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There has been more mainstream press on Virtualization technologies and the adoption of roles outside the traditional data center use case. It is apparent that this technology is working its way into the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise).

Internally we are using Virtualization technology (variety of programs) for server consolidation, testing, evaluations and troubleshooting. The ability to load multiple desktops is important in providing demos of upcoming products and evaluating application and program compatibility without disrupting my primary desktop.

It is my understand that the upcoming Windows Server 2008 will have more technology built on virtualization and the ability to manage multiple instances. The core features will occur post Server 2008 launch (http://news.com.com/Will+virtualization+be+Windows+Servers+silver+bullet/2100-1016_3-6190465.html).

The challenge for vendors (Pervasive included) it to identify the best licensing model that meets the needs of all parties.

So I have a few questions for our partners and uses around virtualization:

Do you have any plans to incorporate Virtualization technology into your testing or production environments?
What is your expected timeframe for adoption (6 months, 12 months, longer)?
What is the expected benefit that you are looking at gaining (application compatibility, testing, etc)?
When purchasing products will you start to consider the licensing model around virtualization as a decision in the buy process?

Hey, maybe actually, it is below our standard!

I’m referring to the article titled “New Ethics Code Governs Businesses that Serve Fund Raisers” published today on the News Updates website of The Chronicle of Philianthropy.  Authored by Holly Hall, this article cites the action of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) to create these “new” ethical standards and invite businesses to pay to attest they meet those standards. They do this by now offering to allow these businesses (including us for GiftWorks fundraising software) to become AFP members so we can display their “Executive Circle” logo.

I’m still trying to understand the logic of being charged to be labeled ethical but I certainly appreciate the need in the marketplace. Fundraisers, often so pressed for time and dollars, can give due diligence short-shrift. Lamentable but true. Then, of course, no field is free of shysters either.

In any case, I’ll hold our Mission Research standards of ethics and demonstrated behavior, up to anyone. Everyone here “gets it”. And we didn’t need AFP to get there. Now about that AFP membership fee….

Working on a presentation for a conference where I’m going to talk about RSS and am wondering - what are the coolest examples of nonhuman generation of RSS feeds? I know that technically every search feed, stock report feeds and things like that are generated without the immediate involvement of humans. But some time ago Lisa Williams told me about a buoy at sea that publishes a feed of hourly updates to all kinds of weather conditions. That’s from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS). She told me she would like to be able to subscribe to a feed that would tell her when her home’s heating oil was running low.

There’s got to be more examples out there - anyone care to point to ones you know of? I know there are systems to track package delivery (like FedEx). There have to be some RFID systems that utilize RSS. I know there are quite a number of innovative examples of RSS feeds generated in libraries. Limited traffic reports for particular cities from Yahoo and Traffic.com. Incidentlog.com is a cool use of police reports, mashing up feeds and Google Maps.

Really far out examples of RSS feeds being generated for a useful purpose without substantial human input is what I’m looking for. I really believe there will be a lot of this in the future, but the sooner we can find examples the sooner we can prepare ourselves and others for the idea. Please do post examples in comments if you can think of or find any that I haven’t.

To be honest I’d be curious to see peoples’ favorite applications of RSS in any context. Anything already listed by Tim Yang or Basement.org excluded.

I had a buddy of mine in high school use McAfee products and he hated them.  He had viruses on his computer that needed cleaning so he went with Norton and after his complete scan with Norton, his computer was virus free.  I would recommend everyone getting Ad Aware.  Its a free program and it does a good job at detecting and eradicating spyware.

With 91% of the fortune 500 companies who actually have the need to protect their assets using CA (Computer Associates) you should ask yourself why?!  Trend Micro is the same system which is used by Microsoft, hello…

We have and continue to use CA only on our business and personal equipment because it is not at all a system-hog and is tunable and completely adjustable.  It is cheaper to buy online from CA.com and it is bullet-proof.  By the way the spyware scan takes seconds rather than hours.

One of my friends told me he uses AVG free with daily scan which is overkill but allows the luxury of aborting the scan if he is working.  Next is Windows Defender also with a daily scan.  The scans never find anything so I might turn them off soon and just the let the real time protection suffice.

However there are some extra freebies which I keep on my desktop to do deeper/different cleaning:  Adaware, SpyBot Search and Destroy (one searches by file, the other by threat alphabetically!), Windows Live Safety Scan (for its registry cleaner - who better to know what to clean than the guys who built the registry), and TrendMicro Housecall which is a super deep online scan from the guys who discovered VISTA’s fatal flaw hours after it was released.

He previously did Disc Clean-up but have little to clean up now that I tweaked Tools>Internet Options>Advanced to delete Temporary Files when I close window.  So a monthly Defrag (for orderliness) and occasional Disc Check (for errors) rounds out my regimen which keeps our machines whistle clean and lasting ten years now.

WINDOWS ONE CARE saves the day with automatic backup.  Always forgot or didn’t remember if I backup’d at the end of the day and as a result I was biting my fingernails until the next morning that everything was AOK.  Sometimes I would leave home and forget for the second day with all the activity going on around me.  With ONE CARE, I had no care as it was done for me each day.  Great.  Also like the feature of Virus and Spyware along with the tune-up.  Best there is.

Why of you used to be a huge fan of Symantec products ever since the late 90’s? This past year I decided to give up on Norton Internet Security and try something new.  The reason is because Norton takes up so many resources!  What a hog it can be!  I found a great deal at the time through newegg.  I bought Trend Micro Internet Security for 40 bucks but there was a 40 dollar rebate!  I got the rebate back so essentially I got the program for free!

I haven’t had any suspicious software or viruses lurking on my PC!  THe program is light on resources and it has great real-time protection.  Sometimes when I am surfing the net, I may stumble across a hijacking website and Trend Micro warns me right away of the possible spyware/hijacking software that may be embedded in the websites that I come across!  Its a great program and its cheap!  Try it you might like it:)

The .net fetish is very disturbing, it has to be said. I avoid .net stuff like the plague (or SWT), so I have no idea how things look from that side of the fence. Do .net sites also go on and on about Java? It just seems like bad manners and a distinct lack of social grace. It’s not called randomlobbyforpartimejavamonkeyswhoalsodabbleindotnet, last I checked.

Here’s a plea to the evil minds behind javalobby, can you please split up the RSS feeds you aggregate at javablogs? The product announcements are an enjoyable informative read that I’d like to keep seeing. The forum posts however make me want to launch into a fairly disturbing frenzy of self flagellation and stabbing of random innocents; a situation which can only end in tears from almost all parties involved. Finally, something for all you Americans. Please, please, vote for notbush tomorrow, or don’t vote at all. I won’t join the mental masturbation that is so fashionable now and gloat about how evil one side or the other is.

It’s easy for you all to have pithy cosy opinions about war, civil liberties, democracy, peace, freedom, and all that. You might not know anyone affected so it’s all fun, in some sick sense. Some of us however have relatives in Baghdad. Some of us are Arabs in the US.

I’m sure it’s easy to condemn random brown people out there, to thump your chest about the greater good and whatnot. Is it as easy to look me in the eye and tell me it’s alright for my relatives to be killed? Relatives who love, cry, laugh, joke, and have children. A family that deserves to be bombed, invaded, ‘liberated’, and attacked about as much as you think your own family does.

Let’s look over some threads on there shall we. We have a thread about how Sun has no faith in Java 5.0, as proven by the fact that the ‘latest’ download on java.com is 1.4.2. We have a discussion about how Java is going to die on the next version of Windows. Of course, it’s all not all anti java, we have some pro .net stuff too! To inject some variety, we also have the ‘come on guys, lets band together and promote interest in java’ type gibberish. It’s like there’s this horde of demented lobotomised children out there, who take what their fearless leader says a wee bit too seriously. Who can forget Rick Ross’ poignant offer to help NASA with their Mars ‘java stuff’ using nothing but the willpower and intellectual prowess of javalobby members? We laughed, we cried, but mostly we shuffled about feeling very uncomfortable and embarrassed. It’s a bit like when your senile uncle whips his willie at a wedding ceremony and brandishes it furiously at the groomsmen while tittering ‘I am a purple teapot, short and stout’. Funny for a split second, but very uncomfortable thereafter. To its credit though, javalobby represents the masses perfectly. Endless stupid threads that somehow defy reason and all that is rational by generating comments that seem to outdo each other in terms of sheer ignorance.

I am heartily sick and tired of javalobby’s endless crusade against all things Java. With friends like this, who needs enemies? It’s utterly revolting how those swine manage to go on and on and on against Java in so many different threads.

What’s astounding is that there’s actually an audience for that kind of fear mongering. All those people seem to secretly wish their jobs didn’t force them to use Java, and would allow them to wallow in .net filth instead.

Particularly bizarre is Rick Ross’ vendetta against Sun. Now, I don’t know who from Sun pissed in his coffee (and by the sound of it, has a rather oversized bladder and thus hasn’t stopped pissing for the last few years), but the guy has a very deranged and bizarre Sun fetish.

He just can’t say enough mean things about that poor little company. Sun sucks, Sun doesn’t understand Java, Sun should , Sun hates developers, Sun ate my babies, Sun should stop molesting my pets, Microsoft will tug my penis but Sun will only point and laugh, and so on and so forth.

One rather enjoyable activity to while away a few hours is cracking java applications. Setting aside the legality of such nefarious activities, it’s a very educational and entertaining hobby. Of course, I am sure that anyone who indulges in such activities will have the decency to at least purchase said product.

Java licensing schemes vary from the impressively convoluted with multiple points of entry, to the incredibly simple and childish.

IDEA for example is more of the former, interestingly enough, my first introduction to IDEA was through a challenge to figure out its licensing algorithms (back in the 1.1 days), I very quickly purchased a license because it was pretty clear that these guys really are rather smart.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have some novel approaches which often suffer from one fatal flaw. They have one clever bit of code that everything else assumes is uncrackable. Needless to say, a simple NOP here does wonders.

Funniest of all are apps which don’t even use public/private keys, but employ a simple built in algorithm to read in a license file. Simple reverse that section of code and you have a key generator.

Another ridiculous idea is the encrypted classloader approach. I know of two apps which use this. There’s something strangely satisfying about making the application itself do all the work for you and decrypt all the classes; using its own cleverness against it

Speaking of apps which encourage you to use their own cleverness, it really is rather surprising how many ship with the code they use to generate keys. I know of one very famous ‘must-have’ java desktop app that comes with a key generator built in, if you can find it!

In the middle we have a whole bevy of novel and interesting approaches, often combines in entertaining ways. For example, disguising public keys as something else, perhaps a class file. You could go one step further and have the classfile be actually valid and decompilable, with the key material being an offset into the bytecode. There’s always the approach of obfuscating the compiled code and transforming method names into java keywords, so you can’t simply use jad to undo it, this coupled with flow obfuscation will stop pretty much all casual poking around. However, anyone genuinely curious will of course be armed with a disassembler, and through practice have an automatic bytecode to javacode mapping built into his or her mind (or at least, enough to figure out what a particular chunk does).

Most interesting of all are those companies who for whatever reason, feel they don’t really need to enforce technical constraints on their users, and choose to simply rely on the honour system.

What is fascinating about all this is that while many people have been involved in coming up with all these schemes, nobody will talk about it (that I can see anyway). It’s understandable, of course, as this stuff is very much in the realm of ‘trade secrets’. So in many ways, it’s a solitary programming task that one can indulge in, but not really brag about, or discuss with peers. Of course for some, if you don’t get to brag about it and gain gratification through peer approval, it just ain’t worth doing.