Day: November 15, 2002

I’m going to the premiere of Washington Interns Gone Bad tonight at Art-O-Matic.  My older sister, pictured in this Washington Post article, has a role in the low budget movie.  The production even has a weblog.  Rock!

In local news, a parking garage under construction partially collapsed a few miles away from where I work.  The Washington Post reports:

Two people are dead in the partial collapse of a parking garage being built in Rockville.

Montgomery County Fire spokesman Pete Piringer said another person is missing, while a fourth has been pulled to safety and taken to Suburban Hospital.

More as it happens. [Mapquest location of collapse] [Google News roundup]

Greg pointed this out:

Just found Flock—a J2EE RSS Aggregator (similar to Amphetadesk). I will give it a try, I definitely need one of these things. And it’s Java after all…

CNET:

IBM on Friday unveiled a set of programming tools specifically designed to bring Web services to mobile devices.

The new Web Services Toolkit for Mobile Devices (WSTK) provides developers with tools and Java-based runtime software for building Web services applications that can be accessed on three mobile devices: Windows CE-based Pocket PCs, Palm devices and BlackBerry handhelds from Research In Motion.

It’s not Java, but I’ve got pocketsoap on my PocketPC 2002 PDA, and it kicks much ass.  I’ll probably give it a whirl though.

I’ve been looking into developing for the Sharp Zarus lately.  It looks like my options are dealing with a minimalistic QT environment (I’ve never done any *nix GUI programming) or work with the equivalent of Java Applets on the Zarus.  I have a feeling that I might not be satisfied with the level of control and robustness of the Java solution.

Who knows?

Xmlenc 0.13 has been released:

The xmlenc library is a light-weight XML Encoding Library for Java. It fills the gap between a light-weight parser like SAX, and a heavy-weight XML output library, like JDOM.

Changes:

This release removes all deprecated methods and fixes a bug introduced in 0.12.

Here are the details: [homepage] [freshmeat page] [sourceforge project page]

Oh no!  Jeremy Zawodny is being sent to the bullpen!

Charles Miller goofed:

I meant to type: dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/fd0. I typed dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/hda. I have utterly destroyed the partition table on my primary hard drive. I have no backups. I am so completely fucked.

Don’t drink and su.

But later, Linux made it all better:

I overwrote the first megabyte of my primary hard drive. That’s the boot sector, the partition table, and a large chunk of the start of my root filesystem. I have now recovered to the point where I believe (believe, but have not tested) I can reboot the system and have it come up in one piece. I’ve recovered my partition layout and built a new table. I’ve fscked the root filesystem and restored the obvious damage. I was even able to backup /home to another drive, just in case the recovery hasn’t been as successful as I thought.

Respect the OS:

Ask any Unix system administrator, and they’ll tell you about the one time they stopped respecting the OS. Unix respects you, it trusts you, because the only way to gain trust and respect is to offer it yourself.

Congrats for a successful recovery.

 

David Gammel points out some wicked things that the US House of Representitives has been doing with XML:

Check out xml.house.gov to see what the U.S. legislature has been up to with XML. If you are in DC, there is a presentation next week about their efforts as well.

Hmm, it’s next Wednesday evening.  The funny thing is that I was thinking of attending a DC-LUG meeting next Wednesday for the first time.  You know you’re a geek when two really geeky things conflict in your schedule…

Brad Wilson is on the ball tonight.  He pointed to several things that are on the money:

Chris complains that Linux is ugly. Sam says that Windows installations have a half-life (something I truly believe was brought about by the invention of the registry). Robert thought Linux would come up and challenge Windows on the desktop, but was surprised when Apple became cool again.

My thoughts are, in this order: Try Red Hat 8.0.  That’s pretty.  Yes, Windows installs do have a half-life, I just never thought of it that way.  Apple is cool.  Here’s another one:

Are you listening, Apple? Make a tablet, make it sexy and hella-fast, and we’ll be there.

Ahh yes, the iPad.  Is it just a matter of time?

Thanks, Greg, for the encouragement.  🙂