MS .NET 3.5 users: beware fix pack 1

I don't use the .NET 3.5 framework myself, I'd rather stick pins in my eyes, but for those who do: watch out for fix pack 1 - it'll open up a security hole. The vigilant will probably notice that you have a new add-on in Firefox that can't be uninstalled without some registry diddling. I'm sure it'll be patched some time, perhaps next month.

Of course, if you're one to install the .NET framework in the first place, you're probably not the type to check these things.

Here's a particularly inflammatory post about it.

Related articles

• Microsoft .NET Framework: Making Firefox Just as Vulnerable as IE (blippitt.com)
• Do You Trust Microsoft? (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
• Microsoft cannot be trusted! (dvorak.org)
• MS Issued a Fix For Its Unwanted FireFox Extension (yro.slashdot.org)
• Did Microsoft Install A Firefox Extension On Your System? (lockergnome.com)
• Think Firefox is Safer than IE? Microsoft Doesn't Want It That Way (lockergnome.com)

Bitnami in the Clouds

A couple of months back, I posted this about Bitnami. They provide applications such as Drupal, Wordpress or phpBB to be installed natively on a PC, Mac or Solaris box with no existing web application infrastructure stack in place - all in one convenient installation file, providing the complete package: a full-stack infrastructure with the application of choice as the cherry on top.

This makes the whole process of getting a blog, CMS, bulletin board or portal set up as easy as possible. All you need is a modest box to serve it to the company, or to the world at large.

Of course, if you don't have a modest box (a server, in other words), you're stuck. Hosting a public application can be a headache, and there's a cost involved, which can grow as your application scales.

Why not take one of these Bitnami stacks and put it in the cloud? There are lots of cloud providers out there, that will provide you with a scalable site with an application, configure it, manage it, load-balance it and monitor it for you.


Enter Bitnami and RightScale, linked with Amazon's cloud offering. RightScale will give you 10 hours free cloud computing with Amazon EC2, after which further costs are linked to your EC2 account.

I'm not the biggest fan of cloud computing, yet, but if you have a business that needs a public facing site, and you want to put the responsibility of running it firmly in the hands of people that know what they're doing, then I can see how this could be a great solution.

Can anyone stop Oracle?

A few weeks back, when IBM turned down Sun's offer to acquire them, I thought they were crazy. You would think they would at least try to block their main competitor, right? Wrong. Oracle have been busy doing some buying of their own of the last few years, gradually building up momentum, looking for a big name acquisition.

Image via CrunchBase

Then, they got one.

Weeks have passed, and it's still hard to say what the future will hold for Sun, and for Oracle. While in the past they have been pretty much steamrollering the smaller companies they've got their hands on, a company of the stature of Sun - who gave us Java and Solaris - requires different treatment. This should be an alliance, a meeting of minds.

However, what makes this approach even more interesting, is that Sun only recently acquired Oracle's greatest open source competitor, MySQL.

Image via CrunchBase

Now it's personal. Reading around on TheRegister and Slashdot, amongst other places, I'm getting a bit worried. I actually care about MySQL. I've been using it since I started to work with databases and especially since I started to develop web applications. It's default beep, sounding every time I type something stupid into it's command line, is music to my ears.

Where will things go from here? Who'll be next?