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Ted's Radio Weblog Mission: Interoperable. Competition breeds Innovation. Monopolies breed stagnation. Working Well with Others is Good. |
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Twiki Blog Archive 2002-06 Sunday, 30 June, 2002 Spent the majority of the day cleaning out the cellar. Saturday, 29 June, 2002 Tim O'Reilly writes "While it may not seem so from this article, I'm actually a big fan of Microsoft. " and many more interesting comments,in this article.Friday, 28 June, 2002 TGIF. Extremetech continues the onslaught of information on Palladium. Cringely's column summed it up the best: "The end is near." Open magazine's latest issue is here. Thursday, 27 June, 2002 Microsoft's Palladium is the latest proposal in digital rights management. As an author, I welcome the ability to control the distribution of my document, but as a consumer, I am strongly opposed to anything that will restrict my ability to copy, merge, mix or modify software, paper, tape, CDs or bits. This is an infringement on my ability to do my job. "Personal use" is a principle and not a Constitutional Right, and it is being eroded at an alarming rate. Palladium is a heavy metal poison, a carcinogin, an element, the name of many theaters, a role-playing game and the protective statue that guarded Troy. Microsoft protected Trojans? It does make you wonder. Read more about Palladium here: Stephen Levy writes for MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.com/news/770511.asp Slashdot goes crazy: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/06/27/125227.shtml?tid=109More follow-up (cross-links from Slashdot):
Wednesday, 26 June, 2002 User group meeting tonight. I volunteered as substitute moderator for the early session, and to do the main session on Outlook. Tuesday, 25 June, 2002 Found the best waiting room! While getting my car repaired at Saturn of Manchester, spent two hours in Barnes and Noble, catching up on 2600 magazine, Microsoft's .NET books, Perl, Zope and Network+ books, and searching the bargain bins. Miraculously, I left the store empty-handed. However, the car repairs more than made up for it :( Monday, 24 June, 2002 Once again used the marvelous and simple Web Services within Visual FoxPro to post and then update an entry on http://www.foxcentral.net. It seems that the Boston Area FoxPro Users Group has moved to http://www.bostonusersgroup.com/vfpboston. -- TWikiGuest - 24 Jun 2002Sunday, 23 June, 2002 A cold, wet, rainy Sunday. Perfect to spend a few hours slapping together the rest of the HTML for the GIF version of EssentialSourceSafe. Done. Shipped. Used the Universal Document Converter to convert 432 pages of Word documents to GIFs, after using FoxPro to reformat and re-flow them, and then used FoxPro again to generate HTML wrappers for each of the images. Pretty cool! Spent the afternoon on the phone with Whil, the publisher.Saturday, 22 June, 2002 A totally brutal review of Apple's new advertising campaign here on the Register. Generated a GIF-formatted version of EssentialSourceSafe. Way cool. Thought I had added a bunch more links here, but the editor must have gotten blasted away. Bummer... Friday, 21 June, 2002 Summer Solstice! Sunrise: 5:07 Am, sunset 8:30 PM, for the longest day we get in these parts. Yahoo. Spent the morning fixing up the EssentialSourceSafe PDF, using Adobe Acrobat. Cool program, although the interface was giving me some pretty inconsistent results, no doubt due to my unfamiliarity with the program. Never the less, I was able to produce a pretty nice looking TOC in about two hours.
A beautiful sunny Wednesday. Busy day. Got some software in the mail to test, and set that up today. Answered a question or two on the SourceSafe newsgroup list, on Ed Leafe's ProFox mailing list, and cleaned out a ton of stuff from my Inbox. Oh, and billed clients for a couple hours of work. And went to the doctors. And the pet food store. And cleaned out a room in the cellar. And walked the dogs. And loaded Steve's car with a batch of recycled cardboard for recycling. -- TWikiGuest - 19 Jun 2002 Tuesday, 18 June, 2002 Tuesday. Yet another article claiming to know Why Software Is So Bad.Monday, 17 June, 2002 http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~InstallShieldExpressAndVfp7~VFP has an interesting discussion on using the lightweight version of InstallShield Express with Visual FoxPro. Hiyawatha Bray (man, sometimes I think I'd like a cool name like that, but I bet he took a beating in the schoolyard) had yet another blogging article at: http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/globe_tech/upgrade/2002/0325.html Joel on Software argues micro- and macro-enconomic theory will let Free Software carry the day. Interesting arguments. Sunday, 16 June, 2002Happy Father's Day! Spent the morning at home, enjoying a cold, rainy morning, and the afternoon at my sister's, visiting with relatives. Saturday, 15 June, 2002 Happy birthday to me. Forty-four, and still going. Things could be worse. Today in History... courtesy of Yahoo, The History Channel and Google, http://www.todayinsci.com, ... 1215: The signing of the Magna Carta may have been the start of modern government in the West. Rudyard Kipling wrote this. 1330: [[http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0816807.html][Edward, the Black Prince] born. 1752: Benjamin Franklin flys a kite with a key attached to show that lightening is a form of electricity. Don't try this at home, kids. 1775: Congress appoints George Washington as the first Commander-in-Chief 1836: Arkansas became the 25th state. Halfway there... 1844: Charles Goodyear received a patent for vulcanizing rubber. 1846: Signing the Oregon Treaty, Britain and the US establish the northern border from the Rockies to the Pacific. 1864: Grant attacks Petersberg, VA, the start of a 10 month siege that ends with the rapid fall of Petersberg, Richmond, and the surrender of Lee at Appomattox Station. 1867: John Stough Bobbs performs the first gallstone operation. 1869: John Wesley and Isaiah Hyatt invent the first plastic: celluloid. 1877: The first black graduate of West Point. 1944: V-1 rockets descend on London for the first time. 1993, John B. Connally dies. He was critically injured in the assasination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 in Dallas. In 1996, Ella Fitzgerald died on this date. A wonderful talent silenced, but not forgotten. J.D. Hildebrand wrote these notes last year.Other folks sharing this birthday: Edvard Grieg David Rose (composer of Bonanza theme and bandleader of Red Skelton show) Morris Udall Mario Cuomo (1932) Harry (Edward) Nilson III: score to the Courtship of Eddie's Father Eldor Gemst Jim Belushi (1954)Wade Boggs (1958) Helen Hunt (1963) Friday, 14 June, 2002 Happy Flag Day!
Ace technician Steve has diagnosed the grinding sounds of my main development machine as a failing CPU fan. Got a new one on order. Gotta cross my fingers that it gets here first... http://www.google.ca/press/zeitgeist.html has some great information about who is using Google and what that are looking for. Tuesday, 11 June, 2002 Justification for my slacking off the last two weeks could be twisted out of Tom Demarco's latest book, ISBN:076790768X Slack. The Boston Software Process Improvement Network has an interesting site, newsletter and group mission. Time to go multi-user. Added the HoneyDew topic. Boy, am I in trouble now... First buglet: IE6 centers all of the text in the Tiger skin. Monday, 10 June, 2002 Blogging is a fascinating self-referential game, where many of the players contribute to a conversation and link to each other. The New York Times in jumping in on the story today, calling bloggers journalists. Perhaps journalists in the old sense of "keeping a journal." Metafilter, Scripting News and InstaPundit? have dozens of links. An incredible time sink. Sunday, 09 June, 2002 If VOB does what it claims to do, it looks like quite the bargain! Robert Scoble, a fellow MVP, blogs on Radio Userland, a place where he used to work for Dave Winer and associate with the likes of Dan Gillmor. I've been following some of the goings-on personally between the men, and trying to understand how having this out in the open is more challenging. Touching story at http://www.diveintomark.org/archives/2001/10/09.html.-- TWikiGuest - 09 Jun 2002 Saturday, 08 June, 2002 Happy birthday, Mom. Another beautiful Saturday, spent doing work around the house. Repaired two outdoor extension cords - out eaten by the mower, the other, I think, by the snow blower. Both are working now, and made it through the first day of mowing. Weeded gardens, repaired the hanger for the bird feeders, and did other domestic kinds of things. Great day. Friday, 07 June, 2002 Links to useful tools:
Busy day searching the web and learning about publishing! Thursday, 06 June, 2002 Spent the morning walking through the "InstallShield Express Limited Special Visual FoxPro? Edition" that replaces the Setup Wizard to install a VFP application. The interface is pretty good, although not entirely consistent, and the frequent ads for "you could do this in the real Express edition" showing disabled features was a little annoying. But, it got the job done. -- TWikiGuest - 06 Jun 2002Wednesday, 05 June, 2002 A brief day. Worked on client stuff in the mornings, prepared and attended the Boston Windows 2000 User Group in the evening. Arrived home to spectacular thunderstorms, left the computers off. Tuesday, 04 June, 2002 An interesting new project on SourceForge?, izfree, is promoting a set of free tools to manipulate Microsoft's new installer technology.Monday, 03 June, 2002 Up late last night wrestling with ActiveState Perl on Apollo. While I got the basic functionality working, and RCS functional, I'm not able to add additional Perl modules from CPAN. It looks like the Makefile is being generated with "bad separator" characters, and consequently, I can't get updates to Perl. This won't do, as I need several modules for login and email. Whew! Did I get my butt kicked. A classic example of 95% done, 95% of the effort remaining. The basic Perl behavior - showing pages, editing, running RCS to store and recall revisions - went relatively smoothly (see the last two days blogs). But a couple of the advanced functions - registering new users, sending mail - required additional Perl modules not included with the original. I attempted to run CPAN to obtain these modules, but it was throwing errors on cl.exe and make. It appears that there was no cl.exe included, and the Cygwin Make.exe is incompatible (too UNIXy) to work with the ActiveState native Win32 stuff. So, installed VC6 to provide the native Win32 tools of Nmake.exe and Cl.exe. Still got errors, way outside my level of expertise. Dug around newsgroups and messageboards and finally threw in the towel. The conventional wisdom is the cygwin is a Unix emulation on Win32, while ActivePerl is a full port, and the two do not co-exit well. Wish I knew how others got it to work, or claim they do. Out with ActiveState, rolling back to Cygwin. A big disappointment, as performance is a key reason for moving to Apollo, and the Cygwin Perl in CGI mode is not going to be as scalable as the PerlIS module in native ISAPI mode. On the bright side, the ISAPI interface is more likely to crash the server, so we'll just have to see how it works out. Sunday, 02 June, 2002 Didn't get TWiki running on Apollo last night, but tantalizingly close. http://apollo/twiki would bring up the main WebHome topic, but navigating to any other topic would either bring up the same topic again, or return a 404 "Page Not Found" error. Gotta keep tweaking til I get it right... five minutes later, I'm up and running. Go figure. A good night's sleep is magic. Just reversed the slashes on one of the paths and I'm good to go! Saturday, 01 June, 2002 A bright and beautiful Saturday. Lots to do around the house. And very little to do with the computer. In the late afternoon, I did get some time to set up ActiveState Perl and CygWin on Apollo, the new web server box.
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