Month: March 2003

Kat Donohue:

The requirements keep changing. I’m trying to hit a moving target. An undocumented moving target.

Pull!

I have a decent little cel phone, an SCP-6200 from Sanyo/Qualcomm.  I paid way too much for it right before Sprint dropped the price and just before a bunch of color phones came out.  That’s okay, I was going to wait for a ‘real’ color phone anyway.

I’ve had the phone for awhile now, so I decided to do a little research about what phones are available in my area.  Some carriers have launched GPRS support, so I was hoping for the best.  Unfortunately, none of the cool phones that Russ has been blogging about lately are available in the states.

I wasn’t able to find anything that runs the Symbian OS besides the klunky Nokia Communicator.  About the coolest thing I’ve been able to find that is available now in my area is the Sony Ericsson T68i.  No supercool P800, just the T68i.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a sweet phone, it’s just that Russ has got me craving some Symbian.

About the coolest thing I can get out of Nokia is the 7210.  Its specs are nice too, GPRS, MMS, some Java, but again, no Symbian.  This one doesn’t even have bluetooth.

What the hell is a motechnophile going to do?

I know that the P800 is due out soon (someday?), but I haven’t heard any talk of unleashing the cool Nokia phones on the States.  I guess I’ll have to keep waiting, eh?

CNet:

Dell’s Inspiron 1100 will start $899, a lower price than most desknotes. Its standard equipment includes a 2GHz Intel Celeron processor, a 14-inch display, 128MB of RAM (random access memory), a 20GB hard drive and a CD-ROM drive. Upgrade options include a 15-inch screen and 2.4GHz Pentium 4.

Clarence Westberg:

.NET Alerts Software Development Kit 5.01. Microsoft® .NET Alerts is a message and notification routing service that makes delivering customer communications easy and helps avoid the negative perceptions associated with junk e-mail. This SDK provides several components that help you implement .NET Alerts on your Web site. [Microsoft Download Center]

Burn to the Brim is a “Utility for grouping files and folders together in the most efficient way to fill up an entire CD (or other medium)”.  It runs on the Windows platform and could be useful if you’ve got gigs to back up:

The program analyses the files and folders in a folder you specify, and groups them in the best possible way. Most likely BTTB will find a near-perfect solution for you within one second, and a perfect one in just a couple more.

Pivot, a lightweight php-based GPL’d weblogging tool, looks promising.  It doesn’t rely on a database backend, which is nice for some of those $4.95/mo hosts that don’t have MySQL in the plan.  The Pivot weblog also contains an RSS feed, which is a very good sign.

The setup process appears simple, but I had a few problems with it.  I was unable to end up with a working installation, but I only tried it on a testbed and not a server configured for production.  I’m impressed with how clean the interface is.

Canned Platypus:

It looks like our good friend Den Beste has succeeded in using his position as a well-known blogger to cow a less well-known blogger into removing content. Way to go, Steven! Unfortunately, I think this kind of groupthink enforcement will become ever more common as the class distinctions in the weblog community become more like those in real life.

From the looks of things, Den Beste didn’t ask the author to remove the entries.  It also looks like the author didn’t remove them from his archives yet either.  I had quite a nice rant ready to go about censorship, I even found a google cache of the offending entries.  The end of this entry contains a modified mini-rant on censorship.

For now, your best bet is to avoid reading warbloggers in general.  Oh, and watch out for public radio.  Last time I turned it on, I got WAR-FM instead.

Here are the good bits that still apply from the rant that was not to be:

True censorship is hard these days on the web.  If you’d like to take a peek at the posts that have now been removed, all you have to do is pull up a google cache.  This applies to pretty much anything that is censored on the web.  I’ve seen it happen in the past, and we’ll see it happen in the future.

Sure, I’d be pissed off if someone wrote a post slamming me, though as long as I don’t have any legal ground, there ain’t a whole lot that I’m going to be able to do about it.  At least in the states, you’ve got your free speech, go ahead and use it.  As long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others, enjoy.

I spent some time offline over the weekend playing pool.  I lost a lot, but it was fun.  I also brought along my digital camera.

I apologize for posting so many, but I think these are the first decent photographs I’ve taken in awhile.

The first rule of Project Orion is that you do not ask questions about Project Orion.
The second rule of Project Orion is that you do not ask questions about Project Orion.

Rick:

MSDN: Building a Desktop News Aggregator via Jeff Key’s .net blog.

It’s a cool article and nice C# demo app.  It looks like it assumes that any given feed that it tries to chomp is valid and well formed and all (of course we all know of an RSS parser that can handle anything you throw at it), but it does handle 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0.

I’d like to see Dare Obasanjo go into a little more detail, show and explain a little more code, but the article is well worth reading.

Diego:

Almost two years after JXTA got going, Microsoft has announced the availability of a P2P software development kit for Windows XP. Some or all of the APIs included in the Kit are expected to make their way into Windows. No hope that they would use the JXTA Protocol for that uh?

Of course not.  It’ll be interesting to see what MS does with p2p though.

Kevin picked up a new aquarium, a 50 gallon hex.  Rock on.

When I was younger, I had a 10 gallon community tank, but my friend’s Oscar convinced me to go that route when I picked up my 30 gallon tank.

Have fun, Kevin.

BBC News:

“I think they’re really trying to reach out to the businessman, someone who is going to have time to kill in an airport and already has the cellphone on him and thinks ‘why not just spend the $4.99 to download this game and check it out’.”

Someday, we’ll get some 3G in the states…

Keith:

Via Bill, XML.com: An Introduction to Streaming Transformations for XML

Well, at least the US Army will be running it. [Slashdot]

Scott Mace has some excellent coverage and quotable quotes from the Spectrum conference at Stanford.

Dave has the list of bloggers at the conference:

People with weblogs at the Spectrum conference. Scott Mace, Kevin Werbach, Cory Doctorow, Dan Gillmor, Lisa Rein, Joi Ito, Dave Sifry, Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey.

Bill Kearney:

A recent thread discusses possibly security issues with embedded scripts inside RSS items. Basically the idea is that an RSS item could have embedded scripting that attempted to wreak havoc.

Read on for an amusing Newton hack.  I agree wholeheartedly with what he concludes:

RSS with extremely rare exception, does not need live scripting embedded in it. Reader programs should attempt to neuter anything that looks like a script AND tell the user about it.

Rabbit Rabbit!