Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: February 13, 2003

  • OSX 10.2.4

    Rael notes that OSX 10.2.4 is out.

  • Mono Developments

    Here’s the new news from the Mono team:

    • Mono now distributes a few new assemblies: Mono.Security.Win32 as a layer to use the crypto functionality on Win32. The Mono.Posix assembly which contains functionality for taking advantage of Unix facilities.
    • There’s a Mono site in Poland.
    • Stubs for the Gtk# documentation have been checked into CVS. If you want to contribute please read this message.
    • Mono development is moving quickly: Tim and Daniel have been improving the Oracle database provider and Sebastien Pouliot has got code signing to work using Authenticode with pure open source and managed code. Plenty of new VB.NET work from Marco (compiler) and Daniel (runtime). Also Jackson has resumed work on the IL assembler and the fully managed library to generate CIL images (Sergey wrote the first Mono.PEToolkit).

  • Buzzwordometer

    Buzzwordometer is fun.  I found it via my referrers this evening.  Here are my stats:

    • My overall buzzwordosity: 749
    • Suit: 321
    • Geek: 928

    That sounds pretty buzzword compliant to me.  Maybe my suit result will increase with more use of the word synergy.  Buzzwordometer has the potential to be a quickly rising and popular meme, catch it before it’s last week.

    It’s interesting to note that Erik’s site scores 814, and an amazing 999 on geek!

  • Network Utilities Module for Webmin

    This module sounds really useful:

    The Network Utilities Module for Webmin features tools like ping, traceroute, nslookup, nmap, whois, dig and an IP subnet calculator.

    I think I’ll be installing that on my linux boxen. [via freshmeat]

  • Mono Aggregator

    Cool!  Russ points to a post by David Watson in which he posts a bit of software that runs on Mono 0.19 and works a bit like Amphetadesk.  I’m definately going to check this out.

    I agree wholeheartedly with what David thinks about Mono:

    I’ve been exploring mono to see what’s possible with current builds of the compiler and runtime and have been blown away by how much progress has been made by this team while maintaining a very high quality level.

  • The Joy of Python: class2dict and dict2class

    One of V. Satheesh Babu‘s joys of Python is coverting dictionaries to classes and back again.  Silly but cool!

  • Technical Yahoo!

    Michael Radwin got his slick new business cards today.

    I wonder if his yahoo mail account gets as much spam as mine does.  🙂

  • Sega Merges With Sammy

    CNet:

    Struggling video game maker Sega announced Thursday that it plans to merge with another Japanese company that specializes in pinball machines.

    Sega did not provide financial details but said the merger with Sammy, Japan’s largest maker of pinball machines for pachinko parlors there, would take place in October.

    Interesting.  Sega!

  • DC Blogger Meetup

    James Robertson:

    Awhile back, I opined that a DC area blog meetup might be interesting. It turns out that there’s a blog meetup clearing house. The next DC area meeting is February 19.

    I’ll do my best to make it (I’m a true slacker if I don’t, it’s just a few miles from my house), and if there’s too much talk about Iraq I can always play some video games…

    Seriously though, it sounds like fun.

  • Shuttle Image Made With a Mac

    The Washington Post:

    The shadowy, closely-analyzed photo of space shuttle Columbia’s underside was not snapped with cutting-edge military equipment, but by three researchers playing around with an old computer and an ordinary telescope in their free time, officials said Wednesday.

    […]

    But contrary to reports last week, the photo was not snapped by one of Starfire’s extraordinarily powerful telescopes, which are designed to spy on enemy satellites and detect incoming missiles.

    Instead, it was taken by Starfire Optical Range engineers who, in their free time, had rigged up a device using a commercially available 3 1/2-inch telescope and an 11-year-old Macintosh computer, the researchers said. The telescope was surplus laboratory equipment, kept in a cabinet at the Starfire range.

    Thanks to MacSlash for pointing this out, but <rant>SHAME ON THEM for pointing to the printable version rather than the on-screen version.  I think that’s bullshit.  We’re using their resources (information), and they need to pay for it (ads).  I also totally lost any chance of navigation from that story to elsewhere in the site.  The other problem with the printable version is that at first it didn’t seem credible.  It was text on a blank background with a teeny Washington Post logo.  I thought it had been faked.  I checked the URL to see if someone had spoofed the address (washing.tonpost.com or similar), and had to remove the ?language=printer to be sure.</rant>

    I need more caffeine!

  • Web Services Interop vs. A Single Platform

    Phil Waineright:

    There is no ‘split’ between J2EE and .Net — the whole point of web services is to bridge the gap between the two. Tom Welsh explains why in a cogent opinion piece on The Register yesterday. I was amazed to hear recently from a leading manager at a big systems integrator that the biggest issue facing his firm’s clients was consolidation, as if putting everything on a single platform will solve everyone’s IT problems. Far better to concentrate on getting them to work in synch, I would have thought, and as Tom identifies, that’s the real objective of web services. So if .NET does one job well and J2EE does others better, then you can deploy the right platform to do each job without landing yourself with a horrendous integration headache.

  • Blosxom to Get Trackbacks

    Rael:

    Per Dash’s and Kottke’s suggestion, not to mention finally having two moments to rub together, I’ve integrated comments and TrackBacks on my weblog. Just a few mods to MovableType’s standalone TrackBack implemention and I’ve comments and TrackBacks a la TrackBacks.

  • Linux Cellphone

    LinuxDevices:

    Motorola, Inc. today announced the Motorola A760, the world’s first handset combining a Linux Operating System and Java Technology, with full multimedia PDA functionality.

    The Motorola A760 is designed to offer a rich end-user mobile experience based on the open source OS. Motorola’s leadership in Java technology coupled with the Linux OS, arms mobile developers with an increased freedom to create new Java applications, from games to productivity tools, for smart devices like the A760.

    [via NewsForge]

  • New O’Reillynet Articles on XML, Python, and Web Services

    O’Reilly unleashed several new articles today:

    Is There a Consensus Web Services Stack? by Kendall Clark:

    What Marx said of world history — that it occurs the first time as tragedy, the second as farce — is increasingly true of conversations in the XML development community. Conversation among XML developers has grown increasingly ossified. Permanent topics of conversation return — never, it appears, to be fully repressed — over and over: the ins and outs of namespaces, the nature of resources and representations, why SOAP is sweetness-and-light or pure evil, the ideal simplifying refactor of XML itself, and so on. And, each time the cycle repeats itself, the positions grow more shrill, more caricatured, and less interesting. I suppose that it’s possible that someone eventually learn something from all of this; more likely, people give up the hope of learning something and stop paying attention.

    Building Metadata Applications with RDF [and RDFlib] by Bob DuCharme:

    The real test of any technology’s value is what kinds of tasks are easier with it than without it. If I hear about some new technology, I’m not going to learn it and use it unless it saves me some trouble. Well, being a bit of a geek, I might play with it a bit, but I’m going to lose interest if I don’t eventually see tangible proof that it either makes new things possible or old things easier.

    Simple XML Processing With elementtree by Uche Ogbuji:

    Fredrik Lundh, well known in Python circles as “the effbot“, has been an important contributor to Python and to PyXML. He has also developed a variety of useful tools, many of which involve Python and XML. One of these is elementtree, a collection of lightweight utilities for XML processing. elementtree is centered around a data structure for representing XML. As its name implies, this data structure is a hierarchy of objects, each of which represents an XML element. The focus is squarely on elements: there is no zoo of node types. Element objects themselves act as Python dictionaries of the XML attributes and Python lists of the element children. Text content is represented as simple data members on element instances. elementtree is about as pythonic as it gets, offering a fresh perspective on Python-XML processing, especially after the DOM explorations of my previous columns.

    I’ll be reading all of these articles later this evening after some coding for schoolwork gets done.