Will Cox doesn’t like that phone numbers are not portable. I have a Sprint PCS number (since I was a senior in High School) and I’m not letting go of it anytime soon, even though Sprint can suck sometimes. The sad thing is, I was trying to justify keeping my Sprint number and using the Sidekick for internet…
Year: 2002
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Number Portability
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Sidekick
Hiptop Nation clues me in to Amazon’s T-Mobile Sidekick deal. You get the Sidekick + Camera for $249 – $50 T-Mobile mail in rebate – $100 Amazon mail in rebate == $99. Plans are $40/mo. That’s almost attractive enough…
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WAPBlog
I set up freshmeat and sourceforge pages for WAPBlog this morning. Now the key is not letting the project stagnate. Any major improvements will probably have to wait, as finals and projects come first.
You know you’re a geek when you take a break from coding by coding something else that’s easier and fun/interesting.
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Tim Perdue Interview
OSDir has an interview with Tim Perdue, who recently released GForge:
Tim Perdue was one of the founding architects of SourceForge, the open source project management and website, hosting thousands of projects and home to over 500,000 developers. Tim is also known for having built both GeoCrawler and PHPBuilder. OSDir asks Tim about his days at SourceForge, what happened behind the scenes, and his latest project, GForge, a scaled down and enhanced version of Alexandria, the code that VA closed to sell as proprietary.
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Draw The Line
Mark Pilgrim was that close.
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ConferenceXP
Steve Makofsky (Furrygoat):
Interesting find up on Microsoft Research’s website: The Conferencing Experience Project. ConferenceXP integrates recent advances in high performance audio, video and network technologies to seamlessly connect multiple distant participants in a rich immersive environment for distance conferencing, instruction and collaboration.
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Distributed Computing in the Workplace
CNet:
Rather than continue to let the thousands of PCs in its stores sit largely unused, Gateway plans to announce Tuesday a project that will let companies tap into those PCs for large computing projects.
The PC maker is teaming with distributed-computing start-up United Devices to sell the combined computing power of its PCs to companies on a per-hour basis. Gateway plans to charge 15 cents per PC per hour to companies that want to marshal the computational resources of the latest Gateway desktops.
Potentially cool application. I’m sure that they won’t be running SETI or trying to break crypto, but they’d have a good bit of computing power at their disposal.
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Electric XML vs. MSXML
Graham Glass benchmarked Electric XML (J# CLR & Java JVM) vs. MSXML (C#) and found that Electric XML Java came out on top.
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Jury Duty
Michael Radwin has jury duty:
José took about 15 minutes of questions. People asked everything from “What happens if I run my own business and it’s a financial hardship?” to “Do we need permission to use the restroom?” to “Do you know if there are any phone jacks in this room so we can dial out for Internet access?”
What is going to happen when the lawyers find out that he has a weblog. “Sir, can you define the term ‘weblog’?”
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WinForms PhoneCon
Chris Sells is looking for papers for his first PhoneCon:
The conference format is 8 conference calls over 8 weeks. Each conference call will be 90 minutes long with a 60 minute talk and 30 minutes for q&a/discussion. The call will require attendees to queue with questions, so it won’t be chaos. Also, each attendee will be able to log into a WebEx (or some such) session to see the slides and demos as the speaker talks. The number of attendees will be limited to 100 this first time around (gotta work out the kinks), but I think the idea of a series of conference talks you can watch w/o the expense or time required to travel has merits, i.e. attendees only pay for the content and not the travel and speakers get paid for their talks, but don’t have to leave home.
The topic of the first “PhoneCon” will be intermediate to advanced WinForms. Anyone interested or that knows someone interested in giving a talk over the phone in their PJs, please send me abstracts. Thanks!
Cool idea. Email Chris at the link above if you’ve got what he’s looking for. I’m just waiting for the sign-up email.
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Mono 0.17 Released
From the Mono news page:
Many new features as well as plenty of bug fixes. Many new System.Data providers and a more mature System.Web (ASP.NET) which can now be hosted in any web server. A simple test web server to host asp.net has been released as well.
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O’Reilly Roundup
John Udell: Scripting Groove Web Services. It’s a little more technical than other GWS articles he’s written, and it also contains some sample code in Perl and C#. I met John Burkhardt (more accurately I listended as he spoke) in Boston a few months ago, and I’m glad to see some of this web services stuff see the light.
Matthew MacDonald covers Visual Studio .NET macros:
Now that the .NET mania is finally settling down and developers are starting to adapt to life with the platform, it’s a good time to consider a few less-revolutionary (but very practical) details that can simply your programming life. One of these is the often-overlooked macro engine and extensibility model that’s built into Visual Studio .NET.
Shawn Van Ness talks about NDoc for .NET and what sets it apart from other mine-info-from-source documentation tools.
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WSE
Here’s the big announcement: Web Services Enhancements 1.0 for Microsoft .NET (WSE) provides advanced Web services functionality for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft .NET Framework developers to support the latest Web services capabilities. Enterprise ready applications can be developed quickly with the support of security features such as digital signature and encryption, message routing capabilities, and the ability to include message attachments that are not serialized into XML. Functionality is based on the WS-Security, WS-Routing, WS-Attachments and DIME specifications.
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Power Law
If you want more readers, you should become famous and, lacking that, write frequent, long posts about stuff that you know well. Encourage inbound links, but don’t worry about outbound.
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WAPBlog
I finally got around to implementing that proof of concept I spoke about a few days ago. It’s a wap-based weblog editor. I was able to post to my weblog via a email to weblog gateway while I was in florida, but it took way too many steps to be useful. I tried to implement this a few days ago, but I stumbled across weird errors from a blogger API implementation in PHP. This afternoon I thought I’d try again, this time in Perl.
I hit up CPAN for Net::Blogger, which includes Net::Blogger::Engine::Userland::metaWeblog. I stumbled around that for a little bit, as it’s been forever since I’ve used Perl for something useful. I was able to quickly post to a test weblog from a perl script. After that, I created a cgi script that takes info from wapblog.wml and posts it to a weblog. Wapblog.wml is just a simple wap form and the weblog is currently hard coded in the cgi script. A lot of stuff is hard coded and it’s quite ugly, but I will get the source out there as quicky as I can deuglify it.
All of the heavy lifting is done by the the perl modules. The source is about 45 lines long, but there’s lots of white space (it doesn’t look dense enough to be perl). The WML that feeds the cgi script is about 24 lines long. Granted, someone could do a lot more with a small cgi, but I like this solution. It can probably be run in a hosted environment, as the only requirements are Net::Blogger and CGI. It’s extremely lightweight. It lets you blog on the run. Now all I need is a cel phone with a UI that doesn’t suck.
Here are some screenshots. The source is now available: wapblog-0.0.1.tar.gz. It is currently licensed under the Perl Artistic License. That may change in the future. Let me know if the license offends anyone.
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Guess What?
This is being posted from a cel phone using my wap-based metaWeblogAPI client. More to follow.
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OpenBSD Wiki
Go visit the OpenBSD Wiki at pronym.org. [via OpenBSD Journal]
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Gnome2
A few weeks ago, we reported on IBM’s GNOME2 Accessibility Guide. Since then, Sun Microsystems have written a user guide for the GNOME 2.0 desktop.
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Itty Bitty Transistors
CNet:
The length of the transistor’s gate–a tiny pathway for electricity–is only 6 nanometers, or 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
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Gateway Tablet
CNet:
The Gateway tablet is powered by Intel’s 866MHz mobile Pentium III processor and comes with 256MB of memory and a 40GB hard drive. Priced at a hefty $2,799, it includes built-in 802.11b wireless networking, a portable keyboard, a docking station and external combo drive that can play DVD movies and burn CDs.
Ouch. That’s almost three grand.
