Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: December 2002

  • 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.

  • 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.