Day: April 2, 2003

CNet:

Next-generation cell phone networks are arriving in Africa, a region some carriers view as an enormous business opportunity, despite widespread poverty.

This just in.  The vast majority of phones in the US still suck.

Here are links to several RSS feeds from Dave:

• Apple has four new RSS feeds. Thanks to Steven Garrity for the pointer.
• Fast Company has an RSS feed too. Bing!
• Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds. Latest News Releases, Content Networking, Partner, Routing, Security, Software, Standards, Storage Networking, Switching, Voice, Wireless, Features.

I’m teetering on the edge of information overload, so I don’t know if I can afford to subscribe to any of these.  When I started weblogging, I tried to get my hands on as many primary sources as possible (Currently monitoring 243 sources).  I would filter out the drek and report to the world my findings.  Nowadays I have to rely on other webloggers, most of them more intelligent than I, to filter through the drek and report back to me what they have found.

Finding the intersection of primary sources and intelligent analysis is key.

TheServerSide:

In a recent interview, Cape Clear CEO Annrai O’Toole criticizes appserver vendors for convincing people you need fancy orchestration and transaction mangement services (of an appplication server) to build service oriented architectures/web services. He also claims that javascript is all you need to maintaining workflow and transactional integrity.

That’s right kids.  All you really need to host web services are a box and some free software.  You can put together XML-RPC, SOAP, or REST services with Perl or Python through CGI.  You can run Apache Axis on top of Tomcat or another free server.  Things don’t need to be as thick or as complicated as you are making it.  Take a step back and stop spending so much money.

Wired News reports on the iBox, a potential $250-$350 barebones Apple-compatible platform assembled from replacement motherboards.  I’ve wanted a low-cost entry into OSX for some time now, but my 8500 doesn’t take it, I haven’t found an iMac cheap enough, and the G3/G4 towers are still a little too expensive for me.

The design of the box itself is very good.  It almost looks like it was born at 1 Infinite Loop.

LWN:

In accordance with our errata support policy the Red Hat Linux 6.2 and Red Hat Linux 7 distributions have now reached their end-of-life for errata maintenance. This means that we will no longer be producing security, bugfix, or enhancement updates for these products.

Erik Hatcher on dress code:

Make your impressions with the code!

Kerneltrap:

Jeff Roberson recently announced a new 1:1 threading implementation that has been merged into FreeBSD -current. The effort builds upon the work done so far on KSE [story], offering SMP scalability and working proof of KSE’s design. Jeff explains, “This code works in parallel with KSE and does not break it in any way. It actually helps bring M:N threading closer by testing out shared bits.“

Clemens Vasters:

Get over RPC. Think messages. Get over coding and programming models. Think data.

Keith Devens:

Via BitWorking, MSDN has RSS feeds!

Dave Winer:

I think open source is to programming as pro bono work is to lawyers. Programmers are by their nature generous beings. But we also have mortgages, need health insurance, have kids who want to go to Harvard, and occasionally want to take a vacation (I know that’s unreasonable).

He will be keynoting the conference which runs that runs May 28-30.

When will people start linking to weblogs that they happen to own BlogShares of?

I put up a page about my new rackmount server.  I know that it’s sad, but I did it anyway.