Month: October 2002

Allie Rogers points out NewzCrawler, which looks like a pretty sweet Windows rss aggregator.  The features list is impressive.  It also does Usenet and allows you to post to your weblog.  Gosh darn cool!

Update: I was able to slurp my mySubscriptions.opml file, and NewzCrawler is now importing all of the feeds that I currently follow.  Very cool stuff.

It’s a cute little app, but I found myself going to the ‘make newspaper’ tool, which is basically like what I already have with Radio.  The app could use a little refinement, but it’s cute.

Paolo:

The new toy from Palm: great, but where’s the killer app?

Tiki: Version 1.0 looks very clean.  Here are some additions in this version:

Blogs (including the XMLRPC Blogger API!)

Articles and submissions

Banners system

Dynamic content system

Integrated search engine

New rankings and RSS feeds

configurable home page

Editable templates

Many bugfixes and suggestions

From the Tiki freshmeat page:

Tiki is software written in PHP4 to develop Web sites and applications. It includes a Wiki, Weblogs, a CMS system, a banner system, and a lot of other features. A permission system and admin panel allows any configuration for the application. It is template-based using Smarty and supports multiple languages and themes (CSS). There is complete documentation for users and developers.

This looks like a clean and professional system if you are looking to implement a wiki.  Tiki includes a heck of a lot more, too.

CNet/Ian Fried:

Aiming to kick-start a sluggish market for handhelds, Palm has unveiled two new devices for mobile professionals and businesses.

They’re cool and all, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t know if I could justify $500 for PalmOS.  If I am going to spend that kind of money, I would probably sink it into a PocketPC.  The shot or two of PalmOS 5.0 looks great though.  It reminds me a bit of Apple’s Aqua.  The high end model has a 166MHz processor.  This is great, but isn’t that about a third of the horespower of a similarly priced PocketPC?

They also have a Treo/Blackberry/PDA/Phone model that will sell for $549.  Good luck on that one.  It’s a great idea, but will people buy?

Benjamin Disraeli:

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Keith Devens asks:

I’ve always wondered this: How does an experienced developer dive into the code of a project he’s never looked at before? I mean, do you look at the makefile, see where the main is, and try to follow the execution of the program? Or do you first look at the file layout to try to get an idea of how the app is structured? Do you just open a file that looks interesting and start reading, following the chain of included files around until you get an idea of what some important files are? How do you start building a mental model of the structure of an application while you still have incomplete information as you’re reading the source, when you didn’t have any documentation in the first place?

You get the idea. I bet people who are accustomed to reading other people’s source on a regular basis have a definite process they go through, and the experience they have helps them grasp the structure of a program quicker than others would be able to. Are there any secrets?

Coffee is required, but beyond that, I don’t know.  I have never grokked source in a professional setting, usually for me it is makefiles or a little source if I’m curious.

Scott Johnson has coverage of PHPCon 2002.

Wow. That and “Outstanding” are pretty much my comments on PHP Con 2002. Not only did they put on a great conference, everyone learned something (and I mean everyone), there were great networking opportunities.

Read the rest if you are a phphead.

Linux Journal/Andrew Webber:

Linux was originally written as a general-purpose operating system without any consideration for real-time applications. Recently Linux has become attractive to the real-time community due to its low cost and open standards. In order to make it more practical for the real-time community, patches have been written to affect such things as interrupt latency and context switch. These patches are public domain and are becoming part of the main Linux tree.

A lot is going on in the embedded Linux community.  I attended a real-time and enbedded conference about 6 months ago, and there were several vendors there, each with their own customized toolchain.  Several of those vendors also had programmers that worked on kernel code, that then fed back to the community.  Good stuff.

CNet/Michael Kanellos: Dell thinks small.

The OptiPlex SX260 is roughly the size and shape of a standard dictionary. The computer weighs 7.8 pounds and comes with an Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron processor and six USB ports. The computer can be mounted horizontally, vertically, under a desk, on a wall or behind a flat-panel monitor.

[…]

The SX260 (the s stands for small) measures 9.7 inches by 9.5 inches and is roughly 50 percent smaller than Dell’s next smallest desktop. The most basic configuration sells for $599. A typical configuration will sell for $1,499 and come with a 2GHz Pentium 4, 256MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, a 15-inch flat panel and a CD-ROM drive.

And to think that I paid close to three grand for a decked out Dell PII-450 with a 19″ monitor years ago.  Markets change.

Doug Kaye has just posted an essay entitled The Web Services Technology Pipeline.  Read it and let him know what you think.

JavaWorld/Erik Swenson:

The Jakarta Commons Digester is a popular open source utility that facilitates XML file processing. This article provides an overview of Digester, followed by an example that uses Digester to parse an XML configuration file. [via NewsForge]

OSNews/Clinton De Young: Debian 3.0 Step by step (by step by step by step…)

This walkthrough does not cover every last facet of installing Debian, but it is quite thorough, and even painfully detailed. I wrote this with somebody completely new to Linux and Debian, but somewhat familiar with their computers, in mind. I hope people new to Debian find it useful.

I’m a trebuchet addict, so I had to post this for posterity [metafilter]:

Trebuchets , Trebuchets, Trebuchets: where geeks get medieval on thine ass. Some people have a love of history, spare time and an excuse to buy more tools. (His Earth Viewer is cute, too) Also needed are open expanses–like in Australia. Note: Punkin’ Chunkin’ (©donkeymon 11/03/01) 2002 is coming up in a week. Will Team Banka’s Pumpkin Slayer return? Also, there’s Gulf Wars XII for y’all next March. And, courtesy Nova, for the shockwave addicted, Play Destroy The Castle! Manual here. Also, here’s the Virtual Trebuchet java applet. And last, massive trebuchet linkage.

The best part of a recent slashdot article:

Mac Porn

CNet:

The next version of the heart of the Linux operating system is expected by June, project founder and leader Linus Torvalds predicted on Thursday.

Doug Kaye:

Will Web Services Change Web Hosting?  The high-end web-hosting business is cooling off, but web services are on fire. What’s going to happen when they meet? I recently spoke to some of the movers and shakers of the web-hosting world, and asked them how they were anticipating the arrival of web services. [My October column for The Web Host Industry Review]

Keith Devens:

Up until just now I had been poo-pooing .Net – I’ve really taken absolutely no interest. C# is easy if you know Java, .Net the libraries are just a bunch of class libraries I can pick up, and while IL I’d be interested in, it’d take more time to really understand deeply than I was willing to give right now.

Then I got a call from a recruiter. I told him I wasn’t in the market right now, of course – anyone who’s been following my weblog realizes how much work I’ve had in school this past week, for instance – but that I’d be happy to be back at work. Compared to work, I hate school. So he asked my timetable for school, and I told him, and he said he’d keep in touch.

Before we got off the phone, he recommended that I learn C# and .Net. He didn’t really seem to know what they were, but he said that that’s what’s going to be big. Like I said, up until now I’ve been poo-pooing .Net, but today I’ve realized that maybe someone will be willing to pay me to do it. I’m more interested now… 🙂 So maybe I should keep my “skills” up to date with .Net…

C# is wicked cool, and seems natural from a Java programmer’s point of view.

Magnus Lie Hetland: Instant Python.

To begin with, think of Python as pseudo-code. It’s almost true. Variables don’t have types, so you don’t have to declare them. They appear when you assign to them, and disappear when you don’t use them anymore. Assignment is done by the = operator. Equality is tested by the == operator. You can assign several variables at once.

Dude.  I always knew that Python ruled, but I needed this bootstrap a lot.  Everything python that I’ve read makes complete sense, but this feels like a handy dandy reference for programmers who need to know the basics of py.

Blocks are indicated through indentation, and only through indentation.

I love this language.

Tara Sue Grubb votes GNU.

Rogers Cadenhead:

Francois Lane, the publisher of the Zoyth and Amazon weblogs, is offering to fill weblogs with thousands of phony referrers for $1,000 U.S. He’s hit this weblog three times today from the IP address 207.253.71.48, putting his own URL as the referral. (Via Blogroots.)

I’ve had similar referral spam for my weblog, one or two hits.