Here it is, about 1 p.m. on New Year's Day, and here I am, slaving over a hot
keyboard as the snow falls and accumulates outside. In the American tradition
of doing as little work as possible on a federal holiday, let's jump around
and take a brief look at several topics.

#1. Microsoft Home Server

It hasn't been around very long, and the installed base, fortunately, is limited.
That's a good thing, because MHS (yes, I know it once stood for Novell's Message
Handling Service, but that was long ago) has a penchant for, well, corrupting
data under certain circumstances. This occurs when MHS is under an extreme load
while doing a large file copy. Furthermore, it happens only when server's cache
is full and the user simultaneously edits a file previously saved to a shared
folder.

A Microsoft Knowledge Base posting,
titled "When you use certain programs to edit files on a home computer
that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when you save
them to the home server," urges users not to use Windows Vista Photo Gallery,
Windows Live Photo Gallery, OneNote 2003, OneNote 2007, Outlook 2007, Microsoft
Money 2007 and SyncToy 2.0 Beta under some conditions. It also has happened
to files from Intuit's Quicken and QuickBooks.

Fortunately, I haven't run into the problem -- yet. But I do use Outlook, Money,
SyncToy, and QuickBooks. I'm being very careful. If you've recommended MHS to
any of your clients (in response to the inevitable, "you've taken care
of my enterprise, so what should I do at home" queries) this is something
you'll need to understand fully.

#2. Netscape, R.I.P.

As the sun was setting on 2007, so too did it set on Netscape, the venerable
browser that launched household use of something called the World Wide Web,
which itself was a piece of a larger entity called the Internet. Until then,
we lived in an online universe driven largely by CompuServe, MCI Mail, and thousands
of dial-up bulletin board services.

On Dec. 28, AOL, which long ago acquired Netscape and CompuServe in separate
transactions, finally put a needle into the arm of Netscape Navigator, the browser
we all once used and that few people now remember.

For the history-challenged among us, Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark created Mosaic
Communications in late 1994 to market their browser (built upon technology developed
at the Univ. of Illinois). With no real competition, they owned virtually the
entire market. That was until another software company, one located in Redmond,
Wash., launched its own browser the following August. Called Internet Explorer
and given away for free, it soon took over the market. Netscape eventually stopped
charging for its browser, but by then it was game over. In mid-1998, AOL snapped
up Netscape for more than $4 billion. What's that worth today? Don't ask.

While IE continues to rule the world, it's not alone. Firefox now holds roughly
16 percent of the browser market, though there are some applications that don't
work with it. Microsoft, of course, gave up on IE for the Mac a while back,
where Apple's Safari now reigns supreme.

For solutions integrators, there's no money in browsers, but having one fewer
to support will almost certainly make life a tiny bit easier for developers
of Web applications. Which brings me to…

#3. A new cultured Perl

Among the most-used and most-underappreciated technologies is Perl, the scripting
language that drives zillions of Web applications. (For the trivia minded, Perl
is an acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language.)

For the first time in a half-decade, there is a new release of Perl. A run-time
interpreted language, Perl is an essential component of interactive Web apps,
systems utilities, and its long-standing use in development of CGI scripts.

The new version is faster, smaller, exhibits improved portability, and adds
new comparators as well as other features. For the developers on your staff,
Perl 5.1 is a must have.

I'm off to Vegas (again) for the Consumer Electronics Show (again). If I see
anything appropriate for the integrator market, I'll report on it here.

ITworld.com

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