Month: June 2003

It wasn’t raining this morning.

I opened the windows and moonroof of the car, put some Prozzak into the CD player and hauled ass down 95.

It was nice.

Here’s a press release that I have no problem posting:

June 20, 2003 — The Fink, Gentoo,and DarwinPorts projects are pleased to announce the formation of a cooperative development alliance forged to facilitate delivery of freely available software to Mac OS X. Under this new alliance, the projects will share information and coordinate efforts for porting software to Apple’s Mac OS X and Darwin operating systems. Members of the alliance will share information using the www.metapkg.org Web site, which will provide a home for this cooperative effort.

As an aside, is there any way to disable the annoying <!–StartFragment–> That I always seem to get when cutting in Moz/Netscape and pasting in IE?

Matthew Langham has unleashed the Silent Penguin.

Congrats to Jeremy Zawodny for one year of blog.  It seems like there was a surge of people starting blogs around June/July last year.  My 1 year is coming up in just a few weeks.

<Netminder> hey Jim, Russ, all.
<RussB_> Matt!
<JimH> hi Matt
<RussB_> How was your trip to DC? LOL
<Jim> Hhow was RMS? 😉
<Erik_> Hey Matt.
<JimH> I did that once, turned up for a party a week late 🙁
<JimH> and my mate who was holding the party had buggered off on holiday
<RussB_> JimH: In Washington DC?
<JimH> no, much worse
<JimH> Croydon
<RussB_> LOL
<Netminder> hahahaha!

How many Apple webmasters get fired before major product announcements?  MacNN points out the apparent goof and posts the specs that showed up at the Apple Store:

• 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz, or Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 processors
• Up to 1GHz processor bus
• Up to 8GB of DDR SDRAM
• Fast Serial ATA hard drives
• AGP 8X Pro graphics options from NVIDIA or ATI
• Three PCI or PCI-X expansion slots
• Three USB 2.0 ports
• One FireWire 800, two FireWire 400 ports
• Bluetooth & AirPort Extreme ready
• Optical and analog in and out

Who can say if these specs are accurate, but either way it’ll be an interesting WWDC.

No!  My local Linux box with the most uptime (280+ days) didn’t withstand the thunderstorm.  It’s on a UPS that must not have been able to handle it.

Perhaps I’ll move it to its own UPS in the next day or so, since uptime isn’t much of an issue now.

This just in from CNet:

Openwave Systems, a maker of cell phone browsers and messaging products, said Thursday that it plans to cut another 12 percent of its work force in an effort to make a quicker return to profitability.

Ouch.  I know that Openwave powers most of the WML 1.x browsers, at least here in the US.  The current trends is towards WAP 2.0 and XHTML mobile profile.  I’m not sure if Openwave is positioned to take advantage of this shift.

They do have a secret project that is burning through resources, so perhaps they have something up their sleeve.

Ed Cone reports on the recent NASCAR announcement.  As a casual NASCAR fan, it’s no longer NASCAR to me if they change the Winston Cup to the NEXTEL Cup.

I’m sure I’ll forget about it soon enough, but NASCAR without the Winston Cup doesn’t seem worth watching or racing.

(The above is a mini-rant.  It’s really not a big deal.  I’ll get over it)

I’m leaving work early this evening to hear Richard Stallman speak at George Washington University.

Hopefully I won’t get lost.  I’ll be bringing my camera and a notebook.

Update: Mental note: double check your dates before you drive to DC.

My old standby email address is working again, sorry if mail bounced in the meantime.

Brett Morgan:

If I don’t get around to firing up this software again before it expires, I’d just like to say bye bye.

Wow, has it been a year already?  I’ve only got 16 days left on my serial number.  I haven’t decided if I’m going to renew my Radio license or if I’m going to look for other blogging solutions.  I’ve tested out Movable Type but it doesn’t feel quite right yet.  I either need to find a good blogging client or find some other ways to tweak it to my liking.

Radio’s aggregator would be hard to loose.  It might be worth $40 a year just for that.

I’ve also been considering Blosxom, Blojsom, and many other blogging packages.  Nothing has jumped out at me yet.  As always, I’ll keep you posted.

Ewan at SymbianDiaries has a nice tutorial on producing a WAP/WML index for a Movable Type weblog by adding a simple template.

Slashdot posted a story earlier this evening that sounds like a major loss for the consumer:

According to this Bangkok Post article, in December the USB Forum renamed USB 1.1 to USB 2, and USB 2 stayed as USB 2. They did this because consumers were demanding that the computers they buy have USB2 on board. The story also claims that both Sony & toshiba have released laptops with the USB2 that is really USB1.1. This was the first I had heard of this and the article said the change took place in December, has the USB Forum really been able to pull a fast one on us?

The USB Forum site doesn’t seem to mention USB1.1 at all.  If this reporting is corrent, the move is confusing at best and blantant misdirection at the worst.

I was excited earlier when I found out that I could get Win98 drivers for my new JumpDrive.  A little background: I recently picked up a 128MB version (yeah, it’s purple) at my local Micro Center last week.  It’s more fun than useful at this point, but this evening I discovered that IT WORKS PERFECTLY WITH LINUX.

Things sounded good when I read this post on Everything USB, but it really was this easy:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/jump

This has now become about 100% more useful, as it can now travel back and forth between all of the machines that I use on a regular basis.  It is now traveling back and forth between Windows 98, 2000, XP, and Linux.  That’s pretty darn cool.

So now I’ve got source code in my pocket.

Update:

Erik asked me how I like it, and that reminded me of a few things.  First off, I bought this particular device because it was really cheap.  It was $30US after rebates, only one of which was mail-in.  I only have one complaint so far: the little clip that covers the USB port is only held on with friction, and it likes to come off.  It can connect to a keychain, but I think that the plastic and the cover wouldn’t hold up to the abuse that they would get on my keychain.

Alll in all I’m quite happy, though if it were on sale, I would suggest a more rugged version.

Via Bob McWhirter by way of Erik Thauvin, Book Crossing looks like an excellent idea.  It’s a catch and release system for books.  It looks like quite an interesting idea, though I’m not sure how practical it is going to be.  I might try releasing a few and see what happens.

Google AdSense.  Get it while it’s hot!

An interesting note about the weblogs.java.net RSS feed: Each entry in the feed has the following properties:

<dc:rights>Copyright 2003, Sun Microsystems, Inc.</dc:rights>
<dc:publisher>O’Reilly and Associates</dc:publisher>

It’s interesting to note that the weblogs.java.net entries are Copyright Sun Microsystems and not their authors.  It’s probably not significant, just ineteresting.

• Via #mobitopia, Symbian phones lined up by size.
• The Register: Bluetooth to outship Wi-Fi five to one.
• MSN Messenger 6 is on its way.
• Mobitopia: The Treo 600.  It’s cute!
• Zawodny: The MSN bot is coming.
• Don’t piss off Mark Pilgrim.  Evar!

LinuxSecurity points to a CrossNodes article about PKI:

Your company is negotiating a big deal with a partner, making you a bit nervous about the security of exchanging documents via email. There is a non-disclosure agreement in place, but you’d like to be absolutely certain that only the recipients can see the plans for your company’s new product initiative. When the partner emails their agreement to the final version of the proposed deal, you also want to be able to prove absolutely that the email really is from them. Is there a proven technology that can fulfill both needs?