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This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.
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| Friday, April 04, 2003
Linux thoughts Tony's got a link to an interesting freshmeat article about there being too much free software. Tony's remarks, " This has been a bigger impediment to the growth of Linux than many people would realize. I see it in email every day - "Which text editor should I use? There are so many." Or, worse yet, "I tried x and it didn't work, so I tried y and it didn't work either. Does any of this stuff really work?" As much as I hate to say it, what's been touted as one of the greatest strengths of the open source model could actually be one of its greatest weaknesses. There are way too many "vanity apps," applications created for the sake of solving an individual problem, with no eye whatsoever to the big picture of the needs of the open source community. A little attention to finishing the ones that work would go a longs ways in drawing and keeping new users. " ring true for me in the relatively short time I've been playing around with Red Hat. I've tried a number of programs that simply don't work very well, or require some sort of major configuration change to work. Trying to find a program that works within the Red Hat setup I have, to do what I think it should do, is like finding a needle in a haystack. There are some out there, and they do work pretty well, but trying to find it isn't easy and makes the whole learning curve that much steeper. By the way, a note to open source zealots out there, lines like this one: So how do we get more people using Free Software? Preaching about it doesn't work with the majority, which has been so dumbed down by the importance of money as not to care for liberty anymore. don't get you many converts. The fact of the matter is people pay for software because they know it works, or if it doesn't they know where they can go to get it to work properly. Wanting something that works is not "dumbed down". Spending hours upon hours trying to get free software to work when I could have easily spent a little cash, gotten good quality, working software and had time to do other things with my life, is. Your conclusion is right, make software that works, and does what people want it to do, and you'll have people using free software all over the place, like you have with Apache, MySQL, or Movable Type, but continue to tell the average computer user that they're stupid, and the average computer user will still be buying MS products from now until forever. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:07 PM | 0 comments | 
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Sparks fly Yes, first thing this morning, sparks flew, and I had to lug monitors around the office to replace the shorted one before I even had my first cup of coffee. Not the way I like to start my day. Heavy lifting in the morning is no good for me. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:38 AM | 0 comments |
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Thursday, April 03, 2003
Tech news Microsoft has released details on the Office 2003 lineup. Which components are included in which version, etc. Sounds like the Professional Enterprise edition is going to be the most "improved" over earlier versions of Office, what with rights management and XML stuff built in, but the lineup will be changed from the way XP is packaged so you probably want to check carefully when it's released, in June. Newsgator 1.1 is out. (link via Christine) ZDNet has a Centrino review. I have to say the marketing for the Centrino chips does have me intrigued, but not really intrigued enough to spend the cash for one myself. I am keeping an eye on it for future business purposes though. If they work as good as Intel claims, it's something to keep in mind for our travelling employees, when they need their current ones replaced. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:38 AM | 0 comments |
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RTFM Much to the chagrin of my geeky side, yesterday while trying to figure out how to remotely check messages on our new answering machine, I accidentally erased the greeting instead of the message and had to record a new one. I recorded a new one, but in the course of telling Angela about this little mishap, she suggested that maybe I should "RTFM". Ouch... :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:39 AM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, April 02, 2003
Windows NT 4 As someone who still works with NT 4.0 servers in my professional life, I wasn't thrilled when MS didn't come up with a patch for an RPC vulnerability. On the other hand, I already have our NT 4.0 server behind a firewall with port 135 blocked, so it's really not that big a deal. I probably wouldn't have patched it anyway, since our setup removes the vulnerability through it's design and I don't have to rely on a MS patch for everything. (Not running a webserver eliminates most of the "danger" of running NT 4.0 right off the bat, as it would with any NOS.) I also don't really have to worry about whether MS eliminates support for NT 4.0, again, because the setup we have now works, and isn't really in danger of being hacked because the only outside access to our network is through a firewalled T1 line that goes from our office to another office building of another company and sits behind all of their firewalls and proxies before it ever really comes in contact with the outside world through their ISP, which has another layer of security. You would have to breach their security to even find our network and then have to breach ours from within theirs to access anything. Believe me when I tell you though, there's nothing on our network worth that much trouble. :) Anyway, I don't really need MS to continue supporting NT 4.0 until I replace the server hardware, or switch to running a webserver, in which case I would probably jump to 2000 anyway. (or 2003 depending on when this might happen) I think most small shops still running NT 4.0 probably will do the same, eventually. MS not patching this isn't really a big deal to us, we're used to "making do" with work-arounds. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:40 AM | 0 comments |
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Our own little war.. There's going to be a war in my office, specifically on the floor I work on, and it's going to be over the coffee maker. I do not understand how grown adults can think it's ok to spill coffee down the counter and into little puddles on the floor and walk away from it. (That's what I walked in on this morning, coffee on the floor and no one around..) Then there's the people who turn off the coffee but don't bother to rinse the pot, or the people who take all but the very last drop of coffee and put it back on the burner, (Yeah that makes quite the mess!) or leave the burner on overnight, etc. It's bad enough that I have to babysit some people when it comes to using their computers, isn't it? OK, I'm all vented now. I feel much better. *L* Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:39 AM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, April 01, 2003
By the way For those of you following along in the comments, there probably is something to the fact that Angela and I had our first date on April Fool's Day. It says that we have a lot of fun together and have a sense of humor about life. Or something like that... Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:02 PM | 0 comments |
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Links OpenOffice 1.1 released. I tried out 1.0 way back when and found it to pretty useful in some situations. Unfortunately I couldn't really replace Office with it because so much of what I do is in Access and Open Office doesn't have a database component, relying instead on a somewhat difficult to configure interface with MySQL. (at least it was difficult for me as compared to using Access.) I do like the fact that 1.1 is coming with DocBook XML import/export. That's kinda cool. (link via Josh) There's a whole new redesign of Blogrolling. Seems like Jason may be giving us some new toys soon as well. Mmm, new toys...(link via Jim) Meanwhile, over at Just Another Geek's Blog he's playing with the new keyboard for his Axim. I haven't gotten a keyboard for mine yet, mostly because I rarely use it for typing up emails or doing major writing, but it does look pretty cool. At this point in my usage, I do most of my typing on the laptop that syncs with the Axim and the Axim becomes more for having information (maps, notes, appointments, checking account balance, etc.) with me as I go along as opposed to inputting information. Of course that's just me, and the way I use it, your mileage probably will vary. It's the first, so I'm currently awaiting the accounting department's OK to run their month-end stuff. (They need to run some reports before I run the month end modifications to the database, stuff like dropping unpaid accounts, etc.) So that'll keep me busy today. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:39 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, March 31, 2003
Server 2003 Microsoft Releases Windows Server 2003 To Manufacturing. Hmm, I think I'll have to keep an eye on how this works out for early adopters, if I can find any. :) If nothing else, it would be nice to grab a demo copy of this and see how it works for myself. I'll have to settle for playing with the demo of 2000 for now, though. 2000 hasn't proven to be terribly difficult to handle, at least when compared to NT, which is what I know quite well and use every day. But there's some advanced features I haven't gotten into yet that may prove to be a tad more confusing. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 4:24 PM | 0 comments |
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Back at it.. Had a nice weekend visiting with Angela's family, and, as usual, ate too much food. :) But now, as much as I hate to say, it's Monday and I'm back at work again. Seems like I have a bunch of data that came in through the website that I'll need to wade through and make sure everything gets input to the database properly from that. It bites having your main database not live on the website, but there's no infrastructure to allow for that and still allow us to have full control of it locally to do all the things we need to do. Life in not for profit, I guess. There's never enough money to do things properly. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:47 AM | 0 comments |
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