Music file sharing: it apparently can't be dissuaded, but is it ethical? ProRec.com editor, recording engineer and certified computer wonk Rip Rowan makes a point with his usual sharpness.

Switching your preferred net browser to Mozilla or Opera may no longer be considered a simple expression of Gates hate:

The reputation of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has been mauled by security experts.

...The self styled 'chief hacking officer' of U.S.-based eEye Digital Security, which has been responsible for the discovery of a plethora of vulnerabilities in Microsoft products, says that Internet Explorer has been insecure for a long time.

"It has been a long running theme that at almost any given point there is a remotely exploitable bug in Internet Explorer," he told ZDNet Australia. "It's one of the biggest security risks for most 'Microsoft based' corporations. Microsoft is not fixing these publicly disclosed bugs in any sort of timely manner or more so they seem to just not be fixing them at all."

The article is worth a read and some dedicated thought. I switched from Netscape to Internet Explorer three years ago when I tried in vain to use Netscape 6.0 as a functional, viable browser (a sorrily clumsy dud if ever there was one). To be fair, IE hasn't been the source of many headaches since. But given that a few hours were spent between yesterday and Monday getting to the bottom of what turned out to be a coworker's machine infected with QHosts, news like this turns me on to the idea of alternate browsers.

I found a link to this headline, incidentally, on Slashdot.org, where Microsoft and the Borg are considered - at least ethically - one and the same. Clever.

That laptop I've been tussling with has provided a couple of interesting (and wistful) glimpses into the past. A flash of the BIOS actually required an operating system based on DOS - so Windows 2000, which we had recently plunked down on the system for an employee's quick-and-dirty field work, wouldn't do. We don't have a copy of Windows 98 lying around the office, so I turned to an unused, legal copy of Windows 95. There I was, leaving the world of Windows 3.1 for Workgroups behind again - it was very 1996-1997. I successfully flashed the BIOS but, as I explained previously, failed to accomplish my ultimate objective.

Before pressing on - shutting down and removing the Windows 95 installation in the process - I glanced at the hard drive's free byte count. How much disk space did the old software consume? 70 megabytes. 70 megabytes might get you about fifteen MP3s - certainly not a modern Microsoft operating system. A dream, especially on the ancient 4-gigabyte drive. See "streamlined." While it wouldn't hold a candle to the applicability, flexibility and stability of Windows 2000 and (according to some) Windows XP, Windows 95 indeed lived in an age before the dawn of bloatware.

I'm always happy to help out freshly minted bloggers and promote the Axis of Naughty in the same move. So, one and two. Done. I'll keep an eye on the scorecard; you read both weblog entries. If you blog, vote yourself.

The move from CoreComm to Hosting Matters was neither a cinch nor a completed process. First and foremost, the weblog's entry numbering system was thrown completely off by my failure to reset the MySQL database; imported entries were thrown on an existing set - even though I'd deleted all entries in Movable Type - so enumeration was off by over 800.

I've partially fixed the problem; my first entry begins at number one, and I value that for peace of mind. Permalinks inside the uBlog and from other sites, however, will not arrive at their intended destinations: Over the course of blogging, entries that had been deleted or mistakenly duplicated were nevertheless counted in the entry series. For example, if entries 345, 346 and 347 were accidental triplets and I deleted the two excess posts, my next entry would have been 348 (and the correct entry before it would be 345). Imported into a new database, entry 348 would thereafter be identified as 346. Luckily, until today I have preferentially archived posts according to category, so any missed link will end up on the same page as the desired post.

Categories remain the only archive listing on the main index, but as most of them have grown to accumulate months of entries they're beginning to become cumbersome downloads - and a slow page is none too welcome to the innocent surfer looking to follow up on someone's link to a single entry on my site. So I've changed the default permalink to individual archives - a good hack job on my amateur behalf, I'm happy to say, as it was one hell of a coding tug-of-war for Saturday morning.

So then: Isabel's gone, old Sol is back to its rightful skyborne throne, and the uBlog is back to normal operation. Fortune!

"Foremost on any commander's mind," I recall a military historian saying, "was where his men would eat and drink." Equipment for a modern fighting force has certainly expanded and specialized over even the last decades, and the laws of logistics still can and do make or break operations. That makes quite a potential for dangerous confusion. The United States Marine Corps, as always, wants mobility and efficiency. How can it manage that in the growing complexity of weapons and supply technology? By going wireless:

To get their far-from-common job done, the Marines need to do some rather mundane things, like tracking supplies and equipment. Every tank, munition, first-aid kit, and food ration must be accounted for at all times and often in the heat of battle. To do this, the Marines rely on some highly mobile wireless technology. This technology has already been field-tested in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, helping to ensure that troops always have what they need.

...To track all this equipment, wireless networks and handhelds go out with the troops. Designed to be set up in the field, the tracking system "gives us total asset visibility," [Captain Gary] Clement boasts. "Commanders get a view of exactly what equipment they have on hand. They know what their capability is at all times." With real-time inventory data, commanders always know which missions they can support.

The tracking starts long before equipment arrives on the battlefield. At Marine warehouses, supplies are packed into thousands of containers and pallets. A typical pallet may hold 10 or 15 different items. The Marines use 2-D bar codes—which can hold more than 1,000 bytes of information—to tag each pallet with a wealth of information: what items it contains, what its destination is, what truck it should travel on, and so on.

All of this information can be read instantly by any of some 3,000 Symbol PDT 7240 handheld units the Marines purchased from Symbol Technologies. The handhelds, which run on DOS, Microsoft Windows CE, and, most recently, Microsoft Pocket PC, use built-in radios to communicate with a Symbol Spectrum24 wireless network. During the war in Iraq, such networks were set up at half a dozen Marine base camps, each camp having its own transportation management office (TMO) that receives and ships supplies.

...The system must be set up on the fly, so it also must be easily transportable and simple to use. The network equipment and handhelds are packaged in sealed transit cases that resemble large suitcases. All the necessary settings are programmed in flash memory. "Just break open the box, light it up, and you're ready to go," says Tom Roslak, vice president of homeland security for Symbol Technologies.

Plans for Marines' materiel centralization and vital medical information are on the horizon. Much better than a clipboard, no?

A CoreComm beneficiary no more, I've made the switch to Hosting Matters. 20% more disk space, 500% more bandwidth, near-instantaneous technical support at all hours of the day from real experts: all for half of what I paid in a monthly CoreComm bill.

Dig it? Dig it.

UPDATE: The way in which I imported my archives (long story) set the enumeration off, so a few inbound links to entries will hit the archive header instead. Eh, could be worse.

That's one vote for Ilyka.

Not too long ago I noted a startlingly assertive campaign underway by Autodesk to replace the Adobe PDF with the "DWF," a file format that Autodesk boasts to be far superior in its parsing of computer-aided drawing files. Now, I'll admit: I recently began using Acrobat Distiller's add-on soft-printer to prepare AutoCAD files for clients, and the day I found out about all of this, I'd run into some difficulties with a few complicated drawings. Since Adobe Acrobat's PDF files are universal for document exchanges, my assumption was that Adobe and Autodesk might sit down for an intercorporate powwow to work out better communication between CAD files and Acrobat Distiller - all for the benefit of individuals, companies and municipalities who aren't specialized and rely on generic formats to communicate.

I was wrong. Now, commercial death fatwas aren't unheard of; Microsoft has spent the better part of two years trying to smother MP3.com tycoon Michael Robertson's Linux-based operating system called "Lindows." But they're not common occurrences in the market, either. I don't recall any Coke pitch along the lines of "Pepsi is scraped from the bedpans of dysenteric elephants," or a McDonald's ad with old Ronald suggesting "Burger King today, vegetarian tomorrow." Pepto-Bismol gets a reprieve with semi-anonymity when slammed as "the pink stuff." Even Rosie spares Bounty's competitors when she wipes away fruit juice spills at two - no! - three times their capillary action. Most companies realize that lowering the standard for their rivals opens themselves up for the same treatment. It's a touchy business.

So you can imagine my reaction when a coworker showed me this ad he found on the inside back cover of this month's Cadalyst:

Part of me is speechless; the other part is busy figuring that the top-left performer snuck out of a Wim Wenders movie and that the de-unicycled fellow's expression is priceless. What's Autodesk's next step in, er, wooing open-mouthed tech consumers to the DWF?

Whatever may come - for now? Ouch. That's a jab and a haymaker, Adobe. You've got a bit of honor to defend.

UPDATE: My silent prediction that Adobe would give Autodesk's offensive the silent treatment is underscored by the fact that the attack on the PDF may only amount to bizarre fist-shaking:

On Wednesday [September 10, 2003], Adobe announced it had net income of $64.5 million, or 27 cents a share, for the quarter, which ended Aug. 29. That compares with $47.2 million, or 19 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Analysts polled by research firm First Call had predicted income of 25 cents a share. Revenue for the quarter was $319.1 million, compared with $284.9 million a year ago.

Executives attributed the growth to the company's e-paper division, which produces Acrobat and other products based on Adobe's portable document format (PDF). The company revamped the Acrobat line a few months ago, adding a high-end version and a stripped-down product, aimed at getting office workers to use PDF as the standard choice for exchanging documents.

Touché. Adobe defends their honor after all!

Autodesk is picking a fight with Adobe. And starting it with a rabbit punch to the windpipe. Dear Lord.

Like any tale of intrigue, there's sure to be a backstory somewhere. I'll do some digging. In the meantime, you can bet more than a few pocket protectors have had a switchblade added to them.