Day: December 5, 2002

Scott Hanselman:

Here’s a super cool use of WebServices…an Outlook 2000/XP AddIn that interfaces with the BabelFish Translation SOAP APIs…and it’s free!

Peter Merholz has caught the United States of Whatever bug:

Jen‘s little brother Liam used to best be known as one of the hands on America’s favorite stoner sock puppet program, The Sifl and Olly Show. But thanks to the release of his song “The United States of Whatever” in the UK, he’s becoming a pop star in his own right.

Liam’s produced a video perfect for the song, so you should click on this link and watch it an enjoy it (RealPlayer required). (My favorite scene is when he’s “wearing his leather”…

That song still gets stuck in my head every once in awhile.  I heard the song back in the S’nO days and it stays with me still.  “Calls calls calls, calls from the public…”

I’ve been looking into WML lately for a proof of concept I’m getting ready to whip together.  I’d love to work with Struts-wml, but I think it’s way-overkill for my ghetto proof of concept.  I’m thinking about using PHP, as it’s easy, I know my way around it, and it can be more widely deployed (most shared hosting environments have PHP but not a JSP/Servlet container).  I’m playing around with the WML that is supported by my cel phone, which is UP.Browser 4.1 I think.  It’s not cutting edge, but that’s okay.

So here’s a list of tutorials, references, and other cool stuff that I’ve found:

• WML Language Reference (For SDK 4.1)
• WAPForum technical papers (PDFs)
• Webmonkey WML Overview (First WML article I read)
• Lots of links at Oasis
• Openwave Tech Library
• AllNetDevices Wireless FAQ
• CPAN Modules for WML (WML::Deck, WML::Card, CGI::WML)
• Zvon.org WML Tutorial (good tutorial)
• PHPBuilder WML Intro (good php tutorial)
• Wireless Developer Network WML Intro (good examples)
• WAP Section at W3Schools

Ed Cone is writing by the fire:

We have electricity, which puts us ahead of about two million of our neighbors. The storm dumped enough snow to cover the grass and then coated it with ice, so the sledding has been good all day. No school of course–one of the nice things about a North Carolina childhood is missing school on the mere suggestion of snow–and Guilford County Schools have already announced they’ll be closed tomorrow. I could have driven to my office, but why bother, I’m on deadline anyway, so I wrote in front of the fire for a while, and now I’ve hidden myself away in the bedroom.

CNet:

Hewlett-Packard in January plans to release the last major update to its Alpha chip, the EV7, paving the way for the retirement of the storied high-end processor.

An updated version of that chip, the EV79 will follow about 12 months later, HP executives said at a meeting this week with financial analysts. At that point, HP plans to shift Alpha into what it calls “maintenance mode,” a move that will save the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

802.11b News:

Project Rainbow announced as Cometa: AT&T, IBM, Intel: The rumored collection of companies planning to offer wireless hot spot service with the code nam Project Rainbow have announced themselves — with fewer members and under the name Cometa. AT&T, IBM, and Intel are the partners in this operation which will deploy wireless hot spots into hotels, universities, and other venues through partnerships. More news as it emerges.

MacSlash reports that Macworld Tokyo has been cancelled.

Slashdot notes that eGovOS is putting together a conference:

The Center for Open Source in Government is proud to present a conference on “Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU” held in Washington, DC, USA, March. 17 – 19, 2003.

I’ll do my best to attend as long as I remember to go back and register.  (I wasn’t able to find any registration as of yet.)

802.11b News:

NIST draft goes final: The report on wireless network security that NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) was circulating over the summer went final last month without any fanfare. You can retrieve document 800-48 directly as a PDF or as a zipped PDF.

What’s wrong with CNet lately?  Today I see a story about Microsoft releasing .NET Server 2003 RC2 today.  This strikes me as odd, seeing how I registered to download RC2 shortly after I blogged about it being announced by OSNews on December 2.

Graham Glass:

GLUE 3.3 beta 1 is due for release tomorrow. it has so many features, we could easily have called it GLUE 4.0. so why didn’t we? the main reason is that we reserve major releases for features that are allowed to break backwards API compatibility. GLUE 3.3 maintains compatibility, so we’ll keep 4.0 in our hip pocket for next year.

Excellent work.  I agree with Graham that a major release should include major new features and/or major/minor API breakage.  Congrats on the new release.

There’s light snow out my window right now.  It is supposed to pick up later tonight and keep snowing or mixing with sleet/rain/freezing rain tomorrow afternoon.  We might get 4 to 8 inches.  Nothing major, though it’s enough to make already bad DC drivers worse.

Morning Update: several inches, looks like we’ll be getting 6-9 inches by the time this is done.  No school.

Neo-Portal is an interesting project.  It seems clean and mature in some way, and rough and childish in others.  Here’s a blurb from it’s freshmeat page:

neo-Portal is a data presentation and delivery system. When data is output in DHTML, it behaves like a portal. It features full i18n localization support, OS, Web server, and database independence, support for WSDL Web services, and output in XHTML, PDF, RSS, TXT, RTF, WML, and more.

It’s interesting.  It looks like it has a plugin interface that can do some cool things, but it doesn’t look like every other portal/CMS, which is a good thing.  I haven’t installed it, so I don’t know how customizable it is, but if it lives up to its specs, it could be quite useful.  There is also a lot of information on the project’s SourceForge page.

Linux Security notes that the source to PGP 8.0 has been released under a crippling license:

Newly formed PGP Corp. took a big step Monday toward endearing itself to cryptography enthusiasts and privacy advocates by releasing the source code for its flagship line of encryption products. The code for the entire PGP 8.0 line–which was also introduced Monday–is available on the company’s Web site for free download. This move is a resurrection of the policy of openness and freedom that led to the creation of the original Pretty Good Privacy software more than 10 years ago and was a hallmark of the now-defunct PGP Inc.

Users can download and review the code for free but cannot reuse or modify it.

The article that prompted the Linux Security story is at eweek.

Hack the Planet:

OS X IP over FireWire Preview Release. LocalTalk is back!

I had thought that IP over Firewire (and other exotic/esoteric media) would be really cool, but never got off my butt to play around with it.  Excellent idea, I hope that it makes it into the mainstream.

CNet is a little slow to pick this one up.  Worse than Slashdot even.  Their coverage of the new (7.0) release of Intel’s C++ compiler brings a question to mind.  I know that the Intel compilers are highly regarded as being very compliant to the specs and are also pretty zippy.  My question is: does anyone use these compilers outside of an academic or research setting?  It’s not cheap (but not outrageously expensive either at $399), but from what I’ve heard it’s a great compiler.  I’m sure that most of the win32 GUI apps out there are being authored in some language with some version of Visual Studio.  What exaclty does the Intel compiler excel in?  It used to blow GCC out of the water.  With recent releases, GCC has made up some ground, but Intel still outperforms it.

Blog it or email me, I’d love to know.  Did I ever tell you that I was a big picture kinda guy?

Jeremy Zawodny has the scoop on the Yahoo Messenger for Linux:

It’s unofficial and unsupported. Use at your own risk. It’s version 0.99.21. It’s here. It fixes some very annoying bugs that users of 0.99.19 are likely seeing.

If you’d rather wait for the next official one (rumored to be 0.99.22) hang on a week or two. It’ll probably appear on im.yahoo.com.

O’Reilly OnJava:

I have examined the latest version of Castor JDO; it is very different from the Java Data Objects (JDO) standard. It uses Exolab’s OQL query language implementation, which uses ODMG’s query language name, yet it is not compliant with ODMG’s OQL. JDO has its own query facility, called the Java Data Objects Query Language (JDOQL). The JDOQL and OQL languages are very different, offering different capabilities. There are many fundamental differences between Castor JDO and the JDO standard.

I’m a little confused, being an all around blogger and not a java.blogger, with my Java experience being 1.1/1.2/J2SE1.3/1.4.  The article alleges that Castor is not JDO (Java Data Objects) compliant.  This strikes me as odd, as David Johnson has been using it in a possibly pluggable manner for persistence in Roller.  I don’t think it really matters a whole ton, as long as Castor is useful in some way or another, as it appears there are no free (beer, lunch, etc) JDO implementations:

If you are considering the use of the Castor JDO product, you are now aware that it does not support the JDO standard. You would have access to a free object-relational mapping tool, but one with a proprietary API. However, if you would like to build your applications using the JDO standard, you should consider one of the many commercial implementations now available.

So as long as I’m getting my information correctly, horray for Exolab for creating a very cool (free) product, Castor.  At the same time, it’d be nice if they made it a little clearer that they were doing their own thing and not implementing the JSR-12 JDO.  It confuses the bloggers, for one thing.