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Run E2K admin tools on WinXP
Hallejulah! Microsoft has released a patch that allows the Exchange System Manager tool to run on Windows XP. As it turns out, getting this done took a lot of work from several product teams at Microsoft. Good for them– this is a welcome, if overdue, release.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
MSDN goes RSS
Microsoft’s Developer Network website has started a set of RSS feeds. This is huge news if you’re a Windows or ASP.NET developer, since it means that you can get up-to-date content with much less hassle. If you’re using an aggregator, you’re in luck. If you’re not, well, you should be.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Three essentials
From this morning’s New York Times:
In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today.
What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?
“Democracy,” the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. “Whiskey. And sexy!”
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The ants go marching…
News flash from CENTCOM-North: This morning, we’ve had a two-pronged attack, with the First Ant Infantry attacking to either side of the front door and driving through the living room and the Red Ant Commantdo mounting an all-out assault on the dining room wall. This is clearly part of a large-scale offensive, since our HQ is also under attack.
Intelligence reports tell us that the ants have attacked in hopes of securing a reliable supply of vegetable oil, and that a rebel band of toddlers led by the elusive Subcomandante Matthew has been depositing supply caches in key locations. However, we are counterattacking vigorously with a defensive belt of ant traps, backed by precision strikes from Arlene’s shoe. We expect to blunt the attack in the next 24-36 hours, then establish a defensive perimeter to prevent further incursions.
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Get stiff
So, I got some email from Mary Roach, who used to write a very funny column for Salon (a few favorites: here, here, and here). She was plugging her new book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. I immediately ordered it, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Anyway, she’s new to the world of blogging, so give her a big welcome by visiting her book site.
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Filed under Reviews
O’Reilly & the Founders’ Copyright
I got a (form) letter from Tim O’Reilly yesterday; he’s the head of O’Reilly & Associates. Tim is a very bright guy who has done a lot to help build the Internet’s knowledge infrastructure. Much of what he’s done has been cultural, and the letter falls into that category.
O’Reilly is asking its authors to put their books under the Founders’ Copyright. He believes that the existing copyright system has deviated from the Founding Fathers’ intent: that the interests of authors be counterbalanced with the public good. It’s hard to argue with him, when you see that companies like Disney are able to protect their works, basically, in perpetuity, even though many of those works are based on public-domain works themselves. (If you’re wondering why you should care, see this FAQ; it does a better job explaining than I could. This article is also pretty good).
Anyway, Tim’s asking that O’Reilly authors agree to have their books fall under the Founders’ Copyright. For those authors who agree, O’Reilly will release their books into the public domain (under the “Creative Commons” reuse license) after 14 years have passed. This doesn’t harm the authors in any meaningful way, given that in 14 years almost none of O’Reilly’s current books (and definitely none of mine!) will be of anything but historical interest. The practical value of releasing that content to the public is pretty small too, but the symbolic value is large. That’s why I’m going to sign the agreement.
One minor kibitz: the agreement O’Reilly sent us has three choices: put the book under Founders’ Copyright, leave the copyright alone and have the book taken out of print (which is what would happen normally), or leave the copyright alone, but give the author a chance to find another publisher when ORA decides to take the book out of print. Most publishers now allow the copyright to revert to the author when the book goes out of print. (Some even put the copyright in the author’s name– the publisher gets an exclusive perpetual license to use the work, until they decide they don’t want it any more.) I’m a little disappointed that Tim didn’t offer authors the option of having the copyright returned to them.
When I get around to it, I’ll probably be putting both this blog and E2K Security under the Creative Commons license.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Bread machine bounty
For some reason, my post on bread machine parts continues to be very popular. It’s undoubtedly thanks to Google; a query for “breadmaker parts” turns up my entry at #3. Of course, most of the people who are posting comments are blithely ignoring the places that actually sell breadmaker parts in favor of posting comments saying “I need $part, please help”. So, in a no-doubt-vain attempt to help these folks find the parts they need. Read on to see the whole schmear (much of which was stolen from this wonderful page. Interestingly, no one’s asked about parts for major brands like Sears or Hitachi; evidently they have a better spare-parts system.
Filed under Musings
What do Perrysburg and Kabul have in common?
It’s a small world. Today at the Rotary Club meeting, I learned that the Rotary chapter in Kabul has been reopened. It was founded in 1968 and remained active until 1979. It turns out that a Rotary chapter near LA whose membership is mostly Afghan immigrants is cosponsoring the new club, along with a Rotary club in Peshawar. Good stuff. (And, speaking of which, I just got dragooned into the Perrysburg club’s technology committee, so I expect to be tuning up their web site over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!)
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Kung-Tunes equivalent for WMP
John was admiring my KungTunes-driven “what’s playing” list. It turns out that there’s an equivalent for Windows Media Player. That means that there’s almost certainly one for WinAmp, but I’m too lazy to look for it.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Where soldiers come from
This week’s Economist had a terrific article on the geographic makeup of the US armed forces. It’s only available to print subscribers, but I’m furnishing a commented excerpt (my comments are in italics):
WHO are the young men and women now going to war? A look at where America’s armed forces come from reveals the continuing variety of the country. Two states, Texas and Florida, account for nearly a quarter of the total (Well, that explains the tans): Texans alone make up 18% of the army. (Let’s see: 18% of 750,000 is 135,000; that means according to page 11 of this report Texas has more troops than Australia, Libya, or Saudi Arabia, and nearly as many as Israel and Greece), California (which provides 12% of the navy and 11% of the marines), New Jersey and Pennsylvania round out the top five states. In general, the navy gets a surprising number of recruits from the mid-west (I don’t know why this is surprising; the cliché about farmboys joining the Navy has been with us at least since before WW II); the air force hails, on the whole, from the west (The west, or California?), and from Alaska; marines come from all over. Soldiers– the people who do the hard work on the ground– tend to come from the obvious places. The harder-jawed a region, the likelier it is to put its young into the army. The generally Republican, pro-gun south contributes a lot more soldiers than the Democratic north-east, both in absolute numbers and percentages of the regional population. A Texan is eight times more likely to be in uniform than a New Yorker. (Again, this is perfectly unsurprising, except that I might have guessed it to be ten or more times more likely to find a Texan in uniform…) The presence of military bases and arms-making firms also has an effect. Again, the south leads the way. Virginia has five army bases, Georgia four; Texas has eight air-force bases, Florida five, South Carolina and Georgia two each. Seven (actually, there are nine by my count, including reserve units) southern states have marines stationed on their soil (OOH RAH! Conquering from within, that’s the USMC way!), including at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Camp Albany in Georgia and Quantico, in Virginia (which is shared with the FBI, the Presidential helicopter detail, and a number of other functions). The arms-industry factor may help to explain why Washington state, which in politics leans to the Democrats but until recently was the home of Boeing, a huge defence contractor, offers many of its young people to the armed forces. (Doubtful; after all, look at Grumman (Bethpage, LI, NY) or the various California-based contractors for counterexamples. Arms factories ended up in the South for two reasons: political patronage and the availability of cheap land and labor.) The number of troops a state provides is not always a clue to its political opinions(not least because the political opinions of those who volunteer for the military are often quite different than those of the “average” American): New Jersey’s contribution, large for its size, has not prevented President Bush’s approval-rating there from sinking back to pre-September 11th levels. But Mr Bush can take comfort from the fact that most of his men (and women) at arms come from, or are based in, friendly states, not least his own, almost-a-fifth-of-the-whole-army Texas. And he does not have to rely entirely on native-born Americans. The air force says it has more men born in Britain than in admittedly tiny Delaware. (Wow. Does that mean that low-population, low-growth states like Delaware are in danger of being delisted?) |
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Filed under FAIL
Can you feel the love?
This is revolting.
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Filed under Musings
Aggregating within Outlook
I just found NewsGator, which aggregates RSS feeds directly into Outlook! How cool. I’m going to have to try it and see how it works with Outlook 11. This could be big.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Test
| Let’s see how this looks for a blockquote.
From the halls of Montezuma |
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Filed under Uncategorized
SF goes after Speicher
Tonight on ABC Radio (about 1940 EST), I heard an interview with Amy Waters Yarsinske. She’s the author of Leave No One Behind, the story of Navy Lt. Commander Scott Speicher. He was shot down during Desert Storm and is widely believed to still be a POW in Iraq. Yarsinske claims that a Special Forces team was inserted to retrieve Speicher, and that he is known by the US government to have been alive as recently as Monday, 3/17. Incredible, if true.
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