Year: 2002

Inbox Buddy: J. Scott Johnson’s latest project.  It’s a spam detector, color coded organizer, and a lot more For Outlook.  He’s also Blogging the product.  Great stuff!  I’d definately download it and try it out, except I don’t use Outlook at all.  I’m in front of so many boxes during any given day, that I find it easier just to deal with all of my email over a web-based interface.

Uche Ogbuji at WebServices.Org: “The Past, Present and Future of Web Services, part 1.”

Web services are somewhere around the crest of their hype cycle and currently the darling of the prevalent media. This cresting is like that of other technologies in that it precedes full development and maturity. Web services, an undoubtedly important technology regardless of media interest, have a good deal of development ahead of them. Those who find success using Web services will be those who understand the technology fundamentally: its motivations, the reasons why some components are winning out over others, and the likely course of maturity.

I’ll read the entire article this evening, but so far it looks like a very worthwhile read. [via Loosely Coupled]

See what David Carter-Tod is reading: He has posted his Amphetadesk page.  Voyeurism at its finest!

MIT Open Courseware went live today. [via Serious Instructional Technology]

Red Hat goes 8.0: “You’ve never seen Linux look like this.”  There are a few new features (besides the obvious desktop overhaul).  The full package list is here.

The distribution is a lean 5 ~675MB CD’s small.

Does anyone else remember installing Slackware from a bunch of floppies?

Newsforge has an article about Firebird, an open-source database that was born from a fork of Borland’s InterBase.  It is released under the Mozilla Public License, and can therefore be used in commercial apps free of charge.  There are some differences under the hood when compared to MySQL, but it looks darn robust.  I remember reading about this some time ago, but it’s nice to see random projects float to the surface every once in awhile.

How To Write JavaDoc Comments: It has been so long since I’ve had the need to write JavaDoc comments, that I thought I would point to a quick reference for them.  It brings back memories of learning Java 1.1/AWT and then having to scrap that and learn Java1.2/Swing.  That was a party.  Luckily pretty much everything that I remember from Java 1.2 has carried over to Java 1.3.

Oh, and Eclipse on Windows rocks nowadays.  It’s much easier to use than the Eclcipse/Motif I have installed on my Linux testbed and is leaps and bounds more stable (and quicker!) than the older version of Eclipse I had tried on Windows.

Brad Wilson on RSS 2.0:

So, why is the net wasting so much damn time on RSS 2.0? What’s wrong with 1.0 if you want an extensible, rich publishing format? It’s not like RSS 2.0 offers anything of value over 1.0, except that it’s “vaguely 0.9x-ish”. Sorry, but that’s hardly a compelling answer these days, given that it appears RSS 2.0 is going down the “break backward compatibility” route. If you’re going to break backward compatibility, just stick with RSS 1.0.

I have a feeling that as long as Dave Winer is involved, RSS 2.0 will not break backward compatability.  However the solution to not breaking backward compatability (and homegrown parsers) is to remove the namespace element.  This might just make a backward compatible RSS2.0 feed an RSS0.9x feed with version bloat.

OSNews has a review of Red Hat 8 and UnitedLinux.  The Red Hat review is more on user experience and new features (including the lack of mp3 support), while the UnitedLinux review focuses on installation.  It will be interesting to see how these two megadistributions do in the near future.

Ryan Dawson at SellsBrothers.com:

The whole Linux uprising is ludicrous from a purely economic stand-point. Many do not want to pay for software now that Linux is widely available for free (or very cheap). But, in actuality, more resources go into software, whether it is man-hours or intellectual property than into your Cisco router. People cannot continue to support a cause like this, as it will destroy the software market and crater productivity.

I’m not sure what to say to this.  I’m of the mindset that there are different tools for different jobs.  Sometimes Windows or a commercial project running under Windows is the solution, sometimes an open-source solution is best.  Every situation is at least slightly different. 

Perhaps we should shut down the 10,811,987 sites that run Apache.

Mac Net Journal:

I may have found the cause of the problems with the flickering LCD on my Pismo PowerBook. On a whim, I decided I should try taking one of the two 512MB RAM chips from my machine and swapping it with a 128MB RAM chip from my wife’s Pismo. I took out the top RAM card and put it in her machine and when I tried to restart her machine the video wouldn’t display at all. I put her 128MB card back in and started my machine up with just the 512MB card in the lower RAM slot and so far I am not seeing any flickering LCD problems…

Defective RAM always produce the most bizzare problems, and usually problems that are extremely hard to identify.

Wow, I can be grumpy right after a nap.

Least significant Photokina Announcement: DPReview reports:

Photokina 2002: Panasonic has announced (and demonstrated) the new two megapixel DMC-FZ1 digital camera which has a unique “Leica” F2.8 – F4.6 12x optical zoom lens with a built-in stabilizer. The camera has selectable sensitivities of ISO 50 – 400, an electronic viewfinder, a 1.5″ LCD monitor and stores images to SD / MMC cards. The DMC-FZ1 will soon be available in Silver (DMC-FZ1-S) or Black (DMC-FZ1-K) finishes.

Hmm.  I’m not sure what to make of this.  It’s a brick.  It’s only 2 megapixels.  It has a Leica lens, so it’ll be expensive.  It has a 12x zoom (cool).  Did I mention that it’s a brick and only has a 2 megapixel resolution?  Oh yeah, I guess I did.

It looks like it has a similar LCD to the Leica Digilux 1.  That was the most heavenly LCD screen I’ve ever seen.  It was huge, bright, and came with a little plastic popup shade for the screen.

Will Intel’s Itanium flop?  The New York Times reports:

It turns out, Dr. Schmidt told the audience, that what matters most to the computer designers at Google is not speed but power — low power, because data centers can consume as much electricity as a city.

If power efficiency does indeed trump processing speed, everything that Intel and Hewlett-Packard have done to pack raw power into the 221 million transistors of the new Itanium 2 could now be a handicap. The chip, which is as large as a silver dollar and whose 130 watts of power dissipation are enough to fry the proverbial egg, is not even a contender in the Google universe. “We’re incredibly, incredibly power sensitive, and we’ve been talking to Intel about that,” Dr. Schmidt said.

I found the article via Emergic.  I would personally like to see AMD’s x86-64 technology thrive.

Earlier, Russell Beattie pointed to an XPath tutorial from w3schools.com.  I have only skimmed the introduction, but it looks like a really powerful tool.

And yes, Russ, I have read everything that you’ve written since Friday.  From the same entry:

Actually… Now that we’re at the end of September (time flies!), I’m going to go through and re-read what I wrote during the month. I’m sure there’s lots of links to thinks that I wanted to review again, but never did and thoughts that I’ve since forgotten about.

This is a great idea, I need to conjure up some time to do the same.

LinuxFromScratch: They have a new release out (4.0-RC1).  I’m taking a look at the 4.0-RC1 manual to see what’s going on in this release.

Leo Laporte (The Screen Savers rockstar) has some great video blog entries from his trip to Arundel Mills Mall yesterday.  They hung out near the Muvico Egyptian 24, the biggest effing movie theatre in town.  If I didn’t have a bajillion things to do today, I’d drive up to White Marsh for some autographage.

Linux Kernal 3.0? According to a recap at Kerneltrap, it just might be:

Linus agreed that if the VM is as good as it seems to be, indeed the upcoming release deserves to be called 3.0. But he also pointed out that there are many silent users who tend not to speak up until there is an official release. He asks, “people who are having VM trouble with the current 2.5.x series, please _complain_, and tell what your workload is. Don’t sit silent and make us think we’re good to go.. And if Ingo is right, I’ll do the 3.0.x thing.” [via Slashdot]

I have also extended my data collection tendrils to include both the Kerneltrap main page [rss here] and the Kerneltrap blogs page [rss here].  As long as my head doesn’t explode, everything should be okay, and the big picture will be enlarged.

Only4Gurus: A resource for Microsoft-based consultants.[via Sells Brothers]

Linux Devices covers the Project Blinkenlights installation in Paris.  The article also includes real-life screenshot, as well as technical info and linkage to a video feed.