Category: Technology
October 27, 2006
Resolving CVS Commit Conflicts with Word Documents
CVS is extremely popular for configuration management (with Subversion quickly gaining speed). It uses “optimistic locking” in which multiple users can work on the same file at the same time, and any conflicts are resolved when the file is “checked-in”. …
October 25, 2006
TinyMCE, Spellchecker, and Firefox Crashes
TinyMCE is a powerful JavaScript-based WYSIWYG HTML editor that you can embed into TEXTAREA fields of your Web forms. In addition, a PHP based spell checking system called Spellchecker allows TinyMCE to highlight unknown words (using aspell or Google’s spelling Web service).…
September 20, 2006
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be irrelevant within 2 years
So high-definition video discs are hitting the stores now and yet again the electronics industry has shot itself (and early adopters) in the foot. Only, I think this is a lot worse than the Betamax-versus-VHS nonsense we all suffered through, or did…
September 19, 2006
An Exercise Left to the Reader in “Godel’s Proof” by Nagel and Newman
In 1931, the mathematician Kurt Godel showed that any axiomatic system in natural number theory that is “complete” (can prove every postulate that is true) will not be “consistent” (it will prove a postulate that is false). While having an impact…
September 6, 2006
NIST publishes secure Web Services
NIST has published a paper (Special Publication 800–95)that addresses the problem of deploying Web Services in an SOA while maintaining security. Some of their recommendations:
Using XML encryption to ensure confidentiality.
Using XML signatures to ensure integrity.
Using Security Assertion Markup…
August 31, 2006
Dreaming of an English-Based Object Oriented Language
MIT’s media lab has created “Metaphor”, a facinating tool that parses
standard English into a programmatic pseudo-code. Take a look at: http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/032305/Tool_turns_English_to_code_032305.html. Metaphor seems very cool, but to deal with the ambiguities of its English parser, it ends up with non-working pseudo-code. They…
August 29, 2006
Quick File Thunderbird extension
I have a lot of folders in my Thunderbird install, to track projects, people, companies, and so on. When I receive mail, most of it is filtered out into the appropriate folders but that leaves plenty of others that are not caught by…
August 3, 2006
2007 Excellence.Gov Awards topic: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Collaboration
Every year the Excellence.Gov Awards are held to highlight the very best government IT projects, and I’m the chair this year! The awards receive significant publicity every year, including the annual award ceremony, which is one of the Industry Advisory…
August 1, 2006
More on that GCN story / business problem ≠ technology problem
Yesterday I posted about this GCN story that seems to lay all blame for grants management inefficiencies at Grants.gov’s door. In re-reading the article, think the author got the wrong end of the stick from GAO’s report. Here’s the first sentence…
July 27, 2006
A nice reminder
I went to a meeting today with some folks I’d never met before and we got to talking about the use of open source. They are in a government agency and are extremely enthusiastic about using as much OSS as possible. And…