Year: 2002

Uche Ogbuji’s article on proper XML output in Python went live today:

The main problem with simple print is that it knows nothing about the syntactic restrictions in XML standards. As long as you can trust all sources of text to be rendered as proper XML, you can constrain the output as appropriate; but it’s very easy to run into subtle problems which even experts may miss.

WebServices.Org points to two interesting articles this afternoon.  The first article from rediff.com contains a quote from Bill Gates:

“Tablet PC and XML Web services on .Net will bring about a revolution in using the converging technologies to such an extent that in the current digital decade, the use of paper and other intermediaries will become minimal,” Gates asserted.

The second article is from IDG’s IT World.  It highlights some proof of concept projects and some gosh darn useable applications of the Google API.

Alexandre Dulaunoy at Advogato has released a draft paper entitled ” Good security practice for a Free Software release.”

As everybody knows, a lot of trojaned Free Software has been found. A vast majority of them are not using OpenPGP signed checksum file. I’m currently trying to make a basic HOWTO to make a Free Software release including OpenPGP signature. This can minimize the risk (as long as the user is checking the signature ;-). Here is a draft in PS and PDF format.

Don’t hesitate to provide comments and feedback following your own experience of the issue. (I hope to include the chapter in the Software Release HOWTO afterwards)

There’s a review at Slashdot of Java Development with Ant by Steve Loughran and Erik Hatcher.  I’m about halfway through the book myself.

Mesa 5.0 has been released.  A few features and a bunch of bugfixes.  Mesa now supports OpenGL 1.4.

MSNBC Reports:

A last-minute addition to a proposal for a Department of Homeland Security bill would punish malicious computer hackers with life in prison.

DURING CLOSED-DOOR NEGOTIATIONS before the debate began, the House Republican leadership inserted the 16-page Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA) into the Homeland Security bill. CSEA expands the ability of police to conduct Internet or telephone eavesdropping without first obtaining a court order, and offers Internet providers more latitude to disclose information to police. [via Newsforge]

I’m a little worried by this.  I in no way support hackers and script kiddies using DDOS attacks and stuff like that.  That is bad, they should be pubished.  I’m not so sure about life in jail though.  Yes, if the crime is serious enough, it’s nice for prosecutors to have that as an option, but does this mean a 13 year old script kiddie might serve life in jail for bringing someone’s website down for a few hours?  That doesn’t exactly sound like the punishment fits the crime.  We’ve seen that post-9/11, your civil rights can be suspended at a moments notice and the Constitution thrown out the window if you are a suspected terrorist.

I’d like to reiterate that I think malicious hacking is an extremely bad thing.  The thing that scares me is that if this bill passes through the Senate, it would make things much easier for the Department of Homeland Security to invade my privacy.  It makes it easier for the Department of Homeland Security to go to my ISP and make them divulge information about me.  A bill like this might sound great in theory, as long as it is not abused.  I’m extremely worried that it will be.

Supporters of the Berman-Coble p2p bill consitantly used the argument that if you opposed this bill, you were pro-stealing of files.  Unfortunately this is not the case, and I oppose the Berman-Coble bill and this bill on the grounds that they freak me out.  I’m worried that they will unneccesarily invade the privacy of too many people.

For the person reading this after a Carnivore dump, I am not a hacker.  Well I am only a hacker in reference to “hacking on code.”  I’m sure you’re not convinced.

Well, after looking into SOAP::Lite a little more, it appears that there is no real support for WSDL on the server side.  This is a pretty big bummer.  There is a module at CPAN called WSDL::Generator, though it would not install correctly via CPAN for me.  WSDL::Generator looks pretty slick in theory, as it will generate a WSDL file from your perl source.  I’ll have to look into this a little further, because I’m not into editing WSDL by hand.  There is a WSDL editor available (free) from Cape Science, but that’s one more level of debugging that I’d rather not do.

I’ll have to do a little more digging before I figure out what to do with the status project.  It’s a fun idea, and I think it could be useful at the same time.  Porting over to Java once I have figured Axis out might be a good bet, or I could try playing in Python, another language that I sorta have a handle on.  There are two implementations of SOAP for Python.

One thing that I’ve learned this afternoon/evening is that loosely typed languages make great SOAP clients, but not ideal servers.

This is an idea that I’ve had brewing in my head for awhile, and I finally took some time this afternoon to start on it.  I envision a SOAP-based *nix monitoring server and client suite on several different platforms (hence web services).  I decided to try out  the SOAP::Lite implementation to create a quick test/proof of concept service using that implementation.  I fired up CPAN, installed the module, and began.  I was slightly frustrated at how seemingly vague the examples were, and that the same example was used on so many sites on the net.  Here’s all that the service does at the moment:

[Curveball perl]$ perl status_client.pl

Calling uptime SOAP service

4:47pm up 6 days, 17:41, 2 users, load average: 0.08, 0.06, 0.15

SOAP call finished

Right now this web service is extremely simplistic, but over time I envision it evolving into a fairly sophisticated service that would be able to echo back to the client a lot of information, for example, returning a struct that contains values such as uptime.days, uptime.hours, uptime.minutes, load.average, users.numusers, and so forth.

Perl is the ideal language for this, because it is trivial to execute a command line program like uptime, strip it down to what you need, and return away.  I’ll have to eventually put a proper page together, but for now you can snag the source in tgz or zip form.  There’s a README and an INSTALL included in there which should be sufficient for most people with limited linux/*nix experience to test it out.

I’ll try to put together a coherent example using this at some point, and I’ll post any development news in here as well.  I also plan to incorporate WSDL, just as soon as I read up on that part of SOAP::Lite.

Now I’m off to look at cars with my girlfriend.  🙂

Brent Simmons has this to say about weblogs and RSS:

Brent’s Law of Weblogs: If you’re not syndicating, you’re not publishing.

Heck yeah!  72 Miles!  Computerworld has the scoop [vis Slashdot]:

The link to San Clemente Island — used to carry data from a seismograph, data logger and Global Positioning System receiver — runs with the maximum 1-watt power output allowed by the Federal Communications Commission for 2.4-GHz equipment, Werner-Braun said. At both ends of the link, HPWREN technicians installed high-gain, 2-ft. parabolic antennas to provide an additional boost to the signal.

Infoworld reports on the price cut:

INTEL HAS CUT the prices of its Celeron and Pentium 4 desktop processors in advance of the expected launch of a new 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor this week, the company confirmed Tuesday.

To bring slower processors in line with the new chip, the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 will fall in price from $508 to $401, and the 2.67GHz and 2.60GHz Pentium 4 processors will decline from $401 to $305, according to Intel’s Web site. All prices are in 1,000-unit quantities.

Intel will also cut prices on its budget line of Celeron desktop processors. The 2.0GHz Celeron will fall from $103 to $83, the 1.8GHz from $83 to $69, the 1.7GHz from $69 to $54, and the 1.4GHz from $74 to $54, Intel said.

I usually glance at my wusage-digested server logs every few days.  This evening I saw the strangest thing pointing to 10/1 on my weblog:

http://srd.yahoo.com/S=2766679:WS1/R=22/K=free solitare downloads for mac OS X/T=1037006744/F=da6c3a21153f1686e3c45b90bc9f20bd/*http://postneo.com/2002/10/01.html

Is it just me, or is that one funky referrer?

Other server log goodies: google.ca, google.com, and google.co.jp liked 9/17 so much in this last week that they decided to crawl it.

One other thing that perplexes me is that if I type http://hasselbladusa.com, I find out that they are running Apache 1.3.9 and I am forbidden to do anything with / on their server.  However, if I type http://www.hasselbladusa.com, I get a happy fun corporate homepage.  I know that most web users out there couldn’t fathom a website without www. in front of it (don’t worry, I’m not talking about you, I know you know better), but it saves wear and tear on my wrists and fingers, so I avoid www. as much as possible.

You’ll notice that I have set my blog up on all of the search engines and news services and stuff as http://postneo.com, not http://www.postneo.com.  I like it, it’s shorter, simpler, and looks hella cooler.  I also use http://google.com to shorten things (when I’m not in mozilla, which is set to search google of course), and usually forget the http:// thing unless neccesary.  For the sake of this ramt, prefixing urls with http:// means that Radio hyperlinks them, which is good for a lazy weblogger ranting.

Infoworld reports a really cool thing:

SEEKING TO UNITE disparate development camps, Oracle on Tuesday announced a two-tiered strategy for promoting standardization in the tools space: The company is joining the IBM-led Eclipse tools initiative and introducing a proposal for a single API to access multiple vendors’ Java-based IDEs.

This has got to be a win-win situation.  This is something to keep an eye on.

Congrats to Brent Simmons: 

It looks like NetNewsWire will be on television, on TechTV, Wednesday night. I think that’s pretty cool.

(I hope I’ll be able to watch the video from the site since I don’t get TechTV.)

Here’s the Download of the Day page featuring NetNewsWire.

SFGate reports:

A Saratoga High School senior, frustrated with the sluggishness of the Internet, has invented his own algorithm to compress data, an accomplishment that won him top honors this weekend in the Western region of the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

[via Chris Gulker]

The Quicktime movie of the day has got to be the Canada Switch ad.

“Canada’s money doesn’t stink.  US money… the green stuff… it stinks”

Ask pointed to it, he got it from Boing Boing:

Really funny new switch parody. Switch to Canada (original). ~8MB Quicktime.

Scott Hanselman pointed out Thinking in C#, which I ordered as a $5 Acrobat version.  I can’t wait to check it out.

Update: It looks like I can’t print it, but it’s definately worth fifty bucks and a monkey, so I’ll cope.

TheServerSide notes that IntelliJ IDEA 3.0 is out:

JetBrains has announced the immediate release and availability of IntelliJ IDEA 3.0 java IDE. The new release has tons of new features including new refactorings; built-in support for JSP, XML, and EJB; open API’s for third-party plugins; Starbase Starteam integration; local version control; and more.

Check out IntelliJ IDEA 3

I peeked over Steve Loughran’s shoulder Web Services DevCon (East) while he was playing with IntelliJ IDEA.  It’s extremely slick.  I haven’t looked at it, as Eclipse handles pretty much anything I can throw at it.

It looks like Jeremy and Keith are both skeptical about the Plaxo thing.

Jeremy:

Heh. I visited Plaxo to do some consulting. We just focused on the technical stuff I was there to talk about. But over lunch, I asked the “how will you make money” question. I got similarly evasive answers.

Keith:

I just got one of the update e-mails from one of my friends today before I had ever heard about it. Also read Matt’s comments. I agree with Doc’s quote too, it does feel like spam… there’ll have to be a culture change for it not to feel like spam.

And here’s what Keith’s friend has to say:

I really need to think of a cool idea and implement it quickly! I must give props to Parker this time around– Plaxo seems really neat and useful. Do you think this thing is gonna take off?

Scott Hanselman has today’s lesson:

Gary Klimowicz’s First Law of Organizational Development

Most business meetings do not progress beyond the average High School Student Council meeting.