Matt Croydon::Postneo

Year: 2002

  • Wardriving

    Slashdot is running a story today about Worldwide (read: California) WarDriving Day on Aug 31.  The story also linked to some wardriving swag:

    Get your wardriving swag now before it’s too late.

  • Blogging Roller & JIRA

    David Johnson’s Blogging Roller gets a JIRA boost: Atlassian’s JIRA is now powering  Blogging Roller’s issues and bugs.  JIRA’s ‘dashboard’ is pretty slick.

  • Worst. Printer Name. Evar!

    Epson debuts silliest-named printer ever: The 10600.  Huh?  Who got paid what to think of that?  (Update: If you pronounce it Ten-Six-Hundred, it’s not so bad)

    Built using the same print engine as the 10000, the 10600 model sports Photo Accelerator Technology, which offers full performance when outputting RGB-based image files.

  • Tara Sue Grubb for Congress:

    Candidates have been e-mailing me about the blog.  Some have or are planning to start their own blog.  Let us hope it will be used effectively and honestly.

    As Dave would say, Bing!

  • John Robb

    John Robb:

     Is it just me or is weblogspace looking more and more like a group mind?  A new organism.  If so, this is the first example of this ever.  Why not write about the mechanics of this?   How can a 1/2 million smart people (1/3 on UserLand, 1/3 on Blogger, and 1/3 on other systems) and 5-10 m readers cooperate to create a new paradigm for conscious life?  How can we incorporate more people without becomming too chaotic for any advancement?  Is this worthwhile?  

  • RPC::XML

    RPC::XML: A perl implementation of XML-RPC turns 0.44 for a bugfix update.

  • EtherApe

    EtherApe: An open-source *nix traffic visualizer.

  • What the hell is a permalink anyway?  Dave clues us in.  But who is going to define link rot?

  • Xopus: Wow!

    Xopus is a browser based in-place wysiwyg XML editor. Xopus allows users to edit their XML data in an intuitive word processor alike way.

    Xopus allows common users to edit complex XML documents without knowing anything about XML without even realising they are editing XML.

    Xopus uses XSLT stylesheets to transform the XML to user presentable HTML. The user can edit this HTML like he or she is editing HTML in a wysiwyg HTML editor or a word processor. All changes are stored in the XML.

    Xopus uses an XML Schema to preserve the XML validity. Xopus does not allow the user to create invalid XML.

    Xopus works inside Internet Explorer 5.5 and up on Windows and Mozilla 1.0 and up on all platforms.

    There is a demo with an impressive screenshot.  This could be big. [via Sam Ruby]

  • Antville: Another weblog host/community. Most of the weblogs are not in English, although there are a few. It appears to be based on Helma, another open-source app-server. Each weblog looks like it can have categories and sports everyone’s favorite little orange button with those three letters on it. Here’s a blurb from the antville homepage:

    antville is an open source project aimed to the development of an “easy to maintain and use” weblog-hosting system. it’s not limited to just one weblog, it can easily host up to several hundred or thousand weblogs (the number of weblogs is more limited by the site owners choice and server power than software limitations).

    I think it is important to note that I stumbled upon this community by clicking on a link from the weblogs.com top 100.

  • CNet: HP unveils cheaper (yet still overpriced) servers.

    The Unix/RISC 2405 server starts at $4,795, and comes with one 650MHz processor, two 18GB hard drives and 512MB of memory. The 5405 starts at $29,026, and comes with two 650MHz processors, 4GB of memory and 72GB of disk room. It can accomodate up to four processors.

    The 7405 starts at $50,595, and comes with two 650MHz processors, 4GB of memory and 146GB of disk space. It can accomodate up to eight processors.

    It seems to me that I could build a freaking megacluster of AMD or Intel machines with at least double the specs of the 7405 for a fraction of the price.  The 2405 does seem like a nice entry-level RISC based server, through, and probably worth the $4,795 they want for it.  I’ll take two.

  • CherryPy: Freshmeat Gem of the Day (FMGOTD).  It’s not quite a content management system, not quite an application server, and not quite a compiler.  From the website:

    CherryPy is a Python-based tool for developing dynamic web sites. It uses many powerful concepts together, which makes it unique in its approach to web site development. It is available under the GPL license.

    CherryPy sits between an application server and a compiler. You write source files, compile them with CherryPy and CherryPy generates an executable containing everything to run the web site (including an HTTP server)

    I’ve been thumbing through the tutorial and it looks decently simple and potentially powerful.  I can’t see it becoming insanely popular, but it looks like a great nice solution which will definately make someone’s life out there easier.

  • MyRSS: A command-line (python) RSS aggregator.

  • A Lindows PC for $199.86: With a Via C3 800mhz chip in it of course.  That’s really really cheap for a PC though.  Roll ’em back!

  • LJ::Simple: An OOP Perl library for accessing livejournal.

  • Latest Netcraft Survey: Apache owns about 2/3 of the web serving scene. This is good. [via dive into mark]

  • Horrible Exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError

    Ack!  A horrible exception!  Of course that’s opposed to all of the happyfun exceptions that a program can throw.  This horrible exception comes from a Jetspeed demo site.  Jetspeed is part of the Jakarta project, which is in turn part of the Apache project.  Jetspeed looks like a really cool project:

    Jetspeed is an Open Source implementation of an Enterprise Information Portal, using Java and XML. A portal makes network resources (applications, databases and so forth) available to end-users. The user can access the portal via a web browser, WAP-phone, pager or any other device. Jetspeed acts as the central hub where information from multiple sources are made available in an easy to use manner.

    A working demo site can be found here, although it is a development version, so horrible exceptions might be lurking.  Of course the horrible exception came from a bleeding edge demo site too, so there’s not a whole lot to worry about, stability wise.  I’ll have to code that in to a project sometime.

    class CoolAppObject

    {

    public CoolAppFeature thisFeature(string s) throws HorribleException

    {

     . . .

    }

    }

  • K5: A memo to Cornell students about DMCA enforcement.

    In July of this year, a 29-year-old computer technician entered a federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania to begin serving a 46-month term for the illegal distribution of millions of dollars worth of copyrighted software, games and movies on the Internet. The alleged “ringleader” of an Internet group known as “DrinkorDie,” he is among the more than one hundred people arrested last December for violation of federal copyright laws on the Internet, and among the 15 who have already pleaded guilty. One of those fifteen was a student at Duke University.

    It just gets worse from there…

  • Kuro5hin: Introduction To and Experiences With Mac Cocoa, probably one of the few k5 articles that is fit for posting on this weblog.

    Cocoa is the native system for developing applications on the Apple Mac. This article introduces Cocoa and describes my experiences after about a year implementing a complex application in Cocoa using Objective C.

  • PHPOpenTracker: A php-based (I think) tracking system that can be embedded in php or tracked with an image tag.