Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: September 2002

  • Camero: A webcam system using MySQL, with a web based interface and a portal-like interface for users.

  • GKrellM 2.0: A new version of the coolest system monitor thingie for the Linux desktop for Gnome2. If you run linux and have Gnome or Gnome2 libraries, you should be running this on your desktop.

  • Mozilla Calendar: Now with fresh iCal support. [via Russ, whom I shall refer to by his first name]

  • Mick Bauer: An article at Linux Journal about running Snort and other intrusion detection systems without an ip address.

  • Russell Beattie: “It dawned on me today as I was talking about my website and projects and such that my “get it done” attitude is great for my personal ambitions and project goals, but it may not be the best plan of action if I’m ever going to show off the stuff I’m writing to prospective employers.”

  • OSNews: Gentoo user-users vs. developer-users:

    The users’ main gripe (except the involved installation process) is that Gentoo takes too long to compile either itself (during installation) or when later compiling big packages (eg. KDE/Gnome) or when updating the system. Installing the system, using the Stage 1 tarball, can take from 24 hours up to 2 days, depending on the power of your system. Also, (un)fortunately, most packages have new ebuilds in the Portage tree every few days or weeks, with fixed bugs. This is of course a good thing. But it is not when you need to wait hours to recompile from scratch all these packages every few days. And when “updating world”, most of the times it would take a while. This is a tiring process.

  • Developer.apple.com: Web Services with AppleScript and Perl.

    You can’t create a SOAP web service with AppleScript, but you can have it act as a SOAP web client and use Perl to create the service. So it becomes a simple matter of passing structured data between Perl and AppleScript, with the Perl service running either on the same machine or remotely. This is much nicer than firing off a new Perl process with the do shell script AppleScript extension, because the startup time is much faster and thus the latency is nearly eliminated. Also, state can be preserved without having to scribble it down to disk between invocations, such as a hard-to-marshal database connection or cached results.

  • Goodbye

    My grandmother passed away this evening. She had lived about eight years after a major stroke.  I saw her this afternoon and she was sleeping, tired.  She was ready.  I’m sad but I understand.  They say she wasn’t in pain.  She left so many good memories behind.  She will be missed and remembered.

    If my blog becomes sparse any time in the near future, this is why.  If I post more than I usually do, it’s a coping mechanism.

  • Phosxom: A php-based version of blosxom.  Awesome stuff!

  • The Cocoa Files: Gobs of tutorials and musings by Andrew Stone.

  • The Washington Post: A quick history of ThinkGeek, though it fails to mention OSDN or VA Linux, er, VA Software.

    Fairfax-based ThinkGeek, founded in 1999 by a group of four friends, grew out of $25,000 in proceeds from a previous business that never took off. The founders designed the site themselves, wrote and created most of the products on their own, and spent evenings packing and shipping orders while running the “real” business, an Internet service provider, during the day.

  • Webmin: The web-based control panel for Linux destined to save your ass goes 1.000 today.  Here are the changes in this version from freshmeat:

    This release adds a Linux Firewall module for configuring iptables, renames the old PPP Usernames and Passwords module to PPP Dialin Server and adds support for configuring mgetty and setting PPP options, adds the Voicemail Server module for configuring vgetty, improves Irix support for NFS, disks, and filesystems, quotas, and file manager, adds ports to RedHat 7.4 and UnitedLinux 1.0, adds support for JFS filesystems, and includes lots of other minor bugfixes and features.

    If you run your own Linux box, webmin can save you tons of time.  Sure it’s not maintaining your system by editing hundreds of files in vi.  It’s not for purists.  It saves tons of time tho.  I’ve been using it since the 0.790 days or so, and it hasn’t caused me more than one or two headaces over the years.  It has definately saved me tons of time, though.

  • Newsforge: Mozilla 1.2alpha is released.

  • IBM: Securing Dynamic Web Content.

    This article details how to secure dynamic content on an Apache Web server. Topics covered include general security issues pertaining to dynamic content, securing Server Side Includes, configuring Apache’s Common Gateway Interface, and wrappering dynamic content. The article is targeted primarily at Webmasters and system administrators responsible for maintaining and securing a Web server; however, anyone with a need or desire to server dynamic content will benefit from the topics covered. A basic understanding of Linux commands, permissions, and file structures is assumed. [via #Rootprompt.org]

  • Aaron Swartz: “The Wayback Machine Adds Diff”  Great stuff.  To see Dave’s live-editing technique, here’s a diff from last year.

  • Kate’s laws of programming:

    If you find you need it in two different classes/apps you should make it into it’s own class. Reuse should never be underestimated.

    Your code isn’t nearly as cool as you thought it was when you wrote it. Be sure to fix it next time you’re in there.

  • Exhibit 13: A Blue Man Group project that displays pieces of paper that flew into the Bronx after that World Trade Center attacks.  It’s well done. [via The Desktop Fishbowl]

  • Slashdot: Canon made a mistake and announced an 11-megapixel camera two weeks too soon.  PC Magazine covers it and I’m sure that as soon as it’s “official,” DPReview will have a writeup on it.

  • IBM Alphaworks: IBM Alphaworks announced IBM Lightweight Services:

    IBM Lightweight Services (LWS) is a J2EE (JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) application that provides an event-driven hosting environment for lightweight services. Lightweight services are persistent, transactional, server-side programs developed in lightweight programming languages such as JavaScript and Python. Developers of these services have high-level, extensible access to IBM middleware, enabling services that communicate via Web services, Sametime instant messaging, and high-performance publish/subscribe. The LWS development tools, paired with a flexible deployment and administration model, allow rapid composition, installation, instantiation, and debugging of server-side applications.

    The screenshots look great, it looks like an extremely easy to use application.  The page also features links to scritpting tutorials and example agents. [via Newsforge]

  • Brent Simmons: An XML-RPC demo using Cocoa on OSX 10.2:

    Mac OS X 10.2 includes a new WebServicesCore framework which allows one to make XML-RPC calls from Cocoa apps. (And Carbon apps, too, by the way.)

    This article will demonstrate making a very simple XML-RPC call and getting back the result. This article assumes you’re familiar with Cocoa: I won’t go through the steps involved to create outlets and actions and so on.

    Note: I haven’t seen any documentation for the WebServicesCore framework yet. This article is based entirely on reading the header file and building an application that works. Please email any corrections or clarifications to me (brent at ranchero dot com).