Day: October 29, 2002

Eweek interviews Darryl Taft of Microsoft:

Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft Corp.’s general manager of platform strategies, is considered one of the company’s top “big picture” thinkers. Fitzgerald, who focuses on Windows and .Net and bringing together all of Microsoft’s complementary technologies such as XML and Web services into a unified infrastructure, spoke with eWEEK Senior Writer Darryl K. Taft earlier this month about issues ranging from the Redmond, Wash., company’s odd-couple Web-services relationship with IBM to standards to Microsoft’s platform strategies. [via WebServices.Org]

MacSlash reports that Apple now ranks 5th in the server market.  Pretty impressive for a new player.

Sam Gentile:

The consistently excellent Dino Exposito has a nice introduction to .NET Remoting. Unfortunately its in VB.NET but he’s a great writer and teacher and it looks good.

CNet/John Spooner:

The new AMD Developer Center, located at the company’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters, will give software developers and hardware manufacturers access to AMD’s engineers, software and testing facilities.

AMD is doing everything they can to make x86-64 work.  I wish them luck, I’d love to have an Opteron on my desktop someday…

Chris Sells mentions that Mindreef’s SOAPscope goes beta:

“SOAPscope is designed to help diagnose problems developing XML Web Services by logging message traffic and helping you find problems with the SOAP messages and WSDL.”

Mindreef did a very cool demo of their diagnostics tools at the DevCon and it was a big hit. Recommended.

Mindreef’s demo at the Web Services DevCon was wicked cool.

Newsforge: Film Gimp gets $1,000 from LinuxFund.org.

Ed Cone:

Tara Grubb’s weblog was discussed high in the story, which was headlined “Grubb’s ‘hits’ don’t faze Coble.” The lede: “If Internet page views were votes, US Rep. Howard Coble might be quaking in his loafers.” The top of the article dwells on Grubb’s “innovative use of the Web.” Grubb’s opposition to the P2P bill is discussed, as is Coble’s concern for copyright protection.

K5/kpaul: Portrait of a Blogger.  I thought the article was way off until I read the techblogger section:

Percentage of blogger population: 20%
Hours spent blogging: 56/week
Habitat: Usually a messy desk type area with lots of caffeine nearby. Techie Bloggers have been known to be nomads, though, with the advent of wireless internet technology. You may see them anywhere as a result, although most tend towards urban areas.
Average Age: 20 something
Favorite hangout: Slashdot
Last Book Read: Understanding the LINUX Kernel: From I/O Ports to Process Management
Favorite Offline Activities: Microsoft jokes, computer swap meets, hacker conventions.
Mode of Dress: Varies wildly, but you will usually notice at least one obscure reference to linux ruling and microsoft sucking.
Psychological profile: INTP
Typical post: select extract('epoch' from now()) as unixtime; Recompiled the kernel from CVS today. Blech. While waiting for it to compile, I worked some on my project to turn GIMP into an auto-dynamic IP range modifier for my Sega Dreamcast box. The boxen are doing ok, but the 486 piece of crap is pulling too much juice and overheating so I’m thinking of rerouting the fan and mounting it inside my refrigerator. Yeah, yeah, I saw the /. article, but mine is going to be way cooler. More later, my Mac is beeping…

I think I’ll take the 5th of that.  I haven’t booted my 486/netbsd box for awhile (I added an extra case fan), tho my mac does beep every so often.  I actually don’t have a monitor hooked up to it, I VNC in.  At one point I thought a 4 port KVM would be more than enough…

Keith Devens pointed out The Unix Programming Environment, by Mark Burgess.  It covers shell scripting, C, Perl/CGI, network programming, and a lot more.

Linux Journal/Louis Iacona: Dogs of the Linux Shell

Could the command-line tools you’ve forgotten or never knew save time and some frustration?

There are some good ones in there, including head, tail, tac, fold, and others.  You don’t always have to write a perl script to get the job done…

Peter Drayton is moving to Seattle to keep the CLR in check.  Sweet!

IM Conversation of the day

MattSchwackAway: You can dream about some weird effed up stuff if you read a computer programming book right before you take a nap.
adam: LOL
adam: oh man, it’s funny you say that.  i actually did that just recently too
MattSchwackAway: 🙂
MattSchwackAway: it’s scary sometimes
adam: what did you dream about? (i’m curious)
MattSchwackAway: I don’t remember, but it was event-driven and object oriented.
adam: LMAO
adam: oh man

(Adam’s screen name changed to prevent AIM spam.)

Jeremy Zawodny’s continuing PHPCon coverage, Dirk Elemendorf’s closing keynote:

He then threw us a bit of a curve ball by revealing that a sizable chunk of their PHP code is being replaced by Python. The silver lining in the story is that SOAP is allowing them to keep much of the customer-facing stuff in PHP and the back-end code in Python.

Yeah, PHP!  Yeah, Python!  Yeah, SOAP!

VIA Eden Invisible Case Mod

I’ve spoken about it several times, so here’s a perfect example of how NOT to run your VIA Eden itty bitty motherboard:

Don’t try this at home, kids.  Now it’s back to cleaning up my room.

Rogue Books

Here are a bunch of books that managed to sneak off my bookshelf and were partying at different parts in my room:

If you can’t read any of the titles, click on the image for a 640×480 version.  And yes, they’re sitting on top of a Sparc 5 (170MHz, 128MB RAM, 2+ gig hd).  Here they are from top to bottom: Learning Perl, Web Services Essentials, Programming Web Services with XML-RPC, Python Cookbook, Using Samba, Core Java 2, Volume I, TCP/IP Network Administration, AXIS: Next Generation Java SOAP, Java Development With Ant, Java How to Program, Core PHP Programming, Oracle8i: The Complete Reference.