Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft

Welcome to OCSON 2006

jcannon — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 07:29:45 GMT

Welcome to this year's Open Source Conference in Portland, OR - we're very excited to be participating and will be updating the site frequently this week with photos, updates & blogs from our trip. We also figured you would want a space to discuss and share your experiences as well - so we've launched this as one of our first forums. You can also check out O'Reillys Conference news page.

Forums are not moderated, much like comments. However, you must register. This is also our first forum, so please send suggestions, or any issues you have to port25@microsoft.com.

Looking forward to our official kick-off tomorrow morning w/ the O'Reilly Radar day.....although if you were around today (tutorials mostly) - it was a sweltering 93+. Stay cool

- Port 25 Team

final

girish — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:43:13 GMT

final

developers

girish — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:09:57 GMT

learn silverlight

change

girish — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:29:00 GMT

Community by girish

girish — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:44:46 GMT

Join this community

gnnnbnn

girish — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:01:38 GMT

fhmhgmhghmgfmg

AD: Synchronization between unicodepwd and userPassword

fenomeno — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:03:12 GMT

Hi,

Supposing that we have extended the Active Directory Schema with the Person class, is it possible to set up Active Directory to automatically update the userPassword attribute every time unicodepwd is updated?

Password in the userPassword field shoud be stoted in a compatible fashion for some UNIX services (MD5 hashes, crypt, etc.)

Thanks in advance.

Multi-OS

ChrisBradley — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 01:45:26 GMT

Using a technology called PearPC which emulates a power pc G3 chip, I've successfully run MAC OSX and Windows (using Innotek VirtualBox) at the same time on the same Linux Box. Each one operates as its own independent system.

The only thing I've had trouble with to date, is getting the Networking to work with the MAC, so essentially, the MAC is internetless. Being that this is fairly new technology though, only a year or so old, its remarkable that it works on this box:

Compaq SR2002X 512MB Memory AMD Sempron 3200+ NVIDIA GeForce 6150LE

Enhanced with SanDisk 1GB MMC/SD Memory Chip Used as Linux Swap

Here are some screenshots:

Windows with Networking

http://www.noisecontrolpublishing.com/timeswiki/index.php?title=Image:Macxplinux2.png

Mac and Windows First Trial Run

http://www.noisecontrolpublishing.com/timeswiki/index.php?title=Image:Macxplinux.png

The next frontier - YouTube Embedding

ChrisBradley — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 07:32:19 GMT

I just tonight compleeted a 7 day organization of 7 channels of YouTube Music Video content. It didn't require much from a programming standpoint, as their services do most of the work.

Here's what's neat about it,

You can embed their player as an object in your index.html file on your virtual server,

and use their playlists to send content to the player. So it is all managed from within YouTube,

Except for some of the little add-on things I created to switch channels (a circular channel switcher)

Each instance of the player has its own playlist, so conceivably, right now I am playing more videos than MTV.com or MTV2.com

in a format that is easier to read than all of their heavyweight mumbo jumbo.

Viacom - I'm still unemployed...

I become more dangerous, the longer that is the case...LOL

http://www.noisecontrolpublishing.com for a demonstration.

Complete Submersion In Wifi

ChrisBradley — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 04:11:46 GMT

Its rare that anything this cool happens to me, that I feel like blogging about it, and spending some real time on explaining it all.

Yesterday, a friend of mine decided to buy a laptop. Not just any laptop, but a spec perfect laptop for the applications that she needs, and today, I had an opportunity to outrig the thing to my own personal specifications for her.

My first step was setting up her e-mail and IM accounts, that was easy enough, if I could have remembered that gmail now uses 995 for pop (secure pop). In any case - getting past that - the next phase was experimenting with the vino clients in Linux on my PC’s and seeing if I could find something comparable for windows. Because I wanted to be able to take control of the mouse and patch things up if she had troubles with the system, which inevitably she will.

A little bit of history on my PC’s. I bought them both this year. One is slightly older than the other, but they have about the same specs as this one. They are an e-machine and a compaq. The compaq even has nifty compact flash slots so I can use it with my digital camera Sandisk memory chips and move around 250 photos with a point and click.

Both of my PC’s run Linux now. It is just more flexible and runs faster with the customizations built into the version I use (frugalware .7). Frugalware uses the pacman package manager from arch linux and adopts a middle of the road package management slack philosophy - which is that it is easy to use with pacman - but available to have posix compilations. I still have to read up on posix btw.

Up until this Acer pc - I’ve had nothing but headaches with wifi. But literally with Windows Vista Basic installed (which is a perfect match for the 512MB ram) it was just a point and click at the connect frame - and I connected directly to my wireless Linksys WRT54g router. The technology on the antenna side (built into the computer) is called 802.11g (I believe - don’t want to mistype).

Anyway - once all the pc’s were connected on the router, at their various addresses 192.168.1.101, 102, and 103 respectively, all I had to do was search for and install TightVNC for Windows - (both server and client) and I am able to either view the windows desktop remotely, and manipulate it, or to view my Linux desktops upstairs remotely from the kitchen.

I can’t tell you what a joy its been to be free of my upper room scenario and actually be around people and life for a day. I made cheese sandwiches for lunch here in the kitchen and had a couple of hard boiled eggs while hanging out in America - and I’ve been listening to .ogg files that I ripped from my certified collection of CD’s all day. Some of the artists I listened to included David Bowie, Yellow Card. Poe, Depeche Mode, and Bob Marley. I even threw in the second half of the musical rent early this morning for good measure.

In essense, I’m saying that the life on IRC and the life in reality is really a pleasant mix. And I didn’t feel like I was trapped in any one particular place. I plan to buy one of these neat little guys as soon as is earthly possible.

That way the desktops can sit on the desk, and I can go where I please. And the virtual servers out there in lala land can keep virtual serving.

Smile, there aren’t many days when you can actually call it a day and say, man, I really enjoyed this.

Talk to you soon,

-Christopher J. Bradley

Microsoft vs. "Open"?

fluke — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:15:50 GMT

In a Port 25 article called "Mindedness," Bill Hilf has asked the readers of Port 25 (largely targetting the OSS community) to keep an open mind. He points out that a lot of conversations tend to point to the past and fail to acknowledge the change that has occured or the current situation. So, I have been trying to keep an open mind and so far I have liked some of what I have heard from Port 25. The overall message seems to be that Microsoft no longer considers open-source the enemy but something that contributes to a hybred enviroment. As such, strongely FOSS based shops should consider Microsoft to help augment their solution just as much as strongely MS shops should consider possible FOSS solutions.

However, today's Slashdot included an item which it labelled "Microsoft Attempts to Quash OSS Recommendations" and a link to: http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/01/commission

Rather than give a summary of the article (and thus add my bias to the summary), I will leave it to the reader to read the article themselves. It is relatively short and I think the issue it raises goes to the mission of Port 25.

I would like to point out that I do not bring up this article here to attack Microsoft. That angle on the article is already being covered well enough on Slashdot. Instead, I feel there is two sides to every story and since this article has probably been brought to the attention of several of the Port 25 readers at this point anyways, I thought it might be a good idea to open up discussion here.

Questions I have after reading the article:

1) There does not seem to be a unified front yet on how Microsoft should handle OSS. Do most people at MS share Gerri Elliot's view or Port 25's view when it comes to open source?

2) There has been several times where a small group at Microsoft has made promises to be dedicated to an open enviroment and the bottom line has resulted in that commitment coming to an end. How much faith should we put in MS having changed when someone at the VP level seems to pushing the same old stance?

Again, this is not ment to be an attack. I recognize that even largely pro-FOSS companies have a non-unified front toward FOSS. And also, largely pro-FOSS companies also have VPs that haven't gotten on board with the company's new mission regarding OSS. So, I take the article with a grain of salt. But at the same time I think it does effect the opinion of members of the FOSS community and with Port 25's mission to open a dialog to these people, I would hope this is considered on topic.

Thanks

A different view on Interop

Cay — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 22:12:03 GMT

I think with WS, CORBA (IDL) and other source code the biggest Interop is on Operation System level.Applications often only run on versionxx.yy._zz

I think the real interop problem to be solved is to agree on comon OS minimum environment (maybe just with the most essential features) as system can then virtualize on that enviroment and applications that do not change very often like your accounts can then run on this for much longer then today.

This is also the reason that all the 3270 screens (on emulator as the virtualisation engine;-)) written in COBOL are so popular with business as they save a lot of money on upgrades. I know that this is not popular with people who want to sell software or support but it is impossible for many businesses to develop an application for 5-8 years with the crrent change on OS Interop. versionings.

Sometimes it is funny that today applications on different OS can talk together but to have two applications on a same OS but different versions causes a real problem as the vendor is interested to keep the business running. If we do not break that cirle the 3270 will still be there in 10 years.