Day: October 7, 2002

OSNews reviews SuSe 8.1 Professional:

If there are two things in this apartment that I don’t like, that would first be the dog upstairs which barks at 5 AM almost every morning, and the fact that UPS almost never deliver things on our door. They never bother to check if we are in. The SuSE people were very kind to send us the Professional version of SuSE 8.1, but unfortunately, I received it 10 days later after it arrived in the apartment’s complex. But now we got it here, we gave it a spin for almost a week, and here is what we think about it.

Jeremy Zawodny:

A week ago, I couldn’t keep the server from shitting itself every 12 hours. Now it’s been up for almost 5 days.

Loosely Coupled:

Then, just at the moment when everybody hates web services so much they can’t even bear to read about the technology any more, mainstream adoption will begin to build, unnoticed by the media as it moves on in search of other topics.

A press release that caught my eye:

BEDFORD, Mass., Oct. 7 /PRNewswire/ — Sonic Software today announced that it has contributed standards-based enterprise-class SOAP messaging capabilities to Apache Axis, the next generation of Apache SOAP 2.0. With the acceptance of source code for inclusion in Apache Axis 1.0, Sonic delivers its market-leading reliable, asynchronous Web services expertise to the largest open-source Web application community.

Is it just me or does the Boston/New England area seem to feel like a web services hotspot? [via Newsforge]

Some things never change

A few days ago, I snagged the GTK+2 version of GKrellM, probably the best system monitor that I have ever used, regardless of platform.  I love that everything is right there in front of you.  I was curious to see how the new version might take advantage of the new GTK+2 libraries.  It does not appear any different than it did before, and I don’t think that’s really a bad thing.

You can find plugins to monitor many services and tasks at a glance, and it’s fully skinnable.  If you use a *nix or *BSD running with Gnome libraries, you should probably at least have access to it.

I still love Bluecurve.  It’s been rock solid both idle and under stress.  I don’t have killer uptime because I’ve had borrow parts from it over the past couple of days, but I’m pretty sure that it is capable of it.

I still want to see one in a production environment.

Both Mongomery County and Prince George’s county schools are on lockdown now.

Here’s the google news roundup of the middle school shooting.

Update by email– Shots were reported in a Walmart parking lot in Bowie, Maryland. Nothing has come up yet, and nobody appears to be injured.  It looks like nothing major happened there.

A child was shot outside of a Bowie, Maryland school this morning.  Police are not sure if it is connected to the recent sniping spree.  The child has been rushed to a local hospital and will be transported via helicopter to a trauma center.  More as I hear it.

CNet: HP introduces a new Compaq laptop well equipped at $899.

I would like to know why I can’t spend a couple hundred bucks and get a decent but slower laptop.  Pentium 166 notebooks go for $200 and more all the time.  That’s annoying.  At least HP is lowering the bar for entry level laptops.  Maybe I’ll be able to afford one to replace my ancient laptop.

Then again…

CNet: Microsoft unveils new Web services tool

Microsoft is scheduled to formally announce Content Management Server 2002 at the Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, Calif., where the company also plans to reveal more details about the next versions of Outlook and Exchange.

And pricing:

Content Management Server 2002 will retail for $42,000 per processor. Companies running multi-processor servers could pay considerably more for the product. Microsoft said the software would be generally available by the end of the year.

That would get expensive on my quad Xeon box.  Ha!  Just kidding.

Blogging has been slow over the weekend as I have a ton of stuff to get done before the Web Services Devcon.