Stunnel.org: Stunnel -- Universal SSL Wrapper

Stunnel is a program that allows you to encrypt arbitrary TCP connections inside SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) available on both Unix and Windows. Stunnel can allow you to secure non-SSL aware daemons and protocols (like POP, IMAP, LDAP, etc) by having Stunnel provide the encryption, requiring no changes to the daemon's code.

OpenSSL: The Open Source toolkit for SSL/TLS:

The OpenSSL Project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as a full-strength general purpose cryptography library. The project is managed by a worldwide community of volunteers that use the Internet to communicate, plan, and develop the OpenSSL toolkit and its related documentation.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Rotten Linkage

So I want to make my own position clear here:

Links are fundamental to writing and publishing on the Web.

Writing for the Web without linking is like eating without digesting. It's literary bulemia.

Disrespecting the links others have made to your work is irresponsible to their good intentions and disrespectful to your own authority as a source. It says fuck-you to the world and to your own ass.

Please not that the empahsis is Doc's and so's the bad language but that's OK since Doc is from New York!

What has brought this all about is the change to Dan Gillmor's e-Journal - see Dan's response at Silicon Valley | 02/09/2002 | More on Broken Links - that has 404ed everybody's links to his writings. No doubt there are few broken links like this in DJ.

Eve Andersson's Diary of a Start-Up is a precise and well documented summary of how VC's destroyed ArsDigita - the company she helped found.

"Lessons learned

Over the past 1.5 years, the VCs and their management team have taken a profitable, healthy, interesting company and:

• spent the profits that ArsDigita had saved
• spent all the capital raised
• destroyed an excellent software product
• released a horrible product a year behind schedule
• hired a slew of incompetent managers
• fired the people who made ArsDigita profitable
• repeatedly lied to customers
• repeatedly lied to employees
• repeatedly lied to the press
• repeatedly lied to the outside developer community
• and given themselves big bonuses as a reward

Greylock and General Atlantic Partners have mis-managed ArsDigita into the ground.

What can we learn from this? Be clear about control. Don't assume that people with MBAs know a thing about business, let alone technology. Don't throw out your prime source of revenue before another one is in place. Fashionable programming languages don't equal useful software. Don't lie. And steer clear of General Atlantic Partners and Greylock."

In his Archipelago: Daniel Berlinger's Archipelago News Weblog Daniel links to Dave's observation that:

"Now the class of 96 is coming back online, I'm not on the mail list because of all the flames, but when it quiets down I look forward to hearing people's ideas on the next steps in the evolution of our environment and tool set." [Dave that's a really nice olive branch. Good on ya!]

It's great to see the class of 96 come back online and I'd like to echo Daniel's thanks for the olive branch. There's a lot of positive energy rejuvenating the ScriptMeridian community - brought about, it would seem, by the release of Radio. Most of us seem to be tuning in to the real potential of Radio from a developer's perspective. One really wierd coincidence is the fact that three of the ScriptMeridianers were born within two weeks of each other in the same year - 1954. Spooky!

I'd also like to endorse Daniel's message:

"Don't read meaning into people's messages. If you're not sure what they meant, don't make an assumption, instead ask for clarification." It works for me.

I'm slowly learning this - after 47 years ;-) Feel free to seek clarification!

Dave's from New York too. Dave was of course referring to one of the stories that he was instrumental in bringing to our attention and which I cited in my The Doc Searls Weblog : Rotten Linkage backlink.

Linkrot is one of the banes of my life especially when at work my students use their own web-space to prepare and submit their group work for my Computer Architecture and Design class. Since much of the student work is of sufficiently high quality to merit dissemination to later cohorts of students, linkrot that set in within little more than a year was becoming a major PITA.

Axis/Radio interop, actual and potential

To borrow a line, SOAP celebrates diversity This document describes the integration between a popular scripting platform and a Java based implementation of SOAP, both in what is possible today and what could be done to improve the user's experience in the future.

Tech News - CNET.com | Computer science's gender gap

In a new book entitled "Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing," social scientist and scholar Jane Margolis and computer scientist and educator Allan Fisher explore why only a small fraction of high school and university computer science students are female, even though women make up a growing portion of computer and Internet users.

As part of their research for the book, Margolis and Fisher followed more than 100 computer science students, both male and female, at Carnegie Mellon University for four years beginning in 1995. The book details the unique experiences and challenges women confront in the field of computing and how it contributes to the thinning ranks of women in such programs.

An interesting article with suggestions how to achive better enrolment stats. Their research has had an impact on the computer science department of Carnegie Mellon, raising women's enrollment in the program from 7 percent in 1995 to 42 percent in 2000.

MacNet Journal - Tired of viruses and bugs? Ditch Microsoft

"This is the way I view it: One reason I use a Mac is that the underlying system is less likely to be attacked by hackers than if I used Windows. Sure, the Mac has some killer applications that help make this decision easy, but a big plus to running Macs as a small business owner is that the machines are easier to maintain and one part of that is that viruses and crippling security risks are lessened, at least at this point in time, just by choosing Apple products. And, since I decided to use Apple products to avoid many of the pitfalls I would face if I was running Windows, why would I then decide to hop into bed with Microsoft and introduce more of their buggy products to a machine that I want to rely on?

With this underlying philosophy, the decision is pretty easy. I minimize my exposure to Microsoft and at the same time minimize my exposure to viruses and bugs. That folks is a win-win situation."

Right on!

David Davies' Radio Weblog

An admission. I've been bitten by Radio's web services and am licking my wounds somewhat. All was going so well until I ran up against a wall, the wall being Radio's handling of TCP connections on the Mac.

As a Radio scripting newbie, Chris Double is digging around for documentation about Radio/Fronter/UserTalk. His Radio Weblog contains the links he's dug up so far.

And Andy Sylvester anounces a Radio UserLand Resource Directory.

THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING

This WWW page is the initiation of a collection of materials related to the history of computing as collected and written by J. A. N. Lee, until 1995 Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, past chair of the IEEE Computer Society History of Computing Committee and current chair of the IFIP Working Group 9.7 (History of Computing). It was original constructed as part of the course materials for the "Professionalism in Computing" class at Virginia Tech, and in particular as a set of notes and amplification of the materials in the video "The Machine That Changed The World", developed and distributed by WGBH (PBS) and the British Broadcasting Company (BBC).

A great resource.

>From the latest update to Librarians' Index to the Internet:
>
>>The History of Computing - http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/
>>"This collection of materials relating to the history
>>of computing" includes links to historical overviews;
>>information on people, corporations, and machines;
>>organizations and museums; and more."
>
>It is a good resource and includes a version of "Who
>wants to be a Millionaire" in which all the questions
>are on computing (unlike the computer-phobic tv original).
>See:
>
>http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/cgi-bin/million/index.html
>
>[snip]

I actually managed to answer everything correctly up to, and including, the 64000 hokie question. I bombed out on the 125000 question when I gave the wrong answer to 'What kind of engineer was Konrad Zuse?'

I'm pretty proud of my score. How sad is that ;-)?

Thanks for the link Alan.

Duncan

via CamWorld - CMSWatch: Featured Opinion: Why Getting Laid Off Is Better Than Building a Proprietary CMS

So there you are, called into the Vice Presidens office. Immediately your mind is racing withwhat the heck did I do Then your VP hits you with it you are now in charge of a very strategic projectBuild me a content management system in 4 months or less says your VP, who happens to be from thewe can build anything in our IT departmen mentality. At this point you wish he had laid you off. ...

ArsDigita closes shop, sells assets to Red Hat