Month: July 2003

  • Prepare For Departure

    I’m off to bed.  I’m catching an early flight in the morning.  I’ll be posting here and moblogging at textamerica.  I’ll be bringing a laptop to sniff the WiFi out there, but most of my connectivity will be via GPRS.  I’ll try to stop in on freenode while I’m out there.

    I’ll be keeping up a little bit with my wap aggregator, but I don’t have all 278 feeds in there.

  • Parsing RDF Under Mono

    Edd Dumbill has been looking into parsing RDF in C# (under Mono no less):

    So I went looking for a C# toolkit for parsing RDF, and immediately encountered Drive, a 100% C# RDF parser. Drive was developed on Windows .NET but compiled painlessly under Mono. With a small amount of flicking through the API documentation and a test program or two, I was ready to go within the hour.

    Very cool stuff indeed.

  • Forensic Accounting

    Kathleen Day reports on the Freddie Mac investigation in The Washington Post today:

    The report is the result of an eight-month investigation by James R. Doty, a former Securities and Exchange Commission general counsel. Among the steps he and his team of lawyers and forensic accountants took were sealing the offices of 20 employees when they learned documents may have been altered and listening to 11,000 minutes of taped calls by company traders completing the transactions used to smooth earnings.

    The emphasis is mine.  In the current climate of corporate scandal, it looks like at least one job will be in demand.

  • California

    testing to see if I can still post to my blog via email. I’m getting ready for a weekend in California.

  • Netcraft: JSP Usage Up

    Netcraft tracks the trends of JSP usage:

    Last December we reported that the number of JSP sites had grown quickly during 2002, albeit from a small starting point. Reviewing the growth over the past year since July 2002, JSP continues to enjoy fast growth with a 94% increase in ip addresses running JSP based sites to over 44,000 ip addresses running some 105,000 active sites.

    Check out the rest of the article.  The makeup of operating systems running JSP is quite interesting.

  • Nikon D2H Delivery Schedule

    From a Nikon newsletter:

    “…pricing will not be provided until approximately 30-days prior to planned beginning of delivery.  The current delivery is scheduled to begin during the early part of this calendar’s 4th quarter.”

  • MI-5/Spooks

    I caught part of an episode of MI-5 on A&E last night.  It is an imported version of Spooks renamed and reworked a little for the US.

    MI-5 is, in my opinion, the best parts of CSI, 24, and every spy flick ever made.  Someday I’ll have to find the DVD box set of Spooks and scare up a region-free DVD player…

    It looks like new episodes are airing Tuesday nights at 10pm.  They seem to be rebroadcasting the current episode several times in the middle of the night throughout the week.  I’ll have to set the VCR up for that one.  (Yes, technofreak that I am, I do not own a TiVo.)

  • JEP-0107: User Moods

    JEP-0107, a Jabber enhancement suggestion for user moods, was released yesterday.  Here’s an example of mood showing up in a presence packet:

    <presence>
      <show>dnd</show>
      <status>Wooing Juliet</status>
      <mood value='excited' xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/moods'/>
    </presence>

    I’ve got a knife that’s +9 against ogres!

  • Dream Job

    Can anyone hook Russ up with his dream job?

  • Sony VAIO PCG-TR1A

    Design Technica takes a look at an amazing little VAIO laptop, the PCG-TR1A.  It has a 10.6 inch wide screen and features a 900MHz Centrino under the hood.

  • Nikon D2H, DX Lenses and SB-800 Flash

    It looks like the cat is out of the bag.  DPReview:

    Nikon has today made official the camera leaked all over the net in the last week. The D2H is a four megapixel digital SLR which can shoot continuously at eight frames per second. Its buffer is large enough for 40 JPEG or 25 NEF (RAW) frames shot at this rate. The sensor used in the D2H is Nikon’s first in-house designed sensor and based on a totally new ‘JFET LBCAST’ technology which appears to be similar to CMOS but capable of outputting data at a far higher speed. The D2H supports an optional accessory, the WT-1 which provides direct wireless transmission of images from the camera by WiFi (802.11b), images are sent using the FTP protocol. The D2H has numerous other new features and improvements such as; 11-area Multi-CAM 2000 AF module, 80 ms viewfinder blackout, ambient WB sensor, new Lithium-Ion battery, 2.5″ 211,000 pixel LCD monitor, orientation sensor, more viewfinder information and support for the advanced i-TTL flash lighting system.

    More information can be found at their 5 page review, DigitalReview.ca, and Imaging-Resource.

    Other rumors were confirmed today including two lenses designed for the DX series of cameras:

    Along with the introduction of the new D2H Digital SLR Nikon is also introducing two ‘complementary’ DX format lenses. The Nikkor AF-S DX 17-55 mm F2.8 G provides an equivalent field of view of 25.5 to 82.5 mm on a DX format digital SLR (D2H, D1 series, D100), having handled this lens I can say that it is slightly smaller and lighter than the Nikkor AF-S 28 – 70 mm F2.8 lens. The other amazing lens is the new AF DX 10.5 mm F2.8 G fisheye, on a DX format digital SLR this lens provides an equivalent field of view of 15.75 mm.

    A new flash for the D2H, the SB-800 was also announced:

    Nikon has today announced the new SB-800 Speedlight. This new flash unit is designed to complement the D2H digital SLR and incorporates many new features associated with Nikon’s i-TTL ‘Creative Lighting System’ including Flash Value Lock, Auto FP High-Speed Sync and Flash Colour Information Communication. The SB-800 also facilitates advanced wireless lighting, “Up to 3 SB-800 units can now communicate monitor pre-flash data with the Master unit for fully automatic multiple flash exposures, removing the need for flash meters or manual calculations. The D2H Digital SLR 1005-pixel Matrix metering sensor is utilized to calculate exposures, and transmit each Slave output changes back to each Slave unit.”

    It’s interesting to note that most of the rumors held up pretty well.  There is absolutely no mention of the D2H at Nikon USA’s website, and no mention of it at Nikon’s dealer website.  I’ll relay pricing information as soon as it becomes available to me.

  • Jabber/Mono Crossover

    This is a very cool little press release:

    Denver, CO – July 21, 2003 – The Jabber Software Foundation (JSF), the organization that manages open messaging powered by the IETF’s extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP), today announced continued vendor adoption of Mono to provide cross platform .NET collaboration.

    It looks like both Winfessor and Tipic are working on apps that use mono for cross-platformedness.  Jabber on!

  • Blosxom 2.0 Released

    Rael has pushed Blosxom 2.0 out the door:

    I’m thrilled to announce that Blosxom 2.0 has been released today. For those not in the know, blosxom (pronounced “blossom”) is a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability in mind.

    He has also rolled out blosxom.com.  I’ve been using the 2.0 betas for quite some time now on a test basis, and they’ve been behaving quite well.  Blosxom 2.0 has tons of gooey plugins for your enjoyment.

  • Symbology

    Rod Waldhoff has compiled a list of characters (and their shortcuts) for coding on a Sharp Zaurus.

  • Out To Lunch

    This just in: Russ is out to lunch.  And here I thought it was common knowledge… 🙂

  • Struts and OSX

    Apple Developer Connection has an excellent beginners tutorial on using Jakarta Struts under OSX.  It goes over installation and configuration in the OSX environment and also has a few short examples.

  • Trackback for Radio

    Jake Savin says that UserLand is working on Trackback for Radio, but it’s not out yet.

    Update: Here’s the beta.  Remember, it’s a beta so it could hose your blog completely.

  • New Samsung Mobile Chip

    PocketPC Thoughts notes a Samsung press release announcing a 533MHz mobile chip.  PocketPC’s and smartphones should be seeing this chip around Q4 2003.

  • RedHat 9.0.93 Release Notes

    OSNews:

    DistroWatch published the release notes of Red Hat Linux “Severn” 9.0.93.

    Looks like there’s a new beta around the corner and a possible new release in the next few months.

  • RSS Creator

    RSS Creator 1.2 is out:

    RSSCreator is a PHP class that provides an easy way to create RSS feeds from within PHP. RSS 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0 are supported.

    1.2 is a bugfix release, and is darn useful if you need to produce RSS with PHP.