Backdoor Tech          

Your daily helping of technology

Monday, August 25, 2003

 

VoIP starts to attract the attention of regulators

Free ride over for VoIP?: "But as U.S. IP telephony subscribers near the 2.5 million mark, and some 10 percent of all calls are VoIP generated, a growing number of states and the FCC have begun exploring whether to put VoIP providers on their regulatory radar. Analyst group In-Stat/MDR believes there will be 7 million VoIP phones in circulation by 2007." CNET News.com I did a paper on this issue about five months ago.

Friday, August 22, 2003

 

More links checking

My apologies to anyone visiting this site in the past few weeks. Since switching over from my other web site, I've failed to convert the internal links. I didn't realize how poorly I had covered my ass. I promise to do a better job -- if I can get enough time to do it.

One excuse is that this frontpage is done in Blogger, which means I can't check links and other housekeeping as easily as I could in one of my editors.

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

 

Goofs on the 4DOS/Take Command page

I did some checking of the links of the Flashback to Command Mode and found there were several broken links. Some were my fault because I did not make the necessary changes after reorganizing the structure of the site. That meant that several archive and example pages did not work. In other cases, sites have disappeared from the web.

The latter is just the ongoing shift towards Windows and Unix operating systems. Products like 4NT and Take Command are so deeply rooted in the past, representing 15 years of work, that many newcomers don't want to learn from the old way of doing things, even if it may be better in some respects. I know that JP Software has undergone some downsizing recently, relocating to here in Maryland from Boston.

4DOS came into existence because of the memory limitations imposed by MS-DOS, and the incomplete implementation of features. In the shaky shift to graphical interface, 4DOS and its related programs provided the powerful continuity of the command line. DOS was still the foundation of Windows 95 and 98. Now many of the original limitations of Microsoft operating systems have been, for the most part, been overcome. If you want a geeky dip into the operating system, you can try out Linux.

Monday, August 11, 2003

 

Cash from the Web

Making the web pay: "What's more, the answer may well turn out to be a hesitant yes. Six years on from the start of the popular web explosion, people are adjusting to paying for content on the internet. The Wall Street Journal, for example, announced last month that its subscriber base had brought in $80m (£50m) last year. Revenues for the online wing of the New York Times have grown more than 20% in this past quarter to $21.6m (£15m): operating profit increased to a record $4.3m (£2.7m). The Guardian started to charge for some services this month. It goes on." Guardian (UK) An area that I am interested in because my main client, GlobalSecurity.org, needs to start generating some cash flow to improve its long-term viability -- and its ability to pay me for consulting work. Obviously, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are in another league, but Google's AdSenses has shifted the balance in favor of medium-sized websites who were at the mercy of online ad agencies.

Thursday, August 07, 2003

 

Grunt work

I have been bogged down in converting hundreds of web pages to a new site design for my main client, GlobalSecurity.org. This process has been time consuming and painstaking because the original pages were in such a mess, HTML-wise. Some pages date back from 1995 when little concern was given to Web standards. It was not a smooth process, but I now seem to have a system cobbled together that is speeding up the process. That's a good thing, because I may have thousands more to do.

I have employed a really useful set of programs. HTML Tidy and its multiple implementations has proven to be a god-sent. It can clean up a lot of bad coding and when part of a batch file, it can go through a folder of files in seconds. I resurrected my affinity for 4DOS, 4NT and Take Command, all JPSoft products, to do the batch work. They have a more powerful set of commands than DOS. I even got around to upgrading from the versions that I had from four years ago.

I suggest that anyone who wants to use it should start with a user interface version, something like TidyUI for Windows. Because HTML Tidy is a command line product, you have to configure it with an archaic ini file (in other words, command line switches). TidyUI allows you to experiment with the settings and see how the conversion turns out, then go back and tweak it some more. Once you're satisfied, you can save the settings to a Tidy configuration file and have the command-line version read in the settings. You can also use HTML-Kit, my favorite editor.

I suspect that my use of HTML Tidy in batch operations is pretty primitive because there are versions that can be used in more sophisticated languages, like Java, Perl and Python.

The other key to this exercise is employing search and replace to morph the code into the new format. That means that you have to identify specific HTML or text patterns and then use that as the search target for the replace part. I happen to like the search and replace features in HomeSite.

It can be pretty daunting to set a batch process loose on hundreds of files because you can never be 100% sure that it will work the way you planned. Be sure to have backups. That's why I took the slow route of doing a bunch of operations by hand, then working on smaller sets of files and finally on the whole group. I still have to open each file to make sure that there are no surprises left behind. I found some web pages with no HTML code at all.

Monday, August 04, 2003

 

Battle of the blog | CNET News.com

Battle of the blog: "The dispute offers a glimpse into the byzantine and highly politicized world of industry standards, where individuals without legal authority over a protocol may nonetheless exercise control over it and where, consequently, personal attacks can become the norm. Despite the apparent pettiness of developers' sniping, their arguments over digital minutia may carry enormous consequences, and corporate interests remain poised to capitalize on the conflicts if they are not resolved. " CNET News.com

I have a continued interest in RSS and blogging in general. The cited article above gives a good overview of the issues and personalities involved. But the discussion tends to clouds things for the ordinary user who should not need to worry about technical workings.

I have not been blogging here for a while because I have a really big work assignment for my consulting sideline that requires a lot of time and pains-taking effort. I try to keep my other site's weblog going because it's more news-oriented.


Where We're Coming From

In October 2001, I was a member of a group of 17 IT professionals that took their first tentative steps together towards a graduate degree in information technology. Over this period, we learned together, we griped together and we ate stirred-fried vegetales together for lunch until fast food started looking good. Our classes took place at the Shady Grove campus of the Maryland University System.

In April 2003, we finished our course work and we graduated on May 17. But our professional journey does not end with that ceremony. This site is meant to be a landmark for the classmates who shared 18 months. I also intend to use this site as a learning area. It's part of my mental makeup to register things on the Web as part of my continuing learning process. After all, the technologies that we studied are in constant evolution and flux.

Resources

Site Index