Day: March 28, 2003

After doing some text messaging and IMing on a T9-enabled phone, I can’t go back to my old phone.  Here’s why.  If I were to type This is an example on a T9-enabled phone, I would type:

8447 47 26 3926753

For a non-T9-enabled phone, like my SCP-6200:

844(space or wait)4447777 4447777 266 339926755533

Granted, every once in awhile I have to cycle through a word combination to get to the word that I’m actually looking for with T9, but 97% of the time, it’s right on.

This is a no brainer.

CNet reports that Sun is dropping its own version of Linux in favor of forming alliances with Linux distributors.

When they put Sun Linux on their workstations for LinuxWorld, they didn’t even bother to replace the red hat at the bottom left of the screen, so it was fairly obvious what Sun Linux was.

“We will not be supporting the customized version of Sun Linux. We’ll be moving to standardized distributions of Linux,” said John Loiacono, vice president of Sun’s operating platforms group, in a meeting with reporters here. The change will take place as soon as possible, he said–“way before the end of the year.”

I’m also not suprised that Red Hat isn’t really excited about the whole Sun Linux thing in general:

Red Hat declined to comment for this story. However, in February, the company indicated Sun won’t have an easy time forming an alliance. “We don’t see why we should get any cozier with them,” said Mark De Visser, Red Hat’s vice president of marketing.

Congrats to Ingo, now a DMer.

Charles Miller on why testing private methods is a bad thing:

I don’t test private methods. Being able to quickly create, move around, and change the functionality of private methods is vital to remaining agile while developing.

For the last few days, The Washington Post has been printing the Business section in black and white.  I’m not sure if this is to save money on ink for the new War in Iraq section or if it’s a commentary on the state of business in Washington.  In any case, it’s eerie.

The Washington Post held out with black and white longer than The Washington Times.  They started with a color front page, then color seeped through the rest of the paper.

Now we’ve got a Business section in black and white.

OpenBSD Journal:

A recent OReilly Network article gives an example of how to use NFS for networked backups. It includes a couple of example scripts you can use to build small backup commands. Backups are lifesavers, and I’ve found it worth the brief time of setup and testing to make regular backups.

This method, NFS, is essentially what I do when I have an NFS server available in my environment. While I use rsync with ssh when I don’t have an NFS server around, when I do have one I use rsync and NFS. My basic backup command mounts the NFS volume to the right place and executes my rsync command to copy the information I need to the server, and then unmounts the NFS system. It’s a simple setup, but it’s saved me hours of rebuilding. Check out the article for some ideas.

Sam Ruby has implemented the CommentAPI with a few tweaks:

If the request comes in with a SOAP envelope and/or rdf:RDF element, I will respond in kind.  That’s just the kinda guy I am.

Via Sam Gentile and Simon Fell.  Congrats to the Mindreef guys on their Jolt Productivity Award.

Twin is:

Twin is a text-mode windowing environment: it draws and manages text windows on a text-mode display, like X11 does for graphical windows. It has a built-in window manager and terminal emulator, and can be used as server for remote clients in the same style as X11. It can display on Linux console, on X11 and inside itself.

Here’s what’s new for 0.4.6:

Several bugs were fixed, including a buffer overrun in twdisplay, a memory leak in ‘Reload RC’, a missing stdarg.h includ in the libTw headers, compilation errors in hw_tty.c, and a problem with cut and paste pasting when clicking on the window border. getpt() support was added along with better error reporting in the pty code, ‘make uninstall’, a new shinyMetal_6x13.xpm theme. The twdisplay now autoprobes module HW drivers, support for utf8 on the Linux console was added, and more libTutf character sets were included. ‘make install DEBUG=y’ no longer strips binaries.

It’s an interesting project.  The screenshots bring back memories of the menu-driven DOS days.