Monday, February 17, 2003

There's been a lot of great Microsoft stuff in Scoble's weblog recently. Keep it coming! In this entry, he notes that Scott Guthrie now has a weblog, and that the ASP.NET team is now named Web.NET. I wonder if the product name will change as well, or if it's just the name of the team that's changing. 10:03:01 AM

The Gentiles have good news. Glad to hear that Heather's gotten better! 9:59:13 AM

The Scobleizer says "Copying PowerPoint isn't gonna get close to what I saw last week." It sounds enticing, but one big difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Apple only announces things when they are close to the ship date. Microsoft likes to talk about stuff years before it comes out, which leads to a lot of confusion. For example, even though Windows Server 2003 is (at present) exclusively a server platform and Longhorn is (at present) exclusively a client platform, people are still confused. Beyond that, Blackcomb looms. So Microsoft's talking about three new Windows platforms, and not one has shipped yet. That's confusing. When it comes to Apple, good luck learning what's going to happen next week. I'd prefer an approach that's somewhere between the two. Let me know your product roadmap six months out, and I'll be better able to make purchasing decisions (like whether to buy a 12" Powerbook or wait for an Aluminum 15"). 9:46:08 AM

James Duncan Davidson explains some cool configuration options for mod_rendezvous_apple. 9:41:39 AM

Work Day at AS220 I spent a surprisingly productive four hours at AS220 yesterday, along with Matt Obert, Scott Schoen, and Shawn Wallace. We had all gotten together to do some much-needed maintenance on gumzilla, the server that provides web and email services to over a hundred users at AS220, a non-profit and unjuried center for arts of all kinds. gumzilla had been running Debian stable, which at one point was the potato distribution. By telling it to upgrade to the latest release, it bumped itself up to woody. All in all, it was a painless upgrade. That brought us up-to-date with all the latest security fixes, which is a nice thing. We also had a locally-installed copy of Apache running on the server, and decided it would be best to switch over to the one that comes with Debian. After all, the point of running a Linux distribution with a great package management system is so that it can keep you up to date and handle all the dependencies. That proved to be painless, as well, and all the other Providence arts websites hosted at AS220 appear to be operating correctly. By the end of the day, we had gotten to our ultimate goal, installing SquirrelMail. We were pleased to find that it was available from the Debian package manager. So, we managed to fit a lot of stuff into four hours of work! I'm sure we'll run across a few glitches because we had strayed from the true path of letting the package manager handle everything, but this is one of those pay me now or pay me later kind of things. In a nutshell, we rolled a lot of our own stuff, didn't document it, and little things (like using nobody/nogroup instead of www-data/www-data) bit us in the ass. But as we get over each one of those stumbling blocks, we bring our installation in line with a well-documented standard, and the need for us to document our own deviations is lessened, simply because we have fewer deviations. 9:34:31 AM