Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: May 2003

  • Scobleized

    Wow, I’ve been Scobleized.  I feel honored.

  • Gates and Jobs Coverage

    Dan Gillmor:

    Denise Howell has posted Bill Gates’ and Steve Jobs’ remarks on her weblog. Should I post my own coverage soon, now that Denise (and others in the audience) are filing their own stories? Why shouldn’t I?

    Another example of professional level coverage by a weblogger, and information getting out that otherwise would not.  Here’s a permalink to her coverage.

  • The True Geek Drug

    Scoble:

    But, beyond that, it’s the same drug available to geeks anywhere. Build something cool and ship it. That’s the true drug. All the rest is just artificial sweeteners.

    True.  True.

  • Bryce on Mac: Rest in Peace

    MacCentral notes the demise of Bryce on the Mac.

  • If You’re Geeky and You Know it, Clap Your Hands (*Clap*Clap*)

    Via Jim McGee and BoingBoing: Bumperactive.

    Must.  Create.  Geeky.  Customized.  Bumper stickers.

  • PHPX Content Management System

    Via Freshmeat, PHPX 1.0.0 (PHPX Lite) has been released.

    From the freshmeat description:

    PHPX is a Web portal system, blog, Content Management System (CMS), forum, and more. It is designed to allow everyone to be able to have feature-rich, interactive websites even if you do not know a bit of programming. Some key features include fully-integrated forums, downloads, an image gallery with slideshow and auto-thumbnailing, support ticket system, a GUI interface for Web page content management, news with topics and instances, and a whole lot more. It allows you to fully customize the look of your site.

    PHPX has good clean lines in a not quite *nuke kind of way.

  • Waste Wasted?

    CNet notes that AOL’s Nullsoft has pulled the download link for Waste.  Email me at m croydon (one word) at comcast dot net (my main email is down) and I’ll get a copy up and point a link.  Does anyone have the Linux version stashed?

    Update: Dave has the windows version online.  Does anyone know AOL’s motivation for pulling it, besides the obvious one?

  • Interview with Fyodor

    I’m slowly reading a Slashdot interview with Fyodor, the creater of nmap.  It is by far one of the most detailed interviews I have ever read on Slashdot.

    I’d highly suggest reading it if you’ve got even a minor interest in computer/network security.

  • J2SE 1.4.2 Bugfixes

    From java.sun.com:

    Over 2700 bugs were fixed in J2SE 1.4.2. This article tells you about the most important ones, as well as about the long-awaited upgrades to the user interface, toolset, and look-and-feel. There’s also support for Active-X Bridge and Linux ALSA!

    Also note that Sun is monitoring how much traffic they get from their RSS feeds.  Observe the following URL: http://servlet.java.sun.com/logRedirect/rss_java_highlights-PARTNER/http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/releases/j2se1.4.2/.

    I wonder if someone has to justify the bandwidth that their RSS feeds consume.  I hope not, but it wouldn’t suprise me.

  • Canon PowerShot G5?

    Gizmodo notes rumors of a Canon G5 (5 megapixel G3 replacement).  Nikon just announced their Coolpix 5400 (5mp/4x/$799).

    Time for Nikon and Canon to go head to head again!

  • Changing Land Use

    ScienceDaily News:

    COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Land use changes in the United States are responsible for a significant portion of the country’s temperature increase over the past five decades, says a University of Maryland study published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. The findings suggest that land use changes are responsible for more of the rise in global temperatures than scientists previously had thought, say authors Eugenia Kalnay and Ming Cai, scientists in the university’s department of meteorology.

    If correct, it’s not great news, but it’s always nice to hear about research coming out of College Park.

  • Creating XML With Python

    This morning I wrote up a quick tutorial on producing XML with Python.  There seems to be many resources on parsing XML in Python, but very few articles/howtos on actually creating it.  Here’s the sample code from the first part of this hopefully multipart tutorial:

    from xml.dom.minidom import Document

    # Create the minidom document
    doc = Document()

    # Create the <wml> base element
    wml = doc.createElement(“wml”)
    doc.appendChild(wml)

    # Create the main <card> element
    maincard = doc.createElement(“card”)
    maincard.setAttribute(“id”, “main”)
    wml.appendChild(maincard)

    # Create a <p> element
    paragraph1 = doc.createElement(“p”)
    maincard.appendChild(paragraph1)

    # Give the <p> elemenet some text
    ptext = doc.createTextNode(“This is a test!”)
    paragraph1.appendChild(ptext)

    # Print our newly created XML
    print doc.toprettyxml(indent=”  “)

    You can find the output of this program and some links in the article.  Murphy willing, more will follow.

    Update: The code listing should be fixed.

  • AirTraf: Surveying Your Wireless Site

    Victor Marks at IBM Developerworks takes a look at AirTraf, a GPL’d wireless sniffer and security audit tool.  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

    Enter AirTraf. AirTraf began as an open source (GPL) project for gathering and decoding packets sent via 802.11b. With information received from detected access points, it then calculates the bandwidth and signal strength of each individual wireless node. These are the standard sorts of things you would expect a wireless utility of this nature to be able to detect and log. It’s like heart surgery: still highly difficult to implement, but commonplace.

    This package performs a number of tasks, such as determining the Service Set Identifier of the access points, and the channel it is operating under. It can tell how many wireless nodes are connected to a given access point, as well as that point’s total load, and also the amount of bandwidth being utilized by all the connected wireless nodes. AirTraf is capable, too, of polling a number of sniffers through a central polling server in order to collect the most current information, which can then be saved for analysis for just a few days, or up to an indefinite period of time — years, even.

    Good stuff.  I need to find some more inexpensive 802.11b gear.

  • Animatrix Review

    Diego has a more detailed writeup of The Animatrix.  There are probably some spoliers in there, so you have been warned.  The connections between “The Kid” and Reloaded, as subtle as they are, are pure evil genius.

  • RTCW: Enemy Territory

    Slashdot notes that Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is out and is free.  Someone at idsoftware has a .torrent for it.  I’m currently downloading at 35k and uploading at 22k.  It’ll be up while I’m at work, leech away.

    Update: I played it a bit last night, but I will probably stick to other games to get my fix.  I can’t put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t feel “just right” about it.

  • PHP 4.3.2

    This just in:

    The PHP developers are proud to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.3.2. This release contains a huge number of bug fixes and is a strongly recommended update for all users of PHP. Full list of fixes can be found in the NEWS file.

  • Nullsoft’s Waste

    Via Slashdot: Waste, released by the guys that do Winamp, is “a secure, distributed mesh-like networking protocal and platform.”  What can it do?  “This v1.0 beta release uses RSA (key based) and Blowfish encryption for security, and features Instant Messanging and group chat, along with file browsing, searching, and transfer.”

    It’s GPL, it’s out there.  I wasn’t able to get a network connection, but the installation process and key generation process was painless.  We love you, Nullsoft!

  • Joi Ito’s Technobot

    Joi Ito:

    I wrote a script that gets your technorati cosmos and creates a sidebar file of inbound blogs like the one on my blog and sends you email and jabber chats when there are new inbound links. It’s written in python. It’s ugly and totally amateur, but Dave Sifry said that making it available now was more “in the spirit of things” than trying to clean it up before I made it available. It’s a bit embarrasing, but like with my Emergent Democracy Paper, I hope the releasing it early and getting feedback will be a good learning experience. Anyway, feedback is greatly appreciated and I hope to continue working on it. It is available on the TechnoBot Wiki Page. Please feel free to add feature requests or make comments about the way I am doing this.

    GPL license of course.

    Very cool, thanks for getting it out there.

  • SCO Sucks

    Jeremy Zawodny:

    This is interesting. According to Bruce Perens, SCO’s 10-K filing indicates that Novell is right.

  • Pre-2.6 Coming Soon

    Kerneltrap:

    With the latest release of the 2.5 development kernel, Linux creator Linus Torvalds noted that he’s planning to work with Andrew Morton [interview] soon to start the pre-2.6 series, moving toward “more of a code slush“, at least a little closer toward a stabalizing code freeze.