Service Pack 2 is a security must-have for Windows XP users. But
it breaks a lot of things. In many cases, this breakage is just
a very conservative approach to functionality that could possibly
be misused. But if you need that functionality, and know you won’t
misuse it, you can still get it… with some additional work.
December 17, 2004
Oracle Web Conferencing with Windows XP SP 2
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November 19, 2004
Outlook is brain dead
I said I’d skip trying Outlook 2003 for now because I couldn’t even
sync it with my Palm, due to Palm’s unwillingness to let me download
that capability from their web site. Well, I borrowed a Palm
install CD from someone so I could install the Outlook conduits
for use with my Palm, and am giving Outlook a try.
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November 17, 2004
Try Outlook?
Well, my PC acted up yesterday, so it was time to wipe the hard drive and start over. Our IT group got me a new disk image right away, and I started moving my data over. But, since it was a brand new PC, I decided to try some new things out. For example, I’m not going to install ZoneAlarm; I think the new XP SP 2 firewall will meet my needs. (It doesn’t do as much as ZoneAlarm, but I think it covers my vulnerabilities.) And I decided to try Outlook 2003.
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July 27, 2004
XML Schema Languages
The speaker didn’t make it, so we have a substitute. He seems
knowledgeable, but unprepared. So far, he’s reading the handout
document to us and adding comments. The handout is excellent; I’m
extremely disappointed that the speaker who wrote it isn’t here.
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Subversion: Version Control Rethought
Greg Stein is going to tell us why and how to use Subversion. I don’t
expect to take too many notes, though. It’s pretty hard to do that
in a session like this.
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July 26, 2004
Python Quickstart
My first session at this year’s
Open Source
Convention here in Portland, Oregon, is a
Python
Quickstart. I’m not really looking to use
Python for anything,
but I’d like to be able to program in it. After all, it’s the
language that Zope and
Chandler are written
in, and I think both those products are very good.
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June 23, 2004
Analysis. Design. Code. Test. Litigate.
I’m at the opening keynote of the
Agile Development
Conference in Salt Lake City. Timothy Lister (co-author of
Peopleware
and Waltzing
with Bears) is talking about software development and risk. The heading of
this post is the view he often has of the software development
lifecycle (he’s an arbitrator for software development disputes).
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May 8, 2004
Building Apache
I posted some
notes about building Perl with
Microsoft’s
free C++ development tools. Today I’m rebuilding my PC, and
I’m using my own Apache build instead of their binary. Here’s what
I had to do.
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May 6, 2004
Green stamps of the 21st century
When I was a kid (in fact, even when I was a grad student), grocery
stores gave you green stamps with your purchase (or brown and yellow
plaid stamps if you shopped at Winn-Dixie). The more you
spent, the more stamps you got. You dumped the stamps into a
drawer, and when you decided you needed a new waffle iron, you
dragged them out, unstuck them from each other, and pasted them
into a book. If you had enough books, you took them to a
redemption center and traded them for your waffle iron.
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April 28, 2004
My new Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones…
…are already proving themselves. My flight’s delayed about an hour,
and the Crown Room is, as almost always, more of a zoo than the
gate, so I’m waiting at the gate. It’s noisy here; a
constant background of machines and chatter. So I put on my new
headphones and turned them on (without plugging them into any audio
source). Instantly, it’s like I’m in a library. I can still hear
announcements (actually more clearly than before), and occasional
take-off rumbles or dot matrix printers, but they’re in the background.
And the rest of the noise is gone.
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April 25, 2004
Building Perl
In an earlier
post, I talked about Microsoft’s
free
Visual C++ Toolkit. I built Perl
for Windows with it successfully,
but it took me about half a dozen tries. On a Unix machine the
build process is very sophisticated. You run a Configure program,
which figures out everything the build process needs to know about
your environment, then you use make to perform the
actual build. But Configure is a Unix shell script, and you can’t
run it under Windows.
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Great Free Stuff from Microsoft!
Just a few days ago, Microsoft released free set of development
tools, the Microsoft
Visual C++ Toolkit 2003. (As always, don’t be surprised if the
link is broken. Even Microsoft’s own web pages often have broken
internal links, thanks to Microsoft’s inexplicable compulsion to
move their pages again and again and again, and never
leave pointers behind. Google should be able
to find it, though.)
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March 29, 2004
“Fudgability”
Kasei writes about
the importance
of fudgability in software to automate previously manual
operations. It’s worth reading.
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March 28, 2004
Bluetooth
After I spilled
a coke on my ThinkPad T40 I got a loaner immediately (thanks to
our IT staff). But soon after that, I got upgraded to a T41. This is a
lot like the T40, though with a bit faster processor. There are
really two main improvements in the T41 over the T40:
an extremely high-resolution display (1400 by 1050), and
Bluetooth. I’ve been waiting for Bluetooth to
solve all my cabling problems, and now I’ve got a chance to see
how well it works.
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March 16, 2004
March 15, 2004
Faster Acrobat
A while ago I
mentioned that Adobe Acrobat 6.0 takes forever to start up,
but doesn’t do a single thing I care about better than earlier,
faster versions of Acrobat. I just upgraded to a new PC, and it
had Acrobat 5.0 on it.
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March 8, 2004
Back to Eudora
A few weeks ago I wrote about
Changing
Software Programs, and said I liked
Mozilla
Thunderbird and would stick with it over my old favorite,
Eudora. Well, I changed my
mind, and I’m back to Eudora.
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March 2, 2004
Voting in Georgia
I just voted electronically here in Macon, Georgia this morning. I
left the polling place quite upset, and with little confidence in the
process. First, the smart card I was given was programmed incorrectly,
and didn’t include the Democratic presidential preference primary. When
I reached the end of the ballot without seeing that race I complained,
and the pollworkers came over and examined the screen. So much for a
secret ballot. They then pressed the “Cast Vote” button over my
protests, saying that they would void the vote later. I then got a
correctly programmed smart card and voted again.
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February 27, 2004
My Assessment of the RSA Conference
Although the quality of the sessions picked up a lot during the
last two days, I was still disappointed with the content of this
conference. There is a great quantity of material (14 concurrent
tracks, 4 sessions per day, for 4 days; about 200 sessions in all),
the quality is generally very poor. The content has often been
trivial and obvious, and the technical level has been very low, despite
the self-assigned ratings. About 10% of the conference seems to be
pretty good, but even then, the technical level is usually pretty
low, and the material covered is often handled better at other
conferences.
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Cracker Methodologies and Tools
Douglas Conorich of IBM and Matthew Luallen of Sph3r3 and Argonne
National Laboratory.
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Charles Engelke's Blog 