Month: September 2002

Blinkenlights: Blib, Blinkentools, and Blinkensim.  All three tools are available here.

Blib: blib is a library full of useful things to hack the Blinkenlights. If you need to read the various formats for Blinkenlights movies, want to implement the network protocol, or aim to develop a viewer/editor or simulator for the Blinkenlights, this is what you need.

Blinkentools: blinkentools is a set of commandline utilities related to Blinkenlights. It includes b2b, a converter for blinkenmovies that can apply some simple effects, b2mng, which creates MNG animations from blinkenmovies, and bsend, which sends movies over the net using the Blinkenlights network protocol.

Blinkensim: blinkensim is a graphical Blinkenlights simulator that displays the UDP packets it receives according to the Blinkenlights network protocol. It supports themes and comes with DirectFB and GTK+ backends.

Blogging Network seems to go against everything that I believe in about weblogs and their diffusion of information.  Weblog information, to me, should be freely distributed to as many people as possible.  I’m sure that this doesn’t fit every persons definition or ideal of a weblog, I guess I’m just an extremist.  Sign in to read more, er, just kidding.

Blapp: An OSX application that allows easy management and posting to a blosxom blog.  Everything is convenient drag-n-drop.  Sweeet!

newSyst: newSyst is a php/mysql powered CMS/weblog.  It looks pretty lightweight and is configurable.  I don’t know a whole lot more, and some screenshots or a demo of the admin interface would be great, but this might be an option for anyone looking for a small footprint CMS that’s simple and doesn’t look like yet another *nuke site.

RSS Roadmap:

Therefore, the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0. We anticipate possible 2.0.1 or 2.0.2 versions, etc. only for the purpose of clarifying the specification, not for adding new features to the format.

I think this is good.  Here’s an similie for you:

XML-RPC is to RSS 2.0 as SOAP is to ____________?

Whatever fills in that blank is gonna be damn powerful.

Codenames

Open source software tends to use codenames for just about every project out there.  Sometimes they’re descriptive, sometimes cryptic.  I was reading the release notes for Apache Tomcat 4.1.10, and was almost completely overcome with project jargon overload.  Codenames are good (they must be since everyone uses them), but man they can confuse me sometimes.

Sam Ruby:

Lots of really, really, really good progress on RSS.  Now, I’d like to make a plea.  Slow down.

RSS 2.0: Dave Winer writes his thoughts for adding namespaces and modules ot the RSS 0.9x spec and bumping the version up to 2.0.   There has been a flurry of RSS activity lately which will hopefully revitalize the standard that moves our content.

That Philip Greenspun: Internet Application Workbook.  An online book from a guy that I didn’t know did anything other than run one of the best photography web sites out there, photo.net. [via Victor Ruiz -> Ron Lusk]

John Robb (on reviving P2P):

It’s pretty clear to me (and has been for a long time) that the way to restart P2P is to ground it in desktop weblog software.  In that capacity a P2P networks will be used primarily for publishing original media too heavy to publish via the Web.  That would allow the integrated P2P system to recentralize the search function, which despite best efforts can’t seem to be done in a distributed way.  As a recognized user in the system (users will all have weblogs with a defined location which implies identity), it’s much less likely that wholesale copyright theft would occur and we would likely see an explosion of original content, some of which may have mass appeal.

Yes!  I’d like fries with that.  Seriously, though, this would be a great direction to take, especially with the recent rise in audioblogging and the inevitable adoption of videoblogging.  Bandwidth and distribution are going to become issues.  Soon.  P2P might be the solution.

Postnuke Gets a Face Lift: And it is slick!  Newsforge has a little bit of coverage with a few pointers.

O’Reillynet: A spiffy FreeBSD multimedia desktop built from source.

O’Reillynet: A Nagios tutorial.  Nagios looks like a good system/network monitoring and visualization tool.  Yet another thing to install on my Linux box when I get some free time.

osCommerce: An alternative to that Miva monster.  Sponsored by my old web provider pair no less.  They were a great provider just a little on the expensive side at the time.  They look darn competitive now in the barebones hosting department, though you still have to pay $17.95 a month for PHP/MySQL/FrontPage extensions, all of which come stock for $8.95 a month at westhost, my current provider.  I don’t have any complaints with either company, they’ve both been excellent.

Kicking the tires of MicroBSD: BSD Newsletter takes this lean and hardened *BSD for a spin.  A 160MB default install of a mostly OpenBSD-based distrobution.  They had some problems, but are curious to see more.

Ars Technica: A thorough Jaguar review.  This review came down through so many RSS feeds that I’m not sure who to credit, but it’s worth a read and worth preserving here.

GAUL: Genetic Algorithm Utility Library.  This is a powerful library written in C for making use of genetic algorithms.  The page also contains pointers to quite a few genetic programming resources, including other implementations.  Another tool for the toolbox…

Clover: A code coverage tool for Java. [via Rebelutionary]

DPReview: Sinar releases 22 megapixel digital back.  This really doesn’t apply to consumer digital products– yet.  Most point and shoot or digital SLRs are in the 2-6 megapixel range.  This is a little more than that.  The impressive thing about this particular Sinar back (for medium format cameras) is that the 22 megapixel resolution is a 1-shot resolution, not a scanning resolution or a 3-shot resolution.  Older high end digital backs tended to be of the scanning or 3-shot variety, rendering them completely useless for anything other than studio work.  This digital back uses a large (1.5×2.0 inches) CCD sensor, significantly larger than most CCD sensors out there.  The resolution for the camera is 4080×5440.  Someday this technology will trickle down.

Telnetting to SMTP Servers: A quick howto for sending mail via SMTP directly from telnet. [via transMorphic]