Day: July 31, 2002

Do you visit the weblogs you read? Mac Net Journal asks the question, and my comments are here.

Ford does something intelligent: They will be discontinuing the Excursion soccer assault vehicle in 2004.

No Staroffice for OSX?  It seems so.  Sun is denying any involvement in an OSX port:

“There is a port of OpenOffice in development that is coming along quite well, but there is no development of a StarOffice port at this time,” Nancy Lee, group product marketing manager, office productivity at Sun, told MacCentral.

Web Services Architecture Usage Scenarios: A working draft by the w3c illustrating how web services can make life easier.

Amtrak derailment update: These pictures were taken locally with an APS camera.

The Web Services DevCon is mighty tempting.  Now all I have to do is justify it in my mind and my bank account.

Too Easy to Collaborate?  Michael Helfrich recalls some past experience with collabaration:

The IT guy concluded that, “You guys are making it way too easy to share with others.” And then he dropped the bomb: “Listen, our business users are stupid, we have to help protect them from themselves.” Yea, and if you allow them to share and work securely with others this company JUST might keep up with the demands of the street, because human interaction is the rocket fuel that propels innovation.

Windows 2000 Service Pack 3: The Register is reporting that SP3 is available now.  Grab it here [125MB].

[H]ard|OCP releases an RSS feed: Good stuff.

Algorithm::Evolutionary: It is a perl library designed to make evolutionary algorithms easier and available to more people.  Here is what the freshmeat description has to say about the 0.5 release:

Algorithm::Evolutionary is a flexible set of classes for doing evolutionary computation in Perl, integrated with XML for evolutionary algorithm description. So far, it contains classes for doing string, tree, and vector array-based evolutionary computation, several variation operators, and simple population-level algorithms. It has been distributed algorithms using SOAP, and integrated with the DBI and HTML::Mason libraries. It contains an XML dialect for definition of evolutionary algorithms, called EvoSpec; experiments defined using Algorithm::Evolutionary can be completely serialized/deserialized using this language.

The Shifted Librarian agrees:

More format choices = bad, although when you get beyond 128 MB, there’s some incentive. Smaller memory cards worry me because I have a difficult enough time keeping track of my Sony memory sticks. Anything smaller (the xD-Picture Card is about the size of a penny) and I might accidentally eat it thinking I’m grabbing a breath mint out of my bag.

Besides, the user interface for tracking 8 GB worth of pictures would be unreal. I have problems organizing the 6 GB on my Archos Jukebox MP3 player, so 8 GB of anything that I’d have to wade through on  a small device would probably make my head explode. The industry needs some serious usability testing and implementation before introducing this much memory in a package that small.