Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: January 2003

  • Usability

    Jeremy Zawodny:

    Controls in the cockpit that do very different things should look and feel different. Ask and usability expert abou that one.

  • My New Digital Camera

    DSC-U20I finally did it.

    After years of having several (broken) toy digital cameras, I actually bought a real one.  It’s frickin’ tiny, made by Sony, and shouldn’t suck too much.

    The batteries are still charging.  I’ll definately be using it to cover LinuxWorld Expo this week.

    <happy digital camera dance/>

  • Downloading FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE

    I’m downloading FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE on the off chance that I’ll get some free time to play with it.  I really like the Early Adopter documentation, it makes me feel cool.  The release notes are also fun to read while downloading.

  • NetBSD Gets pThreads!

    NewsForge:

    Jan Schaumann writes “Jason Thorpe has merged the nathanw_sa branch with -current. NetBSD now has a high performance, modern kernel thread implementation using Scheduler Activations in the main source tree. This work was performed by Nathan Williams with contributions by several other developers.”

  • FreeBSD 5.0-Release

    OSNews covers FreeBSD 5.0-Release:

    The OSNews mailbox has already been flooded with submissions that the FreeBSD 5.0-Release is already present on many mirrors around the world (i386 USA mirror, Europe one), but the CDs are not present to all mirrors as we type this. 5.0-Release is the next-big-thing for FreeBSD as it includes great new features (some not even found on other OSes) like SMPng, KSE, UFS2, GEOM, MAC etc. Read here for a quick explanation on what is what. The release has two CDs, and for the minimalistic, there is a mini-distro (225 MB) with only the essential tools in it (e.g. no X11). This version will also see FreeBSD supporting more platforms, like the IA64, SPARC-64 etc.

  • 25 Years of Animal Magnetism

    Megnut:

    “For years, our customers have asked us to make and sell various items with our animals on them. We are pleased and proud to present our first collection of official O’Reilly animal swag.” So, if you’re a geek and you know it, um, buy a t-shirt (and clap your hands if you want to, too).

  • Groove Web Services: Almost There

    John Burkhardt:

    It looks like we’re really close to shipping Groove Web Services. Things have turned out quite well. Between the beta and v1 we were able to move closer toward the feature that Jon Udell mentioned. It was tricky and it makes programming to GWS a bit harder, but the benifits are huge. Basically all we did was to move the user information out of the service URL and into a header. (Yes, more SOAP headers. Yummy!) What this does enables is the ability to share URLs obtained from GWS with other users. As long as the other user has authority to access the same resource in Groove they will be able to resolve the URL.

  • Mono Update

    Mono News:

    • Christopher Bockner has contributed a DB2 System.Data client.
    • MacOS X support on the runtime has been integrated into the distribution, and MCS works with it.
    • Zoltan has managed to get IKVM (a Java VM for .NET) to run with Mono. The HelloWorld.class runs with the Mono runtime.

  • Full Moon, Baby!

    Chris Heilman posted a sweet picture of the moon on his weblog this morning.  Rock on!

  • 802.11g Here We Come

    Good stuff from Wi-Fi News:

    Get the 911 on 802.11g, especially AirPort Extreme: My book co-author Adam Engst and I have co-written a 3,000-word article on the state of 802.11g equipment including an enormous amount of detail about AirPort Extreme: both the Base Station and the AirPort Extreme Card. This article will be available next week as a downloadable PDF with illustrations and photos, too. (And remember: we launched an Apple AirPort-specific blog earlier this week, too, for all your AirPort needs and questions.)

  • Stop It!

    Dave Hyatt (in his new MovableType weblog:

    If you’re trying to embed the Safari layout engine right now, stop it! 🙂 Don’t try to build code around these two components.

  • GNU Source-highlight

    Mental Note: GNU Source-highlight 1.6.2 is out and looks like a good tool for highlighting c/c++/Java/perl/Python/php(3 only) for the web/weblogs.

  • Geo::Weather

    Geo::Weather is a cool little perl module that scrapes weather.com and produces your local weather in html.  I installed it on my box at home (perl -MCPAN -e shell as root and then install Geo::Weather) and have been playing with it for a few minutes.  Here are a few lines of code adapted from the man page:

    use Geo::Weather;

    my $weather = new Geo::Weather;
    $weather->get_weather('Kensington','MD');
    print $weather->report();

    That’s really all it took.  Here’s the output from that (as viewed in Lynx):

    Kensington, MD

    [29.gif] Partly Cloudy
    Temperature: 28° F/-2° C (Feels Like: 18° F/-8° C)
    Wind: From the Northwest at 12 mph
    Dew Point: 14° F/-10° C
    Rel. Humidity: 48 %
    Visibility: Unlimited
    Barometer: 30.03 inches and rising
    UV Index: 0 Minimal

    Pretty darn cool.  Of course you can access specific bits of weather information if you want.  Of course if you want to get down and dirty, you can use Geo::METAR, which was written by our very own Jeremy Zawodny.  It’s a damn small world.

  • Konica/Minolta Merger Latest Update

    I have previously reported on the Minolta-Konica merger.  Here’s the latest from a letter that I recieved at work this afternoon.  (Any typos or misspellings are my fault not theirs): 

    January 14, 2003

    To all Minolta Consumer Products Group Dealers,

     

    Recently you heard news of a merger between Minolta and Konica.  While you may have learned most of the information already, let me review the basic facts.

    The Boarts of Minolta and Konica have agreed that they will bring the two organizations together into a single entity.  This was announced formally on January 7th.

    The extreme competition that exists in our business world has made this alliance neccessary.  Minolta and Konica each bring strengths to this new association.  Together we will be positioned to grow and prosper.

    You may have questions about specifics, but it is a bit too early to have all the answers.  The merger will not be final until August of this year and the integration of the business units will start in October.

    You will be kept informed by a series of communications that will elaborate on every detail as it unfolds.

    This may seem like a very sudden and dramatic change, however, changes are often neccessary for growth and success.  We pledge that there will be no disruption in our service or supply to you as we proceed with the merger.  With this new organization, we will be able to deliver an even stronger value proposition to you, our valued dealer.

    Best Regards,

    Yoshi Ito
    Executive Vice President, General Manager
    Consumer Products Group

  • How To Survive a Slashdotting

    Ace’s Hardware has a good article up about how to survive a Slashdotting.  It looks like they’re using UltraSparcs, though I thought I had read a piece several months ago about them trying to migrate to Intel.  Oh well.

  • Navel Gazing

    Wow, I’ve had 14,240 page hits to my weblog according to Userland.  Of course I’m still a long way from the top 100 list.

    In further navel-gazing, I’ve moved up and am now the 41st Matt on google, up from 45th.

  • Castor 0.9.4.2

    Castor:

    January 16, 2003 Version 0.9.4.2 is now available for download.

  • SOAP::Clean

    Here’s something interesting the flew down the freshmeat pipes today– SOAP::Clean:

    SOAP::Clean is a set of modules for quickly and simply deploying SOAP client and servers. On the server-side, it is intended to enable legacy, command-line oriented applications to be made into Web Services with little or no modification. On the client-side, it is intended to make Web Services look like legacy, command-line oriented applications!

    SOAP::Clean was original developed to provide a framework for computational scientists to use one another’s components, without having to download and compile each others codes. The name SOAP::Clean comes from the fact that it is designed for entire XML documents and non-XML files to be embedded within SOAP requests and responses without losing their integrety. These files are passed directly to the legacy application on the server and stored directly to disk on the client.

    SOAP::Clean is not intended for implementing “servlets”. In particular, it makes absolutely no attempt to map XML data types into convenient Perl datatypes. Nor does it allow arbitrary Perl functions on the server to be invoked by SOAP requests. If you need this functionality, I recommend SOAP::Lite.

    Cool!

     

  • SCons: a Make Replacement using Python

    SCons 0.10 has been released:

    SCons alpha release 0.10 is now available for download. SCons is a software construction tool (build tool, or substitute for Make) implemented in Python, based on the winning design in the Software Carpentry build tool competition (in turn based on the Cons build tool).

  • Slashdot reviews Brin

    Slashdot reviewed David Brin’s Kiln People this morning.  My review: one of the best Brin books that I’ve read (and I’ve read them all).