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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004 |
Well, it took some struggle, but I got the Python project up and running on the Mac. Many of my struggles had to do with working in an unfamilar environment, although now I'm catching myself typing ls in DOS command shells :). A few of my struggles were just the rtfm kind, where I couldn't understand why it wouldn't work after I did step one and three... until the obvious answer, step two, hit me on the eighth or tenth read. doh.
One of the key ideas was to understand that you might install a couple of different "pythons" in a couple of different directory structures, but you only needed to specify the path to the one you wanted to work with, and they could each be used autonomously. Easy to say now, hard to grok when I was in the trenches. So, fink's python is installed in /sw and works fine with other fink projects, MacPython is installed in /usr/bin and appears in the Application folder. Launch the first with "python" and the latter with "pythonw" or specify paths for it to be explicit.
8:52:34 PM 
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So much to learn, so little time. Some cool Panther Secrets Revealed in this article from MacWorld. It's a pretty cool tool!
8:44:22 PM
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Interesting story here of a fellow switching out his laptop for a Mac Powerbook, and how he was able to continue to function in a nearly pure Windows environment with the Mac's software compatibility and just a few third-party tools. The benefits of having a Mac helped, too! [OSNews]
8:42:38 PM
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I'm been talking with a couple developers who are working on a project in Python and they offered to give me access to the source code. I was interested in trying it out on the Mac. In order to do that, I needed the SubVersion client. I visit http://subversion.tigris.com, and there are instructions for downloading it, using a tool called fink. It turns out that fink is a friendly front end for the apt-get and dpkg tools of Debian, modified for OS X usage. Lots of packages available, but first I have to download and install fink. Fink has an optional GUI, Fink Commander, and I throw that in the mix, too. After install, of course, fink needs to be updated to the latest versions. Doing that fails, as Fink is depending on certain Apple developer tools being available. Surfing the Apple site for a while tells me the developer tools are right here on my hard drive, under "Installers." I install the Apple developer tools. Fink updates. I try to install the SubVersion package, and it fails with an error about a java14-dev package it can't find. After trying a few variations on the command, I hit Google and find a link that tells me I need the Java 1.4.2 SDK update of the Apple Developer Tools from the Apple site.
Going to the Apple site reveals that you have to register at the Apple Developer Connection. I register. Plodding through the interface, I attempt to download the Java SDK. It fails. Three times. I log out, and back in to the ADC. I download and install the Java SDK successfully. I try to install the SubVersion package again. Finding all these delightful tools on my machine, it attempts to recompile everything it can find, text scrolling by for an hour before it reports an error. It seems that the X11 server I have has a conflict with the XFree86 server it wants to install, and it tells me there is a way to resolve this, but I can't understand the instructions. A little more surfing and I find the page on the fink site (http://fink.sourceforge.net/doc/x11/inst-xfree86.php) that explains the difference between Apples X11 and XFree86, again, with instructions I can't understand. I read it, three times. I could just uninstall the Apple X11 server, but I installed that in order to run OpenOffice.org, and Apple's X11 was the recommended choice. I walk the dogs. I break for dinner.
I read it again. I decide it wants me to install the X11 SDK that comes with the Apple X11 package. Can't find it on a search of the Apple site, but digging around on the hard disk in the Installers folder finds it and it installs. Update fink, per the instructions, and then try to rebuild "fink install system-xfree86" with no luck: "no packages to install." Return to the shell for installing svn and try that process again. It asks me to pick the correct 'virtual packages' for python and apache I go with the defaults. It informs me it needs to install 34 dependent packages (down from 52 the first run, iirc) including such things as ruby, guile, Python and Apache, and I tell it to continue. Mindless text scrolls across the terminal as make and compilers and sh and rm fight for notice. Staring at the screen just lets me catch glances at warnings about missing prototypes and implicit declarations; nothing I feel I have a lot of control over.
I fall asleep at the machine at 9:30. The dog scratch at the door at 5:10; time to get up. Compile completed successfully. I download the packages from Subversion without a problem.
No wonder Open Source development takes so long.
9:01:59 AM
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Monday, March 29, 2004 |
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports from Novell's Brainshare conference: "Heck, it's hard to believe I'm writing "buzz" and Novell in the same sentence."
12:55:48 PM
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IBM has published a nine-part series on their website entitled "Windows to Linux: A roadmap for developers making the transition to Linux" aimed at developers. It's not yet another boring step-by-step installation guide. It starts with "We're assuming you already have Linux installed. " and goes on from there to talk about the aspects of Linux development in nine chapers:
- Thinking in Linux
- Console crash course
- Introduction to Webmin
- User administration
- Linux logging
- Working with file systems
- Networking
- Backup and recovery
- Installing software
Looks like a great starting point.
8:00:59 AM
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Saturday, March 27, 2004 |
Scripting News links to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer: article hinting at the new "MSN Blogbot." What they missed was the story. Instead of breathlessly reporting that they had no news but had heard the name of a possible new product, they should have reported what they saw: Microsoft launches a FUD attack. The Seattle PI reports: MSN exec Yusuf Mehdi showed it briefly on screen during a conference on the Redmond campus today, along with MSN Newsbot, a news search engine also in development... Mehdi was pressed for time and moved on quickly, so he didn't share many details about Blogbot.
What nonsense. He wasn't 'pressed for time,' he had delivered his FUD payload and moved on. In a Microsoft controlled PR event, he showed exactly what he wanted, no more, no less, and left everyone guessing. He showed Microsoft's hand just enough to let all the players know they were moving into the space, and they'd better put up their 'For Rent or Sale' signs now if they didn't want to get run over. I hate it when Microsoft wags the dog like this. The press should know better.
6:44:08 PM
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Thursday, March 25, 2004 |
Seems like TDS Internet is having a hard time keeping their service running. This is the second long-term downtime this month. The first resulted in the discovery that my 'static' IP address wasn't. http://www.tedroche.com went down at 6:04 AM this morning. Testing at the server shows the DHCP at the ISP is no longer handing out IP addresses. A call to their service number plays a recording that they are aware of the outage and working on it. Four hours and counting... [UPDATED] Back up and running at 10:50, nearly five hours down.
10:27:21 AM
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Wednesday, March 24, 2004 |
I updated my test laptop to Fedora Core 1 from RedHat 9 to try to get rid of a few problems, and update a bunch of stuff. Other than being slow (an old 8x CD-ROM), install looked successful, until I tried to access the network. The 3C905 card I've used in the docking station since the beginning of time doesn't seem to work right under Fedora Core 1. Thank goodness for internet search engines - in a few minutes I had the clues here, here and here, that it was an interaction between kudzu, the RedHat hardware change detector, and the card. Disabling kudzu on startup solves the problem temporarily. Check out all three sites: linuxquestions.org, artoo.net and bugzilla.redhat.com, for loads more information. It is amazing how much knowledge is out there!
2:41:38 PM
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With Novell's annual BrainShare conference in full swing, Novell's making the headlines. Here's a sampling:
Torvalds: Outside threats to Linux. During a surprise guest appearance at Novell to Combine Best of KDE and Gnome. Novell's Linux-oriented divisions, Ximian and SuS... [OSNews]
Linux on the Desktop, Part XIV: The Novell Years. Novell, the up-and-coming superchum of Linux who has recently acquired both SuSE and Ximian, wants to toss its hat into the "desktop panacea" ring and pontificate on the future of Linux on the desktop (with Novell products in the server closet). [Ars Technica]
Q&A: Novell's Messman and Stone weigh in from BrainShare. Novell's top two executives, CEO Jack Messman and Vice Chairman to the CEO Chris Stone, talked about Linux, the future of grid computing at Novell and more in separate interviews. [Computerworld News]
Novell: VPN for Macs, iFolder, Linux Certification, Migration. [OSNews]
Siemens, SuSE Linux partner on sales. Siemens Business Services GmbH & Co. OHG (SBS), the IT service subsidiary of German electronics giant Siemens AG, has agreed to a sales partnership with Novell Inc.'s newly acquired open source software vendor, SuSE Linux AG, the companies said Tuesday. [InfoWorld: Top News]
8:49:01 AM
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New York Times: NYT HomePage reports Edwards to Be Replaced as NPR Host. "National Public Radio has bounced Bob Edwards, host of "Morning Edition" since its inception in 1979, out of his job." By The Associated Press.
How sad, six months short of his 25th year on the show. I've enjoyed Edwards a lot. Replacing him for no apparent reason than "refreshing" the show seems pretty weak. Glad they didn't treat Cronkite like that.
8:30:38 AM
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Tuesday, March 23, 2004 |
There's some interesting follow-up to Dan Gillmor's post I mentioned yesterday, where Dan is pointing to Jon Udell's recent column on the new Mozilla FireFox browser in comparison to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Dan took it as a complaint on the monopoly power of IE supressing development of great tools on other (better?) platforms; Jon replied that that wasn't his intent. Both the comments on Dan's site and Jon's original article are worth a read.
1:41:17 PM
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Monday, March 22, 2004 |
Boston Fox UG, Wednesday, March 24, A Whirlwind Tour of Microsoft SQL Server. A Whirlwind Tour of Microsoft SQL Server - From Newbie to VLDB Design (Very Large Databases) by Steven Lundahl, Senior Developer, Brickmill Marketing Services, Nashua, NH. Steve is the system architect and DBA of a 500 GB fundraising database system using SQL Server and Visual FoxPro with some VB (and soon .NET). Steve presents a general orientation on SQL Server tools including: Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer, Data Transformation Services and SQL Profiler. He then moves on to discuss database design, programming techniques and hardware considerations for scalability and performance. Emphasis is on planning for Very Large Databases. Programming examples are in T-SQL, Visual FoxPro, VB6 and C#/.NET Windows Forms. 7:00pm, Microsoft offices, 210 Jones Rd., Waltham, MA. Bonus: 2 Microsoft-supplied doorprizes. For more UG information and directions, tune into http://www.bostonusergroups.com/vfpboston By Boston Area FoxPro User Group. [FoxCentral News]
8:51:57 PM
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Sunday, March 21, 2004 |
 Slashdot asks Can Your ATM Play Beethoven? Hard as it is to believe, Diebold, the manufacturers of electronic voting machines raising a great controversy, have a diversified product line that includes ATMs running Windows XP. Why is it we need Windows XP in order to read a magnetic stripe, verify a PIN, and disgorge bills? Scary stuff. (Picture courtesy of unworkable.org)
10:53:49 AM
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Friday, March 19, 2004 |
I don't think even a ThinkPad stands a chance against a Powerbook.
However, I've intalled Fedora Core 1 on a second hard drive in my THinkPad (A31p) and have been delighted with the capabilities and compatibility. Hope to document some more of what I've done soon...
In the meantime, Doc blogs... ThinkPad vs. PowerBook, Round 1. Driving to Laptopia is my latest SuitWatch at Linux Journal. Comments welcome (at the bottom of the piece, not here). [The Doc Searls Weblog]
4:39:01 PM
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Thursday, March 18, 2004 |
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Wednesday, March 17, 2004 |
From CNN/Money: Worse off than sheep?: If "offshoring" is just global laissez-faire, then what are shepherds doing in the English suburbs?
"I am suggesting that conventional wisdom -- the unquestioned acceptance of laissez-faire in today's global markets -- is terribly naive."
9:31:35 AM
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Tuesday, March 16, 2004 |
Jim Grey is a brilliant computer scientist, but he's not a businessman. On a software conference panel, he suggested that Open Source would destroy the American software industry. Nonsense. It might destroy Microsoft, unless they change their direction, but not the industry. The industry needs to stop selling proprietary products and start selling support for those products. Support is what people *think* they are buying, anyway. PHBs buy BigBlue because "there's one neck to strangle." (Newsflash: there is no neck.) Consumers buy Microsoft because they think they can get support from their friends. As their friends master Ximian and Safari and Mozilla and Evolution and Rekall and more, the tides will shift.
Most software companies don't make money selling software. They make money by helping companies solve business problems through the use of computer technology and software. It is that knowledge - how to solve business problems - that is the value-add, not the ones and zeroes on disk. People will pay for solutions to their problems, for training on how to do it, for support on how to fix it when it isn't working right. We don't pay an electrician an annual licensing fee to have electricity flow through the office. We pay a supplier for the energy we consume, and an electrician for maintenance and repairs.
Microsoft exec: Open source model endangers software economy. SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- A Microsoft official Monday questioned how the software industry could survive if users are getting software for free through open source. [InfoWorld: Top News]
3:17:04 PM
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Monday, March 15, 2004 |
Wired: "A demo publishing system launched Friday by a popular programmer and blogger merges two of this season's hottest tech fads -- RSS news syndication and BitTorrent file sharing -- to create a cheap publishing system for what its author calls 'big media objects.'" [Scripting News]
12:30:09 PM
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Saturday, March 13, 2004 |
Ed Leafe has posted a note recently on his ProLinux mailing list pointing to this article, and OSNews joins in today: GNU Screen: an Introduction and Beginner's Tutorial. Screen lets you have multiple virtual terminal sessions and toggle between them all from one terminal. You can also detach from a session and reattach later. Ideal if you have a costly or infrequent dial-up connection and you want to log onto a remote machine, start some tasks and check back on their progress later.
11:51:42 AM
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Interesting article at OnLamp on the Mono project - an effort to develop the Microsoft .NET Common Language Infrastructure on Linux.
7:09:23 AM
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Friday, March 12, 2004 |
Don't Let the FCC Design Your Software and Hardware. The technology community needs to stand with opponents of the movie industry's software-regulation scheme, also known as the Broadcast Flag. The EFF and others are suing to block stifling rules designed to protect Hollywood at everyone else's expense.
Meanwhile, PublicKnowledge,org is lining up tech companies to sign comments to the FCC opposing such regulation. There are only three days left to sign before the comment deadline ends. If you're a tech executive or have the ear of one, please pass along the links and urge him or her to sign. Posting from Dan Gillmor's eJournal
4:29:13 PM
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c|Net features a story, "Army to Gates: Halt the free software" reporting that Microsoft is giving software away to government officials which "places our employees and soldiers in jeopardy of unknowingly committing a violation of the ethics rules and regulations to which they have taken an oath to uphold." So, is Microsoft committing bribery?
Maybe we should all send them disks of Mandrake and OpenOffice.org instead.
3:57:22 PM
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Wednesday, March 10, 2004 |
So, after four phone calls and nearly an hour on hold, I finally got the straight scoop from my ISP. The DSL they've been selling me for the past year is *NOT* a static IP address, as they'd claimed, it's dynamic. Just lucky it hadn't changed in 14 months. (They're refunding the money I've paid for a static IP address they didn't have to sell me.) They're pretty much in a tizzy in the local office, as they have a number of clients to provision, and no IP addresses to give them. Since they've been bought out by a BigCo, they have to wait for the BigCo to deign to let them have a few measly IP addresses so they can pass them out again. In the meantime, I'm stuck with a dynamic IP address, and I'll have to jury-rig something to keep the website and RSS feeds online as I can. What a pain in the neck.
2:37:30 PM
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Dan Gillmor's eJournal points to a Security Focus article hosted on the Register with some good tips on avoiding publishing every document on your web server onto Google, like the budget spreadsheet or your password files. Worth reading for anyone running a web server. Sometimes Google Knows Too Much. "Security Focus: The perils of Googling. Google is in many ways most dangerous website on the Internet for thousands of individuals and organisations. Most computers users still have no idea that they may be revealing far more to the world than they would want.Everyone with a Website should read this soberly written but fairly alarming piece. It shows how much we may be exposing, often inadvertantly, on our websites."
11:18:54 AM
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Seven thousand Orange County voters were given incorrect ballots, and the efficient electronics system can't even tell who's voted was miscounted! I voted yesterday, too, in a local election. I gave my name to the person checking registered voters upon entering the poll, and a second upon leaving. Supervisors monitored both transactions. I was given one and only one ballot, and I feed it through the mark-sense machine myself. The paper ballots were retained in a locked and sealed container. The results were printed in the local paper this morning. I just don't see anything about this system that needs to be more automated and made less secure!
Dan Gillmor's eJournal reports 'Ballots' Lost in California: Voting Officials Blase. "A registrar of voters who seems more concerned about ducking his responsibilities is saying, essentially, that everything is fine because the margin was lopsided enough to make this screwup meaningless. Oh, that's a relief."
10:33:51 AM
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Tuesday, March 09, 2004 |
... is the caption of one of my favorite Dilbert comic strips, with Catbert seen walking away, carrying a baseball bat.
http://www.tedroche.com is down today, as my DSL company (http://www.tdstelecom.com) has misplaced my static IP address. Just what is it about static they don't understand? If it comes back, you should see tedroche.com re-appear. If not, and you're really desparate, you can surf to http://64.35.197.147, where it's hanging out today. Hope to be back tomorrow.
4:19:18 PM
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Monday, March 08, 2004 |
From OSNews: *The Command Line - The Best Newbie Interface?*. "This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them...".
5:24:34 PM
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I've been in the book and publishing business for a while. I take advantage of the fact that there are local retailers by buying from them whenever possible. Perhaps I could use an Amazon or a BookPool or another online service, but if I've used the local bookstore to browse the stacks, look through possible purchases, I've used their services, what they pay rent for, and I owe them fair compensation. Tim O'Reilly notes similar thoughts here, and my thoughts were spurred on by receipt of my monthly email newsletter from SoftPro. The folks at SoftPro are great - they know their titles, they can order what you need. They're working hard to make it through this "jobless recovery" when the joblessness is hitting hard in the IT sector.
Their "Regular Reader" program is a great deal - a percentage off list price in exchange for an email address for monthly newsletters. In addition, they sponsor the discounts sent on by their publishers, like O'Reilly's "Buy Five, Get One Free" promotion. And to top it off, they throw in their own promotions of T-shirts and coffee cups.
And SoftPro is a cool store, the geek equivalent of a kid in a candy store. Wall-to-wall books, and they're all computer books. O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Prentice-Hall, APress, No Starch Press, Microsoft, sometimes even Hentzenwerke. I was sad to hear they were closing the Marlborough, Mass, store, although the Waltham store (recently relocated from Burlington) is my favorite. Check them out if you're in the area (or near Denver, where their other two stores are).
4:35:12 PM
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Great article over at DevShed on connecting to a MySQL database using the Python language. Folks familiar with ADO or with SQL Pass-through and the VFP way of manipulating cursors will be comfortable with code like this:
#!/usr/bin/python
# import MySQL module
import MySQLdb
# connect
db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost",
user="joe", passwd="secret",db="db56a")
# create a cursor
cursor = db.cursor()
# execute SQL statement
cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM animals")
# get the resultset as a tuple
result = cursor.fetchall()
# iterate through resultset
for record in result:
print record[0] , "-->", record[1]
9:47:04 AM
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OSNews links to a guide on Subversion for CVS Users. Subversion is a source code control system built to address many of the issues of earlier Open Source systems like CVS and RCS.
7:34:48 AM
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Saturday, March 06, 2004 |
InfoWorld: Top News reports companies are finally starting to Weighing the benefits of outsourcing. IT leaders now think before rushing into deals with offshore developers Against the flood tide of IT work moving offshore, a small stream of work has been coming back to the United States as some U.S. companies have concluded that offshoring, for a variety of reasons, is not as much of a bargain as advertised.
TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
9:32:12 AM
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A Reuters story reports that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has invalidated the patent that Eolas was claiming gave it exclusive licensing to the technique of embedding objects (think ActiveX, Java, Flash, MIDI) into HTML pages. As I had blogged here and here, Microsoft had lost an infringement suit, and industry watchers were concerned that the suit could be the precursor to the end of browser technology as we know it.
8:28:47 AM
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Friday, March 05, 2004 |
According to the article at News.com, SCO originally planned to sue Bank of America, but changed the document to name AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler. Remember: just because you can't see the revisions, doesn't mean they are not there!
6:27:16 AM
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Thursday, March 04, 2004 |
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004 |
OSNews links to a review on Fedora: Swapping Red Hat for a Fedora. However, this sentence set me off:
It started off by offering me the same media test that was available from previous versions of Red Hat Linux, something I recommend every newbie Linux user go through.
(emphasis mine) Hey! Only newbies have bad media or bad burns? Snob.
8:01:30 PM
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While the language in the article is Java, the anti-patterns seem to apply to many legacy projects I've seen over the years. Good lessons for all of us to remember when writing code some poor fool will have to maintain in the future: Six Legacy Code AntiPatterns.
And remember, that fool could be you...
11:31:22 AM
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Tuesday, March 02, 2004 |
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Monday, March 01, 2004 |
Martha Stewart Trial - a waste of time?. UCLA professor, and corporate law guru, Stephen Bainbridge has a an article on the Martha Stewart trial over at TechCentralStation entitled: Run Away, Jury. Worth reading, even if you think Martha Stewart is a despicable person.... [Ernie The Attorney]
8:02:30 PM
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