Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: December 2002

  • Build Your Own Bookmarklet

    Jon Udell:

    Googling remains a useful way to discover services, but it only finds a fraction of four supported systems, and there are many still unsupported. So here’s a complementary approach: Build your own bookmarklet.

    The idea here is twofold. First, if your library uses one of the supported systems, but isn’t listed, you can just generate the bookmarklet you’ll need. Second, it provides a framework that can easily include more systems, as people discover and report the URL patterns that can drive them.

    Excellent work, Jon.  Keep disrupting!

  • CC For Software Licenses, Part e^x

    Lawrence Lessig has commented  to his weblog post clarifying his position on using CC licenses for software:

    Great questions all, and I’m sorry I wasn’t clear before. We don’t mean to forbid the use with software. We just didn’t write the licenses with software in mind. But if the license fits, wear it. Obviously, adding this into RSS is a critically useful adaptation, and we encourage it.

    There is a heated discussion going on over at burningbird.

    Denise Howell also discusses CC metadata.

    Thanks to Diego for the links.

  • Phil Windley Switches To OSX

    Phil Windley:

    With my resignation, I find myself, for the first time since 1988, in a position where I must buy a computer. With my own money on the line, I chose a Mac (actually, I chose OS X).

  • Groove Web Services

    John Burkhardt:

    Wow, nobody told me about this nifty GWS page on www.groove.net.  We even have this nifty graphic diagrams and stuff.  And a white paper!  It often doesn’t occur to me to surf our own web site, but I often learn quite a lot there!

    Yep.  Read company website semi-regularly.  Check.

  • IBM’s Open Source Storage

    CNet:

    SAN JOSE, Calif.–To encourage the broadest possible support for its forthcoming “Storage Tank” technology, IBM will release an open-source version of the software needed to let servers tap into the next-generation storage system.

    Big Blue is working with an undisclosed open-source group on the software and will release the code when the product is generally available in 2003, said David Pease, manager of storage software at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and leader of the 5-year-old Storage Tank project. In addition, IBM plans to publish the communication method fundamental to the next-generation storage project.

  • VPN on Mac OSX

    Jason Deraleau/O’Reilly Mac DevCenter:

    Virtual Private Networking is a valuable tool for system and network administrators. It’s an excellent way to reduce the costs of multiple site and remote access networks, while simultaneously increasing the overall security of your network.

    In a moment, I’ll introduce some of the VPN tools that come with Mac OS X, but first, I’d like to help you become familiar with a few basic concepts and some terminology.

    As always, read on for the full story.

  • RMS Clarifies CC Licenses for Software and the GPL

    Thank you to Richard Stallman for getting back to me:

    I expect that most of these licenses are incompatible with the GPL, but they said they would not recommend their licenses for software, so compatibility with the GPL should not really matter much in practice.

  • SOAP By Example

    Sam Ruby: SOAP By Example.  Hey Sam, I’d love to see you give a Python Web Services talk or something wicked like that at PyCon.  I’ll have to bug you and Mark about that on Monday.

  • If You Point to It…

    Well, if I point to enough stuff, I’m bound to help somebody.  I’ve managed to point to two projects that might help Rick (the techno weenie) open source his homebrew RSS aggregator.  Good luck, Rick.

  • DirectX 9.0, .NET Baked In

    Chris Sells, among others, has pointed out the release of DirectX 9.0:

    DirectX 9.0 Release with .NET Support

    I’m not much of a graphics programmer, but I know folks have been anxiously awaiting DX9, which includes MDX (Managed DirectX) the managed API to DirectX for .NET programmers. This release provides a bunch of non-.NET enhancements as well.

  • Java + XML + Web Services = Profit!!!

    CNet:

    Software maker Iona Technologies will seek to do an end run around Java application server companies with the release next year of a software integration server built around Web services technology.

  • Firebird 1.02

    Firebird 1.02, is available to download.  1.02 is a bugfix/maintenance release of the open source database program.

  • ksLogger

    ksLogger:

    ksLogger is ‘yet another Java logging package’. 🙂 To be honest, I don’t even know what’s out there. But I do know that ksLogger is small (<10KB jar file) and has a couple of neato features. Let’s go through the features shall we?

    Version 1.01 is out.  Here are the changes:

    There are three new methods for determining the current log level: isWarn(), isInfo(), and isDebug(). Each method returns true if the log level is greater than or equal to the desired level. For example, if the log level is currently set to INFO, then isWarn() and isInfo() will return true, and isDebug() will return false.

    It looks to be pretty lightweight and only JDK/JRE >=1.3.  Of course the defacto logging standard is Jakarta’s Log4J, but sometimes you’re looking for that lighter weight alternative solution.

  • PHP Eclipse Plugin

    Scott Johnson points to a PHP Eclipse plugin.  File this under look into it later.

  • Windows .NET Server (WNS)

    Early & Adopter Weblog: Windows .NET Server (WNS), why should you care?

    Here are some major points, but the details on Sean & Scott’s weblog is great:

    • IIS 6.0
    • the entire IIS metabase is now just an XML file
    • COM+ 1.5
    • .NET framework 1.1
    • And a monkey

    Well, the monkey part is mine, but it looks like lots of cool stuff going into WNS.  I still need to get around to downloading RC2 so I can play with it.

  • Red Hat to Drop Sparc, Alpha Support

    Newesforge aggregates that Red Hat is dropping support for Alpha and Sparc in the near future.  That’s okay, because NetBSD will still run ’em!

  • Lawrence Lessig on CC for Software Licenses

    Lawrence Lessig weighs in on CC for software licenses:

    Matt Croydon wonders about how CC licenses will interact with software. The answer is that they won’t. We share RMS’s concern that there is a proliferation of licenses in software. Our view was that there was a dearth for other creative content. Thus we start outside the software world. For now, at least.

    I’m going to take that as an authoritative answer.  Unfortunately, CC licenses are already being applied to software.  The cat’s out of the bag.  What do we do now?

  • Creative Commons and the GPL, Part N+1

    Decklin Foster sent me an email this morning:

    The GPL says that you can’t add any additional restrictions when distributing a derived work. So, while “attribution + share alike” would be compatible, anything involving “no derivs” or “non-commercial” would be incompatible with the GPL. Even if the CC license allowed you to add more restrictive terms (I haven’t read it), you would still end up with something not legally distributable, because the GPL’ed parts would no longer give you permission to distribute them under the GPL.

    The BSD/MIT license explicitly grants you the right to sublicence without stating any restrictions, so there is no problem here. (nb: while the BSD license is “attribution”, old-style 3-clause BSD license is “attribution + put my name on all your advertising materials”, which makes software licensed under such terms GPL-incompatible.) BSD-licensed software is GPL-compatible because (a) you can add any terms you want to the BSD’ed parts, and (b) the restrictions of the BSD license are a subset of those stated in the GPL.

  • creativeCommons RSS Module Validates

    Sam Ruby has made sure that the creativeCommons RSS 2.0 module validates.

  • Spontaneous Integration

    Jon Udell: Nobody expects the spontaneous integration (Infoworld).