Day: August 10, 2002

Doc has nailed it:

Having KDE or GNOME on a Linux server is like having a fancy dashboard, comfy seats and air conditioning in the cab of an 18-wheeler.

Tractor trailers are not as popular as cars. But nobody is calling them a failure in the marketplace. That’s kind of like Linux’ situation.

It’s a red herring, this stuff about whose desktop is most biggest. It’s about dicks, frankly. Look at Microsoft! Whoa! Nobody else’s dick is that big! Not even close! That’s your default mainstream desktop story.

Freshmeat gem of the day: A C++ cryptographic library called Botan that does quite a bit, including public key, block and stream ciphers, hash functions, checksums and more.  It runs on several platforms, inlcuding x86 and Sparc Linux, Windows, OSX, Tru64, and Irix.  The site also contains linkage to a listing of other cryptographic libraries, which will probably lead to more surfing and less productivity on my part.  From the Botan FAQ:

5.3 What new features are you planning?

In the near term, I’m mostly concerned with getting things set up for the grand 1.0.0 release. This is taking up most of my (sober) free time.

MS Word error:

wvError: (decode_simple.c:514) Alert, insane repeat "insane" paragraph structure, making wild stab in the dark to attempt to continue

[Via (Polonius -> The Desktop Fishbowl)]

The state of Linux Audio: OSNews has a great roundup of the latest in linux sound apps, including ReBorn, a workalike of the infamous ReBirth.  A similar story also ran on Slashdot today.

Gear that might change things: PC Magazine’s roundup of some of the cool stuff on the horizon.

Samba needs your help: They have recenty set up a paypal donation button so you can send them money.  They are getting by just like everyone else, but they’ve got expenses and they’re also looking at the possibility of moving their hosting from donated space to commercial space.

Ellen Feiss Mania! [Wired]

Pyra: What are they doing?  Here’s a status report, it looks like they’ve got several cool things up their sleeves.

TAM 1 launch successful!  The RC plane is on its way across the Atlantic.  You can check out the latest telemetry data and current location here.  Congrats to the team, I hope it makes it to Ireland!

BPWS4J: IBM released tools to deal with Business Process Execution Language for Web Services in Java.

I missed the presentation that Christian Crumlish made on The Screen Savers this evening, probably by just a few minutes.  Don’t worry, I’ll catch it on a rerun over the weekend.

Roll Your Own .Mac: Alan Graham shows you how to put the bsd core of OSX to use.  He covers Apache, connection decisions, DNS issues, firewalls, and more.  It’s a great overview that makes you crave more.