Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate and Enterprise Editions have the new BitLocker Drive Encryption feature that using the Trusted Platform Model (TPM) to secure data on your hard drive (I wonder why the Vista Business Edition does not support BitLocker). Port 25 reprints (with permission) a blog item by Microsoft France’s Cyril Voisin that provides detailed step-by-step instructions on how to dual-boot Linux with Windows Vista on a hard disk using BitLocker.

Using Vista’s Boot Manager to Boot Linux and Dual Booting with BitLocker Protection with TPM Support

My personal preference is to use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to run Linux along side Vista in a virtual machine (see screen cap on the left).

Virtual PC may not be a good solution for everyone though. For example, if you need a high resolution display or use any number of USB devices, you will want to run Linux natively.

You can learn which features are available on the different Windows Vista Editions at…

Windows Vista Editions

You can learn more about BitLocker by reading…

BitLocker Drive Encryption: Technical Overview

Microsoft Open Source Software Lab’s Sam Ramji announced a number of job opennings at the newly formed Joint Interoperability Lab. The announcement (click on the link below to get the details) includes job titles and descriptions for both open Microsoft and Novell positions at this lab.

Seeking A Few Good People…We’re Hiring! (and so is Novell)

The positions all sound pretty interesting…

• Microsoft: Software Design Engineer in Test, Linux Interoperability
  
• Novell: Software Design Engineer in Test, Windows Interoperability
  
• Microsoft: Program Manager, Linux Interoperability
  

As expected (hoped for?), PowerShell 1.0 for Windows Vista was released along with Vista. You can find the x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) versions for download at…

PowerShell 1.0 for Windows Vista x86 (x86)

PowerShell 1.0 for Windows Vista (x64)

You can also find an example of using PowerShell to get information about a Guest Operating System from Microsoft Virtual Server on the Virtual PC Guy’s blog at…

Querying guest operating system information with Powershell

Finally, the Windows PowerShell Team Blog has a blog entry comparing Bash and PowerShell scripts that each perform the task of disconnecting a drive from a running virtual machine.

Virtual Machine Manager’s PowerShell Support

The Bash script was taken from VMware’s own website and is quite a bit longer than the PowerShell version. I wonder how long/complex a Python or Ruby version might be?

And, here’s a link to the Port 25 blog item that led to my own series of PowerShell commentaries…

Watching a Community Grow - PowerShell

Microsoft Windows Vista launches for general purchase on January 29. If you want to get information about modifying and deploying your Open Source app in Microsoft Windows Vista, you should check out this blog item on Port 25.

Open Source Applications on Windows Vista: Readiness Kit

There is a Q&A style interview about the Microsoft DevReadiness.org community site as well as other resources to help you get your FOSS app Vista-ready.

I suggest adding one more site in the list of developer resource sites you might want to visit in Vista-izing your FOSS app.

Microsoft TechNet Windows Vista TechCenter

While it seems that nearly all of the FOSS applications I’ve tried mostly run fine under Windows Vista (I’m using Ultimate Edition), there are still glitches that turn up now and then. For example, it seems that Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird do not successfully auto-upgrade in Vista. The auto-download works fine. But, the upgrade process itself errors out. Then, the download process is repeated and loops back to try to upgrade again. The workaround is to manually download the installer from Mozilla.com and run the upgrade as you would for a new installation.

CivicSpace, the free open source community organizing web platform, is migrating to Groundswell, which is essentially the same thing, but with a subscription fee and a promise to shield users from technical challenges. It’s not surprising: CivicSpace was impressive, but it seemed to occupy a limbo between open source and consumer software. CivicSpace invited non-technical users by making it easier to build an online political operation. But it was never easy enough, and maybe never could have been, given that just installing it required some minimal familiarity with the LAMP environment. Handling all the ensuing support requests, for free, must have been quite a burden.

It’s important to understand volunteer motivation to encourage further altruistic and mutually beneficial behavior. O’Reilly Editor Andy Oram has created a short survey for people to contribute to community documentation:

“Do you answer questions on mailing lists about how to use a software tool or language? Do you write documentation, put up web pages, or contribute to wikis about software? If so, please take the following survey to help O’Reilly do research that will help us understand why people contribute to documentation (versus software projects themselves.) The results will be published on the O’Reilly web site, and may help software projects and communities get more such contributions. We’re only interested in hearing from people who do this for non-monetary reasons.

I’m in the process of designing a workflow framework (in Python, of course). As I’m laying it out, it’s helpful to think in terms of the types of the pieces that are going to interact with one another and what they can do. I’ve begun creating “base” classes which define empty methods which I plan on objects of corresponding “concrete” classes containing. This is all a nice thought experiment as it helps congeal some of my thoughts, but there is effectively no real value in implementing these empty base classes.

Some time back, I had read about Zope interfaces. I didn’t really think much about them at the time, but now I’m giving thought to using them. Since the Python language does not provide linguistic constructs to specify an interface (at least, not like some languages do), I thought it might be helpful (if for no other reason than documentation and design) to use something like Zope interfaces to help build my workflow manager.

The alternative is to proceed as I had begun and lay out some empty “base” classes which will contain the methods which I expect “concrete” classes to contain. And rely on unit tests to enforce that instances of each concrete class will have the appropriate methods behaving in the appropriate way. (And I would assert that using unit tests is the right way to go even if you use “proper” interfaces.)

Now that I’ve layed out my situation, I have a question. Is there really any value to something like Zope interfaces? And if there really is benefit, is it merely documentational and design-oriented which could be achieved with convention without having to rely on a tool such as Zope interfaces? Please post your comments here, as I’m really interested in reading what others thing on the subject.

As 2006 was drawing to a close, Microsoft’s Bill Hilf assembled a list on the Port 25 site he called The 15 Most Useful Technologies for me in 2006. People who make assumptions about what a high-level Microsoft manager would choose for his list might be surprised. Sure, there are Microsoft products in the list. But, his list also included Apple’s iWeb, Parallels Desktop for Mac, and Ruby on Rails. You should really take a look at this list if you want to find some other surprises.

Bill’s list inspired me to create a list of my own. It’s way too early to know what will be the hot technologies of 2007. But, based on some 2006 previews, here are some of my picks for techie products that are near-release that show much promise (IMHO) for 2007.

1. Parallels Desktop for Mac - It is hard to think of any other software for Mac OS X introduced in 2006 that garnered as much attention as this: The first virtualization software for Intel based Macs. I was one of many who gave it a glowing review and even managed to generate an O’Reilly Shortcut book related to it (Windows for Intel Macs - shameless plug. At last I could run Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows (any version), and Linux (any version) on a single relatively inexpensive platform (a 2GHz MacBook in my case). Parallels has continued to enhance an already remarkable product since its introduction. Most recently, it introduced the ability to run a Windows applications in a single window (without Microsoft Windows surrounding it) in Mac OS X.
   
2. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 & Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 - Currently in Release Candidate and Beta stages, these products are nice upgrades. The main draw for me is support of AMD-V and Intel-VT hardware assisted virtualization. I’m saving my nickels and dimes now to buy a nice Core 2 Duo based PC to use with Virtual PC 2007.
   
3. VMware Fusion (for Mac) - This entered the public beta stage about a month ago. And, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter if it is as good as Parallels Desktop for Mac. Why? Two words: Virtual Appliances. VMware currently owns the mindset of those who want to provide a quick and safe way for others to try out their product. Build a virtual machine with a pre-built OS (usually Linux), install your pre-configured app, ship it, and watch people try it out in complete safety knowing their base OS configuration is safe from side effects during testing. Mac OS X users have been shut out of this unless they had an Intel Mac, ran Apple Boot Camp, installed Windows XP, and then installed the VMware player for XP.
   
4. PowerShell - I talked about this in my previous blog entry here. I predict this will get quick uptake by Windows Server administrators, LAN workstation managers, power users, and dynamic language fans.
   
5. Ruby - Ruby on Rails has gotten a lot of attention over the past two years. The first thing I did after learning about it was buy a Ruby on Rails book. The next thing I did was buy a Ruby book. It is a great language to write code in. And, you can still read it months later. One criticism of Ruby is that it has been stuck in the 1.8.x version for quite a while. Of course, that may also be a strength.
   
6. Microsoft Office 2007 - I keep reading articles about people hating the Ribbon Interface. I’ll go on record saying I like it. I’ve been beta-testing it since, hmm, 2005 and using it as my main suite since October 2006. I have a hard time using the old style menus now. But, forget that. Take a look at the new templates and automatic style previews. It reduces the usually fussing around we all do with formatting over various documents.
   
7. Microsoft Windows Vista - If you had asked me what I thought of Vista last summer during its Beta-2 phase, I probably would have rolled my eyes upward and flipped open my MacBook. it was not pretty or fast or even compatible with the Office 2007 beta (you needed two PCs or virtual machines to test both back then). Then RC-1 rolled out. I sat up and looked more seriously at it. RC-2 really had me taking a hard look at it. Then, I was happily shocked by what I saw when I installed the production version of Vista Ultimate Edition on my relatively low-end cheap home PC. You can follow my ramblings about using Vista Ultimate Edition on a cheap PC on one of my personal blogs.
   
8. Vista Sidebar Gadgets - I tried Konfabulator before it became Yahoo! Gadgets. I tried Dashboard on Apple Mac OS X Tiger. Neither took root in my computing habit. And, quite honestly, early beta versions of Sidebar were removed from my desktop configuration early in testing. But, something happened when the RC2 came out in Fall 2006. It actually worked pretty well, looked good, and was useful. And, I didn’t have to switch modes as I did with Apple Dashboard.
   
9. Apple Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard - From what I’ve been reading, I think Mr. Jobs didn’t even show half of what Leopard will be able to do when he previewed it in Fall 2006. It is scheduled to become available a few months after Vista launches. So, we need to wait and see what this cat is really allow about. I’m planning to upgrade my MacBook as soon as I can buy a copy.
   
10. Apple iPhone - Has any phone generated this much excitement so far from its release date? Not even the Motorola RAZR generated the kind of media frenzy we are seeing about the Apple iPhone. It doesn’t matter which phone platform camp you are in. The Apple iPhone raises the awareness and feature bar for all the manufacturers. We will all benefit from its introduction because everyone else will have to figure out a way to go head-to-head with the Apple iPhone. A secondary benefit might come from something that is generating a lot of criticism: The apparent iPhone applications lockdown. The current statement is that you cannot install applications on it. However, it is supposed to have a full Safari web browser. If it supports AJAX applications and Flash, we may see a whole new rich body of mobile-focused web applications emerge later this year.

    For those of you who (like me) were wowed by the iPhone’s multi-point gesture recognition and orientation detection capabilities, take a look at these two items. The first is a short video clip I took of NYU’s Jeff Han demonstrating multipoint finger/hand gestures on a very large screen at the 2006 O’Reilly Emeging Technology Conference.

    
    
    
    Click To Play
    
    
    NYU’s Jeff Han demonstrates hand gesture control for Microsoft Windows on a large touch senstive display at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego (March 2006).

    A second interesting reference point are a series of products that gives Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphones orientation and motion detection abilities.

    pocketmotion TiltMouse for Pocket PC, TiltDisplay for Windows Mobile 2003 SE, TiltControl for Pocket PC or Smartphone

11. Mobile Web Applications - I mentioned this above related to the iPhone. But, we have already seen a number of web applications for mobile devices introduced by Google, Microsoft, and others over the past year. There’s no doubt we will continue to see mobile web apps introduced throughout 2007.
    

The Plat_Forms web publishing contest has just started. Alvar Freude let me know that the nine Plat_Forms teams represent Java, Perl, and PHP. Oddly, there are no .Net, Python, or Ruby entrants.

The Plat_Forms live contest blog is also available; it has frequent updates throughout the contest.

Do you answer questions on mailing lists about how to use a software tool or language? Do you write documentation, put up web pages, or contribute to wikis about software?

If so, please take our survey to help O’Reilly do research that will be published on the O’Reilly web site. It could help software projects and communities get more such contributions.

We’re interested in hearing only from people who do this for non-monetary reasons.

The nearly 300-page Economic Impact of FLOSS on Innovation and Competitiveness of the EU ICT Sector report (warning, large PDF file) will take some time to review and digest. Meanwhile, the report’s table on the largest commercial contributions to F/OSS caught my eye.

With a review of the code in Debian GNU/Linux through the Constructive Cost Model (that is, COCOMO), the top contributor by far is Sun. That’s a nice confirmation of Sun’s claim to be the largest contributor to F/OSS. IBM provides the next largest amount of contributions.

It’s interesting to see SGI, SAP, and Real Networks in the top ten.

It’s even more interesting to see that smaller, newer companies such as Red Hat, MySQL, and Ximian are in the list. (That’s a good sign that they contribute disproportionately to their size; their influence is much greater than that of many larger companies.)

See pages 48 - 51 of the report for more information.

The Community Patent Review (a phase of the better-known Peer to Patent project) is seeking to hire a top-notch Ruby on Rails programmer.

This is not an ordinary job posting; it’s a chance to get paid for public service. The project is developing software for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and is being closely watched in the UK too. It implements a process to let experts in multiple fields to submit prior art and other information related to patents.

This project has the potential to alleviate some of the problems universally recognized with patents (particularly patents that should have rejected because of prior art) and can serve as a model for other projects that open up government to the public.

Among the companies that have already agreed to submit patents for this process are IBM, Microsoft, Computer Associates, and General Electric.

I think the first O’Reilly Hacks book I bought was Rob Flickenger’s Linux Server Hacks. It weighed in at a lean mean 221 pages and 100 concise and useful hacks. A good number of the hacks included scripts or script fragments written in Bourne/Bash shell scripts or Perl. There is a heck of a lot of power in relatively short and easy to read scripts for Linux (UNIX, BSD, Mac OS X). And, although there are very nice Windows ports of my two dynamic languages of choice (Python and Ruby), I never got the urge to write scripts for Windows.

My interest in programming using a scripting language for Windows was piqued a year or so when I started looking at what was then called Monad the MSH Command Shell. It seemed to provide the kind of rich shell I was used on UNIX/Linux boxes combined with a powerful scripting language. The old DOS box command shell was obviously not long for this world (at least for power users). In November 2006, Monad was released to production as PowerShell 1.0 for Windows XP and Windows Server (the Vista version was not ready at the time though the Release Candidate for Vista is available for download now).

Bill Hilf (Microsoft Open Source Software Lab) seems just as excited based on his recent blog item…

Watching a community grow - Powershell

In it he points out a bunch of PowerShell related projects and tools that I was totally unaware of. You should definitely read the blog to dig into his PowerShell finds.

I’ve got a couple of PowerShell related items to share myself before you click to read Bill’s blog though.

First, PowerShell doesn’t replace the good old DOS box. You can see in my screen segment capture below that I have the DOS box overlapping PowerShell. The DOS box launches a bit faster than PowerShell on my pokey old Athlon 3200+ PC (no Core 2 Duo PC for me yet, sniff, sniff :-). So, it still has a place for a quick IPCONFIG or PING network check.

Second tip. What if the Linux muscle memory in your fingertips are strongly ingrained? Try typing get-process in PowerShell. Looks kind of familiar huh? But, perhaps it seems like typing too many letters? OK, try typing more familiar (for UNIX/Linux users) ps. Ah, much better, right? Now try ls. And, yep, DOS’ DIR still works too. There are some familiar shell commands that work and some don’t. You can find the complete list of aliased commands by typing either get-alias or simply alias (which are aliases for each other of course :-).

Here are a bunch of PowerShell related sites you might want to take a look at…

Windows PowerShell 1.0 Download Site

Windows PowerShell

Microsoft Windows PowerShell Team Blog

Microsoft CodePlex PowerShell Projects Directory

Finally, being designated a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in the Mobile Devices category, I wanted to point out the blog of an MVP in the PowerShell area.

Keith Hill’s Blog (Microsoft PowerShell MVP)

BTW & FYI: MVPs are not Microsoft employees. You can learn more about the MVP designation at: Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Overview.

I’m really hoping to see a bunch PowerShell script utilities and applications being developed and released with Open Source licenses. I think it will go a long way to promote its use and help those of us who are newbies to it (pretty much 99% of the world at the moment I would guess) get up to speed quickly.

Virtualization became a hot topic in 2006 (although it has been around for something like 40 years on the mainframe side of the world). And, it looks like it might be the hot topic for 2007. Virtualization generally refers to a technology that lets you run two or more Operating Systems (OSes) simultaneously on a single platform. So, for example, you might be running Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows 98SE (for that old game that only runs on that OS), and a Linux distribution at the same time on the same physical PC or server. With powerful CPUs like the Intel Core 2 Duo and reasonably priced RAM, virtualization on a PCs is now a very realistic and reasonable thing to do even at home or in a small business.

Microsoft’s Bill Hilf explores this technology and explains…

Why Virtualization Is So Darn Popular

…on Microsoft’s Port25 site. He discusses virtualization as a business strategy for Microsoft and Microsoft’s partnership with XenSource (the company that is the hub for the Open Source Xen virtualization project).

You can see the CentOS 4 Linux (community clone version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4) login screen running inside of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 Release Candidate in the (cropped) screen capture. Virtual PC 2007 Release Candidate itself is running on Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. Linux runs just fine on top of its Virtual Machine. This Release Candiate became available on January 2. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta2 (quite a mouthful, eh) has been in testing since mid-2006. It has been very stable in my tests. Both products (and their current production versions) are free. So, grab some copies and start testing your Linux distros and old Windows versions on it ASAP.

Port25 blogger MichaelF let us know that the technical preview release of Microsoft FastCGI for IIS6 and IIS7 is available for download in FastCGI and Zend Core 2.0. This is a big deal for people interested in PHP running as efficiently as possible with Microsoft’s IIS web server. PHP can work with IIS either by being installed with a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) or ISAPI (Internet Server Application Programming Interface). However, according to the Microsoft support article HOW TO: Install PHP for a UNIX-to-Windows Migration, the simpler to install PHP MSI installation package only provides support for CGI. CGI tends to be slower and resource intenstive because a new process to be launched for each request. FastCGI for IIS allows a CGI process to be reused after the first request.

In speaking with dozens (maybe hundreds) of people in various areas of technology work over the years, one topic that seemed to bring a smile or look of past contentment to a large percentage was LEGO. Those of us old enough to remember when there weren’t any pre-fabricated themed kits (just bricks of various sizes and colors and maybe some windows) recall endless hours of enjoyment of building some defined form out of a bunch of rectangular bricks. In 1998, LEGO introduced their Mindstorms Robotics Invention Kit (RIS) and, for many of us, merged the worlds of software with motors and sensors in a retail product that was with the reach of most techies (US$199). The kit apparently didn’t have a huge number of people buying it, however. And, for years it looked like an abandoned product. That all changed in 2006 when LEGO released the next generation Mindstorms NXT. It moved away from the traditional LEGO brick base to the more recent Technic type parts and replaced the last century infrared computer-to-LEGO communication with Bluetooth and USB. You can see my first generation RCX brick and current generation NXT control brick pictured here.

Robotics on a much larger scale (figuratively and literally) was also in the minds of a group at Microsoft. It released the Microsoft Robotics Studio in 2006. Microsoft’s Port25 has a two-part video interview with the Architect and General Manger of the Microsoft Robotics Group.

Something wonderful has happened… Number Five is alive!

Robotics Redux: Demo My Robot

GM Tandy Trower mentions that the services made available by the architecture can be used by any .Net aware language including IronPython.

Ruby has become one of my favorite programming languages over the past couple of years. And, maybe I’m in the minority but I use Ruby itself. I haven’ t done any Ruby on Rails development (yet). I haven’t used RubyCLR yet (all my little Ruby system applets have been written for Linux boxes), I’ve been following it with quite a lot of interest.

Microsoft Linux Labs Director Sam Ramji interviewed RubyCLR’s creator, John Lam back in August 2006 before John announced (in October 2006) that he was going to work for Microsoft.. You can find their 17.5 minute video interview and a demo of RubyCLR and an Avalon Ruby Editor (Avalon == Windows Presentation Foundation in Vista-speak. I.e., it is part of .net Framework 3.0). Note that RubyCLR itself just needs .net Framework 2.0. You can find and download this video interview from Microsoft’s Port25 site at:

John Lam and Sam Ramji discuss RubyCLR, Avalon Ruby Editor and Open Source Funding

Note, if you’d like more information about Microsoft’s CLR, you can find an MSDN overview article on the topic at…

Common Language Runtime Overview
…and its MSDN web home at…

The Common Language Runtime

There are a couple of other .net related Ruby projects that I plan to take a look at and discuss here in the future.

• IronRuby
• Ruby/.NET Bridge
• Gardens Point Ruby .NET/Compiler

Chad Fowler and Kevin Barnes recently considered the idea of The Big Rewrite:

• The Big Rewrite
• To rewrite or not to rewrite, that is the question

I’ve most often seen the desire for The Big Rewrite where Technical Debt is so high that developers believe that throwing away the existing code and starting over is cheaper than fixing the problems in the code. It’s technical bankruptcy.

Of course, if (like most developers) you can’t actually read source code, your bankruptcy threshold will be awfully low–but that’s another rant.

I very much appreciate how both Chad and Kevin analyze the other costs and drawbacks.

The marketing people at O’Reilly seem to get right to the point when they describe their books. On the catalog page of Linux System Administration you will find this quote:

The ingredients for this book had been scattered throughout mailing lists, forums, and discussion groups, as well as books, periodicals, and the experiences of colleagues. Everything is now in one handy guide. In the course of their research, the authors also solved many problems whose solutions were completely undocumented. They now pass their lessons on to you.

As the primary author, I can explain the inspiration and some of the issues involved. When we started the project, I didn’t expect it to take two years of concentrated effort to get the result. But, like the copy states the answers to many OSS application issues required much research. If I wanted to see this book come to fruition, then I had to persist and that meant late nights and long days searching for hints on the Internet as the starting point.

So, Why MCPs?

Aside from my life as an Open Source practitioner, I’m also a MCP going through recertification on the Server 2003 track. Integrating Linux application servers into domains and forests seemed easy to me, but getting the applications installed on Linux proved challenging far too often. As the paragraph above says, many solutions were undocumented. So, we had to document them.

I had an inspiration on how to put the book together, but when writing a proposal you need prove a market exists. So, I went looking for the market. In an interview with Mike Webber at Spidertools I recognized the need for a definitive Linux administrator’s book unlike any I saw in the market. When I interviewed Mike, he called from his headquarters in Trout Creek, Montana. His business model involves putting a customer on a box and training him or her one specific technology at a time such as building a Sendmail server, etc.

Then I ran across Falko Timme, a German fellow who started publishing comprehensive, step-by-step guides to building Linux servers. I built a Debian server from scratch using his “Perfect Setup”. His approach of building a application servers one at a time proved a smart way to put material together.

Some of the work at the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft involves research to help Microsoft practitioners work with Linux- or perhaps stated differently - help them integrate technologies. I understand the problems the Lab faces as I faced them eight years ago. As a Solution Provider, I needed to integrate a Linux box running an Apache Server into an ecommerce solution. The first step in that process required learning how to use Linux, which provided quite a challenge.

Now, imagine this type of scenario. An enterprise system admin at contoso.com gets a call from the CIO who wants a load balanced High-Availability Apache Cluster on Novell SLES 10 running Heartbeat setup for a demonstration in a week. OK, the admin says, I’ll just head on over to a search engine and run a few searches. As bits and pieces of information comes forward, panic starts to emerge. That’s how I felt eight years ago.

Today, he can sit down and open a chapter in a book and build the server in a couple of days. That’s why I wrote Linux System Administration. You won’t find much discussion about Linux this and Linux that, but you will learn to build a server, get the components together to create a load balanced Apache cluster and other applications box by box.

I’m recertifying on Server 2003 and some of the best material I found sits on the Technet site in Step-by-Step guides. So, this isn’t a new concept, I just never saw the approach taken at the system admin level in the OSS community until I ran into Falko’s web site. And, by the way, I don’t discriminate when I say system administrator or system engineer. It’s all technology to me and I want to learn as much as I can as quickly as I can.

Does this Benefit the Open Source Community?

It does in several ways and O’Reilly’s marketing people once again articulate the points:

Linux is now a standard corporate platform … and there is a definite shortage of talented administrators. Linux System Administration is ideal as an introduction to Linux for Unix veterans, MCSEs, and mainframe administrators, and as an advanced (and refresher) guide for existing Linux administrators who will want to jump into the middle of the book.

In the early days of Linux almost everyone contributed code. The community started off small and grew to around 30,000 users by the release date of Windows 95. By 1998, the Linux community reached around 2 million and only a small percentage of those folks contributed code or could administer even a web server.

I saw this book as a way to go beyond the standard Linux Bibles and power user orientation. I knew many people who wanted to deploy stand alone servers running Apache, DNS, Mail, Blogs, etc. I also saw experienced administrators wanting to learn how to put together high performance clusters, virtual machines and servers running multiple silos on the same box or blades and to incorporate single sign-on directory services into their infrastructures.

Technology moves quickly and if you have to find answers from mailing lists, forums, and discussion groups the time to find out how to do something takes longer than doing it. From my perspective, it takes significant resources to put together the documentation to allow people to quickly deploy the solutions they need. Those resources should come from major players such as the consortium at OSDL and the troopers at the Open Source Software Lab.

I came to recognize the massive proliferation of NT infrastructures when I started up my first Linux company. The first task required someone to build a UNIX client for Exchange. With pockets of Solaris and Linux users in companies like Ericsson, Boeing and Intel to mention a few, a need existed to join the two communities. We call that interoperability.

I see more acceptance today on both sides of aisle - a bi-partisan effort so to speak in the fields of technology. So, as the days pass, I expect everyone to begin working together to create a world that works for everyone. Only time will tell if it comes together in pristine form.

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

“For the first time in the two months I’ve been working on Parrot, ‘make test’ completely succeeded — and with some TODO tests passing, to boot!”

– James Keenan, sharing the good news in ‘All tests passing!’

I don’t believe there’s been enough discussion of the weaknesses gradually being uncovered in Microsoft’s 6,000-page dump of Office behavior, which they are trying to call a standard. Andrew Updegrove’s summary has gotten some circulation on the Internet:

The Contradictory Nature of OOXML

and now Groklaw is organizing opposition to the ECMA standardization process, which is being fast-tracked (a better term would be railroaded):

Searching for Openness in Microsoft’s OOXML and Finding Contradictions

To help Office to become a standard, one adaptation governments could make would be to retroactively declare 1900 a leap year. This would require updates to history books and other documents (for instance, V-E day would change to May 7, and the World Trade Center attacks would have taken place on September 10) but I’d like to see a cost comparison with the alternative that businesses dread: migrating to open document formats.

Penguin.swf just announced the final release of Flash Player 9 for x86 Linux. I just tried it on the ubiquitous talking cat video and the not so ubiquitous angry cat video. Both played fine for me.

Yes, it would be nice if Flash Player were open source. Yes, it would be nice if there were a release for 64 bit and Power PCs. But it is nice that I have a Flash 9 Final for my laptop. I consider this progress. I’ll keep hoping with everyone for Adobe to open Flash Player. I’ll also keep hoping for releases for non-32-bit-x86 Linuxen.

UPDATE: I just received this press release about the Flash Player 9 Release:

Adobe Delivers Flash Player 9 for Linux

New Release Joins Adobe Flex 2 for Linux-based RIA Creation

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jan. 17, 2007 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the availability of Adobe® Flash® Player 9 for Linux, the next-generation client runtime for engaging with Flash content and applications on Linux open source operating systems. Adobe Flash Player 9 delivers a consistent cross-platform experience and extends unprecedented performance and advanced features to the broadest set of developers and users to date. Additionally, Linux developers can create, test and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the Linux platform using the free Adobe Flex® 2 Software Developers Kit (SDK), Adobe Flash Player 9 and the free Flex Data Services 2 Express.

Installed on over 700 million Internet-connected PCs and mobile devices worldwide, Adobe Flash Player engages people across a wide array of different channels, enabling collaboration and delivering richer, more interactive experiences that work consistently across multiple platforms.

“With the proliferation of video on the Web, Adobe Flash Player is quickly becoming the de facto industry standard for delivering engaging interactive content and applications,” said Emmy Huang , senior product manager at Adobe. “Now the Linux community has full access to the high volume of Flash content and applications available on the Internet today, bringing Linux developers and users to the forefront of the Web 2.0 experience.”

Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux vastly enhances user experiences with new capabilities such as efficient memory utilization, advanced features for graphics, video and text, as well as the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), which allows up to 10 times faster scripting performance. Adobe recently contributed source code from the AVM2 to the Mozilla Foundation, which is hosting a new open source project called Tamarin to accelerate the development of a standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications that work across multiple platforms. The Tamarin source code is available via CVS, an open source version control and collaboration system, from the Mozilla site www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/ .

“Adobe Flash Player 9 delivers high-quality performance, a more secure viewing experience and an enhanced programming model that will help further advance SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop as the top Linux desktop for business,” said Justin Steinman, director of marketing for Linux and Open Platform Solutions at Novell. “Novell is committed to providing our users the means to experience the latest in rich content on the Web.”

“Red Hat is committed to providing the world’s best Linux user experience,” said Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Red Hat Enterprise Solutions. “Offering our users Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux helps Red Hat deliver the desktop capabilities Linux users want, and is an indicator of the growing demand for rich Internet applications certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Pricing and Availability

Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux is available immediately as a free download from www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer linux. The standalone and debug versions of Adobe Flash Player for developers are available from www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html . Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux will also be included in Linux operating systems distributed by Novell and Red Hat later this year.

Adobe Flash Player 9 is available in both English and localized versions and is available for Linux, Windows and Mac platforms. To learn more about Adobe Flash Player 9, please visit www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/ . For system requirements, please visit www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/systemreqs/ .

For more information about developing RIAs for the Linux platform with the free Adobe Flex 2 SDK and Flex Data Services 2 software, please visit www.adobe.com/products/flex/productinfo/overview/ .

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information - anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com .

###

© 2007 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Adobe, the Adobe logo, Flash and Flex are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

Seems I’ve been tagged by chromatic to reveal five things you didn’t know about me.

For several years I’ve been fascinated with technical information people get online, instead of from books or journals. Everybody looks online for help installing software, finding programming library calls, fixing bugs, and solving any other technical problem they have on their systems. (Systems, not computers–computers are boring, Steve Jobs told us that. Nobody wants to be associated with computers any more.)

A lot of information is still missing online. That’s good for O’Reilly, because it means the book industry still plays an important role. But this article is not about missing information in general. It’s about a specific segment of missing information: the frustration you feel when you visit a site and don’t understand it because it lacks some background you need.

I encountered innumerable background issues while coding up some JavaScript recently. For instance, after cloning a large and complex node, I was stymied for a long time because I tried to alter children of the node and kept being told they didn’t exist. It was a surprise to find, ultimately, that white space between nested elements counts as a child node. (The log call in Firebug helped a lot to clear up the mystery.) This is just one example where a reader needs to bring his own background to online documentation.

My friend and co-author Jim Shore tagged me to share five little-known personal facts.

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

“…I think you’re the path toward sanity.”

– Larry Wall, in ‘Patterns’

Aaron Seigo has an excellent summary of a lengthy report on the use of F/OSS in European governments. He makes me want to read the entire study… alas, not today.

Here’s my favorite quote from his posting:

oh look, we’re doing better in smaller firms. again, no surprise. many of us have been saying that’s the case for some time all while too many continue to obsess over the “enterprise” when that is not where our bread and butter tends to be, by a factor of 2.

I don’t know when it popped up, but as I’ve been working on a new Django project, I’ve been noticing the newforms documentation page. Today, I decided to check it out. I am quite impressed with what newforms do. The “old style” “automatic” form handling in Django revolved around database Model object and “manipulators” (which you could create from a Model). Form handling was closely tied to your database model. Indeed, form handling was closely tied to the Django ORM.

New style “automatic” form handling revolves around a Form object. Said Form object is apparently decoupled from the Django ORM. (I suspect this was a necessary step in order to integrate SQLAlchemy and any other non-Django ORM.) Here is an awesome little tutorial on using newforms.

Some of the benefits of using newforms are

• Less code in your view
• Less code in your template. I forgot to mention that newforms automatically generate HTML. Including errors! Very nice…
• Easily swap out form input “widgets”.
• Easily ties to an database model…or not.

If you can’t tell, I’m really worked up about newforms. Django just got a whole lot cooler. I’m sure I’ll write more on this later.

From Jerry Gay, this month’s revolving Parrot release manager:

On Saturday, 13 January, 2007, please join us on IRC in #parrot (irc.perl.org) to work on closing out as many RT ([https://rt.perl.org/rt3/]) tickets as possible in the parrot queue. This will help us get ready for the next release of parrot 0.4.8, scheduled for Tuesday 16 January 2007. You’ll find C, parrot assembly, perl, documentation, and plenty of tasks to go around. Core developers will be available all day (starting at around 10am GMT) to answer questions.

No experience with parrot necessary. See [http://rakudo.org/parrot/index.cgi?bug_day_2007_01_13|the parrot wiki page] for more information.

Last month’s first-ever Parrot bug day was a huge success, as we closed some old bugs, attracted some new developers, and managed to improve portability to alternate platforms and toolkits.

This time, I hope to improve the state of Parrot::Embed. Windows developers are particularly welcome.

The 2.5.0 release of the Twisted project was just announced. The release announcement follows:

Get Twisted: http://twistedmatrix.com/

Twisted is an event-based framework for internet applications which
works on Python 2.3.x, 2.4.x, and 2.5.x.

Twisted 2.5.0 is a major feature release, with several interesting new
developments and a great number of bug fixes. Some of the highlights
follow.

* AMP, the Asynchronous Messaging Protocol, was introduced. AMP is a
protocol which provides request/response semantics over a persistent
connection in a very simple and extensible manner.

* An Epoll-based reactor was added, which can be used with twistd or
trial by passing “-r epoll” on the command line. This may improve
performance of certain high-traffic network applications.

* The ‘twistd’ command can now accept sub-commands which name an
application to run. For example, ‘twistd web –path .’ will start a
web server serving files out of the current directory. This
functionality is meant to replace the old way of doing things with
‘mktap’ and ‘twistd -f’.

* Python 2.5 is now supported. Previous releases of Twisted were
broken by changes in the release of Python 2.5.

* ‘inlineCallbacks’ was added, which allows taking advantage of the
new ‘yield’ expression syntax in Python 2.5 to avoid writing callbacks
for Deferreds.

* Many improvements were made to the Jabber support in twisted.words.

Hit http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/Downloads to see what’s new and
to get the latest downloads, including tarballs and Windows
installers.

Again thanks to Jean-Paul Calderone and Cory Dodt for helping get this
release out the door, and thanks to all the Twisted contributors whose
work went into Twisted 2.5.

–
Christopher Armstrong
International Man of Twistery
http://radix.twistedmatrix.com/
http://twistedmatrix.com/
http://canonical.com/

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

Remember, the next Parrot bug day is 13 January, 2007. Join the rest of the team at #parrot (irc.perl.org) to work on closing as many bugs as possible before the next Parrot release.

Lars Wirzenius posted a short reminder that the single point in common for all free software developers is that we write free software. Please keep that in mind before you assume that all or most other free software developers share specific hobbies, values, or beliefs.

You haven’t seen me much since October. You can blame that on my editor - the task master during the days leading up to production and the laid back, friendly guy afterward. I’ll dangle a participle fir you: Writing “Linux System Administration” daunted me. Whoever wrote this got it right:

Linux System Administration (LSA) is not only knowledgeable and practical, but convenient. The ingredients for this book had been scattered throughout mailing lists, forums, and discussion groups, as well as books, periodicals, and the experiences of colleagues. Everything is now in one handy guide. In the course of their research, the authors also solved many problems whose solutions were completely undocumented. They now pass their lessons on to you.

Oh, I did I mention Bill Lubanvic who came in during the later innings and rescued us, handling tech review comments and backing me up beautifully. His name goes on the cover for what he contributed.

I’m back now and looking for real work. LSA took my full attention and I could only take short-term assignments during that time. I’m ready to get back in the saddle. So, what’s up?

I’m pretty impressed with Server 2003 and the integration of Realms in AD. Putting together NIS and Kerberos to integrate users makes so much sense to me. I also have open eyes now when it comes to forests and trees. I could go camping.

We’ll see what happens and I’m keep you posted. Meanwhile look for http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009526/#top the book. It’s due out in March and I promise you have not seen this level of sysadmin before. Thanks to all the people who believed in the concept.

If you’re like me, you never want to lose a command. I’m constantly searching back through them to find out just what those command line flags were, what the esoteric command is (and where it’s located), and most of all: what in Tcl’s name did I do last month when I installed foobazzulator. First thing to know: control-r.

A while ago I wrote the Learning Perl Study Guide for O’Reilly. It’s 64 pages of additional exercises and answers for the end-of-chapter exercises in Learning Perl, 4th Edition. At the moment it’s available through Pearson educational channels as a bundle with Learning Perl. At Stonehenge we use these guides in our Perl trainings.

To make my study guide available to everyone, I bought a big box of them and am selling them at cost myself. O’Reilly’s already paid me for the work and I just want to make the study guide available to anyone who wants it. The cover price is $19.99 (US) and $25.99 (Canada), but I’m selling it at $14 (North America) and $18 (everywhere else). That’s a flat price that already includes taxes, shipping, and everything else.

And, since it’s just me selling these out of my home office, I can give people a break on bulk orders and special deals. Just ask!

The Adobe JavaScript execution bug recently discovered is a huge security issue for any organization that serves PDF files via its web servers.

A colleague told me an amusing story about an oddball design decision that puzzled him and three tech service representatives for days. Norton Antivirus told him his antivirus software was out of date, so he updated it. The next time he booted, the program told him it was still out of date–and it continued to do so on every boot even though it had claimed the previous time to have updated successfully.

The first responses naturally focused on whether the database was corrupt or otherwise failing to update. But eventually a savvy technician figured out the real problem.

It seems that my colleague had checked his calendar for a date in the following month and had left his calendar on the month of October while in fact it was still September. Norton Antivirus relied on his personal calendar to determine what date it was. The software had been updated for September, but the program thought the month was October.

I am curious as to why a programmer would take such an unrobust decision to use a user’s calendar setting to determine the date. I’m wondering whether the programmers discovered that to get the date from the operating system would require a variety of different calls on different systems, and found it simpler to consult a calendar. Obviously, this backfired. A program that installs automated updates should use an external authority to find the date, and not depend on any settings on a user’s PC at all.

The bug was particularly amusing because the program was promising to have an update it couldn’t possibly have for the upcoming month.