Day: September 19, 2002

PaSaMuF:

The Pasamuf team is proud to announce the first release of Pasamuf – the document sharing tool. Pasamuf indexes your favourite doument files (doc, pdf, xls, …) and makes them searchable and downloadable for others in your community. It is completely written in Java and works via web services.

Note that this release is an re-release (about 3 months old) and is not intended to work! A stable everywhere-to-use version is coming soon!

We’ll have to keep an eye on this, it’ll be interesting to see how this does once it is ready for semi-primetime.

IASlash: W3C/NIST workshop on usability & the web.  November 4-5.  All you need to do is write a position paper.

OSNews: FreeBSD 4.7-RC1 is out.  What I’m really waiting for is the next release of OpenBSD, mostly for the release song and cover art.  The 3.0 release song has made its way into a roadtrip mix of mine.

John Robb:

Awkward.  I love that word.

I love the word awkward.  It’s so awkward.

I’m back from the Cato Institute panel debate.  A full writeup might have to wait until I’m done with work.

Silicon.com: In an article about Microsoft asking 2,300 organizations if they wanted to see Microsoft’s source code.  Only 150 said yes.  Jason Matusow, shared source manager at Microsoft, was quoted in the article as saying:

“One of the great myths of open source is that everyone wants to look at source code.”

Ximian announces Evolution 1.2 beta.  Evolution is Ximian’s workalike of Microsoft Outlook. [via PC Linux Online]

Infoconomy: Sun considers $1,100 cheap.

The PCs, which have still to be given a brand name, will be assembled from commodity components that Sun will source from the open market. Sun intends to sell the Linux PCs in units of 100 at a cost of around $1,100 (€1,125) each, with part of that paid upfront and the remainder spread over the lifespan of the PC.

While that unit cost is actually slightly higher than an equivalent machine from Dell or HP, the real cost savings will come from replacing Microsoft software with open source alternatives and from lower administration and support costs.

Aside from the Linux operating system, the PCs will mimic a typical Windows set-up by using the Gnome desktop environment, the Mozilla browser, the StarOffice applications suite and the Evolution clone of Microsoft Outlook.

This seems to be good, however I’m trying to figure out where Sun isn’t going to loose their shirt on this computer.  I’m sure that the specs on this commodity hardware machine will be easily duplicated for 25-40% less through other vendors or by building the machine yourself.  It also appears that once again Sun will be using its software (a derivative/rebranding of Red Hat Linux) in order to sell hardware.  Anyone can go download .ISOs of Red Hat Linux, but they’ll have to spend a premium on hardware in order to get Sun’s identity management software and control panel.

I hope that Sun does well, but I’m not sure if they’ll be able to. [via Kenneth Hunt and Newsforge]

Blog: An automated weblogging application.  Have you heard of it?

Blog is an automatic web logging program which allows you to update your site easily without the hassles of HTML editing and having to use a separate program to upload your work. You simply set Blog up with the necessary information for logging into your site via FTP, define a template to specify the look for your page and then type in your entries in the main Blog window and click Publish and Blog does the rest! Blog also handles the task of generating archival entries for older posts. It is a really convenient way to keep a site (or multiple sites) updated without going through several programs to do the job.

Blog can be operated in three different modes – a) Standalone – which allows a single person to maintain their own site(s) from their desktop machine b) Server – which allows collaboration between several people or for the same person to post from multiple locations using the third mode of Blog which is … c) Client. The Client and Server modes might be a bit confusing to set up but do refere to the included Blog.txt file which is present in all distros of Blog to get some hints as to what you need to do.

The interface is sparse, clean, and seemingly functional.  It looks like it can manage the weblog via ftp, has templating support, and is free-as-in-beer. [the first useful link harvested from Betanews]

Ovidiu Predescu:

Sam Ruby changed his RSS feed again, which apparently breaks my RSS aggregator that you see on the right hand side of this page. I’ve removed him from my subscriptions list! At least until I have some time to figure out what’s wrong with the XSLT-based RSS aggregator I’ve written.

I have a feeling that we will see quite a bit of the homegrown RSS aggregators choke on RSS 2.0, even thought it’s not really supposed to break stuff.  Granted that the big three blogging packages will soon be able to handle RSS 2.0 gracefully, but this means that a lot of the single-programmer RSS aggregators and generators are going to be hitting the drawing board.

Hopefully this will be good for the long term and only minorly annoying in the short term.

The Shifted Librarian likes the new Phillips Stremium. The funny thing is that this sounds like exactly the same thing that the Kerbango could have been (had 3com not bought it and killed it), and then some. We’re talking CD, CD-R, CD-RW, mp3, broadband and traditional radio.

I want one.

The Cato Institute’s Copy Fights panel debate is tomorrow. Keep your eyes peeled for a writeup as soon as I get back from it.