The Register: Sun’s missing Xeon-killer discovered.
Linux and Main: Metrowerks, the Motorola subsidiary, is expected to announce that it is acquiring the embedded Linux company Lineo. The announcement could come as soon as Friday. [via NewsForge]
O’Reillynet: Use Metadata to Improve Your Pictures.
Aaron Swartz will be at Comdex. on a panel called: The Computing Re-Revolutionaries: Business, Consumers, or Both?
That is all.
Chris Sells has been cranking out the content lately. Tonight’s installment is WinForms Data Validation. It’s a good quick tutorial on validation for all the .NETters out there.
I wonder if this weblog is in any way undesirable to both Java/Open Source people and .NET people. I’m an all of the above kinda guy, but do potential .NET readers get turned off by my Open Source/Java stuff and vica versa? I know I should really set up channels so that people can tune out the noise and only focus on the topic that interests them, but I’m lazy. It’s on my list of someday, which was listed as right after the recent template shift. We shall see.
Coverage by Paul Festa at CNet on recent activities at the W3C:
The Web’s leading standards group on Thursday issued a trio of documents on the architecture of Web services and launched an unprecedented effort to standardize Web services lingo.
Here are the docs:
Uche Ogbuji’s article on proper XML output in Python went live today:
The main problem with simple
WebServices.Org points to two interesting articles this afternoon. The first article from rediff.com contains a quote from Bill Gates:
“Tablet PC and XML Web services on .Net will bring about a revolution in using the converging technologies to such an extent that in the current digital decade, the use of paper and other intermediaries will become minimal,” Gates asserted.
The second article is from IDG’s IT World. It highlights some proof of concept projects and some gosh darn useable applications of the Google API.
Alexandre Dulaunoy at Advogato has released a draft paper entitled ” Good security practice for a Free Software release.”
As everybody knows, a lot of trojaned Free Software has been found. A vast majority of them are not using OpenPGP signed checksum file. I’m currently trying to make a basic HOWTO to make a Free Software release including OpenPGP signature. This can minimize the risk (as long as the user is checking the signature ;-). Here is a draft in PS and PDF format.
Don’t hesitate to provide comments and feedback following your own experience of the issue. (I hope to include the chapter in the Software Release HOWTO afterwards)
There’s a review at Slashdot of Java Development with Ant by Steve Loughran and Erik Hatcher. I’m about halfway through the book myself.
Mesa 5.0 has been released. A few features and a bunch of bugfixes. Mesa now supports OpenGL 1.4.
MSNBC Reports:
A last-minute addition to a proposal for a Department of Homeland Security bill would punish malicious computer hackers with life in prison.
DURING CLOSED-DOOR NEGOTIATIONS before the debate began, the House Republican leadership inserted the 16-page Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA) into the Homeland Security bill. CSEA expands the ability of police to conduct Internet or telephone eavesdropping without first obtaining a court order, and offers Internet providers more latitude to disclose information to police. [via Newsforge]
I’m a little worried by this. I in no way support hackers and script kiddies using DDOS attacks and stuff like that. That is bad, they should be pubished. I’m not so sure about life in jail though. Yes, if the crime is serious enough, it’s nice for prosecutors to have that as an option, but does this mean a 13 year old script kiddie might serve life in jail for bringing someone’s website down for a few hours? That doesn’t exactly sound like the punishment fits the crime. We’ve seen that post-9/11, your civil rights can be suspended at a moments notice and the Constitution thrown out the window if you are a suspected terrorist.
I’d like to reiterate that I think malicious hacking is an extremely bad thing. The thing that scares me is that if this bill passes through the Senate, it would make things much easier for the Department of Homeland Security to invade my privacy. It makes it easier for the Department of Homeland Security to go to my ISP and make them divulge information about me. A bill like this might sound great in theory, as long as it is not abused. I’m extremely worried that it will be.
Supporters of the Berman-Coble p2p bill consitantly used the argument that if you opposed this bill, you were pro-stealing of files. Unfortunately this is not the case, and I oppose the Berman-Coble bill and this bill on the grounds that they freak me out. I’m worried that they will unneccesarily invade the privacy of too many people.
For the person reading this after a Carnivore dump, I am not a hacker. Well I am only a hacker in reference to “hacking on code.” I’m sure you’re not convinced.
Well, after looking into SOAP::Lite a little more, it appears that there is no real support for WSDL on the server side. This is a pretty big bummer. There is a module at CPAN called WSDL::Generator, though it would not install correctly via CPAN for me. WSDL::Generator looks pretty slick in theory, as it will generate a WSDL file from your perl source. I’ll have to look into this a little further, because I’m not into editing WSDL by hand. There is a WSDL editor available (free) from Cape Science, but that’s one more level of debugging that I’d rather not do.
I’ll have to do a little more digging before I figure out what to do with the status project. It’s a fun idea, and I think it could be useful at the same time. Porting over to Java once I have figured Axis out might be a good bet, or I could try playing in Python, another language that I sorta have a handle on. There are two implementations of SOAP for Python.
One thing that I’ve learned this afternoon/evening is that loosely typed languages make great SOAP clients, but not ideal servers.