Year: 2002

Kenneth Hunt points out that AthlonXP prices are falling:

XP 2400+ $195
XP 2200+ $145
XP 2100+ $91
XP 2000+ $81
XP 1900+ $74
XP 1800+ $66

Crap, is it time to build a new box already?

My Hasselblad sales Rep just stopped by the store.  She had the new Hasselblad H1 with her.  It is an abosultely wicked camera.  They spent their time on it, it was supposed to be out 2 years ago.  Now it is ready.  It’s auto focus, 6×4.5cm, with a built-in AE prism and all kinds of wonderful stuff.  It will hit the streets mid December for a kit price (Body, 80mm lens, back, prism) for just under US$6000.

It’s designed to work with both the Kodak and Phase One digital backs.

When I first heard of the announcement at Photokina, I was skeptical.  Hasselblad, 645, and auto focus in the same sentance?  You really have to hold the camera to realize how much sense it makes.  It’s still a Hasselblad.

Oh yeah, it’s bluetooh-enabled.  The hack of the century would be using your Erricson or otherwise bluetooth-enabled cel phone to remotely trigger the H1.  That.  Would.  Rule.

Russell Beattie is searching for the next KILLER app:

The question that just popped into my mind is, can you find the next killer app by looking? Am I doomed to wander the technical world searching for this digital holy grail forever?

I think killer apps are stumbled upon more than planned out.  Having said that, you can’t write that next KILLER app if you don’t write any apps at all.

If you code it, they will come.

Diego Doval has released a new version of spaces with seveal tweaks.

Bryan Bell is having a bad couple of days.

Hang in there.

Itamar Shtull-Trauring attended the Lightweight Languages Workshop at MIT over the weekend.  He has notes from some of the talks.

On a similar note, the aggregation of recent advogato diary entries has more code snippets per square blog entry than most.

Wired News has a story about a new venture by Napster co-founder Sean Parker:

Here’s how it works: A Plaxo user sends plain-text e-mails to friends and colleagues requesting contact information updates. Recipients can reply to the request by updating their info in the template provided or by e-mailing free-form text, which Plaxo parses using natural language processing technology.

The key to Plaxo’s success appears to lie in its virus-like nature.

It sounds like a cool idea, but I do have to agree with what Doc is quoted as saying in the article:

“If they won’t explain how they intend to make money, one can only assume they intend to spend it,” Searls said. “The product looks like a new way to hire a company to annoy your friends. It feels like spam. It’s annoying, and I don’t think there’s a viable plan here.”

I’ll have to file this under “interesting” and see what happens.

San Ruby reminds us:

Joel on Software:  “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.”

The Register is covering an interesting story about journalling file systems on Mac OS X Server.

Apple has added journaling capabilities to its HFS+ Extended file system in a point.point update to the OS X Server software.

Journaling is a convenience feature for system administrators: it improves restart times after a crash on large volumes, as the system only needs to check the journal rather than every block on the disk. Linux users can take advantage of three journal file systems: ext3, ReiserFS and Silicon Graphics’ XFS.

Journalling == good.

Brent Simmons will be adding outlining support in the new version of NewNewsWire Pro.  Very cool stuff:

This screen shot of NetNewsWire Pro’s Notepad should be fairly self-explanatory.

Today Rael announced O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference for 2003.  It is April 22-25, 2003 in Santa Clara, CA.  Details can be found here and proposals are here.

Jeremy Allaire:

Today, Macromedia launched Macromedia Contribute, a powerful new desktop application that aims to unleash web publishing for everyone, while providing control to web professionals ultimately responsible for websites and applications.

What amazes me more is that Macromedia was able to take Drumbeat 2000, a painful to use development environment, and turn it on to something useful (Dreamweaver UltraDev).

I just took a peek at the overview video, and Contribute looks pretty slick.  Browse -> Edit -> Publish.  It seems like a good combination of Manilla, Mozilla, and FrontPage.  I haven’t viewed source yet on what it produces, but it looks like the overview relied on tables.

Brian Graf:

As of today, I am finally allowed to talk publically about what I have been working on for the past six months. Here is the press release and an early article.

In all fairness, I had really very little to do with this. Most of my contributions were related to getting Dotfuscator translated into all of the languages that Visual Studio ships in. We turned over our first feature complete version three weeks after I was hired, so most of my stuff won’t be seen until a future version.

Congratulations to everyone at PreEmptive Solutions for a job well done.

Congrats!

There’s an interesting article going on over at Kuro5hin on current RSS problems and possible solutions:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web content syndication format based on XML 1.0. In the current implementation it’s a very capable format used to aggregate content from multiple news sources. The problem with this format is that the architecture on which it is deployed hasn’t changed in a while and places too much load onto the infrastructure. (e.g. Joel’s RSS problem)

In this article I try to point out different approaches to solve these problems and make RSS more suited to be used on mobile devices which are not always-on.

Charles Miller chimed in with all kinds of goodies including mod_gzip, NNTP advantages/disadvantages, server-level caching, and the Jabber possibilites.

I have managed to implement about 3/4 of the AggregatorAPI methods via XML-RPC in C#.  I don’t really know C#.  I have a book by Peter Drayton and others called C# essentials.  That and my Java/C++/Visual Studio experience is all that I’m drawing upon.  The testing app is quite ugly, but you’ll note that I can subscribe, unsubscribe, get stats on the last aggregator run, and get info for a specific feed.  I have to figure a few things out before I can implement the last few methods.

As soon as I can implement and test the other methods, I’ll release the C# source under a license that is compatable with the XML-RPC library, hopefully something BSD-style.  This might save other developers with implementation, they can just roll with it.  I should have some free time tomorrow to work on it.

I still have not had time to write up my experiences thus far.  One thing I will note: there’s a HUGE difference between http://127.0.0.1/RPC2 and http://127.0.0.1:5335/RPC2.  I smacked myself for that one.

Here’s a little teaser for you.  In addition to some schoolwork this afternoon, I also wrote up a quick proof of concept client for Radio’s XML-RPC based AggregatorAPI.  After frustration (I’ll tell you later), I ended up using Visual Studio .NET and Cook Computing’s XML-RPC library.

I hope to turn this proof of concept micro-app into something potentially useful.  I’d also like to share some of my experiences with writing and debugging XML-RPC apps, and writing for Radio, but that will have to come a little later.  For now you’ll just have to wonder.

Expect to see a recount of my experiences later this evening.

The BBC reports that parents are freaking out about America’s Army: Operations.

A computer game devised by the US Army has come under fire from parents anxious that it glorifies violence.

The army hopes that the game, America’s Army, will help it to attract the tens of thousands of young people it needs to join its ranks each year.

The game allows players to go through a virtual army enlistment and basic training.

More controversially, they then go on to more advanced training, including marksmanship.

The shooting part of the game is so realistic, the computer screen even moves in time to the digital soldiers’ heavy breathing.

Yes.  The game is realistic.  Actually, it’s probably the best and most realistic first person shooter that I have played, and I’ve played a lot of them.  I’m not a parent so I can’t see things from the same perspective.  I do know however that I’ve been playing first person shooters since the 386 days, and computer games in general since I was a little kid, and I’m not out shooting people on the streets.

Computer games, TV violence, movie violence, and other external factors are easy scapegoats when something goes wrong.  I’m not convinced that they are the root of the problem.

Russell Beattie shares his experiences with developing for really expensive cel phones.  He touches on SDK shortcomings, J2ME headaches, and some cool stuff too.  It’s definately worth a read even if you’re not considering developing for the platform.

Alan Cooper imparts 14 principles of polite applications.  I’ll read it in depth in the morning, but right now #4:

Polite Software Has Common Sense.

Google has recently cached the updated version of my weblog.  The googlebot is still choking on my blogroll.  Perhaps I should rename and relink miniXmlCoffeeMug.gif, or I might just get rid of the pictures completely.  Something like:

Site Title [rss]
Site Title [rss]
Site Title [rss]
Site Title [rss]
Site Title [rss]

I think I like that.  Over the weekend (Sunday) I’m going to be helping a friend with some Java, and I’m going to try to sink my teefus into the Radio Aggregator XML-RPC interface.  We shall see.

I’m also the 77th Matt on google.  We’ll see if this changes after the googlebot crawls my content and not just half my blogroll…