Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: January 2003

  • Windley on Web Services

    Phil Windley spoke about web services in DC today.  I wanted to be there, but I wasn’t able to get out of work.  I’m going to look at his slides and pretend that I was there.

  • PyCon 2003 Update

    I just got an email from the Pycon interest mailing list by Guido van Rossum.  Here are some details on pricing:

    • $150 early bird (registered and paid up to 4 weeks before the conference)
    • $200 regular pre-registration (registered and paid up to a few days before the conference)
    • $250 all on-site payment (pre-registration is still strongly recommended when paying on-site, to ensure your space and to speed up badge creation)

    There is also an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net called #pycon.

  • Freshmeat Roundup

    Here are several programs that I think are worth mentioning or taking a look at.  These have been released or updated in the last day or so.  I regularly try to point out notable freshmeat releases in individual posts, but there are a bunch today:

    fn 0.0.1 was announced on freshmeat today.  Here’s the project description:

    fn (FetchNews) is a non-interactive command-line tool for downloading and aggregating xml-based newsfeeds from web sites. It is suitable for use in a cron job to gather newsfeeds and generate reports at regular intervals.

    It looks like this bad boy is written in C for the following reason:

    A program like this should really have been done in a scripting language like perl or python, but when I started writing it I was bored with both those languages and was looking for a challenge.

    Good stuff.  The author has made some output from his program available.

    pycURL 7.10.3 (and the underlying cURL/libCURL 7.10.3) has been released.  Looks like a bugfix/tweak release from here.

    JCTerm, a Java SSH2 terminal emulator, 0.0.2 has been released:

    New features include sftp support, function keys and arrow keys support, and improved rendering speed.

    TkVNC, a VNC viewer written in pure Tcl/Tk (!!!), 0.9 is out.

    Qt# 0.6 is out:

    This version improves support for Portable.NET and Ximian Mono, corrects the ctor signature for QTabWidget, now explicitly names all anonymous enums, includes boxing constructor access modifiers, adds missing methods to QComboBox, corrects ctor syntax for the examples, adds byte[] to QByteArray conversion, adds a new qmake-based build system for qtc distributions, adds a new csant-based build system for Qt# distributions, and includes a QFractals sample, a port of a Java quantum fractal generator to C#.

  • Linking to Your RSS Feed in Radio

    Sam Ruby encouraged me to link to my RSS feed, which Mark Pilgrim had suggested before I started blogging with Radio.  Mark pointed to instructions by Dave Winer on adding this, rsd, and blogroll support to your Radio template.  It’s as easy as adding a little macro to the head of your template, Radio takes care of the rest.

  • New Edition of Py (the zine)

    NewsForge notes that Py (the zine) 1.3 is out.

  • KeithDevens.php

    Keith Devens has been playing with PHP 4.3.0.  At first he had to squash some quirky behavior that the upgrade caused, but now he’s exploring new undocumented stuff like debug_backtrace().

  • Good For Google

    Ovidiu Predescu:

    Tomorrow will be my last day working at HP, I’ve accepted an offer to join Google. While I’m sure I’ll miss a lot of colleagues at HP I’ve worked with, I’m really excited about the new job. I’ll get a chance to work in the most successful start-up in the Valley at the moment, and get to do some really exciting things.

  • Sam Gentile’s Introduction to Managed C++

    Sam Gentile unleashed his Introduction to Managed C++ for O’Reillynet this afternoon.  Congrats, Sam!

  • LinuxWorld Blogger Meetup?

    Update: Please go to my wiki page on this subject.

    I’ll be in New York City to attend the LinuxWorld Expo for probably one (perhps more if it’s worth it, though this poor compsci student only has an expo pass) of the following days:

    • Jan 22 – Matt Croydon?
    • Jan 23 – Matt Croydon?
    • Jan 24 – Matt Croydon?

    I know that there are several NY local bloggers out there and I’m sure that many more will be converging on the Javits center for one or more of these days.  Shall we arrange a weblogger meetup/dinner/gathering?  Something like Spicy Noodles or RTP Lunch for the Linux blogging crowd that will be on hand?  How does does 6ish (1 hour after exhibit hall closes) sound?  Somewhere, I’m not sure where.  Suggestions?

    If you’ll be around one or more of these days in the general LinuxWorld Expo/New York area, drop me an email with when you’ll be around and I’ll add you to the list.

    Any RTPers?  Anyone traveling from the west coast?  Any fellows?  Any Senior Editors at Linux Journal?

    Yeah, yeah, I know this should be done wiki-style.  Perhaps this will be motivation to set one up.

  • Source Code Formatter for Weblogs

    Rogers Cadenhead:

    Useful utility for webloggers: A Source Code Formatter and DeFormatter for publishing source code in a weblog or other site. The formatter converts “<“, “>”, and other characters into HTML character entities that can be safely published (via FuzzyBlog).

  • Graffiti, We Hardly Knew Ye

    Slashdot bears the sad news: RIP Graffiti.

  • W3C Standards

    Mark Pilgrim is fed up with W3C standards:

    I migrated to semantic markup that has been around for 10 fucking years and they go and drop it. Not deprecate it slowly over time, mind you, but just fucking drop it. Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I’m still stuck in a dead end.

    Wait for it…

    Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.

    I’m migrating to HTML 4.

  • metaWeblog Clarification

    Dave posted further clarification on what to do with things like the source element in the metaWeblog API.  Here’s a word of advice to all: even if you’ve read a spec a million times, re-read it before you claim to not understand it.  It will save you from looking like a complete moron.

    Trust me.

  • Sam in Seattle

    Sam Ruby will be in Seattle in two weeks.  On an unrelated note I was in West Virginia last night.

  • It’s Not Just Me

    David Johnson in response to Sam Ruby’s post about weblog APIs:

    It hurts my head too. I’d rather see a SOAP interface where everything is specified by WSDL, or a RESTLog-like interface where everything is drop-dead simple.

    I’d love to see a SOAP interface.  I love parsing some WSDL and ending up with everything I need to use it generated for me.  I’ve done it in both Java and .NET, and it’s wonderful.

    Simultaneously, I would love to see a minimalistic RESTful interface.

    I just hope that the major weblog software vendors go for it.

  • Forecast: Scattered Blogging

    Today will be a light blogging day.  I’m taking my little sister to see Avril Lavigne this afternoon and after that I’m driving my friend Adam to West Virginia.  He starts school again tomorrow.

  • PostgreSQL and OS X

    X-Archetypes:

    Apple’s Internet Developer has an interesting article on PostreSQl and Mac OS X. The PostgreSQL installation on OS X is examined and well as interaction with Java, Perl and PHP.

  • Mark Pilgrim’s CSS Safari Hack

    Mark Pilgrim has been looking into hiding CSS from Safari.  He has come up with a hack that can be used to deal with CSS for Safari only.

  • Nothing

    It doesn’t look like I have anything interesting to say today.

  • Weblog Moderation

    While I was crossing the street (Connecticut Avenue in Kensington, Maryland: 6 lane divided highway) this evening, I thought to myself: why isn’t my weblog moderated? [context is important here]

    I link to a lot of stuff. I write some personal stuff, and then every once in awhile I write something quite worth reading.  Why can’t someone view my weblog at a Slashdot threshold of 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, or -1 depending on what they’re looking for.  If they viewed my weblog at 3, they’d catch some of my better work, probably the stuff that gets me flow from various sources.  I would probably set the default for my weblog to 1, that way the stuff that doesn’t matter would get modded down, but everything else would be 1 or above.

    The stuff deemed useless by my readers would be modded -1 Redunant, Unfunny, Dross or something of the sort.  Users who found a particular post helpful would rank it +1 Insightful, Interesting, Amusing, Funny, Productive, Useful, etc.  It could be done on a per-post basis or someone could moderate several posts at once on the main page.

    Now here’s the kicker for everyone who complains about weblogs always being in reverse-chronological order: There’s a little menu on the sidebar that allows you to view posts by date (chronological or reverse chronological) OR by rank (highest moderated weblog posts first).  This way someone can come to my weblog and view my stuff staring at the most intelligent things I’ve said.

    I can see this easier to implement (in theory) with a dynamic weblog (like Roller) but I’m sure Sam could hack this up in about 6 lines of Perl (I’m being generous) and the obligatory new template.

    Moderators: Please mod this post up.