Month: May 2003

Scientific American:

A report published today in the journal Nature moves scientists one step closer to electronic newspapers and wearable computer screens. It describes a flexible electronic ink display just three times the width of a human hair that can be viewed from almost any angle.

The Register:

Infogrames is to change its name to Atari when NASDAQ opens for trading tomorrow. It will trade as ATAR.

Sadly the Infogrames/Atari target market has probably never played on an oldschool Atari.

Wired News:

Granted, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Gates doesn’t have quite the crazed charisma of Apple’s CEO Jobs. But the new prototype computer Gates was fondling in front of hundreds of hardware developers on Tuesday looked so much like a Mac that it was impossible not to draw comparisons between the two men and their machines.

Great looking stuff.  Palladium is now known as NGSCB: Next Generation Secure Computing base.

CNet:

Market researcher Evans Data on Tuesday said 52 percent of software developers surveyed use Visual Basic today, but 43 percent of them plan to move to other languages, including Java and C#, a Java-like language developed by Microsoft.

There used to be a huge learning curve difference between Visual C++ and Visual Basic.  Now it’s just about as easy to learn C# as it is to learn VB.NET.  VB.NET has become more complex and C# is much easier than C++ (at least at first glance).

From the Mono homepage:

We have released Mono 0.24 which includes our new code generation engine. A list of the new features is available here.

Packages for Windows, and various Linux distributions are available on our download page. We are shipping Gtk# and MonoDoc packages for the first time.

IBM Alphaworks:

CodeRally is a Java-based, real-time programming game based on the Eclipse platform. It uses the Eclipse platform and a very simple API that allows users unfamiliar with Java to easily compete while they learn the Java language.

Cool.  Think of it as a user friendly RARS, in Java, using Eclipse.

The Washington Post:

U.S. savings bonds, a time-honored gift for children, will be available for sale in paper certificate form for only a few more years, the Treasury Department announced yesterday.

The thought of a savings bond existing only inside a government database scares me a little bit.  Sure, with online banking and such a lot of our money is stored in databases, but this is different.  This is a US Savings Bond.  It’s the thing that you buy when you don’t really care about making the most from your money, you just want security.  You want to clutch the paper in your hand.  The last thing you want to do (or would be willing to do) is order it from a website.  How willing would a grandparent be to hop online to buy a savings bond for their grandchild?

Progress, baby!

I installed Blojsom this evening in hopes of trying out Blojsim, which enables blogging from AIM/Jabber.  (Of course, it’s the jabber part that I’m psyched about).  The problem that I’m encountering is that there are no installation instructions (that I can find).  I’m sure that it’s obvious to someone who is familiar with the blojsom codebase, but I’m just a stupid end user here.  I’ve submitted a feature request on the sourceforge site.  Hopefully someone will write up some quick installation instructions.

I was amazed at the Blojsom installation.  It “just worked” and was as simple as a blosxom installation (assuming Tomcat or similar is already purring along)

BBC:

US media giant Clear Channel Communications is hoping to beat the bootleggers, by launching a venture to sell CDs of concerts minutes after the show ends.

As much as I dislike the giant that is Clear Channel, this is a really good idea, and will probably make them tons of money.

According to the Netcraft weblog:

Ironically, Richard Stallman best known for the creation and relentless advocacy of the Gnu Project Licence, has for many years run his own site using software produced under the more generous BSD licence. www.stallman.org switched from FreeBSD to Linux during April.

Dogfood consumption is always a good thing.

Wil Wheaton:

“Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”

It’s been a slow weekend, blogging-wise.

We’re +1 kitten this afternoon, bringing the current kitten count to 2.  His name is Tigger.  Hopefully we’ll get a peace treaty signed by sometime tonight.

Update: Hopefully the cease fire will hold this time.

Leo:

Call for Help and The Screen Savers will be dark today – we’re showing re-runs instead – so we can all go see X2. It’s in my contract.

Remind me to write that into the next contract I sign…

The Jabber Developer’s Handbook [amazon] by Dana Moore and William Wright will be coming out in the next couple of months.  I’m really excited about it.  It looks to be oriented toward machine to machine communication (messaging, RPC, etc) using Jabber.

I looked at Instant Messaging in Java, which looks great for creating chat clients.  I’m going to take a closer look at Programming Jabber, but at first glance it seemed to be all-perl.  That’s not a bad thing, I just seem to have a hard time wrapping my head around perl stuff sometimes.

Big things will happen in the future with Jabber/XMPP as the transport protocol, and I’m not talking about Ronnie and Kim trading gossip over IM.

Via Sam Ruby, Matthew Thomas muses out loud about the ideal GPL blogging system.  I can’t say that I agree with absolutely all of them (I’m with Sam, the database might not be neccesary) but he hits on many good points.

Sam Ruby:

A Python implementation of Gump is proceeding, this time with a GUI.

I’ll definately have to check this out.

Linux Today, Slashdot and others are reporting on Red Hat’s x86-64 “Technology Preview.”  Here’s the press release from Red Hat, release notes are here.  You can grab it from the main Red Hat ftp site or one of the various mirrors.

CNet:

Akamai and IBM plan unveil a service Thursday that they say will speed delivery of Web-based business applications.

[…]

By creating copies of a company’s Web-based applications that are closer to customers or partners, businesses can improve the performance of these applications.

Woohoo!  Distributed web services.  Be 110% buzzword compliant.

I saw an Acura TSX on the road this afternoon.  My first impression was “overpriced Civic.”  Turns out that it’s built on the Accord platform.  It’s tiny though.

After checking out the Acura TSX website, the 200 horsepower inline 4, available 6-speed manual tranny, and 17 inch rims almost justify the $28,000 pricetag.  Almost.

For the record, you can get a Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V with a 175 horse I4 for $10,000 less.  A Jetta GLI with a 200 horse V6 is about $5,000 less.