Month: September 2002

Blackboard Version 6 is released. I found this link via Serious Instructional Technology. I have to say that I used a version of blackboard a year or two ago, and it was slow (could have been the school’s servers), buggy, and the UI was painful to use. I’d be curious to see how they’ve improved things since then.

Radio plays nice with aggregators:

“system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeRssFile changed on Fri, 27 Sep 2002 14:44:34 GMT: Drop the xmlns attribute on the rss element. Its presence breaks some parsers. Instead, I’m letting Scripting News bear the brunt here, it’ll retain the xmlns attribute, for the time-being, and shake out the broken parsers. They’ll have a choice of fixing them or not. Note that with or without the xmlns attribute it’s still a valid RSS 2.0 feed.”

Brett Morgan:

“Something all commercial unix sysadmins should do right after installing a box. Install all the gnu command line tools. They actually work as advertised. Rates up there with installing gcc and perl in my mind. Oh, add bash and xemacs while you are at it. ;)”

I was so confused when I first logged into my Sparc box. Everything was so familiar but so different at the same time.

Sunfreeware is also a great site for freeware stuff for Solaris.  The website is painful to the eye, but it’s a good resource.

MSNBC: $200 Lindows/Netscape/AOL PC? It could work. And it’s also not a crippled appliance, which is what every other ‘appliance’ computer has been. Keep an eye out on this one. [via Newsforge]

CNet:

Three of the major hard drive makers will cut down the length of warranties on some of their drives, starting Oct. 1, to streamline costs in the low-margin desktop disk storage business.

Does this mean that they can now slack off on quality assurance?  I understand the problem of saving money, hopefully we won’t get burned when a year and a month down the road a batch of drives go bad…

The companies will maintain three- to five-year warranties for drives used in large businesses such as banks and companies that keep track of financial transactions. Western Digital will offer extended warranties directly to customers, while Maxtor and Seagate expect retailers to have extended warranty programs for consumers.

That’s just what I want to do, pay Best Buy an extra $30 for my hard drive.  Then you have to wait in line for 45 minutes just to have them tell me that I’m missing an obscure piece of paperwork and they can’t help me.

Daemonnews:

DarwinPorts provides the infrastructure and meta-information that allows easy installation of freely available software on a Mac OS X 10.2 (or any Darwin 6.0.1 or newer) system. Like the FreeBSD ports system and other similar systems, it automates the process of locating, downloading, configuring, patching, building, installing, and managing third-party software.

Excellent!  Check out the DarwinPorts page for more info.

XML-RPC Class Server: This is a cool idea:

XCS stands short for XML-RPC Class Server. It can make any existing PHP class available for access via XML-RPC (without any modifications). You only need to put the file “xcs.php” in the same directory with your class files.

I’ll definately have to play around with this. [via Keith Devens]

Y! Finance RSS feeds

Is it true?

Thanks for testing our proof of concept RSS feeds!. Our RSS test is over. We appreciate all the feedback.

*Sigh*  It’s like giving a kid a pound of candy and a 2-liter bottle of soda, letting them eat it all, and then saying, “GO TO BED!”  Thanks for the great work, Jeremy.  I hope you’re not catching too much flak for sucking up Y! bandwidth 🙂

I’d still love to see some stats about what we were watching.

Desktop Fishbowl:

Well, I’m off up the coast for four days. I’m not sure how I’ll survive four days without net access. Can you get Internet patches? Or maybe one of those plastic Internet inhaler things…

If only it were that easy.

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.