MySQL 6 is still in its alpha release stage. However, I’ve found that it takes me a long time before I am comfortable in migrating production databases to a major new database server release. And, moving from 5.x to 6.0 someday definitely qualifies as a major migration to me. So, when MySQL’s Director of Product Management, Robin Schumacher, writes to tell us that MySQL 6 has a new backup scheme, I think we MySQL users should pay attention.

A Quick Look at MySQL 6.0’s New Backup

Here’s the thing for Windows users. The article is based on testing using Fedora Linux on a relatively small machine (1GB RAM, single CPU). I never carried out serious MySQL on Windows vs. MySQL on Linux comparison tests with like-servers back when I ran a bunch of MySQL servers at my former job. But, my impression was that MySQL ran a lot, um, smoother (real technical term) on my Linux boxes than my Windows boxes. Now, it may have been that I had tuned my.cnf better for Linux or I did not adjust the Windows Server cache optimally. But, that was my impression.

I only ran into two major problems in the pre-virtualization days (both hardware failures). And, fortunately, my simple minded backup scheme worked as designed. But, since MySQL 6 seems to have such a different take on backup compared to version 3, 4, and 5, if I were still running MySQL servers, I would start reading about this now to get ready for it a year or two from now.

Microsoft Port25 MySQL related blog entries

Well now, this is very interesting. Cisco just bought PostPath. PostPath is an Exchange alternative and has been around for quite a bit. They don’t get as much press as Zimbra, but they are a contender.

Cisco.

Very interesting.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols just wrote an absolutely excellent article about whether open source can replace Exchange or not. It’s highly suggested. Anyway, the article touches on several products, including Scalix and Zimbra, which reminded me of my own blog about open source and Exchange. Also suggested reading, albeit a much shorter read.

Steven brings up several good points, which I’ll highlight here:

1. MAPI is actually now an open protocol due to EU forcing Microsoft to divulge information on CIFS and MAPI.
2. A research analyst considers many Exchange alternatives, including Scalix and Zimbra, to be “mere ‘noise’ in the business e-mail market”, at least in the US.
3. In other parts of the world, including in Europe, open source and Exchange alternatives have around 10%, which is considerably more than noise.
4. Thunderbird is neglected.

This last part got me thinking. I am a Thunderbird user and have noticed the slow release times, but I haven’t really thought about it. Now that Steven mentions the lag, I think he’s right. Thunderbird releases are very slow. Oddly so.

Is this impacting overall adoption of open source products? Maybe so. I’ve been an Outlook user in the past, and while I use Thunderbird (for now), I do miss some of the integrated groupware features of Outlook.

I do keep meaning to take another look at Zimbra. It’s an excellent package, and once I have some free time I’ll take it for another spin.

PHP 5.3.0 is only in its first alpha release. But, if you run PHP in Microsoft Windows, you should talk a look at…

Release Notes for Windows Binaries (for PHP 5.3.0)

Here are the important changes:

- Support for Windows versions prior to Windows 2000 have been dropped. If you run PHP on Windows 98, 98SE, ME, and NT and plan to upgrade PHP to 5.3.0, start your Windows upgrade planning now.

- Up until now, PHP for Windows has been compiled using Visual C++ 6 (VC6) which was released in 1998 (no kidding). There will be two binary builds available for Windows for the 5.3 release. If you use 3rd party extensions or the Apache httpd server, you need to use the build compiled with VC6. Otherwise, you can use the version compiled with VC9. Future versions of PHP compiled binaries will only be released as compiled with VC9.

- 64-bit binaries will be provided on an experimental basis. They should not be used in production environments. The release notes do not discuss running the 32-bit binaries in a 64-bit environment (Windows Server 2008).

Most so-called Linux security issues turn out to be some insecurely coded PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/fill_in_the_blank app that is simply another application and not a core part of Linux at all. So, I wasn’t alarmed when I read this in Information Week.

Red Hat Confirms Intruder Breached Fedora Servers

From the sound of it, the problem has been contained. And, more importantly, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) production software is not affected at all. The assumption is that RHEL is used for production work and the quickly changing experimental Fedora distro is used for testing, personal workstations, and maybe test servers.

But, I wonder if that is really true? We’ve probably all seen little servers running on platforms that were never intended for that purpose or are incredibly ancient. You’ve probably seen isolated ftp servers running on Windows 98 or a small phone system still running on an unpatched Windows NT box. I’d hazard to guess that there are more than a few small or forgotten servers running Fedora because a RHEL license couldn’t be obtained in a timely fashion and they didn’t know about the CentOS distro.

If you have some examples that can be safely discussed (don’t ID the party or otherwise worsen the security problem for the party), please share them here.

Microsoft paid Novell $240 million in 2006 in what they call subscription fees as part of an agreement for technology sharing and to not sue each others customers for alleged intellectual property (IP) infringements. The payment was not made in total, however. Instead Microsoft pays subscription fees for its customers to use and get support from Novell for SUSE Linux. This week, Microsoft and Novell announced another $100 million will be paid for certificates starting on November 1.

I noticed one of the side-effects of this agreement after the 2006 subscription fee contract was announced. Prior to that Microsoft had recently announced supporting Red Hat, SUSE, and one or two other Linux/BSD distros under Virtual PC and Virtual Server. The Virtual PC and Virtual Serve versions after the 2006 contract dropped support for all *NIXes except SUSE. And, it turned out that installing distros such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Ubuntu 7 required jumping through hoops that included modifying Linux kernel boot options. Microsoft has not, to my knowledge, addressed this issue over the years. There is no reason current Linux releases should not easily install under Virtual PC or Virtual Server. Other virtualization hypervisors I’ve tried installed various Linux distros without a fuss. I’ve tried VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop for Mac, VMware Fusion for Mac, and VMware Workstation 6.

I should note that I have not tried Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V because I’ve never had a spare 64-bit server (or PC) to use for testing. If anyone would like to comment on installing something like RHEL5 or Ubuntu 8 as a Guest OS under Hyper-V, I would be interested to hear about that experience.

I vaguely remember hearing/reading something about the MySQL Drizzle project among the news emerging from OSCON last month. But, it didn’t grab my attention enough at the time (I thought it was just something compete with SQLite), so I didn’t follow up to read more about. However, while wandering through the aisle at the local Costco (part of my weekend rituals), I happened to be listening to the FLOSS Weekly podcast #35 which featured an interview with MySQL’s Brian Akers and the topic was Drizzle.

The first thing I learned from the podcast is that Drizzle is NOT designed to compete with SQLite. What I did learn is that Drizzle is NOT a product. It sounds like it is more of a concept project that may result in some technologies that may be reintroduced back into MysQL. Drizzle itself is derived from MySQL code. However, its purpose is to strip out unnecessary features and legacy characteristics and to re-engineer the code to focus on web and cloud services. You could say it is taking MySQL back to its roots. I was happy to hear that the project is not attempting to be backward compatible with all the features of MySQL. For example, the current working versions only run on 64-bit systems. And, there is no build for Microsoft Windows yet.

I really hope Microsoft takes this same attitude and approach with a future version of Windows and re-imagine and re-engineer Windows down to basic, fast, secure components. They can provide a hypervisor layer to run legacy Windows applications on an as-needed basis. Many Mac users already do this using either Parallels Desktop for Mac or VMware Fusion to not only run Windows XP or Vista but to remove their visual surround (using features called Coherence by Parallels and Unity by VMware) to only display the Windows application’s window without the usual Microsoft Windows in the visual background. The Windows app, in effect, looks like it is part of Mac OS X. Bi-directional shared folders in the next version of VMware Fusion creates further application transparency by letting applications in either Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows (run by a hypervisor) access data files on either Windows’s virtual hard drive or the Mac’s physical drive.

Microsoft Port 25 MySQL related blog items

Wow, apparently Blackbox has been available for Windows for a while now, but I didn’t know it. If you aren’t familiar with Blackbox, it’s a Window Manager (WM) for X. You can compare an X Window Manager to the Windows Explorer. It’s the desktop interface that sits on top of the UI engine.

There are about as many WMs for X as there are stars in the sky, and each one is geared for people that have different needs. KDE (which is a WM+environment) is for those that need a full-featured interface with applications that have a consistent look&feel. Ditto for GNOME. WMs like Blackbox are built for speed. You can quickly access your applications, control the UI, etc., but it’s not heavy like KDE, GNOME, or.. Windows Explorer.

I may have to try this.

Essentially, Blackbox for Windows (bb4win) is a port of BB and can act as a replacement for Windows Explorer. That is, the Windows UI you are used to goes away and you get BB instead.

Have you tried this? Hmm, I may just check it out.

Here are some screenshots.

Microsoft is set to release Windows HPC Server 2008. According to people in the know, it’s supposed to be “a real milestone product for Microsoft”. Hmm, I’m curious. Read this blog on MSDN to learn more.

An interesting paragraph:

Windows HPC Server 2008 is about high performance computing on the Windows platform. Or highly productive performance computing how we call it on our main product website www.microsoft.com/hpc.

HPC = Highly Productive Performance Computing?

I visit SourceForge.net and Microsoft’s CodePlex.com once or twice a month to see what’s new and the most downloaded projects lists. The different natures of the top 10 most downloaded projects on each site always struck me as interesting. Let’s take a look at the what the lists looked like recently.

Three of the top 10 on CodePlex are product samples for SQL Server and SharePoint. The, there’s a couple of developer kits like AJAX Control Toolkit or .NET Reflector Add-Ins. There are only three rather narrow applications that can be used out-of-the-box as standalone projects: Rawr (for World of Warcraft players), Live Hits Finder, and Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager.

The top 10 on SourceForge have completely different complexion. All 10 projects provide out-of-the-box ready-to-use applications that most for end users.

There are, of course, many Open Source projects with end-user ready applications for Microsoft Windows (FileZilla, TrueCrypt, and 7-Zip come to mind) and are, in fact, often hosted on SourceForge. But, it seems to me that CodePlex’s real value will emerge if it became a destination site for both end-users and developers to go to for Open Source projects for Microsoft Windows. The samples and toolkits are fine. But, they don’t generate much interest or provide much value to the vast majority of Microsoft Windows users.

Microsoft Port 25 Codeplex related blog items

I have to admit I laughed when I read Randall Kennedy’s blog “Why FOSS is still so unusable”. Kennedy was himself commenting on another blog about the 15 reasons why FOSS projects often crap out. (The “15 reasons” blog has been getting popular and is making its round around the blogosphere.)

Kennedy obviously has some issues with the FOSS crowd, and I can’t say that he doesn’t have some justification for his feelings. For example, he comments that some FOSS developers tend to be lazy in how they approach their work; if you’ve ever looked in source code you may agree. That said, this affects “commercial” programmers as well. The “many eyes” FOSS approach doesn’t tend to counteract this problem.

Anyay, I invite you to read Kennedy’s blog and let me know your thoughts. Kennedy is obviously not in a loving mood with FOSS, and so his views are a tad on the extreme side I think, but that doesn’t discount everything that he says.

Why do FOSS projects have such bad User Interfaces (UI)? There are exceptions of course. However, there are a lot of X and web-based UI’s that are just.. confusing. I think this has to do with the fact that the FOSS coders want to focus on the internal guts of the application, instead of the User I/O layer (yes, I made that up and it’s a bad term). While I can see why that happens (heck, even I prefer to avoid the UI when possible), it can easily be argued that a good program with a bad UI is really just.. a bad program.

Thoughts?

Roger Klorese has a blog from a week or so ago about the upcoming XenServer Orlando beta. (Who’s going to beta this? I’d like to know what you find out.) XenServer is becoming a contender in the VM world, and it’s now owned and released by Citrix.

There are some cool features apparently that will be available in the beta, including (I’m copying from the original post):

• Automated high availability
• Windows Server 2008 guest support
• Persistent performance statistics and metrics
• Fully integrated Fibre Channel multipath support with configuration via XenCenter
• VM grouping, searching and tagging
• Email alerts
• Disaster recovery for VM metadata
• Active/active NIC aggregation
• Xen hypervisor updated to version 3.2
• XenConvert P2V migration tool
• Wider hardware support
…and many more.
Cool stuff.

Some of the real highlights seem to be:

• You can define resource pools, and assign priorities within those pools. Then, if you lose a VM, XenServer will restart that VM based on its priority. That way, if you lose a bunch of VMs then you get the mission-critical ones back first.
• XenConvert will be available to do P2V. This is cool since you can now do everything out-of-the-box, instead of relying on third party or manual processes.

I have often heard the argument that UNIX sysadmins are more expensive than their Windows counterparts are, but that UNIX sysadmins could manage more boxes at a time. All, some, or none of this may be true. I have not seen any studies on the latter statement, but the former seems to not be very true.

In his article, Murphy notes that payscale’s numbers show that UNIX sysadmins have a premium, but not a very large one. If you are an employer that uses UNIX, then this is good. If you are a UNIX sysadmin, perhaps not so good.

Murphy also discusses the latter statement to some extent, but instead of approaching it from the “more boxen” angle, he discusses how UNIX sysadmins tend to be a more varied lot and can often do more than sysadmin task (e.g., manage an Oracle database). I’m not so sure I agree with his logic. I know a large number of Windows sysadmins that also manage SQL Server for example.

Anyone know of some good research on how flexible Windows sysadmins are in comparison to UNIX sysadmins?

Just read about the Silverlight Flickr client (see above) that Microsoft’s Jimmy Schementi build for a talk to .NET developers there. The interesting thing is that he used IronRuby (his language of choice) instead of the C# or VB that we normally associate with the .NET Framework.

You can read what Jimmy has to say about this demo web app on his blog: Walk-through: Silverlight Flickr Client in IronRuby

And, the Silverlight Flickr Client itself can be checked out at: http://jimmy.schementi.com/silverlight/photoviewer/

Jimmy notes in his blog that it works fine in Firefox on a Mac but not in Safari.

Microsoft Port 25 Silverlight related blog items

I caught this on Slashdot over the weekend…

Microsoft Investing In “Open Source” Lab In Philippines

…and followed the link to the original article on GMANews.tv:

Microsoft launches open source lab in RP

According to GMA News article, the lab opens in September and will be located in the Philippines government National Computer Center (NCC) in Quezon City.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft-Open Source interoperability issues play out in Asia especially in active high-tech areas like the Philippines, China, South Korea, and Japan.

Robert Bruner has an excellent blog about the challenges facing management. I read the article and, generally, I have to agree with his view. As a quick list, here are the items Robert noted:

• Ubiquitous mobile connectivity and computing.
• Growing interactivity.
• Spreading norms of open source collaboration
• Increasing complexity of software service
• Unlimited and unfiltered access to products: “hits” versus the long tail
• Daily me

The two that I found the most fascinating were “Spreading norms of open source collaboration” and “Increasing complexity of software service”.

Opens source collaboration is about a lot more than just writing open source software. It is about the whole mentality that goes with being open, including “pen-source software consortiums, wikis, blogs, software mashups, chat rooms, social networking, peer-to-peer downloading, personal broadcasting, and the like”. In other words, it is about the community.

What is so exciting about open source and the open source community, to me at least, isn’t so much the software but the lifestyle and how its changing government, business, and our own personal lives.

There’s been a lot of interesting product wars over the years: WordPerfect vs. Word, 1-2-3 vs. Excel, Harvard Presentation Manager vs. PowerPoint, Novell vs. Windows NT, Netscape vs. Internet Explorer, Palm OS vs. Windows Mobile, and the list goes on and on.

One of the current product battles taking shape is in server virtualization. And, like many past product confrontations, Microsoft’s Hyper-V is the late-to-the-game underdog. VMware’s ESX and Vmotion are the clear market and technology leaders right now. And, there are other viable virtualization hypervisor alternatives including Sun xVM, KVM, and Parallels Server.

However, it doesn’t matter how good the underlying hypervisor is if you don’t have any Guest OS to install on it because of licensing problems. It is an easy decision to use CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, or any of the Debian derivatives because there is licensing issue I can think of with those Linux distros. This is important both to end-users and virtual appliance builders. And, it gives the LAMP stack an advantage over WAMP, WIMP, and WISP stacks for the same two groups.

Licensing issues are not limited to the Windows operating system itself. Virtualization has moved beyond simply virtualizing server stacks. In the past year we’ve see a huge movement towards virtualizing desktops and even individual applications. Both Microsoft and VMware have moved aggressively in this space buying technology to fill the gaps between virtualization tiers. But, still it is complicated, from a licensing point of view, to decide when you are able virtualize Windows Vista, Word, Exchange Server, and other licensed Microsoft products. Commercial Open Source products can create similar licensing issues. However, there is usually the option to use the lesser supported Community Editions of these kinds of products (MySQL, for example) for testing and development, for example.

All software firms with commercially licensed products need to resolve how to allow their customers to run their products in virtual environments.

Microsoft Port 25 virtualization related blog items

It’s in all the news of course: IBM is collaborating with Red Hat and Novell to offer “Microsoft-free” PCs. That’s not news (at least not in the blogosphere, which has had the story for a few days now).

However, the story does highlight something that I think is important to note. Namely, the near revolt by many Linux users against Novell for the Microsoft/Novell partnership is proving to be much adieu about nothing. Moreover, for Novell, it is not necessarily a bad deal. I have not seen any numbers coming out of the deal, but it is at least nice that Novell can claim the partnership when they are pushing for a big deal in a Microsoft-heavy shop.

All that said, let us not forget that there is something to be said about “either being for me or against me,” and some may feel that applies here. What do you think?

The Samba Team released version 3.2.1 on August 5. It includes a bunch of bug patches for the version 3.2 released on July 1. In addition to IPv6 support (has anyone deployed IPv6 seriously and widely???), the release notes indicates a couple of important support items for interoperability with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008.

• Full support for Windows 2003 cross-forest, transitive trusts and one-way domain trusts.
• Support for Active Directory LDAP Signing policy.
• Support for establishing interdomain trust relationships with Windows 2008.
• Support for joining into Windows 2008 domains.

Microsoft Port 25 Samba related blog entries

I have no idea who Matthew Paul Thomas is even after Google-ing (um, that should be using Google to search for more information) his name and learning he lives in New Zealand and has written some very interesting blog entires. However, I followed a link from Slashdot to his blog entry titled…

Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it

…and found a lot to agree with written there. Here’s his key points (be sure to head to his blog to read the text that follows each point).

1. Weak incentives for usability.
2. Few good designers.
3. Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed.
4. Usability is hard to measure.
5. Coding before design.
6. Too many cooks.
7. Chasing tail-lights.
8. Scratching their own itch.
9. Leaving little things broken.
10. Placating people with options.
11. Fifteen pixels of fame.
12. Design is high-bandwidth, the Net is low-bandwidth.
13. Release early, release often, get stuck.
14. Mediocrity through modularity.
15. Gated development communities.

Of course, usability issues are evident in proprietary for-fee software too! Windows Vista’s UAC (User Access Control) billions of clicks when I just want to copy my family photos from a hard drive to an external USB hard drive comes to mind. Corel’s Paint Shop Pro Photo X11 completely changed color balancing from earlier version leaving me dazed and confused when I wanted to fix the white balance of an outdoor photo taken with the wide balance set to a fluorescent light white balance setting is another one. And, then there’s the Apple’s application design standard that says the menu structure should be at the top of the primary screen. This is fine when you have one display. But, if you have two displays and have the application on the second display, you are forced to move the mouse to the primary display everything time you need to use a menu item (unless there is a keyboard shortcut and you know what it is).

I think freeware, Open Source, and proprietary software developers all have a lot to learn from each other’s design practices. And, Mr. Thomas’ list is a good starting point for everyone to take a look at and think about.

Microsoft Port 25 blog items tagged with ‘usability’

Ooh, now this is cool: Microsoft is now a contributing member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This does not mean that Microsoft is just talking the talk; they are actually putting up money to help support the management and coders that support Apache.

Microsoft was quick to say that:

It is not a move away from IIS as Microsoft’s strategic web server technology. We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP. We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8.

Okay, understood. Still, this is good. First, I have a strong suspicion that Microsoft is probably going to come up with a decent amount of cash for the ASF. That is good for the ASF and the Apache community as a whole. Second, this makes PHP even more viable (not that it ever wasn’t) as a direct competitor to ASP. Third, let’s not forget that ASF has its hands in Java as well (e.g., Tomcat), which is a competitor to the entire Windows platform in some ways.

On Wednesday, I asked about: Popular Open Source Projects Based on .Net? A bunch of people provided information about Open Source .Net projects I was unaware of. So, I decided to summarize the projects mentioned in response to my question in alphabetical order.

- Castle Project: Hmm, the projects flowery first paragraph doesn’t really tell me what it is. It looks like it started as a style of software construction and evolved into several glue-code type projects that includes an MVC web application framework, AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) and more.
- dasBlog: Blogging platform
- Lucene.net: This is an Apache incubator project of a port of the Lucene text search engine library written in Java
- mod_aspdotnet: A loadable Apache 2 module for serving ASP.NET content using the Microsoft’s ASP.NET hosting and .NET runtime within the Apache HTTP Server process
- mojoPortal: Web content management system (CMS)
- NHibernate for .Net: Port of the Java based Hibernate
- .netTiers: Application Framework
- npgsql: .Net Data Provider for Postgresql
- ScrewTurn Wiki: Wiki engine
- Subtext: Personal blog platform
- umbraco: CMS based on ASP.Net

Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond with information about Open Source .Net projects.

Microsoft .Net Framework blog entries on Port 25

TechNet Port25 has a short little blog from Richard Wilder, the… *draws breath* Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property Policy at Microsoft. First off, that is a very long title. I wonder when I will get one of those. Anyway, Richard makes a few notes about his stance and about that he is “pleased” with the direction that Microsoft is taking in regards to open source and openness.

Yet, 99.9% of the code that Microsoft develops continues to be closed source.

Microsoft has made some strides in being open. The fact that we are asked to blog about this very issue, with no editorial oversight by Microsoft, is some evidence of that. Moreover, Microsoft’s other forays into open source are also nice to see.

However, again, 99.9% of the code that Microsoft develops continues to be closed source.

How big of a change has really occurred at Microsoft?

What are the big Open Source projects based on or intertwined with the Microsoft .Net Framework? I knew of a couple of projects. But, I had a hard time getting beyond my personal recollections when I searched using Google in various ways. So, here’s the list of .Net based Open Source projects that I could remember.

- DekiWiki: Wiki
- DotNetNuke: Web development framework
- Mono Project: .Net port for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, Solaris
- Moonlight - Mono: Microsoft Silverlight port for Linux based on Mono
- Paint.net: Bitmap graphics editor
- SharpDevelop: IDE for C#/VB.net
- ZedGraph: .Net class library for charts and graphs

I guess I can also include…

NASA World Wind

…even though the .Net version has been abandoned when the project moved to Java.

So, what are the other popular Open Source projects based on .Net?

Microsoft’s John Lam announced the availability of ready-to-use binaries of the IronRuby alpha-release at OSCON last week. You can read more about it in his blog at…

IronRuby at OSCON

You can find the ZIP file download at…

RubyForge IronRuby Project download page

There’s no installer since it really doesn’t need one. Here’s what I did to make life a little easier for me. I installed it on both a Vista PC and an XP PC.

- Open the ZIP file using Windows Explorer. You don’t need any special software to open a ZIP file.
- Copy the folder named ironruby to C:\Program Files (on XP)
- Go to the bin subdirectory
- Right click on ir.exe and select . This will create a shortcut int he bin directory on XP. If you are using Vista, the shortcut will be placed on your Desktop instead.
- Right click the Start button and select Open all useres
- Cut the shortcut from the bin subdirectory and put it where it makes sense in your Start folder/menu hierarchy.
- Rename the Shortcut to ir.exe to something else if you want. I cleverly renamed it to IronRuby on my PC

So, we now have three first-class .Net dynamic languages available for Windows XP/Vista: PowerShell, IronPython, and IronRuby. Nice.

OK, I was caught by surprise (but pleased anyway) by these announcements by Microsoft’s Sam Ramji (Senior Director of Platform Strategy) in his blog entry…

history.forward()

The two that interested me most are…

1. Microsoft has become a sponsor of the Apache Foundation.

2. ADOdb patch for a native driver for PHP”built by the SQL Server team.

My take on both of these announcements is that they will enable Windows shops to more easily seriously consider running an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP and maybe Python and Perl too) stack on Windows (WAMP). This should help AMP based web products get some consideration in these Windows shops.

A powerful 6.8 earthquake struck near Hachinohe, Japan earlier this week (USA Today: Earthquake hits Japan, more than 100 injured). My wife and daughter happened to be about 200 miles south-southwest of the quake when it struck shortly after midnight (my daughter is participating in a sporting event there). Everyone there is safe, btw. But, a curious thing was noted when everyone gathered in the morning: All the parents accompanying their children felt the tremors and woke up. None of the kinds (between 6 and 13) noticed the tremors and slept through the night.

Bryan Kirschner (Director of Open Source Strategy at Microsoft) in his blog item titled…

Participating Actively

…responds to Infoworld’s Rodrigues & Urlocker commentary…

Microsoft at OSCON

…who wrote: Brian Kirschner pointed out that Microsoft has 400 open source projects. Most people would struggle to name even a handful. (Ok, at MySQL we use WiX, the Windows Intaller (sic), so I know about that one, and also IronPython sounds cool.) Kirschner, Sam Ramji and others are helping Microsoft develop a better understanding of open source, but Microsoft still has a long way to go towards putting it into action..

I think Rodrigues & Urlocker make a good point. And, while I can’t name many of the 400 Microsoft open sourced projects either, I can think of two that could make a huge difference: IronPython and IronRuby. Back in the old days, PC-DOS (IBM) and MS-DOS (everyone else) came with BASIC or GW-BASIC and a couple of sample apps. I’d bet a lot of people started programming with one of these versions of Microsoft’s BASIC interpreter and made their early computing days more productive by writing little apps to get a few things done. That is one of the aspects of computing that has nearly disappeared because Microsoft Windows doesn’t ship with a simple programming environment anymore. Mac OS X, on the other hand, not only ships with a bunch of Open Source development tools like Ruby, but also provides their XCode and Automator to let anyone develop anything from little toy utilities to full blown applications. Microsoft has both PowerShell and Visual Studio Express Editions available as free downloads. But, PowerShell is mostly aimed at system administrators while Visual Studio Express Editions are a bit heavy for even casual programming.

I think Microsoft should include IronPython, IronRuby, and some lightweight (but relatively powerful) editor like Notepad++ in every copy of Windows 7 when it is released. It would not only provide a strong message of Microsoft’s support of interoperating with Open Source products (in this case, their own), but might restart the casual programming movement that fired up the computing revolution.

I’ve been cleaning up and re-organizing my home office this week and found all kinds of stuff that didn’t survive into the 21st century for one reason or other. In the photo above, you can see an OS/2 binder, a 5.25″ floppy, a digital tape labeled 350 but was actually a 170MB (not GB) tape that might get near 350MB with compression, a 56Kbps PC Card modem, a font cartridge for the HP Deskjet, and one of the manuals from Paradox for Windows. In many cases, it appears to me (as an outsider) that many of the entities behind these products simply didn’t notice the various technology quakes shaking the industry and became irrelevant. It should be interesting to see which of today’s products and technologies are irrelevant in 2018.

Now, back to cleaning up my home office. Any suggestions what I should do with a couple of hundred CDs from beta tests and ancient MSDN subscriptions? Some sort of giant artwork? :-)

Yesterday, I commented on Andy Patrizio excellent blog about some potentially high-reward buy-outs/merges, and one of those was Microsoft and Salesforce.com. (Yesterday I focused on Dell potentially buying SGI.) I did some thinking about Microsoft and Salesforce and I like that idea even more than I like the idea of Dell buying out SGI.

Here is why:

• Microsoft is pushing into the whole SaaS world, certainly, but it is lagging behind. This is partially because it has no choice but to keep a lot of focus on its sources of income.
• Salesforce.com definitely knows what its doing and is building a significant platform in the cloud on which to build future enterprise applications.
• Salesforce.com is agile. Microsoft, alas, is not.
• Salesforce.com is not OS-driven, it’s capabilities-driven.

All that said, if Microsoft, as it currently exist, were to buy or try to merge with Salesforce, then Salesforce would simply cease to exist. To counter this, Patrizio talks about Microsoft spinning off its low-end divisions and focusing on the mid- and enterprise-market.

I have to admit I am not so sure about that last part. Much of Microsoft’s advantage is based on the sheer number of users. It can leverage those numbers to get mindshare and to finance projects which begin with a loss but that can develop into new profit centers. So this would certainly be a HUGE gamble.

What do you think?

Computerworld has an article titled…

Study: IT jobs will drop in 2009

…that reports the findings of a Goldman-Sachs survey of top CIOs (100 decision making managers at mostly Fortune 1000 firms). The article quotes Goldman Sachs speaking in terms of a cost-constrained IT budget scenario. OK, that makes sense given the current economic outlook. They go on to say that server virtualization and server consolidation are their No. 1 and No. 2 priorities. This makes sense too. The 3rd through 5th priorities are cost-cutting, application integration, and data center consolidation. So far, so good. The summary finishes up saying that the bottom of the priority list consists of grid computing, open-source software, content management and cloud computing.

Charles King of Pund-IT, Inc., is quoted saying that the surveyed managers and CIOs simply don’t understand the value of their low-priority items. I agree with Mr. King. In an budget constrained IT environment, Open Source and Cloud Computing are exactly the kinds of technologies that should at least be evaluated.

If you run into any of the Microsoft Open Source Labs (Port 25) people at OSCON, you might want to ask them if they could say a few words about these items sent to the bottom of the priority list by Fortune 1000 decision makers.

Snazzy headline, no? Andy Patrizio over at internetnews just made a very good case for some e-marriages, including:

• Apple and nVidia
• Dell and SGI
• Microsoft and Salesforce.com

I have to admit that it is difficult to argue with the logic, although I am sure a little more time of thinking on this would end the insanity. Or perhaps not.

Let’s talk about Dell and SGI for one. SGI, which, frankly, I had rather forgotten about, is still out there and focusing on high-end supercomputing. This is not exactly news to anyone, and has not been for a while I suppose. SGI has always focused on the high-end market (although they did make a push toward the mass market if I remember correctly), and when they started getting into financial trouble they began to regear and refocus. It seems that their strategy may be working.

SGI seems to be making the “niche player” come back in style. The computer market is a commodity market. Only the high-end, including mainframes and supercomputers, can be considered specialized. SGI knows this and instead of fighting a losing battle with IBM, Sun, HP, Dell, and others, they instead are taking advantage of their existing expertise.

A Dell buy-out could very well give Dell that high-end appeal that it lacks. However, it could also saddle Dell with a set of skills that it cannot handle or, more to the point, capitalize on. Dell is a mass-market company. That is what they do. It’s not often that I visit a colo facility anymore, but when I do all I really see are blue lights spread across a considerable amount of square feet, and we all know what those blue lights are.

I’m going to give some more thought to Patrizio idea about Microsoft and Salesforce and blog about that tomorrow. Hmm. Interesting.

P.S. Sorry for the whole “e-marriages” word.

Microsoft’s Port 25 announced that MindTouch has a beta MSI installer for their Deki Wiki software. So, I decided to install it in Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and ran into a MySQL problem in my first attempt. Fortunately for me, eagle eye Max noticed the doesn’t have a default value part of the error message and told me that the problem is that the freshly installed copy of MySQL 5.0.51b sets SQL to strict mode that disallows empty fields (no default value). So, I went to C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\my.ini and commented out the line as shown below.

This led to a successful configuration and installation of MySQL tables (see below).

One oddity showed up though. For some reason, MindTouch has Google Analytics code with the key US-68075-16 reporting back. You can strip this out. But, I’m curious why every installation has a Google Analytics code embedded in it (see below).

However, as you can see from the screen cap below, Deki Wiki is indeed running on my virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition now.

I took a look at MindTouch’s Deki Wiki about a year ago. I decided to use Mediawiki for the project but recall being impressed with a number of Deki Wiki’s features. One of the reasons I decided not to use Deki Wiki was the need to install and maintain Mono on my Linux box. Mediawiki just needed a LAMP (where P = PHP in this case) platform stack that was already a supported stack. Adding Mono would increase the stack management support requirements.

So, I was interested to learn that MindTouch announced a beta release of a Deki Wiki MSI installer for Windows Server 2008 (and 2003 later).

Mindtouch: Deki, OSS and Windows

A WIMP (Windows+.NET, IIS, MySQL, PHP) environment is an easily supportable environment for a Windows-focused shop. So, I decided to take a look at this beta release and create a test installation.

Deki Wiki needs MySQL 5.0.45 or newer. So, I installed MysQL 5.0.51b (the current production release) on a clean Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition installation with all current Windows patches applied. This is running in a VMware Fusion virtual machine. The initial Deki Wiki installation phase seemed to go smoothly. I noted that it enabled FastCGI for IIS7. Looking at the installation directories, I saw that it also installed a PHP engine for its use.

However, as you can see from the screencap above, Deki Wiki’s configuration failed while attempting to insert a record into MySQL. I’ll send an email message to MindTouch support and point them to this blog. it is a beta-release. So, these kinds of problems can be expected. I’m hoping to be able to successfully install and test the Deki Wiki MSI installer on its next release.

So in a recent blog I brought up IBM Lotus Symphony, and during the discussion that followed a mention was made about Abiword. I have to admit, I have not looked at Abiword in a VERY LONG TIME.

I just checked out Abiword again on their website, and I have to say they have made a lot of progress. It is not a bad piece of software. And.. It’s light. Microsoft Office is a big application. OpenOffice is a big application. But Abiword is rather targeted and not all that large. At all. A quick run through a download seems to be pretty snappy.

Hmm. Not a bad choice for PCs that don’t have Microsoft Office installed at the factory..

AbiWord: A Worthy, Free Microsoft Alternative

AbiWord: A Scalpel, Not a Chain Saw

If you come from a UNIX/Linux background, you probably rubbed your chin or scratched your head thinking two things when Microsoft announced PowerShell (codenamed Monad when it the first beta was released in 2005): 1. Well, it is about time! 2. Why didn’t they just port or copy Bash (or csh or zsh or whatever you favorite *nix shell is)?

Linux Magazine’s Marcus Nasarek took the issue literally and wrote a 2-page PDF document comparing and constrasting Bash and PowerShell. The download is linked at…

SHELL GAMES : Comparing Bash with the Windows Vista shell

For me, PowerShell has had a odd learning curve. It sort of looks like the old DOS CMD shell when you first bring it up. But, that is all there is: A superficial resemblance. This might throw off Windows/DOS users. It also has kind of a Bash/Perl feel to it at first. But, the differences show up pretty fast as you explore PowerShell. Nasarek’s article does a good job of comparing and contrasting Bash and PowerShell in the 2 page PDF. Any *nix shell user who may need to work with PowerShell on Windows Servers will find this article interesting.

Microsoft Port 25 PowerShell blog posts

Every now and then I get the urge to the the Microsoft Open Source Labs people to talk to the freeware Visual Studio Express group about tweaks to make it aware of various FOSS languages like Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. After all, way back in 2001, Microsoft worked with ActiveState to produce Visual Perl and Visual Python. There’s also a current 3rd party project on Microsoft Codeplex named IronPython Studio that uses the royalty free Visual Studio 2008 Shell runtime that doesn’t need Visual Studio itself to be installed.

I usually back off the idea because there are a number of free and/or Open Source developer platforms and advanced programmer’s editors that are also multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/BSD/UNIX). Four that I have used over the years are Eclipse (gave up on it), NetBeans (playing with it), Komodo Edit (use it frequently), and jEdit (used to use it a lot but have not recently). But, I still think it would be a good idea to tweak a free Visual Studio Express edition for IronPython, IronRuby, and PHP.

There is, btw, a third party for-fee tool for the full Visual Studio 2005/2008 and PHP: VS.Php 2.4 for Visual Studio. There’s also a prototype form designer for IronRuby: IronRuby Visual Designer.

OK, I admit the subject line is a bit misleading. IronPython 2.0 Beta 3 has nothing to do with Python 3.0. However, since Python 3.0 might be released as early as next month (August), I wondered if there are Python 3.0 related plans for IronPython.

So, I checked various Microsoft IronPython blogs….

- The IronPython Team Blog
- Jim Hugunin’s blog
- Harry Pierson’s blog
- Dino Viehland’s blog
- Srivatsn Narayanan blog

…and didn’t see anything regarding Python 3.0. So, I used Google and found Michael Foord’s blog entry titled…

Python 3.0, IronPython 3.0, Robots, Talks and Python in Interesting Places

…who way back in early 2007 reported from PyCon that… Importantly, Python 3.0 was up on the list. The IronPython team is definitely intending to support Python 3.0.

So, IronPython 2.0 looks like it is on track. Python 3.0 looks like it is close to release. The question is when these two will sync up.

Microsoft Port 25 IronPython blog items

I just read this little news release about the Sydney Diocese of the Anglican Church moving away from Windows and Microsoft to open source solutions. Very interesting! What really causes my eye was this:

Office will be the first to go. Lymbers had two alternatives for replacing Microsoft Office: OpenOffice and IBM’s Lotus Symphony, based on OpenOffice source code. He decided to go with the IBM solution, on security and support grounds.

The fact that he went with Lotus Symphony over OpenOffice is more interesting to me than the fact that he is leaving Microsoft Office for OpenOffice. Why? Because IBM is a household name, while OpenOffice is most certainly not.

I wonder how many more consumers, small businesses, and enterprises would be more open to the OpenOffice journey if they were able to go along for the ride with IBM? Lotus Symphony is OpenOffice+, from what I have seen, so you get the benefit of OpenOffice and open source and the name of IBM.

Plus, you have the option of getting support from IBM.

And that is a major selling point.

And read this little ditty:

Organizations which Lymbers’ services — including schools, youth groups and aged care villages — will be able to go onto the Web, and click on an icon which is via thin client that will open an open-source Word. “They can open it up and it’s totally safe and secure,” Lymbers said.

Death of the Desktop you say?

I just read about…

SharpOS 0.0.1

…which is an Open Source project attempting to write an Operating System (OS) in C# based on Microsoft .Net technology. I’m not sure about the .Net part of the statement. But, I downloaded the 840KB (that’s right, kilobytes, not mega- or giga-bytes) ISO file and fired it up in virtual machine using Virtual Box running on a Mac (OS X 10.5 Leopard). As you might guess from the 0.0.1 release number, the project is still in the early stages of development. But, combined with their SharpSQL relational database (no binaries released for this one yet), they should have an interesting platform to look at in a couple of years.

I wonder if someone from the Microsoft Open Source Labs group has spoken with the members of this project yet?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The operating system on your computer is becoming less and less important. Really. In the next three to four years, I think the desktop OS will become a minimal consideration. Why?

Because most people could care less what OS they are running.

They just want to be able to:

• Do their work.
• Access their documents.
• Read and send email.
• Goof around.

That’s about it.

So how is that happening? Well, obviously the whole Web experience is having a huge impact. Moreover, some things that before were a pain or at least difficult, e.g., using webmail as your only email client, is slowly going the way of the dinosaur. Look at gAttach, which lets you use Gmail as your default email application for Windows. You can email people, attach files, and even use Send To right from your desktop.

At a higher level, we have companies like Citrix and even Microsoft which is making server computing more critical every day to enterprises. Server computing is probably going to be one of the strongest motivators for minimizing the importance of the desktop OS. Really, does it matter if you are running Windows Vista if all of your enterprise applications are available via seamless windows on a Citrix server?

This is good for Linux and open source operating systems in general. If the underlying desktop OS doesn’t matter because application compatibility issues go away, then why not run Linux on all of your desktop systems in a corporate environment?

Naturally, this begs a future blog on how these organizations can manage Linux and other open source OSs in the same way that they can with AD and GPOs.

The other month I blogged about OpenOffice and the fact that it tends to be marginalized in the face of free and commercial products. Most readers did not particularly like that stance. Lou Dolinar just blogged about OpenOffice, but focused instead on what is actually holding it back.

Lou makes some good points, including notes on:

• Compatibility
• Lock-in
• OpenXML

Notice that the technology of OpenOffice is not really mentioned outside of how it is able to interact with Microsoft Office files. The OpenXML format was touted as being a way out of this, but OpenXML does not exactly have the best reputation in the open source community right now.

All this said, I am still very curious about the technology side, especially when it comes to manageability in a large environment. How well does OpenOffice fare against Office in terms of automated deployment, configuration, and upgrades? What has been your experience?

Apache released their HTTP Server 2.2.9 on Friday the 13th last month (obviously no superstitious people on the release team).

Apache HTTP Server 2.2.9 Released

Every now and then, I install the latest Apache web server on a Windows server just to see what it looks like there (compared to the Linux installations I use for production and testing). So, it is always interesting to read the Apache Windows README text to see what it says. One of the more interesting warnings is for people running Windows NT 4.0 or older (Windows 95, etc.) to move to another platform (like Linux). It looks like Windows 2000 is still supported. So, this seems like a reasonable request to me. The question that comes to mind though is: Who is running any version of Apache httpd on Windows 95, 98, or NT 4? And, why are they running it on these ancient versions of Windows? I’m guessing there are some pretty interesting stories out there. And, if you have any to share, I’m sure other people are curious too.

Microsoft Port 25 Apache rellated blog items

Just spotted this by Paula Bach over on Microsoft’s Port 25 site…

CodePlex project developers wanted

The data from the project will be used for Paula’s PhD dissertation project which looks at usability support features in Open Source projects.

When I saw this ZDNet blog headline in my RSS feed the other day…

ZDNet - Dana Blankenhorn & Paula Rooney: Will Bill Gates’ departure usher in open source friendly era at Microsoft?

…my first thought was: Here we go again, another uninformed opinion. But, if you’ve opened the link in another tab and read their blog item already, you know that this was not the case. It was just a good attention grabbing blog title with some interesting quotes from players in the Open Source community.

My gut instinct is that Microsoft’s Open Source strategy will continue to follow the trajectory we’ve seen for the past three years or so. Like any complex undertaking, there will be three steps forward with the occasional two steps back every now and then.

I read about the U.S. government’s USAsearch.gov site using the Vivisimo engine for search federal, state, and local government sites in the U.S. This is the same engine used by the Clusty search site (which somehow always reminds me of Krusty the clown from the Simpsons :-).

The first phrase that came to mind to search for was Open Source. But, the result surprised me although I should not have been surprised. Why? The first hit was a site named OpenSource.gov. That makes sense, right? And, it does unless you are a tech geek (like me and most of you reading this) and always think of Open Source in terms of software. In government lingo Open Source means available sources of intelligence information (not in the espionage sense of the word). So, in their own words: OpenSource.gov provides timely and tailored translations, reporting and analysis on foreign policy and national security issues from the Open Source Center and its partners.

For some reason, after slapping my forehead and uttering a Homer-esque “Doh!” when I realized my error, I thought about Sam Ramji’s blog entry titled Managing Towards Open. And then, with all seriousness, it occurred to me that Microsoft’s Open Source Labs is performing somewhat similar work as OpenSource.gov by gathering intelligence about software countries (so to speak) with different philosophies like various Open Source licenses (both in the free as in freedom and free as in beer - or carbonated beverages in my case).

BTW: I found it a bit odd that my search on USAsearch.gov using both “open source” and “open source” + “software” didn’t actually result in many finds or of the ones kinds of results I expected (SELinux, NASA related projects, etc.).

Here’s something that’s a bit dated (a few weeks old) but something I’ve been meaning to mull over and comment on. On May 28, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said that…

Open source a more disruptive competitor than Google (as reported on ZDNet by Mary-Jo Foley)

Mary Jo Foley goes on to report that: Ozzie said that competing with open source “made Microsoft a much stronger company.” He cited changes Microsoft has made to its business model — such as focusing on making its closed-source software interoperable with open-source products — as directly attributable to that competition.

If you take this view and combine it with the information we’ve been reading over on…

Microsoft Port 25

…it really looks like Open Source is not only a beneficial disruptive technology for Microsoft, it is also also becoming more of a “co-opetition” partner. Zend, Spikesource, and Novell/SUSE are just some recent examples. And, there are also the in-house projects like IronPython and IronRuby. There’s also cooperation between Microsoft and the Mozilla Firefox and Samba projects.

This is certainly better for all concerned than the Microsoft vs. Open Source situation just a few years ago. Is there a lot of work to be done? Sure. Are there going to be more issues and fireworks in the future. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is :-)

The Open Source Census is a collaborative project that collects Open Source usage information from companies that volunteer the information. The OSS Discovery tool requires Ruby to be installed on a system to be run. The tool collects fingerprints of many Open Source applications on the scanned computer (it does NOT crawl the network). The results are submitted anonymously to the project.

The project was started by OpenLogic and is sponsored by numerous entities including Collabnet, IDC, Microsoft, the Open Source Business Association, and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab.

The brand new IronRuby.net Wiki fired up yesterday (June 19). This wik.is Deki Wiki based site. This is the place to go for information about IronRuby. IronRuby currently requires you to download and build from source. But, as soon as the lazy geek version (pre-compiled and ready to install) binaries are ready, you can expect a lot of people heading to this site to learn more about IronRuby.

This is by no means new news, but I just read a blog from Matthew McKenzie about WRT54G-based open source routers and it got me thinking.

First though, for those not in the know, the Linksys WRT54G can be loaded with a custom Linux kernel and other features so that instead of getting the stock Linksys feature-set, you can run a more powerful router package and do everything from IP- and port-forwarding (most Linksys routers only do port-forwarding) to web filtering (well, to some limited extent because of the limited memory available).

Anyway, the real question: Where are the open source ENTERPRISE routers?

Matthew mentions that it is viable to run a custom WRT54G for a SMB, but I do not see this happening in the enterprise arena anytime soon. That said though, why isn’t there a big move toward open source enterprise routers?

I understand that the big profit in the network world, even for mostly hardware vendors like Cisco, are the up-sells of software, but it does seem to me that a hardware market is a hardware market, and that having a suite of routers that are based on open source could be a viable route to go.

Anandeep just wrote a little blog questioning the long-term link between High Performance Computing (HPC) and open source. His logic boils down to this:

1. HPC, like many other technologies, starts with the need for a small set of people to do something new.
2. Those people build the tools that they need.
3. When they let others use those tools, they assume the other people have the domain knowledge to properly deploy and use them.
4. Power, flexibility, and control are key at this stage and so open source has a strong hold
5. Over time, more and more people use the tools, so ease-of-use becomes more important.
6. Ease-of-use becomes more critical, so whether a platform or application is open source becomes less important.

I do not think I necessarily agree with this logic, at least not totally. I do think it is true that over time that ease-of-use will become more and more important (actually, it is already becoming the case). However, HPC is a very special beast. For one thing, hardware is still the ruling champion in HPC, and will be for some time to come. Therefore, the issue becomes how the owner of a HPC environment maximizes their hardware investment. Generally, they have to tweak the software to best fit that environment. Thus, the need for open source.

Now, I can see how there is convergence, even in HPC, toward a few specific hardware platforms and models of computing. So software vendors will be able to narrow down their scope, and thus the need for flexibility and control will diminish over time. However, that is going to be quite a while.

I just read through “Technical Analysis: Security Considerations for rdesktop and Windows Terminal Services” at Technet. Nothing too big here. The security issues of rdesktop are no different than that of Microsoft’s mstsc.exe client.

However, the paper did leave me with a few questions:

1. There is a not that rdesktop supports an -E option which prevents encryption of the login packet, which could potentially expose a password. Let us ignore the client for now. Why does RDP even support this?

2. Why doesn’t RDP, the protocol, support Kerberos? That is something I have never been able to understand. If it did, then you would get automatic logics from a client to server, regardless of whether you were using mstsc.exe or rdesktop, assuming you had your Windows desktop as part of AD or setup Kerberos between your Linux/UNIX workstation and AD (which is quite doable).

The author, Chris Travers, makes note of the fact that RDP was built around the OSI model instead of TCP/IP, thus it approaches things differently (e.g., not supporting Kerberos). I just do not follow this logic. Kerberos support can be added. What is taking so long?

I was just reading Chris Travers’…

Technical Analysis: Remote Administration of Windows Systems with SSH (9 page PDF)

…which discusses using SSHWindows in a minimal installation of Cygwin. I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable installing Cygwin for just a single function (even one as important as allowing secure SSH access). But, Chris’ analysis makes it worthwhile to look at this method if you want to use SSH to work with a remote Microsoft Windows system.

There is an alternative, however. freeSSHd is a freeware ssh server for Microsoft Windows. It seems a little unstable. So, I wouldn’t recommend it for serious systems work at this stage of its development. However, it does not need Cygwin to be installed to work and seems to work well enough when it is up and running (it has crashed on me a few times). I’m going to keep my eye on future freeSSHd development and hope it becomes more stable in the near future.

One other item: In his closing thoughts section of the paper, Chris says: SSH is not as useful on Windows as it is on Linux, in part due the differences between how remote access to graphical applications is handled, and in part due to the fact that Windows is not generally as command-line oriented as Linux.

While I agree with Chris in general, I think that Microsoft PowerShell is a game changer. Microsoft PowerShell gives system administrators deep system access at the command line level. It basically makes a command line window a usable shell in the way UNIX/Linux shells are. I found that I could start PowerShell up after logging in to a Windows XP box. xterm looked a little odd after starting PowerShell. However, switching the xterm color scheme from black-on-white to white-on-black (old school terminal look) took care of most of the viewing problems (though not all).

I’m may have a bit more free time than usual in July and August. So, I may take more time looking at remotely managing Windows workstations and servers from a command line (shelled in through SSH) using PowerShell. I think this is the way I will prefer to manage Windows servers in the future (especially since that is the way I work with Linux boxes right now).

FYI: The screen-cap above is a CentOS 4 Linux installing running in a Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine accessing the host Windows XP through an ssh session to freeSSHd running on XP.

code_swarm is an animated visualization of the development of software. Its site currently has animated visualizations for Apache httpd, Eclipse, PostgreSQL, and Python.

code_swarm: An experiment in organic software visualization

You can see code and developers in the animations. Really fascinating to watch.

A project was recently removed from Codeplex because it was not offering the source code. The project, Sandcastle, apparently violated Microsoft’s “Open Source policy”. Thus, Microsoft removed the project.

That’s cool and all, but that is not what is really of note. The big news item here is that “A number of people have alerted me in the last 24 hours that a Microsoft project called Sandcastle, located on Codeplex, used the Ms-PL and called itself “open source” yet never posted the source code.”

That’s notable.

The moral of the story here is not that Microsoft removed an offending non-open source project from Codeplex, but that members of the community noticed and their comments made a difference.

And that, to me, is one of the big wins about open source and collaborative efforts that [try] to build communities: The community can self-police.

If Microsoft, IBM, or any company, no matter how big, tries to police this type of community, it will not work. The problem? There just is not enough money put into these online communities/efforts to enable them to review every piece of software. Instead, the community that is being built around the effort must do the job.

John Lam (of IronRuby fame) started summarizing his TechEd 08 experience at…

IronRuby at Tech Ed 2008

Be sure to click on the whiteboard photo in his blog entry. The higher resolution images on Flickr will let you read the whiteboarded IronRuby FAQ intended for the mostly enterprise-oriented TechEd attendees, many of whom had never heard of Ruby or IronRuby. I do wonder, though, if the IronRuby.com scrawled in the middle of a whiteboard is a typo of sorts. Shouldn’t that be IronRuby.net?

Port 25 Ruby related blog items

They listened! I just blogged yesterday about the UI of Codeplex (well, a bit) and apparently there is at least some effort in getting the Codeplex community to help better design the way that Codeplex works.

I should add a caveat to this blog though: I just lied. Paula wrote her blog a few days ago, so she beat me to the punch. Damn. Well, better late than never.

Anyway, Codeplex really does need a better interface. There is just something not-so-usable about it. For one, SF tends to have a better idea of how to organize their projects. I hope Codeplex follows their lead. (Freshmeat isn’t bad at this either.)

Okay, okay, so Microsoft makes forays into open source now and then, including both Codeplex and even some sponsored projects that are hosted on Sourceforge. It looks like they made a bit of a more high-profile push, in marketing terms, by becoming a “Diamond Sponsor” of the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards. Nifty. Nice to see a little money thrown in the pot, even if it is not a significant amount of money. (We takes what we can gets, eh?)

While thinking on Codeplex, have you taken a look lately? It has grown since I last looked. Frankly, I have never really liked the interface of the site, but then again some people don’t like Sourceforge’s UI either (I do).

(The main page is mostly useless. Use this link instead.)

I just looked through some of the projects, and… hmm, well, there needs to be more on there. For one thing, I cannot believe that an AJAX library is #1 on the site. I mean, AJAX? Sure, it’s big and cool and all Web 2.0, but #1?

Oh, and where are the Powershell projects!? I’ve complained about scripting under Windows before, and, obviously, I’ll need to blog about it again, but I just still don’t see a huge Powershell community developing. I hope one develops, but I don’t see a grassroots effort yet, and that’s when you get momentum.

Hmm, Powershell..

Microsoft has a PDF paper describing the history of the IronPython project at…

IronPython: Engaging the Python Community in Its Own Language (5 page PDF)

The paper describes the germ IronPython in 2003 when Jim Hugunin began wondering if Python could run on the .Net Common Language Runtime (CLR), his work at Microsoft leading to IronPython 0.7 in 2005, the 2007 1.1 version release, and the community input that helped solve dealing with the different .Net and native Python string types.

The final section of the paper describes the IronPython based dynamic spreadsheets developed by Resolver Systems.

Microsoft recently posted a 5 page PDF (3 pages of content) titled…

PHP on Windows: Community Involvement Improves Performance (5 page PDF download)

The paper focuses on the background of two projects that enhanced the use of PHP on Windows Servers. The first effort described is the partnership between Microsoft and Zend that resulted in the development of the FastCGI Extension that essentially allowed PHP to be a first-class citizen when used on a Windows Server with IIS. The second effort described is the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP developed internally by the SQL Server team.

Two other projects are briefly mentioned at the end of the paper. The first is the Phalanger project which is a PHP compiler for the .NET Framework (and Mono). The other is the PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library.

I’ve been mostly interested in Ruby for the past couple of years. But, before developing that interest, I spent a lot of time writing little utilities (and a few not so little ones) in Python. I decided to check where the IronPython project is these days and found that they released IronPython 2.0 Beta 2 last month on May 2. You can find it on Codeplex (installable binary, source code, and documentation) at…

IronPython 2.0 Beta 2

Here’s the 2.0 Beta 2 Release Notes.

Nifty! So Asus is set to have an Instant “On” Linux for a line of their notebooks. (And, yes, it supports instant “Off” as well.)

Going back a few years.. well, a few decades.. the whole instant “On” concept is certainly not new. I am trying desperately to remember the name of an 8-bit system that would “instantly” turn on or off and always have your work sitting there waiting for you where you left off.

But we’ve all become so accustomed to having to wait on computers to boot software which we then use to run other software which we have to wait on to do anything. Sigh. It is a little sad.

Anyway, I am hoping this marks a wider trend of focusing more on having computers that act like typical electronic devices and less like, well, computers.

Funny article:

http://www.bspcn.com/2007/12/03/5-things-we-miss-about-old-school-computing/

I wanted to learn more about using Microsoft Silverlight with IronRuby. So, I turned to Jimmy Schementi’s blog jimmy.thinking. Why Jimmy’s blog? Because he is a Program Manager for Dynamic Language Runtime. If anyone knows something about this stuff, it is Jimmy. One of the things I learned from his blog (and there’s a lot to learn there) is that the Microsoft Silverlight.net site now has an area for…

Microsoft Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK

You can download the Silverlight SDK to develop Silverlight applications using IronPython or IronRuby. You’ll also find samples, documentation, and video talks/demonstrations here. The link to the Getting Started with Silverlight MSDN area seems slightly broken. Try this MSDN Silverlight link instead. And, be sure to check out the Breaking Changes in Silverlight 2 MSDN page too.

There is nothing new these days about virtualization, whether at the server- or desktop-level. Nevertheless, a recent announcement by Virtual Iron and 2X did remind me yet again that virtualization is starting to change the very foundation of how software companies, including Microsoft, can position and profit off the desktop experience.

One of the big issues with Linux, even to this day, is compatibility and accessibility. However, as we see more widespread use of virtualized desktop environments and remote access to terminal service-based applications (including the whole “seamless windows” experience), the underlying core OS on the desktop under someone’s desk becomes less and less relevant.

That is a big win for Linux because it is obviously the low-cost solution and it can be well managed across a large set of systems via automated systems.

But, the money is always going to be in the OS and applications that are in front of the user, not the underlying OS on which virtualization software is running. That is where terminal services and seamless windows will help push Linux over the edge in terms of accessibility, compatibility, and, in real business terms, usability for end-users that are generating the revenue to keep businesses in the black.

My point: virtualization and server-based computing will help push Linux on the desktop.

Ostatic posed four Open Source related questions to three key Microsoft people: Sam Ramji (Director of the Open Source Labs), Ori Amiga (Live Developer Platform Group Product Manager), and Susan Hauser (General Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Licensing). The questions were:

• Microsoft has, in the past, employed key open source development concepts such as modular architectures in its own products. Do you foresee more of this, including developing directly on top of existing open source platforms?
  
• What do you think is missing in the open source community as a whole? Better marketing for commercial efforts? Better compatibility?
  
• Does Microsoft’s recently announced Live Mesh platform have implications that the open source community ought to know about?
  
• What goals do you have for Microsoft’s interoperability alliance with Novell, and what’s behind the goal of converting Linux users in the Chinese market to SUSE Linux Enterprise?
  

Microsoft’s Port 25 has a blog entry…

Technical Analysis: VIM, PowerShell and Signed Code

…pointing to an 8 page PDF with detailed instructions for installing a PowerShell Syntax file for the Vim editor. The paper also has a section discussing deal with digital signature code signing when editing PowerShell scripts using Vim.

You can find more information about PowerShell here.

This Vim/PowerShell document was written by Chris Travers who does his usual excellent job of explaining how to use Open Source tools in a Windows environment.

As an aside, as daily vi user, even I’m not sure why I prefer vi/vim to many fancier editors with all kind of features. I think it basically comes down to speed and finger muscle memory after all these decades of vi use :-)

If you are interested in tracking IronRuby’s progress, John Lam’s blog is NOT the place to look these days. The place to look for IronRuby progress information is his Twitter account: John_Lam.

The apparent need people have for up to the minute updates on information of all kinds has pushed us from articles on websites to blogs and now to micro-blog-presence type services like Twitter.

You can find regular blog-sized Ruby and IronRuby items on…

Port 25 Ruby Blog Items

And, I just created a separate Twitter account for posting tech items that interest me (Open Source, Microsoft, Apple Mac OS X, mobile technology, green IT, etc.) at… toddogasawara

I just saw a note that yet another VAR is offering Open-Xchange to its client. Not a big story, but it did get me thinking about the current marketplace for open source Exchange replacements.

Let’s keep in mind that the “open source” market for Exchange replacements is actually a tad on the muddy side. Most of the replacements are more about being free, to some extent, than completely open source, e.g., Zimbra is MOSTLY open source, but the commercially licensed software does come with software that is not exactly open. Ditto for Scalix and a few others.

So maybe we should just consider Exchange replacements. Off the top of my head, we have:

• Zimbra
• Scalix
• Open-Xchange
• OSER

OSER you say? Well, that’s new to me too! I just found it via a Google search. OSER is the “Open Source Exchange Replacement Platform” (I don’t think “Platform” made it into the acronym).

Hmm, getting back to “open source”, how should we define “open source Exchange replacement”? Here are my thoughts:

First, if it’s an “Exchange replacement”, it must support Outlook and Outlook functionality. Otherwise, it’s not an “Exchange replacement”. It may be a groupware solution, but it’s not replacing Exchange. So, to me, this takes out mixed licensed applications such as Zimbra. Zimbra is an open source groupware application, but not an open source Exchange replacement. You don’t get the source code to what makes Zimbra an “Exchange replacement”. This goes for anyone that doesn’t offer the source code to their Outlook connector IMHO.

Second, well, that’s it really.

We have a good market for open source groupware, but not so much for open source Exchange replacements.

I think the point to take home here is that there really aren’t many players that are truly offering an open source Exchange replacement, but there are many players that offer an open source groupware framework and that offer closed source Exchange functionality that makes them a true “Exchange replacement”.

P.S. Yes, I like Zimbra.

Microsoft provides a free set of entry level developer tools called Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions. However, as far as I can tell, out of the box they do not support the languages I tend to use: PHP and Ruby (and starting to refresh my Python memory recently). Eclipse never appealed to me (never liked the UI and workflow). So, I took a look at NetBeans IDE 6.1 for the first time earlier this month. There’s a big 183MB installer for Windows that supports Java, C/C++, Ruby as well as a smaller 16MB Early Access for PHP plugin. I tried out the PHP edition and was surprised how fast it was (compared to my Eclipse experience on the same Core 2 Duo notebook running Windows Vista) and how well it seemed to work with PHP code. The fact that I liked what I saw in NetBeans IDE 6.1 surprised me since I tend to be old school and use vi or nedit when working on a Linux system.

It got me thinking though that Microsoft should provide some resources to the Visual Studio team to develop a Visual Studio Express Edition for IronPython and IronRuby.

Speaking of VirtualBox (yes, I actually spoke about it here), Jason Perlow just wrote a good review of the two in his blog.

I’ll be honest—and a little embarrassed—I didn’t even know about VirtualBox until last month. And when I read Jason’s blog just now I turned over to one of the guys here and he didn’t even know about VirtualBox (apparently my consultants don’t read my blog, I should work on that).
VirtualBox is getting cooler and cooler in my eyes. And the fact that it runs on my platforms that VMware is even cooler.

I have a feeling that VirtualBox is going to bust out pretty soon on the commercial scene in some way or another, probably via a third-party developer that releases enterprise-grade management and deployment tools.

Hmmm…

Information Week published the results of its survey of 536 business technology professionals asking questions surrounding the general question of…

How Open Is Microsoft?

The results might surprise some of you. For example, three years ago, 53% surveyed said Microsoft was not open at all. That number dropped to 19% in this year’s survey.

IW also provides Microsoft with what they call their put up or shut up list consisting of:

* Reveal the patents allegedly being violated by open source products.
* Dedicate developers to open source projects such as OpenPegasus (management software) and Python (programming language) and make contributions that beyond those serving its own interests.
* Support SVG, ECMAScript, and other key Web standards in IE 8.0.
* Work with IBM and Sun Microsystems to unify ODF and Open XML and make ODF-Open XML interoperability a native feature in Office.
* Fund and operate a joint interoperability lab with the Linux Foundation.
* Reduce or eliminate protocol patent license fees for common services like printing and file replication.
* Adopt open source practices, such as community input and development, for the .Net Framework and Silverlight.
* Demonstrate transparency by providing more information about what comes next in Windows 7.

To this list, I’ll add my annual plea to Microsoft to Open Source what might be the best stable light weight operating system ever developed: Windows 98 Second Edition (SE). It could easily be embedded in 64MB (or less) of firmware, run lightning fast with slow processors (by today’s standards), and had great hardware driver support. The Asus Eee PC hardware configuration would actually be overkill for Windows 98SE. And, I believe much of modern malware would not affect it. Once Open Sourced, it could probably be secured relatively easily by the talented FOSS programmer community.

Okay, this is pretty damn funny: Open Source in 2013.

My favorite line:

Americans, who through no fault of their own, lost jobs due to the closing of Microsoft they once believed were theirs for life, are assisted by the Linux Foundation’s worker retraining programs.

Information Week published the results of Q&A sessions with Microsoft’s Sam Ramji (senior director of platform strategy) and Tom Robertson (general manager of standards and interoperability).

Microsoft Open Source, Standards Chiefs Tout ‘Openness’

Here’s a sample of the questions Information Week asked:

• How do you approach people to work out cross-licensing or interoperability deals between Microsoft and the open source community?
  
• How much of this recent public push towards “openness” is about the realities of the Web and of the emergence of open source as a viable model versus something else? The people that you need to convince, they’re going to be skeptical.
  
• How do you convince people that Microsoft is no longer just creating de facto standards over time? That’s an argument that you’ve had to make over and over again as recently as Open XML.
  
• Are there certain thoughts about, here are the things we develop in an open source model versus a shared source model versus keeping it all proprietary?
  
• So how do you address the “distinction between popular perception and the reactions of leaders of open source communities,” as Sam put it? How do you go about changing the minds of those who think Microsoft will always be about ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’?
  
• Does Microsoft need to make its specs explicitly usable with the GPL? Why or why not?
  

Sam Ramji’s Port 25 blog posts

I just read a good article at TechRepublic about MySQL vs. Microsoft SQL. Overall, the article is pretty well-rounded. Good reading. (And short!)

The author based the review on several features, including:

• Licensing Cost
• Performance
• Replication
• Security
• Recovery

The final winner:

If you were hoping to get an ironclad recommendation that one database is better than the other, I’m going to disappoint you. From my point of view, any database that helps you do your job is a good database; one that doesn’t is a bad database. I can tell you that to make a good decision about which of SQL Server and MySQL will help you most, you’ll need to look beyond politics and hype and instead look at function and mission. What do you want to accomplish?

No surprise there of course.

What I did find interesting is that Sanders took the time to explain that MySQL is not free unless you are developing an open source application, but otherwise you have to pay for it. Hmm, I have to admit I’m not 100% on the licensing terms for MySQL. Is this totally accurate? What if I’m developing a revenue generating website based on top of MySQL as the RDBMS? Does that mean I have to pay MySQL AB?

Miguel de Icaza announced the first public release of the Mono based Moonlight for Linux. This supports the Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 video playback, not the 2.0 version that includes a .Net Framework.

You can find the Moonlight website at:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

Other reference: Port 25 Moonlight blog entries

I happened to come across this article in Redmond Developer News recently…

Redmond Among Contributors to Open Source PHP Framework

…about contributers to the Zend Framework. Among the many (400) contributers to the project are Google and Microsoft. It’s probably just me, but I found it amusing (in a good way) that the two arch-rivals contributed pieces to the same Open Source project.

The article goes on to describe how Microsoft sponsored work to enable InfoCard (now called CardSpace) support in a number of Open Source products including Zend and Ruby on Rails.

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday will be upon us soon patching 3 critical and 1 moderate security problems. Security issues aren’t just a problem for Microsoft software of course. And, I recently learned about…

oCERT: Open Source Computer Emergency Response Team

…which describes itself like this…

The oCERT project is a public effort providing security handling support to Open Source projects affected by security incidents or vulnerabilities, just like national CERTs offer services for their respective countries.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot there yet (only 4 advisories posted so far, the last on April 17). But, I hope oCERT will become a good resource for those of us who deploy a lot of Open Source applications.

Port 25 Security Related Blog items

Okay, actually, there are a number of virtualization options not listed in the title, but the one nobody seems to be talking much about Sun’s xVM VirtualBox. But, wait! you say, Sun begs to differ: “Sun xVM VirtualBox software is the world’s most popular open source virtualization platform because of its fast performance, ease of use, rich functionality, and modular design.”

Some cool features of VirtualBox include:

• Seamless windows - rather than a whole desktop environment, just the guest application windows can co-exist alongside native host applications.
• Shared Folders - easily move documents and files between the host and guest systems.
• Mouse pointer integration - it just works how you’d expect it to.
• Dynamically adjustable screen resolution in the guest.
• Time Synchronization.
• Shared clipboard.

A lot of that is available elsewhere (e.g., time sync and shared folders), but seamless windows is a nice touch.
AND, VirtualBox is open source!

Do check it out.

There’s an interesting four page PDF file that appeared recently on the Microsoft downloads site titled…

Open Source at Microsoft CodeBox: Bringing the Open Source Approach In-House

It answers the question: Could the community and collaborative concepts that
underlie open source projects be applied internally to Microsoft product engineering?

CodeBox is an software development environment that was developed as an internal tool to help Microsoft apply the Open Source software development model internally. It gives Microsoft’s programmers and internal tool to manage shared code.

If you are at all familiar with the UNIX or Linux world, you will know about the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) functionality. Essentially, PAM is a highly extensible login framework for authenticating and authorizing a user for access to a server. Prior to PAM, most logins worked directly against the local /etc/passwd database, but with PAM, users are authenticated against the PAM library, which in turns relies on a series of “modules” (surprise!) that return a Yes/No response. On many UNIX and Linux boxes, PAM still relies on /etc/passwd, but it doesn’t have to—and often doesn’t. For example, LDAP is quite often supported for authentication, and this is done by simply adding the right LDAP module to your PAM configuration.

Yawn.

Well, it is all very cool of actually, but it is old news in the UNIX world.

Now, Windows has supported this, kind of, a little bit, with GINA and GINA chaining and what-have-you, but it is really JUST NOT DONE. In addition, the GINA chaining concept is rarely if ever used. (I have heard because of reliability issues.)

However, Vista now supports a new model known as Credential Provider, which is deceptively like… PAM! Well, cool. (And they say Microsoft doesn’t learn!)

Anyway, I suggest you take a look at this as it’s all very nifty stuff:

Windows Vista Sample Credential Providers Overview

Credential Provider Samples

New Authentication Functionality in Windows Vista

OK, I know this is NOT the Inside MySQL blog area. But, MySQL is the “M” in both LAMP and WAMP. And, as one of the people who wasn’t very happy by MySQL’s decision to close source parts of the upcoming MySQL 6.0, I thought I should help spread the good news announced by MySQL’s VP for Community Relations - Kaj Arnö:

MySQL Server is Open Source, even Backup extensions

His six main points are:

- MySQL Server is and will always remain fully functional and open source
- MySQL Connectors will be open source
- The main storage engines will be open source
- MySQL 6.0’s pending backup functionality will be open source
- The MyISAM driver for MySQL Backup will be open source, and
- The encryption and compression backup features will be open source

FYI: MySQL related blog posts on Port 25

Michael Desmond raises an interesting point in an article in Redmond Developer News…

Open Source and .NET

Desmond acknowledges the IronPython/IronRuby work as well as Microsoft working with Zend on PHP and FastCGI. He quotes DotNetNuke’s Bill Walker who told him: Case studies could be sponsored, articles could be included in Microsoft magazines, etc. We have people … who still believe DotNetNuke and other .NET open source software is for the hobbyist set only. Desmond closes by asking: Should Microsoft be doing more to make open source development a first-class citizen in the .NET space?

The answer, IMHO, is definitely yes. I’d like to see, for example, Microsoft’s Port 25 site reach out to various Windows related Open Source project team members to highlight them and their projects. Three that come to mind right away are: OpenNETCF (Windows Mobile and Embedded development), MindTouch Deki Wik, and SharpDevelop (free IDE for C#, VB.NET and Boo).

And, of course, there is always a lot to say about the better known Open Source projects like Apache httpd, Apache Tomcat, and Eclipse. Let the folks at Port 25 know what Open Source projects related to the Microsoft Windows platform you would like to read more about.

If there is one Microsoft product that openly gets inspiration from and gives credit to UNIX and GNU Linux/Open Source, it is Microsoft PowerShell.

How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008

The PowerShell team is at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas this week. And, they posted the PowerPoint 2007 slide deck for a peek at PowerShell V2 on their blog…

MMS: What’s Coming In PowerShell V2

I’m not at the MMS. So, I didn’t see the presentation. However, the slidedeck (downloadable from the blog entry linked above) lists four main topic areas (labeled Themes in the slides):

1. GUI over PowerShell
2. Production Scripting
3. Universal Code Execution Model
4. Community Feedback

In the Linux world, I’ve been asking people to use Python or Ruby instead of Bash scripts so that we don’t have to refactor from one more basic scripting language (say Bash) to a more sophisticated object oriented dynamic language (say Python or Ruby). In the Windows world, the jump has been from DOS batch language to Windows scripting (which I never liked) or Visual Basic/C#. That’s not really an option at all IMHO. PowerShell, on the other hand, brings Windows into the 21st century for system administrators who may not come from a deep software development background. It gives them a first class language and .Net citizen as an alternative to DOS batch (I hesitate to call it a language).

Though PowerShell still seems to have a strange look to it from my point of view, its ability to deal directly with .Net objects gives it the ability to more easily deal with systems level information than we have on Linux with even high-level dynamic languages like Python and Ruby.

Me? I’m still waiting for a binary ready-to-install IronRuby to test with Windows Server 2008 :-)

I was just reading Michael Mimoso’s account of a new MS-SQL injection attack that is making the rounds. Sigh.

The funny thing is that I was just talking to one of our consultants here at Puryear IT about.. SQL injection attacks. He was working on something involving MS-SQL, and commented that MS-SQL did not properly handle dangerous code in comments in SQL code, which made it possible to attack the SQL server if security was not properly setup. Then I found that blog. Good times.

Anyway, SQL injection attacks aren’t specific to MS-SQL. Almost every database server is susceptible to them, not because of the RDBMS itself, but usually because of:

• The fact that the RDBMS was not properly configured and secured.
• Applications, especially web applications, do a horrible job of checking for sane SQL statements.

There are a few ways to help yourself right out-of-the-box of course. For one, using prepared statements and relying on a properly designed database library in your code helps. For example, instead of using something like:

$input = INPUT-FROM-USER;
SELECT col1 FROM table1 WHERE col2 = $input;

You should be preparing the statement and relying more on your SQL library to reject any odd input, like so:

$input = INPUT-FROM-USER;
$prepared_sql = prepare(SELECT col1 FROM table1 WHERE col2 = ?);
$prepared_sql->run($input);

Generally, the latter form will allow you to not worry about escaping your input. (This is not always the case though, so consult the documentation for the SQL library you are using!) That said, it still makes sense to check for anything overtly dangerous in the user input.

Anyway, back on the original blog entry, I found this pretty funny: ‘”They’re blindly tossing SQL injections at sites and getting a high success rate. They’re upping the game,” Grossman said. “This is a new level of sophistication.”’ There is nothing new or sophisticated about blindly running exploits against servers on the Internet. It is an old technique actually, and unfortunately, it’s always had a good rate of return.

Microsoft’s Sam Ramji posted a blog innocuously titled…

Managing Towards Open

Honestly, I might have passed over reading it except for the fact that I read this item over on Information Week first…

Microsoft Uses Open Source To Extend Systems Management To Linux

They’re doing this by taking Open Source (MIT License variety) code from the OpenPegasus project that describes itself as open-source implementationof the DMTF CIM and WBEM standards. This alphabet soup translates to: Distributed Management Task Force, Common Information Model, and Web-Based Enterprise Management.

In a recently posted blog fellow ONLamp blogger Noah Gift called it Microsoft Trojan Horse Part Duex: System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions and Connectors. I’m taking a more wait-and-see approach to it to see what comes of out this effort to interoperate in the enterprise environment. I am curious what the OpenPegasus project members think of this and whether or not they are directly involved in this effort.

Well, this is nifty. A start-up named Kickfire has released a MySQL appliance. There is nothing “nifty” about a network appliance of course; that is, unless the appliance has specialized hardware and software to outperform a similarly configured in-house configured server.

And that is the point behind Kickfire.

They have designed a specialized processor for SQL servers and integrated this with MySQL using customized code. Apparently, the box screams.

I first read about this on Jason Perlow’s blog, and he goes into greater detail, including notes about how this may set a trend for appliance based SQL servers running PostgreSQL, Oracle, and even Microsoft SQL Server. MS-SQL on an appliance? Now that would really be nifty.

Bryan Kirschner (Microsoft Director of Platform Community in their Open Source Labs) talks about three groups of people in relation to their Open Source efforts in a blog entry titled…

Open Source Day + 30 …

His group 3 includes pretty much anyone at Microsoft whose primary job does not necessarily include Open Source but touches on it. I’m really concerned with the direction Microsoft’s virtualization effort is taking since Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 came out and the upcoming production release of Hyper-V. The Virtual Machines team appears to be ignoring everything except for Suse Linux. While that is a fine Linux distro, there are a bunch of other important distros too (especially the ones I use :-). Virtual PC 2007 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 both have problems with Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions starting with RHEL5 (this includes CentOS 5) and Ubuntu starting with version 7.

Supported Guest OS on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

I’ve been tracking the various workarounds that people have figured out for RHEL5, CentOS 5, Fedora 7 and 8, and Ubuntu 7 and 8. You can find my current collection of installation workarounds in the links below to my personal blog.

Red Hat 5/CentOS 5.1 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

TechNet Blog: Fedora 8 on Virtual PC 2007

Ubuntu 8.04LTS vs. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

I haven’t tried these distros with VMware ESX 3.x. However, none of them cause installation problems for VMware Workstation 6 for Windows, VMware Fusion for Mac, or Parallels Desktop for Mac. I really hope that the Microsoft Virtual Machine teams takes a hard look at their product direction and add support for the current versions of major Linux distros like RHEL5 and Ubuntu. Failure to do so simply makes it easier for people to move to VMware ESX and avoid buying Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V.

So, Hyper-V is ready to be released with Windows 2008. More or less. Hyper-V is the “next generation” of virtualization for Microsoft and the Windows platform (at least as far as Microsoft sees it), and includes some enhancements of Virtual Server.

Technically, it doesn’t appear that Hyper-V is going to really frighten the current VM players like VMware and others, but there is an interesting trend that Hyper-V’s inclusion in Windows 2008 highlights: virtualization out-of-the-box.

As of Windows 2008, virtualization will be a “click and run” operation. Linux distributions are doing this as well. For example, Red Hat comes pre-packaged with Xen now and some management tools for Xen VMs.

Jeez, with the move toward application virtualization, server virtualization, and whatever virtualization, the whole argument of Windows vs. Linux or Windows vs. Anything just seems to be slowly fading away. At what point does Windows or Linux as the OS stop being a factor?

The US government’s GSA (General Services Administration) manages many billions of dollars of purchases and operations for government agencies. So, it was interesting to see this quote from the following article in GCN (Government Computer News)…

GSA makes the case for open source

While Coleman [the GSA’s CIO] saw many advantages to using open source software, she mentioned that, somewhat counter-intuitively, saving money may not be one of them.

“If you are looking at open source because of perceived cost benefits, you should know there is no guarantee it will be cheaper,” she said. “Open source does not mean free.”

It turns out that the GSA Open Source toolbox inclues JBoss, Bugzilla, JUnit, JMeter, and Eclipse. And, more importantly, the initial acquisition cost (free) is not necessarily the driving factor.

The article’s author makes the classic mistake of thinking Open Source software cannot be commercial software: Not having sunk costs in a commercial software program also means the agency can move to a new program more quickly should its needs change. So, we still have to educate mainstream journalists a bit more about Open Source. However, the main point is that more and more people understand that the value of Open Source software is not tied to the often (but not always) free procurement cost.

Okay, I’m confused. I just read a blog about using Microsoft Access as the database back-end for a website. I think. Well, heck, I’m not sure. Is she saying you should convert to a true client/server database model or you should use Access itself as the database back-end?

To be honest, I think there is little value in Microsoft Access outside of its insanely easy development front-end for programmers. That’s why Access is popular: It is very easy to create a database application from scratch using Access. Even with web programming languages such as PHP you have a steeper learning curve, especially since you need to setup Apache, PHP, and MySQL (well, those are usually running on a Linux server these days anyway, although that of course brings up an obvious security issue).

It used to be a lot easier to understand the closed source and open source worlds in the old days. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, and the like were closed source and wore black hats. The GNU/LAMP people were Open Source and wore white hats. This world was simple and clean. When I started looking beyond the source code and newsgroups in the early 2000s, I was surprised to see firms like Zope with a combination of Open and Closed Source products. I was a little confused by MySQL’s dual license. And, Red Hat threw me for a loop when they stopped providing free downloads after Red Hat 9 (this is before the Fedora Project emerged). JBoss’ professional Open Source idea seemed like a good idea me but seemed to be drawing some barbs now and then.

The Open Source community-industry has been undergoing a lot of growing pains over the past few years as it transforms from the community-contributer model to a full business model with employees, health plans, boards of directors and the like. Perhaps the Open Source business looked at Microsoft and figure their closed source model has made them a bit of money and that closed source is not that evil if it pays the biils. Personally, I was hoping that Open Source services (consulting, packaging, etc.) would be enough to keep FOSS firms afloat. But, at the moment, it looks like some closed sourcing for value added features is going to be the norm. The EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus effort looks similar to what MySQL is doing but seems to be mostly flying under the radar for the moment. And, as I mentioned, Zope has had this business model for years.

Having spent the 1990s working for a telephone company (good ol’ GTE) I watched a similar transformation in the Computer Telephony and VoIP industry. The Computer Telephony Expo in the early 1990s consisted of a bunch of engineers and startups showing their wares to potential customers (often phone companies like the one I worked for). There weren’t many marketing-critters in the midst. And, the only person wearing a suit and tie was usually Harry Newton (who coined the term Computer Telephony and organized the conference). By the end of the decade, the complexion of the conference had changed, I think the conference grew from 2,000 to something like 30,000 in the years that I attended. And, there were a lot more marketing critters and people in suits. In fact, I recall noting with some distaste that I had decided to wear a suit for the day I was a panel moderator there (it seemed like the right thing to do at the time). The Computer Telephony industry had grown during the decade to the point where people actually had to figure out how to make money and not just show cool IP comm gear. And, then, of course, there were the bigger companies buying the small cool ones. Intel, for example, bought Visual Voice (a very cool software firm) and Dialogic (a very cool hardware firm). Microsoft, Intel, and GTE co-sponsored the TAPI Bakeoff (an Interoperability event for vendors) for several years. As one of the event coordinators, I had a ringside seat to watch the development going on. Most of that technology is now invisible and is simply part of the infrastructure now. It is not something I actively think about unless something goes wrong (very rarely if you think about it).

I think we are seeing something very similar happening to Open Source. Sun’s purchase of MySQL has set off a lot of heated discussion as Sun and MySQL tries to find a business model that can simultaneously keep the Open Source community happy while building a revenue stream. They may have found a model, but it is not exactly making everyone happy quite yet. Personally, I am watching this all with some anxiety as I depend on MySQL for a lot of projects. In the meantime, we are seeing blog titles like:

Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise: So, in effect, they will be giving their paying customers real, true, untested code. How is this supposed to work? In addition, this means that they are changing their internal development model, splitting the relationship between the two trees, and overall going even further down the path of getting the RHEL/Fedora model backwards.

The whole story about online backup: The business reasoning behind the decision to reserve the native modules for paying customers is that only the most demanding users have an urgent need of this feature, and I can see the value of this assessment.

Thoughts on the Fuss: I doubt that this little scheme of charging for these features ever actually takes place. It is pretty much diametrically opposed to the what Sun says they want for MySQL. I think that by the time server version 6.0 is GA that every feature will be fully available for anyone. And that is why I have not taken the time to sharpen a pitchfork and join the mob. Because in the end I don’t think this will ever happen.

The Ingres Vultures Descend: In a despicable business practice, I received a message from a PR Firm representing Ingres. Now, I even wrote about the controversy that seems to have swept the open source community; but even my writings were not completely factually correct — I wrote that even if online backups were closed it was not necessarily the worst thing in the world. The actual parts of the online backup that are not open source and free are compression and encryption — that is all. (FYI: I received a similar email from Ingres but didn’t think it was despicable - just a PR firm doing its job).

The Closed-Open Source industries are in a state of extreme flux. And, it will probably take another decade to sort this all out along with web/mesh services, SaaS (Software as a Service), and service subscriptions. If the various blog reactions to various changes are any indication, it will probably be a bumpy ride. But, let’s hope it all works out for the best for all parties involved in the end.

Is closed sourcing inevitable? I sure hope not. But, we’ll see it play out one way or another over the next couple of years.

I was recently doing a somewhat random Google and found a note from someone about whether there is a “market for LAMP consulting”. Ha. Perhaps. The whole Linux thing may just be ready to get off the ground. ;)

Seriously though, I do wonder about this comment: “may be some market for MySQL work - optimizing adn [sic] so on”. Hmm. I know for a fact that there IS a market for MS-SQL specific consulting, e.g., performance tuning, security, installation, etc. However, I rarely see a need specifically for MySQL consulting. Generally, “MySQL” is thrown in with the overall need for a PHP developer.

Not that this should be the case.

A database administrator is a very important role in any organization, but it seems like MySQL administration is often bundled in with the software development. That’s not so typical with MS-SQL, Oracle, and DB2 work though.

To me, this ties back into the original roots of MySQL and its popularity: LAMP. LAMP breaks out into “Linux Apache MySQL PHP”, and is the development platform of choice for many people and organizations.

But is this limiting the growth of the “MySQL profession” in some ways?

Recently, we were working to bring up a VMware installation for a client of Puryear IT and we hit a snag. To provide some background first though: We had decided to go with a GigE NAS based environment rather than a more traditional SAN. We had seen Dell’s NF500 in use already and were pleased with it overall, so we went with the NF500 with RAID-10 on a GigE switch and, of course, GigE on the Dell servers running VMware.

Great, right?

Alas, not so much. During our benchmarking, we found that the NFS performance on the NF500 across the GigE was pretty bad. This goes for every variation, including NFS over UDP and TCP, v2 and v3, rsize and wsize of everything from 4kb to 32kb, and so forth. Yes, we tried every performance tweak in the book, but just could not get the Linux servers to get good NFS performance against the NF500. Well, the performance is good enough if you were using the NAS as only a file server, but not if you want to run VMs off it.

That said, there is no real reason why you can’t or shouldn’t run VMs off a GigE network and a really fast NAS. It’s more than sufficient. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the hours to troubleshoot whether there was something going on with the Linux NFS implementation or the NF500, but we still had to get the problem solved.

Fortunately, we did find a solution that not only worked, but worked well: CIFS.

Everybody knows and loves CIFS. (Well, everybody at least knows CIFS. Oh, and hello Samba.) It’s just Windows Networking. Generally, we use NFS within Linux and UNIX networks where we can tighten down security enough on the network to make it reasonably safe to use (NFS is not, and has never been, a secure protocol.) But I am quite familiar with CIFS and was curious if using it would clear the problem up. And yes it did.

I found that mounting the VM shares off the NAS on the local Linux VMware servers let us transfer at near-wire speed. We were then able to run our VMs off the NAS; we have yet to see any performance issue or bug, and the whole thing just works like a champ.

Very interesting.

Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (Bill Gates was their first CSA) delivered one of two keynotes at the Microsoft MVP Summit I attended last week. I was debating whether or not to get in line at one of the microphones during the Q&A session to ask him about Microsoft and Open Source. But, someone else decided much faster and was able to make a good statement and ask a good question. The entire transcript of Ozzie’s presentation and Q&A session can be found at…

Ray Ozzie: Microsoft 2008 Most Valuable Professional Global Summit

Here’s the section from that transcript regarding Open Source…

QUESTION: I have a question about the software as a service space that’s currently existing. If we look out at the Web now with all the providers and vendors, we see Open Source playing a very strong role with a large number of vendors, and it’s very different from the Microsoft platform what role Open Source plays as opposed to the other platforms. In fact, Java is Open Source now.

So, my question is, with the Microsoft vision, where do you see Open Source playing a part on the Microsoft platform, and what is your position towards it?

RAY OZZIE: Well, my position toward Open Source generally is that it’s a part of the environment. It’s very useful for developers to be able to get the source code to certain things, to modify them.

Microsoft fundamentally as a whole has changed dramatically as a result of Open Source in terms of as people have been using it more and more, the nature of interoperability between our systems and other systems has increased. And I can tell you from an inside perspective in terms of dealing with individuals inside, when you build a new product, immediately you start thinking of how shall this product expose its APIs, what type of developer is it serving, should there be SOAP or Web Services APIs, because it will be being used in system integration context within an enterprise, are the people who are going to be integrating with it going to be more of the Web community and should they exposed through REST-based technologies, should the results come back in XML or JSON or some other formats based on the type of consumer of the thing.

Open Source is a reality. We have a software business that is based on proprietary software. We tactically or strategically, depending on how you look at it, will take certain aspects of what we do, and we’ll Open Source them where we believe there is a real benefit to the community and to the nature of the growth of that technology in Open Sourcing it. The .NET Framework is a good example of it, and we’re working with Novell to make model work so that people don’t have to make this choice if they do want to do something with a Linux or UNIX back-end, and so that we can share tools and technologies.

But the bottom line is we believe very much in the quality of Microsoft products. We are an IP-based business. But we live in a world together with Open Source, and we have to make it possible for you to build solutions and for customers to build solutions that incorporate aspects of both.

Some of the articles and blogs about Sun/MySQL’s growing Open/Closed Source forking has been pretty dramatic. ZDNet’s is one example…

Did Sun just my MySQL Closed Source?

MySQL was moving down this path by splitting features available in their Community and Enterprise editions long before Sun announced it was buying MySQL. So, I’m not placing the blame (if that is what it should be called) on Sun. I think it is just the reality of trying to stay in business in the Open Source world. It is tough to make money from a free product - even a great one like MySQL. If the model of selling services does not justify something like a billion dollar price tag, what then? For MySQL and Sun, the answer is to provide more value-added features for a price and closing the source.

Am I happy about this? Not hardly! But, I saw this coming and have been preparing for it. I’ve been looking at PostgreSQL since the day Sun announced buying MySQL. And, recently, it was pointed out to me that Ingres (which I used back in the 1980s) is now an Open Source product. I’m not going to suddenly stop using MySQL or recommend that people switch away from it. But, I think it is prudent to take a look at alternatives.

MySQL related blog entries at Microsoft Port 25

If you work with Microsoft adCenter to generate ads, you might find it interesting to read the PHP code samples collected in this blog entry by Walter Poupore.

Recommended Reading — php and Ad Groups

The code samples available there cover the topics listed below:

How to Check the Status of an Ad Group in PHP (V5)
How to Submit an Ad Group for Approval in PHP (V5)
How to Create Keywords in PHP (V5)
How to Create Ads in PHP (V5)
How to Create Ad Groups in PHP (V5)

For more PHP-Microsoft Windows related interop, here are the Port 25 blog items with a PHP tag.

Port 25 - PHP

I was reading a quick run-through of memcached and it occurred to me how absolutely simple and SIMPLISTIC memcached is. Really, it’s absolutely.. basic. Oh, but wait, what is memcached? memcached is really nothing more than a cache service for accessing data. Its origins are as a cache service for the RDBMS used by Facebook. Anyway, memcached is nothing more than a hash table in memory that is used to cache query results. That’s it.

“So what?” you ask.

Well, memcached is actually a pretty big deal. It’s used all over now. And if you monitor places In The Know, like the High Scalability blog, you’ll notice a trend: A lot of people use it or plan on using it Real Soon Now.

memcached was written to serve one basic role: cache database request. It wasn’t written to provide a massively redundant service. Or to distribute load across memcached nodes. Or to provide a secure proxy to a database service. It just takes a query and returns whatever is in the cache. And this is done using a simple hash, meaning that at its core memcached uses a set of algorithms that you’ll find on every second year Computer Science exam in college.

What I find so fascinating is that yet again we see a very simple but hugely effective service developed in the UNIX world. Why aren’t these things happening for Windows? With Microsoft’s forays into HPC, you would hope that people both in research and business would start fleshing out these genius little nuggets on the Windows platform, but I haven’t seen this happen yet. So, what’s the hold up?

I’m attending the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Global Summit in Seattle this week (I’m a Windows Mobile - Mobile Devices MVP). IronRuby was not on the Open Spaces meeting agenda this afternoon, so John Lam staged an impromptu meetup for people interested in talking about IronRuby. John is 4th from the right in the photo. And Jimmy Schementi (Program Manager - Dynamic Language Runtime) is 2nd from the left.

I found the nearly two hour long session very interesting even though, as I explained to John and Jimmy, I’m one of the people too lazy to build IronRuby from source (I compile nearly everything from source for Linux but nothing for Windows) and am waiting for the installable binaries.

John will talk about IronRuby on Rails at the upcoming RubyConf.

Port 25 — Blog entries tagged with Ruby

I often refer to blog entries over on the Microsoft Port 25 site. if you are interested in Open Source interoperability with Microsoft products, you definitely need to follow some of their product teams as much as you follow Open Source product information. Here’s a MSDN blog post by Tadd E. Dawson that collects and lists what looks like every Microsoft product team blog in existence.

Microsoft Product Team Blog Directory

Not exactly “new” news but there is a reasonable article by Gary Morgenthaler at Business Week about Apple and Microsoft. Definitely well worth the read. Gary discusses how Apple is developing a multi-pronged strategy to battle Microsoft. In all honesty, the strategy has very clear for a while:

1. Use bottom-up marketing by targeting consumers to increase mind- and market-share.
2. Focus on ease-of-use, which has always been a foundation for Apple.
3. Keep their presence known in the enterprise, but don’t focus on it.
4. Be the cool company.

I think we can all agree the strategy is working. Apple is becoming a bigger player every day, and *gasp* they do seem to be slowly making some headway in the enterprise, albeit extremely slowly (at least in my experience).

There’s a question that comes out of this success however: How does this impact the open platforms like Linux and FreeBSD? Well, a lot actually. Linux maintains a strong but shared leadership position in the data center, but has yet to have even moderate success on the desktop. Certainly you can find stories of large Linux desktop roll-outs here and there, but when viewed in light of the total desktops in use and those being deployed now or even in the future, the number is almost dismissively small.

Just as importantly, if you ask your average consumer or enterprise desktop user about Linux they will either have no idea what you are talking about or ask you why they would put the mail server on their desk.

That’s not the case with Apple. Everyone knows Apple. And most people have a very positive impression of Apple computers, although Apple is often avoided due to cost and compatibility (whether that remains a valid reason or not). But Apple on the enterprise desktop? That’s another ballgame altogether. The “cost” side of the equation goes away for the user and the compatibility issue is slowly fading with virtualization, published applications and terminal services, and web-based access. So what DOES happen if you put an Apple on someone’s desk? They’ll probably play with the computer for hours and tell their friends how snazzy it looks. And then they’ll start working.

Microsoft does indeed have a very serious problem here.

I just read in Matt Asay’s CNET blog that Microsoft Open Source Lab Director Sam Ramji has been promoted to lead Microsoft’s entire Open Source/Linux efforts.

Microsoft gets a new open-source chief

You can find Sam’s Port 25 blog items here…

Sam Ramji - Port 25

Has anyone read Putting Our Own House In Order? I thought this little quip was funny: “Tony’s background is in academia, a place where Microsoft has had some challenges.” (Queue the old graphic of a million students sitting in class with Macs.) Okay, pretty accurate really. When I was going to LSU ages ago it was cool even back then to have a Mac instead of a PC for a laptop.

Mind you, when I went to LSU my first assembly class was on an IBM 3-something-another and I remember learning that there was no stack for us to use. We had to do all kinds of weird things. I had already learned PC x86 assembly by then (anyone remember coding or watching intros or demos in high school?), and so I thought the IBM assembly was pretty sucky. Still, I did learn a lot. ANYWAY.

The basic premise of the blog about Microsoft is that they have made some strides, but have quite a ways to go. I think the discussion about Microsoft and academia is pretty on point. Most universities basically give Microsoft Office away (by “give away”, I guess I should say “license thousands of copies on your behalf”), but that’s not the point being made. The issue is: Is Microsoft making any headway in being a real power in the academic side of universities, not the business side?

Even back in my day, you could go to a “Windows lab” and work with Visual Studio or go to a “UNIX lab” and use vi and gcc. And you know what? All the fun was in the UNIX lab? And not just for me. There was just a difference in the attitudes and ethic across the two lab environments. People in the Windows lab were trying to get their project in before it was 11:59 PM, while people in the UNIX lab were goofing off, playing with code, and… trying to get their project in before it was 11:59 PM.

What is it about UNIX, vi, emacs, gcc, perl, and INSERT-HERE that makes it fun to play with, while Visual Studio just makes you want to… well, work?

There’s an argument here that the point of coding is work but *cough cough*, no, I don’t think so. Most of the innovations in software are from people that tweak, fiddle, and play with concepts, code, and ways of doing things. And THAT is the essence of academia: The freedom to play and learn and make progress.

Licensing is a big factor here. But there’s something else, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think Microsoft is trying to figure out the same thing.

So, I’ve been MIA for almost two weeks now. I’m sure you were pretty worried and possibly even losing sleep. But, it’s okay. I’m fine and back. For now. But what happened?

Well, the whole “SSO” happened.

O’Reilly uses Single Sign-On (SSO) within its network between certain applications (apparently), and something wonky happened with my blogging account that prevented me from properly signing in. I don’t have all the details, but I do know that while logging into the “O’Reilly SSO Site” works, that I can’t then access the blog manager because I’m again prompted to login. Which fails.

So much for SSO.

But let’s not be too critical on O’Reilly here. Sure, it’s annoying, but it happens. Everywhere.

Why is SSO such a pain? When I work with clients on Identity and Access Management (IAM), the first acronym they usually bring up is SSO. And then I warn them that achieving true SSO is usually a long and difficult journey, and that you need to start small. Usually real small.

Typically, I see SSO develop over time using a progression such as:

1. Implement a single username/password system for core services such as logins to servers. No SSO, but you do have Centralized Sign-On (CSO).
2. Implement some type of identity management on top of the directory containing your single username/password.
3. Begin thinking about SSO.

The problem with SSO is that until you at least have a handle on where your username and password is STORED, you can’t get very far with it. And most people don’t have a handle on that.

So stay focused!

Microsoft released another 14,000 pages of protocol documentation for Microsoft Office, Office Server, and Exchange Server (2007 versions). This brings the total documentation pages released up to 44,000 (and, no, I have not actually counted this to verify it :-). The documentation is in what they call preliminary form. I’m not quite sure what that means (not fact checked? incomplete?).

You can find their general principles statement at…

Interoperability Principles - Open Connections, Standards Support, Data Portability

The key line/point to note and ponder is:

5. Open Source Compatibility. Microsoft will covenant not to sue open source developers for development and non-commercial distribution of implementations of these Open Protocols.

The MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) protocols documentation is found at…

MSDN: Open Protocol Specifications

Jonathan Walz and Hal Rottenberg posted the second part of their interview with PowerShell architect Jeffery Snover on their PowerScripting Podcast. At one point Snover makes says “I’d like to Open Source almost everything” (at 22:14) in response to a question about open sourcing the PowerShell GUI host. He does backtrack a bit and restates it as “Shared Source.” But, still, the thought is there :-)

If you are interested in learning more about PowerShell, you can find the Windows PowerShell Getting Started Guide on the Microsoft TechNet site.

In a recent blog item here titled Linux ext2 recovery, NTFS, and Ghost my Inside Port 25 blogging colleague Dustin Puryear mentioned Chris Traver’s great technical analysis note…

Recovering Data from Windows Systems by Using Linux

I thought it might be useful to highlight just a few of the points Chris brings up in his paper…

- Using sfdisk instead of fdisk
- Using dd (this may seem trivial to old time *NIX users, but most Windows users have never heard of dd)
- Linux NTFS support and issues
- The Coroner’s Toolkit (TCT)

Click on the note’s title above. It will take you to Jamie Cannon’s blog item announcing the paper and provides a link to download the PDF document file.

I read this over on Port 25 this morning…

Microsoft Open Source Initiative

…and nearly got sucker punched until I headed over to the linked so-called blog entry on OSI’s blog page…

Microsoft looks forward to working with the OSI

OK, I get it now. April Fool’s. I rarely like tech site April Fool’s entries. But, I have to admit that I was amused by this one. BTW, click around OSI’s site. That Microsoft OSI logo is everywhere, not just that one blog entry page.

One of the things that most impressed me about Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 (besides being free) was Microsoft’s official support of various Linux distros as a Guest OS. I started testing Virtual Server after I found that the then current version of VMware ESX 2.5 could not run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 based distros (CentOS 4 in my case). Microsoft Virtual Server did and when the R2 release officially listed RHEL4 and SUSE Linux as supported Guest OSes, I was pretty happy. So, I when I read this headline on Network World, I was really puzzled.

Hyper-V Leaves Linux Out In The Cold

I headed over to this Microsoft web page to check things out for myself…

Supported Guest OS on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

…and verified that the only supported Linux distro there is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Service Pack 1. Now, to be fair, the list also does NOT include Microsoft’s own Windows Server 2000, Windows NT, Windows 98, or MS-DOS either. Hyper-V should at least include support for RHEL5 based distros, Ubuntu based distros, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, and Open Solaris.

However, this makes sense given that the current Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 does not really support the X11 that ships with RHEL5 and Ubuntu. I’ve been wondering why this is so hard since workstation based virtualization products like Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Workstation 6 work fine with the current Linux/X11 releases I’ve tried. I spent quite a while piecing together how to configure RHEL5 based distros to work under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 (see my blog entry linked below).

Red Hat 5/CentOS 5.1 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

I hope this lack of support for major Linux/BSD distros is just something that will be corrected before Hyper-V is released in its complete 1.0 format. But, if not, it will be a huge disappointment to me having invested a number of years working with Microsoft Virtual Server and in the planning stages to migrate to Hyper-V.

Here’s a detailed take on Microsoft’s virtualization and interoperability direction from Michael Francisco written last August…

Linux and Windows Interoperability: On the Metal and On the Wire

One of the things Michael says in it is: First, customers are insisting on support for interoperable, heterogeneous solutions. To me “heterogeneous” needs to include more than just SUSE Linux from the *NIX ecosphere.

I use Drupal to power both a personal site (my OgasaWalrus Freeware and Open Source apps blog) and an Intranet blog in my office. So, I was more than a little envious when I read Garrett Serack’s mini trip report for Drupalcon 2008.

How a cowboy spends two days in Boston: Drupalcon 2008

Drupal’s been attracting quite a bit of attention over the past year or two. And, the commercial support available for the product is a good for the product’s long term survival and growth. Several Drupal’s main figures (including its creator - Dries Buytaert) formed Acquia last year to provide value-added software products and services for the Drupal social publishing system. SpikeSource provides a for-fee Drupal sandboxed package (with Apache, PostgreSQL, and PHP) for Linux and Windows called Drupal SpikeIgnited.

Chris Pirollo just announced his Drupal-based community social network platform project. Check out his blog and videocast to learn more about this project.

I’ve been using MySQL since early 2002 and Sun’s purchase of MySQL has me quite concerned (unnecessarily, I hope). I’ve been hedging my bets in case Sun decides to radically change MySQL’s Community Edition (the free version) availability or make it too experimental to use in production or near-production environments (forcing MySQL users to the for-fee Enterprise Edition). One hedge is getting familiar with PostgreSQL. I’ve invested a bit of time building it from source code on a test Linux box and then testing upgrading a datbase from version 8.2 to 8.3. That was quite painful compared to MySQL, btw. I was surprised I had to perform a full database dump from 8.2 and then import everything back in to the 8.3 installation.

EnterpriseDB has been selling a repackaged version of PostgreSQL since 2004. They relaunced the product this week and renamed it Postgres Plus and Postgres Plus Advanced Server. The Postgres Plus edition seems similar to the MySQL Community Edition in that both are available with easy to use binary installers. Postgres Plus Advanced Server is priced at US$5,995 per socket. It provides additional features such as the ability to run applications designed to work with Oracle, database migration tools to move from Oracle and other commercial databases, and advanced management and monitoring tools. The Advanced Server developer edition is free. This is a good idea and one that MySQL should emulate with its Enterprise Edition.

I haven’t looked a the Windows or Mac OS X versions of Postgres Plus (the free version). But, I did download the Linux distribution and found that the gzipped download contained a single bin file. This really appealed to me since PostgreSQL’s binary versions consisted of what seemed like an endless list of RPMs to choose from and download. In fact, I decided to install from source code on Linux since it seemed easier than figuring out which RPM files I needed.

Old PostgreSQL hands probably don’t have any great need to take a look at EnterpriseDB’s offerings. However, newbies like me looking for a quick, painless, and correct installation of multiple PostgreSQL components across multiple OS platforms to create a stable platform from which to learn will probably benefit from EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus offerings.

FYI: Those of you considering running PostgreSQL or Postgres Plus on Microsoft Windows might want to take a look at these two PDF documents available from Microsoft’s Port 25 site…

PostgreSQL on Windows: A Primer

Connecting Office Applications to MySQL and PostgreSQL via ODBC

PowerShell (formerly referred to by its codename Monad) was created by Microsoft as its next generation command line environment and scripting language. Although it is not an Open Source product itself, you can see the influence FOSS dynamic languages like Perl and Python had on it. There’s an interesting interview (part 1 of 2) that Jonathan Walz & Hal Rottenberg had with PowerShell’s architect Jeffrey Snover on their…

PowerScripting Podcast (Podcast 21)

One of the interesting discussion topics that came up during this part of the interview was a need for something like Perl’s CPAN (or Ruby’s RubyGems or PHP’s PEAR) to ease the download and installation of community contributed components.

You can find an older video discussion between Port 25’s Sam Ramji and Jeffrey Snover here…

Powershell Released: An interview with Architect Jeffrey Snover

Microsoft’s Open Source Labs Manager Stephen Zarkos posted a photo tour of the facilities there at…

Inside the OSS Lab

I had a chance to take a peek inside the server room when I dropped by Building 17 a year ago. The photo above is a closeup I took of the tux penguins seen with the human lab inhabitants in the final photo of Steve’s photo tour. You’ll note that the tux-es look healthy and happy. No daggers or other sharp objects have been hurled at them :-)

I was reading through some new postings on a local LUG mailing list here in Louisiana, and saw a note from Chris J. about Microsoft’s Windows vs. Red Hat page. Chris brought up some good points, and I wanted to respond to them.

CJ: Now, let’s rip this FUD apart. First, Microsoft acts as if RedHat is the only option that enterprises would ever go with, and they say that while RedHat itself is cheap, it’s $2500 a year for support. Okay, that’s support, Microsoft. Why don’t we compare apples to apples, and point out that Microsoft’s support is somewhere around $700 per incident? To me, $2500 a year is FAR cheaper

The cost of Red Hat. Okay, in all seriousness, Red Hat is a little expensive on the front end. We often deploy it for clients, and the base cost of RHEL is a little high, especially since it’s a subscription model (you pay it every year) and not a one-time purchase (as with Windows Server). That said, Windows CAL licensing can add up very quickly. So, personally, I would have argued the point based on CALs. But as far as upfront purchase-the-shrinkwrap costs, Windows tends to be cheaper than Red Hat. As far as support costs, well, the RHEL subscription does get you support, but it’s not like your local ABC IT company. And most people don’t call Microsoft OR Red Hat for support.

CJ: I also find a lot of issue with the fact that Microsoft claims that every distro of Linux is so different that migrating from, say RedHat to SuSE is very difficult, if not impossible. One of the key strengths of any UNIX architecture is the portability of files. The file structure is based on an open standard, and you could very easily take files from something like Turbolinux, and easily bring it back up on any other distro of Linux, or perhaps BSD, Solaris, OSX, HPUX, etc… Linux admins tend to keep the data files on seperate drives/partitions from the OS, so you could simply install another OS on a new hard drive, and mount the old data partitions under that OS, and continue right where you left off. If you need something like a database, it’s not hard to dump SQL to a file and reimport it on the new server. And the configuration files are generally flat text files, so how is your data somehow married to the OS/distro that it originated on?

File System Differences. To me, this is a valid point actually. The directory structure across UNIX systems, or even across Linux distros, may be technically something of a standard, but in reality it’s not. Even within the Linux eco-system, it can be hard to remember what is where. Are installs in /opt/ or /usr/local/? How are my rc files organized? Where are my network configuration files? The Linux Standard Base (LSB) group is working hard to address this, but the cold hard reality is that it’s in fact a pain if you are managing more than just a few Linux servers.

Migrating SQL databases. Good point. That is pretty easy (thanks SQL). It’s also very easy to copy a MS-SQL database from one server to another.

CJ: Also, they make the claim that Windows 2003 has fewer published vulnerabilities than Linux. We all know that more bugs will be FOUND in Linux, and they will of course be squashed rapidly. But, due to Windows’ closed nature, how many bugs actually EXIST but have yet to be FOUND?

Vulnerabilities. There has been a bit of a fuss these days about vulnerability counts in Linux. The core of Linux, i.e., the OS proper, is stable and generally secure. It’s rather rare to see a published vulnerability for the kernel or any of the base operating system programs. However, most Linux distros do commit the cardinal sin of installing everything and the kitchen sink, and it’s an entirely valid argument to say that a vulnerability in an installed-by-default application is a point against Linux. This is very similar to how people group vulnerabilities in IIS and Exchange with “Windows”. Tit-for-tat. That or we need to all step back and stop grouping vulnerabilities in this way.

CJ: The only valid argument that Microsoft brings up in this article is about the management interfaces. They hands down win in that department, but that’s why you hear of UNIX guys working at places like NASA, making $200,000 a year. UNIX OS’s are definitely not easier, and you do have to know what you’re doing to accomplish the same thing that you can do in Windows with a mouse click. So what? It is what it is. I also love how Microsoft neglects to mention the fact that Windows Server 2008 is playing catchup with the UNIX world by adding a new feature called Windows Server 2008 Core. The core mode basically turns Windows Server into a GUI-less command-line-based server OS. That way, it can run faster, without the bloat and massive overhead associated with a GUI. Sound like any OS you’ve ever used? Oh, that’s right…UNIX/Linux/etc… And of course, once you are using Windows Server 2008 in core mode, you suddenly lose that one advantage that Windows has: its GUI based management interfaces. Those are some great arguments, Microsoft.

GUI. Actually, I tend to strongly disagree here about the focus on the Windows GUI. First, I think that most Linux servers, especially those used in large, commercial deployments, have pretty good GUI management tools. Second, whether in Windows or Linux/UNIX environments, if you have more than several servers to manage you usually manage a lot of it via scripting and automatic deployments (again, this applies to both Windows and Linux/UNIX). That said, you are right that Windows is pushing a more “scriptable” environment (e.g., with WMI, PowerShell, etc.), although even back to NT4, there was the ability to script a lot of tasks if you could live with the pain of using Windows shell scripting and/or of WSH.

I’m neither an Eclipse user (though I download it every now and then but never get around to actually trying it :-) or a Java developer. But, I read Sam Ramji’s blog post…

Supernova

…with quite a bit of interest when he announced that Microsoft would be collaborating with the Eclipse Foundation to help Eclipse developers building software for Windows. Yeah, sure, you might say. They are just doing this to sell more copies of Windows. But, it is the way they are doing it these days that interests and even impresses me. Just think back to the message and rhetoric coming out of Redmond 4 or 5 years ago. Who would have thought that they would have forged relationships with JBoss, MySQL, Zend, Samba, Xen Source, and Eclipse? Not to mention hiring the brains behind IronPython and IronRuby?

If their collaboration with Open Source projects helps me get better tools, I’m glad to see it. Have I lost all of my skepticism and paranoia? Um, ok, not all of it. But, I’m happier with the way things are now than they were a couple of years ago.

Ooh. Okay, so this is news to me. There is a freeware tool to recover ext2/ext3 filesystems from Windows. Wow, that’s a change. Is it just me or do most of the free and open source recovery tools seem to run under Linux these days? (Microsoft even has an article about how to recover NTFS with Linux.)

Well, hmm, on a second look it looks like DiskInternals Linux Recovery is free but not necessarily open source. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Thinking along these lines, I’m curious about the current state of accessing NTFS from Linux. I know that back in the day you could read an NTFS disk from Linux, but you could sometimes corrupt the NTFS volume. So, I did a quick Google and found the Linux-NTFS Wiki.

Okay, so here’s the deal apparently (pulled right from the Wiki):

• kernel driver: fast, reliable, read-only. Most people already have it.
• ntfsmount: fast, reliable, read/write, userspace.
• ntfsprogs: various tools for managing ntfs, like mkntfs, ntfsresize and ntfsclone.

So it looks like the status quo has been maintained to some extent. You can read NTFS right off the bat. To write to NTFS, you need to install ntfsmount.

Looking more into ntfsprogs, I see ntfsclone. Nifty! I was thinking this may be a free way to Ghost (say, if you could use ntfsclone, Knoppix, and an NFS filesystem somewhere), but apparently you have boot issues if you just move NTFS to another computer without doing a little legwork. OR. You can run GAG, a graphical boot manager. Check it out.

One of the sites you often see mentioned in the Microsoft Port 25 blog is CodePlex where Microsoft technology related Open Source projects are found. I pop over there from time to time to see if there are any interesting projects that might be useful in my own work. I found PHPExcel 1.6.0 on my most recent visit. It was last updated on Feb. 13 and provides PHP classes to read and write Excel 2007 spreadsheet files.

The examples section provides simple to read and understand PHP code to get a handle on how to use the classes as well as 16 sample XLSX sample spreadsheet files to test interpreting spreadsheet features such as formulas, conditional formatting, and page breaks.

Microsoft’s Port 25 has underwritten a number of technical notes (which they refer to as a technical analysis) providing detailed instructions on getting Windows and Open Source projects working together. One of the more popular topics is Apache httpd. I went through Port 25’s blogs and collected these Apache web server related technical notes.

Technical Analysis: Installing Apache on Windows

Technical Analysis: Installing Apache with SSL on Windows

Technical Analysis: Apache with mod_auth_kerb and Windows Server

You can find the Apache httpd 2.2.8 source code and installer binaries (with and without OpenSSL) at…

Download - The Apache HTTP Server Project

The official Apache 2.2 web server documentation for the Windows platform is found here…

Using Apache with Microsoft Windows

Okay, this is funny. I just read a little blog by Jamie about ComicCon and saw a link to this site. Um. Okay. So I see a preview comic strip and then click it, as told (I’m quite the sheep), and then am asked to download Silverlight. Sigh. Great, another plug-in.

Why does everything require a plug-in?

Please, someone tell me.

Anyway, I’m a little crazy so I click the Download Silverlight link and then get the luxury of reading what is perhaps the shortest license I’ve seen in about a decade:

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/LicenseWin.aspx

Well, that’s refreshing.

Oops. Except now I’m told I can’t “work around any technical limitations in the software” (which basically means I have to use the software as I’m told, at least if this could stand up in court).

At this point I give up.

Whatever happened to clicking on a link and seeing the latest Dilbert cartoon?

I’m thinking this comic strip is probably meant to showcase Silverlight, thus the requirement to download the plug-in, but, really…

At least give me an alternative URL option. ;)

I saw Jamie Cannon’s announcement that the second Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum will be held at the upcoming Infoworld Open Source Buisness Conference (OSBC) later this month.

NXT Up: OSBC

Any chance for interoperability discussions between Microsoft and Open Source developers is good news for end users like me. But, what really caught my attention was this quote from Jim Zemlin (Linux Foundation Executive Director) in InfoWorld…

Linux Foundation: We’d love to work with Microsoft

InfoWorld: Apparently, Microsoft is going to get together with the Eclipse Foundation next week. Are there any accommodations between or collaborations between Microsoft and the Linux Foundation?

Zemlin: Not at this time, but we’d love to do it.

I think the article’s title is a bit of an overstatement based on the actual response to the interview question. But, what the heck :-)

Ooh, nifty! Sun and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas have released one of the “fastest supercomputers in the world”, at least according to Sun. Hmm, so 500 teraflops of computing power. That’s pretty darn fast. Sure, not as fast as my dual-core laptop, but.. Well, okay, maybe that fast, at least when my AV is scanning a Word doc before it opens. (Is it just me, or does AV tend to make your computer seem SLOW at times?)

Anyway, this got me thinking about where Microsoft is with High Performance Computing (HPC). Historically, HPC has always been in the realm of the traditional Cray-style supercomputer and, more recently, big, powerful, and distributed UNIX clusters. Microsoft has been kind-of sort-of dipping its toes into the HPC realm, but there’s certainly no concerted effort. There are at least two reasons for this that I can see:

• HPC is unfamiliar territory for Microsoft. Without any qualification, HPC is an entirely new market to Microsoft. I’m not even sure they have a business model for it.
• Microsoft is unfamiliar territory for HPC. In other words, there’s no history of HPC users working with the Windows platform. If you’ve ever looking at code that runs in these types of environments you’ll see a lot of reliance on libraries and utilities designed to distribute load either across a cluster of servers or the code is very intelligent about how to use the several hundred processors on the supercomputer. I’m curious how many of those libraries have been ported to Windows?

Oh, and one final bullet point:

• Microsoft is about software, not hardware. As far as I know, vendors that implement HPC sell hardware. On the Sun end, there is… well, Sun. For Linux we have hardware vendors like Linux NetworX. Who’s pushing this with Windows?

Should I be expecting a 2000-node Windows HPC cluster anytime soon?

A tad unrelated to the theme of this blog, but I found this very interesting. Apparently, HP is leaving the Identity Management market (refer to my recent post about Linux and Windows Identity Management). Hmm. Interesting. To be honest though, I haven’t ever come across an HP IDM installation, although I know they are out there. Typically, we work with and see CA, Sun, Novell, Oracle, and others, but not HP.

So is this a case of one of the weaker players just bailing out?

Microsoft’s Director of their Open Source Software Lab told us…

Why I’m excited about Yahoo!

…in a Port 25 blog entry. Sam’s comments are very positive and his excitement is understandable. Here’s my take on MicroHoo/YahooSoft.

The Feds and the EU approved Google to acquire Doubleclick. So, Microsoft and Yahoo should get through that hoop too. Yahoo (YHOO) is not only underperforming compared to Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL), it is also underperforming compared to the NASDAQ index. I found it kind of interesting that Microsoft and the NASDAQ tracked each other nearly perfectly over the past two years too. The chart is from Yahoo Finance, btw. I really like its charting features.

I think the acquisition is inevitable for the simple reason that Yahoo’s major investors must be pretty restless given what looks to my financially untrained eye as a two-year loss of market cap only broken when Microsoft made the move to acquire it. But hey, I don’t claim to be a financial expert or to see into the future.

Yahoo has a lot of good stuff and good people that aren’t reflected in their awful market performance. And, it would be interesting, as Sam implies, if those people stay on after the acquisition. But, having been one of many peons involved in a past mega-merger, I’m not so sure the Yahoo superstars will hang around long enough for the acqusition to close. That’s too bad, because I think the addition of Yahoo’s Open Source superstars to places like the Microsoft Open Source Labs might really ignite Microsoft’s detente with Open Source and turn it into a really productive path for Microsoft. And, yes, I can see some of your raising your eyes to the air and saying this is all this detente stuff is pretense on Microsoft’s part. I felt exactly the same way when I heard that Microsoft had an Open Source Lab a few years ago. I felt for sure it must be some kind of propoganda FUD team. But, I decided to visit there while on vacation and was able to meet and speak with Bill Hilf (the Director of the Labs at the time). I visited the Labs again last year (again while in the area on vacation) and met with more of the team. Guess what? I think these people are sincere in their efforts to get Microsoft and Open Source people and projects together.

I think it would be really interesting to see a huge influx of Open Source and web talent come in from Yahoo and, potentially, make a sea change there. Time will tell.

I was recently poking through some of the more interesting blog entries on Port25, and I came across “Active Directory and Linux Identity Management”, which is not a bad intro to integrating Linux into Active Directory. (You can also view a PowerPoint presentation that I did on a past road-show about Linux and Active Directory integration here.) Alas, I was thinking it would be about the broader concepts of identity management in heterogeneous networks. And that’s the thing..

At my consulting company, we do a huge amount of work in identity and access management, and I see two classes of clients:

• SMBs. These clients know AD and just want to get away from having to create accounts for users in multiple places. This usually means Linux/UNIX integration with AD at the operating system level (e.g., with Samba) and sometimes at the application level (e.g., by plugging Apache or Tomcat into Kerberos).
• Enterprises. These clients know a lot more than AD, and they want to have a solid set of provisioning and access controls in place to ensure that users have only the accounts and access that they need, and this means a strong and granular set of access control features. (Think CA eTrust Admin/Identity Manager, Sun Identity Manager, etc.)

I think it’s important that SMBs start to see “identity and access management” as being more about ACCESS than IDENTITIES. Or, more to the point, about CONTROL and not ACCOUNTS. SMBs tend to push integration so that they can reduce workload, while enterprise pushes identity and access management so that they can increase their control and audit capabilities.

The thing is, you can do a lot after integrating Linux/UNIX into AD, but most admins just stop at “Great, now I don’t have to create accounts several times when a new employee is hired.” So, take a step back and reevaluate what you’re trying to accomplish.

Leaving aside the issue of why someone would want to use a WAMP environment for the moment, I wanted to point out that Chris Travers wrote an instructional document that provides an annotated httpd.conf for people who want to i install the Apache 2.2 web server on a Microsoft Windows platform. You can find the PDF file linked at this Microsoft Port 25 blog item…

Technical Analysis: Installing Apache on Windows

If you are thinking about installing Apache under Windows Vista (as someone who is testing PHP on a desktop or notebook might want to do), pay special attention to what Chris has to say about the dreaded Vista UAC (User Access Control).

Microsoft announced its Document Interoperability Initiative and the release of version 1.1 of the translator between ODF and Open XML for Microsoft Excel (spreadsheet) and Microsoft PowerPoint (presentation) applications.

Press release: Microsoft Launches Document Interoperability Initiative

The odd thing is that nothing in the press release tells you how to actually find this translator. It’s on SourceForge and here’s where you can find it:

OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-in for Office

If you head over to its download page, you will find individual add-ins for PowerPoint and Excel. Although both were mentioned in the March 6 press release, the Excel add-in has a Dec. 4, 2007 release date attached to it and is listed as version 1.0, not 1.1. The PowerPoint add-in is version 1.1, however.

I’ve always been a big proponent of virtualization for many reasons, one of the most powerful of which is that it is making the underlying platform less and less important. For years, there has been the struggle for the “desktop” by Windows and X, where X has been OS/2, Apple, or Linux. (Yes, I said OS/2. Yes, that was before the invention of the wheel.)

Anyway, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the underlying platform that runs the box in front of you will become less important from a technical standpoint.

For Linux, this is a good thing.

Obviously, Linux wins on the upfront licensing end of things. Windows has some clout in the enterprise desktop market of course because of its huge third-party market, manageability in terms of policies and AD, and… well, because everybody knows it. Linux of course can be just as easily managed, but it’s just not as big a dot on the radar as Windows.

One reason for that is the fact that Linux takes a different skill set that Windows. And the supply of that skill set is much smaller than what is available for Windows.

But as virtualization continues to centralize application management and deployment (think Altiris for Windows and Linux), and as we move more toward the seamless windows in servers offering Windows-based applications, there is less reason to run Windows for management reasons and more reason to focus strictly on upfront costs.

I’m curious about Microsoft’s plans to face this threat to its desktop domination? Or is this in fact part of its plan? Where are things headed really?

Some people may be familiar with my writing/blogging about Windows Mobile, Mac applications, or Freeware and Free & Open Source Software for Windows & Macs. Microsoft gave me a unique way to discuss why I’m so interested in getting Open Source and Proprietary software products to work together. You can find three short videos of me talking about what I do and why I do it at…

Microsoft Open Source Heroes - Todd’s profile

There are a couple of minor detail glitches in the text part. But, you know how things get lost-in-translation :-) In any case, it is an interesting way for me to say “hello” to you all. So, Iet’s see how this works.

Hope to “see” (read) your comments to the blog topics Dustin and I write about for Inside Port 25.

The last time I installed PHP on Windows for serious testing (with Windows that is) was probably in 2002. It was a really painful process that involved (if I recall correctly) manually copying ISAPI DLLs and other obscure (to me) files to various directories to get it up and running with the Apache web server for Windows. And, after installng it… well, there were still some oddities that left me uncomfortable. However, the story from Microsoft, Zend, and SpikeSource for the past week has been that FastCGI fixes those performance issues. I’ll find out what installing and configuring PHP for Windows and IIS is like when I test it out myself this weekend on Windows Server 2008 in a virtual machine (in case I mess up :-). In the meantime, check out the commentary from Microsoft’s Hank Janssen about working with Zend to optimize PHP for Windows…

PHP on Windows

You can also find a video about configuring PHP with IIS7 and then modifying Wordpress to use IIS7’s Forms Authentication.

Installing PHP Applications on IIS7 (13 minutes)

You can see and hear Hank himself along with John Bocharov talk about the SQL Server Drive for PHP running on Windows at..

John Bocharov and Hank Janssen: Introduction to SQL Server Driver for PHP (SQLPHP)

Since I had “Windows vs. Linux” on the brain (as opposed to “Windows and Linux”, which happens now and then as well), I was thinking back to a recent meeting I had for the Baton Rouge Information Systems Security Association, which is part of the national ISSA. We were discussing upcoming topics, and one item that came up was log management.

Things that we all agreed needed to be discussed in a presentation were issues such as:

* How in the world do you view the logs from all of your servers?
* How do you filter out noise from important events?
* How do you store logs for future review, audits, and regulatory compliance?

The funny thing about that discussion is that the group that had the biggest problem understanding possible solutions were those that ran Windows.

Outside of enterprise settings, log management is just a completely under-served Windows market. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of log management solutions that work just great with Windows; some are open source, and some are commercial. But that’s not the point. The real issue is even if Linux and UNIX sysadmins aren’t actively managing their logs, they at least understand that it is possible. But a lot of Windows sysadmins don’t even think about this problem, much less try and pursue a solution.

This reminds me of the Shapir-Worf Hypothesis, which I learned in an anthropology class at LSU a long, long time ago. Essentially, Shapir-Worf says that the language you think in has a very big impact on how you think. A tad simplistic, but it makes sense to some extent.

It seems to me that an IT’ish Shapir-Worf is also at play here. Your view of the world in IT, and the problems and solutions available in that world, is in large part dictated by your platform of choice.

Obvious? Perhaps.

So, I just pointed out how this has limited Windows sysadmins to some point. In what way has this limited non-Windows sysadmins? What about Linux sysadmins?

I just read an interesting if short blog from Ann All about Linux in the SMB market. Basically, the question is: How far has Linux penetrated into small and medium sized businesses?

That’s a great question.

I’m a big fan that, in most situations, the best product is the most supportable product. Now, with a platform choice like the one people make between Linux and Windows, there are a lot of variables that go into “supportable”, including:

* Knowledge of the OS. Easy enough. Do you have the knowledge, or can you find someone that has the knowledge, to manage the servers. Far too often I see people with Windows and Linux servers that are horribly configured and frighteningly insecure.

* Vendor support. Does the vendor actively support the product at a reasonable cost? This one bullet item could start a flame war, but I have to say that I don’t think either side is better than the other on this. At the end of the day, most SMB-level organizations have to pay a vendor for post-installation support.

* Community support. Again, another flame war possibility here, but in my opinion both the Windows and Linux camps do well here. If nothing else, both camps have some very smart people in forums and newsgroups that can help.

* Third-party support. Okay, here is where Windows has a lead. Let’s be honest, there are a lot of really cool commercial applications for Windows and not so many for Linux.

All that said, Linux really packs a punch when it comes to upfront costs. Most people use free versions of Linux (e.g., Debian, CentOS), the servers run powerful and free software (e.g., Apache, PHP), and it just works.

So why isn’t Linux in more than “a fourth” of SMBs?

P.S. And of course, there is PHP on Windows..

When I read Bill Hilf’s See Change blog entry reflecting on Microsoft’s Feb. 21 Open Source Interoperability announcement, I didn’t think this direction shift would be felt by the Internet Explorer team. I mean IE7 doesn’t leak like Firefox 2 does (on both my Windows and Mac boxes). But, IE7 sure breaks a lot of web pages (including my personal Windows Mobile focused blog) that Firefox renders without issues. But, check on the announcements made today (March 3) regarding Internet Explorer 8.

Press Release: Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards

IE Blog: Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 by Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager, Internet Explorer

Dean’s blog comments…

Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action. While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it’s the better choice.

…really caught my attention. I wasn’t paying much attention to IE8’s development up until today. I was just waiting for Firefox 3 to get further along in its development before trying it out. Now, I’m paying attention to IE8.

You know, I’m really starting to wonder about OpenOffice after reading this note from Ed Moltzen. So great, OpenOffice 2.4 is about to be released. That’s.. boring. Who really cares? There just doesn’t seem to be much of a vibe around OpenOffice anymore.

Obviously, the problem here is Google. Without question, Google stole all of OpenOffice’s thunder (well, what thunder there was) with Google Docs.

Personally, I use Microsoft Office 2003 (yes, I’m behind the times). I write a good bit, as a consultant I work with documents internally in our office as well as with clients, and, frankly, Office just works. But if I had to change, I’d just take the plunge and try an online office suite like Google Docs. Why take the effort to jump to OpenOffice just so I can.. well, nothing. What does OpenOffice offer me that would make me want to change? Not much. Google Docs is another story. Everything is “up there” in the Big Network In the Sky. How cool.

I think OpenOffice is going to get more and more marginalized over time. I don’t see how that can’t happen.

P.S. Okay, okay, so OpenOffice gets a mention about how well the overall architecture works and its impact on Microsoft. I’m still not blown away.

Todd just commented on WISP (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, PHP) and I have to say I’m curious. I have to admit I wonder how viable WISP really is. With LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), most developers are relying on the built-in “free” of, well, Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. But with Windows that’s not the case. At a minimum, you have licensing cost for Windows, and also SQL Server if you aren’t using Express.

An obvious rebuttal here is that the savings is in systems management. If you have systems administrators that are used to managing Windows, then I can certainly see where Linux may be a bad idea. But it just seems to me that most people that want to run most of the open applications, such as phpBB, Moodle, and Mantis are going to be at least familiar with Linux.

Speaking of Moodle.. well, maybe I’ll hold off on Moodle for a later discussion.

Anyway, please, someone tell me what real advantage WISP has in the real-world? If nothing else, most Windows-based web servers are doing .NET these days. I just don’t see PHP on Windows often—at all.

The last time I installed Apache httpd in Microsoft Windows was, hmm, early 2002, I think. And, I’ve never tried installing Tomcat under Windows. So, I read through Garrett Serack’s comments on Microsoft’s Port 25 site with interest since two of his recent blog items talked about Apache team members visiting Microsoft.

The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day One

The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day Two

One comment I found interesting in the Day Two blog entry was: a few things were uncovered, primarily around UAC, data redirection (where Windows redirects writes to the file system and registry to safe locations for low-rights processes). Argh. UAC (User Access Control) drives me nuts when I use Windows Vista. I know you can turn it off. But, that seems to defeat its important purpose of improved security. UAC should be priority one for Windows 7. The other item the comment brought to mind is this: From my limited Windows Server 2008 experience, it looks like its end-user UAC-isms are better behaved than Windows Vista. But, I thought the two OSes shared a great deal of the same code. So, why does the user experience on Windows Server 2008 seem so much better than the workstation-oriented Windows Vista?

The IIS7 administrative interface looks a lot different than IIS6 to me. So much so, in fact, that I suspect it is probably easier for an experienced Apache httpd web server administrator to install it on Windows Server 2008 than an experienced IIS6 admin would have configuring IIS7. So, I hope Microsoft and Apache can quickly iron out the issues Garrett mentions in his blog items to make the transition even smooth for Apache web server admins.

My comfort zone is in the LAMP stack. I’ve played around with some WAMP (use Windows as the base OS instead of Linux) stack configurations. But, I’ve never really considered using a WISP (Windows, IIS, SQL Server/Express, and PHP) stack. SpikeSource’s Dominic Sartorio describes their work in a guest Port 25 blog post to provide not only a functional WISP stack but stacks with pre-configured and ready to run Open Source applications like phpBB, WebCalendadr, Gallery, moodle, and Mantis optimized for Windows Server 2008 and taking advantage of FastCGI to provide PHP performance that is supposed to be much better than we’ve seen prior to FastCGI being available for Windows Server and IIS.

Someone recently asked me about installing phpBB. Honestly, I’m not much of a bulletin board user, so I’ve never even installed it on a LAMP stack. I’m giving some thought to at least giving SpikeSource’s turnkey WISP+phpBB a test drive just to see how much time in might save me by going that route instead of installing and configuring it on my usual LAMP environment.

Okay, not very original as far as titles go, but I’ll take it.

So, I’m new to O’Reilly’s Port25 blog, and happy to be here! As a quick introduction, I spend a lot of time talking and writing about interoperability, identity and access management, and directory services. I base everything I say and write on the actual experience I get from providing expertise on, well, interoperability, identity and access management, and directory services.

Oh, and speaking of.. speaking, I’ll be presenting at the Directory Experts Conference in Chicago next week. DEC is an excellent conference, and you’ll be able to rub shoulders with some real industry heavyweights, so you should show up.

Like I said, I’m excited to be here, and this should be an enjoyable ride. I’ll be talking about my real-world experiences with plugging Linux and UNIX into Active Directory, using various directory products (such as OpenLDAP, AD, eDirectory, and Sun) together, and what it really means to manage access across servers and applications that don’t want to speak with one another. Should be fun!

If you read Sam Raimi’s How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008 and Dominic Sartorio’s Dominic Sartorio on SpikeSource and Open Source Interoperability blog entries on Microsoft’s Port 25 site, you might wonder if FastCGI for PHP only works with Windows Server 2008 and IIS7. Fortunately, that is NOT the case. Head over to…

http://iis.net/php

…where you can find and download FastCGI for IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003. You will also find a link to a video tutorial titled Setting up FastCGI for PHP on that page. It is part of the IIS7 video tutorial series found at…

http://learn.iis.net/

I was surprised to read what Sam Ramji had to say in his Port25 blog entry…

How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008

Sam lists some of what he considers the things about Open Source development that works well and then describes how Microsoft applied this ideas to developing Windows Server 2008. This is the aspect of the blog the surprised me.

Sam goes on to describe some really interesting Open Source related developments like the FastCGI enhancements to speed up PHP on IIS7 (and IIS6 too as I’ll discuss in a separate blog entry). He goes on to talk about how system administrators who write code are first-class citizens now that PowerShell is built right into Windows Server 2008. Personally, I think PowerShell was the single most important product released in the 2006-2007 timeframe that saw Windows Vista (lukewarm IMHO) and Office 2007 (great) released. You might be thinking what I thought when I first heard about PowerShell (then called Monad) back in late 2005 or early 2006: When don’t they just use Bash scripting or Python or Ruby? Go take a look at PowerShell and you’ll understand why Sam says this makes script-writing sysadmins first class citizens on Server 2008. PowerShell works directly with the .Net Framework. You can work with the system at the object level. This eliminates a huge amount of the parsing and formatting that we normally do when working on a UNIX-ish type OS (Linux, BSD, etc.) using Bash, Python, or Ruby. And, although Sam doesn’t mention it, I’m hoping to read more about using IronPython and, eventually, IronRuby with Windows Server 2008.

Speaking of all these cool new features… If you install and fire up Windows Server 2008, you won’t see any of this stuff! Don’t worry. It is all there. These features are all turned off by default. To turn on features like PowerShell, head to the Control Panel, select Programs and Features, and then use the Add Features Wizard (see my screen cap above) to turn on things you want to test out.

By the way, unless you want to test out the pre-release Hyper-V virtualization features, you don’t need to dedicate a PC for testing. In fact, I’m running my tests on a Mac using VMware Fusion. Windows Server 2008 installs and runs fine there. I definitely am saving my nickels and dimes to buy a small test PC with a Core 2 Duo chipset that supports Intel-VT for virtualization assist though. Be careful in buying a desktop or notebook PC for testing Server 2008 if you are interested in playing with Hyper-V. Not all Intel Core 2 Duo processors support Intel-VT.

I’m probably not saying anything that hasn’t been said before here, but I thought I’d share a few thoughts on why people seem to be drawn to the Microsoft Way. I recently did something at the ‘day job’ that I’ve thought about doing for a long time, but never quite worked up the steam to follow through on, I signed up to participate in a a Microsoft-centric project, and to learn .NET.

I have made abortive stabs in the past to learn to code in the Microsoft Universe. I made a stab back in the bad old COM days, but the number of hoops I was being asked to jump through was more than I wanted to bite off at that time. Since then, I’ve carried that bad taste in my mouth, and resisted adding any Microsoft skill sets to my repertoire, even though it was sometimes a gap in my resume.

I’ve worked frequently in environments where there was the one Microsoft Guy, the evangelist who would constantly tell you how much easier it would have been in .NET. I’ve written them off as Kool-Aid drinking Gates worshipers. But, at the end of the day, I felt that if I was going to criticize them, I really needed to understand where they were coming from. Know thy enemy, and all that.

I spent last week learning in order C#, .NET and VSTO (that’s Visual Studio Toolkit for Office, if you’re not familiar with Microsoft’s alphabet soup.) I used the O’Reilly ‘Learning C#’ book, and did something I rarely do, went through it pretty methodically (at least the first half or so.)

Guess what? Microsoft has a pretty good development suite on their hands. To be honest, C# is largely what I’d do if I could rewrite Java from scratch with no concerns for backward compatibility. It has a couple of really cool features, like the virtual, override and new keywords that let you specify what should happen when you cast a class to it’s base class and then call a method on it that’s defined in both.

Visual Studio is a slick tool that really does let you bang out applications (and with VSTO, plug ins for Office) is very little time. ADO.NET is no worse then JDBC, and is pretty seamlessly integrated into Visual Studio. I was able, by the end of the week, to develop both stand-alone applications and Office plug ins that could talk to back-end databases, having written very little code. From what I’ve seen, ASP.NET does the same for MVC web applications.

So what’s good about a monoculture, and why does Microsoft win so often when people make a decision about platforms? Largely because what the open source community sees as a strength, people trying to get a job done in the real world see as a weakness. We celebrate the diversity of choices available to solve a problem and call it freedom. IT managers and CIOs look at it and call it chaos, confusion and uncertainty.

Should I use iBatis or Hibernate? XFire or AXIS? Perl, PHP or Ruby? Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu or Suse? Make the wrong decision, and you can waste a ton of time, as we found out on a recent project when we wasted a week try to make AXIS2 work for a web service project, only to find out that XFire was the right choice.

For the Microsoft Guy, no such confusion. You use ADO.NET, ASP.NET, C# and Windows. They all work, they’re all well documented from the perspective of a developer’s needs, with nary a disparaging ‘go look at the source’ blow-off. Every time I thought I was going to be stuck, there were a dozen articles explaining how to do exactly what I needed to do, with sample code that was up to date with the versions of the software I was using, and that actually related to the problem I was trying to solve.

Microsoft offers the certainty of no choices. Choice isn’t always good, and the open source community sometimes offers far too many ways to skin the same cat, choices that are born more out of pride, ego or stubbornness than a genuine need for two different paths. I won’t point fingers, everyone knows examples.

Now, least you think I’ve been turned to the Dark Side, there is one BIG problem with a monoculture, which is that you’ve essentially sold your soul for the stability of a clearcut set of choices. You go down the .NET path, you’re pretty much stuck there forever, Mono not withstanding. You’re always going to be running on a Windows platform. You got the pretty gold ring, but Sauron gets to pull your strings and make you dance. For many companies, ones that don’t need to worry about deploying into heterogeneous environments, that’s a deal they’re more than willing to make.

The takeaway I get from this entire line of reasoning is this: that somehow, someway, we need to start doing some winnowing. The 700 lb clue-bat has to be available to pound on the head of those who fork for no better reason than a disagreement over a license, or who should get to call the shots. When we hear about two or more projects that answer the same question, we should be asking ourself “Why don’t they pool their effort and produce one really good solution?”, rather than celebrating diversity for diversity’s sake alone.

Do we really need Ruby on Rails AND Groovy on Grails? When the April Fools’ announcement of Python on Planes came out, it took me a second to realize it was a hoax, because it’s just the kind of ‘doing something for the sake of doing it’ effort that fractionalizes the OSS community. There’s no way to stop people from starting new duplicative projects, nor should we want to, but please God, do we have to actively encourage it?

We spend a lot of time complaining about all the evil ways Microsoft uses to foist themselves on the world. By doing this, we automatically remove any blame that we ourselves may bear for their successes and our failures. The reality is that there are good, practical reasons that drive people into the arms of the Redmond tool set, and we need to accept that as a fact and learn from it, rather than shake our fists and curse the darkness. For we have met the enemy, and it is us, not Microsoft, at least not all the time…

It just occured to me that Microsoft’s Port 25 site turned 1 year old on March 1. So, here’s a belated Happy Birthday to the site :-) The first official Port 25 welcome message was posted a bit later by Bill Hilf on March 28 (Welcome to Port 25). And, Jamie Cannon laid out the 10 point Port 25 Mission statement just a week earlier. So, perhaps I am not that late in my well wishes to the site.

Earlier this week Information Week’s David Strom attended the Microsoft Tech Summit and wrote…

Microsoft’s Tech Summit: Redmond Still Trying To ‘Get’ Open Source Software

One of Strom’s comments is: There is a growing emphasis on interoperability at Microsoft, and they are clearly spending a lot of resources on projects (such as Windows and other operating systems, new versions of Windows networking protocols, and new programming languages with older ones), but there is still room for improvement. You can never do too much interop testing. Interop is getting more attention, but still isn’t infused into the core culture yet.

This whole Open Source and Proprietary Software Interoperability movement is still very new. I still get odd looks in response to the tag on my business card that reads Open Source & Proprietary Software Can Co-Exist. In fact, the first person who did not produce an odd look on his face after seeing my card was Bill Hilf of the Microsoft Open Source Labs when I dropped by his office to introduce myself and ask for more information about what this Open Source Labs was doing at Microsoft nearly two years ago.

There’s a lot of business model experimentation going on in both camps. Red Hat probably led the way years ago when they stopped providing ISO files after Red Hat 9. Then, they embraced Fedora Core. And, now, well, I can’t figure out what Red Hat is doing with Fedora Core to be honest. SUSE moved in a nearly opposite direction after being acquired by Novell taking SUSE from for-fee only to providing an OpenSUSE edition with freely downloadable ISO files. And, well, of course, that partnership with Microsoft that generates a lot of heated debate. MySQL split their distribution to a free Community Edition and a for-fee Enterprise Edition that adds some interesting proprietary management applications to entice potential license purchasers. Marc Fleury cause a bunch of commotion a few years ago with the Professional Open Source initiative at JBoss (before being acquired by Red Hat) and paying lead programmers of Open Source projects (to be honest, it seemed like a good idea to me). Google, the openess poster child and acknowledged thought leader in the web space releases their client-side applications (Google Earth, Picasa, Google Desktop, etc.) as free but closed source applications. SUN moved both Solaris and Java into the Open Source space. And, there are, of course, many more examples of interesting movements in one direction or the other.

The “truth”, I think, lies somewhere between the shrillness of the cries of “Microsoft is evil” or “Open Source is evil” from opposing philosophical camps. But, “the truth”, as the X-Files fictional Agent Fox Mulder would say,” IS somewhere out there.”

This Inside Port 25 blog vehicle has been an interesting 10 week experiment for me. I was thrilled when O’Reilly Media contacted me to ask if I would be interested in really focusing in on Microsoft’s Port 25 site and provide reflective commentary as an interested outsider (I spend a lot of time talking about Open Source software for Windows and Mac OS X on my personal blog). This my last official blog item within the scope of this great 10 week reflection experiment. But, I’ve been talking about this in more general terms for years. So, I’m definitely going to continue this conversation on the various sites and sub-sites (such as WindowsDevCenter and MacDevCenter here in the O’Reilly Media blogging space). Thanks for the 10 week ride. I hope those of you who spent your valuable time reading Inside Port 25 items from either me or Matt Asay felt it was an interesting experiment too! See you out there!

Anandeep of Microsoft’s Open Source Labs posted a blog with a brief…

An Interview with Ruby on Rails Core Team Member: Michael Koziarski

It is an interesting interview if you, like me, are interested in learning a bit more about why certain people choose certain tools of the trade (Ruby on Rails in this case). But, personally, given Koziarski’s deep involvement with Rails, I would have been more interested if some of the following topics had been discussed (hint and request for future interviews):

• I first tried Rails on a Linux box. However, I recently had to opportunity to watch my new development partner take a look at it starting out on a Windows PC. It seemed to me like the PC configuration is strictly for prototyping and testing, not for production. Is this an incorrect perception?
  
• Rails works fine with the database I use for nearly all projects of any kind: MySQL. But, what if you or your customer wanted to use Microsoft SQL Server or the soon to be nearly Open Source Microsoft FoxPro?
  
• Is it possible for Microsoft-centric development shops to use Visual Studio and Visual SourceSafe to build and maintain Rails projects?
  

For reasons I’ve never understood Python never quite got the hype that other dynamic (scripting) languages like Perl, PHP, and Ruby have received during different periods over the past 20 years. Nevertheless, Python has not only driven many a utility or full application but also generated variants such as Jython (written in and integrated with Java) and IronPython (runs on and integrated with the Microsoft .NET Architecture). The author of both Python variants, Jim Huginin, went to work for Microsoft a while back and can be seen interviewed by Microsoft’s Open Source Lab’s Director Sam Ramji…

IronPython: Python evolves again

You can also watch a view of Jim demonstrating IronPython in this 18 minute long MSDN video…

IronPython: Python on the .NET Framework

Microsoft Port 25’s Michael Francisco lists a bunch of new projects hosted on CodePlex in his blog…

New Codeplex Projects….

Two projects in the alpha development stage caught my attention…

Windows Installer PowerShell Extensions: Exposes Windows Installer functionality to PowerShell. Head over to this project and read the descriptions of some of the proposed PowerShell Cmdlets. This project should be an interest to watch develop over time.

Crash a Party: This sample mashup uses the Windows Live Contacts Control and Virtual Earth to place your Windows Live Contacts on a map. This one sounded fun. I visited the mashup site linked on the project page and fired up the Live Contacts Control. However, instead of clicking through the contacts and sending them over to be visualized on the Virtual Earth map, I canceled the session. Why? I didn’t want to accidently expose my friends to a web app that I hadn’t fully investigated. Identity and Trust are the cornerstones of the Web 2.0 world. How do you decide on what and who to trust? I don’t even provide my cell number for my Twitter account fearing a SMS deluge that might be caused by a large number of legitimate twittering from friends or an accidental text flood.

Although the launches of Windows Vista and Office 2007 got all the attention during the Winter 2006-2007 period, I think that when people look back on this period in a few years, the standout Microsoft release will be PowerShell. I’ve mentioned a couple of Port 25 interviews and comments on PowerShell in the past. Here are some of the pertinent ones to refresh your memory.

Watching a community grow - Powershell

Powershell Released: An interview with Architect Jeffrey Snover

Powershell in Action! Hank interviews Bruce Payette

PowerShell is currently a free downlaod add-on product for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2003 (I couldn’t get it to install under Longhorn Server Beta-2). This week, however, Microsoft’s Jeffrey Snover (PowerShell Architect) Announced: PowerShell to Ship in Windows Server (Longhorn)!!!! This is good news indeed. Having spent the last couple of decades working on UNIX/Linux servers (mostly from the command line), I find managing Windows Servers from the GUI often slows me down and makes remote management a chore. Having PowerShell built into the future version of Windows Server makes life easier for those of us with mixed server environments.

Here’s a PowerShell goodie I found on Microsoft’s CodePlex site that is an example of the power PowerShell brings to Windows.

PowerShell R Interop

This brings together the Windows data objects that PowerShell has access to with the statistical analysis power of the Open Source R statistical package. The oldsters among you (if you remember the late 20th century, you are old :-), will find that your old S statistical package books mostly applies to help you use the powerful R statistical package.

BusinessWeek has a great article on Microsoft’s recent stumbles in online search. It’s reflective of Microsoft’s - and, indeed, any successful company’s - attempts to cast itself in a new mold.

If Microsoft can’t keep pace, it risks seeing its Windows and Office software franchises erode as Google and others launch Web-based rivals. “It behooves Microsoft to be there,” says Charles Di Bona, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. (AB ). “If they don’t get there, it gives others a platform from which to attack Microsoft’s core business.”

Just as troubling, Microsoft’s search problem reflects its approach to new markets in general. It spends little time focusing on tiny, emerging niches that generate little, if any, sales. But those are precisely the markets that can quickly blossom on the Net into meaningful businesses. “Bill [Gates] and Steve [Ballmer] and the leadership don’t understand the value of small things,” says Robert Scoble, a former Microsoftie whose blog recently took the company to task for its Web missteps. “That cripples their entire Internet strategy from the start.”

This is the same trouble the company has had with open source, though I believe it has generally been more successful with open source than with these other, product-related decisions. Once Microsoft figured out that open source is a development methodology, and not a traditional competitor, it has responded much more productively to the “threat” than it has to search, online applications, etc.

In open source, I believe Microsoft’s best strategy is to start creating entirely new products completely in the open. It doesn’t have to sacrifice its Windows or Office cash cows to open source. Rather, it can experiment in safer territory.

What Microsoft can’t afford to do is sit around and wait for open source to happen to the company. It won’t. Open source requires a complete restructuring of how one thinks and behaves as a company. It’s asking too much of Microsoft to make this shift (just as my old company, Novell, failed to make the corporate shift). But it’s not too much to ask of a division within Microsoft. Or a product. It needs to happen sooner, not later.

Open source is not as open as it claims, and Microsoft is not as closed as is claimed. Thus spake Brad Abrams, group program manager for ASP.NET AJAX at Microsoft.

Abrams argued that Microsoft is not the cathedral when it comes to ASP.NET AJAX but is quite transparent. Furthermore, he stated that most successful open source efforts are backed by a commercial vendor, making them less bazaar than they claim to be.

“I’m not sure the bazaar analogy works,” Abrams said. “Neither cathedral nor bazaar are the same in the AJAX Web space; rather there is a continuum that reaches across space.”

According to Abrams, ASP.NET AJAX offers the best of both the commercial and open worlds. On the commercial side Microsoft offers 24 x 7 support. “In the open source world you can talk to people and get answers,” Abrams said. “But we’re offering guaranteed support.”…

On the open side of things, Abrams claimed that Microsoft was providing ASP.NET AJAX components with 100 percent source code availability. The components are being licensed under Microsoft’s permissive license, which allows users to view, modify and redistribute source code for non-commercial and/or commercial purposes.

Fair enough, and no doubt true. It also points to an important point (though not stated): different groups within Microsoft are more open than others. I’m willing to bet that the emerging groups have more leeway to be open than the old cash cows within the company. That’s to be expected.

Fragment of my business card

Are you inspired by Open?

Bryan poses three scenarios that encourages openness: Curiosit & Creativity, Economic Opportunity & Problem Solving, and Status & Recognition.

A few days earlier (March 21), internetnews.com reported on the keynote given by Brad Abrams, Microsoft Group Program Manager for ASP.NET AJAX at the AJAXWorld conference.

Microsoft Not a Cathedral; Open Source Not a Bazaar

Abrams reflects on Eric S. Raymonds oft referenced The Cathedral & the Bazaar saying that Microsoft is not the cathedral when it comes to ASP.NET AJAX but is quite transparent and “I’m not sure the bazaar analogy works,” Abrams said. “Neither cathedral nor bazaar are the same in the AJAX Web space; rather there is a continuum that reaches across space.”

I suggest that there is room for extrapolating a bit on both these points of view. To Bryan’s list I’ll add Do the right thing. Being open in terms of information in general and source code in particular often just feels like the right thing to do. Microsoft itself has recognized the value of sharing information by awarding its Most Valuable Professional (MVP) designation to those they describe as: …are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community’s best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.. And, the creation of the Microsoft Open Source Lab seems to demonstrate that they are serious about understanding FOSS better.

My take on Abrams’ point that the Cathedral and Bazaar analogies may be less applicable these days is to add a less colorful but perhaps useful analogy of workshops in clear view of each other and where things simply need to be built or repaired. For years I’ve been trying to promote a pragmatic view of just getting work done in a heterogenous environment. The section of my business card showed here pretty much says it all for me.

As Paul Kedrosky is reporting, Microsoft continues to struggle with its online strategy.

This is further evidence that Microsoft needs to look forward, rather than trying to tie everything into its history. The way forward is by burning the boats, not by continuously plugging the holes in those boats. Microsoft will never succeed in the online world until it competes as vigorously there as Google does, which will be difficult while its interest is in hording the riches it has made in the past with the offline world.

CodePlex is a Microsoft’s Open Source project hosting site. The source code is managed using a Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. But, what if you want to use the site from a non-Windows workstation running,for example, Linux or Mac OS X? The answer appeared earlier this week in a Port 25 blog item titled…

Cross-Platform Access to Codeplex Compliments of our Friends at Teamprise

Teamprise is offering three tools to let you use CodePlex from a non-Windows platform. These tools are:

• Teamprise plug-in for Eclipse
  
• Teamprise Explorer (a stand alone GUI client)
  
• Teamprise Command Line Client
  

Microsoft has taken an increasingly warm approach to open source. It’s not going to revolutionize the company tomorrow, but Bill Hilf and others are successfully nudging the company toward greater and greater experiments with open source.

Since the company will eventually get to an open source model, or die fighting it, I have some advice for Microsoft:

Go GPL.

This will sound ridiculous to those who don’t appreciate the nuances of the GPL, but the GPL is capitalism, pure and simple. It is the best way to benefit customers while inhibiting competitors, as I’ve argued before, which lends itself perfectly to Microsoft’s business. From my interview with Charlie Babcock:

If a competitor takes your code, modifies it and redistributes it, then the giveback provision reasserts itself….So your competitor will be required to give the originating company all the changes that its made.

And the community that’s formed around the original GPL code will probably not assist the competitor with further improvements. But it will quickly assimilate a competitor’s changes, test them, modify and expand them and in general make life miserable for the competitor.

“With the GPL, you get the value of the changes back. You don’t get that with other licenses,” Asay notes. And if the original code supplier is on the ball, its going to move faster than any competitor can keep up.

“It’s produced the best open source companies on the planet–Red Hat, MySQL and JBoss. The GPL is best suited for commercial companies….” he says.

But more profoundly, the GPL enables a fundamental change between a software company and its customers that in the long run is going to give GPL companies immense staying power.

“The GPL aligns the company’s interest with the customer’s. It forces me to stop thinking of the relationship as ending when I ship a set of bits. Instead, that’s the start,” and the nature of the ongoing relationship is determined by the caliber of upgrades to those bits, the quality of technical support, the strength of the programming community that forms around the bits.

Isn’t this precisely where Microsoft competes? On the value of its ecosystem and the ability to deliver updates to customers? Why couldn’t Microsoft have essentially the same model (for enterprises) with GPL’d code as it does with its proprietary license?

It could. It should. Hopefully, it will.

Some open source licenses don’t readily lend themselves to commercial open source. Apache/BSD licensing, for example, is hard to monetize (directly). But the GPL is very easy to monetize directly: customers get the value they want and competitors are scared to touch it. Everyone (that matters) wins.

Microsoft needs to ditch its weird view on the GPL. It used to call it anti-American. It’s actually the exact opposite. It is the most American of open source licenses. Microsoft could embrace it and continue to pull in its billions…and what could be more American than crass materialism? :-)

MIT Press released the book…

Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (2005)

…as a free PDF. I just took a brief look into it. But, you gotta give credit to an academic oriented book (vs. pop book) that uses phrases like nerdish stereotype (p. 32) :-). There’s a section that starts on page 59 titled Comparison between Open Source and Closed Source Programming Incentives that I suspect will become required reading for the staff of Microsoft’s Open Source Lab.

I also hope that someone at the Lab takes a look at the document mentioned to on page 66 (An internal Microsoft document on open source (Valloppillil 1998) describes a number of pressures that limit the implementation of features of open source development within Microsoft.) and reflects on this nearly decade old point of view.

BTW, don’t assume that this book is some kind of FOSS cheerleader. Take a look at Chapter 4 written by Robert L. Glass who takes FOSS to task.

In what might be a minor move at any other company, Microsoft’s decision to move FoxPro to its CodePlex open source site is big news. And good news, too, in my opinion (one that I share with Jason Matusow, apparently.)

Why is it big news? An increasing number of companies have started to treat open source as a dumping ground for old, unwanted code. FoxPro certainly seems to fill that description, though not for existing customers that use it and rely on it. But this move is bigger than just one piece of code. It reflects, I believe, a shifting mindset within Microsoft.

No, it won’t be licensed under an OSI-approved (read: open source) license. It will be under one of Microsoft’s Shared Source licenses, as Mary Jo Foley points out. That’s OK, because I think this decision is less about open source and more about collaborative community development. Very few get this aspect of open source right, and I’m hoping that Microsoft will do better than many of the rest of us.

Microsoft, for all its faults, has traditionally understood the importance of developers better than most companies. Steve Ballmer’s famous developer dance is just one indication of this. To the extent that Microsoft can figure out the open source development model, and marry it with the passive-aggressive open source licensing model, it will win big in this new world of software.

Chris Travers, who wrote the recent Port 25 tutorial for installing PostgreSQL on Windows, is back again with a tutorial describing how to install MySQL on Windows Vista. You can find the paper linked in a Port 25 blog entry from Jamie Cannon at titled…

MySQL on Windows: Configuration & Install

Chris’ paper focuses on installing MySQL on Windows Vista because its new security features require a few tweaks to allow MySQL to install properly. The general information provided in the paper could also be applied to Windows Server, however.

Since it isn’t discussed in the paper, I thought I’d mention that MySQL comes in two flavors now: The Enterprise Edition appeared late last year (2006) and has a tiered pricing depending on the kind of support desired. The Community Edition is still a free download. However, the two editions have forked in a way that appears similar to the relationship between Red Hat Enterprise Edition (RHEL) and Fedora Core.

MySQL Enterprise Edition is the version MySQL recommends for use with mission critical applications. It is said to be more stable and will have minor point releases available as a binary download for the various supported platforms.

MySQL Community Edition does not have formal support options from MySQL. It will include new features before the Enterprise Edition and can be, I guess, considered be the testing ground version. Binary ready to run installation files will only be released twice a year for this version.

The two versions will converge about every 18 months and then fork again for the next round.

I used to install/upgrade MySQL using the RPM releases from MySQL. However, since the code was forked, I have been installing MySQL for Linux from source code which is released for every minor point version. One minor issue on the Linux side of the world is that the RPM installer assumes the socket file is located at /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock while the source code version points to /tmp/mysql.sock. Tweaking the my.cnf file for MySQL and php.ini for PHP takes care of this from a LAMP point of view. I haven’t tried to build from source for Microsoft Windows.

I spent the past week attending the semi-regular Microsoft MVP Global Summit in Seattle and Redmond Washington. What’s an MVP? Microsoft describes MVPs like this: Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. My particular community involvement focuses on the Windows Mobile Smartphone and Pocket PC products. The knowledge and passion of anyone deeply involved with any knowledge area becomes quickly apparent and appreciated during a discussion of the subject. I have often said to my fellow MVPs that the most valuable take-away for me from MVP Summits is speaking with and learning from the other MVPs.

We naturally associate many Open Source projects with passionate and knowledgeable communities. But, there are many other kinds of communities: Some more formalized than others. On Thursday (March 15), I had the opportunity to drop by the Microsoft Open Source Lab and meet some of the people blogging on the Microsoft Port 25 site for the first time: Anandeep, Jamie, and Sam (Ramji - Director of the lab) were there and took a break from their busy schedules to speak with me about Microsoft and their work to interoperate with the Open Source products and the people involved in those projects. I had the chance to have a long conversation with Kishi and Chris (Tavers, an independent consultant and software developer, who wrote the PostgreSQL on Windows how-to paper I blogged about recently) earlier on Monday. I also ran into Sara Ford (Influencing the Microsoft culture one open source presentation at a time) long enough to say hello. A quick peek into one of the Lab’s server rooms and being greeted by the Linux penguin trio provided one of the more amusing moments. And, no, this is not some gigantic glass walled server room with an unearthly glow. It probably looks like a lot of the small-ish servers rooms many of you have built and installed over the years.

My take away from the series of brief afternoon meetings at the Microsoft Open Source Lab is that these are people who are knowledgeable, engaged, and passionate about their work of somehow bridging the worlds of Microsoft products and Open Source products to create interoperable productive software eco-systems. And, of course, I am aware of the whole Microsoft-Novell/SUSE-Linux issue, what CEO Steve Ballmer said, and various other heated and confusing issues. But, quite frankly, I doubt if a little ol’ nobody like me was going to resolve those issues in 90 minutes. However, I was able to have a good old fashioned handshake and conversation to learn more about the Lab group as thinkers and human beings. And, that seemed like a good way to start things off for me. As with my interaction with other MVPs at the MVP Summit this week, I found a lot of value in my first time meetings with the various people at the Microsoft Open Source Lab. As with nearly everything else in the world, it really is all about people.

You can find more detailed information about the Microsoft Open Source Lab in a two part blog written about a year ago found at…

A Look Inside Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab (Part 1)

A Look Inside Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab (Part 2)

In a sign that Microsoft finally feels the faintest stirrings of an open source business model, Jeff Raikes has gone on the record as asking people to steal from Microsoft if they’re going to pirate/steal from anyone. Now, in the open source world we don’t call using software for free stealing. We call it seeding the market. Microsoft is starting to understand:

“If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” Raikes said….

Raikes, speaking last week at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco, said a certain amount of software piracy actually helps Microsoft because it can lead to purchases by individuals who otherwise might never have been exposed to the company’s products.

“We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products,” Raikes said. “What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”

You can almost see the lights coming on in Raikes’ mind. Now if he could just grasp that letting everyone on the planet have it for free, and finding other ways to charge them, is an excellent way to achieve World Domination Part II. I know at my company, nearly all of our customer leads come through free downloads of our product. They then return to pay us for additional services, certified binaries, etc.

It works. Even for Microsoft.

MainSoft has an interesting approach with their…

Visual MainWin for J2EE Version 2.0 Technology Preview 2 (released March 1)

…that lets you port a Microsoft .NET application to Linux using a plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio. It does this by transforming the .NET CLI bits into J2EE JVM bytecodes and then using Mono-based class libraries.

You can learn more about the Microsoft .NET and the Open Source Mono Project by viewing the Port 25 interview with Mono Project leader Miguel de Icaza at…

Talking Mono with Miguel de Icaza

Redmond Magazine has a great article on Microsoft’s changing perspective on open source, featuring Bill HIlf as one of the key drivers of this change. I know and respect Bill, and agree heartily with the article’s conclusions:

When Bill Hilf came from IBM Corp. to join Microsoft three years ago, the company’s stance on open source vacillated wildly. It would swing from outright indifference to overt nastiness. Today, something else is unfolding: Microsoft is striking a surprising balance. It has stopped dismissing open source licensing and community development as dangerous folly or evil foe, and is looking for a way to both compete and co-exist.

Let’s start with Hilf. Under his direction as general manager of platform strategy, Microsoft is crafting a multifaceted plan to approach open source from a number of different levels: Linux as an operating system competitor; interoperability with Linux in mixed environments; partnering with open source ISVs; development of Shared Source Licensing; contributions to and support for community development sites….

Perhaps the biggest challenge that Hilf faces is changing the internal tone at Microsoft. One of the things he’s worked on is convincing developers that they need to play a role in the open source process and take part in projects on CodePlex to join the so-called community. The engineers caught on right away, he said, while the sales and marketing organizations were tougher to persuade.

Yesterday I heard one of the most prominent open source figures in the industry suggest that maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is changing its tune vis-a-vis open source. It has a long way to go, but the work that Bill, Sam Ramji, Jason Matusow, and others have done is truly changing the way Microsoft thinks about its ecosystem.

The big question, however, is how Microsoft views itself: platform company or applications company. To the extent it is the former, it has a big tent to share with the open source world. To the extent that it is the latter, it will try to quash any part of its ecosystem that aggressively competes with it.

But that’s not any different from how it deals with closed-source companies. So maybe it will beat up on open source just as much as it does closed source. Nice.

The Port 25 blog entry…

Technical Analysis: Linux VPN & How-To

…points to a new Microsoft technical document titled: Linux VPN Technical Analysis and HOWTO.

As its title implies, this 33 page PDF document gives both a technical reading of Linux VPN as well as specific how-to information. The work is based on testing using Red Hat and Fedora Core Linux distros.

If you are looking for some Windows VPN help, you might want to check out the OpenVPN GUI for Windows I mentioned in an item in my personal blog recently.

I was talking tonight with a friend that manages the medical arm of a large humanitarian organization. We were talking about poverty and he suggested that there are basically three things necessary to enable people to pull themselves out of poverty:

1. Food and water. It’s difficult to worry about building for tomorrow when you can barely make it through today.

2. Health. In like fashion, it’s very difficult to earn one’s way out of poverty if debilitated by disease or other maladies.
3. Security/safety.

My friend focused on this third thing. He suggested that most people overlook it, but that it’s imperative to enable poverty-stricken people and societies to pull themselves out of poverty. Why? Because it’s useless to plant if there’s little chance of harvesting. There’s little reason to build a product or render a service if the government or a neighbor will likely rip it away tomorrow.

Security matters. This is why governments are set up - to remove us from our Hobbesian existence (”nasty, brutish, and short”) and give us the opportunity to reap what we sow. This is also why the US Constititution provides for intellectual property protection.

I’ve spoken against proprietary software in the past but, hearing my friend speak tonight, I think I should qualify my opposition to current usage of copyrights and patents in software. My contention is not that these are not necessary - they are. I firmly believe that it’s important for software developers, just like farmers, land developers, etc., to be able to build something and be secure in their expectation of attempting to monetize their product. Microsoft, just like everyone else, needs to be able to invest in R&D with confidence that its money is not automatically wasted simply because the system rejects investment.

But what if this old version of intellectual property has been superceded? What if, in fact, one can get equal or possibly better protection by putting the same code under an open source license, rather than under a closed-source license? I’m not talking about relinquishing ownership of one’s developments. On the contrary, copyright law is absolutely foundational to both traditional software licenses and to open source software licenses: open source is meaningless without property. You must first own it in order to assign copyleft-style distribution requirements.

Rather, I’m suggesting that perhaps we’re entering a new phase in intellectual property (2.0), when our basic needs don’t change (food, health, security), but the way we fulfill them does. I can still earn a living (to feed myself and my family) with open source, and I can provide equally (or superior) infringement protection (health) with open source. And, importantly, since open source depends on the same rule of law to guarantee security, I’m safe in my development, too.

All that changes is how I choose to monetize the software. Instead of charging for access to the software, I charge for access to a certified version of the software. Or to services around the software. Or the software as a service, itself (like Google, Salesforce.com, or a range of others). In other words, I make the software experience more about experience and less about software.

This sounds like progress to me. I know that there are a wide range of companies tied up in IP 1.0, which will find the transition to IP 2.0 difficult. Microsoft need not be one of these. The company has been aggressive in trying to figure out open source and this 2.0 world. It just needs to keep moving in this direction.

I just happened to catch this Port 25 blog item by Jamie Cannon about one of my favorite tools (MySQL)…

MySQL Conference 2007

In it he gives a bit of history about Microsoft’s relationship with MySQL and pointers to using Visual Studio with MySQL.

But, what really caught my interest was an unadorned link in a list of MySQL/Windows references at the end of the blog. It points to a blog focusing on using Visual Basic with MySQL that I had not known about (VBMySQL.com). There’s a short article there that asks the simple but interesting question..

Why VB/MySQL?

Check out both Jamie’s blog item linked above at the VB for MySQL site. I wonder if MyODBC can be used with the free Visual Basic Express (vs. the full Visual Studio)?

I wrote on this topic earlier this week, but my post is lost in the ether(net) somewhere. I can’t help but notice that Microsoft is working hard of late to shroud itself in protectionist robes of the holiest color.

First it was a battle for the sanctity of its patents. Now it’s a self-righteous tirade against Google for not being protective enough of others’ intellectual property. “Let me lead you into the Promised Land of IP Safety!” seems to be Microsoft’s latest rallying cry.

Isn’t this the same company that needed masses of US federal judges to stop it from trampling on others’ rights? The same company that flaunted antitrust laws to build and maintain monopoly power so that it could tax billions of dollars into its coffers? I’m as willing to forgive and forget as the next person, but it’s a bit galling to have Microsoft preaching morality and ethics to the world.

It would probably sound slightly more credible if its sanctimonious bile weren’t directed at its chief competitors, open source and the Internet (Google being the ‘Net’s chief representative in this case). Even more so if the rocks being thrown weren’t being thrown in apparent desperation.

Some of us, perhaps best put forth by Tim O’Reilly, feel that the more Microsoft seeks to “protect” the more Neanderthal it looks. It’s not that respecting others’ property is not important - it is. It’s just that the more Microsoft and others cling to the old ways of protecting that property, the more they lock themselves out of future prosperity. I understand that it must be hard to see this when the company continues to generate money like Niagara Falls gushes water, but this is precisely the time when the company needs to be most prudent on how to manage the future.

Microsoft’s way forward is to move forward, and not to greedily horde its past. It must do that to a certain extent to preserve shareholder value, but if it doesn’t change, that’s all it will own: shareholder interests of the past, which will drag it down to prevent it from embracing the future.

Microsoft’s anandeep posts a thoughtful Port 25 blog item titled…

Who really needs to gather crash information and what do they need to do with it?

…relating his recent visit to the Microsoft Cambridge Lab and a recent conference there focused on the topic of software reliability. He closes his blog by writing…

Open Source would have much the same issues but for the fact that there is not a central organization that collects all this failure data. The situation in Open Source may be the reverse of the situation for proprietary software makers in that the failure data is collected at the IT organization level and not centrally. How does this failure data really result in code defect corrections? I guess that it is either pre-analyzed and submitted as a bug or people patch their own instances of the source code. But my opinion is that eventually open source software systems will have to build central repositories of failure data in much the same way that commercial software vendors have built them.

Let me preface my comments on this by admitting that I have never made a significant contribution to a major Open Source project. But, I am a long time FOSS Lurker (FOSSL - pronounced fossil? :-) as a relatively early end-user of FOSS (before the term Open Source was coined) software such as GNU EMACS, GNU C, and Perl since the mid-1980s and having installed Linux from floppies downloaded in increments of uuencoded files from USENET newsgroups.

My gut instinct is that the large Open Source projects that I follow and use (Apache httpd, Firefox, Thunderbird, MySQL, PHP, Ruby, Python, Zope, etc.) as well as many of the smaller projects already do pretty well in the error reporting and correcting department. The various communities around healthy FOSS projects are, it seems to me, extremely knowledgeable about the products they use and proactive in terms of bubbling up issues to the FOSS project members. There are chat rooms, bulletin boards, user groups, and formal error reporting procedures.

The FOSS communities have, it seems to me, performed a remarkable job of identifying and responding to product reliability issues.

However, we have been watching the emergence of FOSS business models over the past few years that may change the complexion of these communities. For me, the first change came when Red Hat stopped providing free ISO distributions after Red Hat 9. More recently, MySQL forked their product into Community and Enterprise Editions and reduced the release of Community RPM releases to twice a year. In their case, however, the MySQL Community Edition source code releases configure and compile easily on a Linux system making it easy to stay up to date (I haven’t tried building from source under Windows). These notable (to me personally) changes are understandable from a revenue driven point of view. But, I wonder if it signals, perhaps, the need for these more commercial FOSS projects to focus more on centralized repositories of failure data as anandeep suggests.

I just spent an interesting and productive hour with Matthew Aslett of the Computer Business Review. Matthew writes one of the most interesting blogs on open source, so we met to talk about the state of the open source market.

In the course of our conversation, we talked about Microsoft and its reactions to open source. In discussing this, I raised the issue of how hard it is sometimes to give credence to what Microsoft says. Not because of what it says, but because of all that it does not say.

I know that public companies are under amazing pressure to be as universally bland as possible, but Microsoft can dazzle at times with its willingness to attack others publicly (as it did yesterday with Google, and which Tim rightly calls “foul” on). So, it doesn’t have a communication problem.

The problem, as I see it, is that Microsoft only appears to be willing to be public about negative moves, and only en masse as a company. It doesn’t allow its employees (or they don’t feel entitled to do so) to discuss the company’s actions publicly. (Apparently, it also muzzles those of us who simply occasionally blog on Microsoft-related sites.)

Letting a few small cracks show through would make Microsoft stronger, not weaker. It’s hard to trust a company or person that purports to be perfect, simply because we know that we, ourselves, are not perfect. If an employee were to get out of line, it’s either a sign that a) the company has serious strategic problems it needs to fix or b) the employee doesn’t believe in the company’s correct strategic decisions and needs to go. Either solution is fine. But silence leads to neither, and so leaves both the bad employee or the bad company intact.

Open the windows, Microsoft. Let some fresh air in. Let conversation flow, both out from the company and into the company. It will make you a better company. And a more credible vendor.

I revisited Michael Francisco’s CodePlex Update blog post on the Port 25 site this evening and downloaded the Cache My Work utility on CodePlex. It lets you select currently running items to restart after a controlled reboot (on Patch Tuesday for example). For some reason, it saw IE7, Firefox, and Thunderbird but did not see Windows Explorer. It would be useful if it did and also keep your place on the directory tree. Perhaps the next version will. In any case, it looks like a useful utility for the next Patch Tuesday (or some other controlled reboot). Check out Michael’s CodePlex updated project list for other projects that might interest you.

Microsoft continues to show foresight in some areas while distinctly lacking it in others (i.e., the Internet, Web 2.0, search, etc.). As an example of foresight, check out Mary Jo Foley’s coverage of Microsoft’s new Beginner Developer Learning Center.

What’s it for? The name says it all: help drive more would-be programmers to Microsoft by lowering the bar to writing good (or, at least, decent) code.

According to its own studies, Microsoft believes there to be about seven million professional programmers worldwide. But there are as many as 100 million tinkerers who are doing everything from HTML tweaks, to JavaScript coding, to macro-based development. Microsoft refers to this group as “non-professional programmers.”

Via the new BLDC site, Microsoft is working to provide non-professional programmers with basic content.

Smart, smart move. I’m not sure it will be enough to stem the tide of new developers moving to open source, but that’s not really the point. Microsoft is expanding the universe of potential developers with this move, and not merely carving up an existing market of developers.

Good idea, Microsoft.

Hank Janssen may not be drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid, but he’s certainly jazzed about his work at the company. And I was frankly a bit bowled over by something he said:

[W]e have been touching a lot of items people never thought a few years ago would be likely. Getting Mozilla people on site for one. Another one that would have been considered impossible is Microsoft writing plugins for Firefox. Here is a cool one for example Photosynth, and you can listen to my podcast in which I interview Ian Gilman one of the Photosynth developers….

Just think about that for a second, Microsoft writing Firefox plugins!!!

I am thinking about it, and I’m very impressed. Microsoft is either the shrewdest company on the planet or it’s actually feeling its way toward open source. I’m not suggesting that the company has a grand strategy to go open source, but I do believe that it’s hiring a generation of developers and business people that are intelligent about open source, rather than knee-jerk against it.

I grew up in open source. I never had a career outside open source. It’s therefore easy for me to accept it as the default business and development model. For those who grew up on proprietary software, the inverse is true. Not because they’re bad people, but because they were “raised” differently.

As Microsoft attracts good people from the outside (Bill, Sam, etc.), and as it hires from the universities that increasingly teach open source, Microsoft will “get” open source more and more. I don’t think this will fundamentally change the company from a products company to a services company, but I also believe that Microsoft’s vision of baking services into software meshes well with the underlying ethic of open source.

In short, I continue to believe that open source is a massive opportunity for Microsoft, and I continue to be impressed (not always, mind you - I still despise the Novell patent fiasco and am not a fan of the “Get the Facts” campaign) with steps the company is taking to figure out open source. Maybe it will never quite arrive, but at least it’s trying, which is much more than I’d say about some of its proprietary cousins.

Port 25’s Hank Janssen interviewed Ian Gilman from the Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon Project (12 minute interview). You might be more familiar with their PhotoSynth project. One of the outcomes of this specific project related to the Open Source world is the first Firefox plugin developed at Microsoft.

Hank also looks back at his first 10 months at Microsoft as the resident skeptic at the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab. He lists his impressions and significant events during this period. You can find this blog item and the link to the interview with Ian Gilman in a blog entry titled…

We’re Writing Firefox Plug-ins? Interview with Ian Gilman and Thoughts on 10 Months at Microsoft

Of course, what we all want to know is when the rest of us can upload our own photos to create our own PhotoSynth image collections to wander around in.

Port 25’s MichaelF collected another bunch of Microsoft CodePlex project updates.

CodePlex Update

One of my long time techie-passions has been playing with Windows Mobile based Pocket PCs and Smartphones (now called Professional, Standard, and Classic). So, the CodePlex project in Michael’s list that caught my eye is…

SMS Notifier

Its project page describes it like this: SMS Notifier watches for incoming calls that are missed (i.e. not answered). Depending on configuration settings it does the following things: 1) Send an SMS message to the caller (configurable contents), possibly containing also the end time of current appointment (configurable). 2) Adds an item to calendar (containing the caller info).

Check out Michael’s blog to read through the rest of the CodePlex project updates.

I had a friend tell me a funny thing today. He suggested that good software would put IT admins out of basis. “The depend on bad software for their jobs,” he laughed.

While he was obviously joking, there’s some truth to his comment. If software worked perfectly, there would be no need for vendors to support it (write once, runs forever), or for IT workers to manage it.

However, this has not proven to be the case in the real world. As IT has become easier to use (and cheaper), it has expanded the market, not killed it. Take a look at Microsoft if you don’t believe me.

Microsoft, in a very real sense, is all about taking the heavy lifting out of IT. Microsoft has a range of products that are designed to interact seamlessly with each other. They don’t always live up to this promise, but that is the promise of Microsoft: IT solutions for the average person, as I’ve written before.

Some scorn Microsoft for this. Others, like me, chide Microsoft for locking customers in and competitors out with its end-to-end solutions. I’m sure there’s truth to what I’ve written on the subject, but I also believe that Microsoft genuinely sees huge market opportunity in making IT easier to use. Microsoft, as I once heard Jason Matusow say, bakes solutions into its software, removing (as much as possible) the most expensive part of the software purchase: consulting to make it useful.

Interestingly, he has also pointed out that open source has historically focused on islands of functionality that don’t necessarily work well together without consulting. This is changing, but it’s a valid criticism if you look at the past open source market.

On this note, I believe we in the open source world have a lot to learn from Microsoft. It’s important to recognize that most developers and IT administrators aren’t Linus Torvalds. They’re average, like you and I. The biggest market opportunity is in serving the needs of the average person, as Microsoft has learned. Open source needs to learn this same lesson. I believe that we are, but Microsoft may well show the way forward.

I had a conversation with Bill Hilf not long ago. We were talking about the Microsoft-Novell deal, but the conversation ended much more broadly, discussing the US patent system. It’s the same conversation I’ve had with Jason Matusow, and a range of others both inside and outside of Microsoft.

The conversation goes like this: we don’t like the patent system, but we’re forced to work within it. That means both licensing patents (to and from others). It means occasional sabre rattling (when you think someone is infringing your patents). And it means (very) occasionl patent suits. (Microsoft, for its part, has almost never actually ligitigated its patent portfolio, to its credit).

Funny enough, these were the same sorts of things I spent my Masters degree working on. The degree was in International Conflict Analysis, which basically boils down to, “It’s a cruddy world, but we have to make do.”

I’m not naive. I don’t think Microsoft can afford to lay down its patent portfolio and hug and kiss everyone. Others certainly don’t seem to be willing to do the same for Microsoft.

I do wonder, however, if there’s a better way to leverage it; one that doesn’t require the occasional FUD bomb.

Part of the GPL’s genius is that it allows you to have a copyright and exercise control with it, but transparent (and, I would argue, benevolent) control. You grant rights, but you don’t give up any in the process. I wonder if there’s a way for Microsoft (and others) to make their patents available in such a way that they can be used, but not easily used against the holder. I haven’t thought this through (just thinking out loud here), but it seems like this is the sort of aggressive move that would speak well to Microsoft’s competitive inclination, without making it prey to others who opted to horde their own patent portfolios.

Again, just thinking out loud. I suggest this for Microsoft because for all the grief I give the company, Microsoft has generally been an innocuous holder of intellectual property, whatever its other faults. The company has rarely sued anyone. It has a comparatively anemic licensing business from its patents. Etc.

So maybe Microsoft could afford to take a “patent-left” approach to its patents. Or maybe it’s late and someone left the gas on…. :-)

I’m not at the HIMSS Conference today, but Steve Ballmer was, and delivered the opening keynote. Scott Shreeve was there and captured some of Ballmer’s more notable statements:

1. Healthcare is “the greatest opportunity that Microsoft has ever had in its 30 years of existence.”

2. Microsoft plans to “leverage ALL their hardware, software, and creativity toward solving healthcare related problems”. He promised that Microsoft would “apply” itself fully to solving this problem.
3. Azyxxi, a proprietary enterprise Electronic Health Record company that Microsoft purchased last summer, is “the most exciting software that Microsoft is working on” right now. Ballmer described Azyxxi as a “unified healthcare information technology platform”.

Wow. That’s a lot of superlatives to find in one place. It’s especially intriguing because Ballmer isn’t any ordinary speaker - he knows that everything he says is carefully noted and will be remembered. As such, he can’t afford to waste superlatives.

His recent comments that he worries more about disruptive business models than specific competitors (a sentiment I suggested back in the first half of 2005), and that open source is one of its biggest threats (though I think it’s an opportunity), added to these healthcare statements make you wonder:

If Microsoft’s biggest threat is open source, and it’s biggest opportunity is health care, then wouldn’t an open source healthcare company be its biggest competitor?

Like, maybe, MedSphere?

Hmmm….

Just a quick note that…

Mono 1.2.3

…was released last week and that it includes two interesting new feature additions.

• IronPython Community Edition
  
• Visual Basic 8 Compiler
  

Mono is a clean room port of Microsoft’s .NET architecture that lets you build and run .NET applications on other OS platforms such as Linux and Mac OS X.

You can find a video interview with Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza on Microsoft’s Port 25 site at…

Talking Mono with Miguel de Icaza

I generally work in a LAMP environment. So, I was interested to read PostgreSQL on Windows: A Primer announced on Port 25. I had looked briefly at PostgreSQL about 3 or 4 years ago. But, MySQL had always suited my database needs well. It also seemed to my MySQL spoiled fingers that PostgreSQL required a lot more manual intervention to install on Linux (compared to MySQL). So, I haven’t revisited PostgreSQL since then.

The PostgreSQL server was not available for Windows back then (though I seem to recall some kind of client piece was). And, I had not realized that a version for Windows was now available. This was enough to pique my curiousity. So, I fired up a previously built and fully patched Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition virtual machine in Virtual PC 2007, attached a shared folder pointing at a directory on the physical hard drive (for unpacking the installation files), downloaded PostgreSQL 8.2.3-1 for Microsoft Windows and followed along the instructions in the 11 page primer (9 pages of instructions with lots of nice screen captures). Chris Travers’ instructions were very easy to follow and understand. You’ll want to read it carefully though since some recommendations are not reflected in the screen caps (e.g., he recommends that character encoding be set to UTF-8 but the screen cap shows the default SQL_ASCII setting).

I fired up the bundled Pg Admin III GUI and it looks like PostgreSQL is running on my virtual machine. Nothing is as simple as installing MySQL from RPM files in Linux (one command line and set the root passwords). But, installing PostgreSQL for Windows was smooth and painless with Chris’ Primer as a guide.

Microsoft is in the midst of oral arguments before the Supreme Court this week [Full transcript here] with interesting repurcussions possible for the entire software industry. The WSJ has a good synopsis of what’s at stake:

In general, patents are only enforceable in the country that issues them. Thus, it is no infringement for a foreign firm to manufacture and sell a rival’s U.S.-patented device abroad. To extend their monopolies overseas, U.S. companies must obtain a patent in each nation where they wish to protect their inventions. Under a special exception, though, it is an infringement to ship U.S.-made components of a patented device for assembly overseas.

AT&T Inc. holds a patent for voice-compression technology that makes it easier to transmit and store speech on personal computers and other devices. Microsoft Corp. concedes installing the technology on U.S.-built computers would infringe the patent. But it says it isn’t a violation to ship a master disk of the software overseas, where it duplicates the software for installation on computers assembled in Germany, Belgium and other countries.

Microsoft argues the “component” is a physical disk containing the software, and it is free to duplicate it overseas, much as it could duplicate any other patented device overseas. AT&T contends the software itself is the component, regardless of the medium.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, as InformationWeek reports,

It’s possible that in their decision, the justices could give broad opinions on the scope of patent law, how it affects innovation and even outsourcing….

That, despite the fact that Microsoft and its backers argue a victory for AT&T could put U.S. software developers at a disadvantage relative to foreign competitors, some of whom operate in countries with more lenient patent regulations. An AT&T win would “hinder software development in the U.S. and encourage companies to move their software development overseas,” says Roger Kennedy, who represents Oracle in the Coalition For Patent Fairness.

What’s most interesting in the case is what it means for the definition of a software product. Is it the software, or the disk that it ships on?

Justice Anthony Kennedy called it “odd” that Microsoft would be the party contending that a computer disk, rather than the software, is product. “I mean, Microsoft doesn’t say please buy our disc because it’s the prettiest disc in the business,” he said. “It says buy our program because the program means something,” he said.

“But the program is nothing until made into a physical manifestation that can be read by the computer,” replied former Bush Solicitor General Theodore Olson, representing Microsoft. “An idea or a principle…can’t be patented. It has to be put together with a machine and made into a usable device.” In this case, “the components that make the machines run that are produced abroad are not supplied from the United States.”

I’m trying to figure out the ramifications of Microsoft winning its suit on the definition alluded to above. Do we really want to tie code to physical media? Is that what Microsoft’s argument requires?

I’m not sure, but this is a case worth watching.

The Open Solutions Alliance launched the other day at LinuxWorld. If you read my InfoWorld blog, you know that I’m not a big fan of the OSA. But it’s not personal to the OSA. I just don’t believe these sorts of organizations provide any value to the industry, though they occasionally provide momentary value to their members.

Why? Because customers don’t buy from committees. They buy from companies.

In many cases, they wish those companies’ products worked better with other products they buy. But what they really seem to want, if history shows anything, is for the market to naturally rally around a leader. Microsoft is a good example.

Microsoft makes some excellent products, and some that aren’t as good. (Just like anyone.) But on the balance, the company makes good software that a great deal of people want to buy. To maintain its leadership position, the company has enabled other companies to build on it as a platform and make money from add-on/tie-in/integrated products. The richer the ecosystem, the richer Microsoft’s bank account.

Only recently has the company awakened to its open source ecosystem (and the associated opportunity) with a lab set up specifically to enable interoperability, but even slow learners learn. :-)

This is the sort of interoperability that the market cares about. Not whether Alfresco is interoperable with Compiere or MuleSource - we have few customers in common at this point. It’s when customer counts dramatically increase that interoperability really matters to buyers, and at that point an industry organization set up to enable interoperability is somewhat pointless. Why did JBoss partner with Microsoft? Because more than 50% of its customers use Microsoft Windows. Same with SugarCRM. And MySQL. And Zend. And…you get the point.

But OSDL, OSA, and others may not, so I’ll restate it: the point that interoperability matters to customers is the point that an industry organization becomes immaterial.

Remember United Linux? It was an effort by the also-ran Linux vendors to counter Red Hat’s dominance. It never took off because customers didn’t want to buy from an industry organization. They clearly wanted to buy from Red Hat.

Customers interested in a full suite of software (for BI or whatever else) aren’t going to look to a disparate band of small-time open source vendors to provide it. They’re going to look to market leaders and a single company to provide it. That’s why it’s critical for open source vendors, as Microsoft learned long ago, to build a compelling product (or suite of products) and win. Everyone wants to be interoperable with a winner.

That’s the goal. To write history, not to be history. Love Microsoft or hate it, it’s writing history. Industry organizations…? You know what I think.

Microsoft’s Port 25 reports that Microsoft Virtual Server PC 2007 has been released. They have links to posts by the Virtual Machine team’s Ben Armstrong who provides tips on running Linux as a Virtual PC 2007 Guest OS. Note that both Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 are free products.

I’ve been running Fedora Core 5 & 6, CentOS 4.4, OpenSUSE 10.2, and Ubuntu 6.06LTS and 6.10 under Virtual PC 2004, 2007 Beta/Release Candidate, and now 2007 (production). I’ve also run Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista Beta-2, Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, and Longhorn Server Beta-2 as Guest OSes successfully. The most important Guest OS is Windows 98 Second Edition. Why? Because it is the newest version of Windows (I don’t count Windows ME :-) that runs LEGO Loco (see video clip below). LEGO Loco will not run on Windows NT or its descendents (2000, XP, etc.).

Be sure to install Virtual Machine Additions for any Windows version for a better virtualized experience. Happy virtualizing!

Click To Play

Venkatesh made a comment to a post on my InfoWorld blog which has been troubling me all weekend. He asserts that Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop has inhibited its ability to dominate the online world. I agree.

Microsoft has been struggling to live up to its means in the online world, as Ballmer himself has noted. What he didn’t address is why. He seems to believe that it’s just a matter of time and innovation.

What he may be missing is that by holding so tenaciously to the desktop, the company is ripe to be disrupted, not to do the disrupting. This is Clayton Christensen’s classic “innovator’s dilemma”.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Microsoft, and believe the desktop as we know it (mostly “fat” client) will be around for awhile. But I also worry that Microsoft may be giving up its future to ensure the profitability of its past. It is starting to figure out open source - that is good. But to truly compete with Google, it needs to abandon its fetish for the desktop.

Or maybe not? After all, people like me predicted the end of bricks-and-mortar retailing during the height of the bubble. As it turned out, the Internet only partially supplanted traditional bricks-and-mortar retail. The best strategies may well combine the two.

What do you think?

I’m old enough to remember installing and using GNU EMACS, Perl, and even Linux before the term Open Source was coined. I remember patiently waiting for bunches of uuencoded installation files to appear slowly over USENET (I think GNU EMACS required something like 50 newsgroup postings). And, yes, I know RMS hates equating Free Software with Open Source. But, let’s put that aside for a moment.

So, when I saw the Slashdot item titled Has Open Source Lost Its Halo?, I felt compelled the read the Illuminata Perspectives blog item that prompted that item: Predatory Open Source? by Gordon Haff.

It hits on one aspect of the many changes we’ve seen in the Open Source community for the past five years or so. It seems like Open Source has become somewhat less of a community and more of an industry over the years. For me, the big event was when Red Hat stopped providing free ISO downloads and updates for Red Hat Linux (after RH9). Fortunately, the community was still strong and the Fedora Core project (later absorbed back into Red Hat) and CentOS distribution picked up the slack. More recently I watched MySQL fork their database into Enterprise and Community Editions. But, although the Community binary (RPM) distributions will be limited to twice a year releases, the source code seems to be flowing at its regular pace. And, it is very easy to configure and build MySQL from source. Let’s hope it stays that way.

In his blog, Gordon looks at the more recent Open Source phenomenon of firms Open Sourcing their (previously) proprietary code and ponders on possible hidden agendas. He says In effect Open Source has become a free pass for all sorts of competitive actions that would once have been–at a minimum–roundly criticized.

And, of course, the various proprietary-Open Source joint efforts (e.g, Microsoft, Novell, and Xen) and outright control by purchase (e.g., Oracle purchasing InnoDB) has raised all kind of eyebrows and questions.

One has to wonder if it is even possible to launch a new large scale Open Source project without major corporate support in today’s environment. The attorney fees alone would be daunting.

That said, I still support the cooperation and convergence of the proprietary and Open Source industries (community no more? I hope not). And, I still hope that someday one of the best lightweight operating systems built gets converted from proprietary to Open Source. Which one? Windows 98 Second Edition. It requires fewer resources (RAM and disk space) than most current Linux distros, has pretty good driver support, works with a lot of peripherals, and runs some great old games that won’t run in Windows XP or Vista. I’m looking at the Windows 98SE VHD file I use with Microsoft Virtual PC and note that it is mere 180MB (and runs comfortable in 64 or 128MB RAM)! Yep, you could burn it to a CD-R and have room to spare. Ok, I know it will never happen (see my tongue in cheek blog item from 2004 Microsoft should release Windows 98 SE as Open Source). But, it sure would be nice to have a bunch of FOSS developers take a swing at bringing Windows 98SE into the 21st century without making it too much bigger. :-)

And, as I said in my previous blog… I hope the new Microsoft-Novell Joint Interoperability Lab staff create a community around their work rather than just tell what will happen. Let’s hope the nice folks over at Microsoft’s Port 25 encourages the new joint teams in this direction.

Way back on January 30 a simple blog item titled Now Hiring: Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Labs went up on Microsoft’s Port 25 site. The positions available include: Microsoft: Software Design Engineer in Test, Linux Interoperability. Novell: Software Design Engineer in Test, Windows Interoperability. Microsoft: Program Manager, Linux Interoperability.

According to Microsoft’s Sam Ramji, it drew a good number of comments and resumes. So, he’s back blogging about it and describing the joint lab’s major focuses: Virtualization, Directory and Identity, and Management.

Microsoft-Novell Interoperability Lab - Sneak Peek

If I can put in my two US cents (And, I can! So here goes)… I’d like to see both the Microsoft and Novell Joint Labs staff become integrated into the Proprietary-Open Source interoperability community at large. A joint blog and a community Wiki would be a nice start. I’d like to see more than bits and bytes entries in the Wiki. In my experience, the intersection of proprietary and Open Source technologies is often more about practices and procedures as much as it is about bit twiddling.

So, whether or not you agree with me, head over to the Port 25 site and provide your comments about the upcoming joint lab. No one told us we had a vote. But, no one told us we didn’t have one either :-)

That’s the number of Brazilian government workers that will be moving to a Linux desktop soon, as reported by eWeek.

Estimated monthly deployment is about 10,000 desktops, with 50,000 desktops already delivered, EnabledPeople, a Linux development company, said. The company did not indicate the total number of desktops that are to be deployed in the course of the project.

The Computers for All project is part of the Brazilian federal government’s “Program of Digital Inclusion,” initiated in 2003. The project’s objective is to provide low-cost computers to the population and to boost technological development, EnabledPeople said.

This news follows on the heels of the Peugeot Citroen Linux desktop news of earlier this month. Both are significant, but I think the Brazilian experience poses more of a threat to Microsoft.

Why? Because I don’t believe the Linux desktop will ever go mainstream in the “developed” nations of North America and Western Europe. We just have too much experience with Windows. The benefits of moving off Windows (or, in my case, the Mac) are outweighed by the costs. Not dollars-and-cents costs, but productivity costs. It’s not worth $400 to me to switch to an experience that doesn’t work nearly as well (especially since I can get my applications as open source, like OpenOffice, Handbrake, Adium, etc.).

Established users are not the market for a Linux desktop. New users are. While this may come from consumers in established markets, I suspect the real growth is in markets that can evaluate the Linux desktop on its own merits, not on how it compares to Windows. (And I believe that most established markets will move online, if anything.)

This is why projects like One Laptop Per Child are the true battleground for the desktop in the future. Microsoft will continue to mint money in established desktop markets, but it has to earn its keep in emerging markets. It should be grateful - Microsoft does its best work when facing real competition. I don’t think it has much to worry about from Linux in its established desktop markets.

But everywhere else? Game on.

Earlier this month I noted the ASP.NET AJAX kit release announcement and the video interview with ASP.NET Technical Evangelist Steve Marx on Port 25.

If the ASP.NET AJAX kit interests you, you might want to check on the 23 video tutorials on the topic on Microsoft’s ASP.NET site.

“How Do I?” with ASP.NET AJAX

A few of the tutorial titles include…

• Get Started with ASP.NET AJAX
  
• Use the ASP.NET AJAX CascadingDropDown Control Extender
  
• Add ASP.NET AJAX Features to an Existing Web Application
  
• ASP.NET AJAX Enable an Existing Web Service
  
• Use the ASP.NET AJAX PasswordStrengthExtender
  

The video tutorials range from 2 to 28 minutes. Most of the videos appear to be less than 10 minutes long.

Today Red Hat announced that has joined the Vendor Interop Alliance, the group that Microsoft chartered with other top software companies, but which has not involved Red Hat to date.

I suppose it’s a good move for the industry, but I’m left wondering what substance, if any, it provides. It’s not that the VIA is a bad idea, but rather that the fact that one has to come up with such a thing in the first place suggests that the market is a bit broken, and unlikely to be fixed by a crowd of people standing around, clapping each other on the backs.

As Matthew Aslett notes, Red Hat’s participation seems to be limited to its JBoss middleware, which already had partnered with Microsoft to improve interoperability. So what, if anything, does this agreement get Microsoft that it didn’t already have? Or Red Hat?

Red Hat’s membership in the alliance builds on the interoperability work started by the JBoss Division 18 months ago to optimize JBoss Enterprise Middleware on the Windows platform. To date, those efforts have been primarily in the Web Services arena, including the critically important World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) WS-Addressing specification and several plugfests around WS-Security, WS-Transactions, and WS-Addressing. In addition, Microsoft completed Hibernate certification for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver. Now, Red Hat can extend and deepen interoperability beyond standards to the native level on Windows for its JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

The strange thing in this announcement, and in the existence of the VIA, is that we have to talk about interoperability at all. It is precisely because the system is broken - with intellectual property rights driving vendors apart, rather than together - that something like this VIA is even remotely interesting.

But still I wonder if an industry alliance is the way to resolve the problem. Yes, you need scale/network effects to make something like this work. But in a large room filled with vendors who inherently distrust each other, I don’t see much interoperability emerging. Just lots of meetings about interoperability.

If the goal is to get one-on-one interaction, what good does the Alliance provide? Not much, in my view.

I do think it’s important to make sure different enterprise software works well together. I think this is particularly true of open source and proprietary software, and I applaud all that Bill Hilf, Sam Ramji, Jason Matusow, and others at Microsoft have done in this regard. They have made Microsoft a great partner for open source companies (really), whatever Microsoft’s larger intentions may (or may not) be.

But their work has been done one-on-one, which I think is the right wayt o enable interoperability. We’ll see if VIA can prove me wrong.

Perhaps not perfect, but Microsoft has done a decent job of trying to standardize its Open XML format. As Jason Matusow writes:

Customers have been very clear with us over the past few years (as have many other vendors including our friends in Armonk) that they wanted to see our Office document formats become more open and standardized. So we did that. (OSP-licensed, Ecma standardized)

Governments have been clear that they need the ability to have interoperability between ODF and Open XML. The Open XML Translator is now in production, and delivers interoperability. In fact, we built that to enable ANY ISV to use the technology - not just Microsoft. Novell has already announced (back in December) that they are going to build it into Novell’s OpenOffice. Sounds to me like customers are going to have greater choice.

I have attended open source conferences for the past 6 years, and sat on innumerable panels with various executives from IBM. I am really unclear as to the relationship between the rhetoric of openness and increased choice that they have been saying in that arena and how it lines up with the reduction of choice and closing of a participatory process in this arena. The message from IBM standards participants around the world has been consistant: don’t even consider Open XML for ISO/IEC standardization. That is less choice for customers.

Why, indeed….

Well, Jonathan Murray thinks it may have something (actually, everything) to do with IBM’s business model and its fiduciary duty to its shareholders:

IBM’s position on the Open XML vs. ODF standardization debate is in no way altruistic. IBM takes the position it does, not to make life better for the Open Source community or to advance the position of free software. IBM takes the position it does because this position ultimately creates more value for its shareholders. Period. It is a pity that they seem to be doing this against the best interests of their customers.

The question is why IBM would be taking this position when the risk to its reputation with its customers seems to be so high. My personal belief is that the 180,000+ hungry mouths in IBM’s global services division are a big part of the reason.

The importance of global services to IBM cannot be over stated. IBM is a services company far more than it is software or even hardware company today….

So what does this have to do with the IBM’s campaign against the Open XML standardization process? In a word: complexity.

[I]f you are in IT services business…complexity is your friend. Any reduction in complexity dilutes the value you can offer to your customers. This, in my view, is why IBM seems to be so focused on preventing customers from having to right to choose between two open standards for their document formats.

Jason has apologized for making snarky comments about IBM’s lack of enthusiasm for OpenXML, but he needn’t have. IBM should be called into account for its continued intransigence vis-a-vis Open XML. It’s not a perfect standard/process, but nothing ever is. I personally don’t believe that this opening up of OpenXML is a big deal, as I’ve written before. An open file format is not going to move enterprises off Microsoft technology any time soon, especially given that SharePoint, not file formats, is the new battleground.

Regardless, Microsoft should be given kudos for OpenXML, and IBM should be a bit ashamed. IBM has been given a lot of love for its open source support, but look a little closer and all you see is support for Apache-licensed projects (and, of course, Linux). Like any good corporate citizen, it feeds itself before it worries about feeding others. But word on the street is that IBM won’t consider buying an open source company unless its licensing is Apache-style. I guess it likes to consume open source but doesn’t like free source-requirements to give back….

Port 25’s Michael Francisco provides a list of recent releases on Microsoft’s CodePlex open source project hosting site.

CodePlex Projects Update

I tend to build web sites using PHP, but this ASP.NET project in Michael’s list will probably be of interest to ASP.NET coders.

ASP.NET RSS Toolkit

The package handles both creating RSS feeds as well as reading them. You should check out the Port 25 blog item to find other CodePlex gems that may interest you.

You can find the official ASP.NET site at…

Microsoft ASP.net

There are great inventors and scientists that are so well known, that, like rock or movies stars, we can refer to them by a single name (usually the surname) and know that other people will know the reference: Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Curie, Watson & Crick, and Hawking, for example.

Our tech biz has created one-name recognition (mix of surnames and given names) for Knuth, Stallman, Rasmus, Guido, Jobs, Woz (part of name! :-), Linus, and Kernighan & Ritchie come to mind for that group. Open Source, in particular, seems to have created a good number of these one-namers because great ideas rarely come out of design-by-committee (IMHO).

We are at a unique point in tech-history in that most of our recognizable by one-name people are still alive today. I find the various podcasts (netcasts?) and videocasts involving these people particularly interesting from both an informational point of view and a kind of future historical record point of view. So, I was very pleased to see that Microsoft’s Port 25 site posted a video interview with the co-creator of the latest language that I’ve been tinkering with… PowerShell. You can find a Port 25 interview with Bruce Payette at…

Powershell in Action! Hank interviews Bruce Payette

Bruce discusses the UNIX and Open Source software that inspired the design of PowerShell. He also takes to the keyboard and taps out a number of examples of how PowerShell works.

You can find two useful PowerShell tutorials at…

Microsoft: What Can I Do With Windows PowerShell? A Task-Based Guide to Windows PowerShell Cmdlets

Arstechnica: A guided tour of the Microsoft Command Shell

…and, of course,…

O’Reilly: Top 10 Tips for Using Windows PowerShell

And, finally, one little complaint. There doesn’t seem to be a PowerShell release that works with Microsoft’s Longhorn Server Beta-2 release. The PowerShell available for Longhorn IDS (server) Build 5600 decided that it was not compatible with the Beta-2 version.

Mary Jo is reporting about Microsoft’s new officelabs project. What is it? It’s an attempt by Microsoft to upgrade its development methodology to Development 2.0. Also known as open source. As Mary Jo writes:

One of the criticisms most often levied against Microsoft — and not just by anonymous posters on Mini Microsoft — is that the company has gotten too big and too slow to be effective. Can Microsoft change this dynamic?

Officials have been trying. That’s what all those greenhouses and incubators seeded throughout Microsoft are all about. Allow small, targeted teams to flourish inside the bigger Borg. Good concept, but the results haven’t been all that noticeable.

Enter, officelabs.

Officelabs, sources say, is a new kind of incubator that is taking shape inside the Microsoft Business Division (the unit in charge of Microsoft Office, Dynamics ERP and Dynamics CRM). It’s a fledgling group that is going to operate more like the Windows Live team than the Office one, by tossing a bunch of new products over the transom in beta form and watching to see what sticks.

It’s fascinating to see how Microsoft is pushing officelabs. Here’s some text from a job posting on its site for an officelabs developer position:

Officelabs is a new group in Microsoft Business Division tasked to push the productivity horizon farther through rapid innovation. We believe officelabs is the most innovative group pushing the envelope at Microsoft.

We are assembling small teams of top notch developers, PMs, and SDETs that will pursue their most creative ideas with a near-complete autonomy….Teams will operate in a beta release model where early, addictive and widespread real-world usage of innovations will enable them to have maximum impact without the usual prolonged shipping process. Teams will be encouraged to use an internal Open Source Model to leverage the tremendous developer talent across Microsoft. We envision that when a team decides that most of the learning is done with respect to current project, it wraps it up; and sets its sight on the next exciting challenge.

“The most innovative group…at Microsoft.” “Maximum impact without the usual prolonged shipping process.” Dare I parse this for you?

“We believe open source is a superior development model to our creaky old system, and we’re hoping and praying it will save the company.”

OK, I may have exaggerated a wee bit, but it’s almost shocking to see this sort of admission from Microsoft: open source works better. Or, at least, Microsoft believes it just may work better, and is experimenting to see for sure.

All of which means that, as I’ve said before, open source is perhaps Microsoft’s biggest opportunity and it, more than any other big proprietary software company that I know, is really struggling to figure out how to compete against open source and work with it, all at the same time.

Threat and opportunity, with the opportunity rising the better the company figures out how to leverage open source, rather than compete against it. This is a project/concept worth watching inside the company.

There have been two natural disaster related reflective blogs over on Port 25 in the past month…

On January 9 Bill Hilf posted What Matters… (with photos!) discussing the loss of electrical power in his area for eight days.

A few days ago Kishi Malhotra commented that It’s not all technology… and focused on power abstinence, chaos, awareness, and our fragile infrastructure.

Looking at the photos and reading the situation descriptions brought to mind my own shorter bout with nature a few months ago. I blogged about it on the MacDevCenter (see blog link below), so I won’t repeat the details here.

A Tiny Taste of “Jericho”: Tech Grades After an Earthquake

But, I did want to note that for me it was always about the available technology and what was actual usable and useful. I suspect that because my area did not seem to be in any danger after the tremors stopped and the weather was reasonably nice (see the photo at the top left), I started assessing what was working right away. Electricity disappeared about 10 minutes after the quake. In fact, I had just booted up my Mac mini to check the news as power failed. Fortunately, the UPS kicked in and I shut it down gracefully. Wired phone service stayed up but my cell carrier was overwhelmed and I was out of wireless voice and data for the duration. But, old and simple technology like flashlights, canned food (canning is technology IMHO), and propane camping stoves all worked fine. As I mentioned the 100+ year old wireline phone service kept working too. One radio station stayed up even though they kept playing a pre-recorded political panel discussion for nearly an hour after the quake. One television station stayed on air. But, because most of us get TV signals from cable (I can barely get radio reception where I am), the only people who saw them were in other States.

Generally speaking, for the ordinary citizen (like me), GSM, GPRS, EDGE, TCP/IP, and a whole lot of other tech developed in the last 40 years were unusable. Even the relative oldster Television (in its mid-60s in age for widespread use) was not helpful even though one station was broadcasting.

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. I seem to recall reading that a mesh wireless LAN used for security cameras in New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina and was used to provide Voice over IP (VoIP) after other communications conduits failed.

Given the seemingly slow recovery times we’ve been seeing nationwide (worldwide?) for mild to catastrophic events, one wonders if the powers that be and utilities factor in technology recency and complexity into their post-disaster triage plans.

Over on Port 25 Anandeep is wondering, in essence, “Is open source structurally incapable of innovating?” Anandeep answers correctly (”Yes”), but not for the same reasons I’d give (and have given here and here).

He writes:

[C]an futuristic experimental projects be developed using the open source process?

I think that the answer is yes. But these kinds projects cannot be developed in a pure open source community process like that of Linux. An institution like a university or a company has to bring to it critical mass. The US government paid for a lot of ALICE - before it could be put out there in a true community process.

I agree with Anandeep that having an organization makes open source innovation easier. After all, an open source company is no different in its ability to innovate than Microsoft, a proprietary startup, or anyone else is. It just chooses to license its software differently.

But, by the same token, what is to stop an individual from innovating a new project - perhaps the “Cloud OS” that Anandeep talks about - and releasing it as open source instead of proprietary software? Nothing. There is no structural defect in open source to prevent this, and to prevent a community from growing up around it, anymore than there is a structural defect in proprietary software from doing the same.

That said, it may be very true that there are plenty of legal reasons (If I develop something on my employer’s time, it will likely own the innovation, for example), money reasons (I may not believe I yet have a strong enough profit model in open source to convince me that I can keep it open source and still become a billionaire, for example), and other reasons. But structural incapacity in the open source model itself?

I don’t think so.

I’m in the middle of watching what apparently others had inflicted on them during the Superbowl (I’m a soccer guy - I watch real football): Microsoft’s “a href=”http://www.clearification.com/”>Clearification” campaign for Windows Vista (link courtesy of OS Weekly.)

Nothing could be more confusing. Or annoying.

It’s like the ad agency was desperate to be like a Wes Anderson film (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, etc.), and failed miserably to capture his genius. Or even his worst moments.

Bill Gates did a poor job of pitching Vista to Newsweek readers. Now the entire company seems intent on lobotomizing the world into buying Vista through sheer, relentless inanity. (You can watch one of the TV spots here).

I’ve seen Vista running. It’s very pretty. I’ve talked with some Microsofties who describe how easily it discovers networks and devices on the network (printers, etc.). It’s supposed to be dramatically more secure and stable than any Windows Microsoft has ever shipped. I believe it.

But this message doesn’t convey these benefits. Nor do the TV spots that talk about clutter. Vista helps cut through clutter, sure, with improved search and other means. But this is not a message that will win over my parents, at whom the TV ads seem to be targeted. “We used to be a business thing, and now we love consumers” might be one way to describe the marketing message(s). As for the Clearification site, I can only guess that I’m the target audience and that they have overestimated my attention span and underestimated my IQ, if only be a few points.

Microsoft: you have developed a cool new product. This is not the way to market it. Maybe it doesn’t matter, since the entire known universe has already bought into Windows, but I can’t see how these commercials will make people want to upgrade.

You have undersold Vista’s value.

I posted what I thought was an innocuous post on Bill Gates’ comments on the superiority of Vista over Mac OS X, and spent the rest of the weekend approving comments. I’ve never had so many comments on a blog post. Traffic, already quite healthy, went up 388%.

Why?

Because Mac people and Windows people seem to have more mutual scorn than open source and Windows people have for each other. Just one more reason to believe that open source is an opportunity for Microsoft, not a threat. Macs and Windows are separate entities, though virtualization is changing that. Open source and Microsoft need not be.

All that said, I do think we need to remove the political and/or religious vitriol from the discussion. I lean pretty far to the “Left” on licensing issues - I prefer the GPL to the BSD, for example. But a license is just a license. Microsoft could use OSI-approved licenses as easily as it does its Shared Source licenses. It chose not to for a range of reasons (mostly out of caution, in my view, which caution should dissipate over time). But it could.

A license should begin the conversation, not end it. The real conversation is about customer value, which really is about service. You can roll some of that service into the code itself, as Jason Matusow once told me is one of Microsoft’s goals. That makes sense, and I think it’s good for customers, but customer value will always be more than just code.

Regardless, that’s what the debate should be about. What license/software/service/etc. drives the most customer value? Not whether my Mac is prettier (it is). :-)

Port 25’s Michael Francisco let us know that…

ASP.NET AJAX Released!

And, Port 25’s Sam Ramji provides a 20 minute video interview with ASP.NET Technical Evangelist Steve Marx in…

A Technical Look at ASP.NET AJAX

ASP.NET AJAX is probably exactly what you might guess from its name. It is a freely downloadable AJAX framework for use with the ASP.NET platform. You can download it from…

ASP.NET AJAX Home

It is a Javascript library that is cross-browser compatible.

It can be used with either the full Visual Studio 2005 or the free…

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition

You can also download the SQL Server Express Edition and MSDN documentation at the same time (you’ll need just shy of 2GB free for all this stuff).

Or, you can choose to use your own tools. According to the ASP.NET AJAX documentation: However, you do not require Visual Studio 2005 to use ASP.NET AJAX to create ASP.NET Web applications.

You can install and use the Microsoft AJAX Library without the .NET Framework. You can also install it on non-Windows environments to create client-based Web applications for any browser that supports ECMAScript (JavaScript). In fact, you don’t even need to use Microsoft Windows to make use of this library.

You can, for example, look at the…

PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library

…on the Microsoft CodePlex site.

ASP.NET AJAX is licensed under the…

Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL)

…which is apparently similar to the BSD license (I’m not a licensing expert :-). However, while you can modify the library for internal use (if I’m reading the Ms-RL license correctly), Microsoft will not be taking community contributed changes into the production codebase.

Mary Jo Foley has an interesting post today about Microsoft paying IDC to research Linux TCO and tweak that research to Microsoft’s advantage. The “facts” came out in court documents filed for an Iowa antitrust case against Microsoft.

When the results didn’t come out in Microsoft’s favor, it voted to bury them:

In an e-mail dated Nov. 1, 2002, Kevin Johnson, now the head of Windows, wrote: “I don’t like it to be public on the doc that we sponsored it because I don’t think the outcome is as favorable as we had hoped. I just don’t like competitors using it as ammo against us. It is easier if it doesn’t mention that we sponsored it.”

Before we cry ‘Foul!’, however, let’s ask ourselves honestly a simple question, “Would we have done the same?” I think the answer is “Yes,” nine times out of 10. If Linux Vendor X commissioned a study and the study wasn’t favorable to Linux, I’m betting that X would either bury the report or certainly take their name off of it. This is part of competing: you present your best case and defer to your competition to present your worst case.

In some ways, though, as Mary Jo says, it just doesn’t matter. This is ancient (circa 2002 :-) history.

But the problem is that Microsoft continues to use the bought-and-paid-for research in its Get the Facts campaign. Maybe it feels the “facts,” however gathered, are, well, factual. Or maybe it feels that since it admitted to paying for the research, it’s for the buyer (reader of the facts) to beware, and not its job to delineate the “facts” lineage.

I don’t know. I do know that as a products company, Microsoft does a very good job. I don’t like its strategies fairly often (like this one), but I respect its products. I think Microsoft competes very well on the “facts” of its products’ strengths. Those really should be the primary facts it sells. Not this anti-Linux FUD.

The authors (James Avery and Jim Holmes) of the recently published book Windows Developer Power Tools wrote an article for O’Reilly’s WindowsDevCenter making…

The Case for Freeware and Open Source Windows Tools

One of their key points is that even if you already use the feature rich Microsoft Visual Studio for development, there are many freeware and Open Source products that can be used to enhance your work with Visual Studio.

A Port 25 post titled simply Following-up… from May 2006 lists a number of Microsoft-related freeware and Open Source tools. Two in particular that caught my attention are Open Source products that help Visual Studio work with the popular Open Source CVS and Subversion version control applications.

Jalindi Igloo - Connects Visual Studio to a CVS repository

AnkhSVN - Visual Studio add-in for working with a Subversion repository

I have been arguing for years that Microsoft, perhaps more than any other company, has much to gain from open source. Think about it. Windows is the world’s biggest platform, especially when you measure it across the server, desktop, and mobile environments.

While I’m not a fan of some of the company’s moves, I firmly believe that there is a growing force within Microsoft that wants to figure out “this open source thing.”

The company is starting to get it, after years of marketing FUD and other wasteful responses. With the most popular open source software - SugarCRM, Alfresco, Zend, MySQL, JBoss, etc - running on or with Windows (over 50% of the time, in many cases), it makes sense for Microsoft to support this new category (open source) into its ecosystem.

In this opportunity, however, lies Microsoft’s biggest roadblock. It’s a massive platform company and, as such, needs to be neutral to positive toward all players that enrich its platform with their applications. But Microsoft is also an applications company, with a growing database business, exploding Sharepoint business, and an already gargantuan Office business. Yes, Windows competes with Linux. But I believe Microsoft’s biggest opportunity is above the operating system, and this is where it bumps into a range of open source (and proprietary) businesses.

Josh Greenbaum of ZDNet concurs:

Microsoft, always interested in being the center of the IT universe, has realized that the carrot is just as good, if not better, than the stick. Remember the key component of an ecosystem strategy — to paraphrase an old Ann Landers column on whether a husband is considered a philanderer if he looks at another woman — it doesn’t matter where a customer works up an appetite as long as they come home to Microsoft’s technology to eat. So what if a customer is using Linux, Java, Business Objects, or something from Software AG (whatever) as long as the main platform comes from Redmond.

This is yet another example of how smart…Microsoft has become in a market where its traditional monopolies are more and more threatened. I would argue that, done rightly, being the owner of a software ecosystem could be even a better deal than just bludgening the market with monopolistic practices.

So far, Microsoft has done a good job of working with open source companies - even competitive ones - to facilitate their integration with Windows, SQL Server, etc. And so it should. The question will be whether it can continue to do so.

In short, the billion-dollar question is whether Microsoft can continue to view itself as a platform company. To the extent that it does, open source is an opportunity, not a threat.

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.

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.

    
    
    
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    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.
    

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