A friend and co-worker from back when I worked on proprietary software has now seen the light and is writing Free software in his spare time instead.
Admittedly, software designed to produce correctly-formatted "apparatus" (citation footnotes and bibliography) for publications conforming to the Society for Biblical Literature's SBL Handbook of Style: For Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies is probably the epitome of 'niche', but I'm told the academic world is loving it. You'd be surprised how picky people can be about footnote formatting.
A small piece of crypto news.
Since HTTP 1.1, the technique of "virtual hosting" - having multiple websites on the same IP address - has been extremely widespread. This is done by sending a "Host:" header in the initial HTTP connect, which tells the server which site you want.
However, it's not possible to do the same trick with SSL, because at the time you create the SSL connection, the HTTP exchange has not happened, so the webserver doesn't know which certificate to send. The fix is SNI (server name indication), as defined in RFC 3546, a way of putting the host info in the SSL handshake.
SNI is supported in Firefox 2, IE 7 on Vista, Opera 7.6+ and other modern browsers. For Apache, mod_gnutls supports it, but not mod_ssl (OpenSSL). I'm not sure about IIS.
Now the news: Steven Henson recently backported the SNI support in OpenSSL 0.9.9-dev to 0.9.8 (the stable version). This should speed up the day when SNI support is available in stable releases of Apache. Sadly, it'll probably still be a while before it can be used on the public web, because the SSL improvements for IE 7 are only provided on Vista. :-(
The family I am currently staying with bought a new 1440x900 monitor for their reasonably old Windows XP computer. However, the onboard graphics card wouldn't support that resolution, and so the desktop was stretched - it looked terrible. I tried installing a second graphics card (I couldn't see how to turn the first one off in the BIOS) but that didn't work very well. The machine kept failing to boot. It eventually turned out that the cheapest fix was to get Dell to send them a brand new computer, including another monitor the same size!
I was somewhat apprehensive about them having to spend ages setting it up, but as we were preparing to do a long migration, Windows popped up a Welcome Centre, and told us about something called "Windows Easy Transfer". You run it on the Vista machine, it gives you an app to go and run on the XP computer, and then that app gathers up all the data and settings for all the accounts, bundles them up, and puts them into the correct places on the new computer (so e.g. pictures go in the new Pictures area, rather than My Documents/My Pictures). It imports all settings, wallpaper, the lot. It's incredibly easy to use, and 2GB of data and settings moved across in a very short time. It can use a special cable, a network, CDs, DVDs or (the option I chose) one or more flash drives.
The family now feel quite at home on the new machine. Full marks to Microsoft. Some stuff from very old apps which didn't use "Application Data" for data files had to be moved manually, but that's not their fault.
So my question: does Linux have a Windows -> Linux migration tool like this? You would click "Migrate from Windows" on your Linux box, and it would either pull everything across the network, or give you an app to run on the Windows machine to tarball it all up and copy it across.
If not, why not?
I'm here this week, but on holiday again next week. I'm currently ploughing through the email/blog/newsgroup backlog.