May 2003

NASA Looks at going back to basics

May 11, 2003

An article run on the UPI wire today suggests NASA is looking at a return to Apollo style capsules. The article cites NASA reports suggesting that the Apollo style modules may be more cost effective than attempting another winged style craft.

Happy Birthday Frontier-OSX

May 11, 2003

Ireoncally after my post last night about CMS systems. Scripting News reminds us today that it's been two years since the release of Froniter for OS-X. Happy Birthday to a truly wonderful application.

What is 131.107.163.50?

May 11, 2003

This address in Microsoft's name space has hit the web sever about 500 times in the last day... It would be great if somebody at Microsoft would tell us what they are doing.

Update: This URL explains the responses others have gotten about Microsoft's Prototype crawler that lives at this address.

Verizon to make pay phones into wireless network

May 11, 2003

The Washington Post reported Saturday that Verizon is poised to announce that they will make pay phones into wireless access points. This timing coincides with what our local Verizon sales folks have been saying about Express Net coming soon. Will these be one and the same? I'd hope not as the Post article says they will only put the wireless hot spots in high traffic areas.

The remaining question is when will resort areas figure out that people want wireless high-speed access. I'm tired of paying $9/hour at an internet cafe for access. I'd be far more likely to visit an area that has good wireless in it's motels than one that doesn't..

CMS for TidBits

May 10, 2003

There is a very good discussion on the TidBits-Talk list about finding a new CMS for the publication. They are looking to replace their home built system as they move to an X-serve/OS X system.

I've worked with several systems including Clay Basket, Userland's Frontier (versions 4-7.x), Zope (2.x), Nuke derivatives and now Drupal. Each has something powerful to offer.

Turnitin.com

May 10, 2003

Should sites like turnitin.com have to follow licensing provisions? For example a site can have a license that says you may catalog and index the site as long as the index is made freely available to the public. However sites like turnitin.com are using my copyrighted material to make a profit. I wonder if their robot will listen to robots.txt.

How are they making certain that their archiving of my information published on the web does not violate the copyright I have on it? Turnitin has a legal document explaining how their service does not infringe. However as far as I can tell it only applies to works submitted to their service and does not cover their robot crawling my website.

A similar note came from reading a comment on Dave Winer's Scripting News the other day. In this piece he suggests they are handling referrer spam by using robots.txt so that indexes such as Google won't crawl these pages and the spammers won't benefit from seeing the links listed. I prefer to use my reporting software to have these references not show up. In this way the integrity of the reporting pages still works for sites like Google.

Learning Organizations

May 5, 2003

In doing some research I stumbled across this 1996 paper by a group at the Univeristy of Albany. It is a great collection of information about learning orginizations and systematic thinking. The challenge - how to explain system thinking in a couple of words so that people understand this important concept in understanding complex problems.

OS X to the rescue

May 2, 2003

Another day and OS X comes to the rescue again. This morning we had a network outage. When it came back the proxy server wasn't alive and well. After logging in to the iMac, using Fink to install Squid and WebMin to set it up we had connectivity back for the office over the VPN link.

In this is the main difference between companies with a startup mentality and those with the mentality of huge corporations. Huge corporations (and those wishing to be huge) get so wrapped up in how it's "supposed" to happen. It's all about process and ISO. ISO is not a bad thing, but in many companies it is viewed as a crutch to replace independent thinking. The breakdown occurs when people are scared into behaving like robots and not thinking for themselves.

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