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Oracle has announced a free version of the 10G “express” version of their database:

The latest edition is the same as other databases in Oracle’s lineup but is limited in usage. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk memory and 1GB of memory. Oracle on Friday offered a beta version of the new database for Windows and Linux on its Oracle Technology Network Web site.

Continue reading "Free Oracle Version"...

Linux 2.6.14 came out recently, with a pretty impressive list of changes. Notable (to me) among them are:

• PPTP support in the kernel
• FUSE (userspace filesystem) support has been merged
• ipw2100 and ipw2200 (the wireless card my laptop uses) have been merged in as well

Check out the human-readable Changelog.

I’ll give credit where credit is due. This is a cool idea:

Microsoft has taken a new approach to security in particular in the enforcement side. They took a clean computer. Infected it with a common malicious code. That code turned the computer into a Spam zombie. A Spam zombie is a computer that is connected to the Internet that has been infected and checks in with the zombie controllers to let them tell it what to do. Microsoft documented 5 Million connections used to send over 18 million Spam messages in less then 3 weeks. This was just one computer. There are reported to be thousands of Spam zombies out there. Microsoft cordoned their Spam zombie off the net so it could not be used to actually send the Spam. Microsoft filed a lawsuit and contacted ISP’s to try to discover who is really sending the Spam.

Continue reading "Microsoft’s Anti-Spam Efforts"...

There were articles posted a while back on comment spammers and referrer spam. So for those of you who found those posts informative, you might be interested in this article I just read on Wired.com about how to find out if your blog is a splog victim and how to fight back.

Opera Watch verifies that Opera 9.0 will include a bittorrent client.

I have mixed feelings. I hope that it won’t add to Opera’s increasing bloat and memory profile, but on the other hand, I think bittorrent is a great technology that more people should use.

With the news that SBC is buying AT&T and Verizon and MCI merging again, the rolling back of regulation in the telco industry continues apace.

Check out the AT&T breakup on wikipedia, which has a rather hilarious disclaimer at the moment:

This article has recently been linked from Slashdot.
Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.

You can’t take those slashdot kids anywhere.

We had and have a lot of non-profit clients, and this article at TechSoup is a great primer on planning for technology needs for non-profits. Check it out.

The (hopefully) soon-to-be-released Zend PHP Framework is something that I am watching closely. I have recently started a new position here at CentreSource as Director of Operations. In this role I will be involved in a fair amount of project management. Currently CentreSource is primarily a PHP shop. This gives me a different perspective on the Zend PHP Framework than I have seen elsewhere so I am sharing it here.

Continue reading "Zend PHP Framework: A Project Manager’s Perspective"...

As a followup to this post, I should note that dovecot, an IMAP daemon I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now, does indeed suport server-side indexing to aid searching for mail.

I haven’t found any good answer to the problem of compressing and archiving mail server-side, however (although they have discussed it on the dovecot dev list). Probably because this requires cooperation on behalf of both the MDA (i.e. the MTA or something like procmail) and the mail-reading protocol (IMAP, et al) to both agree to read/write gzipped/bzipped data.

Continue reading "dovecot IMAP"...

Is Google taking a shot at Ebay with their new Google Base?

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

* Description of your party planning service
* Articles on current events from your website
* Listing of your used car for sale
* Database of protein structures

It’s a pretty nebulous idea that has ramifications elsewhere, but you can’t help but notice the parallels in the use for this and the current popularity of things like ebay/ebaymotors, craigslist, etc.