for a new business plan for WiFi. The column was pretty firmly trashed by WiFi Networking News in "Cringely Builds Cloud Castles" and denounced and defended on Slashdot in Cringely Proposes New WiFi Plan. My take? I'm no visionary (evidence: Amigas, FoxPro, disco), but I don't see the huge attraction of "TCP/IP Everywhere." As a business traveler, I've occasionally dipped into free or per-pay WiFi when in a rush to get something done, but I much prefer the hotel with 10 Mbps Ethernet. I'm not convinced you've got to have WiFi everywhere. If your local coffeeshop is a favorite hangout and they charge for access, you'll probably pay for something there, but for the majority of us, I'm just not convinced this is something we'll pay for over and above the connectivity we've got. 5:42:11 PM    comment []

Thursday, January 08, 2004

Outlook 2003 Spam Filter: pretty limited. MAPILab documents the Outlook 2003 built-in spam filter. The supposed "state-of-the-art" technology seems to come up short on a number of fronts. Guess I'll stick with SpamBayes. 7:15:50 PM    comment []

Microsoft - The Path Ahead Microsoft - the path ahead [OSNews] Another intriguing post from the fellow at aaxnet.com - a presentation with a lot of citations, although I think the conclusions are sometimes a stretch. Interesting prognostications, nonetheless. 8:48:48 AM    comment []

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Microsoft ad: Linux is a competitor worth evaluating CNET News.com - Front Door reports Microsoft ad campaign digs at Linux. "The software giant launches a marketing assault on Linux, in a sign that the open-source solution may be a mounting threat to its server system sales." The Register responds with its usual ascerbic Microsoft ad push cranks up the 'get Linux' volume. "Would you buy a used fact from this company?" I think it is great for Microsoft to name names and make it clear what alternatives their customers should be considering. As a vendor, it's only reasonable that they highlight those facts that bolster their case. While the Microsoft studies do show some advantages in some situations for their solutions, I hope this encourages customers to do their homework and consider the many other information sources out there, too. 9:41:07 AM    comment []

Monday, January 05, 2004

Stallman: State of Free Software Seems like this is the month for 20th anniversaries: OSNews posts Stallman: State of Free Software Address: "Richard Stallman wrote a short editorial on the 20th anniversary of GNU. It's a summary of what he considers needs to be done now." Slashdot follows up. 3:55:37 PM    comment []

Sunday, January 04, 2004

Dan Gillmor: Mac and AT&T break-up, 20 years old this month Dan Gillmor's eJournal: How the Mac and AT&T Breakup Ultimately Converged. "They were seemingly unconnected events, two decades ago this month: the launch of the Apple Macintosh computer and the formal breakup of communications giant AT&T. As it turned out, they were Big Bangs in universes that have ended up converging -- computing and communications -- and their impact still reverberates today." If Apple ceased to exist, the technology world would be poorer in ways that mere money can't measure... Sadly, in a way, the same can no longer be said for AT&T. The anniversary of the Mac might be best observed on January 24, the date of the incredible '1984' Super Bowl commercial, described and viewable here. 5:54:48 PM    comment []

First Mars Images Dan Gillmor's eJournal blogs Fabulous Mars Images. "The Mars photos from the Spirit rover are remarkable. It's wonderful to see humanity exploring the cosmos again...." I'll second that. There's an infinitesimally small chance that the human race will colonize other worlds before we manage to exterminate ourselves. I think that, despite mankind's many shortcomings, we're a race worth perpetuating. 2:13:52 PM    comment []

Saturday, January 03, 2004

So, would you call the combined company FedKo or KinkEx? FedEx announced plans to acquire Kinko's last week. FedEx to use Kinko's stores to offer e-services to enterprise customers. "FedEx views its $2.4 billion acquisition of Kinko's as a way for it to provide Internet access, videoconferencing and document management services to enterprise customers. " Article from Computerworld News 8:29:55 AM    comment []

Friday, January 02, 2004

Cringely: Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back Cringely gives himself a generous 80% on last year's predictions, and makes a few for 2004 in "Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back: Bob's Predictions for 2004" Not a bad set of guesses, all in all. 5:59:23 PM    comment []

The Best of O'Reilly's OnLAMP O'Reilly and Associates host a hopping web site along with publishing all of those books with the intriguing animals on the cover. Fellow Foxer Ed Leafe points out a column by chromatic summarizing his picks for The Best Articles of 2003. Check out the articles - there's some good stuff in there! 2:00:55 PM    comment []

Fight clutter: store it better -- or throw it away! Michelle Slatalla writes a great column at the [New York Times: Technology page on Clutter Combat: Containing the Enemy. "Enough containers are available on the Web to help tame the clutter in any closet." There is, however, another solution. With support and encouragement from Laura, I've spent the past month cleaning out all of the cruft that accumulated in an old office, in preparation for moving in with new furniture and a new iMac. While it was challenging at first, and there's still a small ton of paper to shred (I can't believe how many pieces of paper have my SSN on them!), major progress has been made, and the place is actually looking pretty good! 1:58:32 PM    comment []

Thursday, January 01, 2004

2004: Looking back and looking forward Jim Louderback posts the Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever and Tech Predictions for 2004(link via Slashdot) Marshall Loeb: Ten top trends for 2003 (via Ole Eichorn via Scoble) BBC: World leaders take stock in 2004 8:08:12 PM    comment []

So, who visits your web site? Happy New Year. Inspired by Joi Ito's post, I took advantage of the morning to do some analyses of last year's weblogs. Yeah, what a geek. Assisted by the fantastic (and free!) Analog package to analyze the logs, ReportMagic to spiff up the presentation, and QuickDNS to convert the IP addresses into domain names, here is what I found: 220,000 requests, total. 778 DEFAULT.IDA exploits, rejected. 20,000 requests for the BAFUG.GIF, displayed on the http://www.foxcentral.net web site as well as the Visual FoxPro Task Pane Community Pane. 19,000 requests for the FoxCentral RSS 2.0 feed, 12,000 requests for the http://fox.wikis.com RSS 2.0 feed. For their RSS 1.0 feeds, the requests were 4,000 and 5,800, respectively. The RO BOTS.TXT file was requested over 3,000 times, not surprisingly, as the GoogleBot, InkToMi and Teoma search engines made it to the top 20 most popular domains. Glad to see the site is getting some use. 1:44:06 PM    comment []