I have been meaning to send out this email which I have had sitting in my drafts folder for many months but never got around to it. I just created a little mailing list to help manage my contacts so ignore the welcome message you just got.
Lots of big news to report:
Copilot Communications has been acquired by Telepacket Inc of Temecula. This is good news for our customers because Copilot Communications customers will become Telepacket customers and will have access to all of the new features we are working on for the phone system plus better worldwide PSTN connectivity and nationwide and potentially worldwide DID’s.
As for me personally, I am now working for Telepacket in the capacity of Director of Software Development. I will continue to operate Copilot Consulting (Linux oriented consulting business) although on a more part-time basis and will probably be referring a lot of work to my colleagues. Telepacket is sending me to Vietnam to manage their Ho Chi Minh City office and lead a team of programmers over there on a semi-permanent basis. I will be returning to the US every couple of months for meetings and various personal business. I expect to depart in approximately 6 weeks and will be there for at least a year and potentially much longer as long as things continue to go well.
Before I go I am going to cram in as much fun in the US as I can. This includes a couple of ski trips and finishing up my seaplane rating. I want to get in as much flying as I can because General Aviation simply doesn’t exist in Vietnam since it is illegal to own an airplane over there. You can find pics of my seaplane adventure in the photo gallery at my personal website:
And now on to the tech news and links: Today’s theme is viruses. We’ve all heard about and probably had Windows viruses on our Windows PC’s. Most people just assume viruses are a basic fact of computing and perfectly normal. It has pretty much become an accepted fact of life that we need antivirus software. But that is not really the case. Very special circumstances have to arise to allow computer viruses to spread and it just so happens that Windows provides an ideal breeding ground. Linux, on the other hand does not get viruses. Why? I recently stumbled across this article which does a nice job of summing it up:
Just ran across this one today: “Why do PC users put up with so many viruses and worms?”
(Note that a modern Macintosh is a Unix computer) Department of Homeland Security Computer Emergency Response Team recommends NOT using Internet Explorer and I emphatically agree:
- http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=74&e=3&u=/cmp/20040702/tc_cmp/22103407
- http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/07/02/alternative.browsers.ap/index.html
- http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/713878
Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org) is the way to go for a web browser these days.
And just for giggles, check out this funny Linspire ad which unfortunately requires your browser to have the Flash plugin:
I hope this email finds you all well!