Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: February 2003

  • Gnome 2.2.0

    LWN notes that Gnome 2.2.0 has been released.

  • After Groove Web Services

    John Burkhardt after releasing his baby into the wild: “Ok guys, what’s next?”

  • Mono Doc 0.1 Released

    From the Mono site: “A preliminary release of the Mono Documentation Browser is now availble. Release notes“

  • Temporary Fix

    I’m posting this from a temporary install to make sure that I gather all the neccesary bits from my hard drive.  I figured that if I went to all the trouble, I wouldn’t loose anything, but if I just trusted everything to be backed up, I’d forget something.

    Hopefully I’ll get everything double backed up and restored later this evening.

  • Blojsom Picks Up Calender-Based Navigation

    Quickie: Blojsom now supports calendar-based navigation.

  • Main Box Hosed

    It looks like I’ve hosed my main XP box.

    One second I was playing a demo (that shall remain nameless to protect the thing that hosed my OS) and the next it was locked up. I hit the reset button, and have been booting with various options, using the XP recovery console, and trying other fun tricks ever since. All is not lost, as all of the crucial stuff is on a different drive and/or backed up.

    Do not worry, Radio is not on that box, so I’ll be able to bitch and moan throughout the reinstall process 🙂

  • Jetty 4.2.7

    Jetty 4.2.7 has been released:

    Jetty is an Open Source HTTP Servlet Server written in Java. It is a full featured HTTP/1.1 server and a Servlet container. It is designed to be small, fast, embeddable and extensible. It supports HTTP/1.1, servlets 2.3, and JSP 1.2.

    This release upgrades the JSSE libraries to fix a security vulnerability found in the reference implementation of SSL. SSL users are advised to upgrade to this release or update their SSL jars from JSSE 1.0.3_01.

  • Next on VH1’s Behind the Weblogs

    Mark Pilgrim:

    Pretty soon we’ll have a privacy policy and a mission statement, and it’s all downhill from there.

  • Blosxom OSX Installer

    Rael:

    After much futzing and a few hints dropped along the way ;-), I’m happy to announce the Blosxom Installer for Mac OS X.

    This is good news for OSX users.  I’ll still have to use the ‘less than 5 minute install’ process 🙂

  • ASP.NET Without C#: Why Bother?

    I was looking at ASP.NET books over the weekend, and I found that the majority of books that cover ASP.NET choose to do so using VB.NET rather than the relatively easy and extremely powerful C#.  I wonder why this is?  Oldskool VB was definately easier than C++.  Today VB.NET is almost as (if not just as) complex as C# (IMHO), while C# seems to be more simple and elegant.

    I picked up ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials and Code at MicroCenter over the weekend (for $4.99!) and it tries to cover both VB and C#, though it is extremely biased towards VB.  I’m really not going to complain for what I paid, but if it had been any more than five bucks, I probably couldn’t justify it.

    Doing ASP.NET in VB seems like buying a Bentley with a four-banger.

    On a related note, I also picked up Building Web Services with Java: Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI for half off at a computer show.

    I’ve been doing some skimming of both books, but I’d really like to dive in.

  • PyBlagg == Spycyroll

    V. Satheesh Babu:

    Apparently, my quick and dirty news aggregator is found useful by others too. So, we have setup a sourceforge project to host this. At the moment, it is still the same code base. We’ll add more features to this.

  • Quick tblib Tweak

    I tweaked tblib to use a user agent:

    User-Agent: tblib/0.1.0 Python

    I’ll probably tweak that a bit before the next minor tblib update.

  • WSDL and Python

    Uche Ogbuji released a tutorial at IBM DeveloperWorks in 2001 that guides you through using WSDL in Python.  He also released a library for Python called WSDL4py.

    It is interesting that neither of the two “major” Python SOAP implementations seem to support WSDL at all.  I have been spoiled by the tight WSDL integration with C#/.NET and WSDL2Java.  Even the lightweight SOAP::Lite for Perl has WSDL support for the client side.

    I might have to take a closer look at WSDL4py (which was hard to locate, the links from IBM’s website didn’t want to work).  It looks like I can use it to generate a WSDL document as well as consume them.

    It feels weird getting back into SOAP after spending a lot of time in more lightweight web services.

  • SOAP Behind the Firewall

    Phil Wainewright:

    Integration vendor Cysive has issued a report that recommends dispensing with SOAP for high-volume applications deployed inside an enterprise, writes line56. “If we’re inside the firewall, why do we need to get to http, which is a relatively slow protocol, and why do we have to do all this parsing to get there?” wonders the company’s director of public relations.

    I’d like to paraphrase something that Sam Ruby said during his talk at the Web Services DevCon East:

    If you control both ends of the wire, SOAP is probably not for you.

    I think I got that about right, I’ll have to check my notes.  That’s what came to my head while reading Phil’s entry.  If you control both ends of the wire, RMI, .NET remoting, COM, or other forms of communication are probably faster and more appropriate.

  • Blosxom 1.2 Released!

    Rael:

    Blosxom 1.2 is available for download. This release adds static rendering of individual entries (along with path- and date-based views), customizable daily date-stamp (via date.flavour template), configurable file extension and default flavour, and bits and bobs of cleanup (most notable being the end of the dreaded double-slash bug — if you don’t know what this means, don’t worry about it 😐 ).

  • weblogs.py: Aggregated Python News

    Python Programmer Weblogs aggregates approximately 30 (as of this writing) python-related weblogs, my Python category included.  Think of it as the python equivalent to java.blogs.

    It is simple, yet elegant.

    It uses pyblagg [cvsweb], which relies on Mark’s awesome RSS parser.  Pyblagg was written by V. Satheesh Babu, and was obviously influenced by Rael’s blagg.

  • Enterprise FreeBSD

    OSNews:

    After three years in the making the FreeBSD Release 5.0 operating system has been made available to the general public. Released towards the end of January, the OS provides first-time support for Sun’s Sparc64 and Intel’s IA64 platforms. And while some effort has been put into AMD’s Hammer architecture, there is presently no usable support for the 64-bit mode of Hammer, said FreeBSD engineer, Scott Long.” Read the article at LinuxWorld.

  • Using NUnit

    Sam Gentile:

    Ron Jefferies, one of the inventors of Extreme Programming, and a man I admire very much, is working on an online book, Adventures in C#, of which the latest installment is Adventures in C#: Using NUnit, Be sure to check this out.

    I’m reading the tutorial while at work, it looks like an excellent resource.  The tutorial made sense to me, having some experience with JUnit on the Java side of things.

    Adventures in C# also has some great info for applying eXtreme Programming to .NET.

  • J2EE 1.4 Waits for Web Services

    CNet:

    Sun Microsystems, which controls the widely used Java standard, said Tuesday that it will push out the delivery of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4 specification until this summer. The J2EE 1.4 specification, which gives Java licensees the blueprint for building Java programming tools and server software, was set to debut in the current quarter.

    The forthcoming J2EE specification incorporates Web services protocols, a set of standards and a programming method for connecting disparate computing systems. Adoption of Web services is accelerating as companies look for ways to lower the cost of sharing information.

    Sun representatives said the company chose to push back the finalized J2EE 1.4 specification in order to comply with interoperability guidelines set forth by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I).

  • Linux on an iPod

    Slashdot:

    Here is the announcement for a port of uClinux to the Apple iPod, checkout the project page for extra details. Currently the frame buffer, audio and IDE devices are working. Still plenty of work to do.”

    From the FAQ:

    1.2 Why would you do that?

    A number of reasons but mainly because its there.