Ovidiu Predescu posted the following revelation on his weblog yesterday. It seems he found out that power companies had actually installed Microsoft Windows in their operations, despite all the known dangers of MS Windows due to security vulnerabilities, prevalent worms and viruses, reliability problems, etc....

There are lots of speculations about the powergrid being brought down by a remotely triggered virus. I just found this Frontline episode on PBS:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/view/

This episode was published back in April 2003.

On the Bugtraq mailing list there is a discussion going on about exactly this. There are two interesting comments: one and two. It seems that the core systems controlling the power grid are running Windows OLE and DCOM applications, the last being the target of the attack of MSBlast.

As the MSBlast worm continues exploiting a Windows vulnerability to spread across the Net, Microsoft issues an alert on three critical security flaws in Internet Explorer. [CNET News.com]

W3C's updated "Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2" Working Draft moves SVG beyond an XML format for graphics, positioning it as an application platform. New features include Rendering Custom Components (RCC); Live Templates alternative; dSVG reference (a UI toolkit); filter region extensions; SVGTimer interface; better network data fetching; Document Simple Model (scripting without DOM); tooltips; an experimental RelaxNG schema. [The XML Cover Pages]

The W3C XForms Working Group has released its "XForms 1.0" specification as a Proposed Recommendation and welcomes public review through August 29, 2003. XForms is W3C's new generation of Web forms which separates purpose, presentation, and data. XForms is designed to be more flexible than previous HTML and XHTML form technologies, enabling validity constraint checking and integration into other markup languages such as XHTML or SVG. [The XML Cover Pages]

Well, apparently not only has the quality of Microsoft's Windows product been called into question, but also the reliability of the patches they throw like scraps of food to dogs under the table.

These scraps, or patches as they are called, have been known to crash users computers. Administrators have had to spend hours backing them out before getting the computer to work as well as they did before the defective patch was installed.

The latest worm to successfully exploit one of the myriad security loopholes in Microsoft Windows, used by home PC users to run games and some businesses to calculate sensitive financial records, infected 120,000 IBM PC clone computers in just 24 hours.

Apparently the infection continues to spread, though for the time being the rate has slowed a little.

According to computer analysts, the legion of reprogrammed computers will attack Microsoft's windowsupdate.microsoft.com domain this Saturday.

Although they allowed the needed patch to languish for half a decade, looks like the security programmers and operations staff at Microsoft's security-and-other-bugs patching web site will be working overtime this weekend.

Release Candidate 1 is out of Apache Cocoon.

It looks like the next generation of Cocoon will be out for real soon.

Cocoon is a wonderful example of how much can be done all from one environment, using XML.

Although it is hard to believe, from Cocoon, you can access: XML, XSLT, SQL, scripting languages (Jython, Rhino, etc.) via BSF, Java code (by subclassing Action or whatever), SVG (creating JPG, GIF, etc.) graphics, PDF files (via XSL-FO), and tons more. Though direct manipulation of complex documents in Java is tedious, using Cocoon it is quite simple. In fact, since it requires no programming and very little typing, one could say it is even trivial.

Struts 1.1 went final in early July 2003.

Reportedly the combination of Struts 1.1 and JDK 1.4.2 is very fast.

Early July 2003 was a banner week for Java software community. Quite a lot of software as been upgraded in the wake of JavaOne this summer. Java has gone from very good, to great, to wow!

There has been a steady surge in Netscape and Mozilla browsers the last two quarters too. And over the last week or so there is a new version of each of them out too. Netscape 7.1 and Mozilla 1.4, respectively.

They use JDK 1.4, of course, making nice version parity in Java land. Looks like 2003 is shaping up to be an amazingly good year to be a developer - and a user.

JDK 1.4.2 was released at the beginning of July 2003 by Sun with very little fanfare.

Strange they have not hyped it more because it significantly improved performance and fixed some very serious sounding bugs.

Apple Mac OS X is running JDK 1.4.1 at the moment. I heard that many of the fixes in JDK 1.4.2 actually came from Apple's JDK 1.4.1.

JDK 1.4 series looks like it will be a really nice platform to do development on. All the XML and XSLT goodies are built in. They have done a lot of work in the Hotspot JVM to speed things up. Bugs are getting fixed. Swing GUI is really nice. Performance is very snappy.