Day: April 29, 2003

Damn Small Linux is a great name for a compact, business card sized (~50MB) Linux distro.  It is derived from Knoppix and features about as usable an X desktop as you could expect in 50 megs.  Lots of minimalistic goodness.

For those keeping score, Lessig bet his job on anti-spam legislationon in his blog January 1, 2003.  The mainstream tech media (Infoworld, ZDNet, PCWorld/IDG) noticed a few days ago, a time delay of almost four months.

The Inquirer:

One integrator told the INQ today: “The Intel compilers are by far the best for optimising X86 but of course do not recognise an AMD Opteron.”

He continued: “The Opteron has SSE2 support, but to get a binary calling SSE2 one has to compile the binary on a Xeon machine. Move the binary over to the Opteron box and it flies.” Further – the integrator, who sells Intel server machines too, he claimed that the SMP performance is excellent on the Opteron platform. He said: “Typical SMP benchmarks in HPC show about a 30% gain with 2 CPUs over one on a Xeon/P4 platform. The same tests on Opteron show an 80% gain”.

Cross-compiling: It’s not just for the embedded market anymore.

My copy of Loosely Coupled has started its trek across the country.  Thus begins the tradition of stalking (er, tracking) of my shipment as it meanders about.

Every time I track a shipment from the UPS or FedEx website, I wish that there were an official SOAP or XML-RPC interface to the data.  An open-to-the-public interface directly to the data.  I found two SOAP interfaces from xmethods: FedEx Tracker [WSDL] and UPS Online Tracking Web Service [WSDL].  These are both third party implementations that no doubt take in your information, call out to the UPS/FedEx www tracking page, parse what comes back, and send it back to you.

I’d really like to point a client directly to some WSDL at either fedex.com or ups.com.  Until that happens, tracking packages via web services is just there for the “cool” factor.

From the PHP QA Team:

PHP 4.3.2RC2 has been released. This is the second release candidate and should have no critical problems/bugs. Nevertheless, please download and test it as much as possible on real-life applications to uncover any remaining issues.