Month: August 2003

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RSS to replace email? Nah.. I've heard a lot about how Outlook 2003, both alone and in combination with Exchange Server 2003, has been beefed up to fight the war on spam. From a client-only perspective, it doesn't look too promising. Apart from filtering messages that have been externally processed — for example, by SpamAssassin — the primary strategy appears to be blacklisting or whitelisting senders. As this screenshot illustrates, Sobig-like worms destroy that strategy. I can neither whitelist nor blacklist email appearing to be from Dave Ogle or Anne Manes or Tom Thompson or Lowell Rapaport. Quite likely, none of these folks has even been infected with the worm. Their names just happened to be chosen randomly from the address books of users who were infected.  … [Jon's Radio]

I found this post more interesting on the second reading. It took a second reading before I understood the problem. The screenshot I omitted showed an inbox with a lot of email generated from the Sobig worm. Jon says he uses three lines of defense against spam, SpamAssassin, SpamPal, and SpamBayes. He has a a fourth line of defense he did not mention, virus checking software. I expect these emails are probably clean of viruses or worms but are not valid communication from the sender. There lies the problem. You cannot filter this mailbox using only a whitelist or blacklist. An external sophisticated spam processor, such as SpamAssassin, is required to categorize the emails. However, I have not read or seen Microsoft pushing Outlook's new spam processing support as a total spam solution. I got the distinct impression that Microsoft was opening the api's slightly to make integrating external processing easier. Maybe we can get an open source version of SpamAssassin running with Exchange 2003. Deersoft's Spamkiller is nice but free is better if you are competing with a free SpamAssassin on Linux.

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You might be a teacher if…

  1. You believe “shallow gene pool” should have its own box on the report card.
  2. You want to slap the next person who says, “Must be nice to work 8 to 3:20 and have summers free.”
  3. You can tell if it's a full moon without ever looking outside.
  4. You believe the playground should be equipped with a Ritalin salt lick.
  5. You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if anyone says, “Boy, the kids sure are mellow today.”
  6. When out in public you feel the urge to snap your fingers at children you do not know and correct their behavior.
  7. You have no social life between September and June.
  8. Marking all A's on report cards would make your life SO much easier.
  9. You think people should be required to get a government permit before being allowed to reproduce.
  10. You wonder how some parents ever MANAGED to reproduce.
  11. You laugh uncontrollably when people refer to the staff room as the “lounge”.
  12. You encourage an obnoxious parent to check into charter schools or home schooling.
  13. You can't have children because there's no name you could give a child that wouldn't bring on high blood pressure the moment you heard it uttered.
  14. You think caffeine should be available in intravenous form.
  15. You know you are in for a major project when a parent says, “I have a great idea I'd like to discuss. I think it would be such fun.”
  16. Meeting a child's parent instantly answers the question, “Why is this kid like this?”

[The Braden Files]

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Commandments fray goes beyond Alabama. Christian proponents have been losing legal battles, but many now feel energized by a new cause. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

I guess the real challenge for the judicial system is whether they recognize the real issue. They believe the issue is about promoting religion in public places. They apologize for the inconvenience and remove the offending monument. They naively believe they have solved the problem.

Christians view the removal of the monument with increasing alarm. The Ten Commandments are core moral statements that are the foundation of our legal system and they are being dismissed as offensive. It appears that the judicial system has embarked on a process to rewrite history. This issue is not about the stone monument, it is about the values of our judicial system. It has become increasingly easy for people of many faiths to see the actions by judges to remove the monument as another step by the United States along the path to a “godless, valueless society”. Even Christians who believe Ten Commandment monuments are counter-productive are drawn into the fray. Their minds search for a sense of judicial balance and sensitivity to their issues. They do not find balance. They find arrogance. Their hearts cry out that this “godless” path is wrong.  They find a dogmatic assault on all references to God in our laws and our daily life. The intertwining of faith with our daily lives, that has proven successful for so many of our great leaders appears to be illegal if you are a judge. I have become increasingly concerned that our judicial system bows to a new set of idols. They worship themselves. 

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Murphy's other laws

  1. Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film.
  2. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
  3. A day without sunshine is like, well, night.
  4. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
  5. Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?
  6. I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.
  7. When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.
  8. Seen it all, done it all. Can't remember most of it.
  9. Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
  10. I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
  11. He's not dead. He's electroencephalographically challenged.
  12. She's always late. In fact, her ancestors arrived on the “June flower.”
  13. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.
  14. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.
  15. Honk if you love peace and quiet.
  16. Pardon my driving, I'm reloading.
  17. Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?
  18. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
  19. It is hard to understand how a cemetery can raise its burial costs and blame it on the higher cost of living.
  20. Just remember … if the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off.
  21. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.
  22. It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would be stupid enough to try and pass them.
  23. You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
  24. Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world population.
  25. If the shoe fits, get another one just like it.
  26. The things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those who got there first.
  27. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
  28. Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.
  29. The shin bone is a device for finding furniture.
  30. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
  31. It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
  32. Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
  33. I wished the buck stopped here, as I could use a few.
  34. I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.
  35. When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of 12 people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
  36. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

(Thanks to Annette!) [The Braden Files]

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Experts Retrace a String of Mishaps Before the Blackout. At 3:32 p.m. on August 14, a transmission line sagged into a tree just outside Cleveland, setting off the events that led to North America's biggest power failure. By James Glanz and Andrew C. Revkin. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

This is the best explanation of the blackout that I have read. It helps if you have an electrical engineering degree. It also explains why southern Ohio(where I live) was not affected. The short version of the theory is that First Energy(Cleveland) was having transmission line problems. This problem aggravated an overheating with the transmission lines to AEP(south of Cleveland). When First Energy lost a second transmission line, AEP circuit breakers tripped on the lines to First Energy. This walled off First Energy from the south and the system quickly started to pull large amounts of power from the north. In a cascading patttern circuit breakers protected the equipment and shut down the transmission lines from Michigan through Canada to New York. It was interesting to note, that New York was exporting a large amount of power through Canada at the time and went down because they could not slow their power generation fast enough.

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SBS2003 Preview

Other people have already talked at length about the new release of Small Business Server from Microsoft so I will try to brief and highlight why I like the product.

Why I like SBS2K

I have been using SBS2K for about a year. I think the old product, SBS2K, had a lot of value for small businesses and I think the new product, SBS2003, expands that scope. The reasons I liked the old product was because it was a solid fileserver, mailserver, and firewall. It has some other features such as SQL2000, fax server, and IIS web server. For most small businesses these are low priority items. For some businesses the firewall would be a low priority item but it was nice that it was included. There has been a lot of heated arguements from big business consultants that it is a bad practice to have the firewall on the domain controller. I see the small business viewpoint differently. There are probably some small businesses without a firewall or incorrectly set up firewall. That is bad! ISA is a solid firewall and for many customers appears to be free since that is not the reason they are buying SBS2K. Good firewalls are still expensive. One good firewall is good and two good firewalls is great! There are some nice competitors in this area, such as Linux and Novell's Groupwise, but I believe most small businesses would feel more secure with a Microsoft solution. I know I would feel comfortable walking away from an installation and not coming back for thirty days.

SBS 2003, What I like

The two most attractive new features to SBS2003 is remote web workplace and sharepoint services.

  • Remote web workplace is an attractive replacement for vpn. It appears to be easy to configure and setup at both ends.
  • Sharepoint services looks like a more attractive way to share files in a team environment.

Volume Shadow Backup looks interesting. In the presentation it sounded like it could keep file versions during the day. I need to investigate.

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Too Much Pride

Alabama Judge Defiant on Commandments' Display. Hundreds applauded Chief Justice Roy Moore's refusal to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the State Supreme Court. By Jeffrey Gettleman. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand the situation is out of control and counter-productive. On the other hand there is a strong backlash against the judicial branch for ignoring their religous heritage and for supporting the “Hollywood” morality. For better or for worse, the programs we watch on television have become our primary influence in helping us distinguish the differences between right and wrong. The results have not been pretty. Instead of clinging to moral principals that have worked for centuries, the courts have gradually succumbed to our present fad in which no one is responsible. Instead of embracing a useful part of our heritage and using it to reduce crime, the courts have opted to throw the baby out with the bath water. Several years ago the judicial system got after Judge Moore for displaying his wooden plaque with the Ten Commandments in the courtroom. Now they are fighting over a large granite slab with Ten Commandments on it in the State Supreme courthouse rotunda. There is too much pride at work here! I guess this is another reason why pride is considered a sin.

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Using a public folder in Exchange to support sales

I did a little hacking on the vba macro in the microsoft provided osmsgclas.doc. This is same macro I used in “Using a public folder in Exchange to support sales”. I was grateful that the original macro would change my msgclass from ipm.note to ipm.note.sales. This allowed me to use the customized Outlook form which automated several tasks. Since the macro was supposedly written to support Word97 and still worked, I decided a little hacking was okay. I changed it to change only the items that had still had the original ipm.note msgclass. There were a couple of salesresponse forms that were changed back to sales. It wa not a problem but it was annoying since changing salesreponse forms to sales was not part of the plan. The change was minor, it was easy, and it worked! Oh well!

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Putting the GPL on trial. Columbia Law School's Eben Moglen writes that SCO's strategy of challenging the legality of the GNU General Public License suggests a fundamental misreading of the Copyright Act. [CNET News.com]

I admit that I like some open source software. It is an important force in the software innovation and design process but it also has some very pragmatic benefits. Some of my more pragmatic reasons for using open source software are:

  • Good quality software for free.
  • Software licensing is a pain in the butt.
  • For some features it is easier to use open source software than the commercial varieties.
  • Some commercial software vendors do not innovate enough.

The last issue is a touchy issue. Most software vendors release a new version of their software each year and many software consumers do not upgrade. Many new releases are not sufficently different from the last version to warrant an upgrade for most people. Some reviewers of the new software deride the new version as nothing more than a bug fix. It is good that they finally are fixing the bugs but really annoying that you have to pay for it twice! When you combine all of these annoyances together, a competitive open source product becomes an attractive alternative. Microsoft has responded by reducing prices for large consumers(e.g. governments and companies).

Having said all of that I primarily use commercial software. I have replaced my use of Notepad with Jedit and ftp with Filezilla. Soon I will install a Linux server as a testbed for web development. I have installed Perl and Python on a Windows platforms but I think a local Linux server running Apache, Perl, Python, and PHP is the best way to test web development. IIS is nice but Apache is still the web server of choice for the Internet. I do not see .Net changing anything.

Finally, I enjoy following the software development process in the open source community and the reactions by the commercial vendors. Although the commercial vendors complain I see the combined commercial and open source software environment as a much more responsive and vibrant development community for the consumers. Since I view most software copyrights and patents as “standing on the shoulders of others”, I have little sympathy for SCO and the others who claim ownership of specific pieces of code.  Most of the commercial software vendors I work with produce solid, propietary products that need some form of protection from theft. IMHO, their products might be unique but most of the programming code used to create the product has been around for a long time.