Thursday, April 22, 2004

Attendance
Ken B, Chris J, Lawrence L, Chris B, William P, Dave M


Meeting Business

PegaSoft Summer Retreat

PegaSoft's Annual Summer Retreat is a 3-day weekend in Ontario vacation
country with computer hacking, boating, fishing and an all-you-can-eat
breakfast.  This year's summer retreat is tentatively scheduled for the
August 21 weekend.

Membership

Chris B and Dan B owe membership dues.

Mailing List Failure

We've fallen back to the old develop mailing list.  Chris Browne said that
due to a change at his ISP the mailing list was taken down.  He would
attempt to restore it.

Open Forum - Industry Quote

Quote:   "Until Linux achieves the same level of reliability and security required of commercial operating
systems, it should not be used in critical defense systems...Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY-178B
operating system is being used in critical defense systems that require EAL 7 certification by the
U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)...but Linux has only achieved EAL 2. Even Microsoft Windows has
achieved EAL 4."
[Green Hills Software's CEO Dan O'Dowd regarding his Linux Security Controversy white paper]

The old classification was D (no security, i.e. DOS), C1 to C3,
up to A1 (mathematically provable security).  Linux falls into the C
category.  UNIX security was designed for an open environment.  The
problem with A1 operating systems is that they are so restrictive that
they are function poorly for practical applications.

The white paper goes on to say that the open involvement of China and
Russian developers on Linux poses a "national security threat".  He
fails to point out that MicroSoft software poses a much more dangerous
national security threat to those countries, where a single, closed
source company can add back doors easily and without peer review.

At least some of Mr. O'Dowd's assertions against Linux have little
logical or factual basis.

Headline: Sun Java Application Server Platform Edition 8 released
for free development [CNet]

This isn't a response to the war between Sun and IBM.  Solaris,
Linux and Windows all support Java.  The Mono project attempts to
port .Net to UNIX.  The availability of Edition 8 doesn't
guarantee that platform-dependant code isn't written.

Headline: Forrester Study shows that Windows and Linux are both secure
if properly deployed. [LinuxSecurity]

Reports that suggest Windows is less secure than Linux or vice versa
often overlook that the greatest security threat is administrators that
don't set up their systems properly.  Or that they don't have time to.

Another overlooked security threat is the installation of third-party
software onto any system.

Very early versions of Red Hat often opened up all available services
to the Internet.  If an attacker knew you were running Red Hat, he knew
what he could access.  OpenBSD purports to have no root exploits reported since 1997, probably
because all ports are closed by default.  The administrator must open
ports one-by-one until his system is working properly.

Headline: Sun and Microsoft set aside legal struggle: Sun gets
$2 billion in cash and Java will remain on Windows.  Microsoft
gets another anti-Linux ally and .Net on UNIX. [Cringley]

Sun is in poor shape.  A big ship can sink if many small holes are not
repaired.  Sun needs to reinvent itself as a hardware company to
survive.  There is demand for a mid-sized servers, especially reliable
servers for institutions like banks.  However, Sun has had reliability
problems with their recent hardware.

Java didn't make money for Sun and the software wars have been
draining the company's coffers.

Headline: Steve Jobs was voted the Wired Rave Award winner they most want to meet.
Peter Jackson was a distant second. [Wired]

Chris B. said he would like to meet Donald Knuth at organ recital, Knuth's hobby.

PegaSoft Project Updates

Software Projects

BUSH
- text templates
- stats library
- simple stacks/queues
- looked at using SDL/OpenGL as an off-screen graphing solution.

There is rumours of a second AdaScript shell in development to compete
against BUSH.  Ken questioned the market for two AdaScript shells and
wondered why such a person wouldn't contribute code to BUSH, an open
source project, for the benefit of the community.

2004 Workshops

It was suggested that PegaSoft should canvas people for topics they would
be interested in and what level of difficulty people wanted to see.

Chris B. wanted to raise the price of workshops to $750/day, to get
corporations to treat us seriously even if it meant competing with
companies like Learning Tree.  We would need to find some way to market
to corporations and the quality of the workshop materials and presentation
would have to improve accordingly.  Workshops are purchased by management
and they would have to be sold accordingly, not targetted to developers.

On the other hand, user groups prefer free things even though there is
no expert presentations or handouts.

Regarding the 2003 promotions, Ken said he emailed the standard Linux
newsgroups, TLUG and posted to Linux PR.  He couldn't remember if he sent
press releases to the free Toronto newspapers (i.e. Toronto Computes,
now called Hub).  It may be that such newspapers would require purchased
ads since that is how they make their money.

Chris B. said he was willing to present another PostgreSQL workshop.

The discussion would continue at the next PegaSoft dinner.

Call for Projects II: MPEG Logger

Ken pointed out that the general concensus was to work on the MPEG logger.
Chris J was to present details of his investigation of "Linux Toys" on
the mailing list but he had no details yet.

KTDV is a KDE TV package like TiVo that records, schedules and gets
channel information.

Dave M. was going to talk with Dan B. on Wednesday to begin creating
a project spec.

Several people had expressed interest in this project, including
Zbigniew K. and Chris J.

Contract Work

Ken announced that PegaSoft was looking for two full-time developers
to work on an upcoming contract for a web-based application using
PostgreSQL.  Details were to come up at a future meeting.  PegaSoft
would be expected to submit a formal proposal, including timelines
and costs.

Lawrence L. said he may know of 1 or 2 programmers who could
contribute.

Discussion: Logical Reasoning (Chris Jezovnik)

With Mel W's absence, Chris J repeated his Fallicies of Reasoning talk
for the benefit of those who missed it last month.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be Thursday, May 13, 2004.  Topic: TBA, possibly
a review of Chris Crawford's book on the psychology of computer games.