Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: March 18, 2003

  • RDF Ticker

    Bill Kearney points to RDF Ticker, a news ticker style app for displaying RSS feeds.

  • Practical Cryptography

    Lawrence Lee:

    Crypto-Gram: Practical Cryptography. In “Practical Cryptography,” we took a single problem and discussed it deeply. The most common problem cryptography solves is what I call a secure channel: Alice and Bob want to communicate securely over some insecure communications line, so they need to establish a secure channel on top of that insecure line.

  • MySQL Fit For Production Use

    Slashdot notes that as of 4.0.12, MySQL is ‘fit for production use.’

    Check out what’s at the top of the 4.x release page:

    Learn about “Using MySQL Replication in Large Scales” from Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo! Technical Lead), explore “MySQL Full-text Search” with Sergei Golubchik (MySQL developer), and find out about “InnoDB: A Robust Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL” straight from the source, Heikki Tuuri (InnoDB developer), at the MySQL Users Conference & Expo 2003 in San Jose, April 10-12.

    Go, Jeremy! (and thanks for the mirror!)

  • Patch Your Samba

    Infoworld:

    The developers of the open-source Samba file server product are urging users to upgrade to the latest 2.2.8 stable version of Samba after discovering a potentially critical flaw in earlier versions.

  • Distributed .NET Newsletter

    Ingo’s Distributed .NET Newsletter hit my mailbox this afternoon.  Stuff like this shouldn’t be free, but I’m glad that it is.  Thanks, Ingo!

  • Mobitopia Roundup

    Lots of great stuff is going on at Mobitopia today:

    • Russ debunks MMS as a bloated, slow, and expensive thing.  I seriously doubt that it is ‘the next big thing.’
    • Russ also points to Motocoder, which offers a free license of Metrowerks CodeWarrior Wireless Studio.
    • Jim Hughes: “How long will it be before mobile devices (phones, PMGs, PDAs, whatever) are able to automatically determine which of the available connectivity methods are the most appropriate and select the right one?”
    • Erik is trying to figure out the best way to get wireless internet access on his new Zarus.

  • ISpork

    Sean and Scott:

    After a six month intense integration efforts, senior consultants at B2BIntegrationInc have been unable to get a plastic spork from service provider Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) to interoperate with an IBM Mainframe.

    now there’s legacy and then there’s legacy.

  • Inline::Python Blosxom Plug-in

    Rael:

    Here’s an utterly naughty little something not for the faint-of-heart… inline_python is a stub plug-in for anyone wishing to try their hand at writing Blosxom plug-ins in Python. A hearty “yeehaw!” to the creator of the first Python Blosxom plug-in. ;-]

    Truly evil stuff.  <evil grin>

    I think that this might open the floodgates for more robust Blosxom plugins.

  • Python: Batteries And a robots.txt Parser Included

    I love Python.  I really love Python.  I’m working on a little project that should really obey robots.txt. I hit up google to see if there was any code out there for me to take a look at or if I was going to have to write a little code to handle robots.txt. Of course, one of the first things that I stumbled upon was robotparser, a module that does just that.

    Instead of reinventing the wheel, all I have to do is import robotparser and use the code that has already been written for me.  Python’s Standard Library absolutely rules.

  • Verizon’s Next Big Wireless Thing

    WiFi News also points to a Washington Post article about Verizon Wireless’ EvDO high speed wireless:

    Verizon has apparently acquired enough spectrum (and cheaply) in enough markets to roll out EvDO, a third-generation (3G) cell data technology that could allow from several hundred Kbps on the go to 2.4 Mbps for stationery use. I can’t wait to see if those are real-world speeds, or full-shared circuit speeds: that is, 2.4 Mbps is the available per-cell speed, split among users of that cell. (The same story misreports that Verizon is rolling out Wi-Fi service to hotels and airports; rather, they’ll resell Wayport service under their own brand.)

  • Wireless Truck Stops

    An IBM press release via WiFi News

    In the latest update on truck stop wireless hot spots, Columbia Advanced Wireless will deploy 1,000 truck stops with wireless networks for truckers to stay on top of their loads and schedules. So far, they have two locations listed; watch for the 998 to come. (Truck stops are a reasonable place for non-truckers to stop, too, given that these wireless networks will most likely be in areas with otherwise limited broadband capability.)

  • Bush Addresses the Nation

    Yes, I know.  This is a techblog, not a warblog.  The event should probably be marked though.

    It looks like Bush has spotted Hussein 48 hours.

    For the record, I turned the TV off as soon as his speech was over.  I wanted to be informed about what was going down, but I’d rather not hear it rehashed until the late news is over.  As a techblog reader yourself, you’ll be happy to know that my comments on the subject are over for the evening, and hopefully for awhile.