LegRoom.net's main server will be moving this week (along with me) to it's new home in Memphis (Midtown). All website and mail services will go down Monday morning, March 29, and will not reliably resume until Thursday April 1 (just in time for April Fool's, great...).

Also, on a not-so-related note, I don't believe that I ever formally announced LegRoom.net's server migration a few months ago. This site is now being hosted on a bad-ass dual-Athlon system, with 1 GB of RAM. Yeah, baby! Anyone so inclined may check out the stats here.

Here's a brief article on the importance of Open Standards, which, as the author rightly argues, is oribably the single most important consideration in technology today. Regardless of how superior some may feel open source software may be to proprietary software (and all readers of this site know that I feel that way myself), interoperability across all applications and platforms is the true holy grail of any project. Otherwise, you're simply limiting yourself, your application, and your customers.

Do read this article. Very important stuff.

Eric Raymond has a written a great rant on the usability problems of many Open Source programs out there, using his trouble configuring CUPS as a specific example. Now, hmm... why does this seem familiar? Oh yeah, because I spent nearly a year trying to get a similar setup working, and still haven't been able to do so. CUPS/IPP sucks.

Read the full rant. A must read for for any FOSS users and/or developers.

This is an article I've been wanting to post on here for quite a while. This article discusses the major fundamental security rules, based on processes and policies rather than technology. A lot of this, honestly, is common sense, but unfortunately it's the simple things like this that are so often overlooked.

Traditionally, people look at the infosec field as something to do about firewalls and antivirus. They treat technology as THE solution, instead of simply the enabler. And it’s this fallacy that weakens any security implementation. Security is a process, not a product… and should be treated as such. Through the security lifecycle, policy and procedure needs to take precedence over implementation. It’s a bigger part of the circle for a reason.

Overall, this is a concise, well thought out, and well written security article, and is definitely a must-read.

The Eight Rules of Security

I recently came across a review of the upcoming 5.0 version of the SkyOS operating system. I had come across this a while back in my try-every-operating-system-imaginable days, but this review got me quite interested in it again. Once version 5.0 is offically released, I'll definitely spend some time playing around with it.

Check out the full review, or get more information at the SkyOS home page.

Woot! Haven't played it yet, but will probably try it out later tonight. In the meantime, here are some links so you can download it yourself:

UT2004 Demo

pdabuyersguide.com posted a mouth-watering review of Sharp's new newet C-series Zaurus model, the SL-C860. Unfortunately, as with previous C-series models, the C860 is only available in Japan. Damn! But, you can import it through localization specialists such as Dynamism.

You can read the full review here.

David Berlind from ZDNet has written some great coverage of the LinuxWorld 2004 Conference and Expo.

You can read his two-part report here and here.

As we (should) all know by now, Sun is jumping into the Linux arena with it's own branded Linux distribution: the Sun Java Desktop System 2003. Despite the horribly misleading name, the "Java" Desktop System is actually a re-branded SuSE distro.

Mad Penguin gives us a fairly thorough overview of the new OS. To sum up, he gives it a 2 out of 5, with this quote included in the closing comments:

To be completely honest with you (and this is not meant to disrespect Sun), I would not deploy this OS in any situation (other than maybe the most basic user) at this time due to these and a few other concerns I have. It is not ready for the desktop, though I see potential for it in the future if Sun continues its push for the desktop.

Read the full review here.

John C. Dvorak has written a pretty blunt but thoughtful article about IBM missing a huge opportunity by not releasing it's own Linux OS. And who stands to benefit from this mistake? Why, Microsoft, of course! As Dvorak points out, you think they would've learned their lesson by now.

Full story