Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: August 2002

  • The mark of a true geek: Getting up at 4:45am to make the three hour trip to Fry’s so a friend can get back to his IT job later in the day.

  • Don’t drink and blog.

  • Russell Beattie: “My CODE SUCKS”

  • PGP Corporation: Apparently they’ve bought the assets from Network Associates and will be releasing PGP 8.0.  MacNN has the story:

    The new company will immediately license and support current versions of PGP products to current, lapsed, and new PGP customers. PGP has posted detailed customer transition information on its Website and will immediately accept orders for license renewal and new software purchases as well as upgdrade freeware licenses via special promotional pricing being offered through October of this year. The company also PGP 8.0 which is due to ship in November of this year, which will will include PGP Mail and PGP Disk. It will offer full Mac OS X support, compatibility with PGP disks created on Windows, AES algorithm support, and compatibility with older Mac OS 9 PGP disks. PGP Mail will integrate with Apple’s mail application as well as providing support for Microsoft’s Entourage.

    Of course it has also been slashdotted, so all I get at their website is this:

    Warning: Too many connections in /var/www/html/pgp/conn.php on line 7

    Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in /var/www/html/pgp/conn.php on line 7
    Error: Could not connect to MySql

  • OSCache: Cache yer JSP’s in memory, enjoy increased performance.  Woohoo!

  • The Saturn Times: An awesome java resource and blog.

  • Diffie-Hellman to the izzo: Linux Journal plays with crypto.

  • Jake: Here’s hoping that my reliance on older hardware isn’t about to bite me in the ass.

  • PC Linux Online: The next Red Hat beta is out, called null.  It sports GCC-3.2 and “lots-o-bugfixes”

  • Groove 2.1 is released.

  • Goodness, it was a long day.  We took the rental Maxima up Highway 1 from San Luis Obispo to Monterey.  What a drive it was.  We’re back now, it’s 1:30ish local and 4:30ish where I’m from, so here’s this evening’s RSS wrapup from the left coast:

  • 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]

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • SprintPCS: They rock and suck simultaneously, and I use them.  Their account management server is down (again), but they have apparently launched some pseudo-3G goodness called vision.  I’d hop on, early adopter that I am, except I hadn’t recently overpaid for a Sanyo SCP 6200.  Knowing Sprint, it’ll be a great service that will be great when it works, but will be the bane of your existance when it is broken.

  • John Robb also has a laundry list of things you can do with TCP.IM.

  • Lawrence’s Notebook:

    Hello World! I’m posting via IM!

  • ThinRSS: A tiny Java Web Start enabled application that allows you to read RSS feeds. [rebelutionary via zopen-x]

  • Thinblog: Phillip Pearson (of ecosystem fame) doesn’t like to sleep.  He really likes the thinlet gui toolkit (which looks sweet), and thought he’d release more cool stuff upon the world.  Thinblog is a blogger client that weighs in as an 86k jar file.  Three cheers for tight code!