Month: March 2003

Cool, Georg Bauer has posted a step by step guide to starting a weblog with PyDS, screenshots and all.

Keep up the great work!

Dave:

News.Com reports that Groove has raised more money, $38 million, and has laid off 20 percent of its employees. By my count, they have raised $140 million. How many dollars per user is that? How many dollars per employee? Imagine if Pyra had raised $140 million. (They could have bought UserLand, and still had some cash left over. Hehe.)

I don’t want to jinx anyone by mentioning names, but I hope that everything goes as well as possible for everyone that we know inside Groove.

Slashdot asks if we write backdoors.

If we did, would we tell you?

Just when you thought switch parodies were over, Jeremy via Derek:

Okay, this has to be the most amusing switch parody I’ve ever seen. I laughed my ass off.

“What is it, the cloverleaf period thing?”

OS News:

An even bigger endorsement comes from Microsoft Corp., which will begin shipping a 64-bit Windows server operating system for Opteron ahead of the chip’s launch. And in a break from the company’s traditional hand-in-hand relationship with Intel, Microsoft execs are talking up Opteron. They say the AMD chip helps companies that want to move at their own speed. “With 64 bits, some customers are going to want to ease into it,” says Bob O’Brien, group product manager for Windows Server 2003.”

Read the article at BusinessWeek.

I have a feeling that AMD’s x86-64 line, both Opteron and Athlon64, are going to really going to blast through both the server and desktop markets.  By the time they actually hit the streets, we should be able to run a 64 bit version of Windows and probably our choice of 64 bit linux distros.

This is going to be fun.

Sorry about the delay.  320×240 versions of the pictures that I took last night are now up.  They will reside at my Washington Interns Gone Bad Page.  Here are two of my favorites:

That’s my older sister on the right.

I realized last night that I know very little about the DC blogging scene.  I was talking to the director before the showing, and he said, “man, you sure talk about some high end shit.”  I guess.  Of course, the stuff I talk about is second grade spelling compared to some of the bloggers that I read.

I think everything went well last night.  I’m still amazed that they were able to put this together on a sub-$1000 budget.  It could really be the next Clerks, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, or Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I mean it.

I’m back. I told some people that I would put some pictures from tonight up on my weblog. I think that’s going to have to wait until the morning.

Watch this space in the morning and I’ll also send out emails in the morning. The movie absolutely rocked. All with a $600 digital camera, an old school celeron, and Adobe Premiere/After Effects. Truly great stuff.

Visions was really chill too. Details in the morning, pictures in the morning. Emails in the morning. It’s midnight.

I’m off to see a one night engagement of Washington Interns Gone Bad at Visions Cinema.  That’s my older sister with the intern slaying knife.  She made mom proud.  🙂

Wonderful B-Movie goodness for all involved.  This time hopefully I won’t end up lost in Virginia.  I never actually made it to the world premiere, but this time there is one turn in the directions, so I should be okay.

Via Newsforge, The Register:

Microsoft has tendered its resignation from the consortium governing the OpenGL standard, signalling an intention to go it alone with its Direct3D graphics platform.

I have a feeling that the OpenGL and Open Source communities will loose on this, but the article is optimistic:

The sheer number of applications that require the presence of OpenGL suggests that Microsoft will continue to support it, even though its priorities lie elsewhere.

Time will tell.

Slashdot notes that the second installment of the Animatrix is available for consumption.

Personally, I’d be nice to their servers and let their pipes cool down a bit.  I’ll probably download and watch the super big version in a few days.  I saw teh first one, and I was quite impressed.

Via WiFi News, ZDNet:

Sony Ericsson’s card supports three GSM bands, GPRS Class 10, and 802.11b, and will allow roaming when more of the backend components are built. This card would allow a carrier to bill using EAP SIM, which encapsulates messages over the GSM network to allow Wi-Fi network authentication using the SIM authentication module. I’m unclear whether this will use simple MAC address clearance — your MAC address sent over GSM and then the hot spot unlocking access for that address — or something more sophisticated. If just MAC address unlocking, it’s easy for someone with a sniffer to clone your address. According to IETF presentations a few months ago, all of the EAP-plus-method flavors lack cryptographic binding between network layers, which allows address spoofing, but not necessarily network access.

So when can i get my 802.11a/b/g/etc, Bluetooth, GPRS/CMDA/GSM/everything else card?  I’ll take two.  This is really cool tech though.

Scott Hanselman brought up an interesting question:

Also, is it a sin to screen-scrape the bible?

And Moses said, “Thou shalt not scrape screens, especially when the Bible is involved.”  Everyone looked confused, but decided that it must be good.  Moses continued, “If thou needest quotations from the Bible, thou shalt invoke a web service.  Thou may use XML-RPC, SOAP, REST, or whatever suits your situation.”  The people looked around and smiled, for they knew nothing about web services.

I might be setting myself up for a good smoting.  Oh well.

In other mobile news, Sony Ericsson has released the T610, replacing the T68i.  There is further coverage at Slashdot and mobitopia.  Weblogging technophiles everywhere are drooling.

Russell has set up mobitopia, your one stop multiblog for mobile news.  I’m definately going to subscribe once things slow down at work a little bit.

The community is also open to submissions, which I think is really cool.  If I get really motivated, I might send Russ an email later so that I can submit entires.

This just in from The Register:

There will be no price increases (as such) when Microsoft ships its next server OS, Windows Server 2003, on April 24th, but there will be a new budget-priced version of the product aimed squarely at the web server market. Server 2003 Web Edition comes without client access licences, with a 2gig limit on memory, 2-way SMP, and is $399.

Head over to Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 comparison chart to see exactly what you’re getting for $399.  Look at all the empty circles.  The $399 is a hard sell to web hosts and ISPs who can put Linux on there for free.  I think that the pricing for this is just above the sweet spot, but not by too much.  For example, an unlimited domain copy of Ensim that runs on top of Red Hat 7.2 will run you $399, but there are 30 and 300 domain versions available for $199 and $299.

I’m quite curious to see how well Windows Server 2003 performs.  I took a look at RC1 back when it was called .NET server, and I was quite impressed.  It was as stable as some of the highest uptime Windows 2000 servers that I have known.  I think after the initial config, I rebooted it once or twice in my trial, and that was to pull some hardware.  It was easier to administer than 2000 and has all of the .NET goodies.  It never crashed on me.  Everything just worked.

Simon Fell:

Sanjiva confirms my earlier thoughts that WSDL1.2 can’t really describe SOAP encoded messages. Please Please provide a consistent set of features across the specs, either drop SOAP encoding from SOAP 1.2, or add soap encoding support to WSDL, but don’t leave us with different specs doing different subsets. Shouldn’t the WSA folks be keeping these things all lined up and pointing in the same direction?

Sam Gentile’s new Managed C++ article is up at O’Reillynet:

Welcome back! Last time around, in the first article of the series, I focused on what Managed C++ was, some of its advantages and roles, as well as scenarios in which it excelled. One of those scenarios is the focus of the second article of this series: the ability to mix managed and unmanaged code in the same module. This is an ability that is unique to Managed C++; no other Common Runtime Library (CLR) language possesses this capability. In this article, I will explore why this is important to you as a working developer, and how to make use of this capability.

After doing a little bit of googling, I have decided on the Dynatron DC1206BM-R1 for my 1U cooling needs.  It got a favorable review at FrostyTech, which seemed to have more 1U cooling reviews in one spot than anywhere else that I have seen.

It’s made of solid copper, with more fins than any of the other coolers I looked at.

It is available for $18 + shipping at some random Yahoo store in California.

What Memory?

I’m not sure which memory to go with.  Crucial says that it can take straight up PC100, ECC, and ECC Registered.  I don’t have enough server experience to know which one to go with.  My gut says ECC Registered because it’s a server platform and that is the most expensive stuff available.  Any thoughts?  Is Registered ECC worth the $17 per 256MB stick difference over straight PC100?  I dunno.