Windows

No, this is not an exotic seafood/glass recipe. Yesterday (well, Tuesday evening) I was sent down to Poole to set up a caching proxy server for a customer... on Windows. Working with a Microsoft operating system is a little bit unusual in my open source support job, but hey, it pays the bills. It turned out to be surprisingly easy (or rather, my preparation had been sufficiently thorough). We'd budgeted the entire day to set things up - but I had Squid running by 9:20am, and was authenticating against Active Directory by 10am (with a choice of methods; single-sign on with NTLM or prompting the user for credentials). So we had coffee. By 11am there was log rotation and we had tweaked the config file, and by 12pm there were HTML reports of all the accesses (which was originally going to be the optional bonus if-we-had-time feature). So we had some more coffee, and I caught an early train home. ...

June 30 - "That's the last day when large computer makers — the Dells, HPs and Lenovos of the world — will be allowed to preinstall Windows XP on new PCs." -- Computerworld story What caught my eye about this was the fact that OEM manufacturers actually won't be allowed to continue installing XP. This seems quite odd to someone used to distributions of GNU/Linux - sure, security support from the distribution might end, and you might well be hard-pushed to find someone to support your seven year-old software, but if your customers want the older, faster version of the operating system, you will always be allowed to sell it.