WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Cool Tools - jEdit

Third in my occasional series on cool cross-platform tools is jEdit, a deliciously full-featured source-code and text editor - HTML and XML support are particularly strong. It includes folding, macros, syntax support and plug-in support, and the plug-ins offer a wide range of features including CVS, SourceSafe and Clear Case access.

It will be familiar to many Java programmers as it's been around for five years, but those on other platforms may well value having a full-strength editor that is identical on all the platforms they work on. Highly recommended for people who don't need a 'paper metaphor' for their text editor.

[Previous cool tools: jAlbum - jDiskReport ]

posted at 3:20 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Tracking Kids with RFID

Further to the discussion of e-tags, Wired is reporting on a Mexican company offering to implant RFID tags in your kids so that the forces of light can find them for you. Laura Weinstein worries about circumvention:

"My big concern is that kidnappers will simply use 'high-tech' tools like knives to get rid of them"

Indeed. I wonder if this sort of thing will need FDA approval before US introduction?

posted at 2:37 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

SCO Publishes "Proof"

I haven't seen it linked anywhere else, but I note that SCO has made public a presentation explaining their claims [3Mb PPT] from their recent Forum.

posted at 2:05 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Dodging the tough issues

The monoculture debate continues along party political lines, with Rob Enderle (author of such impartial classics as "Microsoft: Hated Because It's Misunderstood", "Reasons To Shun Open Source-ry" and "Linux Is Not Ready For the Enterprise") weighing in on the easy side of the debate. How long before we see a balanced analysis of the real issues, which are to do with the impact of monopoly on the security of nations? Or are Enderle and Gartenberg claiming there's no problem in that area? If they are I want some of whatever they're drinking.

posted at 1:37 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Soaring

Earlier in the week The Register was reporting (under a provocative headline, because Andrew know how to bait) research from Perseus that claimed most ßlogs were actually defunct. Well, research by NITLE [via CyberAtlas] suggests that if they had looked at the real thing the results would have been very different, and that actually the trend is still of a soaring phenomenon. There's much much more on their ßlog.

posted at 11:34 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Slipping the Bonds

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was at the eye of a storm recently when their intent to promote open standards raised a howl of protest from the forces of bondage. They held a meeting for vendors and affected parties (no press) on Wednesday chaired by Eric Kriss (Secretary of Administration & Finance) and Dan Bricklin has kindly provided notes. Reading these one wonders what all the fuss is about. The Commonwealth is crippled by a legacy of vendor control:

The State is suffering from old programs on proprietary or ancient platforms. They have lock-in to an extraordinary degree, where they can't even get some data on a screen, let alone share it. New young programmers don't know early COBOL. The State has become subject to the whims (and fortunes) of companies in the marketplace.

So is it surprise they want to slip the bonds and chart a future course that avoids this issue? Of course, the hot topic was that they were going to 'mandate' open source. As it turns out, that's not the case:

The State is explicitly saying to its people that when possible use Open Source (for the reasons above), evaluating it on a level playing field with alternatives. If a given Open Source product (like Apache or Linux) is known to be robust, widely used, etc., it should be considered, though not required if alternatives meet the Open Standards tests and overall real-cost is competitive.

In other words, open source is not mandated, it's just explicitly not forbidden. Of course, this is a huge competitive threat to vested interests - how can something like IBM's DB2 compete with open source on price, for example - but entirely fair. I'm impressed by the balance and good sense Kriss is showing, hopefully his example will be repeated by state governments throughout the US (as it usually is).

posted at 4:40 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Emancipation

Finally, a positive spin on job cuts. Scary thing is, this is about the sophistication level one actually finds in press releases about bad behaviour these days - just look at Verisign.

posted at 3:35 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Gartner agrees - monocultures are harmful

Maybe to atone for their series of ZDNet articles, CNet are reporting that they have seen a Gartner paper that broadly agrees with the Geer report. In the article, Bob Muglia stands canute-like against the tide but as I said on Sept 26, the monoculture threat seems self-evident and the principle seems to have historic and scientific precedent. Back in the days when IBM was pretending not to be a monopoly they used to compete against themselves when no-one else could do so effectively - maybe Microsoft should do that?

Update:On the other hand, Michael Gartenberg at Jupiter doesn't get it. He thinks the discussion is about recommending to individual users what to do. Wrong. The discussion is a broader one, about the marketplace. Individual users should indeed continue to indulge in the best practices he describes.

posted at 2:29 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Messing Things Up

After the rubbish ZDNet are publishing, The Register has a good article on exactly what it is about a monoculture that's dangerous. Well worth reading if you think "Why, if Linux or Mac OS X was as popular as Windows, there would be just as many viruses written for those platforms!".

posted at 11:37 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Linux Expo

I delivered a talk at London's Linux Expo today. Great audience, laughed in all the right places, even had e-mail asking for the slides. The place was packed with people, not quite so packed with exhibitors. The new Sun Java Desktop System is being received very well indeed - deservedly, in my opinion. I have a beta installed here at home and I've been really impressed with what it delivers, so I was quite surprised to hear the IBM speaker before me claim Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Wrong. Its time has come.

posted at 11:31 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Monoculture Fights Back

CNet's ZDNet flavour has started a three-part rebuttal of the 'monoculture' report. Exactly why they would do this is unclear to me, because they weren't the party criticised and the report has plenty of scope for balanced discussion, but they're doing it anyway - backing the overdog, you might say. One sop to impartiality is that the author appears independent ... until you look at his biography and discover he's the author of many interesting articles like "Top 10 reasons why Microsoft is a good citizen", "Why .NET will conquer the world" and "Death to antitrust". Hmmm. That sounds like an objective commentator.

And indeed, reading the article it looks like we are in for a sequence of exercises of wilfully missing the point. He comments on the need for standards in software:

It’s true that a monoculture has certain costs from the standpoint of shared risks which lead to a larger pool within which a computer virus might thrive. On the other hand, there are also real costs to the lack of a standardized computing architecture, which is the flip-side of the monoculture detailed in the report.

Yet when faced with two examples of the way it ought to be done (standards with multiple implementations) in Linux and with the Java environment, he decides to make a different point:

Java programs can still have coding flaws that have security implications. Such a flaw would exist, therefore, on every platform the application is run on. Sun Microsystems certainly hopes to make Java the de facto standard for application development. Yet, no one is suggesting that these ambitions should be curtailed in order to preserve platform diversity.

That's because both Linux and Java operate in uncontrolled, transparent markets with multiple players - diversity is preserved by encouragement, not curtailment. And a bug in one vendor's implementation doesn't affect others implementing the same interfaces - neither Java not Linux is a single entity.

The article has plenty of places like these where a limited world view (and maybe an agenda?) result in poor arguments - the complexity argument neglects the value of open source communities, for example, or the fact that a reduced environment might be fully-functional because the environment it replaces is over-featured. Reading the flame-fest under the article as much as I can bear suggests the author is ready to continue with cute but erroneous analysis:

Lock in isn't unique to Windows. If you have a Solaris app, you can't move it to Windows (and you implied as much when you noted missing enterprise apps in the Windows world).

says the author, to which a reader replies:

You can't move it to Windows because Microsoft doesn't implement the UNIX98 API. The API is fully documented and standardised by the OpenGroup, and nothing is stopping Microsoft from implementing it on top of their NT kernel. I can move from Linux to Solaris to IRIX to AIX to FreeBSD to some other UNIX without a care in the world. Move from Windows to UNIX or UNIX to Windows and expect a World War III on your hands.

Actually it's not necessarily as easy as that, but you get the drift.

Maybe there are no voices in this world independent enough to deliver a reasoned analysis of this subject? Or maybe they were already involved in the report in question (which I gather the CCIA did not commission, they just provided a launch venue). Whatever the answer, this propaganda article is not from one of them.

posted at 1:04 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Sauce for Goose

In Dave Barry's column in the Miami Herald [via Chris Sells] he relates how much hatred he received from the American Teleservices Association when he gave out thir phone number in this column. The ATA were very upset as it seems they don't like receiving unsolicited calls. Seems so many Americans called to express their hatred of receiving unsolicited sales calls from ATA members that they had to disconnect the phone. Showing how much empathy they have with the 50 million Americans who have added their phone numbers to the national do-not-call register, the ATA were very upset as it seems they don't like receiving unsolicited calls either.

So this week Dave has published another number to help readers who can't get through on the disconnected line. Interestingly, the ATA's web site appears to list no telephone numbers of any kind, even on the 'Contact' page. Seems they prefer e-mail. Being a .org maybe they are unable to join the do-not-call register? Whatever else is true, the ATA are free from a sense of irony, any shame and any form of humility.

posted at 2:25 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Link window

Dave Winer says that links that open in a new window are un-web-like. Not sure I agree, but I do agree you should have the choice so from here onwards my links will no longer open in a new window, you will need to make it happen yourself if (like me) you like it that way.

posted at 2:00 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Hard Questions

The serialisation of Moore's book "Dude, Where's My Country?" [US | UK | CA] continues in the Guardian and today's installment has a series of unanswered questions which, if the US media were to decide to take them on board, would tangle Bush in investigations that would make the Clinton affair look like a party game. Of course, they won't.

But questions about how well the Bush family knows the bin Laden family and whether the Saudi air force trained the Saudi citizens who conducted the WTC attack (which Moore characterises as an attack by disaffected Saudis sponsored by a US-trained multi-millionaire, not quite the way it's usually represented) need answers. We know the US media will do their damnedest to ignore it though:

Fox News led the charge of pinning Chirac to Saddam Hussein, showing old footage of the two men together. It didn't matter that the meeting had taken place in the 1970s. The media didn't bother to run (over and over again) the footage from when Saddam was presented with a key to the city of Detroit, or the film from the early 1980s of Donald Rumsfeld visiting Saddam in Baghdad to discuss the progress of the Iran-Iraq war. The footage of Rumsfeld embracing Saddam apparently wasn't worth running on a continuous loop. Or even once. OK, maybe once. On Oprah.

History will surely repeat itself in this regard. Moore will certainly need a good deal more patience.

posted at 4:38 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Spamday

Over the last week or so, my incoming spam levels have been falling to a emarkably low level. I get almost no spam on my work e-mail thanks to magic worked by Sun IT. Despite over 60% of the incoming mail to the sun.com domain being spam, almost none of it ever reaches me and there seem to be no false negatives either - the folder they dump the suspect stuff into invariably has true spam when I check.

On my personal domains, I am a cheapskate and use a cheap but useless hosting service (which is why I am still not running something like Moveable Type or Roller), so all my filtering is done by Apple's Mail application on OS X. It does a really good job, but still plenty gets through the defences.

Anyway, today (Sunday) I have suddenly had a real deluge, high double-digits or more every hour. Loads of spam, loads of duplicates, all to e-mail addresses harvested from this site or from Susanna's site (and hence probably not virus-related). People are using spam address lists they've got from somewhere because I get as many as ten duplicates of each item. It seems the money to be made from spam is no longer good enough to allow people to devote themselves to it full time, and the result is a pink tidal wave on Sunday - or Spamday as I think I'll now be naming it.

posted at 11:35 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |