David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
In some versions of Windows, the usual method of viewing a file–double clicking on it–doesn’t work for BLG files. If you can’t view a BLG file just by double clicking on it, here’s the other way to open a BLG file in Windows.
This works in current versions of Windows and all the way back to Windows 2000.
My DSL connection went down late last night and I couldn’t get things back up and running until about 10 minutes ago.
The good news is that the next-generation site is almost ready. Want to take a look at it? Look here. It’ll move to the main address very soon, maybe this weekend.
Houston had a problem. Now it’s Microsoft’s problem.
You see, Microsoft threatened Houston with the same threat they’ve been rattling around a lot of other places. Sign a multi-million-dollar, automatic-upgrade deal for Office and other Microsoft software, or face an audit. When you’re the only game in town and you suspect people have played fast and loose with your licensing agreement, you can afford to do that.
Except the Texans stared the bully down. When Microsoft said Houston needed to cough up some bucks for office software, Houston said fine, they’d buy it from someone else.
And now that Houston is using SimDesk instead of Microsoft Office, it’s making headlines.
The city of Largo, Florida, which runs itself on a thin-client environment based on Linux and KDE, is a PR coup for Linux. But Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States. And this is turning into a PR nightmare for Microsoft–now Chicago, the third-most populous city, is also looking at SimDesk.
For less than half the money, the cities get ease of use, cross-platform compatibility, centralized offsite file storage, and longer hardware life. SimDesk stands to save Houston far more than the $7 million on paper.
But SimDesk isn’t the only other game in town. WordPerfect is still hanging on, one of the few survivors of the era when there were a dozen or more word processors, spreadsheets, and databases available for the PC. It’s still solid and capable today, and it’s a good choice if you’re looking to go a fairly traditional route. StarOffice is cheaper but still capable. The 602Suite (a.k.a. 602office) is either free or inexpensive, depending on the feature set you want.
Unfortunately, the highly regarded Gobe Productive is off the market, and efforts to raise the money to purchase the source code for the purpose of releasing it as GPL appear to have quietly failed. The good news is that the declination seem to indicate Gobe expects to have some kind of future.
If you want free, go with OpenOffice, which is StarOffice’s free, open-source twin brother. And if you’re willing to dith Office and Windows, you can run KDE and KOffice, or a variety of Gnome productivity apps, such as Evolution, AbiWord, and Gnumeric.
Most of the alternatives don’t offer all the functionality that Office includes, but few people use more than about 20% of Office’s functionality anyway. The alternatives have all of the essentials down.
The main thing tying most companies and organizations to Microsoft Office file format compatibility. An obscure piece of software called ConversionsPlus takes care of that problem. I’ve used ConversionsPlus to convert literally hundreds of files at a time to and from Microsoft Office format, and the process only takes a few minutes.
New stuff. Hmm. I think I need to adopt a new stylebook…
Old stuff. And, thanks to some SQL heroics by Steve DeLassus, a couple hundred vintage posts from about a six-month span in late 2000 and early 2001 are now online here. I liberated them from my ancient site at editthispage.com (which, I guess, was Silicon Underground version 2.0). This is two generations later. As old entries gain attention I’ll give them categories and proper titles. A lot of the stuff’s obsolete but I’m sure it’ll interest someone. Last I checked, the old site was getting a hundred or two hits per day consistently.
New stuff. And speaking of old site incarnations, once I’ve decided exactly what mods I want to install and use, I’ll flip the switch on the new site, based on the latest version of b2. The most obvious improvement for most readers will be the spiffy new calendar. It’ll also bring in trackbacks and pingbacks for interaction with other blogs. It also makes some changes to make search engines happier.
In 1997, it was a beeper. In 2001, it was a laptop. In 2002, it was a cell phone. This year, it’s a Palm Pilot.
What am I going to have to carry around with me next year?
The talk that’s all the rage on everyone else’s weblog tonight is reader feedback. Dave Winer’s tired of keeping track of where he’s been and checking back for replies.
He doesn’t like the idea of comments as RSS feeds. It clogs up his aggregators, he says. To which I say there are days when I visit a blog and the most interesting stuff there is the reader comments. That’s the case here at least twice a month. If b2 doesn’t offer a comments RSS feed soon, I just might have to code one myself.
Winer proposed an alternate solution that made my head hurt. Way too complicated. The beauty of the comments system is its simplicity. Readers see something, they type in their name and a comment, hit a button, and it’s done. Who wants another username and password to remember? Who’s going to tell everyone they need one? There’s already way too much weblog-ese running around. Pingbacks, trackbacks, RSS, Googlejuice. Even the word “weblog” itself. Why are we always trying to make things more complicated? I’m convinced that 20% of my readers, in spite of my best efforts, think I have one page–some post I made ages ago about some hot topic, like Sotec laptops or eMachines upgrades. They read the accumulated replies, write their own, and think it’s a user forum. Many thank me for providing a place for them to ask questions or vent. Some of them venture out into my Weblog at large. Many never do.
I’m sure more weblog-ese is going to help these people tremendously.
The b2 gang has a solution to Winer’s problem as well. They’re developing a model, utilizing mature and existing Internet standards, that lets you subscribe to a post. Tick the box when you comment, then if somebody replies, you get the reply via–hold your breath–e-mail. I think most people assume comments systems work that way anyway. Set up an e-mail address that you use for comments and only for comments, and you’ve got your solution.
I’m sure that’s way too simple though. It always is.
I’m playing with b2 0.61, which comes very close to feature parity with Movable Type. The only thing MT has that made me jealous that this newest version of b2 doesn’t is allowing multiple categories per post, which is something. I remember a Ted Williams tribute I wrote after he died that someone told me belongs in “human interest” rather than “baseball”–permitting multiple categories neatly fixes that problem.
But pingbacks and trackbacks are there, so I can interact with other blogs and they can interact with me, which is good.
On another front, I’ve managed to pull down all of my old content from editthispage.com (October 2000-April 2001), which Steve DeLassus and I are trying to massage into a form suitable for importing here. I did it in a very crude fashion–I set my display preferences to display 365 entries on the front page, then I downloaded my page with wget and I manually stripped out the obvious cruft. Very inelegant but it mostly works.
As for the custom b2 code Steve wrote, I’m getting closer to getting it into a form that’s distributable. The PHP calendar he modified for my use is history, replaced with one by Alex King that integrates more nicely with the rest of b2 and follows Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility guidelines nicely.
I run this Web site without a static IP address. I registered an address at DynDNS.org which, as long as I keep it updated, keeps me on the ‘Net.
In the past I’ve used a Windows-based program to keep my address updated. But the hard drive in that Windows box took leave of its life a few days ago. Somehow my IP address didn’t change for a few days, but then my DSL modem fell off the ‘Net.
Then I found setup instructions for Debian and Dyndns, which solved that problem. There’s a Dyndns client in Debian now, which this document explains, so now my Web server can keep itself online without any help from a Windows box and without me writing any nasty code.
Now, I haven’t tested this theory, but I suspect one could use DynDNS plus DHCP or PPPoE to run a Web site with a registered domain name without paying the extra monthly fee for a static IP address. The trick would be to set up your registered name’s DNS record as a CNAME to your DynDNS name.
Setting up the DNS records is left as an exercise to the reader, mostly because my understanding of it is good enough for me to do it myself, but not to explain it–when I’ve tried in the past, all I’ve succeeded in doing was confusing both of us.
I’m a bit disillusioned today. Actually the last few days. I don’t deal well with pride and elitism.
Then I read something.
I’m not above a good fight, but I was so tired. I’d been fighting fundamentalist Christians for 20 years, had left my denomination, and had washed ashore with the only congregation that would have someone like me as their pastor. I didn’t have any fight left in me.
So I said the first thing that came to my mind.
“[expletive] A, man. [expletive]-A.”
I have found over the years that with some people, a well-placed “F-bomb” is the best pastoral move I can make. It’s like a conversational “Ctrl-Alt-Delete”. If nothing else works, just reboot and start over.
It’s the story of a hard-cussing preacher and one of his friends. It made me uncomfortable. So did the implied attitude that all you have to do to be a Christian is show up in church on Sunday.
But he had a real point: Show up. Leave the door cracked a little and see if God walks in. You don’t make yourself a Christian. God makes you a Christian.
As for the implication that all you have to do is show up on Sunday, read his own story and you see otherwise. So that apprehension was misguided. And he had Sundays right. Show up. Listen. Sing. Pray. Talk to people. Help put stuff away.
I used to have a church like that and I miss it. The Preacher is one of the most profane blogs I’ve seen. But he’s not wearing a mask. He even says he doesn’t necessarily believe in God all the time. He’s honest and he’s real, and that’s refreshing. I like him even if he makes me a little uncomfortable.
Read about The Preacher and George yourself. Then read The Preacher’s own story.
We talked earlier this week about servers, and undoubtedly some more questions will come up, but let’s go ahead and talk about small-office network infrastructure.
Cable and DSL modems are affordable enough that any small office within the service area of either ought to get one. For the cost of three dialup accounts, you can have Internet service that’s fast enough to be worth having.
I’ve talked a lot about sharing a broadband connection with Freesco, and while I like Freesco, in an office environment I recommend you get an appliance such as those offered by Linksys, US Robotics, D-Link, Netgear, Siemens, and a host of other companies. There are several simple reasons for this: The devices take up less space, they run cooler, there’s no need to wait for them to boot up in case of power failure or someone accidentally unplugging it, and being solid state, theoretically they’re more reliable than a recycled Pentium-75. Plus, they’re very fast and easy to set up (we’re talking five minutes in most cases) and very cheap–under $50. When I just checked, CompUSA’s house brand router/switch was running $39. It’s hard to find a 5-port switch for much less than that. Since you’ll probably use those switch ports for something anyway, the $10-$20 extra you pay to get broadband connection sharing and a DHCP server is more than worth your time.
My boss swears that when he replaced his Linksys combo router/100-megabit switch with a much pricier Cisco combo router/10-megabit switch, the Cisco was faster, not only upstream, but also on the local network. I don’t doubt it, but you can’t buy Cisco gear at the local office supply store for $49.
For my money, I’d prefer to get a 24-port 3Com or Intel switch and plug it into a broadband sharing device but you’ll pay a lot more for commercial-grade 3Com or Intel gear. The cheap smallish switches you’ll see in the ads in the Sunday papers will work OK, but their reliability won’t be as high. Keep a spare on hand if you get the cheap stuff.
What about wireless? Wireless can save you lots of time and money by not having to run CAT5 all over the place–assuming your building isn’t already wired–and your laptop users will love having a network connection anywhere they go. But security is an issue. At the very least, change your SSID from the factory default, turn on WEP (check your manual if it isn’t obvious how to do it), and hard-code your access point(s) to only accept the MAC addresses of the cards your company owns (again, check your manual). Even that isn’t enough necessarily to keep a determined wardriver out of your network. Cisco does the best job of providing decent security, but, again, you can’t buy Cisco gear at your local Staples. Also, to make it easier on yourself, make sure your first access point and your first couple of cards are the same brand. With some work, the variety pack will usually work together. Like-branded stuff always will. When you’re doing your initial setup, you want the first few steps to go as smoothly as possible.
I’d go so far as to turn off DHCP on the wireless segment. Most wardrivers probably have the ability to figure out your network topology, gateway, and know some DNSs. But why make life easier for them? Some won’t know how to do that, and that’ll keep them out. The sophisticated wardriver may decide it’s too much trouble and go find a friendlier network.
Why worry about wireless security? A wardriver may or may not be interested in your LAN. But that’s one concern. And while I don’t care if someone mooches some bandwidth off my LAN to go read USA Today, and I’d only be slightly annoyed if he used it to go download the newest version of Debian, I do care if someone uses my wireless network to send spam to 250,000 of his closest friends, or if he uses my wireless network to visit a bunch of child porn or warez sites.
Enough about that. Let’s talk about how to wire everything. First off, if you use a switched 100-megabit network, you can just wire everything together and not give much thought to anything. But if you’re using hubs or wireless to connect your desktops, be sure to put your servers on 100-megabit switch ports. The servers can then talk to each other at full speed if and when that’s necessary. And a switch port allows them to talk at full speed to a number of slower desktop PCs at once. The speed difference can be noticable.