The U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for Novell to continue their Wordperfect anti-trust suit against Microsoft. Novell's argument is that anti-competitive operating system issues caused their once mighty Wordperfect suite to come tumbling down. This turn of fortune cost Novell to the tune of $1 billion. The lawsuit Novell has filed against Microsoft is for damages potentially in the order of $3 billion.

Whilst everyone agrees Microsoft is no saint the fact of the matter is Novell and Wordperfect got beaten by aggressive pricing and marketing rather than significant operating system level anti-competitive action. Microsoft gained market share by aggressively dropping the price of Office to the point that it was less than half that of its competitors. Rather than following suit and matching dollar for dollar these moves Novell blindly followed their original pricing structures inherited from when they purchased Wordperfect.

Novell's past business blunders aside, given Microsoft's recent showing in the courts you would have to say its an even money bet that some financial compensation arises from this case. Whether it is in the order of $3 billion is unlikely but even a quarter of that amount is still a hefty sum. Does there come a time when Microsoft executives look at Novell and decide it is cheaper to buy them outright than cough up massive legal fees and reparations?

A few years ago the idea of Microsoft buying Novell would be dismissed on anti-competitive grounds, but these days Microsoft faces stiff competition from the likes of Red Hat, IBM, Sun, Oracle and of course Google. Even in recent years the two companies have hardly been competing against each other. The controversial agreement struck a few years ago between the two has seen them in coopetition rather than competition without so much as a mumble from regulatory bodies.

Given Novell's current financial position if a $3 billion payout were on the cards it is not a huge leap to suggest that Microsoft simply buy them out rather than buy their forgiveness. Whilst it would take more than $3 billion to buy the company it would not take much more (relatively speaking) considering Novell has a current market cap of $2.1 billion. Also from a shareholder's perspective an acquisition is much better than a payout as their investment is preserved and built upon instead of going to lawyers and the opposition.

From a technology perspective Novell have two things to offer Microsoft - SUSE and Identity Management. Microsoft currently resell SUSE and have a comparatively weak Identity Management business so both assets could be put to good use. Netware, Novell's other technology is at end of life but this customer base is currently having to weigh up a tricky migration to SUSE or Windows Server. As a consequence owning both end points of this decision would not be such a bad thing from a sales point of view.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to get over is the general idea that Microsoft cannot sell Linux because it invented Windows. Given the recent announcements at Mix'08 in cloud computing and advertising it would seem that Microsoft no longer sees itself as simply a Windows company. Arguably another indication of this is their determination to buy the LAMP-centric (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) Yahoo. Instead of migrating all the tried and tested Yahoo services over to a Windows server infrastructure, wouldn't it be simpler to establish Microsoft Linux through the acquisition of Novell? 

We went up to the Coromandel again this year but the weather was not nearly as good as last year - in fact the words 'tropical cyclone' spring to mind....

This post expands upon a talk I gave recently about using blogs as an academic research and thought development tool.

Identify interesting people in your field of study

Academic research is one part original thought and ninety nine parts identifying the limits of existing knowledge. This task can take up a good part of your time and when it comes to the Web identifying movers and shakers in your field can be frustrating and highly unproductive task.

Online communities: social networks and newsgroups

The first place to start when identifying interesting people in your line of study is the various social networks and interest groups on the Web.

As far as social networks go arguably the two most productive for finding people are Facebook and LinkedIn. Whilst Facebook is aimed at the casual user there is a diverse range of interest groups forming around nearly every topic imaginable. Don't despair at the variable quality of the content within these groups, the fact you are almost always dealing with real people makes the effort needed to browse through these groups worthwhile. Likewise whilst the business-centric LinkedIn lacks Facebook's group capabilities you'll be surprised how many people in your extended professional network share similar interests or could be of benefit to your research.

At the more traditional end of the spectrum newsgroups like those at Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are good places to to find clusters of people interested in your research. Most newsgroups are welcoming to newcomers, especially those that have something to offer, but it pays to passively monitor potential groups for a while in order to properly gauge the tone and style of the people involved. Whilst it may seem easy to charge straight in, it is hard to rebuild bridges if you start things off on the wrong foot. For example it is not good karma for your first newsgroup posting to read "can someone tell me everything about subject X".

A typical Google Groups group (click to enlarge)

Social bookmarking

There are a growing number of websites dedicated to storing and sharing your Web bookmarks.

The most notable of these is del.icio.us but there are others such as Diigo and Simpy that are also very good.

These online repositories assist your research by helping you find people with similar interests as yourself. This is achieved by browsing through the 'tags' people associate with their bookmarks, whilst some services can even recommend people who appear to share similar interests as yourself. Social bookmarking can also act like a human powered search engine by enabling you to track popular or new bookmarks on a specific topic. However the drawback of social bookmarking is that for the system to function at its full potential you must publish your bookmarks for the world to see. This maybe a problem if privacy is an issue with your research or you just don't like the idea of being 'on show'.

Yesterday Google Docs users where given the ability to define spreadsheet-backed Web Forms for gathering feedback from people. The interface for doing this is very clean and it is a piece of functionality that could prove to be a real time-saver for those wishing to conduct quick surveys or gather structured feedback on a topic. Even though Google Docs doesn't compare well in a straight-up comparison with Microsoft Excel it is Web-centric functionality like this that put it ahead, especially in environments where spreadsheets are used more for communication than data crunching.

Below is a screen-cast demonstrating the use of Web Forms within Google Docs. It runs for a couple of minutes and covers the creation of the form, filling it out and receiving the data.

Ubuntu 6.06LTS is a useful platform for VMWare because it has a small footprint by todays standards and is supported by Canonical until 2011. Unfortunately installing VMWare Server 1.0 can be a little painful given there are no binary kernel modules for Ubuntu in this release.

Fortunately there are some excellent guides for installing VMWare on this platform such as this one from HowtoForge. What follows is an installation script based on the HowtoForge guide that saves the administrator a lot of time and solves a bug along the way.

With recent releases of Quicktime and OSX Leopard Apple has removed the need for most people to purchase the professional version of Quicktime to do simple things like play video in full screen. This is a great development but it still doesn't address the fact that as a video player Quicktime is limited in the number of video codecs it supports out of the box. Fortunately Perian is a fantastic Quicktime extension which handles the installation and updating of a range of third-party codecs (including DivX) through one very simple interface. A great tool that when combined with the Flip4Mac Player provides gives Quicktime the ability to play almost anything you can throw at it.

 

Google recently released the highly anticipated Android mobile phone platform to developers. Android promises to be a more consistent and powerful environment for mobile applications compared to what currently exists in the fragmented mobile market. Whilst many people were disappointed that Android was not a Google-branded iphone; from a developers perspective if it can gain broad adoption it will make the developing powerful, Internet-centric mobile applications significantly easier.

One of the most interesting aspects of Android is that it is released under the Apache v2 software license. This license grants obligation-free use of the code to any party. This is different to other popular open-source licenses like the GPL which requires source-code modifications to be made publically available. In the competitive mobile phone market such an obligation is problematic which is why Sun releases the Java Mobile Edition (ME) under different open and closed source licenses.

A question that was hanging around Android was how Google had managed to release a Java mobile platform under the Apache license given that the licenses Sun release JavaME under are not compatible. Stefano Mazzocchi points out on his blog that Google have outflanked Sun by releasing a platform that supports the Java language but does not use Sun's Java compiler or the Java byte-code at its core. Instead Google have created Dalvik, a virtual machine released under the Apache license which understands how to compile Java source code into its own byte-code for execution.

This move outflanks Sun's licensing policies, essentially cutting them out of the Android equation. It is a gutsy move by Google but it does free them to focus on developing a platform they have complete control over rather than working in partnership with Sun. From the perspective of Java as a language this move wouldn't seem to pose any problems as the mobile and desktop/server worlds have always been quite distinct. Plus if anything Google's use of the Apache Harmony JavaSE libraries may actually make developing for the mobile and desktop more consistent than Sun's distinct JavaME and JavaSE implementations.

All things considered this news has made Android more interesting from my perspective. Before I heard this it was just another JavaME implementation but now it sounds like Google will have the capability to do some really interesting things. What has yet to be seen is what level of support (if any) this platform will have on the iPhone. Google and Apple have a strong relationship there and it would seem like Dalvik runtime would be a natural fit on the device if it is lightweight, fast and provides developers with the ability to write applications for both Android and the iPhone. 

Edit 15th November 2007: After a few weeks of use I have found the automount technique described here is a little unreliable not only from the perspective of keeping the mount point active but also for maintaining the correct file permissions. This maybe addressed in future OSX 10.5 updates but for the time being using user-level mounts via Finder or Go -> Connect to Server is more reliable. To automatically mount a volume save the mount point as a Favorite (Go -> Connect to Server -> Add favorite) and then drag this favorite (stored in ~/Library/Favorites) to the Login Items under Account Preferences.

Apple have pleased a number of people by laying to rest the NetInfo Manager in OSX 10.5 'Leopard'. Many of the functions performed by this Registry-like tool have been incorporated into the far tidier Directory Utility tool. Unfortunately whilst this tool includes the ability to define automounted NFS shares the same capability is not provided for Samba. This is a pain because if you have a couple of Samba servers on the network that need to be connected all the time, a good example being a network share for iTunes music.

Fortunately all is not lost as we can still edit the automount configuration files directly so that our Samba shares are always accessible. To start with open up the Terminal application as an administrative user and then use sudo to create a bash shell.

sudo bash (enter)

You will be prompted to enter your administrator password at this point.

We will now create a file entitled auto.smb in the /etc/ directory to hold our server details.

pico /etc/auto.smb (enter)

In this file enter the following line (add more lines for extra servers/shares) 

$Sharename -fstype=smbfs ://$Username:$Password@$Server/$Share

Where:

$Sharename = the name you want to give the mount point
$Username = the user to connect to the server as
$Password = password of the user
$Server = the name of the server (dns/wins entry)
$Share = the name of the share on the server

As this file stores the username and password to the server in plain text set the permissions of the file so that only the root user can read it.

chmod 600 /etc/auto.smb (enter)

Now edit the /etc/auto_master file and append the auto.smb record at the end of the file. The auto_master file controls all the automounts for the system, leave everything about this file alone except for the extra line at the end. 

pico /etc/auto_master (enter)

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master # Use directory service
/net -hosts -nobrowse,nosuid
/home auto_home -nobrowse
/Network/Servers -fstab
/-  -static
/Users/Resources auto.smb

This will tell the automounter to mount the shares defined in the /etc/auto.smb file under the /Users/Resources directory. So for example if auto.smb defined a Music share we would end up with /Users/Resources/Music. Note: You do not have to use /Users/Resources.

With the configuration files in place it is now time to tell the automounter to refresh the settings. Exectute the following command:

automount -vc (enter)

If all goes well you should see the following output from this command:

automount: /net updated
automount: /home updated
automount: /Users/Resources updated
automount: no unmounts

Now you should be able to open the Finder and see a /Users/Resources directory that lists (and magically takes you to) all the network shares you have defined in the auto.smb file.

Hopefully this is only a temporary fix and Apple includes the option to mount Samba as well as NFS shares in Directory Utility. Technically it is not hard to do and the end result would be far tidier. 

AppFresh is a very useful and user-friendly software update tool for OSX. Although Apple includes a very capable Software Update utility within OSX it is only made available to Apple applications. This leaves the thousands of other applications built for the operating system out in the proverbial cold. As a consequence unlike Linux with its powerful apt, rpm, yum and yast tools, keeping all of your OSX software up to date is a manual affair. To ease the burden of users many OSX applications now include their own update checking routines which is handy but hardly a great solution as it often means being interrupted during your working day with the message that you need to update the application right now.

AppFresh is a breath of fresh air when it comes to software updating in OSX. Currently it is in active development and a preview version is available for free. AppFresh leverages the iusethis.com database to determine whether your system's applications are up to date. This is a brilliant solution to the problem of determining software availability as it places the burden of data collection on the user-base and not a single party.

The AppFresh user-interface once the initial scan has been completed (click to enlarge)