IMA writes: ”
Hong Kong, June 27, 2001. Internet Exchange Messaging Server (IEMS) 5, the latest messaging solution from developer International Messaging Associates (IMA) is now on official release.
IEMS 5?s interoperability bridges the best of what Linux and Windows have to offer as the software operates smoothly on both operating systems. IEMS 5 runs on Linux Red Hat 6.2, 7.0, 7.1; Caldera 2.3.1, VA Linux 6.2.3, Turbo Linux Server 6; Suse 7.1, Mandrake 7.2 and 8; and Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows NT.
IEMS 5 has gained favorable review by getting a four- bell rank from Tucows (www.tucows.com). This feature-rich software remains to be the most cost-effective messaging solution available in the market today.
IEMS 5 has a Message Store which allows users to access their e-mail anytime, anywhere through any POP3 or IMAP4 capable clients. Its Distribution List Manager allows users to automatically send messages to numerous lists of recipients by just sending to a single group address.
IEMS 5 provides system administrators easy maintenance through its disk quota management feature, allowing system administrators to allocate and manage disk usage at all times. IEMS 5?s anti-spam and anti-virus engines provide protection against threats of spamming and virus attacks. Further IEMS 5 can run in a distributed environment allowing computing capacity and resources to be distributed access different networked machines, resulting to faster and more efficient processing and message flow.
IEMS 5 is available for downloading and free evaluation through the IMA website at http://www.ima.com
———————————————-Sales and Marketing Contacts:Eric Arandez jearandez@ima.com
Ivy Siaivy@ima.com
Toll Free No. +1 (800) 549-2762
Fax +1 (888) 562-3561
Website: http://www.ima.com
“

I’ve never been a fan of self-quizzes, not of the pop-psychology kind
at least. Attempting to grid the vicissitudes of the human soul with a few
general questions strikes me as a hopeless endeavor.

I bring this up because my co-workers and I were recently given these
personality tests called the SELF Profile. A colleague had just taken
one of those day-long junior-management seminars and brought back this test to
administer to the rest of us so we could all understand each other,
work better together, blah, blah, blah.

I instantly hated the idea, in no small part because I saw it as a way
to hem me in. “Oh, Joab, he’s just the idiosyncratic/confrontational type,”
some junior manager might sum me up, waving off my critique of whatever
idiotic idea was being proposed at the moment. Besides, it looked tedious,
boxing my preferences within this multiple-choice format. “After a hard day’s
work, I prefer to…” was a typical question. And the two choices were a) Get
together with friends or b) Stay home and watch television. Well, some
days I enjoy the former, and other days I want the latter. And some days I
like to nap. Or get rip-roaring drunk. But those choices aren’t on the
questionnaire, are they?

We had three days to fill out these forms and tally the scores. From
this enterprise we would derive two separate numbers, the meaning of which
the aspiring junior manager would reveal at a meeting.

I never did find out what my personality type was, as, well, I never
filled out the questionnaire. I was busy with real work, and besides, I had an
attitude. With the deadline looming, I hurried into a co-worker’s
office.

“Quick,” I said, “let me see your sheet.”

“What, are you going to copy my work?” Jodi said jokingly, before
realizing that this was exactly what I planned to do. I had no intention
of actually taking the test but I needed a score, and I couldn’t just put
any old figures down. I had no idea what kind of scoring this involved; if
the result was supposed to be a number between one and 10 and I wrote
something like “27” or “H,” I’d be exposed as having the “cheater” type of
personality. I needed a number close to someone else’s, but a tad different, to make
it believable. Jodi had two and three, so I took a pair of twos. Pretty
innocuous, right?

When we gathered around the meeting table to find out the import of our
scores, the junior manager — I’ll call him Bob — drew this x-y axis with
four quadrants on a board, each quadrant representing a different
personality type — power seeker, lazy ass, things like that. Now here’s the funny
part — the center of this axis was not zero, but 3.5. So my score was
more extreme than Jodi’s. Bob explained that Jodi’s and my scores indicated
we had “factual” personalities. I’ll admit, Jodi is pretty darned studious.
But my score shaded much more of the quadrant than hers. According to SELF, I
was even more factual. I was like Spock, according to this test.

Anyone who knows me realizes what a crock this is. I have about as much
use for facts as an elephant has for an egg timer. It’s the lowliest editorial
intern, like the reviled Army private getting latrine duty, who gets
assigned the unenviable task of checking my stories for accuracy.

Still, I was factual enough to realize I’d be a fool not to exploit
such good fortune. “You know,” I reminded everyone afterward, “I’m the most
factual person in this office! I’m even more factual than Jodi!” I suggested,
seeing as how I was the one apparently least given to flights of fancy, that
maybe I should be the one to arbitrate intra-office disputes and give final
approval on projects. I foresaw winning arguments for months to come, all on my
trump card of factual superiority.

Only when Jodi threatened to blow the whistle did I shut up. “You keep
going with this, and the jig is up,” she warned. “They’ll find out how
factual you really are.” I suspect she was just jealous, though. We all can’t be
seen as so levelheaded, you know.

---

There are some self-knowledge quizzes on the Internet, though
admittedly ones more whimsical than SELF. Emode,
which promises an opportunity to “explore yourself online,” offers scads of
interesting insights. What kind of dog are you? Are you a great date?
An inquisitive self-help addict can spend days there.

Then there are “purity tests.” This seems to be an entire subculture,
revolving around probing quizzes in which increasingly extreme
questions are posed in “attempts to gauge how ‘pure’ you are within some realm of
experience,” according to the Purity
Tests site, which gathers dozens of such quizzes, ranging in topic
from engineering to pyromania to sex (but mainly sex). You can check your
intelligence at Free Online
IQ Test. For those of less secular mind, the Religion
Selector can help you find the faith most suited to your beliefs.

If you haven’t got time to fill out an entire questionnaire to
determine how smart or pure you are, you can at least get yourself a new name. The Hobbit Name Generator
lets you choose your Tolkien appellation. The Pagan Name Generator can
cut you moniker worthy of a vision quest (Mine was “Mars Elf-Arrow
Druida”). And
Gorm’s Viking Name Converter can give you a handle suitable for a life of raiding and plundering (“Joab
Nohair”).

Ready for 10000baseT? EE Times reports on rival preparations for the next generation of ethernet adapters, at 10 gigabits per second.

Information Security Magazine reports on the safety and history of SSH, or the Secure Shell, developed several years ago as a solution to the vulnerability inherent to a completely open system like the Internet.

Kelly McNeill writes “Each contribution made by an open-source programmer to projects in the mythical territory of ideas known as the “Noosphere” gives the programmer a bit of status. The more status gained through making contributions, the more admired, respected and “richer” each programmer becomes as a citizen of the Noosphere. If a programmer provides enough code to projects in the Noosphere, his or her status would be equivalent to that of a millionaire. What’s wrong with this fable?”

The book is now online for development review and feedback at: http://www.opendocspublishing.com/entry.lxp?lxpe=92

Open Docs Publishing has announced today that they plan to ship their
sixth book entitled “PostgreSQL: The Elephant Never Forgets” by the first week of August 2001. This title will include community version of PostgreSQL version 7.1, the PostgreSQL Enterprise Replication Server (eRserver) and the LXP application server. This will offer to companies the security of a replication server, data backup services, disaster recovery, and business continuity solutions previously limited to more costly commercial Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) packages. Who could ask for more?

Open Docs has gone one step further by not only including the complete source code for PostgreSQL, but a wealth of other tools such as PHP. The book will fully document installation procedures, administration techniques, usage, basic programming interfaces, and replication
capabilities of PostgreSQL. A complete reference guide will also be
included. Databases have become the core infrastructure of e-business, and once again Open Docs has put their writers hard at work to make sure that you will find this guide to be informative and everything you have been looking for in a PostgreSQL technical reference.

About Postgres and PostgreSQL:

Postgres is an active Database Management System that was originally developed at U.C. Berkeley. The Postgres project was led by Professor Michael Stonebraker. The project was originally funded by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army Research Office (ARO), along with the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the English as a Second Language Program (ESL). The Postgres project officially ended with version 4.2.

As the development of Postgres continued, it was renamed Postgres95 and SQL capabilities were added. During the continual evolution of Postgres95, it was later renamed PostgreSQL. The name PostgreSQL was chosen to reflect the standards based nature of the product and to allow comparison with commercial databases such as Sybase and Informix.

About Open Docs Publishing:

Open Docs is a publishing company specializing in technical books. They are a full service publishing company that offers authoring, editing, along with specialized programs that would allow companies to
maintain their focus on
development. Open Docs strives to maintain tight
quality control to ensure
that they publish only the best books. They take
pride in the work that
others find mind numbing; documentation.

Open Docs currently has three books in print. The
third book, “Securing and
Optimizing Linux; Red Hat Edition” is the number one
selling book and has
been for six months on LinuxCentral.com, a premiere
online Linux retailer.
They are currently preparing their fourth title
“Getting Stated with Yellow
Dog Linux”. If you would like to read more about
Open Docs and their Open
Source Documentation Fund you can visit their web
site at
http://www.opendocspublishing.com/

Questions & Comments:

Christine Parmer
cparmer@opendocspublishing.com
http://www.opendocspublishing.com/
+1 503-963-8316

Kelly McNeill writes “Numerous reasons have been offered as to why Microsoft has become fearful of open-source software (OSS). Some claim it has to do with philosophical arguments in favor of a single standard-bearer. That’s laughable, of course, because the users who have fought with MS Office file versions know that Microsoft does not have a “single” standard to bear. Others claim it is simply a case of Microsoft fearing that it will lose control of software developers. The real reason is more basic. It’s simple economics.”

The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about AMD’s rising fortune. One reason: The Athlon chip has “became a favorite among hard-core gamers, Linux users and other PC enthusiasts.”

Paul Nelson tells us about this announcement: K12LTSP
is an easy to install, Linux based terminal server package designed for
schools. It comes ready to run with lots of programs for classroom use.
It works with low maintenance, diskless workstations that are immune to
viruses and mischievous student tampering. K12LTSP is based on RedHat
7.1 (www.redhat.com), StarOffice 5.2
from Sun microsystems (www.sun.com/staroffice)
and the Linux Terminal Server Project (www.ltsp.org).
It is completely free. Installation CD-Roms
may be downloaded from our web site at www.k12ltsp.org.
K12LTSP offers a point and click interface
based on the GNOME (www.gnome.org)
desktop and a complete package of applications useful for classrooms.
StarOffice 5.2 is included providing word processing, spreadsheet and
presentation tools that are compatible with other popular office suites.
Once the K12LTSP server package is
installed schools may access it from legacy PC hardware and/or purchase
new workstations for under $200. With all the applications running on
the server, K12LTSP provides an inexpensive way for schools to extend
the life of aging computers. The speed of the server determines the
application speed, not the client.
A typical lab installation of K12LTSP for
20 workstations would cost $6,000
($2,000 server, 20 clients @ $200 each).
A typical lab installation of Windows98
for 20 workstations would cost $20,000.
($800 per workstation + $200 or more for software)
Initial cost savings in hardware and
software will be augmented by long term savings in lower maintenance
costs. K12LTSP servers allow for easy remote administration. This means
that teachers can focus on students rather than keeping the classroom
computers running.
To celebrate the launch of K12LTSP and to
help schools build servers and workstations we will distribute over 1000
FREE Xeon and Celeron processors donated by Intel through the STRUT
program (Students Recycling Used Technology).
(www.strut.org for STRUT info)
(www.k12ltsp.org/application.htm
for free CPU info.)
K12LTSP was created as a volunteer project
by two educators, Eric Harrison from the Multnomah County Education
Service District and Paul Nelson from the Riverdale School District. It
is an offshoot of another volunteer effort, the Linux Terminal Server
Project. (www.ltsp.org)
K12LTSP Open House – July 4th 9-11am at
Riverdale School
URL: http://www.k12ltsp.org/openhouse.html
Contact Information:
URL: www.k12ltsp.org
Paul Nelson pnelson@riverdale.k12.or.us
Riverdale School District www.riverdale.k12.or.us
11733 SW Breyman Ave.
Portland, OR 97219
(503)636-8611
Eric Harrison eharrison@mail.mesd.k12.or.us
Multnomah County Education Service District www.mesd.k12.or.us
P.O. Box 301039
11611 NE Ainsworth Circle
Portland Oregon 97220
(503)257-1554
###

8wire.com has the how-to article on setting up the fromer BSDi product. “This product offers many excellent installation options and features. The entire ‘base’ installation is
included on a single CD, and the source code is included on the optional Source CD-ROM. You can
choose a graphical (GUI) or text-based (command-line interface) installation. Automated hard disk
formatting does a ‘disk wipe’ and ‘fdisk’ prior to the installation. RSH (remote shell server)
compatible installation lets you install the OS across a network using one central Unix server. The
express configuration option installs a predetermined set of packages and partition sizes and is
perfect for a standard installation or the beginner. A custom installation option lets you install your
own choice of software packages.”