Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: December 15, 2002

  • Open Source Bugs, Java Caching System

    Kevin O’Neill points to Jakarta’s Java Caching System (which looks like a useful project/tool) and says that he has found a potentially nasty bug in the ReadWriteLock class.  Hopefully a JCD submitter will stumble upon the buzz generated by Kevin’s post and fix it.  Or perhaps someone knows a perfect solution, fixes the problem and emails it off.  I like Kevin’s concluding thought:

    This hilights both the problem and the power of open source code. The problem is that you can never be quiet sure of it’s quality (though I have mostly found it to be high, and yes I know that the same could be said for closed sourced code); the power is that you can look at the code and make your own assessments/adjustments.

  • Spare CPU Cycles

    Chris Gulker:

    Anybody want to buy the idle power of gulker.com’s massive array of 6 Macs, 5 Linux boxes and an iPod?

    No, I don’t, though will it be common practice to rent your spare CPU cycles in the future?  Makes me think…

  • Mono 0.17, GTK# 0.6

    From the Mono page:

    • Mike Kestner announced Gtk# 0.6. This new release includes many new features and bug fixes, and is the perfect companion to the Mono 0.17 release.
    • Johannes has contributed a Windows-ready package of Mono 0.17, and its available from our download page.
    • Alp Toker has Debian packages.

  • RSD

    Ben Hammersly implements RSD in MovableType.  Dave implemented RSD in Radio on Friday.  File this under “A Good Thing.”

  • Java related RPMs and Comments about the *BSDs

    Greg Klebus:

    Cool stuff for Linuxers: JPackage Project, RPM packages of loads of java applications and libraries. I’ve always missed such a site.

    That’s a pretty sweet idea, and it looks like there are tons of java projects prebuilt or in source RPM form.  Most of my recent Jakarta-related installations have been from the binary tgz, which is simple enough, but having good fairly current stuff in RPM form should lower the threshold for others.  Of course, this doesn’t solve your classpath huntdown problems for you, nor does it allow you to experiment with bleeding-edge stuff (that depends on other bleeding-edge stuff), but it’s a great start.

    I have also been dissapointed with how stale the freebsd/netbsd/openbsd ‘ports’ of many of the Jakarta projects are.  I wanted to use a *bsd for Tomcat 4.x testbed a few months ago, but unfortunately Tomcat 3.x was the latest ‘port.’  I know that this means that I should get off my butt and modernize a few programs for a particular *bsd, but that pesky time thing keeps smacking me down.

  • BrainSplatPHP

    BrainSplatPHP 0.7.1:

    BrainSplat was originally conceived to scratch my itch for a journal program that I could use to replace LiveJournal.It is a simple blogging program that has support for comments. The recent additions is a client interface and a forum like code for formatting BSPHPCode. The reason I made my own was simply because all the scripts I found were generally made for multiple users. And thus, I made my own. I started originally in Perl, but I found that PHP makes a much better interface for these type of programs.

    Changes:

    Some more themes were added to the distribution, and the BSThemes Web site was created.

  • Codename: Dashboard

    Codename: Dashboard Beta 4.5 is out.  It is built on the .NET framework and looks like it provides a nice “at-a-glance” of some potentially important stuff.  It looks like it supports news feeds, as there are some screenshots of a feed from The Register.  I’m not sure if it uses RSS or scrapes the sites (I hope the former), but it looks like it has potential. [via BetaNews]

  • Evolution 1.2.1

    Ximian Evolution 1.2.1 has been released.  I remember looking into building Evolution when Red Hat 8.0 had just come out, and it wasn’t ready.  1.2.1 officially supports Red Hat 8.0 now.  Sweet!

  • PHPTalk 0.9.4

    PHPTalk 0.9.4 has been released:

    PHPTalk aims to be the fastest and most configurable multithreaded message board system available. It has the usual features like multithreading, auto indexing of messages (for searching), customizable colors, etc. However, PHPTalk differs in that it allows you to easily integrate it into existing sites. It does this by not relying on specific display files, allowing you to template most of the frontend, and allowing you to specify an already existing user table. It uses PEAR’s DBI for portability, ANSI SQL for portability, an advanced and documented API, full multilingual support, and full i18n support for date functions.

    I can’t say that I’ve used it, but it looks clean and different from the other multitudes of php bulletin board systems.

  • Brainf**k Java Compiler

    Java Brainf**k compiler (2.0):

    The wonderful Java Brainfuck Compiler provides a facility for compiling programs written in the powerful Brainf**k language into Java bytecode class files.

    Changes:

    The dependency on Jasmin as an intermediate step was removed. BCEL is now used to produce bytecode directly. A proper build system was implemented.

  • ROI and Web Services

    Phil Wainewright:

    That’s where my analogy came in. In traditional IT projects, I said, ROI has been as elusive as high-school sex: “The question was always, are you going to get any?” But with web services, ROI is more like married sex: “You know you’re getting it, but you’re always wondering, what can we do to make it better?”

  • Webmin 1.040

    Webmin version 1.040 has been released.  Mostly a bugfix/visual interface tweak release.

  • DirecTV DSL Calls it Quits

    Jeremy Zawodny’s DSL is going away.  I hope he can find a replacement ISP soon.  Good luck.