Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: February 2003

  • DTDDoc: It’s like Javadoc, but for your DTDs

    DTDDoc sounds interesting to me:

    DTDDoc is designed to help document your DTDs efficiently. It is a straightforward extension of the Javadoc concept, and a not so straightforward implementation of some of the concepts solidified by Donald E. Knuth.

    I haven’t seen this project before on freshmeat, but here’s what’s new in version 0.0.5:

    New display of element/attribute parent, and a new ability to configure the title that is displayed on top of the index.

    The example output comes with both html-ized javadoc-like human-readable output (too many dashes there), as well as a good old DTD that can be used to validate stuff.  Quite a slick little project.

  • Mono Updates: OpenGL#, Mono Basic

    From the Mono site:

    • Mark Crichton has completed his OpenGL/GLUT bindings for Gnome. A screenshot can be seen here. The bindings are available on the Mono CVS repository on the module `glgen’. This is a straight binding to the C API.
    • Marco has posted an update on the current state of the free VB.NET compiler for Mono.
    • We are looking for contributors and maintainers to the JavaScript compiler as well (Janet)

    The news is a few days old, but for some reason it just showed up in my aggregator and must be spread.

  • Why Warner Onstine Became a Programmer

    Erik pointed to an entry by Warner Onstine about why he became a programmer.

    The first thing that struck me about his blosxom-powered weblog is the navigation at the top.  Sure it gives me nightmares about dealing with MS Access, but it’s quite slick and flows with the directory-based categorization of blosxom.

    I’ve subscribed to Warner’s RSS feed.

  • Radio Backup and Restore

    John Robb:

    Radio back-up and restore is here.

  • 802.11b Switch from Vivato

    Wi-Fi Networking News has the scoop on Vivato:

    Yesterday at Demo, Vivato announced the details of their first Wi-Fi phased-array antenna/switch, an indoor office system that can serve up to 150 users at 11 Mbps at distances up to 300 meters for about $9,000.

    The emphasis above is on antenna/switch, which is quite different than an antenna/access point.

  • PHP 4.3.1

    PHP 4.3.1 has been released to fix a CGI security problem.

    PHP contains code for preventing direct access to the CGI binary with configure option “–enable-force-cgi-redirect” and php.ini option “cgi.force_redirect”. In PHP 4.3.0 there is a bug which renders these options useless.

  • PyQt Tutorial

    Boudewijn Rempt and David Mertz at IBM developerWorks look at Qt and PyQt:

    The Qt toolkit is a widely-used cross-platform GUI toolkit, available for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, and handheld platforms. QT has a well-structured, but flexible, object-oriented organization, clear documentation, and an intuitive API. In this article, David Mertz and Boudewijn Rempt look at the Qt library, with a focus on the PyQt bindings that let Python programmers access Qt functionality.

  • WS-Complexity

    The SD Times:

    You can’t blame older Web developers if they are overwhelmed when considering all the new Web services standards on their way. For example, in mid-December 2002, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, RSA, SAP and VeriSign announced a new set of specifications on top of WS-Security: WS-Policy, WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation. Next, in January, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Oracle, Sonic and Sun announced WS-Reliability to try to bring rhyme and reason to Web services’ transport infrastructure.

  • OpenMosixWebView and PyMT

    OpenMosixWebView:

    openMosixWebView is a PHP script for monitoring an openMosix cluster via the Web. It produces Web charts and useful info tables. It uses openMosixview’s openMosixCollector logs and openMosix metainfo.

    The screenshots look pretty slick, similar to some php-based network traffic graphing programs that I’ve seen.

    PyMT:

    PyMT is a Python module for easy access to Movable Type’s xml-rpc API. This allows you to build desktop or Web applications for managing your MT weblogs without using the MT administrative interface.

    Cool.  Another type of glue for Python.

  • Google Buys Pyra Labs

    Phil Waineright:

    Google has bought Pyra Labs, the company behind the Blogger weblog publishing tool, it emerged last night. Appropriately, the story was broken in a weblog maintained by tech journalist and columnist Dan Gillmor, which previews a story that will run in today’s San Jose Mercury News.

    Related coverage:

  • 2-Disk X window embedded Linux

    I might have figured out what to do with some of the old hardware I have kicking around.  It involves 2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux:

    2-Disk X window embedded Linux is a tiny net-centric Linux that aims at portable secure remote system usage. It contains many utilities including: X Windows, vncviewer, rdesktop, a Web browser, a file manager, a text editor, a terminal, a window manager, a menu system, a dialog system, X scripting facilities, and many others. It aims to work from 1 or 2 floppy disks in any remote location.

    Note to open source developers: take advantage of hosting provided by Sourceforge or others.  Swatting popups when looking at free software isn’t too much fun.

  • GCC Myths and Facts

    Joao Seabra wrote an article posted at freshmeat about GCC that was enlightning:

    Since my good old Pentium 166 days, I’ve liked to search for the best optimizations possible so programs can take the maximum advantage of hardware/CPU cycles. If I have a nice piece of hardware, why not run it at its full power, using every little feature? Shouldn’t we all try to get the best results from the money invested in our machines?

    It has a lot of interesting info for anyone who’s trying to tailor a build to their particluar hardware.  I like the bits about -march implying -mcpu but the myth debunking section rocks too.

  • Washington (DC) Weather

    Wet Wet + Cold Cold = Bad Bad.

    It looks like things are going to get interesting.

  • Aggie 1.0 RC5

    Simon Fell:

    RC5 of Aggie is now available

    David Gammel notes that Aggie now supports scraping of sites that don’t have RSS feeds.

    Good stuff.

  • Say Hello to Agent Frank

    Les has unleashed Agent Frank, his Personal Web Proxy.  Russ likes the idea, but:

    Later… Urgh! It’s GPLed! Bleh!

    You’ve got to have a good sense of software license humor when you’re in the software/open-source biz.

  • Gods Constants and the Mysteries of the Universe

    Scott Hanselman wonders:

    My real question is, did God put these constants as a readonly field in a static constructor or a singleton pattern, or assuming parallel universes, a factory pattern?

    Ingo points out some corrections and notes (absolutely hilarious). 

    Some of the mysteries of the universe have been hard coded.  for example, here’s a one-line code snippet from some ugly parts of the Reality implemetation:

    return 42;

    Did God write tests first?

  • Remote Control for Nokia Series 60

    Russ points to a wicked VNC-like app for his Nokia Series 60 called Remote S60.  That’s really, really cool.

  • Do Not Attempt To Write a Check at 7-11

    Ugh.  I just got back from a soda run at our local 7-11.  I ended up waiting in line for about five minutes because someone in front of me wrote a check.  It required both employees’ attention for several minutes.

    I think they typed her number in about six times: five incorrectly, once correctly.  The clerk hadn’t figured things out by the time I left.

    I didn’t know that 7-11 took checks.

    They shouldn’t.

  • Selfish Routers

    CNet:

    That’s the conclusion two Cornell University computer scientists came to after finding that computer networks tend to be “selfish” when each tries to route traffic by the fastest pathway, causing that path to become congested and slow.

    If the routers that direct the packets of data could be programmed with some altruism, the information might be able to reach its destination a little faster while allowing other packets to also move more quickly.

    This is really interesting.  Sending packets down a route that is not neccesarily the fastest would result in better overall performance.  That’s awesome.  Where’s the altruism button on my router?

    Seriously though, I think that more research in this area could definately help the traffic jam that is the internet.

    Lets do more research and then apply that research to the next generation of Cisco (and other) routers, mmkay?

  • Dolly Dies

    Dolly had lung cancer:

    Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was put down on Friday afternoon, after developing a progressive lung disease.

    Dolly’s birth six-and-a-half years’ ago caused a sensation around the world. But as many sheep live to twice this age, her death will refuel the intense debate over the health and life expectancy of cloned animals.

    The type of lung disease Dolly developed is most common in older sheep. And in January 2002, it was revealed that Dolly had developed arthritis prematurely. She was cloned using a cell taken from a healthy six-year-old sheep, and was born on 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, Scotland.

    <Insert moral, ethical, and scientific implications here/>