Day: September 26, 2002

ExtreneTech: Radio Shack will launch a line of super tiny RC cars, starting at about $20.  The great thing about them is that the will also sell ‘hop-up’ parts, such as better motors, suspensions, etc.  I had three 1/10 scale Tamiya cars when I was younger, and I have a feeling that I’ll be buying a car or two from Radio Shack.  My car will be the one ahead of yours. [via Slashdot]

Ed Cone reports in about the hearing today:

I wish he had mentioned those of us who DO believe in property rights but are concerned with the particulars of this bill. That’s the discussion we need to be having.

I had wished at the Cato debate that people would stop ramming the same issue into the ground and interact a bit.  Oh well.  Ed also points to coverage by Derek Willis.

CNet covers the P2P Piracy Protection Act hearing that happened today.  I wish I had been there.  From the article:

According to the P2P Piracy Prevention Act, copyright holders would have the right to disable, interfere with, block, or otherwise impair a peer-to-peer node that they suspect is distributing their intellectual property without permission. The bill doesn’t specify what techniques–such as viruses, worms, denial-of-service attacks, or domain name hijacking–would be permissible. It does say that a copyright-hacker should not delete files, but it limits the right of anyone subject to an intrusion to sue if files are accidentally erased.

Criticism of the bill has centered around two arguments: Nowhere does it specify what kind of technological attacks would be permissible, nor does it provide sufficient recourse if a computer is unreasonably targeted. Fearing that they may bear the brunt of electronic attacks, Internet providers have joined civil liberties groups in opposition to the proposal.

Apache Tomcat 4.1.12 is out.  The release notes seem to indicate minor bugfixes.

Also in the post today, There’s a 50th anniversary edition of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

The Washington Post ran an article this morning by Leslie Walker entitled “Google News, Untouched by Human Hand.”  From that article:

Despite the service’s glitches, Google’s human-free newscast may prove to be habit forming because it’s so dynamic, changing more frequently than most publications it indexes. The news service has two components: a browsable directory that looks like a streamlined CNN.com and a searchable database similar to other news search services from Lycos, Ask Jeeves and AlltheWeb.

The novel part is the automatically generated directory resembling a digital newspaper, with computers dictating story placement. It presents summary pages in eight categories and contains headlines on about 60 topics, all refreshed every 15 minutes.

Keep the news a’coming.

Is it just me, or does Apple have some of the coolest logos on the planet?

Mark Pilgrim: Explore some FOAF.

Jeremy Zawodny on Y! Finance RSS feeds:

First of all, thanks for all the great feedback. I see that a lot of folks are pulling it now. I’m working on some stats. It’ll be interesting to see which stocks bloggers tend to watch, which aggregators they use, and so on.

Thanks, Jeremy, for doing the hard work.  The feedback will follow.  I can’t wait to see a breakdown of which stocks bloggers are watching.  How about the collective mind stock pick of the day?  Rising and falling trends?  News pages generated by what the weblog world is watching?  This could be sooo cool.  Also, speaking of features:

A lot of you have requested features. The most popular request is to get the latest price of the stock as the first entry in the feed–linked to a quote page for more information. I like that idea a lot. I hope to implement that (and a few other things) in the next week.

How long until someone puts together a Budweiser “Real American Heroes” spoof?  Hmm.  Here’s to you, Mr. Y! Finance RSS feed maker.

Mark Pilgrim: Movable Type gets the RSS 2.0 injection.  Some of his design choices:

There are several design decisions at work in this template that bear explaining. First of all, this template is designed to be backward-compatible with all existing aggregators, news readers, and RSS parsers, ranging from the super-smart XML parser built into .NET to the dumb, minimal, regular-expression-based parser that your downstairs neighbor banged out on a Friday night. If you upgrade your existing index.xml right now, none of these parsers should crash, and none of your subscribers should scream bloody murder. This is a good thing.

Not breaking older RSS aggregators is almost as if not more important than adding new features.  This is a great way of keeping developers happy while innovating.  Keep up the great work!

For all the *BSD freaks in the house, BSDatwork has several new articles worth checking out.  They’re a great general *BSD news source too.

R. Buckminster Fuller: “Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering.”

This is your alternative quote of the day, bought to you by that crazy cat, R. Buckminster Fuller.  Yeah, the geodesic dome guy.

BBC Tech: Michael Crichton, (that guy who wrote that book about those dinosaurs and a bunch of other books), is creating a concept for a game for Sega.  This is good.  I actually bought a PC game based on Timeline, but never got around to playing it.  One of the coolest features on the box was the ability to run around or go through a guided tour of the micro universe that Crichton created.

Primary Sources

You know you read too many primary sources when you read an article on slashdot and think, “I read that yesterday.”

O’Reillynet: Get yer IPv6 on:

There are many different ideas and opinions about IPv6 around in the market. There are even people who think IPv6 will never come to life. Despite this perception, major companies around the world have been quietly developing products and services using the next generation protocol. And with the recent release of my book, IPv6 Essentials, O’Reilly has also entered the fray. Even with the enormous investment in IPv6 development, however, there are many misconceptions surrounding IPv6.