Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: December 2002

  • The History of Roller, Part I

    David Johnson has an excellent retrospective (or “not so brief history”) of his roller project.

  • GTX+OSX

    Slashdot:

    GTK+OSX has released a native Mac OS X Aqua port of the Linux-based GTK+ open source graphical user interface library. GTK+ (GIMP Toolkit) is a popular widget library supporting graphical applications for Linux. GTK+OSX version 0.1 is an alpha release intended for developers.”

    The gooey details are at the project website hosted at sourceforge.

  • Remote Windows Administration

    Mike Roberts has fallen in love with Cygwin+SSHd and TightVNC for administering Windows (and .NET) server farms.

  • Notable Freshmeat Releases

    Here’s a list of releases culled from today’s freshmeat page:

    • nntp//rss: Read RSS feeds from an NNTP newsreader.
    • PhpWiki: Wiki to tha izzo, Wiki to tha izzay.
    • BlinkenStuff: Tools for developing for Blinkenlights
      • Blinkensim, Blinkenlib, Blinkentools, etc are updated and available here.

  • Linux Bootable Business Card

    In a post to Advogato, the Linux BBC people are asking for help testing the 2.0 release.  It looks like they’ve added quite a few features for the new version.  Grab a copy from the website and boot a friend’s computer with it.  That always freaks people out.

  • Future of Music Coalition

    From the Creative Commons Weblog:

    The Future of Music Coalition will host their third-annual Policy Summit January 4 through 7 in Washington D.C. The FMC3 summit will bring policymakers, academics, lawyers, activists — and, of course, a number of premier musicians — together for a discussion of artists’ rights and technology’s influence on the music industry.

    I don’t think I’m going to be able to make the event.  Yes, it’s in town, but I’m going to be taking a day off for Linux World in January, and we’re understaffed at work.  Everyone else is sick.  Much fun.

  • News Roundup

    I’m getting (really) close to my disk quota on my web provider, so I’m going to keep things succinct until I can upgrade the account:

  • Localhost Groove Web Services

    Simon Fell:

    Do Groove Web Services really need a local web server? Wouldn’t it be better to do SOAP over standard input and standard output when you just need to integrate on a single machine? [matt.griffith] Well, I’ve yet to see a SOAP toolkit that doesn’t ship with a HTTP transport, whilst SOAP::Lite it the only one i know that ships with stdin/out support. In addition certain platforms (*cough*cough* asp.net), are overly tied to HTTP.

    Localhost web services, here we come!

  • Kismet: An 802.11b Network Sniffer

    Kismet:

    Kismet is a 802.11b wireless network sniffer – it is different from a normal network sniffer (such as Ethereal or tcpdump) because it separates and identifies different wireless networks in the area. Kismet works with any wireless card which is capable of reporting raw packets (rfmon support), which include any prism2 based card (Linksys, D-Link, Rangelan, etc), Cisco Aironet cards, and Orinoco based cards. Kismet also supports the WSP100 remote sensor by Network Chemistry.

    Utilities such as this will become more important as 802.11 networks overlap, mesh, and do other stuff that we haven’t thought of yet.  There’s also another reason to covet a Sharp Zarus.

  • Phrack

    *Sigh*

    I remember reading Phrack when I was in middle school.

    [via the dot]

  • Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

    DIY Linux junkies will enjoy the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter:

    The GWN was started as a way of giving the Gentoo community one source of information about the Gentoo Linux project. The GWN will summarize issues and discussions from the community, as well as major news items and announcements, as well as security vulnerabilities, bugs and changes to the Portage tree. As we gather feedback from the user community, we will continue to add features and additional areas of coverage to the GWN, with the ultimate goal being to make this newsletter your main source of information about Gentoo Linux.

    [via Linux Today]

  • Zen and the Art of Comprehensive Archive Networks

    This is a great article for many audiences.  Anyone from geeks and programmers to sysadmins or architects of distributed storage systems would get a kick out of this article:

    It seems that there is a lot of interest in having similar archives for other languages like CPAN [1] is for Perl. I should know; over the years people from at least Python, Ruby, and Java communities have approached me or other core CPAN people to ask basically “How did we do it?”. Very recently I’ve seen even more interest from some people in the Perl community wanting to actively reach out a helping hand to other communities. This ‘missive’ tries to describe my thinking and help people wanting to build their own CANs. Since I hope this message will somehow end up reaching the other language communities I will explicitly include URLs that are (hopefully) obvious to Perl people. Note that I’m going to describe what things worked for Perl, translate appropriately for other languages.

    [via Use Perl;]

  • 10-Codes Over IP Followup

    Steve Makofsky (furrygoat) gets it:

    This would be awsome. Its simple, yet an effective means for location based services. Imagine a Pocket PC Phone specifing it’s current location based on cell towers, by the current Wifi access point it’s using, or some sort of integrated GPS – with little more overhead than a standard HTTP GET.

    Yep.  Isn’t that sexy?

  • Russell Beattie on the Universal Personal Proxy

    Russ outlines out loud about the universal personal proxy idea.  I had previously tuned out the personal proxy conversation because my head was already swimming to keep up with everything else floating around.  Now it looks like I should play catchup.  Read the outline if you want to dig into Russ’ head.

  • Web Services Usage

    Australian IT:

    NEW research contradicts recent technology vendor claims that web services are “real” and being deployed by as many as half of Australia’s large companies.

    The real number stands at less than 50, according to research by analyst S2 Intelligence.

    Deploy some more!  [via Doug Kaye]

  • WSDL Wizard

    Simon Fell delivers again:

    Finally wrapped up RC1 of the WSDL Wizard. It supports doc/lit and rpc/encoded, SOAP headers, enumerations, complex types and import [most of the stuff that auto-gen’d WSDL uses, but not everything in XSD]

    Sweet!  Even more things to play with over the weekend.

  • .NET Wrappers for Cg

    Via Ben Houston at Sellsbrothers, (this is awesome): Exocortex Cg – An Wrapper for using NVIDIA’s Cg shaders in OpenGL

    This is awesome.  I’ll have to take a look at this later.

  • TCPTrace 0.7.2

    Simon Fell:

    Just posted v0.7.2 which adds the option to fix up linefeeds from non-windows platforms so that they display properly. Thanks to Eric Promislow for the suggestion.

    TCPTrace: for when you’re banging your head against the wall debugging web services.

  • Ten Codes Over IP

    Bill Kearney thinks about oldskool CB radios and the 10 codes that were used:

    This isn’t quite syndication related. Once upon a time there was CB radio and it’s ten codes. You know, 10-4, 10-20, etc. I’m wondering how these codes might be relevant to notification/update systems. Especially with regard to query/response sessions with wireless and/or low-bandwidth devices. Being able to query for a location started this train of thought. Being able to ask/reply to a ’10-20′, for example, would be rather handy if one were doing any geo-positioned sort of stuff.

    Bill has put together an RDF schema as a thought, but I can see something like this utilized at a much lower level.  Howabout a cel phone running a minimal TCP/IP stack, a stripped down web server (with XML-RPC or SOAP built on top perhaps).  Now imagine that cel phone sending a simple HTTP request to a HTTP 10-20 query:

    HTTP/1.0 200 OK
    Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2002 13:46:23 GMT
    Server: GNokiaSrv/0.2.1
    Content-type: text/plain
    10-20: Lat: 45 35 30 Lon: -90 45 10

    Now imagine all of the wicked things that even a small horsepower processor could do with that information relative to its current location.

    Now, lets take a step back, take a look at some common 10 codes and think about the wicked things that could be done with them.

    Today’s big picture moment brought to you by the number 10 and the letter Z.

  • Erik’s Flu

    Hope ya feel better, Erik.