I note the recent article on Open Source investment. I was too late to make any useful comments there, so I thought I'd put them in my diary.

Strangely, a growing proportion of my income is from Open Source development, or based on Open Source software. If I have a client that wants a job done, I look around for suitable open source tools. Last year it was PfaEdit (which I still use) and this year it was the swish-e search engine. In each case the product did not quite match my client's needs, but I was able to modify the source to get the functionality I needed - and then contribute the new code back to the project - I would not even dream of trying that with a large commercial software company. The end result is a happy client, improved open source products and an income for me.

I've been editing quite a few fonts recently. The fonts are PS fonts for Mac, but I do the editing using PfaEdit on Linux.

I've surprised myself by contributing several bug fixes for PfaEdit. I'm impressed with PfaEdit, it is certainly a lot better (for PS fonts) than the old copy of Fontmonger we have.

I've noticed that the world of fonts could do with more attention from the free software community. Hardly any fonts are available with a GNU (or even BSD) licence. It would also be good to have some really high quality ttf fonts like Verdana or Tahoma - I guess I'm going to have to learn TrueType programming and get hinting.

Unfortunately, I still largely make my living (or should that read earn my pittance) by making and or selling closed source software. Anyway - today I'm applying for a grant to do some localisation of free software into Maori language. My ultimate goal is a complete desktop and application suit in Maori along with some quality educational software.

Wow - I'm now certified to install, configure and disparage Windows 2000 server. Not much wonder I'm still only certified as apprentice.

I'm surprised...

I've installed wwwstat on my (virgule clone) web server so I could make some sense of the web logs. We're getting thousands of attacks directed at IIS (but I knew that already).

I'm still tweaking wwwstat, but one thing that caught my eye is that a number of people have downloaded the rtf- converter. I'm surprised - it must be the freshmeat entry I put up? Anyway, I'm quite pleased with myself.

Damn! We've suffered a number of virus attacks recently.

My Linux boxes have been logging Code Red attacks for weeks. Then recently a virus managed to send itself to one of my mailing lists (so now I've worked out how to bounce attachments sent to Majordomo according to MIME type).

Now we've actually been hit by Nimda - which is probably the nastiest I've seen. It infected two of our test servers, trashing one. This one has four different transmission mechanisms. E-mail, http (infected web servers), buffer overrun attacks on IIS, and through unprotected network shares on the LAN. Quick check for Nimda... search a Windows drive for exe or dll files containing the string: R.P.China ....

My Linux servers have not themselves been compromised, but I am concerned that there are buffer overrun exploits which they are vulnerable to - I guess I'm just going to have to swot up on this...