Twiki Blog Archive 2002-08

Saturday, August 31, 2002

Last day in August - time to generate the calendar for September! Step-daughter Belynda comes up today to spend the day with us at the fair.

Friday, August 30, 2002

TGIF. Friday and the Hopkinton State Fair is going on well. A rainy start yesterday, but today is sunny and not too warm. Hope they have a good weekend.

Thursday, August 29, 2002

Baby bro' Joe turns three dozen today. Happy Birthday!

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

No, really, I was looking for something practical when I ran into Learn Tetris in 21 Days. What a hoot! It's a lot more likely you'll master the game than, say "Learn C++ in 21 Days."

Still not taken seriously, we are, hmm?

Keep meaning to add Hopkinton, NH to my personal web page.

Paul Graham, co-author of what is now Yahoo! Stores, on Beating the averages. Substitute FoxPro? for Lisp and I agree with him.

Monday, August 26, 2002

Searching for remote control software for clients. NetOp Remote was the pick of this PC Magazine review. However, friends also recommend I check out Radmin from Famatech. Looks impressive!

In considering a book about email, my complaint has always been "The Answers Are Out There," yeah, I know, not original, but true. Here's an example, explaining the structure of mail files. However, "out there" and put together in a comprehensive whole, if possible, is another matter.

Peter Coffee is sick and tired and he's not going to take it anymore. Read his column on "Apollo 11, the 747 and .Net? No Way". Way to go.

Sunday, August 25, 2002

Man, am I sore. Spent the afternoon trimming the hedges around Roche Manor. 95% done :)

Had another brief call from Whil, refining his ideas. The boy never stops!

Homebrew movies latest cinematic genre according to this CNN article.

An interesting study of Free/Libre/Open Source Software conducted by the International Institute of Infonomics, part of the University of Maastricht, The Netherlands. FLOSS is a cute acronym. I wonder if they'll prove it fights cavities or prevents plaque build-up.

Saturday, August 24, 2002

Yet another Saturday working on the house. Installed the last of the screens for the porch. End of the first major DIY job and I still have all my fingers. There were a hundred things I really wanted to do better, do over, do differently, but the goal is to get the job done. Always a tough lesson for a perfectionist. It's said that the project manager's job is to know when to shoot the engineer and ship the project. Bang.

Spent hours on the phone with my publisher and friend, Whil Hentzen, planning and plotting "What Comes Next." No answers, mainly questions.

Friday, August 23, 2002

Slate says the music industry's impending downfall is its own fault.

Sent an email to 40 of my "closest friends and associates" that "Amazon needed their help" in getting some 5-star reviews of my book posted. We'll see if I get any takers. Or fakers. Or both.

Already got a couple of replies. Let's see what it does for my sales rank. Probably nothing -- that requires people to actually buy the book. All those folks already owned it.

Thursday, August 22, 2002

Open Magazine features Twiki software. Glad to see the package getting more play. Looking forward to RSS type features in it.

Lost the data on my Handspring the other day, and maybe this time I should leave it lost. It's not bad enough to try to keep up with all the software updates and all, but it just dies. Two nights ago at a UG meeting, I used it to write down some important stuff (don't ask me what - that's why I wrote it down!). When I turned on the machine it told me it was low on power and should be Hot Synched as soon as possible. Yeah, well, it should have told me that before I left home. It said 8% power, so I used it to write down something, maybe a couple somethings, and turned it off. It's in a hard shell case, so I doubt it was left on. The next morning I take it out to dutifully hot synch it and... it won't. I try a couple of times, sometimes the cradle is a little loose. I use the Synch app directly to try to force it to do a local sync. Nada. Hit the cancel button and the unit turns itself off. I turn it on. Cancel button's still darkened like it is depressed, Mousedown. Off. On. Off. On... fine. I hit the reset key and it turns the screen into a glitter of random pixels. Fine. I put it down for a few hours so I don't hurl it against the wall. I remove the batteries. I left it there.

Man, life on the bleeding edge hurts some times.

It looks like Robert X. Cringeley has figured out the ASP model in his most recent column. I saw it in action at http://www.BugCentral.com, and I believe.

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Chris Browne has some interesting links to xBase database technology and formats here.

Growing up in New England (weather) must scar one for life.

The battle of the biggies: in this link Sam Ruby pits Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Lawrence Lessig, Josh Allen and Tim O'Reilly, in a single sentence. Talk about name dropping. Everyone seems to be up in arms about what everyone else is saying about what everyone else said about copyright. Boy, am I confused!

Found another contestant in the email biz today: Pegasus Email and Mercury Mail Transport are free. Manuals and support are extra, but pretty reasonable, too.

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Tonight is the first meeting of the New England Info Security User Group, run by former co-worker Brad Dinerman. Official kick-off is the September meeting, so we'll see how this one goes. Getting a demo from SonicWall on their firewall products tonight. Should be fun.

Monday, August 19, 2002

Twenty-three years ago today, a nineteen year old kid spent the day on Atlantic Avenue in Boston getting injected, inspected, infected and inducted into the United States Navy. What a long strange trip it's been. Some of my favorite links

http://members.aol.com/RidesSubs/626.html http://www.subnet.com/fleet/ssbn626.htm http://www.czbrats.com/Album/Photo_Album5f.htm

Sunday, August 18, 2002

Sunday. Spent the morning digging yuck out from between the floorboards upstairs and scribbing them down with bleach. It seems this was a place the dogs used to like to mark, and now it seems wet and slimy. Hopefully killed the mold.

Assembled the last three porch screens today and got them out to the porch. Assmbly was too much to consider in the heat today. Yet another 100 degree day.

The folks over at Twiki.org are trying to add in Rich Site Summary (RSS) information that would make it easier to have sites produce summary information that could be aggregated. Jon Udell explains some of what this means here. The Twiki folks are working here.

Saturday, August 17, 2002

Another Saturday working on the house. Cut down lots of overgrown honeysuckle, and ripped down the old clothesline.

Friday, August 16, 2002

Where was this article when I needed it? Working with Google and Amazon Web Service interfaces, I found complex data types, and not a lot of documentation on how to work with them. In Handling Complex SOAP Data Types in XML Web Services, Microsoft explains all.

Good articles on the expansion wars and the new Treo in PalmPower magazine

Thursday, August 15, 2002

Steve and I saw "Signs" today. What a good film.

Sent out some invoices and signed contracts. Always a good thing.

Continuing to research feasibility of email book. We'll see.

Updated some sections on the SourceSafe wiki.

New Service Pack 6 for SourceSafe 6.0, "The Last of the Six-Oh Apps Standing," although VB die-hards might disagree with me.

Hot night, too hot to sleep. Going to add Breaking Windows to my when-I-get-around-to-reading list. And perhaps The Innovator's Dilemma, too.

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Lawrence Lessig wows the crowd as usual with a great presentation at OSCON. Sadly, he announced it will be one of his last. However, I've heard that before. http://www.perl.org/tpc/2002/lessig/free.html

Dell may have solved the problem of shipping machines without an OS. http://news.com.com/2100-1001-949671.html?tag=fd_top

-- TWikiGuest - 14 Aug 2002

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

SlashDot's Slashback column had a mention of "Revolution OS," a documentary on the Linux, Open Source and Free Software movements. Preview a nine-minute short from the film here or visit their website here. The film should be out on DVD and VHS this year.

Novell is pushing a white paper titled "What Microsoft Doesn't Want You To Know," a brutal beating of Microsoft for security failures, and the laundry list of complaints on Microsoft Licensing 6.0.

-- TWikiGuest - 13 Aug 2002

Monday, August 12, 2002

FoxPro makes the news!, although not in the way that Fox zealots would like. The article details a conversion of Westport River Wineries away from FoxPro to Linux, thanks to IBM. Remember when IBM was the bad guy and Microsoft the scrappy young promise?

Ah, the pieces start to fall into place. I missed the announcement Microsoft made about Trustbridge, their proposal for security within Web Services. That relies on WS-Security, a proposed standard. That's written with some IP from Microsoft, IBM and Verisign that's threatening to require royalties, introducing the "reasonable and non-descriminatory" (RAND) fee charged for an "Internet standard" that will push the open source movement off to one side. I think. So many players. So many stories. In this article. Verisign is promising an open-source version on SourceForge, so that doesn't add up...

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. -- Mark Twain

Sunday, August 11, 2002

A quiet Sunday morning, followed by a busy day. Replaced the window screening in one of the original, hang-on-the-outside screens - not a simple task for a non-DIYer like me! Had to peel apart all of the wooden pieces, not breaking any, fit new screening material into the gap (thanks to Laura for the extra hand and skill), and fit all the wooden pieces back together. And then paint the whole thing. Whew!

On top of that, I ripped out the four window frames on the front of the porch, nailed in the new trim, trimmed back the screening material, and painted them all. I'll try to get those in tomorrow morning, after they've dried thoroughly.

Pizza for dinner was exactly what we all needed.

Saturday, August 10, 2002

What a surprise. When preparing my notes to be turned in, I discovered the due date was last Monday, not Friday. Ah, well. Hope they'll still accept them.

This morning, the computer decided to start to a blue screen STOP messages, informing me my computer was not ACPI compliant. Funny, it was compliant yesterday. Like the Microsoft message that tells me "to avoid seeing this message in the future, properly shut down your computer," this one arrogantly assumes that the problem is mine and not theirs, incorrectly. Rather than reading a TXT (with what?) or installing a new BIOS, as recommended by the page of text I was presented, I reset the computer and restarted without incident. Really!

Visited the State Prison's store of materials from the wood shop. Saw some really nice pieces of furniture, including several Arts & Crafts style pieces. Once we get some work, we'll plan on another visit to http://webster.state.nh.us/nhci/new_wood.html

Friday, August 09, 2002

Friday. TGIF. Turned in all my DevCon? notes today.

Thursday, August 08, 2002

Great minds thinking alike. I found a discussion on the MSDevApps? forum of CompuServe? where VFP MVPs Andy Kramek and Christof Lange discuss the possibilities of manipulating the Task Scheduler from VFP and suggest the ActiveX control at http://home.sprintmail.com/~mpryor/c-frame.htm?tskfaq.htm.

Trellix (a great company with a radical concept: web editing using a web interface), Dan Bricklin's latest company, announces blogging interface to complement their already cool product.

Wednesday, August 07, 2002

Microsoft's new licensing plan, with deadlines last week, gets a negative review here.

Monday, August 05, 2002

Dan Barclay writes about Language Stability, the bane of the VB story for the past few versions. Interesting reading.

Microsoft explains their Desktop Product Lifecycle here.

Google's Zeitgeist web page is always fascinating reading.

SourceGear, manufacturers of SourceOffSite, may be going into competition with Microsoft with the imminent release of their product, Vault. Interesting!

The VC has a great set ot strips mocking the foolishness that was. The foolishness that ate my 401k. Grrr.

Larry McElvoy?, author of BitKeeper, is interviewed here.

Sunday, August 04, 2002

Spent the day fixing porch screens and shopping for unfinished furniture.

Saturday, August 03, 2002

Another blissfully domestic Saturday. Worked on restoring and rebuilding the wooden screens for the porch. Saw dragonflies swarming over the house as it cooled down from a steamy 90 degrees at the peak of the day. Whew.

Friday, August 02, 2002

Eric Rudder is interviewed on news.com, talking about acceptance of Visual Studio .NET. It's a tough job after the confusing message from Bill Gates last week. imho.

Thursday, August 01, 2002

Red-eye from Seattle to Manchester with a two hour layover in O'Hare at 5 AM is about as rough as it gets. Today's major accomplishments were unpacking and walking the dogs. Good to be home.