Wikipedia will never collect dust on the shelves

A story that has hit many headlines speaks of Wikipedia closing a few doors, making it slightly more difficult to contribute content.

For more details, select your favourite source:

• ZDNet: Growing pains for Wikipedia
• CNN: Online encyclopedia tightens rules
• Associated Press (via Yahoo): Wikipedia Tightens Submission Rules
• CNET/Slashdot: Wikipedia to Restrict Creation of Articles

Related item: Wikipedia Statistics

OpenDocument may lead the way to Web-based office suites
(TinyMCE is shown for illustrational purposes only)

TAGED acceptance of the OpenDocument standard was discussed in the context of Massachusetts. It was also argued, with timely backing from the media, that corporate Open Source migrations are no longer the exception. Finally, IBM have big plans for OpenDocument, which they can vigorously employ and help spread.

IBM plans to support early next year the OpenDocument standard in its desktop software, a product the company intends to market aggressively in developing countries.

IBM and their occasional Open Source push gets mentioned in an article titled “Is Open Source Really Just as Good”? (Part I, Part II – published today)

While I didn’t say it explicitly, when companies like IBM, HP, Novell, Dell and even Sun are driving the adoption, deployment and support of various parts of the LAMP stack in the enterprise, it’s safe to say that the ecosystem for many open source projects is thriving…

Hotter among the gamers’ headlines: Quake4 Demo for Linux

Has Google become Microsoft’s Big Brother as well as ours?

ET us assemble and review at a list of ideas where Microsoft have been claimed to imitate rather than innovate. Most of all, they appear follow Google’s footsteps, rather anxious about the looming threats .

By embarking on projects which have been recently proposed, Microsoft simply make an inimitable Google appear highly inspirational. All are implementations, which have been within their capabilities for years. These were ignored until Google initiatives surfaced or when innovative value was finally realised. It seems as though brainstorming is suppressed in Redmond. Examples:

• New classified lists service
• Satellite maps that make use of AJAX
• Online software/services, namely live.com
• Book scanning
• Search based and encouraged by backlinks
• Context-sensitive advertisement
• (Arguably) Google personalised

There must be more, but I cannot think of any at the moment.

The clock ticks for Microsoft while their competition evolves

AKERS of Windows are expected to ship its next version in line with their promises. Release dates get postponed time after time while immature products develop and skip the conventional testing cycle. Having had to re-build Windows Vista from scratch, this becomes worrisome. More worrisome if the fact that a million users migrated from Windows to Apple Mac last year alone. With a flow of critical, and yet unpatched flaws, one wonders: why has Microsoft not fixed them all?

Almost 4 years after the launch of Trustworthy Computing, I found myself wondering why am I staying up till 4:00 AM to deliver an emergency set of instructions (Home and Enterprise) to my readers because Microsoft felt it unnecessary to patch a flaw six months ago that was originally low risk but mutated in to something extremely dangerous.

Timely link: Novell: Vista to Drive User to Linux

The Trojan horse effect

News headlines refer to this recent critical flaw, which affects Windows users (as Internet Explorer can never be uninstalled).

The security bug, exploited by the Trojan downloader, was originally reported in May

[...]

The vulnerability puts computers running Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 2000 and Windows XP at risk. An attacker could gain complete control of vulnerable systems by hosting malicious code on a Web site. Once an IE user visits the site, the malicious program would run without any user interaction.

Sounds re-assuring. In the mean time, until a patch gets released, Internet Explorer users are discouraged from clicking ‘stuff’ or strongly advised to disable necessary functionality. Otherwise, the Internet may continue to suffer from the existence of Windows zombies, which persistently carry out Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

Related items:

• Yet Another Windows Patch
• 3 More Critical Flaws in Windows

AID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks. As yet, I find RAID somewhat redundant, at least in my individual scenarios and for my personal purposes.

RAID is associated with backups on multiple disks, which in turn enables easy data recovery. The disks may also be distributed across geographically isolated and thus independent places. RAID does not directly cater for synchronation of data, applications, settings. That, for instance, is one of the powers of on-line services and network-hosted environments. This, as a matter of fact, is what pushes computers towards becoming relics.

One question to consider in RAID is the target of a write/read operations. This point refers to where data should be fetched from or save onto and how changes should propagated among the multiple disks. These issues are easily resolved in the following way:

Let us look at this conundrum, which is flawless management of files across computers. The confusion over where data gets stored and fetched from can be resolved owing to remote login. Assuming we speak of high-bandwidth networks here (100Mbit LAN in my case), the ‘cost’ of using SSH bandwidth is almost negligible. Even 10Mbit connections would give you a very responsive UI behaviour over the network. I know this because I tried it. The exception are cases where you stream many large frames over the network (e.g. video, games).

I have never looked deep into RAID technologies. Why not just scp (or rsync) the entire content of a hard-drive periodically? I maintain files on just a single machine, which I always SSH to from elsewhere. Its contents get mirrored on two other remote machines. Files that change on a daily basis are backed on the SAN overnight using cron jobs. This simplifies life a great deal. I still see no compelling reason for using RAID, especially with the existence high-speed networks.

As for Web site backups, these can conveniently be downloaded unless an automated job is set up, which is something I hope to do one day.

Related short items:

• Basics of Data Recovery (XHTML presentation)
• Mail Backup and Restoration
• Backup Fallacy

An example multi-file, Web-based presentation (click to start)

ENCENTLY, I have being passively swayed (“forced” rather) towards using WYSIWYG applications for composition of a presentation. I have done that as a teenager, but I sure know the issues associated with the paradigm. I use OpenOffice at the moment, in conjuction with colleagues who stubbornly stick to PowerPoint.

As sad as this may sound, it seems obvious that, judging by the large, conferences do not accept presentations in formats such as HTML, even if they are as advanced and rich as S5 (exemplified above). Many conference them make PowerPoint the sole option, thus snubbing anybody who does not use Windows or is unwilling to invest in expensive licences that lead to vendor lock-in. Fortunately, I work in O/S-tolerant environments, so I rarely need to suffer from such narrow-mindedness.

WYSIWYG is a good paradigm in principle. Alas, as explained several times in the past (e.g. Dangers of Abstraction), WYSIWYG tends to be lossy. Also, re-use becomes as serious problem; searching and indexing likewise. The idea of encapsulating objects like arrows and circles in a single file, along with videos, images and text is ‘unhealthy’ to say the least. A binary presentation is not one which is open for standards-based tools to interpret. It is also poorly-structured.

OpenDocument does not make it trivial for one to extract individual objects unless various tools are used. Therefore, I am reluctant to ever use OpenOffice and yet I recommend and promote it. Hypocrisy? I say “nay”. Its entry barrier is low, and if not the cost, then open formats should make the difference and end the vendor/product dependency. OpenOffice will never suffer from the same pitfalls Microsoft vainly ignore.

An HTML presentation has its text stored separately (under e.g. index.html). Additionally, there are videos and graphics as individual files in their own isolated directory. The technology which drives S5, as in this particular case, involves a collection of stylesheets which are easily exchangeable, interchangeable, and are stored aside, together with their associated graphics. Lastly, there is JavaScript to integrates this technology and make keyboard navigation, buttons and the like a practical reality.

To finish off with a rant, why is it that ‘simplicity’ ended up attaining a huge tar-like file which is obscure in terms of its content? If it were not for Microsoft Office, would somebody else have done the same? Some time ago I heard that Office files were bound to become a compressed files which contain all the peripheral files, e.g. images and graphs, completely apart. XML is frequently echoed by the media in this context. Could this be related to Microsoft’s recent proposal to open up their formats?