G³ Solutions

Searching this Site?

KGIII — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 19:45:18 +0000

Alright.

So, I was going through the stats for this blog’s subdomain and it seems that there are a lot of people who actually read it but that there are a lot of strange people there too. Let it be known we have no viagra, no mesothelioma lawyers, and certainly no penis enlargement pills here to read about.

Embassy Governement Email Hack

KGIII — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 19:37:19 +0000

Usernames and passwords for more than 100 e-mail accounts at embassies and governments worldwide have been posted online. Using the information, anyone can access the accounts that have been compromised.

Hacks hit embassy, government e-mail accounts worldwide - Network World

Yup. Just, yup… It won’t be long now.

Halo 3?

KGIII — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 02:34:55 +0000

I don’t normally blog about games and I don’t normally play any and I almost certainly don’t play FPS games. (Mostly because I suck at them.) Either way I came across this:

Halo 3: How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play

Bungie’s office in Kirkland, Washington, houses more than 100 workers in a massive open room covered by a domed roof. It’s early June, and the place has an air of quiet, frantic energy. In a far corner, a group of artists work on crafting the swoopy attack movements of the aliens. Along a wall, environment programmers stare intently at screens, fine-tuning scenery in the latest levels. Marty O’Donnell, the company’s audio engineer, is holed up in a soundproof studio room, tweaking Halo 3’s 34,000-plus lines of combat dialog, to ensure that aliens and marines curse and yell appropriately during battles (Wired’s editor in chief, Chris Anderson, voiced a few blood-curdling screams for the game). Near the kitchen area, a programmer naps in a small pile of beanbag chairs.

All I can wonder is, well, how many developers worked to make Frogger or Pong?

Windows In A Box?

KGIII — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:16:40 +0000

Jim Byrd shared a link to this with us in a mailing list and I took the application for a test run. It does what it says it does, it doesn’t attempt to leak data, it is free, and I know it works with Vista and with XP well enough. Give it a shot if you’re interested.

Yes its Free - Directory of Freeware / Free Software to Download

Ever get tired of searching for a setting inside the control panel? Inside Windows XP are hundreds of settings that require endless clicking through the Operating System that can get really frustrating.

Google + StarOffice?

KGIII — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:19:14 +0000

iTWire - Google adds StarOffice to Google Pack

In what may come as a surprise to many office productivity software users, Google has added Sun Microsystems’ open source but not free office productivity suite Star Office to its Google Pack suite of free downloadable applications.

So I read this.

I read this again.

I even read it a few more times and I’m pretty sure that Google knows what they’re doing but I’m really curious as to the why and I’m curious is Sun knows who they’re crawling into bed with?

The Barriers in Place

KGIII — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:46:22 +0000

I thought I’d take a moment to ask this…

Why do we still call the people “users” these days?

We, in IT, still tend to look down on our clients, bosses, and others because they don’t understand what it is that we do. Yet, at the same time, we’d think of a doctor as being a snob and make witty wisecracks about them still calling it, “their practice.”

I think one of the first steps would be to not call them “users” but I can’t think of what else to call them in many instances. Got any ideas?

MA Resolves Format Debate!

KGIII — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:55:30 +0000

All I can say on the subject is it’s about damned time. 2 years in the offing all over something so absurd as document format when viable options where available at the time. If I were a tax-payer in Massachusettes I’d be irate.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has ratified its Enterprise Technical Reference Model which allows use of both the Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format.

“Document formats play a part in this vision by serving as containers for the information rather than being the end goal. The availability of open, standardised XML document formats without vendor bias will move us further along in realising this vision,” Bethann Pepoli, acting chief information officer and Henry Dormitzer, undersecretary of administration and finance wrote in a statement posted on the state’s website.

The ratification ends the two-year debate in the state over which document format will be mandated for official documents, and ensures that Microsoft will be able to continue to sell its Office software to state agencies.

Massachusetts settles ODF vs Open XML debate - vnunet.com

Mac Office 2008 Delayed

KGIII — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:39:52 +0000

Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) said Thursday that the release of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac has been pushed back from the second half of 2007 until mid-January.

AppleInsider | Microsoft delays Office 2008 for Mac until mid-January

It seems that this has been delayed and that doesn’t actually seem to bother too many people. If you’re a Mac user and/or are curious you can see some screenshots here:

Screen Shots of Mac Office 2008

More SPAM FUD?

KGIII — Thu, 24 May 2007 04:28:46 +0000

The Internet Engineering Task Force, which sets the technical standards for the Internet, yesterday approved the DomainKeys Identified Mail standard as a proposed standard (RFC 4871). The specification, a three-year effort pioneered by Yahoo!, Cisco, Sendmail, and PGP, is an email authentication framework that uses cryptographic signature technology to verify the domain of the sender.

From: Dark Reading - Desktop Security - New Spec Could Cut Phishing, Spam - Security News Analysis

I cry bullcrap. Let’s see here… We’ve had both SPF and we’ve had Sender ID, from Microsoft, for quite some time.

Exactly how has my SPAM results lessened? Both of these have been in place for quite some time. Now all three of these are at least listed at IETF and all three may even be ratified standards. I feel that without wide-spread adoption, universal authentication RESULTS, and any of these anti-spam or domain authentication (if you will) processes just muddy the waters and the additional confusion only serves to slow down the process.

With local and server side SPAM filters in place my own personal results are that some accounts get a 10:1 abuse rate. Yeah… That’s actually low and I do a lot of filtering with a variety of methods at both the server end and client-side. Unfiltered? I am not even sure I want to know. Some accounts may well be in the 100:1 range if not much higher.

I know that a lot of people would think that this is something that can only be done with open source, with only non-proprietary, etc… I disagree and, in my opinion; The reality is that it doesn’t have to be any one specific standard but just one specific standard that is in use globally. I don’t care who makes it, I just care who uses it.

Sun Re-Flavors Java

KGIII — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:43:36 +0000

Sun tries again with consumer-flavored Java | Tech News on ZDNet

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday plans to introduce a friendlier way to write Java applications for consumer devices, an attempt to derive more profit from Java and stake a greater claim in the next generation of Web applications.

At the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Sun’s executive vice president of software Rich Green, is expected to unveil JavaFX Script, a simpler scripting language for writing applications on Java-equipped desktop PCs and handheld devices.

To address compatibility problems with mobile phones, Green is scheduled to detail JavaFX Mobile, a package aimed at mobile-handset makers designed to make Java applications more portable across mobile phones.

I have been following Sun pretty closely for a lot of years. I was über impressed when they opted to go Open Source with Java and as part of my predictions for this year I predicted that Java would not fork. (Interestingly enough - it still hasn’t.)

So, there are two things I would like to see happen with this…

The first is, well, I would like to see Sun really get this working. Java is truly one of the “write once, run anywhere” type of languages and it is a shame that there aren’t more developers taking advantage of it. The run-time speeds have certainly improved as has the quality of hardware. The tools for authoring Java have improved and the number of resources have also grown over the past few years.

The second is more problematic. I would like to see the inclusion of Java (and JavaScript compatibility) included more widely. I see no reason, now that the spat has ended, why Sun couldn’t provision the JRE to Microsoft for inclusion with stipulations that the code remains Sun’s. While Java and JavaScript are two entirely different critters I think that it is a matter of changing attitudes more than anything else.