phpWebSite 0.9.3-2 Stable released. The phpWebSite development team has released version 0.9.3-2 of its content management system. This release is mainly a performance enhancement upgrade from previous versions. The memory requirements have been dropped below the 8MB php default and the execution time has been cut in half. Many of the interfaces have been cleaned up and made more consistent. Also a new category view has been implemented for announcements, links, and documents. Other updates include: improved SSL support, a new document manager module, and lots of bug fixes. Two third party modules will ship with this version and all future versions. They are phpwsbb and phpwsrssfeeds. Both of these projects can be found on SourceForge.net. Developed by the Web Technology Group at Appalachian State University, phpWebSite provides a complete web site content management system. All client output is XHTML 1.0 and meets the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative requirements. By [email protected] (Steven Levin). [SourceForge.net: Front page news]

This is an open source product I have been watching for about six months and one of the reasons I built the Linux box. I probably won't get started on this project until I finish the Habitat accounting conversion.

If your installation of Windows Small Business Server 2003 is affected, you will experience the following symptoms.

During the Intranet component portion of Windows Small Business Server 2003 Setup, the following error message may appear: “An error occurred while installing Windows SharePoint Services and creating your intranet site.”

Additionally, the following error message appears when you browse to the internal Web site at http://companyweb/: “You are not authorized to view this page. You might not have permission to view this directory or page using the credential you supplied.”

It goes on to say that you can order a free #3 replacement disk after December 17th and that the fix is required for installations completed before November 24th even though you do not see any symptoms right now. My guess is that M$ has this one figured out and I can start planning my upgrade to SBS2K3.

I went to the TS2 meeting in Cincy to learn more about SBS2003. I was sent two NFR copies of SBS2003 Premium but I have been holding off upgrading my SBS2K even though I would like to upgrade. Today I watched a sales demo of the hightlights, remote workplace, secure Outlook Web Access, and Sharepoint. Unlike a lot of M$ upgrades I find value in these improvements. The management reports are an improvement, too. IMHO, I agree with Microsoft sponsored study that showed SBS is an easier package to install and configure than Linux. I have installed both. I think that Linux has its place but I believe you have to match it up with the right client more than SBS. The presenter said M$ will announce some sort of fix tommorrow for Sharepoint dll problem that forces installers to set the date back to 11/24/2003.

Today I finished loading the payroll transactions into QuickBooks. I have a pretty good matchup on payroll witholding with Peachtree and QuickBooks. There is a couple of cents difference for the federal withholding while the state and local withholding is right on the money. I hope to correct all of the payroll errors before the end of the year and start with a clean payroll liabilities account in 2004.

I hope to start bulk loading the bill payment and check register transactions this week. This project is longer than I expected.

Nasty new IE vulnerability.

Most people reading are probably aware of the common trick whereby spammers and other assorted ne'er-do-wells publish URLs with usernames that look like hostnames to fool people in to trusting a malicious site – for example, http://www.microsoft.com&session%[email protected]. This trick is frequently used by spammers to steal people's PayPal accounts, by tricking them in to “resetting” their password at a site owned by the spammer but disguised as PayPal.com.

Today's new Internet Explorer vulnerability makes the problem a hundred times worse. By including an 0x01 character after the @ symbol in the fake URL, IE can be tricked in to not displaying the rest of the URL at all. Don't expect a patch for a while either; the guy who discovered the bug released it to BugTraq on the same day he notified the vendor.

[Simon Willison's Weblog]

This is a real nasty problem. I went to the site, tried the demo, and looked at the source. It's the real thing. The location bar tells you that you are at www.microsoft.com and you know you are on a locally hosted page.

“The SCO case has been dragging through the courts for months now. McBride threatens another 18 months before he gets to trial. But if this is all they've got, then again, Eben had it right at the start. This is nothing more than a failed company using a failed legal system to make money rather than producing great software. Don't tell me this is what the Framers had in mind when they drafted the Progress Clause of our Constitution.“

I spent too much time today reading about SCO and copyright law but it is fascinating. I started this trip  by reading the Groklaw article,  Eldred v. Ashcroft – Justice Breyer's Dissenting Opinion, and the “Greed is Good” open letter by SCO. I ended up with a nice rebuttal by Lawrence Lessig that dissects the open letter point by point. I couldn't help but notice that I started programming computers before SCO was born and I will still be programming computers well after their demise. In this business that has always been normal.

I have a lot of mixed emotions about wrestling. It is a sport I was successful at in high school but I never wrestled again after my senior year. I won the regional championship but I was feeling very mortal. I know that I was very concerned that my knees would not hold up. Now that I am almost fifty I realize I was probably over-reacted to creaking knees and missed an opportunity. Hindsight tells me my knees would probably have been okay. Now when I talk with these young men I want to encourage them to have fun and enjoy these sports for as long as they can. It is fun to share my passion for sports with young men and I think they like it, too. Most wrestlers toil in obscurity. Most parents do not understand wrestling. The kids are pretty amazed and relieved when they find a passionate parent who knows the sport.

Sometimes I think there must be a curse on UNIX, like there supposedly was on the tombs of some of the pharaohs of Egypt. If you stole any of the contents of the tombs, even though you might be tempted by the possibility of easy wealth, you ended up horribly dead or worse. Or like the curse on the city of Babylon, where anyone trying to rebuild the city would be doomed to failure.I think owning UNIX must be like that. Maybe it was supposed to stay free, and when AT&T decided to take everyone's freely donated work and “monetize” it, the curse began. Now it looks like it's on SCO. The invoice thing didn't work out well. The license program is on a slow boat to nowhere. The IBM trial is not helping, and Red Hat is breathing down their neck too. And now they have announced they want to collect money because of some missing copyright attributions on some really old BSD code. I see trouble ahead. Maybe they're like Sisyphus, and for some great cosmic wrong, SCO has been condemned to try one legal theory after another. Just as they near the top of the hill and are about to make a buck at last, down they fall and then have to start up the hill again, lugging a new and equally doomed legal theory. It's kind of heart-wrenching to watch. Let's take a look at the viability of their latest claim. [GrokLaw]

Whew! The post on Groklaw is long but it is informative. The short version is that BSD and AT&T made a voluntary settlement to include copyright statements on some files in question but the files would continue to be distributed under the GPL. The origin of much of the contested code was never resolved. It appears that the judge presiding over this case felt the copyright claim was very weak and that inserting copyright statements into the code was not required. I guess AT&T saw the writing on the wall and decided that their effort to monetize Unix was doomed to failure. It's too bad that SCO cannot learn from history.

For some reason I decided to run a Perl script inside of Jedit. It didn't work. The “Run Script” macro came up with an error message about a file not found. Eventually I figured out I needed to install the Console plugin. It would have been nice if the help file would point this out or the default install would include this plugin since they included the Run Script macro and it needs it.