Month: April 2003

I liked the phrase tipping point much more before it was in common usage by the Pentagon, White House, and media.  It used to be our phrase.

Via Hack The Planet (Happy Birthday!), monotone is a trippy but interesting version control system.  There is a comparison with traditional version control systems, and it’s really different.  It’s a great idea though.  It looks like building monotone is like pulling teeth, so I’d suggest the static binary.

I posted an RFC this evening for an RSS 2.0 module that facilitates geolocating an RSS feed or a specific item in a feed.  It can be applied either to the <channel> level or the <item> level.  I personally think that using it at the <item> level would be really rewarding.  The full details are at the RFC, but here’s a quick sample of usage from within RSS 2.0:

<icbm:latitude>39.02980</icbm:latitude>
<icbm:longitude>-77.07929</icbm:longitude>

I have posted a validating example of an RSS feed using this module.  The idea is an extension of GeoURL and I remember someone saying that they’d like to attach coordinates to a post a few days or a week ago, but I can’t remember who it is.

Now you can.  Head over to the RFC for more information.  Thanks to Kenneth Hunt and that guy that mentioned something like this a few days ago.  Man my memory sucks.

Rob Fahrni points to Mike Sax:

A team at Cornell University is flying unmanned airplanes using Embedded XP, C#, and components from our Sax.net Connected Framework. All the navigational sensors and controls connect to an array of serial ports. While debugging the flight control algorithms, the software interfaces with Microsoft Flight Simulator, for obvious reasons.

Sweet.  Only fly managed unmanned aircraft.

The London Times:

British Airways and Air France today signalled the end of the supersonic era in aviation by announcing that they were retiring their Concorde planes this year.

BA blamed falling passenger levels and rising maintenance costs for the decision to scrap flights.

Both BA and Air France said their Concorde operations would stop at the end of October 2003. Air France’s last transatlantic flight by Concorde will be on May 31.

Scott Mace:

Broadband’s ‘Critical Mass’. 22% of U.S. homes now in the fast lane [Broadbandreports]

Larry O’Brien:

It’s been a rotten couple of months. For reasons that I can’t talk about publicly, the printing of Thinking in C# has been cancelled. I’d love to just rip the parts of the book that are based on Thinking in Java out, throw them in the trash, and publish the 2/3 of the book that I wrote from scratch, but I don’t have the clear legal right to do so and my former co-author is the one who can afford lawyers. I’d love to produce training information on C# and .NET (after all, one Microsoft reviewer said that Thinking in C# was “the definitive text” on certain subjects), but 18 months after starting Thinking in C# I’m flat broke.

The writing of Thinking in C# was one of the greatest experiences of my life. After 14 years of writing for magazines, it was amazing to be able to tackle broad issues, with numerous examples. The publishing of Thinking in C#, though, was probably the worst experience of my professional life…<long rant scribbled because, like I said, I can’t really talk about it>…

Stay tuned to http://www.ThinkingIn.NET/ — I’ll be making some significant changes to the Website in the coming days.

I bought the $5 non-printable PDF several months ago and considered it an amazing bargain at the time.  I was looking forward to purchasing the book in print for reference, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen.  Luckily you can snag the book in progress that may never be finished here.

Sounds like some nasty stuff must have happened.  I’m sorry that a good book was one of the casualties.

Via Slashdot, it looks like Visicalc was born (released) a month after I was.  Here’s one way to do a code listing:

I made a listing of the TRS-80 program by using my SX-70 Polaroid camera to take a picture of each page and then worked with this listing as I rewrote the code for the Apple.

CNet:

Microsoft on Thursday plans to announce that its Greenwich software will be renamed Microsoft Real Time Communications Server 2003, which it plans to roll out the first half of the third quarter.

[…]

“We’re taking instant messaging as the first enterprise solution here,” said Ed Simnett, lead product manager for Microsoft’s real-time collaboration group. “Forming the cornerstone of that is…the idea that it really changes the way information workers do their jobs by seeing the presence of their co-workers.”

The Register:

It’s still a ways off, but when Solaris 10 arrives, Sun Microsystems will ship the OS with a new type of partitioning technology called Solaris Zones.

In many ways, the Solaris Zones – known internally by the Kevlar code-name – will be a hardened version of the Solaris Containers currently offered to users for keeping applications isolated from each other. With the Zones, users can split up applications into numerous different compartments all running on one OS image. The amount of processor power, I/O bandwidth and memory for each Zone can be altered, and each one can also be rebooted, said John Fowler, CTO of software at Sun.

This sounds potentially cool as long as it’s not PR BS.  It sounds like a little mainstream virtualization.  Cool!

LWN notes:

MySQL 4.1.0, a new version of the popular Open Source Database, has been
released. It is now available in source and binary form for a number of
platforms from our download pages at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/ and
mirror sites.

Watch out, 4.1.0 is an Alpha release and probably not the best thing for production use.  Granted, MySQL’s idea of Alpha is probably much more stable than others, but throw it on your testbed, not your server.

OSNews:

Daily Daemonnews reports that support for PAE and bigger than 4GB Ram on x86 has been committed to FreeBSD -current. Also, Peter Wemm posted a message showing a dmesg output of a real AMD Clawhammer x86-64 processor booting up 5.0-CURRENT.

Also from Infoworld:

Pentium 4-based PCs will get a performance boost next week when Intel begins shipping its 875 chip set, formerly known by the code name Canterwood. The new chip set revs up the highest speed of the front-side bus used with Pentium 4 chips from 533MHz to 800MHz.

Infoworld:

Microsoft will release a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP for Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD’s) forthcoming Opteron and Athlon64 processors, Microsoft announced Wednesday.

Kiss my Opteron, Itanium2.

Rick:

[MSDN] Unit Testing and Test-First Development –> great article that enlightened me on the practice of unit testing.

Here’s a bit from the freshmeat announcement:

The zip task family in Ant 1.5.2 contained a couple of serious bugs that have been fixed. In addition, two regressions in the FTP and manifest tasks have been detected. This final release also contains some other minor bugfixes.

Grab it here.  Also of note:

Ant 1.5.3 will be the last release that supports JDK 1.1. The next major release of Ant, Ant 1.6, will require JDK 1.2 or later.

Scoble:

I spent a lot of time talking with Scott over at Feedster.com tonight. If Google or MSN or Yahoo were smart, they’d buy him right now before he gets too expensive. He groks human relationships and I bet that his search engine will — within a year — be as important to me as Google is now.

CNet:

Sun Microsystems will likely adopt the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices as it extends into new branches of the server market.

[…]

“Can we commit to using Opteron today? No,” Loiacono said. “Can we use it? Are we likely to use it? Yes.”