Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: December 16, 2002

  • Eclipse Adds to Board, Introduces New Projects

    Speaking of Eclipse, CNet reports some news:

    The Eclipse development tools consortium gained momentum Monday with the announcement of 13 members to its board of stewards and the introduction of three new open-source projects.

  • GUI vs. Free Development Tools

    David Johnson:

    Thank goodness for my whiteboard, Ant, and Axis.

    Yep.  It all comes back to the basics.  At least the free (beer/speech) tools keep getting better.  Eclipse was so ugly the first time I tried it.  Now it’s beautiful (especially under Red Hat 8.0) and functional.

  • Capital Centre/US Airways Arena Implosion

    The Washington Post also covers the demolition Sunday of the Capital Centre/US Airways Arena:

    For many who lined up before dawn, a safe distance from 355 pounds of dynamite, the point was not just to see the shell of the old US Airways Arena go bang and disappear in a cloud of dust.

    The hours and then minutes that led up to yesterday morning’s implosion became a vigil for their youth, a farewell to times spent inside the shrine they still call the Cap Centre.

    Yep.  I still called it the Cap Centre.  Saw some sports stuff and a few concerts there when I was younger.  One of my coworkers was going to photograph and videotape the implosion, I’ll do my best to get any of that online a little later.  For now, here’s a shot from our local NBC Station:

    US Airways Arena Implosion

  • Luna Innovations: A Name To Look Out For

    The Washington Post writes about Luna Innovations:

    Part technology company, part incubator and part investment firm, Murphy’s Luna Innovations Inc., which he founded in 1990, in the past two years has built five companies from the ideas at Virginia Tech, Lucent Technologies and from its own labs. All the companies use “Luna” in their name, a moth with finely tuned senses that Murphy saw on the Discovery Channel.

    Here are a few projects that Kent Murphy and Luna are working on:

    One Luna lab is designing sensors that track how proteins interact to better understand how drugs work. The idea came from Lucent.

    Through a couple of doors is an electronics lab, where technicians are working on new kinds of sensors with technology developed in-house.

    Around another corner is a lab where scientists turn super-heated graphite into carbon balls — called buckyballs — for use in medical imaging. That technology was pulled out of Virginia Tech.

    My gut feeling is that you should keep an eye on this company.  Oh yeah, here’s a quick list of Luna spinoffs:

  • Egg-Shaped Mini-ITX Case

    Wow.  This is the coolest mini-itx case I’ve ever seen.  I was checking up on Slashdot Japan this morning and saw a link to Lupo.co.jp.  The egg closes when the cd/dvd is not in use.  This is probably one of the slickest mini-itx case designs I’ve ever seen.

    Speaking of Mini-ITX, I bought a SPARCclassic (loaded with OpenBSD 3.2) at the mac junk sale on Saturday.  I was able to snag a bunch of extra stuff, including a gutted Sparc IPC case, which I think will be a perfect housing for my Mini-ITX.  I know that this case mod has been done before, I just want to get the damn thing in a case.  Yes, Greg and Kenneth, I’m finally going to put it in a case.

  • Creative Commons Launch

    As is being reported everywhere, Creative Commons has officially launched their licensing tools:

    Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the creative reuse of intellectual works, launched its first product today: its machine-readable copyright licenses, available free of charge from creativecommons.org. The licenses allow copyright holders to easily inform others that their works are free for copying and other uses under specific conditions. These self-help tools offer new ways to distribute creative works on generous terms – from copyright to the public domain – and are available free of charge.

  • Nokia 7210 Problems

    The Register reports:

    T-Mobile has withdrawn Nokia’s 7210 from sale just days after beginning sales of the much anticipated picture-messaging handset.

  • Maverick

    Kevin O’Neill:

    Maverick is another web application framework. It’s a cross between Struts, WebWork and Cocoon. The authors have tried to blend the most important aspects from all three frameworks while attempting to keep the maverick framework as simple and unintrusive as possible. From my initial reading it looks like webwork with simplifed cocoon pipelines. Very interesting. Now I just have to find a reason to try it out.

    Here is a little blurb from the project’s main page:

    Maverick is a Model-View-Controller (aka “Model 2”) framework for web publishing using Java and J2EE. It is a minimalist framework which focuses solely on MVC logic, allowing you to generate presentation using a variety of templating and transformation technologies.

  • My J2ME Hello World Experience

    Yep.  I followed Colin Fahey’s guide and got his “Hello World” app to run on an emulator.  That emulator is officially the ugliest phone on earth, don’t you think?  Everything was really easy to do, and pretty much just worked.  I set up a file called “j2me.bat” which sets the environment variables that I need, and when compiling, I had to substitute “-classpath” for “-bootclasspath.”  Overall it was an extremely pleasant experience.  Maybe it’s time to take PocketBlog to the next level. 

    I want to state for the record that I glanced at Kablog the other day, though I did not look at it in depth.  I feel that this is a neccesary statement because I might end up with something similar in one way or another to Kablog, and I want to come up with something from scratch.  What I end up with will be released with source (license TBD), and I don’t want to be ripping off a well done commercial product, I want to end up with my own thing.

    Of course, I’ll keep you updated with my findings.