Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: October 2, 2002

  • University of Maryland reporters detained:

    I heard one of the reporters on a morning radio show today.  It sounded like things were royally mishandled:

    Editor’s Note: Two Diamondback reporters covering the IMF-World Bank protests were arrested Friday morning and manacled for 23 hours. Surrounded by hundreds of protesters in Pershing Park, Washington Metropolitan Police circled and arrested the entire group. Jason Flanagan and Debra Kahn were there as impartial observers, and despite the newspaper’s efforts to release them, they were stripped of all their possessions – even their shoelaces. What follows is a first-person account of their arrest and detention.

    I found this link via Dane Carlson.  I had forgotten about the interview on the radio until I read the article.

  • MacOSXCon Coverage:

  • Buddy for OSX:

    For those of us more accustomed to reading the newspaper than uber-geeky RSS feeds Buddy fetches online newspapers en masse and turns this into one newspaper looking website. Tabs are featured to keep subjects seperate which I thought was an interesting feature for other aggregators…

    Sparing the non-uber-geek from finding RSS links, it will download from noteworthy sites, Washington Post, New York Times, etc etc. Simply click the category of feeds, news, sports, comics, and Buddy will go get them for you.

    This is an interesting idea… an aggregator for non-geeks.  This came up at O’Reilly’s OSDir.

  • Sam Gentile is thinking about Groove, weblogs, and web services, oh my!

  • Add another name to the list of Web Services DevCon webloggers: Greg Reinacker.

    This is so true…talk about a critical mass of webloggers.  🙂  I just yesterday managed to adjust my schedule a bit to make it to this, and I think it’s going to be a great time!  I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of you fellow webloggers.

    *Subscribed* by the way.

  • Kenneth Hunt and LWN point to an Open Source Security Summit hosted by Red Hat and Dell.  I might not be able to stay all day, but I will report anything cool I find.

    Unfortunately the RSVP email address bounced, I’ll have to try again later.

  • Kenneth Hunt has found a cool case to house my via eden/mini-itx motherboard.  The cubey things look really cool, sort of a combination between the Mac (rest in peace) Cube and a shuttle mini system.  I almost bought a plain looking bookshelf case with PS at Fry’s over the summer, but they didn’t have any in San Diego.  The guy helping me didn’t quite understand that I had traveled across the country and driven two and a half hours to get to the store, and that checking other locations wasn’t exactly feasable.

    I’m torn between what type of case to get.  I could always slap it in an ATX case, but that would be downright silly.  The beige and black bookshelf boxes are boring, but they would allow me to use standard CD-ROM’s and hard drives, whereas the sexier smaller cases would require notebook hard drives and stuff.  Thanks, Kenneth, for the linkage to mini-itx.com, I had forgotten about the site after my initial excitement about the platform.

    I like this case at Computer Gate, but at $114.95 it’s a bit pricy, more than the motherboard cost 🙂

  • Ftrain – Colgate Money Shot:

    “Okay,” I said, and very carefully – carefully, because the rm -rf command should not be used when drunk; it’s as dangerous as driving, and can destroy everything you love about your computer – I issued the statement. The hard drive made a noise, then was silent. “It’s gone,” I said. [via Mark Pilgrim]

  • “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”  —Douglas Adams

  • Minimum Advertised Pricing:

    Twenty-eight states filed suit Tuesday against the five biggest record companies and two music retailing giants, accusing them of conspiring to fix CD prices.

    I’m not sure if I understand the artcle.  I deal with Minimum Advertised Prices (MAP) every day.  The dealership agreement that my store has with Nikon, Canon and others is that if we advertise any of their products below their posted MAP, our dealership will be yanked.  This isn’t to say that we’re not allowed to sell products below MAP, we do that on a regular basis.  But we’re not allowed to advertise it below MAP. 

    Did you ever notice that ads for B&H and other cut-rate camera dealers have the price $CALL listed for many of their products, especially cameras?  This is why.

    So who’s right and who’s wrong?  If the record industry looses this suit, it could mean a bunch of litigation against tons of other companies.  Is using MAP wrong for record companies but okay in other industries?  That doesn’t exactly sound right.  At least with camera prices, MAP is there to help the dealer out, to make sure that they don’t get undersold signifcantly.  Should record stores enjoy the same protection?

    Should we beat up the record industry just because they’re the record industry?  I don’t think so.

  • Red Hat

    The GTK2 version of Eclipse is great, it looks and feels much like the Windows version.  The Motif version was ugly.  This is pretty.  The CVS browser is awesome!  Matt does a happy dance.

    How is this release going to handle ser server world?  All of the time and effort that went into the GUI will not be applied to servers running headless or at the text prompt.  I’d like to see some RH7.3/RH8.0 side by side benchmarking on the server side.

  • Simon St.Laurent has a website out there called Monastic XML:

    MonasticXML.org is a look at XML from a different angle, focusing on what markup is best at rather than what markup can do to solve a particular problem or set of problems. While XML is powerful, developers seem insistent on using XML in ways which seem convenient for a moment but which cause much greater trouble down the line to both their projects and to markup itself.

    I am definately going to read this when I get a chance.  He is one of the authors of Programming Web Services with XML-RPC, which was a great read, and is sitting on my desk. [via XML.com]

  • Ed Cone’s laptop bit the big one:

    My laptop ate something poisonous. After a few days of throwing up, it died. My weblog, ie, my Radio software, lived on that computer. With the help of Userland, I was able to salvage my work of the last six months and reopen for business on my desktop at home. This is a workable setup for the short term, but it will change my blogging schedule somewhat for the near future. It has been a long night.

    I need to mirror my XML backup (stored on a different drive) of Radio just in case both drives get fried.

  • Red Hat

    I don’t know if this will mean much to many of you, but I was reading over my previous post in Mozilla on Curveball, my newest Linux box, and I hit the wrong key combination to switch my KVM.  I used the key combination that takes my from Windows to the Linux box, not vica versa.  And I was confused when Linux didn’t pop up.  I don’t think I would have ever made this mistake before.

    Having everything unified is nice, but I have a feeling that open source projects might not be getting the amount of exposure that they used to on the toolbar and the start^H^H^H^H^H”hat” menu.  There’s a “Network Analyzer” under System Tools.  It’s Ethereal, of course, but you don’t find that out until you’ve started it.  I don’t know how big a deal this is, but it might be.

  • Red Hat

    Installed and running.  It runs pretty decently on my Via Eden 533 with 128MB of RAM.  I’m running at 1280×1024 with 8MB of shared memory, and it’s nice.  I might bump it down a notch, but it’s darn pretty.  I can’t believe Mozilla ships with the crappy Netscape 4.x theme, but I’m in modern now.  Tabbed browsing is go.

    I need to install Eclipse and check out the GTK2 interface.  I wanted to check out the sound on this thing, but since there’s no built-in MP3 support, and I don’t have any OGG kicking around, that will have to wait.  The openoffice suite looks nice, but unfortunately, it’s not word.  Not that not being word is a bad thing, but that’s probably what any windows user will say.

    The bluecurve look is just sexy.  It is to Linux what OSX was to MacOS.  It might not be as sexy as Aqua and Quartz, but it’s pretty.  There’s a little red exclamation point in my tray saying those evil words, “Critical Updates” though.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

    Web Services Rock On of the Day:

    Yep, Red Hat is using XML-RPC.  This is awesome.  I’m not sure how long they’ve been doing so, but this is the first time that it has been painfully obvious to me, the end user.  It just makes me want to know how it’s all done!  I think this is excellent.  My apologies to the quality of the pic, I saved with jpeg defaulgs in the Gimp, and while I know my way around Photoshop, I’m still a bit lost in the Gimp.

    Galeon also feels pretty zippy, and the current encarnation of gFtp reminds me of a refined version of WSFTP-LE.  Evolution is like Outlook but cleaner.

    I’ll have to take a look under the hood later, but this is probably Linux on the Desktop Version 1.0.

  • Phil Wolff dropped the K-bomb:

    Version 1

    Pass two elements:

    • ISBN
    • ZIP code

    This might look like:

    http://cardcat.com/isbn/1234567890/zip/94610/

    Return:

    • The book description and a list of libraries in or near the location that have this book in their collection. Availability info too. Link to each library’s page for that book.

    Jenny responds with:

    Phil doesn’t know it, but he just opened a major pandora’s box in libraryland. In a room full of relatives, you don’t talk about religion or politics. In a room full of geeks, you don’t ask which operating system is best. And in a room full of librarians, you don’t really want to ask about Earth’s Largest Library.

    You see, Amazon, Google, and AskJeeves have all rocked our world, and we’re not much further along than we were when Steve Coffman wrote his controversial article in 1999. Which, unfortunately, means the answer to Phil’s question is no one. At least, not in the foreseeable future.

    It’s not totally our fault, though. A little realized fact outside of libraryland is that we’re completely beholden to our database vendors. For the most part, we can’t build our own software for running library catalogs, mainly because of a lack of money, time, resources, and programmer librarians. So we have to rely on the handful of vendors that make the software that runs our catalogs. Naturally, these vendors don’t really play nicely together, and it’s a very drawn-out process to switch from one vendor to another so it’s relatively rare.

    There’s more in her blog entry.  This would rock my personal world, though.

  • Red Hat

    Disc 2 out, Disc 3 in.   I wasted valuable time by forgetting to click ok.

    I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use my old Red Hat 7.2 box again, at least in X.  It’s the fonts.  The user interface.  It’s not right.  It would be like showing someone OSX and then saying, “just kidding, you get OS9.”  This is going to change things.

    Aside: Is it just me, or is xml.apache.org the slowest loading Apache site?  I found that rather amusing, given the bloated nature of xml.  Don’t get me wrong, I love XML, but it’s not always the thing that will solve your problems.

  • Tonight’s Google boredom, I’m currently the 235th Matt  on Google, thought I’m the first Matt Croydon (and the 32nd Croydon).  Also, I’ve been categorized under dmoz.  Thanks, Jeremy!

  • Red Hat

    Ack!  The CD almost auto-ejected my drink off the table.  Disc 1 done, Disc 2 in.  I really need to find a case for this Via Eden board.

  • Mono news:

    Mono 0.16 has been released. Source and RPMs are available. The release notes are here.

    Just to clarify for those who don’t know, here’s a piece from the Mono FAQ:

    The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Ximian that is working to develop an open source, Unix version of the Microsoft .NET development platform. Its objective is to enable Unix developers to build and deploy cross-platform .NET Applications. The project will implement various technologies developed by Microsoft that have now been submitted to the ECMA for standardization.

    Hopefully that will add to the overall value of the post.  And I’m all about value, baby!