Ever wish you could go back to 1984 (and we mean the real 1984, no the other 1984)?
Now you can. Sort of. Run BASIC is a site that lets you relive those heady days of PEEKs and POKEs by giving you a place to run BASIC programs.
Actually, Run BASIC is based on Liberty BASIC, not the more familiar Apple or PC versions, so it only takes you back to 1992. But all your favorite command line and lo-res favorites are there, including hangman and HiLo. You can also write your own programs, or just dig out those old manuals.
This really geeked me out when I saw it. The thrill I got from flipping on our first //e, typing a few simple lines into the built-in BASIC interpreter, typing 'RUN,' and watching my programs actually begin to to something was what got me hooked on computers in the first place as a kid. Seeing how high the computer could count was always a favorite, as was anything that involved an infinite loop or GOTO sequence that left an END someplace other than the last line. [via Chris]
The fourth annual Global Piracy Study, conducted by tech market research company IDC on behalf of the Business Software Alliance, was released this morning. The researchers estimate that again this year, 35% of all software on PCs worldwide is pirated. This is despite claimed advances in legitimate sales in traditional problem areas like China, where the government's decision to license operating systems and other software is uses on state-owned PCs has resulted in a 10% drop in three years (a drop from 92% to 82%, but still). Other developing markets, though, seem to be taking up the slack. Nearly one third of countries surveyed has piracy rates topping 75%, and while developing markets account for fully 30% of global PC sales, they only account for 10% of software revenue.
Perhaps the most surprising finding was that, despite the world's lowest piracy rate--21%--the estimated value of pirated software in the US is the highest on the list. IDC estimates that the US accounts for US$7.3bn in piracy losses. That raises a red flag in my mind: are we really buying (or not) that much more software than other countries, or are we getting ripped off paying for software that sells for less elsewhere?
Even taken with the XXL grain of salt BSA funding requires, these are big numbers.
A couple of prominent web design gurus have announced a mini conference on "Web Browsers, Standards and Interop" during XTech 2007 in Paris on May 15th. The idea is to get browser vendors, web developers and designers all in the same room to spend a day talking about about how to make life easier for each other and, most importantly for website visitors. Ultimately, the organizers want a return to "the original platform and user agent agnostic vision of the Web."
That may sound like pie in the sky, but the organizers have made a good start: Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software have already committed to attending. Hopefully, the Apple WebKit developers and the KHTML team won't be far behind. Ideally, of course, some standards organizations would be involved, too. And who knows? Since this is all happening in Paris, some members of ISO and ECMA working groups just might stop by.
Personally, I'm excited about this. This conversation is about twelve years overdue. I don't expect to wake up on the morning of May 16th and discover that Trident and Gecko render CSS the same way, but it's a good first step in the right direction.
Yesterday afternoon, Flickr announced the release of a new feature that hard core Flickr users have been clamoring for for a while now: subsets or sets of sets. Or, as Flickr calls them, collections. Users can now build up large collections of pictures from building blocks of multiple sets, and even other collections. To differentiate them from regular sets when you're looking at them in the sidebar, collections have icons that are mosaics, with a number of pictures from the different sets that make up the collection.
As you can see from the screencap below, there are a couple of quirks. First, collections can only be nested 5 deep. for most people, this shouldn't be an issue, but some power users may hit that limit fairly quickly. Second, any collection can be composed of sets or other collections, but not both. That means if you have a collection and you want to create a new collection with that collection plus another set, you have to put the set into a collection first. There doesn't seem to be anything to stop you from creating a collection with a single set, so it's no big deal, but it is an extra bit of hassle, and it potentially costs you a layer of nested collections.
Finally, drag and drop editing of sets and mosaics doesn't seem to have the kinks worked out in Safari yet. When I clicked on the icons to arrange the mosaic on my test collection, the icons floated around the window nowhere near the mouse pointer. And the finished collection never showed up, even though everything looked fine. Firefox seems just fine, though.
Internet security watchdogs at the SANS Institute Internet Storm Center are reporting two unrelated issues with the DST changeover on Windows platforms.
The first issue incolves isolated problems where clocks display incorrect times despite being patched for the new US Daylight Savings Time rules. Apparently the problem affects certain systems that were patched using directions from Microsoft the TZEdit.exe application or manual edits to the Registry. A patch is available from Microsoft here.
The second involves certain applications that rely on the TZ environment variable. a patch for that is available here.
Posted Mar 12th 2007 7:00PM by Jay Savage Filed under: News
According a report published today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, only one in five government agencies complies with the 1997 law that requires them to make much public information available on the web and clearly post procedures for obtaining information and making so-called "sunshine requests" under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Some highlights include:
Only one in five federal agencies (21 percent) posts on the Web all four categories of records that the law specifically requires;
Only one in 16 agencies (6 percent) posts all ten elements of essential FOIA guidance;
Only 36 percent of agencies provide the required indexes of records;
Only 26 percent of agencies provide online forms for submitting FOIA requests;
Many agency Web links are missing or just wrong - one FOIA fax number checked in the Knight Survey actually rang in the maternity ward of a military base hospital.
The Departments of Defense, the Interior, and Veterans' Affairs, Homeland Security, and the CIA, among others, were particularly low-scorers. No shocks there. Bright spots, on the other hand, included "E-Stars" such as NASA, the FTC, and, surprisingly enough, the Department of Justice.
Anyone whose ever tried to get information from a government website probably won't be surprised by the results. The best results come from agencies who are either small or see their missions as serving the public interest. The worst results are from agencies who thrive on secrecies and/or bloated bureaucracies, which , unfortunately includes most of them.
The big buzz in the open source community this weekend had nothing to do with software. Instead, the talk was about developer Hans Resier--founder of Namesys and creator of ReiserFS--who found out Friday that he will be arraigned for his wife's murder on March 23rd.
Reiser's estranged wife disappeared this past September. Reiser denied any involvement or knowledge, but was later charged with her murder. What happened after that could have come straight out of a soap opera. Reiser was held without bail for several months, part of the time in solitary confinement. Nina Reiser's body was never found. It came to light that Mrs. Reiser Secretly obtained Russian citizenship for her children, and they were taken to Russia by their maternal grandmother after the son testified that he saw his mother get into her car and leave the Reiser house on the day of her disappearance, and that he and his father played video games all afternoon, contradicting prosecuters' allegations that Mrs. Reiser was killed in the house, and that Mr. Reiser later disposed of the body. Investigators did, however find traces of blood in Mr. Reiser's home and car. They also discovered that Mr. Reiser had removed the passenger's seat of his car, and the original could not be located. There was, however, no indication of foul play, and Mr. Reiser's lawyers requested that the case be dropped. This past Friday, though, the judge ruled that he could stand trial on the strength of the circumstantial evidence including--in a move that is sure set privacy advocates screaming--the disclosure that, at some point after his wife's disappearance, Mr. Reiser purchased a book on murder. Mr. Reiser's mother-in-law failed to return from Russia so that the son could testify on his father's behalf or be cross-examined.
Much of the speculation in the press and the community has centered on the future of Namesys and ReiserFS. I think, though, that situations like this are one of the areas where the open source model really shines. If the community is interested in a project, it will continue. And there certainly seems to be a great deal of interest in ReiserFS. ReiserFS has some strong friends, too. The core of the developers are full-time employees of Namesys, and a large chunk of the R & D budget for recent releases has come from DARPA, which is presumably still interested. Regardless of the future of Namesys, which Reiser looks to be selling to cover his legal bills, the ReiserFS project should continue strong.
Now that somanysites seem to be adopting OpenID, you might have decided that you want one. You may also have decided that you don't want it tied to your circa 1997 AOL screen name (I'm looking at you cyrano99). What better than to tie your online ID to your real identity and keep things nice and simple?
The FreeYourID service combines a personal domain in the .name TLD with an OpenID provided by MyOpenID. since your OpenId will be tied to your .name url, it is theoretically good for life--or as long as you keep the DNS registry up to date--rather than your tenure with with AOL, LiveJournal, another service. And since it's based on your name you should have less compunction about using it in a professional context than, say hottl33gs.
In addition to the OpenID, FreeYourID also includes forwarding of both your .name email and url to addresses of your choice.
They're currently running a 90-day free promo, and membership is $10.95 per year after that. If you don't like it, you can transfer your .name domain to another registrar if you want to keep it.
So far, I've stayed away from OpenID, mostly because I haven't wanted to tie my identity to any particular url. The ability to easily combine the ID with a .name domain, though, may be what finally pushes me over the edge. It would certainly make life a lot simpler.
There is one "gotcha," though: I wouldn't use the service for any particularly secure application yet. Passwords can only contain upper and lower case letter and numbers. Attempts to enter punctuation or other characters result in an "invalid character" warning. That seems pretty short-sighted to me.
As long as we're talking about word processors that have come a long way since we last talked about them: Mac users should sit up and take note: NeoOffice 2.1 arrives on March 27th.
NeoOffice is a OS X port of OppenOffice.org by a group of developers who have thought from the beginning that the Main OO.o team was taking the wrong tack in offering X-11 support on the Mac. Early NeoOffice releases were all-Java wrappers for OO.o (and were known as NeoOffice/J); recent releases have been Aqua native and, as of version 2.0, included both Intel and PPC binaries. NeoOffice 2.1 will include all the features of OpenOffice.org 2.1, including support for Office 2007 XML documents and Virtual Basic (VBA) macros. And, of course, possibly the coolest icon of any app on any platform.
NeoOffice also includes NeoLight, a plugin that allows Spotlight to index both content and metadata of OpenOffice and OpenDocument files. Users of main openOffice.org distribution can download NeoLight as a stand-alone application.
NeoOffice releases are named for the OpenOffice releases they're based on. Since this isn't an official OpenOffice.org release but a project based on OO.o, NeoOffice releases tend to lag a little behind their official brethren, so NeoOffice 2.1 will correspond to OpenOffice.org 2.1, which has been out for a while. While that sometimes means not being on the cutting edge, the NeoOffice release cycle does have a couple of advantages for uses. The most important, of course, is that NeoOffice is a native app. A less obvious benefit is that by the time a Neooffice release is rolled out, it contains the first several rounds of bugfixes to the OO.o codebase.
For those of you who just can't wait, there is still a NeoOffice 2.0 version available for download, and an Early Release version of NeoOffice 2.1 is available to people willing to support the project with a donation of $25 or more.
I can't believe we haven't talked seriously about AbiWord here since version 2.0 more than 18 months ago. Shame on us. The 2.4.x releases (they're currently on 2.4.6) have seen major upgrades to nearly all the subsystems, and a host of new features including Open Document support, image handling enhancements, grammar checking, and equation editing, to name a few.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, AbiWord is a powerful, full-featured, cross-platform, open source word processor. It includes plug-in support for most document formats including Word, Open Document, Open Office Writer, Word Perfect, and even Claris Works, as well as an optional equation editor and LaTeX and DocBook support.
If this sounds a lot like OpenOffice.org Writer to you, you might be forgiven. But AbiWord's motto is "Word Processing for Everyone," and they mean it. Although plans for a full Office suite are in the offing, AbiWord is currently just a word processor and all their energy goes into getting that right. For those of you with older hardware or who are just concerned about performance, AbiWord offers efficient code and a small footprint: a complete XP install including the optional plugins takes up less than 30MB on disk and uses a correspondingly small chunk of RAM. And for you Mac users out there, AbiWord offers a native Aqua interface, so no more X-11 nonsense just to get your word processor running.
Edit: Thanks to C.K. for pointing out that AbiWord on OS x isn't a universal binary yet. It's fast and stable enough, though, that you peobably won't notice it's running in Rosetta. I didn't.
If you've been anywhere except under a rock for the last 18 months or so, you're probably sick to death of the phrase "Web 2.0," and for many people, Web 2.0 has become almost synonymous with Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails, though, has some major drawbacks for the average web designer. Ruby, while gaining steam, is still not as popular as more established programming languages. There aren't as many programmers who know it as there are who know, say, Perl, Java, ASP or PHP. So developing RoR applications means investing time and money in training yourself or your team in a new language.
That may be a minor hurdle, but Rails offers more serious barriers to adoption. First, it expects to run its own webserver, which will conflict with your main webserver listening on port 80. It can be made to use an existing Apache or IIS server, but the configuration is not simple. Even when running on an existing server, it expects to run as a separate application in a mod_ruby environment. While that makes RoR applications very efficient (like mod_perl applications before them), it also means that using Ruby on Rails requires control over you servers. That's great if you manage your own hardware and internet connection, but most people don't. The majority of websites, even those owned by medium to large-sized businesses, are hosted with web hosting companies where individual users don't have dedicated equipment or access to server configurations. Even at my workplace, where we do most things in house, my department web space is just a small part of a server infrastructure maintained by a completely different network and server administration department. Adding my Rails applications to the forward-facing servers isn't in the cards.
Maypole is a rapid web application development framework written in Perl by Simon Cozens and maintained by Aaron James Trevena and others. It will run anywhere there is Perl, which is most of the world's webservers, and provides a powerful environment for "agile web development," including database abstraction and the powerful and popular Template::Toolkit templating system. Best of all, it is platform agnostic. It can run under either mod_perl or as CGI, an will check for itself to see which environment it is running in. That means You can start using it today on your Dreamhost (in fact, I have a Maypole application running on one right now) account, and pick it up tomorrow and move it someplace else without hassle.
The Maypole site has some good introductions and links to some great articles, as well as the Maypole Perl module itself. As with any Perl project, though, the best way to get it is to install it directly from CPAN and read the perldocs.
Thanks to reader Jan for pointing this out. Actually, unless I'm mistaken, thanks to reader Jan for creating this!
If you've installed MacFUSE and SSHFS either from source or using the installer, Secure Remote Disks is a little (<500K) Cocoa GUI to help automate mounting remote ssh directories. As you can see from the screencap, SRD will store a list of servers together with mount points, user names, and even port numbers for those connecting to servers on remote ports.
Best of all, unlike the commandline sshfs, SRD will create mount points if they don't already exist and, best of all, it correctly interfaces with finder's eject/unmount function so you can drag mounted ssh volumes to the trash or hit the eject button in a Finder window to unmount them.
This is an Alpha release, so be careful. That said, Jan's code seems solid so far.
Here are some hints for putting SRD though its paces:
The current SRD returns no error messages of any kind; a connection failure will silently dump you in a Finder window of your home directory. The most likely culprit is (as always) your password, but be prepared to troubleshoot the connection blind.
SRD will mount remote directories under /Volumes. The sample connection the pops up on first launch even has a path under /Volumes. Servers mounted under /Volumes can't be unmounted, though, so choose a mount point somewhere else, as in the screencap above, unless you want to have to logout of OS X to disconnect from the remote server.
Mount points will are not removed when volumes are unmounted, so make sure you don't accedentally start using the mount points for other purposes.
There is no way to reopen the connect dialog if you close it (i.e. File->New Window). If you hit the red button, close SRD and relaunch it.
The big splash in the Mac community--and the rest of the world--last week was obviously the iPhone. For Mac users, though, the iPhone announcement may have distracted from the really big news: Amit Singh's release of a MacFUSE beta, his port of the Linux FUSE API to OS X. If you're wondering what, exactly, that means, FUSE stands for Filesystem in USErland, and it provides a generic interface that lets the operating system see virtually anything as a filesystem. Historically, adding new filesystem recognition to an operating system has meant modifying the kernel for each new FS. FUSE, though, provides a single interface that filesystem modules use to interface with the OS. Best of all, anything that provides the correct interface can be interpreted as a filesystem. One enterprising Python programmer even developed a script to let users mount their GMail accounts and use the extra space in their accounts to save files.
What does this mean for Mac users? A lot. First and foremost, the FUSE NTFS driver seems to work with MacFUSE, so we can finally use NTFS volumes as well as FAT volumes. Web developers and anyone else who manages files via SFTP should rejoice, too. SSHFS (included with the MacFUSE binary) allows users to mount a remote SSH/SFTP directory as if it were a local disk. That means no more synchronizing files with an SFTP client. And while the GMailFS python bindings need a little work, the fixes look trivial, and soon we should all be able to put our extra GMail space to better use.
Amit doesn't think that MacFUSE is ready for production use yet, hence the "b" after the version number, so if you're using it for anything important, make sure you've got backups. If you do run into trouble with it, updates are being released almost daily at the moment. That said, though, my trials of it seem pretty stable. The only issues I've seen have been network related. If the system doesn't get a response to a remote query, it will hang. That can mean the dreaded "Spinning Beachball" in the Finder. In most cases, the problem eventually clears itself. If you're navigating via the shell, a simple Ctrl-C cancels the hanging action.
So how do you get MacFUSE up and running for yourself? Glad you asked.
If you've had a digital camera for any length of time, by now you have thousands--maybe even tens of thousands--of digital pictures of anything and everything. And if you're like most people you've cheerfully imported them into photo management software of some sort. Maybe it's something like NikonView that came with your camera or maybe it's the copy of Photoshop Elements that came pre-installed on your hard drive. Perhaps it's Picasa. If you're on a Mac it's almost certainly iPhoto. Or maybe you're a pro, or just really into digital photography, and you hopped on one of the Adobe Lightroom betas or shelled out some cash for something like ACDSee, iView, or Aperture.
Whatever you're doing it's probably time to stop. Photo gallery and management software is a wonderful way to arrange and display pictures you want to use for something. Most of of the time, the "something" is printing, displaying on screen as a slideshow or screensaver, or uploading to a photo sharing service like Flickr. For most people, that describes a very small fraction of the pictures they take. The rest just sit around in the photo library collecting dust and causing trouble, mostly in the form of slowdowns. Your library has to load all those thumbnails every time you open it, whether you ever look at the pictures or not. When you add new photos, the software has to scan the pictures, add the appropriate information to its database, create thumbnails, probably copy the images to its own directory, and sometimes even convert the images to its native format. And again, it has to do that even if you never even look at the image.
That takes time. Often it takes a lot of time, and for nine tenths of digital photos, it's wasted time.
On the other hand, you don't really want to just delete all those other pictures. The sheer quantity is part of the fun of digital photography, right? And you never know when some of those truly horrible shots might come in handy. Maybe that horrible shot of your uncle making that silly face will turn out to be the only picture of him anyone can find for a scrapbook later. Maybe you'll want something in the background of a blurry shot of a friend for reference later. Who knows? But since storage is cheap these days, there's no reason to delete all that stuff, even if you don't want it clogging up your workflow.
By popular demand--okay, by demand--we've collected all 24 of our 12 Days of Holiday Downloads posts into one convenient package. And just because it is the season of giving, we've included pointers to some of the other seasonal software we've covered, too. Because really, three days before Christmas, what's better than one-stop shopping?
I'll also give you my picks for the best of the bunch.
Yesterday afternoon, Flickr 
Internet security watchdogs at the SANS Institute Internet Storm Center 
The big buzz in the open source community this weekend had nothing to do with software. Instead, the talk was about developer Hans Resier--founder of 
The big splash in the Mac community--and the rest of the world--last week was obviously the iPhone. For Mac users, though, the iPhone announcement may have distracted from the really big news: Amit Singh's release of a 
If you've had a digital camera for any length of time, by now you have thousands--maybe even tens of thousands--of digital pictures of anything and everything. And if you're like most people you've cheerfully imported them into photo management software of some sort. Maybe it's something like NikonView that came with your camera or maybe it's the copy of Photoshop Elements that came pre-installed on your hard drive. Perhaps it's Picasa. If you're on a Mac it's almost certainly iPhoto. Or maybe you're a pro, or just really into digital photography, and you hopped on one of the Adobe Lightroom betas or shelled out some cash for something like ACDSee, iView, or Aperture.
By popular demand--okay, by demand--we've collected all 24 of our 12 Days of Holiday Downloads posts into one convenient package. And just because it is the season of giving, we've included pointers to some of the other seasonal software we've covered, too. Because really, three days before Christmas, what's better than one-stop shopping?
