CDFax: a Linux utility to send a CD over the net from one machine to another. Cool idea. Or have your cd-rom eject every time you get mail with cdbliff. [memetrail: Beltorchicca -> boing boing -> me]
Day: August 18, 2002
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A conversation from work, as pilfered from the journal of my friend Roger:
Tom: Do you know what we need?
Matt: Helper Monkeys?
Roger: Yeah, I wanna be able to say “Helper Monkey: Beer me!“
Matt: Maniacal Laughter -
Network Tools/Caffeine Monkey: A collection of PHP4 scripts that allows you to ping, traceroute, NSLookup, Whois, and a speed test. It’s a nice little open source collection of tools.
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An excerpt from Dave’s Morning Coffee Note:
Related to that, where are the developers these days. I’m not talking about hoardes of people who clone Unix and Unix utilities. I mean people doing real new software, new ideas, patentable stuff, who aren’t taking the patents. Those are the people we should be hearing from. I also like hearing from smart respected lawyers. I’m not one of those people who think all lawyers are slime. But something is really wrong when all we hear from re technology are lawyers. That’s when you get disconnects like his oft-repeated mantra that developers aren’t doing anything. Well, Larry, if you don’t talk to developers, how could you possibly know?
And my take:
Allow me to pause in order to sip my coffee. It’s still morning on the left coast, though this will probably post as late morning/early afternoon from my machine on the east coast. Dave asks a very good question. There are tons of developers out there working on way whizbang things, but unfortunately whizbang things are sometimes less interesting than wars, lawyers, media moguls, or corporate empires.
Sometimes developers are too busy working on stuff, staying up late weekend nights, and not weighing in on the latest CARP or DMCA development. Maybe they should be. At least with weblogs we have access to a multitude of primary source material to sift through. It can be a headache though. You have to read the same thing several times during the same cup of coffee, but at the same time, you get to hear about the same story or event through five different people with five different points of view and five interpretations of what happened. This is good.
The problem with this is unless you sift through multitudes of information, you don’t get this effect. It can be overwhelming at times, and I’m sure that thought scares some people.
I think that there are definately people out there doing cool new things that are totally going to change the way we use our computes. We just have to find them.