A nice Network Management Tool
I use MRTG for monitoring and graphing many of the devices on my personal network, and also on our 80211.net wireless network. MRTG is a very simple, yet powerful application. I happened to come across this project the other day, and we’re about to give it a test. It appears to be a very good extension of the capabilities of MRTG without getting too complex.
NetMRG 0.10pre2. A network monitoring, reporting, and graphing system. [freshmeat.net]
Open Source Terrorism?
I can understand that many people are upset and confused about the SCO Group and their issues with Linux. Some of these people are, however, taking an approach that is a modern form of terrorism to demonstrate their upset.
Numerous times now, hackers on the Internet have mounted large Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks on SCO computers and web sites. To do this, they have hacked into hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of computers on the Internet, and have installed “zombie” software that sends packets of data to the SCO computers. All of these packets can then overload the capacity of these computers, and makes the SCO web site, and other service, unavailable.
There are numerous issues with this approach to dealing with being upset. First, this is a blatant form of terrorism. No matter what anyone “feels” about the situation, SCO is following the letter of the law to pursue its rights. Within the Democratic society that we live in, SCO is using the courts and legal system to pursue the resolution of the issues that it has with its licensees. It is absolute terrorism if all companies across the globe can expect to be attacked for using the judicial system that we have created.
Secondly, as this article talks about, these attacks are not only impacting SCO, but many other companies. This again is a form of terrorism where “innocent bystanders” are being impacted by the attacks aimed at SCO.
It is too bad that even in this new age of computers and the Internet, there are those who still resort to these tactics to attack those who are pursuing their rights within the systems we have created.
Google … an amazing entity …
From my early days on the Internet, I have been facinated with Internet Directories and Search Engines. The various players have come and gone … and some have stuck around. Yahoo! is still one of the “old-timers” in the industry, as Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and Altavista have all gone there own ways.
The one “newer” player that has come to dominate the landscape is Google. With their radical new architecture for gathering, storing, and indexing web content, and then “ranking” based on URI linking frequency, they have created an amazing solution for managing the wealth of information on the Internet. Ouside of all of this technology, there is also the “clean” and lightweight design of their website. Google appears to be the most used resource for searching the web.
There is another side to Google that many people do not see, nor understand. It is the core technology, and how is can be used and repurposed … and expanded. This is what I am most interested in with Google. If you have not visited their Advanced Search page, or explored the Google Labs, then you might not have seen some of the other aspects of Google.
Over the next month of so, I am going to be posting about a model that I have created in my observations of Google and what they are developing. I am hearing more and more about the impending IPO of their company … and I have to admit that I believe they are on to something. I believe they are creating something that is truly amazing.
Microsoft, Blogs, Aggregators, and programming …
Microsoft seems to have taken an all-out effort to embrace and explore the possibilities of RSS and Weblogs. This article is a simple ASP.NET project to create an aggregator – an application that gathers news articles from a range of RSS feeds.
Outside of this article, it’s interesting to see how many Microsoft employees have begun to blog, and that they even are supporting the blogging of their various events such as their PDC conference next week.
When I was at Novell a couple of years ago (has it been that long?) I was proposing several possible ways that blogs would become important mechanisms for information dissemination. Seeing more and more RSS-oriented content coming from Microsoft tells me that they are looking at the same thing.
MSDN: Creating an RSS News Aggregator with ASP.NET. # [Scripting News]
Domains, Domain registrars and Internet property
I have to admit … I hate the Internet “tax” that comes in the form of “domain name registrations”. I remember when I experimented with my domain servers to add the Alternic name space to our servers. It’s amazing to me that with all of the “peer to peer” development going on around the net, that someone hasn’t come up with a good, distributed alternative …
My main purpose in bringing this up is that I “lost” some domain names by not paying in time. It’s an amazing process, and I had given up hope of recovering these names. As of today, I again own my WarBlading domains, and I have found that I “lost” my NoizCast domain.
In the future … I’ll be watching much more closely to ensure that I do not loose these again!
The coming of Dynamic Blogs, and Log Blogs
In following the evolution of the “blog”, I have been thinking about a lot of advanced services that could be converted into “blogging” and “aggregating”.
For example, I am currently involved in a wireless networking project. The wireless access points use the Syslog protocol to send event notifications to a central server for monitoring. I recently realized that it would be great to convert these Syslog events into a blog! So instead of running a conventional “syslogd” on my server, I would instead run a version that created it’s output in RSS format.
Upon thinking about this further, it became obvious that another possible solution would be to instead create a simple log-file-to-RSS engine. It would be given tasks to “tail” a particular log file, and then convert the output into RSS format. This could even be done on demand by a script …
What is very interesting are the number of these “dynamic” blogs that are appearing, and what other possibilities exist …
Wired News has a beautiful new (beta) application for RSS. Give it a search term, and it returns articles that include the term. For example, this feed shows all the articles that contain my name; subscribe to it, and you’ll be informed of anything new written about me on Wired News. We used to call this ego surfing, now I have an ego aggregator. Progress is amazing. As Steve Gillmor says, aggregators are the new desktop, RSS the format that ties together information flows. We call this information routing. Powerful stuff.
[Scripting News]
More and more blogging tools …
I like seeing the increase in blogging tools. There is a lot of work being done to refine the various models and use cases for blogging. I came across w.blogger through the post below. People are building numerous tools for hosting blogs, rendering the posts, and also for posting to hosted blogs. There is a mainstream product just waiting to happen here!
bBlog 0.6-pre1. bBlog is a blogger. [freshmeat.net]
My father and his blogging …
While I have been spending all of my time lately doing everything *BUT* blogging, my father has now got some press about his blog. I set him up a year or so ago with his own place to express himself on the web … SamSaid!. I wanted to do this for him to have this place to publish, and also as an experiment to see how easy it is to blog. My father is not a heavy computer user and so he is a good “average user” for me to learn from.
Somehow he ran into someone in the local press where he lives that was intrigued by his blogging, and so they wrote this article about him. Very cool … my father is proof of the power of the blog, and that it is something that can be done by almost anyone!
Now it’s time for me to get back into the swing of blogging … I’ve been catching up on my reading … I want to start writing again!
SOAP Service Directories … appearing on the net …
The appearance of more SOAP Service “registries” or “directories” reminds me of watching the early Internet as the first web sites appeared that listed other web sites on the net … the beginnings of Yahoo!, Excite and Lycos … and many that are no longer around. What we are now seeing is the “web services” version of this … the beginnings of sites where software can look for software … the beginnings of something Kurzeilian … 😉
http://www.mysantra.com has a good Web Services search engine, which does include all services found in UDDI, SalCentral, and XMethods. You can even compare the services against each other for properties such as Uptime availability (reliability), operations, etc.
Browsers still working on compatibility …
Lately I have been working with some very smart people working on browser user interface technologies. They have been teaching me huge amounts about the DOM standard, and the lack of browser compliance … or the differences in implementations. This is a good overview of some of the know issues …
Waiting for the DOM. Though great strides have been made towards the ultimate goal of a single DOM for all browsers, some implementation differences still remain. Guest author Kenneth Tibbetts provides some browser-specific scripting gotchas to watch out for. From the WebReference Update. 0315 [WebReference News]