Month: September 2002

Krzysztof Kowalczyk points to an entry by Doug Kaye which shows that RackShack.Net is the fastest increase in IP addresses in the month of August.  They do dedicated servers, and from their pricing and what I’ve heard about them, they do it right and cheap. If you can snag a Celery 1.3/512MB/60GB/Red Hat 7.2 with 400GB/mo of transfer, this place is doing a good job at keeping prices down.

Slashdot: Jersey officially limits G-forces on roller coasters. Over the years,  Six Flags Great Adventure, Jersey’s largest theme park has had several incidents, a few involving death. These injuries and deaths are linked to improper operators or poorly maintained rides, not G-forces.

I remember the Haunted House fire of 1984 (towards end of page), and they have had a few other accidents over the years.

While I’m on the subject of roller coasters, here’s an interesting tidbit about a ride that made me feel like I was getting my butt kicked by a bully:

Well folks after three years of speculations it seems that we can finally put the rumors about Drachen Fire to rest.  Busch Gardens Williamsburg has announced that they were not able to sell the ride and it is in their best interests to remove the coaster.  When the ride closed back in 1998 the original plans were to modify the ride and make try to improve the ride.  Plans would then change to Busch Gardens Williamsburg attempting to sell the ride.  Unfortunately the ride never could find a buyer so the inevitable step would occur.  It has now been announced that the ride should be completely removed before the opening day for this 2002 season.   Drachen Fire was designed by Arrow Dynamics (Ron Toomer to be exact) and opened in 1992.  The ride would remain a popular attraction for several years before starting to slide in popularity in the late 1990’s.  One of the rides inversions was removed after the 1994 season in order to make the ride less intense.  As for the land that the coaster stood on, no plans have been announced for what Busch Gardens Williamsburg plans to put there.

And while I’m on the subject of Jersey, here is the best slashdot comment of the day:

I’m from Jersey.

Are you from Jersey?

I’m from Jersey.

Really? What exit?

It’s so true.

David M Johnson (of Blogging Roller fame) likes Eclipse:

Overall, I was very impressed.  Netbeans can do most of things I have described above, but they always seem like a struggle to me.  This was my first time with Eclipse and things just seemed obvious to me.  I hate to say it because Netbeans has served me well and I really like Swing, but Eclipse has a much more streamlined, intuitive, and snappy user interface.  Eclipse is a pleasure to use.

Be gentle though, I went to his site this morning and got this:

An unexpected error has occured in Roller .

Update: Everything is back online.

I just found the DC Metro area blog map.

OSNews: Gnome 2.0.2 is out.

MacOpz: Build your own Mac.  From scratch. [via /.]

Scripting News: Straw, a Gnome 2 desktop aggregator gets a plug/linkage from Dave:

Straw is a desktop news aggregator for the GNOME environment. I got an interesting email from the author of the program, Juri Pakaste, asking if it made sense to add features to RSS 2.0 that link to a blogroll and a list of subscriptions. My philosophy is that yes if it makes sense to Juri, then I think it’s cool. Why? Because he’s out there developing software for the format, and he’s friendly about it (even though it competes with my own software). It’s only because we are trying to work out a compromise that I don’t just add the features to the 2.0 spec right now, and add support for it to the Radio serializer. In other words, we could move a lot faster if we didn’t try to placate our critics. (And lots of luck with that, I don’t think they’re looking to settle.)

I’m not sure if Straw actually competes with any of Userland’s products since none of Userland’s products run in a Linux environment.

Dave: A test version of the RSS 2.0 serializer for Radio is out.  I’ll wait until the kinks are worked out, but it shouldn’t break your feed for RSS .9x aggregators.

PHP Journal:

PHP Journal is the only magazine whose sole intent is to help grow the PHP community. PHP Journal expands your reach with in-depth technical articles that allow developers to leverage the language to its fullest and promotes adoption through advocacy by highlighting the language’s versatility.

It looks like Jeremy Zawodny‘s handling the web work.  Subscriptions are available on the website.

Slashdot: Keanu Reeves as Superman? He could probably pull it off, though it would have to have the Keanu, “whoa” line in it.

Ron Lusk:

This explains why an attorney I know responded to my presentation on blogging with, “But that’s not billable time: I have to bill to a client, don’t I?”

Lawyers.

I’m currently putting a dent in Kenneth Hunt‘s bandwidth and snagging Unreal Tournament 2003.

Linux Laboratory: An article/op-ed entitled “If You Port it, We Will Pay.” It’s about Linux and that if commercial software were available for it, Linux users would buy it. This may be true, but there used to be a game porting company called Loki Games, who went  out of business because they were not able to sell enough copies. I don’t have the energy to write much more, but here’s the leadin for the article:

I can’t help but get the feeling that companies like Real Networks, Adobe, Macromedia and yes, even IBM think that us penguins are all just about the cheapest birds on the entire face of the technology ecosphere, or whatever Microsoft is calling it these days (oh yeah, they think we’re cheap, too). At the same time, Linux, one of the flagship products of the open source/free software movement, is such a buzzword that all of these companies – and many others – want to somehow associate themselves with the community. As a result, we see things like Real Player, Adobe Acrobat, IBM’s ViaVoice and other popular programs being ported to Linux. This all sounds great on the surface, but truth be told, these products are only wannabe imitations of their fully functional cousins that work wonderfully under Windows (for as long as you can get Windows to work, anyway).

Robert P Lessard at OpenBSD Journal: A howto entitled, “Setting Up an Openbsd/Samba Fileserver with NT Domain Authentication.”

J. Paul Reed: A freshmeat editorial about why OSX isn’t unix.

Russell Beattie: He’s just found a java applet called Ekit. It’s a WYSIWIG html editor. He’s not into the GPL all that much and I can understand. More on this later.

Unreal Tournament 2003: Go snag the 100MB demo at Infogrames’ website if you’re a game junkie.  Right now I’m playing America’s Army: Operations, which is well done and is totally free.

NetBSD 1.6 is released: Now supporting more architectures than ever before, the new release features a ton of minor fixes.  I guess it’s time to upgrade my 486 netbsd box.

Blogdex has started crawling my blog.

Abbot: An XML based toolkit for building Graphic User Interfaces.