Month: May 2003

From the Creative Commons blog:

We’ve updated our list of O’Reilly book titles, adding 33 more titles that are set to be released under the Founders’ Copyright.

My friend Mike pointed me to this article at CNN, which gives some details on the PSX:

The revamped PS2 comes with a built-in DVD recorder, a TV tuner, a 120 GB hard drive and will let owners download movies and music from the Internet.

Most importantly, the PSX comes with ALL KINDS of connectors in the back:

I’ll take 2.  It looks like we’ll see these in the states sometime in 2004.  Hopefully someone will port Samba to the PSX platform and we’ll be able to stream our music and video over the network.

Runtime Revolution has released Revolution 2.0.  I downloaded the demo and all I can think of is HyperCard on steroids!  It looks really easy to get things done, the scripting language seems simple enough (think AppleScriptish), and there’s even a great SOAP demo.

PCWorld/IDG:

Oversupply and low-cost entrants to the market for wireless Internet chips are causing prices to plummet as volumes grow, according to a study released by market researcher TechKnowledge Strategies Tuesday.

The average price for a chip that enables connections for an 802.11b wireless LAN (WLAN), also known as Wi-Fi, was $16.06 in 2002, but that price will drop to $6.61 by the end of 2003, said Mike Feibus, principal analyst for TechKnowledge in Scottsdale, Arizona. Revenue from the sales of all wireless chips is expected to decline to $340.2 million in 2003, from $368.7 million in revenue last year, even as volumes soar from 22.5 million to 41.3 million chips sold.

I hope that this is correct and that 802.11b prices drop even further.

Frank Koehntopp at Mobitopia:

Sony Ericsson has now finally released certain attractive and important Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) for the P800 – the Camera and Vibrator API’s.

Also from DPReview this morning:

Sony has today announce two new U-series ultra-compact digital cameras. The DSC-U30 (available in three colors) is essentially an update to the DSC-U20, it has a two megapixel CCD sensor and fixed lens. The ‘new feature’ for the DSC-U30 is a convex mirror on the front of the camera so that you (or your friends) can see yourselves before taking a shot. The DSC-U60 is Sony’s first ruggedized and waterproofed model, it has a rubber body and is waterproof in up to 1.5 m (5 ft) of water. Both cameras should be available in July at $200 and $250.

Luckily there’s nothing really new with the U30 except for the mirror on the front.  It’s still 2 megapixels.  I was worried that I was going to have to replace my DSC-U20 already.

RSS-IM:

The RSS-IM Gateway allows you to let visitors read your RSS feed through an instant messgaing network such as AIM, MSN, ICQ, YIM, or Jabber. It is very easy to set up and can easily handle hundreds of users.

It’s written in Perl.  Very cool.

DPReview:

Nikon has today announced the new five megapixel four times optical zoom Coolpix 5400 (the Coolpix 5000’s sucessor). The Coolpix 5400 is especially interesting because it offers a wide angle 28 mm equiv. four times zoom compared to the typical 35 or 38 mm equiv. Other noteworthy specifications include 1/1.8″ sensor (the Coolpix 5000 used a 2/3″), ISO 50 – 400 sensitivity, up to 10 minute Bulb exposures and front or rear flash sync. I can’t however see RAW format support, which is a pity. Available “Summer 2003” with a list price of $799.

I was telling someone yesterday that with $200 in rebates, the Coolpix 5000’s days were limited.

Darik’s Boot and Nuke:

Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.

Here’s what 1.0.0 features:

This release features a graphical user interface which lets users interactively choose the devices they wish to wipe. Also included are the DoD 5220-22.M standard wipe, the RCMP TSSIT OPS-II standard wipe, the PRNG Stream wipe, additional verification modes, and a rounds option.

Use with extreme caution.  Don’t blame me.

CNet:

AMD lowered the prices of its desktop and mobile Athlon XP processors as much as 35 percent Monday, while Intel cut the cost of its desktop Celeron chips up to 18 percent Sunday night.

Yesterday I pointed my browser to Amazon to look for something.  On the page that popped up, above the fold, was a note about a Gap sale (t-shirts and shorts 25% off).  It featured a particular orange t-shirt that I happened to have purchased in the store the day before.

Amazon, you’re too good!

TheServerSide:

Eclipse has released a plan for version 3.0, skipping on from its 2.2 branch. Version 3.0 requires J2SE 1.4, and is breaking some compatibility with its 2.x counterpart. The Eclipse consortium also elected a new supporting member, INNOOPRACT, a German company that creates Eclipse plugins.

The full details are on the Eclipse site.

CNet lets the cat out of the bag:

Going by names like eDonkey and BitTorrent, many of the latest generation of file-swapping tools have been designed specifically to increase the efficiency and speed of transfer for large files such as movie files. Some of these tools have been in development for several years, but are just now reaching the critical mass needed to make a dent in the file-trading world.

Let’s hope the script kiddies and kazaa-heads aren’t paying any attention.  The geeks have a good thing going here.

Couldn’t the spotme thing be done with commodity hardware (like bluetooth/802.11b PDAs or cel phones) and open source software?  I’m sure it could be.  The idea is great, but man does that look expensive.

Nelson on BitTorrent:

BitTorrent is pregnant hackerware – it works great but is still poorly documented. And the apps aren’t well integrated. Someone could build a killer tech company out of it. Some extra info is available in Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and the BitTorrent Wiki.

Joi “Evil” Ito:

Got my Technorati bot done this morning. It checks technorati through the xml api every 10 minutes for my cosmos. If there is a new inbound link to my blog, it sends me an email and a jabber chat message with the details. Used technorati.py by Mark Piligrim and jabberpy0.4-0. Now I can make jabber bots. Beware beware. 😉

Kottke:

An earthquake and a series of aftershocks hit Japan on Monday evening (local time). Some reactions to the quake from folks on the scene: Cerebral Soup, Toyko Tidbits, AkuAku SF, and Vu Deja?.

Here are links that have come to dominate the taskbar over the holiday weekend, from left to right:

• Timothy Appnel on web services, weblogs, and what’s next.
• Port 80 Software on URLs.
• Zawodny has an obituary of PageRank.
• Maximum Galoots Atypical PHP Soapbox hilights a PHP threading class.
• Ed Cone notes that Orson Scott Card is writing the story for a video game.  He’s got a guaranteed customer here.
• After a few good IPOs, my Blogshares portfolio is doing decently well.  BS$16k is pathetic compared to some, but I’m happy with it.
• Via Slashdot, P45.net has linkage to the source code used in an Ireland election.
• What is Rael up to with all of these test posts?
• Slashdot BSD: “FreeBSD’s Dag-Erling Smorgrav reports the successful cross-world build of the amd64 tree (A tinderbox is system designed to test builds and report failure. In the FreeBSD case, tinderboxes build world [the base system], GENERIC, and if applicable LINT kernels. Dag-Erling Smorgrav currently runs all the tinderboxes by cross-building from i386).”
• PIL, the Python Image Library, 1.1.4 is out.
• JXHTMLEDIT “is a cross-platform WYSIWYG HTML/XHTML content authoring tool, a very small Java applet based on the Java 2 Platform.”
• python-crack “is a module that provides Python programs with the ability to evaluate password strength. It uses the well known cracklib toolkit, hence the name.”
• CNN reports that Enter the Matrix sales have already topped 1 million in about a week and a half.
• According to Yahoo Movies, Reloaded has grossed approximately $209 million.  It’s approaching the $300 million or so that was spent on Reloaded and Revolutions combined.
• I think that Revolutions is set up to blow us away while raking it in at the box office.  Reloaded has been called the most hyped movie of the year.  Revolutions comes out in November.  It’s too big a movie to be a sleeper hit, but it’s going to be huge.  Many were dissapointed with Reloaded, but Revolutions has the ability to piggyback and slingshot off the current release.

Nelson:

The trailer for Half Life 2 from E3 is so beautiful it’s humbling. The download is 500 megs of Quicktime, but worth it.

OSNews:

Project Mono, an effort to create an open source version of the Microsoft Corp. .Net Framework, expects to release version 1.0 of its software this year, probably in the fourth quarter.