All are welcome in purgatory

Now Amber is pretending to be mad at me for not trying to stop her from taking the promotion in the Queen’s England. “Isn’t there some sort of quarantine on pets?” I asked. “If Apache can’t go, I’ll have to stay here.”

No More Wine?

Microsoft’s somewhat subtle antics against Wine — not Chianti, the program that enables Linux to run Windows apps — have been reported publicly, but now a mole tells me that the word around Redmond town is that certain Microsofties consider the open-source scripting language PHP to be the biggest threat to its own ASP .Net. Will Microsoft try to put PHP developers in app-dev purgatory?

Meanwhile, the Army will be showing Oracle Consulting the door when it completes Phase 1 of an IT project in Alabama. Little guys will compete for the Phase 2 work to get the Army closer to its small-business contracts quota. One of my undercover Oracle agents said that execs got wind that members of its on-site consulting team were discussing employment opportunities with some of those small businesses. So what did Oracle do? It removed all members of the project whom it suspected were pre-emptively watching out for their paychecks, pending an internal investigation of whether they gave intellectual property to another company. Oracle then back-filled the project with consultants already slated to be cut.

Ghost in the Machine

One of my informants recently installed Windows XP on a laptop. By default, XP presents an account list that one may add to or choose from. He then wanted to add a user called Administrator, but the system would not let him because one is extant after installation. So my man did about the only thing he could: He changed the login mode to act like Windows 2000 and logged in as Administrator using a null password. I wonder how many installed copies of Windows XP Pro are put in limbo because no one knows how to change login modes and change the Administrator password?

AT&T, meanwhile, is up to something. One of my undercover agent’s wireless phone was displaying “no service” in the Jersey shore area. It was highly unusual because he had switched from Sprint to AT&T years before for AT&T’s excellent coverage in that locale. He finally called AT&T and was told, “We’ve turned down the signal strength because we’re switching to GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications].”

Amber claimed that the rabies quarantine in England is over now. Oh well, I guess that means I will need to play a different card to get myself out of going with her.