Related link: http://www.bsdmall.com/bsdmall/fbsd462update.html
The FreeBSD.org team released a security update on two ISO images. CDs are now shipping over at bsdmall.com and FreeBSDServices.com is making them on DVD.
-Chris
Is anyone interested in seeing binary updates for FreeBSD?
Though it was formally announced today, Netscape 7.0 has actually been available for a little while. I’ve been using it on Windows for about month and I must say I’m impressed. It’s a great poduct.
I installed it when Yahoo! redid their Yahoo! Mail site - the complex table structures caused my old Netscape 4.78 browser to crawl when trying to render my inbox. So I needed a new browser - enter Netscape 7.0.
Some of the cool features are:
And it’s compliant with newer HTML usage as well. In fact, at Netscape Gecko Central, they recommend to people developing web-based applications that it’s more likely to render pages better with their IE6 stylesheets than with their old ones from Netscape 4.x and 6.x.
The “Cookie Manager” deserves special mention - for the first time a browser makes it easy for the users to control who sets cookies on their machines. People interested in managing their privacy should switch for this reason alone.
It’s available now for Windows, Mac Classic, Mac OS X and Linux. You can download it free or have a CD shipped to you for about a $3.00 shipping charge.
But the real story here is the way this browser came about.
The Mozilla project is a case-book example of outstanding open source management - and of how corporations can hook into and harness the power of Open Source. If you are involved with an open source project, you should look at how they run Mozilla.
To begin with, read the Mozilla development roadmap. This is impressive. They forcast release dates and actually release pretty close to on-time. They have code reviews prior to checking code in. They have “project managers”.
They also have the code broken into about 75 modules - each with an owner responsible for a small group that manages it.
Most developers will tell you they’ve never seen a project that, at least on the surface, looks so well managed. And the project is huge. Many of the 75-ish modules are large enough to be products on their own.
But there’s even a bigger picture. That is, “How did AOL/Time Warner get all these people involved in building one of their core products - without pay?”
In case you didn’t realize, Netscape is actually a division of AOL - the media giant that owns Time Warner and CNN, Turner Broadcasting, The WB, AOL, Compuserve, and a bunch of other companies. (They even own The Cartoon Network - home of The Powerpuff Girls and a great place to download scooby-doo wallpaper.)
But yet, a very significant share of the development for the Netscape 7.0 browser is developed by the Mozilla open source project. By making the browser an open source project, AOL/Time Warner has found a way to compete with Microsoft in the browser market. A huge number of people are now collaborating on building the underlying technology that makes up a flagship product for the Netscape division of AOL.
I’m left wondering if this is the first time that a major product from a NYSE-listed corporation was developed for them to a great extent for free. If it is, I can bet you it won’t be the last. Once people in the corporate world finally “get it” that the open source model is a way to build loose collaborative teams of people around the world to all help develop and share applications, you’ll see this happen a lot more.
The “buy -versus- build” decision will become “buy -versus- build -versus- build as open source if we can get people to help us”.
This is already working for AOL/Time Warner and Netscape. And working extremely well.
So who’s the winner here? Certainly AOL/Time Warner and Netcape got a great product delivered. And other companies considering moving portions of their development projects into the open source world have found a good role model.
But I think in the end the real winners are all of us consumers who want a high-quality software that meets OUR needs, and not just the needs of the company that builds it.
Related link: http://www.sba.gov/advo/laws/comments/fcc02_0827.html
The Small Business Administration has taken the bold step of intervening in a subtle and highly technical controversy at the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC is asking for comment on whether it should relieve incumbent phone companies (basically the Bells and their descendants) of some of the requirements Congress placed on them in the 1996 Telecom Act–requirements that were supposed to permit competition by ISPs and competing phone companies. The FCC is essentially declaring these requirements a failure and is hoping instead for competition between the incumbent phone companies and the cable companies in the area of Internet access.
The SBA is declaring the FCC initiative bad for small business, bad for competition, and ultimately bad for consumers looking for an improvement over 56K dial-up Internet access. This is an important moral and publicity boost for those supporting small ISPs–where innovation is most lively–and the prospects for better Internet service to the public.
If you are like me then you know that the world will only survive if we keep on buying the newest gadgets as they come out.
Most of the stuff I buy is now centered around my iBook. And as it is the center of my digital world (at least someone told me that) I was left with the job of buying the rim. So first a digital camera. And yesterday (together with a few other things) I ordered an iPod. Ok, so I already have a Nike MP3 player - but that is at least 2 months old and will not store thousands of songs (not that I actually have that many - but hey remember the world will end if we don’t buy these things).
So, the question remains as to how we pay for them. If - like me - you are married to someone who doesn’t realize about the world ending and all that - then it’s always “difficult” explaining why you need the new gadget that just leapt off the production line. You will have heard these common arguments from “those who do not understand”: we need food, clothes, housing, vacation, shoes for Joey,..
Here’s my solution: I write the occasional article for various publications and so manage to earn a few extra $$ which I can then donate towards saving the world.
How do you convince your nearest and dearest that you really must save the world?
Related link: http://www.jcp.org/jsr/detail/153.jsp
Anyone using the latest releases of the major J2EE containers is aware that the container providers are trying to become the hosts of choice for the quiet Web Service revolution that is speeding across the corporate landscape.
I’m working with both WebLogic and JBoss currently and I can see the writing on the wall. Next year I’ll spend all my time turning the EJB’s I’ve developed into Web Services. And I won’t mind - for many applications this approach is much better than traditional EJB development. At a minimum it opens up EJB’s to be accessible by client software written in any language on any platform (as long as the client software can access a web service).
The writing isn’t only on the wall; it’s also in the Proposed Final Draft for EJB 2.1 that was published this month by the Expert Working Group that is developing the EJB 2.1 specification. Some nuggets from the spec:
So now EJBs=Web Services. And I can access my EJB’s from any client software.
How are the container providers going to provide these services? Both JBoss and JRun are taking the approach of embedding Apache Axis - the newest Soap Engine from the Apache Software Foundation. Axis will be growing in visibility and should be on your radar screen - I’d wager that a year from now you’ll see Axis embedded as the SOAP engine driving the JAX-RPC requirement in a number of major J2EE-compliant containers.
So how do you get ready? I’d recommend picking up some books on Web Services, downloading a copy of Axis and diving in.
After all, you’ve got a lot of refactoring to prepare for.
Over the past few years I have had my fair share of PDAs, starting out with the first Sharp Zaurus und then eventually moving to a Palm. However I never really “used” them enough to warrant the high cost (well, that’s what my wife said anyway). So eventually I got rid of them and looked for alternatives.
Most of my life centres around – well – work. And at work I organize things using Microsoft Outlook (using the calendar for most things – even tasks). Now my private life (married father of 3 young kids) also holds a lot of things that need organizing and for that we have 2 (!) wall calendars in the kitchen (paper ones – just so you don’t get me wrong).
But there is no synching between the paper calendars at home and my outlook calendar at work. So when I want to check on whether my wife will kill me if I go on a business trip for a couple of days (when I should be looking after the kids) I still need to pick up the phone and check.
Now there must be an easier way of doing this. We have a (wireless) Internet connection at home – so we could maintain the calendar on our iBook (using iCal) and then synch the whole thing over the Internet using SyncML. I suppose any calendar maintained on the iBook could then be printed out and put up on the wall of the kitchen.
But you have to remember to keep the wall calendar and the iBook in synch by hand!
My current mobile phone (the Ericsson T68i) has contacts and calander and I could synchronize that with the iBook (using bluetooth) and then with Microsoft outlook at work (using the infrared port) pretty easily. The T68i also does SyncML - so I could use that as well.
But there is still the problem of that wall calendar. Now nothing beats that for “read and write access speed” (just pick up the pen and scribble the appointment in – no system to start - easy). But then you have to remember to type in the appointments into the iBook calendar.
I want a wall calendar that I can write on - and that will automatically send the new appointments via WiFi to my iBook. That would be a start!
So – how do you manage and organize your private and business appointments? How do you keep them in synch? Let me know.
Related link: http://searchwindowsmanageability.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid33_…
Summary: Windows is easier to use and offers some better features, but Linux is more stable and less likely to need attention.
A big factor cited by several analysts is familiarity, where Windows is ahead. Linux (this is my comment) can gradually close that gap.
Related link: http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/data/jk-16.08.02-009/
The worst flooding in centuries to hit Germany has caused havoc on the Internet and mobile phone networks in the affected areas.
Related link: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-950083.html
A door is closing on the movements for information sharing and technology development for the public good. The Linux community warmly welcomed the National Security Agency (despite long-standing battles between the NSA and the hacker community over encryption) when it released
Security-Enhanced Linux,
one of the best things the U.S. government ever did for software. It seemed natural, despite the NSA’s history, for the government to donate the results of research to the public.
But now, due to nebulous pressures from unnamed sources, the NSA is drawing back. About one-third of the way down this generally positive
article
about the promotion of Linux for government use,
an NSA director is quoted as saying “We received a lot of loud complaints regarding our efforts with SE Linux” and “we won’t be doing anything like that again.”
Microsoft is suspected, of course, but the lines of control remain hidden and unknown. The whole affair reeks of the kind of secrecy that is becoming the norm in our government, and that forces like the backers of the CBDTPA are trying to impose on digital technology as well.
Yesterday, Tim O’Reilly put up a weblog with the prescient title:
The Growing Politicization of Open Source.
The politicization goes much deeper and gets much nastier than he says there.
Openness is the promise for our future, but for a lot of powerful forces it is scary. A couple weeks ago, in widely reported remarks, the FBI warned that wireless networks were a security hazard. Of course, everyone in the networking field knows that security has to be improved in wireless protocols, but the FBI was going beyond this: they were raising alarms about the whole idea of a network that anybody could attach to anytime. They underscored this message a week or so later by threatening to prosecute anyone who logs into a wireless network from outside the organization.
What about organizations that provide wireless for free? Their interests get lost in the stampede toward control. Watch for further signs of the backlash .
Is there a backlash against free and open source software?
Related link: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54184,00.html
A
Wired article
reports that ISPs in India are annoyed because customers use instant messaging to place long-distance voice calls instead of paying the ISPs a charge for such calls. So annoyed that the ISPs are calling it illegal. (Luckily, there are no feasible measures for enforcing a ban at this point.)
Ingratitude runs rampant through this complaint.
Four years ago, ISPs in India were debating whether they even had the right to offer service. It took a court ruling to turn back a claim from the monopoly telecom provider that Internet service was illegal unless it chose to offer such service. And it was only April 1 of this year that the courts made it legal for ISPs to offer Voice over IP!
Do these beneficiaries of competion and innovation appreciate it? Not when it turns against their business plans. They were happily undercutting the telecom monopoly while making a profit by charging 10 cents per minute for phone calls anywhere in the world.
For people to go one step further and make the calls over IM is hardly a technological advance; it’s just using a different ISP and business model. Tolerance for innovation goes as far as this month’s business plan; I think it’s time for Indian ISPs to stop carping and change business plans. They’re turning against innovation to preserve profits, like any entrenched interest.
On one point I do have sympathy for the ISPs. They are relatively small companies trying to be viable local businesss. I respect that and recognize that India needs strong local economies producing revenues that get spent at home. The economy will not benefit as much from the success of MSN and Yahoo! offering voice over IM. And the global positions of MSN and Yahoo! allow them to undercut the local ISPs.
But protectionism is risky business. I complain when multinational firms treat people injustly, but I don’t complain when they offer a good service more cheaply. What ISPs (and other businesses in India) have to do is learn how to leverage and build on the cheap foundation being offered.
What would benefit the Internet providers and users in India?
Related link: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0208014
Web services can fill a bigger social need than presenting customers
with the prices of the newest gadget. In this article, “Web Services
for the Virtual Observatory,” they potentially open up new
possibilities for collaboration and data sharing among scientists.
Leaving aside the details of this intensive and heavy-weight project,
I took two interesting points from the article:
When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was a rock star. I wanted to play guitar, get up on stage and have everyone scream while I cranked out some hard rockin’ tune. I wanted to see lighters held up in the crowd as I finished my last set - dripping with sweat, completely tired and no energy left. Leave it all on the stage - that’s what I wanted! My friends all felt the same - we talked about it all the time!
Well, that never happened. Instead I went to college and spent more time in the computer center than I did at parties. The only thing I cranked out was code. Later, I got a job writing software and that’s what I still do today.
But I still think about it - once in a while.
But more than that, I think now about Open Source. So do a bunch of my friends - we talk about it all the time!
I met a guy at the Softpro computer book store off Route 128 in Burlington, MA last week. (I hang out there now instead of the record shop.) He writes financial applications for a mutual fund company in Boston. But all he wanted to talk about was JBoss. He’d spent some time working on the JMS implementation but had gotten too busy to continue. He wanted to get back involved as soon as he could. All those people who were building the latest JBoss - he wanted to be one of them!
In his eyes I saw the same stars I used to have. I used to think that way about Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. I wanted to be one of them! When I was younger, I ran out to buy the latest Led Zeppelin album - now I run out to get the latest release of JDOM!
(Now, this is a bit of a different view from the one Bruce Sterling presented in his talk, “A Contrarian View of Open Source“. He presented this entertaining talk at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. It’s worth reading if only for the priceless pearls of truth in it - such as, “The older Bill gets, the uglier he gets.” It’s a wonderful read.)
Back to our story -
A good friend of mine called me today and went on for 30 minutes about how he was submitting a patch to the Jakarta Struts project (a JSP framework from the Apache Software Foundation) - his patch was going to allow you to define validations for one input field based on the value of some other field (e.g., if you fill in a last name, make sure you fill out a first name…). He was totally excited about it.
After he got done telling me about it, he was almost out of breath. I reached in my pocket, pulled out a lighter and stood there holding it in the air.
Leave it all on the stage.
Did you used to play guitar and give it all up for hacking? What did you think of Bruce Sterling’s talk/article?
Related link: http://magnonel.guild.net/~schwern/talks/
The URL above gives access to most of Schwern’s stuff. His “How to be Lazy Without Really Trying Redux” is great, and “Writing a Test Library with Test::Builder” really ought to lead to several more domain-specific testing libraries. The more good tools we have, the easier it will be to write high-kwalitee software.
I’ve fixed two bugs in the Test::Tutorial slides, so get the latest version from my site. You might also like the additional details in my Introduction to Test::More, which I presented to the Portland Perl Mongers in July.
If you’re still not satiated, drop by Perl QA sometime. There’s plenty to do, and I guarantee you’ll learn a tremendous amount.
Writing about technology for The O’Reilly Network - Crazy!
I’d written for smaller outfits, but this was the real thing. I had to call my mentor, Lester Stallman Raymond Bangs. He’s always home and up late.
“Writing for The O’Reilly Network?” - he sounded interested - “It could be worse. You could be writing for one of those cyber-fish wrapping rags that reprints press releases and calls them news.”
I could hear Lou Reed blaring in the background. He’d probably been up for 48 hours straight again - probably hacking Python code to play checkers against. He hated everything when he was in this mood.
“What should I write about?”, I asked him. He really was brilliant - he could bypass all the fud and fluff and put his finger right on the heart of the matter.
“It doesn’t matter”, he said, “the Internet’s being co-opted as we speak by multinational corporations and governments. These people - the ’swill merchants’ - don’t know what beauty is. They don’t understand the elegance of a well-crafted object design. They laugh at Python. The only object inheritance they want is the one your grandfather left you.”
“Come on”, I said, “there must be something good to write about. I can’t have missed everything.”
I could hear a low laugh coming from the other end of the phone. He was changing the music - he’d put Black Sabbath on. “Here’s what you do…”, he began.
“Tell them you’re going to need some time. Tell them you’ve got a ‘think piece’”, he laughed again, “A story about a rising Open Source project having to face its own limitations under the harsh light of a world-wide user base and an on-line bug list. They’re scrambiling to get committers and Microsoft just announced a competitive offering will be built-in to .NET in the next release.” He laughed some more. “They’ll go crazy!”, he added, still laughing.
“But here’s the thing you need to remember”, he was serious suddenly, “some people out there want to ruin Open Source. They want to control all the API’s and protocols and everything. These people will kill innovation and take away all the stuff we’ve worked to build up, man. Oh, and they’ll try to seduce you with free software and ease of use. They’ll tell you that the chicks will dig you” - I was taking notes as fast as I could - “and that you’ll make more money if you just follow them and promote their platforms.”
“But don’t do it. You’ve got to build your reputation on honesty. You got to cut through the fud and tell it like it is. You’ve got to remember that it’s the Technology that’s at the heart of it all. It needs to be free - and the ideas do too. And the code all needs to…” - he paused - “hey, my pizza’s here I gotta go” <click>. I stood there with the phone still up to my ear.
Wow, that’s a lot to take in. This was going to be harder than I thought. Crazy.
If you haven’t seen the movie “Almost Famous” (one of my favorites), then of course this all means nothing to you. Probably.
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