The feature set of ORF 3.0 is finally getting a solid shape and we are going to publish the development roadmap for 3.0 and maybe the version(s) after.

As the first ORF Software Maintenance Agreements are going to expire on December 1, 2005, it is pressing to let our clients know that renewing the agreement is a good investment: they are going to get improved software for their $99. And definitely we have to give 3.0 a deadline and tell about the expected features.

Now let us forget about how much I am concerned about keeping the deadline (man, it is tight!) and about feature selection, but I am also concerned about our competitors: is disclosing our plans to the competing companies a good idea?

Not that we have some mysterious super-secret technology on stock that is going to change spam filtering for once for all (but we do have a few good ideas :), it is just that our competitors are usually larger than us. I mean, larger by factors. They can easily do in weeks what we do in months and so they can entice our clients by giving them the features earlier that we want to give.

Regardless concerns, I think it is pretty much clear that our clients are first, we must tell them what they are going to get for their money. Competitors are our concern, not theirs. I feel quite naked, though :)

This is a good link abount different presentation styles:
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/the_zen_estheti.html

The site itself contains good thoughts about how to held good presentations. Not that I has to do that very often, but if I have to then I would like to do my best.

This is posted mainly to keep the link in a safe place…

As Mark reports in his blog, Sony finally admitted that there are security problems with its DRM solution and promised to offer a rootkit-less CD version to customers who already purchased the DRM-protected CDs. Also Sony is going to recall these CDs from the stores (about 2 million items).

Battle won. Nice work.

Come on Borland, you can do it better. From the Delphi 2006 page:

• The ultimate productivity force-multiplier for Windows® development
• Ensure visual consistency with customizable VCL designer guidelines
• Easily deploy persisted applications with executable state diagrams
• Seamlessly reverse-engineer, migrate, and re-use existing code

I am in the middle of setting up a new server that will host our web sites (and other thins as mail, news etc). It is hosted in Hungary’s largest ISP, t-online. *

To ease the migration process I will have the same web configuration and file locations as it is on the current machine. I thought create the same settings will require a few hours.
Well, I was wrong. I am doing this for three days now. Point-and-click administration interfaces are a good thing for a beginner admin (or for someone not familiar with the actual software he/she tries to manage), but a real PITA when it comes to transferring the configuration to another computer. Instead of copying a few config files to the new server and restart the services, I have been clicking through wizards of all kind – DNS, web site, new virtual directories etc. The DNS was the most easier of all as the windows DNS service – for some reason – might store the zone information in a standard text file.

But the migration is coming to and end now. I have a few things left (will finish them today) and after the ECC ram modules arrive I will put it into the server room and forget about it for another 4 years…

* Surprisingly, having our server hosted in Hungary means no problems for our clients. The internet is a good thing, after all :)

Mark Russinovich, a Windows expert and author of the famous Sysinternals tools discovered that Sony’s latest copy protected CDs install a small rootkit to protect the media content. Bothering? Add that the rootkit cannot be uninstalled using the Add/Remote Programs Control Panel applet and even if you bypass the file protection of the rootkit, deleting the drivers will cause you to “lose” your CD drive. Also add that the rootkit drivers are poorly written: they may make your system instable and open an easily exploitable backdoor for viruses and other malware, because the “DRM protection” hides any folder containing the string “$sys$”. Driver bugs may also prevent to boot your system in Safe Mode.

If this is OK for Sony, I have great news for them: they just lost a customer. I will not buy any Sony CDs marked with “Copy Protection” and I will dissuade everyone around me from buying Sony CDs. No music is worth driving my system into crashes or making the system insecure. It is just not the way how copy protection should be implemented.