the.Inevitable.Org/anism

It’s fun to see the attention that Microsoft is getting lately … all
based on the rumors of the coming Identity solution.  I saw this
reference tonight on the CNN web site.

I’m hoping to see some of the developer SDK stuff soon …

This is a great report on the various issues facing our nation related to IT Infrastructure Security.

U.S. IT Infrastructure Highly Vulnerable [Slashdot:]

This is a good article to read to understand what is out there on the
Internet right now … a whole lot of Zombies!  For those of you
that do not know what a zombie is, it is a computer that has been
compromised … hijacked … infected … taken over.  In most
cases, this has been done without the owner of the computer even
noticing.  In fact … the people who are responsible for creating
these zombies do not want the owners to know, and in most cases do not
want to harm the owner or their data!

Zombie’d computers are platforms for launching a wide range of attacks
on other computers on the Internet.  They simply have some little
software processes that are running in the background … most of the
time unnoticed.  This software is like a virus, but not to impact
the machine it is running on, but instead to allow a malicious user to
use it to launch various types of attacks on other computers or web
sites.

I have read numerous article that talk about large numbers of zombies
being used to attack gambling sites on the Internet … to shut them
down and extort large sums of money from them.

What is interesting is my experience last week … I set up a new
computer and plugged it into my Internet connection.  It was only
booted for less than 30 minutes … and I was downloading the various
security patches and updates … when I noticed a lot of network
activity.  After checking my new system, I found three unknown
processes running … and also found that it had hundreds of
connections to other computers all over the planet!  In just a
short amount of time on the Internet, my brand new workstation had
become a zombie!  I thought about what to do, and ended up
reformatting the hard disk and starting over … no idea what else
might have been compromised on the machine.

Over a Million Zombie PCs [Slashdot:]

Tonight is a news-reading and e-mail-reading evening. I’m way
behind on my reading and responding. I’ve been way too busy with
a new job, and I’ve been on the road. At the beginning of this
week, however, I was in a programming class and I learned C#. I’m
now moving all of my development to this new cross-platform language.

All of what I learned this week was in Microsoft Visual Studio. I
can not say enough about how impressed I am with the complete Microsoft
development environment. The creators of this development solution
ought to be proud of what they have created.

I am also downloading and installing all of the latest Mono tools to
begin the process of developing C# on Linux. I am looking
forward to tracking the progress of the Mono project, and all of the
various components. What I really like is that C# and the support
behind it appears to be a new language - and complete application
deployment platform - that will deliver where Java seemed to
stumble. C# is now being actively and completely supported on the
two biggest platforms on earth - Windows as the largest installed base
of machines, and Linux as the rapidly growing contender. No JVM
to download and install … no strange looking User Interface.

Anyhow … slightly off-topic … but I wanted to comment on
this. I have to admit that I see C# as a big deal in the next
decade!

I have to admit that I am once again amazed by the power of
Microsoft. I just completed my first Microsoft training course in
a long time … to learn the C# programming language. It was an
awesome experience.

I have a long background in developing software, starting with assembly
language, Fortran, Basic, C, and other languages. I never really
moved to Java, but knew that I wanted to learn a current object oriented
langauge. Over the last several years I have learned both Perl
and PHP, and these are impressive Open Source languages. When I
saw that the Mono project was getting going last year, I immediately
reealized that C# was the language to learn … from a C programmers
perspective.

After three days in class I now have a good understanding of C#, which
I plan to use for both Windows and Linux development. The Mono
project is the Open Source project to bring C# and .NET to Linux …
and obviously Microsoft has C#, .NET and their development environment
Visual Studio well established and moving forward. I will be
looking at Mono, but I realize that they have their work cut out for
them … Microsoft’s development environment is impressive.

I have developed in Visual Basic 6 on Windows for a long time, and I
found this to be a spectacular solution for developing Windows
applications. I was able to rapidly create a wide range of
applications over the years, complete with installers, with very little
effort. With all of this, I was spoiled when I had to deal with
text-mode development in Perl and PHP. I was really waiting for
this C# training … knowing that it was going to leverage a lot of the
same technologies.

Some of the core areas of Microsoft’s solution that I was most impressed with:

• Visual Studio .NET 2003 -
  this is a very impressive Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
  solution. They have done a good job allowing for a lot of
  customization of the development environment. Once I had my
  desktop arranged, it was easy to flip between the visual UI designer,
  and the various code modules. Help was always there, and the
  Intellisense code completion was great. I admit that I wish it
  would complete using the tab key, instead of the Ctrl-Spacebar they
  require, however it is invaluable.
• Database Connectivity and Development
  - it is beyond easy to develop complex applications that access a wide
  range of databases, and data sources. Within the Visual Studio
  IDE, most of the development can be done using wizards and simply
  dragging and dropping database tables from the Server Explorer.
  All of the code to integrate the data sources, and databases, into your
  code is just written for you. You end up being able to use the
  DataSet wizard to then create the DataSet. Again … all of the
  code is basically written for you … and you are left to focus on your
  core logic and functionality.
• XML Manipulation - so
  far, I haven’t found anything that I can’t do with XML. In almost
  no time this morning, I was able to program an HTTP request to grab an
  RSS XML file from one of my blogs. I was then able to transform
  this XML file into a DataSet with one or two lines of code. From
  an XML file, to a set of database tables ready to be read.
• SOAP Client - ok … now
  this was just too easy. I simply located the URI for a web
  service that I was interested in. I actually searched the
  Microsoft UDDI directory through the integrated browser. I found
  a stock quote web service, and clicked the link to add it to the
  project. The next thing that I know, I simply have a new service
  with a couple of new methods that I can call. I then link the
  results of the SOAP request to a DataGrid … and can view the results.
• SOAP Web Service - now this was just too easy. I simply
  went through a Wizard to create the base service class, and then added
  a series of methods that immediately become web-services methods.
  As I added each new method to the class, the build process seems to
  simply re-deploy and everything worked.
• ASP.NET - now this was the final aspect of the course that I
  received today. I am absolutely blown away at hope simple it is
  to create complex sets of interactive pages.

Now … I am completely open to Mono and very interested in it’s
success … however I now have a model product that they are going to
have to beat. Visual Studio and Microsoft are at the forefront
of development with their offering . I’ll post about my
further experiences … and my experiences with Mono!

This morning at Brainshare the first keynote was the Governor of Utah,
Jon Huntsman Jr., and he discussed a lot of information about
Utah. I started to wonder why he was talking at Brainshare to a
bunch of geeks, however he finally touched on the core aspect of his
talk … the newly announced Open Source Technology Center.

I really like the idea, and I look forward to finding out more about
what they are going to offer, and at what cost. I have been
working with folks at the Miller Business Innovation Center
in the Salt Lake Valley, and I have learned alot about how they
structure their deals and offerings. I am currently working on
some start-up ideas that might benefit from such a location.

The funny part is the “other side” of this new announcement. This
is what Novell is going to do with all of the “empty buildings” on the
Provo campus. With all of the layoffs, and the shift of power to Cambridge, the Provo campus has started to become a ghost town.

When
I was reading my aggregator the last day of eTech, I found these
posts in my page of new articles.  I started to wonder “How the
heck is my aggregator
going crazy?  What is going on here?  I’m not doing this!”
… and then I realized what was up.  At eTech, all of the
attendees were on the wireless network behind a NAT.  To Slashdot,
it must have looked like a lot of requests for their RSS feed from the
same address.  Slashdot thought this was all traffic coming from a
single user … and so they pitched the error messages out.

It’s funny to see yet another way in which technology confuses
technology.  I’m not sure how this was solved … someone must
have contacted Slashdot to let them know.  To Slashdot, they only
saw the one “identity” and assumed that it was a single user hammering
their servers.  Yet another case where some sort of solution could
be developed to encode identity into the RSS request.

Funny …

I have slowly been upgrading all of my old RedHat boxes to Fedora Core
1.  I know that this is even old, however this is a tested
configuration for what we wanted to do on our wireless network
infrastructure, and there are some known problems with moving to the
v2.6.x Linux kernel.  I don’t want to deal with those yet.

I have now done three upgrades, using the anaconda installer that comes
with Fedora Core, and I have to say that I am impressed.  It just
works.  Except for Sendmail.  In each install that I have
done, sendmail just stops working, and begins to emit useless errors
into the log … or at least they are useless to me.  On this
latest upgrade, I have spent hours of time debugging the installation
over the last two or three weeks.

Today I was able to find a simple solution to debugging these
issues.  I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this before.  I
simply used “rpm” to erase/uninstall sendmail … and then used
“up2date”  to install it again.  Jackpot!  Sendmail is
now working on this newly upgraded server.  I’m not going to
forget this “solution.”

Wow … it’s almost like rebooting Windows!

It looks like Chris Stone, formally of Novell, is betting on a new area … Virtualization.  He’s joined an advisory board at Virtual Iron. 
I’m going to blog about some more thoughts that I’ve been having about
virtualization lately … I really like this space.

I have been using GetRight for a
long time. It is still, IMHO, one of the most amazing download
managers that has been written. It is to downloading, what ICQ is
to IM … the ultimate download manager with options and features
beyond what the average person could ever use.

Tonight, I was using it’s “mirrors” capabilites, and realized that it provided a “torrent”-like capability long before BitTorrent
was around. GetRight allows me to click a link in my browser, and
select for GetRight to handle the downloading. As the download
starts, I can then go and visit other mirror sites for the same file,
and click those links also. GetRight will automatically notice
that it is already downloading that file, and start a new connection to
the new source server … and split the download into “segments”.
In this example I am downloading four segments of the Fedora Core 3 CD
#4. I simply went to four different mirror servers and clicked
the link to download the same file from each one. GetRight
handled everything else!

It is intelligent software like this, that probably contributed to
ideas like BitTorrent. In this case, I am able to leverage the
various mirrors that exist to increase me download bandwidth …
without requiring things to be in a BitTorrent format. It’s funny
that I have been doing this for quite a while, but failed to think
about the similarity to BitTorrent.

Today
I bought an i-Top at Toys ‘R Us for $4.98 plus tax. Several of
the engineers that I work with had shown them to me. When I first
saw them, I was immediately
impressed … using a moving surface of a top, along with a strip of
light emitting diodes (LEDs) to turn the top into a digital
scoreboard. This week I was at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference in San Diego, and I saw a similar concept … on a cell
phone and on a pager. That’s what had me buy the i-Top. All
of these products are doing similar things … using some sort of
accelerometer to detect motion and then pulse the LEDs on and off at
the correct rate to make LED numbers, words, and images that seem to
float in the air. Or on the surface of a top.

There
are three really cool aspects of these toys … first, it is a
demonstration of the rapidly declining size and costs of the next
generation of sensors. Second, it is the presence of computing
power in the smallest of objects. Third … it is cheap.
The chips in this little top, for example, are able to detect both
time, and rotation … tracking each rotation of the top to know
exactly where and when to blink a particular LED to represent a
particular pixel in a letter or number. At the O’Reilly
conference it hit me that there are numerous places that these displays
will probably show up before long. I’m thinking about how to
capitalize on this stuff.

First, I started to think about how to create a version of this for
bicycle wheels. Imagine if your bicycle had patterns and messages
being displayed to others while you pedal down the street. Of
course for this to work, you would also have to have a way to track
“up” or “down” so that the messages were always readable and not upside
down. The next idea that hit me while writing this post is to put
these on car hubcaps. We already see the “spinners” that people
are putting on their cars, and the neon tubes underneath the car
body. It is only a matter of time before we’ll start to see these
new forms of art … these new expressions of emotion or message … on
a wide range of the surfaces around us.

In all, I am left impressed. At the innovation that can turn the
simplest of toys … a top … into so much more. In to a new
generation of toys that demonstrate just how inexpensive and powerful
our capabilities are growing. Go buy am i-Top … they are a fun
toy … and can make you think.

[P.S. You can right-click the images and select View Image to see a
bigger version of each image.  Maybe next time I’ll make them
links …]

This announcement is yet another team of people who are capitalizing on
the continuing evolution of wireless hardware and software
capabilities. This team has created an almost “turn-key” solution
for creating wireless mesh networking nodes from inexpensive, and
possibly even older used, computer equipment. They claim to have
completely automated the configuration of the mesh … that is a big
deal. Expect to see more and more of this …

CUWiN Goes Public with Open-Source Mesh System.
The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) released the
fruit of their efforts at the end of the week: The project is an
open-source effort to provide mesh networking with no center. The
system is self configuring among nodes which need no non-volatile or
permanent storage. To set up a CUWiN network, you burn a CD with the
0.5.5 software later this week and use it to boot a computer with a
support wireless card. The system finds nearby nodes, creates tables,
and establishes itself as part of the network. The software is free and
open source. The full press release is after the jump…. [Wi-Fi Networking News]

Yes … once again … my Radio Love/Hate Relationship.  There are
so many things tht I love about Radio, however I am here at the
O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, and I have not
been able to blog all week.  Well … I can actually blog, but I
can’t upstream.

I’m not sure why, but the Radio FTP is not working, and fails with a
stupid, non-descriptive error telling me that some sub-table doesn’t
exist.  By now, I know that means that I can’t get to the FTP
server.  There are just too many little problems like this that
really bug me.

What is Funny/Sad is that I have had many people here at the conference
tell me about Radio … and their frustrations.  I have heard
person after person talking about how they left the application due to
the same sorts of issues.  It’s sad to see the momentum that this
product had, fall by the wayside in disrepair.  It still has more
advanced features than anything else that I can find … but I am
slowly beginning my search for something else.

I hope Userland can do something soon … I feel that time is running out for Radio.

I have to admit that I am going to drop freshmeat.net from my news
feeds … for now.  I am really disappointed about this. 
From people not familiar with Freshmeat.net, it is a great resource to tracking Open Source projects, and updates to those projects.

I have relied on the Freshmeat
RSS news feeds for years now to learn about what is going on out in the
Open Source world.  It has been a tremendous resource for me to
learn about new projects, and even some old projects.  The feed,
although it is high-volume, contained a brief entry each time a project
was updated.

A few months ago (or less) they did a major change to their RSS feed
… and it’s for the worse, IMHO.  With the old feed, each entry
was the name of the project and a short description … not more than a
few words.  The new feed is a huge paragraph of text, along with
images!  My news aggregator is now overwhelmed with a flood of
constant paragraphs … more than I could ever hope to read! 
Bummer.

I contacted Freshmeat, and they indicated they are going to fix this
… but it’s taking too long.  I’ll have to drop the feed for now,
and check back to see when they fix it.  I’m not sure what they
were thinking when they did this … anyone who tracked the volume
would know that it’s too much to see and/or read …

I brought home a Tablet PC over the weekend, and let my two boys play with it. There is a cool application called the Physics Illustrator from the Microsoft Tablet PC PowerToys
website that Joe was playing with, and he was having fun creating a
wide variety of physics experiments. It was cool to see just how
quickly he was able to assemble some working physics experiments.
Yeah … some were just experimenting with “gravity” and smashing
things into things … but that is the point!

It was also cool to see Sam playing with one of the painting/drawing
applications. I forget the name, but I got it running for him,
and he was quickly scribbling all over the screen. One of the
coolest things was to watch him when he “accidentally” opened the color
picker. He quickly figured out that he could tap on the color
wheel, and then draw in a different color! He had a blast with it.

So far, I am enjoying the Tablet PC … I found that I really like
reading .pdf files on it … the pen is well integrated to allow for
quick scrolling through the pages. More later!

I have to admit that this is the strangest looking USB peripheral that I have seen to date. It is advertised as a USB Eye Messager! I’m not sure if there was more that I could say about this … or more that I would want to say about this!

Fedora Core up2date e-mail notices. A friend and I were talking about how to get notices when there are
updates available for Fedora Core.  I have thought about this, and
taken the first step … to get daily notices of up2date status.

I simply added a script to my /etc/cron.daily directory called up2date.cron.  The script in this file is:

#!/bin/sh
up2date –nox -l | mail -s “Up2date Check” root

The -l option will list the available updates, and then pipe the results to mail.

After I have got a series of these that tell me that there are no
updates, I’m going to update the script to only mail me when there are
updates found.  Also, if I wanted earlier warnings at that point I
could check more often … but daily is good enough for now.

Cool. On Monday I’m heading down to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I am really looking forward to this. Not only is there an awesome line up of speakers, there are going to be a lot of very cool people ot talk with, and brainstorm with.

I’ll be blogging the conference as I figure they will have wireless everywhere!

I am in the process of installing PHP v5 on one of my Fedora
servers.  I started to wonder if I can install PHP v4 and v5 on
the same machine at the same time.  I did a quick query on the
#PHP IRC channel on freenode … and was directed to the php-general
news group.  Someone indicated a good conversation in teh last week.

I did a quick look back through the web archives, and found the conversation here.  This thread is about the question:  php 4 & php 5

I’m reading it now …