Day: October 18, 2002

Greg Klebus found a sweet case for the Via Eden:

I ran accross this and fell in love at first sight with the design. Just imagine a computer in a semi-transparent blue plastic breadbox from IKEA ($6.50). Way cool! If not for the nasty CD-RW drive, it would be a perfectly clean design (very iMacish).

Matt—if you’re reading this—I’d definitely go for this solution if I had a spare case-less VIA Eden.

Speaking of Matt and his VIA Eden: he seems to have lost the onboard network card due to power outage. What a bad luck. It would be a disaster for me and my Shuttle SV25, as having 2 NICs (onboard and PCI) is crucial for my box being a proxy server for other machines at home.

That’s a really slick case that doesn’t look like it would take much time to reproduce.  I should just take my Eden to Ikea some day and see what kind of fun things it fits in.  Someday 🙂

I’m a little confused about the right sequence of steps that I need to take in order to get Apache Axis to run successfully on my Linux server.  I’ve installed the JDK, Jakarta, and Axis.  The happyaxis.jsp page is quite happy, but I can’t build any projects using the Axis libraries.

I have followed the documentation to the best of my abilities.  I’m a little dissapointed at the docs, as I wasn’t really able to figure out what was going on.  I’d be referred around from one fragment of documentation to another, not sure what to do.  If I ever do get things figured out, I’ll try to post/publish/donate a howto or something like that.

Am I the only one frustrated with installing Axis?  I tried Gump, but ran into some problems getting it to run.  I’m probably misinterpreting something in the Apache docs.  Oh well.

Red Hat 8.0 Server

I installed Red Hat 8.0 as a server configuration last night on a PII350 with 128MB of RAM.  A nice install of server stuff without X, Gnome, KDE, and other stuff I don’t need on a server ran about 900MB.  Not too bad.

Dane Carlson pointed to a bunch of cool stuff yesterday and today, including a color pallete chooser, The Art of Software Development at DevShed, If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers, and Bloggers Proverbs.

Greg Reinacker: Web Services and Schema Validation.

There was a lot of talk at the DevCon about writing your web service interface first in WSDL, and then implementing it in code.  This is in contrast to the method that the current tools tend to encourage; for example, with VS.NET, you can write your code, decorate the methods with [WebMethod], and automatically generate the WSDL.  I wholeheartedly agree with the first way – define your interface first, and implement second.  There are things you can do this way that the tools just won’t do for you.

I agree, writing your WSDL first, generating stubs, and then filling them out makes tons of sense.  Read the rest of Greg’s post for more about restricting values, validating and all kinds of fun stuff.

Mikel Maron pointed to OEOne, a company with a pretty slick looking dashboard/desktop that looks slick and simple.  They have a standalone version which is an everything-in-the-box kind of thing.  They also have a desktop version which can run on top of RedHat 7.x, Mandrake 8.2 or 9.0.  Unfortunately it doesn’t run on Red Hat 8.0.  I’m booting up my Red Hat 7.x box to check it out.

The install procedure starts out pretty easily (as root):

$ lynx -source http://install.oeone.com/ | sh

or

$ links -source http://install.oeone.com/ |sh

Then a pretty easy to use wizard pops up.  It walks you through setup, detects what packages you have, which packages it might have to delete (double check this!) and what packages it is going to install.  It installs a modded Mozilla 1.0 among other things, and the full install totalled just under 100MB for me.  It’s currently slurping RPMs over the net.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.  Install, install, install.

It changed a lot of stuff on my system, I wouldn’t reccomend it to anyone who’s already using Linux.

OnLamp: Beginning Python for Bioinformatics.  This article wins todays prize of wtf title of the day.  It makes sense, Python seems like such a ‘glue’ language to me at times, but at first glance, I didn’t understand why Python and bioinformatics were in the same sentance.

Bioinformatics, the use of computers in biological research, is the newest wrinkle on one of the oldest pursuits–trying to uncover the secret of life. While we may not know all of life’s secrets, at the very least computers are helping us understand many of the biological processes that take place inside of living things. In fact, the use of computers in biological research has risen to such a degree that computer programming has now become an important and almost essential skill for today’s biologists.