Year: 2002

Scott Hanselman gave a talk entitled Web Services, Behind the Music last night in Oregon. He points to several things that were mentioned at the DevCon, and he also put together a great list of tools that he used in the presentation. All of the web services heads in the audience should check it out.

OpenBSD Journal points to several projects designed to make you/let you write more secure C code:

A recent thread on secure programming idioms on the secprog list (hosted by securityfocus) raises a lot of good questions people here often have, namely “how can we more easily program more secure and robust code?”

John Udell writes about debugging SOAP, including using Mindreef’s SOAP Scope.  SOAP Scope is truly wicked, and worth more than the $99 that they are charging if free tools like Simon Fell’s TCPTrace aren’t enough for you.  I think changing views from looking at the raw XML going over the wire to pseudocode was truly cool, and can really help visualize what’s going over the wire.  I’ve said it before, but their presentation at Web Services DevCon East was an eye opener.

Here are the installation instructions for Memo, a simple alarm clock/appointment keeper written in Python for Gnome.

1. Make sure ROX-Lib2 is installed (drag it to your ~/lib directory).
2. Download the archive above.
3. Extract it (eg, by dragging it to Archive)
4. Click on it to run it if your filer supports application directories, or run the Memo/AppRun file if it doesn’t.
5. The documentation is in the Memo/Help directory.

This is, of course, NOT the way that I would install the program.  People look at me funny when I drop to the DOS prompt in order to do some heavy lifting.  I would snag Memo and ROX-Lib2 via either Mozilla, Lynx, or ncftp, then do a little tar -xvf, and probably run ./AppRun & to test it out.

Of course, Linux will never truly make it on the dektop until installing every program (RPMs, .tgzs, etc) install in a similar manner.  Listen up, Red Hat.

Come to think of it, I’ll probably still drop to a shell…

Jonathan Krim at The Washington Post writes:

The Energy Department has shut down a popular Internet site that catalogued government and academic science research, in response to corporate complaints that it competed with similar commercial services.

Department officials said abandoning PubScience, an electronic service that cross-indexed and searched roughly 2 million government reports and academic articles, will save the government $200,000 a year because two equivalent services exist in the private sector.

There’s no way that I can rationalize this as being a Good Thing.  Other agencies are worried that this might pave the way for other closures.

DPReview reports yet another itty bitty storage format, as if we didn’t have too many already:

The MultiMediaCard Association (MMCA) has approved a new RS-MMC (Reduced Size MultiMediaCard) standard. This new flash storage format has the same width but almost half the length of existing MMC cards, RS-MMC cards will be 24 x 18 x 1.4 mm. Hitachi are the first manufacturer to announced RS-MMC cards up to 64 MB in capacity. It’s clear that this new reduced size format is aimed primarily at the mobile phone / PDA market but I’m sure it would also offer digital camera manufacturers the opportunity to build even smaller digital cameras.

So here are the formats available in order to store your stuff: PCMCIA solid state or hard drive, Compact Flash (I & II), Microdrive, SmartMedia, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick, xD (Fuji and Olympus’ stupid format), and [drumroll…] RS-MMC.

Crap, which one does my camera take?  What about my PDA?  Oh, that’s right, they’re all different.

Russell is getting back in the C++ saddle in order to play with Series 60/SymbianOS. 

John Terpstra at IBM Developerworks takes UnitedLinux 1.0 for a spin.  I think I have .ISO’s for the UnitedLinux Public Beta, but I don’t think I ever bothered to install it.  Skimming the specs, I see GCC3.1 not 3.2, and KDE but no Gnome.  The installation screens look fairly useful, but not as easy to use as the Red Hat installed, and no where near as pretty.  It does look like quite a solid distro though.

Margaret Kane at CNet reports:

Members of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) have formed a working group to develop an XML file format specification for the OpenOffice project.

Leo is taping a new pilot tonight:

I’m trying to contain my excitement, but I’m getting to pilot a new show tonight. We’ll tape Leo Up Late (only the working title) tonight after The Screen Savers at about 9:30p Eastern. It won’t be on the air, but you can still help out.

John McGrath has a good roundup of four open source content management systems at ZDNet. [via James Robertson (Column Two)]

Kenneth Hunt points out that RAM is falling again.

Ovidiu Predescu writes about an oh-so-cool J2SE -> J2ME shrinker:

Sylvain Wallez’s J-Fit seems to be an amazing tool. It essentially rewrites the code to remove debugging statements, rewrites the code to work with J2ME which lacks important functionality. Using this tool, Sylvain was able to fit Cocoon in a mere 1.1Mb jar file, and have it running on a PowerPC 50MHz with 32Mb of RAM. Apparently the tools is also very small, about 10 classes each with less than 500 lines of code. All the XSP pages are precompiled, so there’s no compilation happening. The result is that requests are served in less than 300ms. This includes time spent by Saxon, the XSLT processor, whose results are not cached at all. With precompiled pipelines, XSLT would no longer be necessary which would speed things up quite a bit.

Hopefully he’ll release the tool as open-source, so we can all make benefit from it.

I’ll be attending at least one day of LinuxWorld this year.  I currently have an expo pass, but might sign up for a single day of sessions.  Is anyone out there reading this going to be attending?  If so, let me know.

LinuxToday reports that Samba 2.2.7, which looks like a security fix.

Various bits of Mono news this evening:

• Sebastien has got DSA and RSA signatures working as well as RSA encryption. We now distribute Chew Keong TAN’s BigInteger classes.
• Brian has contributed a System.Data multiplexor in Mono, it can be found in the Mono.Data assembly. The details of this new technology are here. It works in Mono and the .NET Framework.
• Larry O’Brien has announced the candidate book for Thinking in C#. The book is Mono-friendly.
• Dan Morgan has implemented a DataGrid widget for Gtk#, you can see Windows screenshots for it here and here.
• Slides from the Mono developers for the .NET ONE conference are available now:
• Mono Keynote presentation
• Hosting the Mono Runtime
  The simple embedding of Mono in Perl is available here
• The Mono JIT compiler
• Mono C# Compiler Overview
• A couple of other presentations from Miguel’s trip to Europe are available here in Open Office file format.

And Yes, playing with OpenMosix is a form of structured procrastination.

It looks like Java programs utilizing “Green Threads,” which was the default before JDK1.2/1.3 will migrate to other nodes, while “Native Threads” will not.  I’ll have to see if there is a compiler or java runtime flag that will allow me to force green threads.

How about a Gump (or similar Ant) build over an openmosix cluster?  That’s what I’m thinking of…

Preliminary searching reveals that green threads are no longer available (at all I think) in the 1.3/1.4 JVM:

Version 1.1 is based on green threads and won’t be covered here. Green threads are simulated threads within the VM and were used prior to going to a native OS threading model in 1.2 and beyond. Green threads may have had an advantage on Linux at one point (since you don’t have to spawn a process for each native thread), but VM technology has advanced significantly since version 1.1 and any benefit green threads had in the past is erased by the performance increases over the years.

I noticed that every once in awhile, openmosix would suck all of the bandwidth on my D-Link DES-3205 switch for a split second every once in awhile.  If I end up adding any additional nodes, I’ll probably migrate the openmosix machines to their own DES-3205 so that they don’t cramp my AA:O.

This is probably okay, as I need to bring another DES-3205 online.  By the way, if you’re looking for high-performance managed 10/100 switched networking, adn don’t mind the noise, they can be found on ebay for as little as $25-30 plus shipping.  They actually run on AMD K6-II’s, which I found amusing.  They are upgradable with modules, but I’ve never seen one in the wild.

I upgraded two machines at home (Queue and Borg) to the latest OpenMosix kernel, and managed to get the openmosix userland stuff up and running after I googled my hostname problem.  I ended up doing most of the work while at school today.  I’ll have to run some stress tests at some point and try to find something useful to do with it.  My next cluster-related task is to try to get openmosix running on my Red Hat 8.0 Via Eden board so I can run openmosixview and 3dmosmon running, which would be truly cool.

So far I do know that if I start a bunch of stuff on one machine, the load on the other shoots up, which is probably a good sign 🙂

Today’s project was brought to you by the word college, the letters SSH, and the program Putty.