Day: September 11, 2002

Reuters: AMD bakes a 10-nanometer transistor. [via Slashdot]

ZDNet UK:

UnitedLinux said on Wednesday that it would release a preview version of its business-oriented Linux distribution to the public in the last week of September, the first chance most potential customers will have to evaluate the results of the combined effort. [via Newsforge]

ComputerSurplusOutlet.com: It looks like a great source for that junk you don’t have that you need to complete a project.  A 3 gig notebook harddrive for $30?  Hell yeah.  Thanks go out to Kenneth Hunt who pointed to an article called A Very Manual Debain Install.

Strange Attractors and TCP/IP Sequence Number Analysis – One Year Later:

The goal of this follow-up is to evaluate any subsequent security measures implemented by the vendors in this field since the release of the original publication, and to evalute several systems that were not covered earlier. For the purpose of this document, we assume that the reader has read the original publication, and has an understanding of the methodology and terminology used.

This article is only for the hardcore network geek, but the illustrations show rather blatantly which OSen have hardened TCP/IP stacks and which don’t. [via Slashdot]

Phillip Pearson continues development of SharpBlog.  Now with extra WYSIWYG.

OSNews: Version 1.4-RC1 of Gentoo Linux is out.  It’s got GCC 3.2 under the hood plus a bunch of other neat stuff.  News hasn’t hit the front page of the website yet.

The Road to RSS 3.0: Aaron Swartz sports his sense of humor.  Here’s a snippet of his RSS 3.0 feed to get you aquainted:

[text example snipped]

Yep, it’s that day.  One year after the Pearl Harbor for my generation.  I’m going to do my best to live the day pretty much like any other.  I’m going to school in the morning, and working in the evening.  Now it’s time to wrap things up and go to bed.

Rael Dornfest: A new version of Blosxom:

About bloody time, I know 😉 The latest incarnation of Blosxom, a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application, is now available.

There’s oodles of new functionality in this release, including: categories, shared weblog spaces, flavours (read: templates or views), and more.

There’s also a brand spankin’ new Blosxom site, brimming with details, documentation, news, ideas, and contributed applications and integrations.

Share and enjoy.

Anti-Aircraft:

The heightened alert, approved today by President Bush, came as the Pentagon loaded live anti-aircraft missiles into launchers around Washington for the first time in 40 years, and prompted the State Department to shutter more than a dozen embassies and consulates in Asia and elsewhere.

That’s kinda scary.  I live just a few miles north of the beltway.  The problem is that the next wave of terrorist attacks, whenever they happen, will have to make the plane hijackings look like childs play, just like the attacks last year made every previous terrorist attack look like a game.  I’ve got a hint for ya: it’s not going to involve airplanes.  It’s going to be so random that we wouldn’t fathom it, even in our current paranoid state.

It might happen tomorrow, it might happen years from now.  Who knows?  But it’ll be big.  Nuclear?  Chemical?  Biological?  Who knows.  Catastrophic, yes.  Other than that, we don’t know.

I’m sorry to go off on this tangent in such an obvious techblog, but I had to get it out.  I will note that last year, The Washington Post and The BBC were the only two major news outlets that I could reliably access.  I watched some of the world trade center stuff unfold on BBC tv over broadband at the school library.  I was kicked out of the library before details emerged about what the heck was going on downtown surfaced, but many nontraditional places like slashdot, Scripting News and others.

Deadly Bloody Serious:

With regard to my last post about making backlinking easier, I’ve modified UserLand’s code to make it easy to see a particular post’s categories and get at the matching permalink.

Details are in the article. [via McGee’s Musings]

Brent Simmons:

I re-designed ranchero.com—but, the funny thing is, you might never notice. If you look at the user agents page you’ll note that most of the hits come from RSS news readers, from Radio UserLand and AmphetaDesk and NetNewsWire Lite.

Yep.  My RSS file gets more hits than my homepage, and the other stats seem to agree that my RSS feed is read more than anything else.

And that’s okay.

Salon:

Detectives are investigating a complaint that retired astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin punched a man in the face after being asked to swear on a Bible that he’d been to the moon.

Go Buzz! [via Dane Carlson and She’s Actual Size, Nationwide, Believe]

RandomMaccess: “Even free, iCal isn’t worth the price.” Ouch.