David Lane's blog

November 1st kicks of National Novel Writing Month—a chance for budding authors to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboards, and bang out a 50,000 word (or more) novel in 30 days. Sound like fun? Well, it can be. And unless you are really fast with a pen, most of the budding authors use some sort of software to write their novel. more>>

If you are a Systems Administrator, the refrain the network is down is routine. Depending on the sophistication of your users, it might be a more specific lament, such as the Internet is broken or email is unavailable. If you have really sophisticated users, you might actually get a real error message to work with. more>>

Overnight I received an email from a friend, forwarding me an article from Redmond Magazine. The topic of the magazine was the huge Patch Tuesday dump that our friends in Redmond have sent down. There was also some discussion about the patch bundles dropped by Adobe and Oracle as well. more>>

When I think of (a) Blender, I think of a device for making slushy adult beverages, not an Open Source tool for rendering images, despite coverage in Linux Journal by Ben Crowder, Robin Rowe, Dan Saw more>>

A couple of days ago, I talked about Yahoo's warning messages saying my system (Linux) had not been tested with their mail program and that resulted in a very impassioned plea to help a group of Yahoo Groups users to protest the changes that Yahoo has apparently made to the way more>>

Sorry, but your system does not meet the minimum system requirements (Adobe). The all-new Yahoo! Mail has not been tested with your operating system (Yahoo). more>>

On Twitter a few days ago, a tweet from @jwildeboer caught my attention:

OATH, OAUTH, OpenID - this is all getting too complicated. We need simple identification for the future. more>>

At the end of a conference, most people have two feelings. The first is a feeling of wanting to get out there and do something. After last year's LinuxCon, especially after listening to Noah Broadwater of Sesame Workshop, I wanted to go back to my office, take a chainsaw to my IIS installations, and tear out my Sharepoint system. more>>

As a society, we are all about numbers -- How much, how far, how fast. In IT, it is all a numbers game. Teraflops to compare computing power, TPC results to compare databases, analyst numbers to compare penetration -- We are all about the numbers. And as a wise man once said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. more>>

If LinuxCon 2009 was all about the desktop, then the underlying theme of LinuxCon 2010 is the desktop is dead, at least as we know it and the new desktop meme will be a mobile device. more>>