This data comes from a simple perl script, which read through all 32,000+ newsgroups on my ISP's server and counted up each of the unique "charset=" tags that it found in the message headers. 4,024,487 messages were processed over a period which spanned 73 hours and 23 minutes (over my 1.5Mb DSL line).

I haven't written anything in a while, but that just means I've been really really busy, which is a good thing. Since I'm going to remain busy throughout the summer, I thought it might be best to send out a summary of my current projects, and share some of the lessons that I'm learning in this work.

A lack of device drivers for networking, video, audio and storage cards is keeping me and many other users from running Linux on a daily basis. Apart from device drivers, the biggest problem for all of the UNIX platforms out there today is that they're just too damned hard to configure. Finally, as long as folks like me still have to dual-boot to load another OS so that we can use an application we need to get real work done, then it just isn't going to become our primary OS for everyday use.

If 1997 was a banner year for the networking industry, bringing a hoard of new technologies and products, then 1998 was the morning after, with most of us trying to make 1997's technology work. Rather than giving us whole new technologies, vendors spent 1998 trying to fix the half-baked technologies that were introduced in 1997. Sometimes it worked, with some products and technologies permanently altering the landscape, while others just proved that some technologies weren't really such great ideas after all.

Network-multimedia is becoming almost commonplace, with technologies like Voice-over-IP and LAN-based video-conferencing proving to be viable alternatives to their circuit-based counterparts. Yet, network-multimedia has some pretty stringent requirements in order for it to work successfully. The original Ethernet - with its shared-access coaxial network that depended on luck in order to function - is woefully unsuited for the job.

NetWare 5 signifies a major redefinition for Novell the company, signifying its egress from the general NOS market, and the beginnings of its transformation into a company whose business is based entirely upon directory services.

Support for forward-compatibility in network design is becoming a crucial issue, particularly as new technologies that push the envelope of network utilization are being deployed. As a result, many of the core elements of today's data networks are being retrofitted to allow these new technologies to work reliably. In some cases, entirely new protocols are being developed to get around those protocols that are so inflexible that they cannot accommodate any sort of tweaking.

Internet technologies have lowered the barriers-to-entry considerably, allowing companies of every shape and size to build dynamic, cooperative business-to-business applications over the Internet. But we lack an open, universally-accepted database exchange protocol that allows this to happen.

Mailing lists are everywhere! Here are some of the best sources for news, analysis, opinion and general-fun that I've found.

The biggest problem facing LDAP today is the tight coupling to X.500. The most-vocal proponents of X.500 technology maintain that it should not be expanded beyond general white pages purposes. But if LDAP is to succeed, then it must provide access to a variety of network services other than 'people' data, meaning LDAP must be separated from X.500 entirely.

For years people have been saying 'when we get better bandwidth to the user...' and other such nonsense, conveniently ignoring the fact that they couldn't handle all of us in the first place. With 1.5 Mbps available to me, I'm now able to exceed what many sites can give.

It's embarrassing when your customers argue among themselves. But it's a hanging offence when customers tell prospects what a miserable product you have, on your own service. These are avoidable scenarios, once you understand how the different aspects of communications theory represent and dictate the underlying communication patterns.

This newsletter is a useful tool for expressing thoughts and discoveries that wouldn't fit cleanly into another forum. Think of it as an effective way for me to send the same journal entry to hundreds of people all at once, and you'll be on the right track.

Linux teaches us many things about user-driven software, but primarily it shows us what can happen when development efforts are freed from corporate agendas. Without a vendor making crucial decisions, the technology is allowed to grow according to the wants and needs of the user community. But Linux also teaches us the difficulties incurred with user-driven software, like the need for commercial products and support, the two biggest holes in the Linux story today.

Dynamic web documents just aren't going to work until we have a stateful protocol that allows the server to communicate with the client on a continual basis. Frames, style sheets and DHTML technologies are all a wash without this essential feature.

I'm tired of trying to make all my systems speak NFS when they all do such a poor job of it. Likewise, I'm sick of trying to synchronize my NDS-, NIS- and NT-based authentication services when each of the NOSes demand on being the primary source, refusing to even boot without a local copy of the data. So much for cross-platform networking!

Let's face it: ISDN just hasn't hit mainstream status. The only people I know who use it are professionals who can comfortably be classed into the technology-enthusiast or early-adopter markets. There is a real, identifiable, justifiable need to make using ISDN a simple, plug-n-play experience.

First there was e-mail. Then web browsers. According to the folks who ought to know, a unified directory service is going to be networking's next Killer App. Although lots of progress has been made, we're miles away from commodity-class directory access.

By all measures, 1997 was a very good year for the computer networking industry. New and exciting technologies gave birth to strong products, which in turn helped many a bottom line. There were also a fair number of loser technologies, products, and companies, as well as the as-yet-to-be-decided contenders who offer strong possibilities, but who have failed to execute in one form or another.

Simply put, as a NOS, NT Server is nowhere near NetWare (and as a platform for running network services, it's nowhere near UNIX). Yet, I find I'm forced into using it simply because that's where the third-party market is. The argument for-or-against has nothing to do with technical merits, but instead it has everything to do with product availability and developer support, an area in which Microsoft totally dominates.

The future problem of spam is not in the 'see horney women' junk mail that we get today, but in the 'new from McDonalds' advertisements that will be distributed by legitimate organizations in the future. If spam isn't stopped, it will slowly become used by so many firms that eventually it will clog the net, and no mail will get through at all.

The Department of Justice has finally decided to show some teeth, suing Microsoft over their practice of forcing OEMs to bundle Internet Explorer with all copies of Windows 95. And they're right.