News from PANUG/BizNix - October 25, 2002 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org It's been several days since we did a broadcast and the articles have piled up. Here's a bunch of them. There's still more to edit and format. KAPOR AND CHANDLER Does the name Mitch Kapor ring a bell? For those unfamiliar, Kapor was the founder of Lotus Development. Mitch is back in the news after a long hiatus. He is now developing an Open Source Interpersonal Information Manager. It will manage your email, track your contacts and TODOs, and have built-in calendaring functionality. It will do all this without any server-side dependencies. Called Chandler, it will initially run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. BACKING UP DATA by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers I've never trusted tape for backing up critical data - it seems too unreliable. When I've used tape, I used a regiment of overlapping backups to duplicated media - a pain in the butt. I typically use redundant on-line storage techniques instead, such as automatically copying important data files to another computer's hard disk. Disk space is cheap. Now that I have a reasonable speed Internet connection, the data is copied to a computer off-site as well as a local computer. I have more redundancy now than I did before with tape and I have the off-site storage. Now I've noticed that some vendors are selling disk-based products that emulate tape libraries. The end of tape may be near. http://www.wwpi.com/Breaking_News/Quantum_D2D.htm VOICE MODEMS At a recent BizNix meeting, Gregg Berkholtz showed off voice mail software that was essentially a graphical interface sitting on top of mgetty/vgetty. Gregg mentioned that one challenge in getting this to work is finding a voice modem that you can use with vgetty. Voice modems are expensive if you can find them. Scott Chapman wrote in to say that the 3Com 2976 Voice/Fax/Data modem will work with vgetty. It sells in online stores for around $50. JUDGE SAYS WEB SITES NOT SUBJECT TO ADA by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers In a case involving a blind man and Southwest Airlines, federal judge Patricia Seitz ruled last week that Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies only to physical spaces, not to "virtual" spaces like Web sites. This is a surprise. The industry has been making an effort to improve accessibility because it recognizes that virtual spaces are frequently replacing physical spaces. Such an effort is the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) that publishes guidelines for Web page development. Once I became sensitive to accessibility issues, I simply made it part of the way I develop Web pages. There's little additional effort beyond the initial time to become familiar with the guidelines. Of course, since I code Web pages by hand, I'm not handicapped by software that makes ADA-compliance difficult. I imagine this ruling is good news to those who have little sensitivity to the plight of those who benefit from ADA and/or use software for Web page development that is ADA- unfriendly. I will, of course, continue developing ADA-friendly content. Law isn't always the best barometer of what "doing the right thing" is. NOVEL AND MYSQL Novell and MySQL AB, developer of the popular open source database, MySQL, announced that Novell will ship a NetWare-optimized commercial version of the MySQL database with NetWare 6 and subsequent releases of NetWare. To download MySQL for NetWare, look for item #167 in the Novell Developer Kit's "Leading Edge" section: http://developer.novell.com/ndk/leadedge.htm FEEDBACK In response to the article SPAM VIA NETBIOS, Ken Barber writes "Criminy. I find it hard to believe that anyone in this day and age still has NETBIOS ports open to the Internet. It's a shame that incompetent people are in charge of administering networks while people who know what they're doing (i.e., me) cannot find a job."