Month: March 2003

I spent some time in front of the television this morning.

Instead of doing an overview of national weather, Al Roker gave us the current weather conditions in Iraq.  This was followed up with the local weather forcast.

If I start seeing a 5 day extended forecast for Iraq, I think I might take a… better not finish that sentence.

[I’m doing my best to post as little as possible about the hmm hmm in mmhmm hmm, but because I live in the States, I’m immersed in it, no choice]

Thought on the JSP2.0 chapters:

If Wrox falls through completely and doesn’t move on the chapters (highly likely), can we point someone from O’Reilly to the authors of the JSP2.0 Wrox book?  I’m sure that they could incorporate or adapt the material that these people have slaved over into something that kicks butt.

Just a thought.

Hack the Planet:

The Danger Hiptop SDK is available. Boing Boing posted an inaccurate rant from AaronSw about it; you actually can run your own apps on your own Hiptop. But it’s still a problem that only T-Mobile-approved apps can be downloaded. It’s increasingly clear that the cellular industry needs to be vertically disintegrated just like wired telcos and ISPs. People also need to learn that “unlimited” plans are part of the problem since they incentivize carries to screw with their customers. I’d much prefer an uncensored pay-per-bit plan.

So far, Danger and T-Mobile have been nonresponsive to developers.  They didn’t post any tech specs, and definately didn’t respond to the email that I sent them as a concerned developer.  I’m glad that they have released the SDK, but it might be too little too late.  Only time will tell, but Nokia and Motorola have been ten times more repsonsive to developers, giving out tech specs, SDKs and emulators to anyone that will take them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll definately look into the Danger SDK.  I haven’t been able to find anyone locally with a working Hiptop on display for me to check a few crucial sites.  If there had been one available, I’d probably have one right now.  If the SDK was out at launch, I’d probably have one right now.  If they had released any specs whatsoever about which subset of HTML or XHTML that their device supported, well, you get it.

I’ll bet that the color one rocks tho.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.