Day: December 3, 2002

Slashdot has a lengthly and informative summary of recent PGP events.  Here’s the first paragraph, but I strongly suggest that you read the story:

In high tech time, the span between Network Associates dropping PGP, its purchase by the purpose-formed PGP Corporation and that company’s release today of PGP 8.0 may not be a short stretch, but it’s been a busy several months. A product which appeared moribund despite widespread acclaim a few years earlier — a victim of skewed corporate logic — has rebounded for another major release, and Philip Zimmermann is doing something he’s never done before: actually selling PGP. And as Zimmermann had urged long before NAI forged a deal with PGP Corporation, this time around the full source code is being released, albeit with strings. Read on for the rest of the story.

I know that many people switched to GPG while Network Associates let PGP stagnate.  I wonder what the state of PGP is in the wild.  I know that the PGP integration on the desktop was much nicer than GPG, which was nonexistant at the time that I was playing with it.  I’ll dig into this in more detail after work.

Tiki 1.3 is out.  Changelog is here.  Here are the changes listed on the freshmeat page:

New features include a FAQ, games, user bookmarks, user configurable modules, spell checking, backups, taglines, and the ability to send/receive articles. Wiki syntax has been improved, and new listings and modules added. There are other enhancements and bugfixes.

I’ve been following Tiki since I first heard about it on freshmeat.  It is really a nice, clean, advanced CMS/wiki/weblog.  Excellent work!

I ordered half a dozen Canon Powershot S45’s for the store this afternoon.  It looks like a good combination: 4.0 megapixel, 3x optical zoom, nice design, it uses compact flash, compact size.  Full specs are here.  The only downside is that the LCD is in perfect nosegrease-smearing position.  Other than that, I think that it is positioned well.  MSRP is $649, street price will probably be around $549.  We shall see.

Wow, John Poindexter lives in Rockville, Maryland, just off of I-270.  That’s not too long of a drive from my house… [via Rafe Colburn, a.k.a. rc3]

Russ:

As if I don’t get enough grief from my wife over this topic, Erik has an amusing new survey up on his blog.

He’s just lucky that CowboyNeal wasn’t an option…

Tomcat 4.1.16-beta has been released.  Changes (from the freshmeat page):

Performance and reliability enhancements were made. JSP compliance fixes were made.

Today’s high is expected to be “near 30(F).”  Will Cox is experiencing something a little colder:

Set my hot coffee cup down on the roof of my car as I got out. It froze to it.

MacNN:

Apple’s senior vice president of retail Ron Johnson said that Apple had its busiest week ever at its retail stores, with over 365,000 people visiting its 50 stores in the six-day Thanksgiving week, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

ONDotnet has a good tutorial on interfacing data and forms.  There is also an excellent tutorial up on C# Generics in Rotor.  Both are worth a read.

From the underdog-linux-distro department: Rock Linux 1.5.20 is out. [via NewsForge]

DPReview:

Ricoh Japan has announced a new waterproof digital camera, the Caplio 300G. This new model has a 3.34 megapixel CCD (2048 x 1536 max image size) and a three times optical zoom (35-105mm equiv.) F2.6-4.7 lens. The 300G is is not only waterproof but also dustproof, and impact resistant and so should appeal to sporty types.

This looks extremely cool, though I was unable to google a price.  I’ve done some underwater photography over the years, and the design of this camera screams “Snorkel but don’t dive!”  This looks like a great camera to take skiing, to the beach, or snorkeling, but it is probably not going to survive more than 10-15 feet underwater.  You have been warned.

Diego has some thoughts on how to make a Swing application not suck.  After trying Spaces, which feels like a native app, I think you should listen to him.

TheServerSide asks this question:

An interesting editorial piece has been published that is suggesting that JBoss is becoming to the app server what Apache is to the web server. What does the J2EE community think?

O’Reillynet posted an article about using PHP in Project Builder under Mac OSX:

Apple provides a powerful set of developer tools with Mac OS X. Originally developed by NeXT for programmers working with Objective-C, the tools have since evolved for use with a wide range of source languages, including Java, C++, and AppleScript. The Mac OS X developer tools package also includes the system header files and a C compiler, so it is an essential addition for anyone who wants a complete BSD Unix environment. At the heart of Mac OS X’s developer tools is a full-featured text editor and IDE called Project Builder. [via RootPrompt.org]

OSNews reports that Windows .NET Server 2003 RC2 is out:

Windows .NET Server 2003 Release Candidate 2 is released to beta testers. Upgrade or join the Customer Preview Program today and see what’s new.

My friend Roger sent me this link.  It’s a flash file called ‘Recursive.swf.’  It might just hurt your head.