Ministry of Education picks StarOffice I was happy to see that the Ontario Ministry of Education has selected StarOffice as its standard office suite. As someone who grew up a test subject under the Ministry, by learning computing on such systems as

• Commodore PET, with Waterloo Structured Basic as an alternate environment,
• IBM PCs with Waterloo Ports as the network applications manager, and
• the Burroughs ICON running QNX,

I'm happy to see some element of real standardization. (Plus a few other exposures to Radio Shack TSR Model 1s through to CoCos, a DEC PDP-11, and submitting Fortran jobs to the mainframe at Waterloo in various classes. It seems romantic now: a new, completely different system every year (or even every semester)...) The ICON was my favorite social hack: it came preconfigured with both administrator and teacher accounts in both English and French. A variant of RTFM gives one root privilege: read the French manual. Ultimately, I got in trouble for this, although trouble followed from viewing the administration as adversaries than causing any actual damage.

Dina passes government test

Dina passed the U. S. Department of the Interior's Federal Information Systems Security Awareness Online Course. Huzzah.

Procyon lotor rules our backyard

We recently uprooted our home office, transplanting it from a bedroom in the front house to the room attached to our garage. With the garage building at the back of the lot, I now have a clear view of the yard. Tonight the sensor lights tripped and I had a good staring exchange with a pair of raccoons. The Redwood City raccoon is no Arctictis binturong, but these two were rudely healthy and (I argue) nonplussed to be both illuminated and observed. (I'll skip over any rivalry with the various, large-lunged cats who've decided that the side of our house is the neighbourhood's romantic nightspot--the healthy trash around here guarantees a champion's diet to any raccoon with a bit of motivation, making him or her more than a match to a typical kitty.)

Since I now have prime suspects for last summer's tragic shredding of Ben's inflatable swimming pool, I'll see if I can get a picture of these two in the coming weeks.

sun.com survey on default secure install

Here's an interesting survey: Sun wants to know how secure the default install for Solaris 10 should be. If you listened to the NetTalk on Wednesday, then you might be able to guess that your input here probably means more work for my team and me.

(I suppose I should really split work blogging from home blogging. Oh, well: work's particularly fun right now.)

Stephen on NetTalk panel at sun.com

Stephen's one of the so-called "rocket scientists" in the Solaris 10 Technical Discussion being offered as a NetTalk tomorrow. (It's at 1pm PDT.) You can register for the live session (or for details about hearing a replay later).

(You would think folks would rather hear from computer scientists or software engineers or operating systems designers than rocket scientists on this kind of topic, but perhaps not...)