Day: September 27, 2002

  • From Ed Cone’s Berman-Coble hearing followup:

    But Sohn says that just being invited to the hearings was a sign of progress. “I was pleased they had a consumer advocate,” she told me. “The industry is used to not paying attention and having their way, but these issues have changed. Now you have people calling their representatives because they understand what this means for their own computers.”

  • ZDNet.com.au on Open Source Content Management Systems:

    As the demand for easily maintainable content increases, the Content Management System (CMS) industry continues to grow. Expensive proprietary or custom-built systems continue to rule this domain, but open source initiatives such as Open Source Content Management (OSCOM) are targeting goals, such as interoperability and low implementation cost, that proprietary systems won’t touch.

    Wyona is an open source CMS mentioned in the article, as is CMS-list, a mailing list for CMSen. [via Ranchero]

  • Most. Insane. Use. Of. CSS. EVAR!

    Click on a thumbnail of one of the pictures on Steven Champeon’s weblog (he’s on hiatus).  It’ll open to a full-sized image.  Now view source and bow down to the CSS masta. [via metafilter]

  • Extremetech: A roundup of the *BSD’s. [via Slashdot]

  • System.Error.Emit:

    Thanks to some very understanding, caring and generous individuals, I am going to be able to attend the DevCon after all – and I won’t have to break the bank to do it!  I can’t wait!  I haven’t been this excited about a technical event since Guerrilla COM VII back in 1998.

    Sweet!  Another blogger out there that I can’t wait to meet.

  • Transmorphic on JIRA: “Indeed, its so slick that its easy to forget its a web application!”

  • Blackboard Version 6 is released. I found this link via Serious Instructional Technology. I have to say that I used a version of blackboard a year or two ago, and it was slow (could have been the school’s servers), buggy, and the UI was painful to use. I’d be curious to see how they’ve improved things since then.

  • Radio plays nice with aggregators:

    “system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeRssFile changed on Fri, 27 Sep 2002 14:44:34 GMT: Drop the xmlns attribute on the rss element. Its presence breaks some parsers. Instead, I’m letting Scripting News bear the brunt here, it’ll retain the xmlns attribute, for the time-being, and shake out the broken parsers. They’ll have a choice of fixing them or not. Note that with or without the xmlns attribute it’s still a valid RSS 2.0 feed.”

  • Brett Morgan:

    “Something all commercial unix sysadmins should do right after installing a box. Install all the gnu command line tools. They actually work as advertised. Rates up there with installing gcc and perl in my mind. Oh, add bash and xemacs while you are at it. ;)”

    I was so confused when I first logged into my Sparc box. Everything was so familiar but so different at the same time.

    Sunfreeware is also a great site for freeware stuff for Solaris.  The website is painful to the eye, but it’s a good resource.

  • MSNBC: $200 Lindows/Netscape/AOL PC? It could work. And it’s also not a crippled appliance, which is what every other ‘appliance’ computer has been. Keep an eye out on this one. [via Newsforge]

  • CNet:

    Three of the major hard drive makers will cut down the length of warranties on some of their drives, starting Oct. 1, to streamline costs in the low-margin desktop disk storage business.

    Does this mean that they can now slack off on quality assurance?  I understand the problem of saving money, hopefully we won’t get burned when a year and a month down the road a batch of drives go bad…

    The companies will maintain three- to five-year warranties for drives used in large businesses such as banks and companies that keep track of financial transactions. Western Digital will offer extended warranties directly to customers, while Maxtor and Seagate expect retailers to have extended warranty programs for consumers.

    That’s just what I want to do, pay Best Buy an extra $30 for my hard drive.  Then you have to wait in line for 45 minutes just to have them tell me that I’m missing an obscure piece of paperwork and they can’t help me.

  • Daemonnews:

    DarwinPorts provides the infrastructure and meta-information that allows easy installation of freely available software on a Mac OS X 10.2 (or any Darwin 6.0.1 or newer) system. Like the FreeBSD ports system and other similar systems, it automates the process of locating, downloading, configuring, patching, building, installing, and managing third-party software.

    Excellent!  Check out the DarwinPorts page for more info.

  • XML-RPC Class Server: This is a cool idea:

    XCS stands short for XML-RPC Class Server. It can make any existing PHP class available for access via XML-RPC (without any modifications). You only need to put the file “xcs.php” in the same directory with your class files.

    I’ll definately have to play around with this. [via Keith Devens]

  • Y! Finance RSS feeds

    Is it true?

    Thanks for testing our proof of concept RSS feeds!. Our RSS test is over. We appreciate all the feedback.

    *Sigh*  It’s like giving a kid a pound of candy and a 2-liter bottle of soda, letting them eat it all, and then saying, “GO TO BED!”  Thanks for the great work, Jeremy.  I hope you’re not catching too much flak for sucking up Y! bandwidth 🙂

    I’d still love to see some stats about what we were watching.

  • Desktop Fishbowl:

    Well, I’m off up the coast for four days. I’m not sure how I’ll survive four days without net access. Can you get Internet patches? Or maybe one of those plastic Internet inhaler things…

    If only it were that easy.