Day: March 19, 2003

Today MontaVista announced that they’ll be powering the new Motorola A760:

CTIA Wireless, New Orleans, March 19, 2003 — MontaVista Software, Inc., the company powering the embedded revolution, today announced that MontaVista™ Linux® is the chosen operating system for the recently announced Motorola A760 mobile phone, the world’s first handset based on Linux and Java technology.

Yeah, I know.  It’s just a press release.  It’s a big thing though.  Montavista is one of the biggest embedded Linux companies out there.  They’ve got the ‘free-as-in-speech but not free-as-in-beer’ thing working for them.

If Montavista is going to be providing the power for the new Motorola phones, it will probably give the Symbian phones some good competition, and competition is good.  I also like Montavista because while their toolchain and distro isn’t free, they do give away tons of programmer hours back to the community in the form of patches to the Linux kernel and other stuff.

I saw a presentation by someone at Montavista who claimed that they had many of their people working on the Linux kernel in order to bring the kernel up to their specs.  Of course they’re also contributing the core kernel code back to the community.  At least last summer, they also had several subsystem maintainers on payroll.

Like I said, this should be a good thing for the mobile phone market.

Dave Winer:

News.Com: “Apple Computer on Wednesday named former Vice President Al Gore to its board of directors.”

Well, I mean he did invent the Macintosh after all.  (Badum-ching!)

Reuters via Google News:

The International Monetary Fund on Wednesday approved the latest payment under its Argentine loan program, paving the way for the release of $307 million in cash which the nation will use to repay earlier IMF loans.

Isn’t that like getting a Citibank credit card to pay off a Citibank credit card?

Bill Kearney:

I see a lot of folks using various forms of dynamic code on their websites and have to wonder why?.

Dynamic content and gee-gaws are all well and good.  Sometimes it can add to things, supplement a weblog entry, link to related stuff.  Other times it detracts from the experience.  It can easily get in the way and far too often it does.

For example, I had a googlebox in an early version of my weblog.  It was ‘staticly dynamic’ though, it was generated on the fly every time I republished my blog.  I removed it after a while because it cluttered things too much.  I also ditched the more graphic intensive version of this weblog for a more back-to-basics one.

Now the focus is on the content, and not on the whizzbang stuff.  I’ll add back anything dynamic or pseudodynamic if it makes sense, but it’ll have to be really good.  Sometimes the dynamic content is just gratuitous.  Every once in awhile though, it’s quite useful.

It’s interesting to see referrers and weblog stats.  I yearn for trackbacks on my blog, but I’m currently doing without.  Sam Ruby adds an excerpt of my blog entry if I point to one of his posts.  For awhile, Mark was compiling a ‘related reading’ section based on referrers and such.  Stuff like this seems to make sense to me and probably does not consume the resources that an every-page-on-the-fly weblog or site might.

Boing Boing:

The new Orange Alert aviation regs have created a no-fly-zone around Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

That’s okay by me.

MacCentral:

Terra Soft Solutions Inc. has released Yellow Dog Linux 3.0, a new version of its PowerPC-optimized Linux environment. The company is also offering YDL.net Enhanced, a new version of its online community for Yellow Dog Linux users.

The last time that I used YDL was during the early 2.x days.  It was stable but a little slow on an 8500/G4-400/256megs/10 gig system.  Then again, the system itself is a little slow by today’s standards.

Xoops 1.3.9 has been released.

XOOPS is a dynamic OO (Object Oriented) based open source portal script written in PHP. XOOPS is the ideal tool for developing small to large dynamic community websites, intra company portals, corporate portals, weblogs and much more.

Why are there so many *nuke look and work alikes?

Update:

Wesley Mason contributes a fork tree from php.weblogs.com to explain:

Thatware -> PHPNuke -> myPHPNuke  -> X-oops -> E-Xoops

I have a feeling that a full *nuke family tree would show signs of a little inbreeding…

Sjoerd Visscher:

I just spent an hour looking for this document: Common HTTP Implementation Problems.

The ‘check engine’ light came on last night in my ’98 VW Golf.  Oil levels seem fine and it’s not time to change the oil.  My local repair shop can’t deal with it.

Time to get ripped off at the dealer!

Phil Wainewright:

Sales of web services development tools slipped last year and won’t recover till 2004, according to a new report from Aberdeen Group. The report blames the slowdown on “over-hyped and under-performing products,” but that’s a little unfair on the vendors. In the first flush of enthusiasm for web services, developers were going to buy anything they could lay their hands on, fully aware that it was going to be roughly-hewn, unproven, first-generation technology. It was the market that was in a state of hype, not the products or the vendors.