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March 11, 2003
Word Crashes Without Dual Monitors
Lately, MS Word (OS X) has been crashing on me. Its starts by complaining that files are corrupt and then quits. Reinstalling Office on my PowerBook didn't seem to give any relief. Today I realized that it only crashes when my PowerBook is operating away from home. When I'm home, I usually work in a dual monitor environment. So, I started playing around and found out that if I close Word with some of its Windows on the external monitor, it won't run again until it has an external monitor again.
I haven't been able to find any fixes or workarounds to this problem. I can solve it by remembering to move windows before I quit, but if I forget and need access to a Word document on the road, I still don't have anyway to access them. Today I resorted to opening a Word document in Emacs and turning it into plain text. Yikes! Anyone have any answers to this one?
For the sysadmins in the crowd, here's the relevant lines from the system.log file:
Mar 11 16:52:04 panther /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents /MacOS/SystemUIServer: kCGErrorIllegalArgument : CGSGetWindowGeometry: Invalid w indow Mar 11 16:52:25 panther WindowServer[184]: Reserved range exhausted. (0xbbfd1000 to 0xbc263000 goes out of bounds)
There are multiple copies of both messages with slightly different parameters, of course.
05:00 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Would You Like Wi-Fi with That?
This article reports that McDonalds will soon be offering Wi-Fi access in select cities as part of their "value meals." The next hour will cost $3. They're not the only ones:
Besides McDonald's, Internet surfers will also be able to tote their laptops to 400 U.S. Borders book stores, hundreds of hotels and a pair of U.S. airports where WiFi access will be available by summer, companies announced Monday.
Having Wi-Fi will only be a competitive advantage for McDonalds in the short-term. Let me illustrate why: You don't pick McDonalds over Wendy's because you like their toilets. You just expect that they'll have reasonably clean toilets in both places. Having clean toilets doesn't bring customers in, but having dirty toilets will drive some of them away. Same thing will happen to Wi-Fi. I predict that the price will go to $0 pretty quickly. As more places offer it, Wi-Fi will become a commodity and competition forces the price of commodities toward zero. Imagine, for example, if McDonalds decided to start charging for their toilets.
The article doesn't mention this, but the company that is making this possible in hotels is Utah's own STSN. STSN was founded by a couple of friends of mine: Eric Smith and Will West. They are the biggest supplier of broadband in hotels and are right now doing the largest roll-out of Wi-Fi ever in those same hotels. Will is still running STSN. Eric has moved on to his next gig: home automation.
10:12 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Open Source in eGovernment
I'm speaking next week at the Open Source in eGovernment workshop in Washington DC and I'm stating to put some thoughts together for it.
One thing that caught my eye was this news report on a bill that has been introduced in Oregon regarding open source software. This bill is not as draconian as a similar bill that was introduced in California (and has yet to pass). The California bill would have mandated open source software. The Oregon merely requires that open source be on the acceptable software list.
While I was Utah's CIO I worked to get open source software included on our acceptable use list. Last November, the ITPSC approved an IT Product Standards list as part of Utah's Technical Architecture. For example, jBOSS, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, openLDAP, Linux, Samba, Snort, and StarOffice are all OK to use (wish we'd said OpenOffice instead---oh well).
I think I've told this story before, but shortly after I arrived at the CIO's post, we had a long series of meetings to decide on intrusion detection systems for the State in preparation for the upcoming Olympics. We saw some pretty outrageous bids from some vendors and I finally asked the stupid question: "Why don't we just use snort?" Utah's security guru said simply "I didn't think it would be acceptable." I told him it was and that's what we used. Often people need to be told its OK to use open source software.
Back to Oregon, there's a lesson for open source proponents in Oregon in the recent passage of HB 240, which establishes a fund of funds in Utah. I wish I could have filmed the process and made a documentary for techies who want to interact with government because this was a model effort. The article on Oregon says:
Introducing a bill -- about open source or anything else -- is only the beginning of the process. "All that means is you've gotten the attention of one legislator," Barnhart points out. He says the next stage is to catch the eye of a committee chairman and get hearings held about your bill...Assuming the committee report is favorable, the bill is voted on by the entire legislature. And then, if it passes, the show moves to the state senate. And, finally, the governor must sign the bill before it becomes law. It's a long and tedious process. To give you an example of the odds, 4000 bills or more can be introduced in a single legislative session, while only a few hundred new laws come out of each session.This was true in spades of HB240 because it was financially complicated. Its almost unheard of for a bill as complex as HB240 to get through the first year. Rich Nelson, Nichole Davis, and Jerry Oldroyd of UITA did a masterful job of shepherding the bill, meeting with legislators, rounding up support, organizing CEOs to testify at committee meetings, informing interested bystanders like me, and encouraging public input. In the end, it was the near single-minded efforts of this group over a period of two months that led to HB240 being passed. If the Oregon open source community wants this bill, you can't just sit back and hope something happens. Appoint a leader who knows at least a little about the legislative process and go hang out at the Capitol. Get behind it and make sure your legislators know you care. Make this your quest.
Photo courtesy of CB Photography. Used with permission, kind of...
09:11 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Calling All Blogs
This blog was featured in the Tech Republic article (free subscription required) by Bob Artner. Other bloggers featured in the article include Dave Winer, Tim Oreilly, and Mike Chambers. I think its ironic that Dave is their first mention and yet Radio doesn't get a mention in the paragraph talking about blogging software. Go figure.
So far, the discussion comments are mostly on the "I don't get it" side. I think some members of the blogging community ought to go give them the answers. I think its interesting that the differences between blogs and web pages, public outlook folders, bulletin boards, and so on are subtle and yet so important. Most important, I think is that my blog is about what I want it to be; its an independent voice and anyone who disagrees with me can have their own independent voice. What makes this work is the tools we all use to form communities (like RSS, news aggregators, referrer logs, trackback, blogrolls, GeoURL, and so on).
I often tell people that starting a blog is a lonely experience because for the first month or so it feels like a monologue. Slowly, though you start to feel part of a community and can see the subtle undercurrents of interaction. You'd never design a communications system like this and yet it works marvelously.
As an aside, the article also calls me "Paul." That is not an infrequent happening. I have a cousin named Paul and he was the Dean of Art and Architecture at the University of Idaho while I was a professor there. That led to more than a little confusion. When we moved from Moscow, he bought our old house, that led to even more confusion.