CNet:
The new UPS-developed Delivery Information Acquisition Device (DIAD) has a record number of ways to wirelessly connect, believes telephone industry analyst Jeff Kagan, who couldn’t recall any other handheld that connects with infrared, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) and two cell networks: CDMA1x and GSM/GPRS.
Ask Yahoo!, a daily column that features Q&A with Yahoo!’s expert team of Surfers, is now syndicating its content via RSS.
I just hope that this will last. I loved the Y! Finance RSS beta, but I missed it a ton after it was discontinued.
Breathing new life into Netware, Novell is making the news with announcements of its Netware 6.5 operating system beta this week, which will include Apache Tomcat and its J2EE 1.3 exteNd application server. In addition, Netware 7 (to be released next august) will offer the choice of a Linux or Netware kernel for its OS.
Sputnik has come out with its first hardware product: The AP 120 wireless access point. It’s an enterprise thingie with auto-configuration (plug one into your LAN, it figures out where to get control commands, puts up a dynamic firewall, and immediately becomes a smart but unobtrusive member of the corporate hive — all while putting out a nice little wi-fi signal). Dave Sifry (Sputnik co-founder and main tech guy) tells me the $185 price gets you the equivalent of a Cisco number selling for $800 or so. Sputnik is selling it even more cheaply to OEMs and giving away the firmware for free. I’m sure a market will follow.
Wow. The only catch that I can see is that the $185 program is a limited release, and you’d probably end up buying Sputnik Central Control Version 2.1 when it’s out.
If they can keep the price point right for their final release, they’d have technie geeks like myself running them at home in addition to their corporate clients.
Don’t underestimate the geeks.
WiFi Network News points to a CNet article announcing that Apple has shipped 150,000 Airport Extreme base stations during the first quarter.
WiFi Network News (it used to be 802.11b News) has recently switched to MovableType, which makes linking to it much easier than their old template.
From the Washington Post Business Section this morning:
Behind the meat counter at Mercadito Ramos II, Jaime Medina lifted a bag of dark-pink iguana meat to the silver scale. The headless, skinless lizard registered 3.3 pounds. “Forty dollars,” Medina said in Spanish.
Since the iguanas began arriving at the Langley Park store last month, Medina, a 23-year-old Salvadoran who runs the store for his father, has sold them at $12.50 per pound to Central Americans hungry for a taste of home. There the meat is a delicacy, a cure-all and an aphrodisiac.
#ifdef SLOW_NEWS_DAY
/* Publish Iguana Story */
#endif
Keith points out that Phoenix and Minotaur are to be renamed Firebird and Thunderbird.
He had the same thought I did: Firebird is already a database. In fact, if you search for Firebird on Google, guess what database is on the top? Yep.
Netcraft has posted a list of the fastest growing hosting providers out there. Here’s an observation they have about the fastest growers:
The top of the table shows that fast growth in the hosting industry is closely linked to providing good value at a low price. 1&1 and Host Europe both offer extremely cheap shared hosting packages, while Rackshack has more or less defined the market for low-cost dedicated servers. Colt is often amongst the cheapest quotes for bandwidth in the cities in which it operates.
The top spot goes to 1&1 Internet AG, sporting 812 servers at the end of ’01 and 7,203 at the end of ’02. The runner up was Rackshack, with 1,208 servers at the end of ’01 and 7,356 at the end of ’02.
That’s a lot of servers.
Ask:
Apple released a new Safari public beta today. With tabs and speed improvements. The tabs are a bit slicker than they were in the leaked beta versions, so go and get it already.
The latest variation over the Apple Tablet rumor is a 15″ tablet with no battery. That seems pretty weird.
Update: Mark Pilgrim has all of the CSS info on the new Safari release.
BitTorrent Files for Slashdot Effect Victims is a great resource for things that are both bandwidth intensive and hard to download. They currently have the Red Hat 9 ISOs, Animatrix 3, Matrix Reloaded trailer, and some others.
I just wanted to clarify something. I jumped the gun on publishing the RSS ICBM module. It was really just an implementation of an idea that was completely Kenneth‘s. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be as excited as I am about geolocation without talking to Kenneth over email and IM, and believe me, I’m really excited.
It’s this excitement that I think motivated me to get the module out there. It’s one of those things that I did just before going to bed, and looking back, I totally should have slept on it.
I violated the trust of someone that I’ve just begun to get to know, and someone that I’ve been thinking of as a friend ever since I started reading his weblog. I’m sorry about that. I messed up.
The spec is out there, it’d be great if it becomes used, though so far very few people seem interested. I don’t think that it would be right to remove it, I think that violates some kind of weblog ethics, but I will if that’s what is best.
However, I am going to stop posting about it, and will set it aside until Kenneth and I can talk.
Here’s a template for doing a geolocated RSS 2.0 feed with MovableType. Works for me with MT 2.63.
Man, now that I’ve linked to the testbed at home, I feel obligated to keep the server up and keep the links permanent.
*Sigh*
Yep. All it took was modifying a stock rss 0.91 head. It’s working on my blosxom testblog right now. The geolocated RSS 2.0 feed is here. Feel free to validate it. The modified head is here.
You can download the Geolocated RSS 2.0 flavour pack here. Change the coordinates to yours and enjoy.
This flavour pack is tested to work fine with Blosxom 1.2 and is based on the RSS 0.91 flavour that I snagged from Brutalhugs.
Geolocating an RSS 2.0 feed in MovableType is rediculously easy. I’ll try to go over the steps quickly in hopes that I’ll do a more detailed job for end-user-types in the future.
You can use GeoURL’s resources section to find out your lat/long. You should probably also have the HTML version of your weblog listed with GeoURL.
As far as examples go, check out the geolocated RSS 2.0 feed for my movable type testblog. I assure you that the feed validates as RSS. Right now the testblog is running on a Linux development box, so don’t be suprised about any outages.
That’s it for now, enjoy.
Thinking in C# no longer available for download. As you may know, one of the aspects of this project was that draft versions of the text had been available for download. Surprisingly, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that some of the other parties involved feel that the “last draft” (the text as it stands today) should not (in fact, must not) be available in any form. In my opinion, that’s a gratuitous disservice to the community — every word in the text is either available for free download in another text or was written by me. The text that I do have rights to (a divvying-up that will take place via lawyers, unfortunately) will be available again as soon as the rights situation is cleared up. To receive an email notification of this and other C# and .NET training products, please sign up on my mailing list.
I’ve heard rumors that some people downloaded the draft of Thinking in C# before it was pulled. This whole thing sucks, IMHO.
I’m looking into implementation details for the ICBM RSS Module. More to come.
I’ve been thinking about ways that you can use the ICBM RSS module. Of course, the obvious thing to do is geolocate your RSS feed. By adding latitude and longitude to the <channel> element, you’re saying that this RSS feed originates from or is about this specific location. That much is a no brainer, but what else can you do?
A moblogging app that is GPS capable or location-aware could tag each post with the location. For instance, if I’m blogging from times square about something, the lat/long for times square could be embedded in that post. Someone like Joi Ito could associate a particular location with a picture posted from his mobile phone. I could then visualize his RSS feed by location, superimposing his entries on a map.
I’m sure that much more can be done, but for now, it’s lunchtime.
Vnunet (among others) reports:
Earlier this week the software giant quietly announced that it had selected media player developer InterVideo to port its Windows Media technology to Linux for use in consumer electronics such as set-top boxes and personal video recorders.
Now if only Red Hat would support mp3…
Update: Slashdot has the catch:
However, WMP will not be available to normal folks…Microsoft will only allow it to be distributed via set top boxes and the like.