Having seen many recent discussions about how to go about password protecting directories on your web host, I decided to see what could be done to help make the process a little easier.

Since many web hosts only offer FTP access, (no shell) it makes it rather difficult to use the shell command htpasswd to create new users for the passworded directory. This new script creates both .htaccess and .htpasswd files, and fills in all the blanks for you, so all you need to do is answer the questions, download the files it creates and upload them to your host. Nice and easy.

The new script is available here: Online .htaccess generator tool.

If anyone has feedback on anything I should change or add, please use the “contact us” link in the main menu to drop us a line.

Regards

Franki

There is nothing particularly new about this issue, but I’ve collected enough stories on the subject to warrant another attack against software patents. The more people that know just how dangerous they are, the more likely that someone in power will notice and do something about it. (or at the very least, stop some even worse law from being added by inept un-knowledgeable politicians trying to get votes, and listening to paid industry lobbyists.)

Big companies like IBM and Microsoft love software patents, they can use them for two primary reasons, one is as a defence; If someone litigates against you, they should make sure that they are not infringing any of your patents or they will face a counter suit. And as an attack; If a competitor is taking market share from you, and you want to turn the tables, finding a patent infringement and litigating for damages is often a useful way to get started. IBM has one of the biggest patent portfolios, but to the best of my knowledge they only use it for litigation defence and licensing. Microsoft has a huge and growing patent portfolio, and thus far have really only used it for defence and licensing as well. Although there is much speculation that they will be using it to attack Open Source software like Linux, Samba, Apache, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org. In some ways they are already using it to fight open source as can be seen in the recent SenderID anti-spam issue covered here.

The question people should be asking, is: Should patents be granted for things like “Double clicking your mouse button” or the local collection of registration information which is later uploaded to a remote server, or a Window containing a “to-do” list. and online voting systems?

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I love Google. At the bottom of a recent Google search up pops a promo for Picasa. It said:

You can find any image you want on the Web. How about on your own computer?
Albums. Editing. Printing. Sharing.
Try Picasa, Google’s new photo organizer.
Free Download!

Now I have to tell you, it looked good when I hit the product features page.

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“Maxthon is a powerful web browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on the Internet Explorer engine (your most likely current web browser) which means that what works in IE, works the same in Maxthon but with many additional efficient features … ” Interesting to me, after reading one of Franki’s posts on here saying a certain MicroSoft Employee uses Firefox, that employee supposedly says that is a mischaracterization in his blog (I have yet to figure out how we know who’s blog it is — oh now I get it I go here). He apparently now says he has a copy of FireFox running, but he does that only to keep tabs on the competition as it isn’t on his primary machine. The article I found where he supposedly explains further says he uses Maxthon. Well does that further help or hurt the case that Internet Explorer as released by MicroSoft isn’t all that? I myself usually run two or three browsers to compare the look of web pages in them. It makes sense he would do the same to keep up on the latest, but why Maxthon … because the stock version lacks useability features!

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As predicted, Microsoft’s efforts to license the new SenderID anti-SPAM technology is causing all sorts of problems with the Open Source community. Microsoft want their alleged intellectual property to be made part of the new industry standard on mail authentication. The problem is that their “license” is not compatible with the GPL and other Open Source licenses. What that means is that some of the biggest MTA ‘s (mail server applications) in use on the Internet may not be able to use the new technology. I suspect Microsoft hopes that will encourage people to buy their own mail server software, or perhaps they consider it a potential lever to use against OSS (Open Source Software) sometime in the future.

Sendmail, Postfix, Courier and other Open Source MTA’s have licenses that basically make anyone using the software a “sub licensee”, something that may well be incompatible with Microsoft’s IP license. As it stands right now, Sendmail have created a testing milter plug-in for SenderID, but did so without any license with Microsoft.

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Microsoft have said in a recent filing to the SEC that it expects sales in 2005 will not be able to keep up with previous years, and that Open Source Software (OSS) is one of the reasons for the less than optimistic forecast.

I find that rather odd that only a week ago, Paul Roworth, Microsoft Australia’s platform strategy manager said:

The perceived threat from Linux is only a misconception and has no validity.
Linux, receives far too much publicity because the truth is that Linux is not challenging Microsoft’s leadership position in the marketplace.
Microsoft’s losses are generally sensationalised; low profile wins by Linux are over-rated, all of which contributes to the misconception.

Is it just me or do Mr Roworth’s statements contradict somewhat, what MS have said in the SEC filing?

It isn’t just “losing” to Linux or other Open Source that is hurting Microsoft, the “threat” of Open Source is almost as bad. Any smart company (or government) that wants a better deal from Microsoft has only to install OpenOffice.org or Linux of some sort on a few machines and Microsoft will drop their pants to make sure they keep the companies business. That aspect is seriously cutting into Microsoft’s profit margins on the big deals. (Ironically not many of those companies are realising just how badly they were being overcharged before. If Microsoft can happily make massive price cuts to compete with Linux, doesn’t that mean that they’ve been overcharging in the past?)

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Google has added some much needed new features to their adwords service. For those of you out there that are webmasters, and make some additional revenue from putting Google adwords ads on your site, these changes are very welcome.

The first of the changes is the best one (in my opinion). You can now have more then one ad block her page, (to a limit of three). Some pages are so long, that they would benefit from more then one ad. (on many of our pages, the ads are so small that most people don’t notice them at all.)

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