New validator.

I'm testing the new RSS Validator from Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby and Bill Kearney.

The following feeds validate: Scripting News, Dave's Handsome Radio Blog. One of my feeds did not validate, I don't want to say which one, but when I went to read the spec, the validator was right! Yay.

The announcement is on Mark Pilgrim's weblog.

[Scripting News]

This post by Dave and a previous post on the RSS Explorer Tool continue to make Radio Userland a very dynamic environment for weblog content using RSS. RSS is quickly becoming the next evolutionary step for the web.

Today I finally verified the Microsoft Security Bulletins. I found it interesting that Microsoft uses PGP to sign the message rather than the signing builtin to Outlook. It took me awhile because PGP is almost in limbo. NAI jettisoned them and Zimmerman has been vocal that PGP should be free. PGP Corp is trying to encourage people to fork over $70 a year. All of this bantering about encouraged me to give GnuPG a try. After a little searching I settled on WinPT. I tried the Outlook plug-in from Gdata briefly but I couldn't get it to work. It kept generating an error messages about spawning tasks. WinPT was actually quite easy to use. First you have to import the key from Microsoft. Then you highlight the signed portion of the e-mail, press Ctrl-Alt-D, and wait for the popup window to tell you it is valid. Okay, this is simple enough I can use it. An added bonus is that I can use WinPT with any of the email readers I use.

New RedHat Kernel Patch Illegal to Explain to U.S. Users [Slashdot] An amusing but ridiculous result of following the rules set out by the copyright act(DMCA).

To install SBS2K I am going to need more disk space. So I picked two new 75GB disk drives off of Ubid last week. I was going to put one on my main desktop that needs more disk space for video files but have instead opted to install both of them on the server in RAID 1 configuration. Since I will be replacing a 8GB drive I should have ample capacity. Since cost remains a higher priority than performance I restricted choices to ATA RAID 1. A little research showed me that there is a lot of interesting work being done in this area by Promise and Highpoint to make affordable and high performance ATA RAID. SCSI is too expensive for the modest improvement in performance. I narrowed my choices to the Adaptec 1200A which uses the Highpoint chip and the Promise Fasttrak100TX2. Both of these companies look like they will be survivors in this business and have current drivers and bios. I ended up getting Fastrak100TX2 for fifty bucks off eBay. So for about $210 I have put together a 75GB RAID 1 configuration and significantly improved the server reliability. I did a quick look for SCSI drives and found a single drive 18GB going for $250.

Before moving on with the SBS2K project I will digress a little and go over the reasons I am pursuing SBS2K versus the Linux alternative. First of all the most important business task I am looking at improving is my email and shared folder storage. About a year ago I installed a Toshiba M500D server on my local network. Since cost was a major consideration I picked it up off of Ubid. My objective at that time was to install shared folders, install a local intranet server to prototype web page changes, and to practice for the MSCE server exam. So I added 512K of memory, installed W2K server, and was off and running. A couple of months later I started focusing on making improvements to my email system, Outlook. I was pulling mail from my ISP and storing it in Outlook. The problem was that I needed to get to my mail from different machines on my local network. There are many solutions in this area but I settled on a IMAP implementation from IMA. They had both a W2K version and a Linux version. I know this sounds corny but I liked the idea of a migration path to Linux. So I installed the W2K version and moved my most of email folders out of Outlook to the IMAP server. I had a few problems with IMAP but nothing serious to me. The biggest problems were:

1. Moving and deleting nested mail folders
2. Running rules on IMAP folders.
3. Backup and recovery was pretty ambigous
4. The IMAP server did not like my local domain name suffix, .local. It has several form validation routines that reject any suffix greater than 3 characters.

Recently I was pondering these problems and whether I should fork over the money for software maintenance when Microsoft made me a very appealing offer. They said if I signed up as a partner and went to a Small Business Server training class they would give me a NFR copy of SBS2K. They further said that they had a channel promotion in which they would give me an up to $500 rebate if I sell SBS2K to a new customer. When I put on my small businessman hat and looked at my problems, I concluded that SBS2K could be very appealing. A small business could get a quality email server, firewall, and SQL server for a little bit more than the price of the W2K server. For all the people who just want to use their PC rather than understand how they work, this is much more appealing than a Linux/IMAP solution. So I went to the class. Harry Brelsford was the instructor. Harry is a consultant whose business is focused around SBS2K and writing books. He conducted a very practical class and naturally recommended we follow the recommendations in his book, SBS2K: Best Practices, to minimize support issues. I was impressed enough to buy a copy of the book. Of course, I bought it off of Ebay to save a few bucks. Now I am waiting for my copy of SBS2K and reading the frequent posts to the SBS2K newsgroup on Yahoo.

I am in the midst of several new projects, SBS2K, Redhat 7.2 Server, and this website. All of these projects combine small business objectives with a learning project. This website started out on a trial with Radio Userland. I wanted a weblog with categories that was not only easy to use but could integrate RSS easily. I looked at Greymatter and Movable Type since I had limited myself to PERL initially. The hosting provider were I wanted to place this site wanted more money for PHP/Mysql so I eliminated some very nice weblog packages that relied on it. The more I looked at the various packages the more important RSS became to me. So RSS drove me here. This site has some bugs but it has most of the features I want, a lot of potential, and is inexpensive. I have decided I am going to keep this site as my Consulting/Personal website and I have started working at feeding news updates via RSS site to another site, Legacy Farm Ltd. The Small Business Server 2000(Microsoft) and the Linux Server projects both involve email/intranet issues and I will talk out loud about them over the next couple of weeks.

This is a good article about the ongoing digital rights issue. It focuses on the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act(CTEA) that extends copyright protection from 20 years after the author's death to 70 years. I don't see where the CTEA promotes the arts by protecting their economic value and thereby fosters greater incentives to create.

BusinessWeek: A Case to Define the Digital Age. A Supreme Court ruling against the CTEA would be the first major victory for digital-rights activists, who want more books, music, and images to enter the public domain. And it would be a grand defeat for corporations, which claim they would forfeit billions in lost revenues. [Tomalak's Realm]

New Feature: Titles and Links in Radio-generated RSS. [Dave Winer: Radio UserLand]