Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: August 2003

  • Pre-Flight Roundup

    I’m getting on a plane in a few hours, but I’ve got to clear out some news first:

    • ABCNews: “After at least two months of studying ways to help wartorn Liberia, President Bush has decided to send six to 10 American troops to assist West African peacekeepers, defense officials said Wednesday.”
    • ITWorld: “Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has agreed to purchase the Information Appliance business unit of National Semiconductor Corp. for an undisclosed amount, adding chips for thin-client devices and set-top boxes to AMD’s portfolio, the companies announced Wednesday.”
    • Infoworld: “Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is showing off a reference design for a PDA (personal digital assistant) based on its Alchemy Au1100 processor running Linux at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, according to the company.”
    • TheServerSide: “Macromedia is de-emphasizing and may be planning to drop or sell off JRun Application Server. It has been reported that most of the JRun team in Newton, MA, have been laid off.”
    • Sean Bonner: “This is a simple request to anyone with a blog and an RSS feed. One of the most powerful aspects, as least in my mind, is to run an aggregator, download everything to my laptop, then read much of it a little down the line, perhaps when I go get lunch or when I’m somewhere without an internet connection.”  I’m a full-post kind of guy.  Radio’s aggregator doesn’t handle the <![CDATA[ in Sean’s feed, so I only saw an excerpt.  The data’s there.
    • Via Russ on IRC, VS HTTPD is a web server for your Series 60 cel phone.  Whose phone can we slashdot first?
    • Mobiletracker has the dirt on the NTT DoCoMo 505i series phone.
    • Jeremy notes Google News Alerts, which emails you when new news items are posted on a perticular topic (as defined by a search string).  Rock on!

    Of course the exciting stuff happens while I’m going to have limited connectivity.  It looks like I’ll have quite a bit of catch up to do when I get back.

    I’ll be moblogging at my textamerica moblog, and might even set up a webserver while I’m at the airport.

  • Radio Silence

    Rick Klau:

    You know you’re slacking when your Dad gives you shit about not posting to your blog in a week.

    I’m going to be away from my weblog for the next few days.  I’ll be following some news on my WAP Aggregator, but will do my best to mostly unplug.  I’ll be back late Sunday and I plan to start catching up Monday morning.

  • Pie/Echo/Atom 0.2 Snapshot

    Mark has released an Atom 0.2 Snapshot.  It includes some changes from the 0.1 snapshot, and also omits some things that are still in flux on the wiki.

    I was able to produce a valid Pie/Echo/Atom feed in just a few minutes using MovableType.  All I did was grab Mark’s template, two plugins: UTCDate and LastModified, and rebuilt my indexes.

    It should also be trivial for TypePad to deploy Atom 0.2 feeds system wide.  I would assume a blosxom (or similar) template wouldn’t be hard to put together either.

    It just gets better from here.

  • Dell To Build Really Big Computer

    Infoworld:

    The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) plans to use more than 1,450 Dell Inc. servers in a powerful Linux supercomputer that will be used for everything from predicting the demise of the universe to discovering new drugs to keep you alive until that happens.

    With all of the recent supercomputer news, it looks like the Top 500 list might have to be shuffled around a bit.

  • Apache J2EE Project

    An open letter from Greg Stein as posted in The Inquirer:

    The project (tentatively named “Apache Geronimo”) builds upon the many Java projects at the Apache Software Foundation. In addition, the project is bringing together leading members of the Castor, JBoss, MX4J and OpenEJB communities. We would like to extend an open invitation to everyone involved in the J2EE space, both commercial entities and talented individuals, to join the community and build a world-class J2EE implementation.

    This struck my by suprise, but I haven’t been paying too close attention to J2EE rumblings as of late.  It’s an excellent project to undertake, and I wish the Geronimo developers good luck.

  • Mono Apache Module Redesign

    There’s a bit of Mono news today:

    Gonzalo rearchitected our Apache module for hosting Mono and ASP.NET. The previous incarnation hosted a Mono runtime on each Apache process, which lead to a slow setup for webforms. The new setup uses a shared mono process for all the incoming requests. Daniel later improved up the new architecture and added dual support, so now in addition to Apache 2.x, we support Apache 1.3 with the same codebase.

    The new code is available via CVS.  A new module, mod_mono is also available.  Rock on, guys.

  • Syndigator: An RSS Reader

    Via freshmeat, Syndigator is another RSS feed reader in typical three-pane style under Linux.

    I do like the ability to easily validate a feed:

    Three new options were added to feed drop-down menu, including the very useful “Validate RSS”.

  • SAP DB Becomes MaxDB

    MySQL AB is going to rename SAP DB MaxDB:

    MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, today announced that it is re-branding the SAP DB database “MaxDB™,” which it will offer as a MySQL AB product beginning in Q4 2003. Through a technology and cross licensing partnership with SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) announced on May 27, 2003, MySQL AB has acquired full commercial rights to develop and market future releases of SAP DB, SAP’s enterprise-level open source database. MaxDB by MySQL is targeted at large SAP R/3 environments and other applications that require maximum enterprise-level database functionality.

    After rebranding issues are ironed out, there will be a MaxDB release with increased MySQL interop, which is “A Good Thing.”

  • Loudmouth: Jabber Library in C

    Loudmouth:

    Loudmouth is a lightweight and easy-to-use C library for programming with the Jabber protocol. It’s designed to be easy to get started with and yet extensible to let you do anything the Jabber protocol allows.

  • FCCBlogging

    Boing Boing:

    Last year, Powell directed his staff to take the steps needed to make the FCC one of the first federal agencies to provide public WiFi access. Visitors bringing their own hardware and software can use the service on the Twelfth Street, Courtyard, and Eighth Floor levels of the headquarters located at 445 12th Street, SW in Washington, D.C. The system uses the 802.11a and 802.11b protocols, commonly referred to as WiFi.

    Hmm, I’ll have to head downtown and blog from the FCC.  It will probably have to wait until I get back from Florida.

  • Ugly KonicaMinolta Logo Released

    Imaging Resource has some information and a logo for the new Minolta/Konica company:

    The color of the oval has been changed to a different shade of blue which has been dubbed “Innovation Blue”, with the five horizontal lines that “represent light and express the wide range of technical capabilities in the field of imaging” retained as-is. Minolta’s logo is sometimes shown with four lines currently, but only in smaller versions where we presume the fifth line makes it look too busy – the larger versions currently use five lines. Meanwhile, a new typeface with a clean, modern look underneath lists the name of the new company – Konica Minolta.

    I honestly think that Konica got the shaft on the logo, as they had the cooler non-AT&T looking logo.  It had color.  The font doesn’t really thrill me either, but they obviously didn’t check with real people after designing the logo.

    I just hope that a little bit of Konica shows through the merger, they were by far the more helpful and more understanding company to dealers.  Their digital cameras have also been top notch and inexpensive.

    Konica stopped making point and shoot film cameras this year.  I really hope that this merger isn’t the end for Konica completely.

  • PyCon DC 2004

    Okay, under no circumstances will I miss PyCon DC 2004:

    DC 2004 will be held March 24-26, 2004 in Washington, D.C. It will contain many of the features of DC 2003, including a development sprint and a similar cost structure. Registration will be open by October 1.

    I flaked out of PyCon DC 2003, but I have to go this time.  I’ll also try to whip up a few proposals, we’ll see how it goes.

  • mytop 1.4

    Jeremy Zawodny:

    After a long period of not integrating patches, I’ve released the newest version of mytop.

    Great stuff for database navel-gazing, I’m checking it out now.

  • RSS Untangle

    TheServerSide notes Macromedia’s RSS Untangle, part of the $99 Macromedia DevNet Volume 4.

    It looks like there are lots of other goodies in that package, it might be worth checking out.

  • Nokia 6800: In The Wild

    News.com notes that AT&T is now offering the Nokia 6800, the funky flipphone in the US.

  • Novell Acquires Ximian

    This just in via Google News:

    Networking software specialist Novell (Quote, Company Info), once a staunch proponent of proprietary software, continued its waltz into the open source sphere Monday with the announcement that it has acquired Ximian, the company behind the GNOME desktop for Linux.

    At first glance, I’m having a hard time viewing this as a good thing, but one must remain positive.  It’s a good sign that Miguel de Icaza will end up as CTO of Novell.  Hopefully the positive energy will flow from Ximian to Novell, and the stagnance of Novell won’t flow back to Ximian.

    I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed.

  • Free Glider

    Chris Heilman pointed out the freeware release of Glider yesterday.  I didn’t have any Macs booted up, so I grabbed the windows version of Glider 4.0.

    It seems to run fine under XP once you get past the installer freaking out because my Windows version number is higher than 3.10.

  • Flash Mobs

    Scoble‘s little flash mob gets some (virtual) ink in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

  • Trackback

    Radio gets trackback.

  • Mobile Market Roundup

    According to The Korean Herald (who got their info from IDG), the top handset makers are:

    1. Nokia (40.9 million units, 34.6% global market share)
    2. Motorola (13.4% global market share)
    3. Samsung (12 million units, 10.1% global market share)
    4. Siemens (6.8% global market share)
    5. Sony Ericsson (5.7% global market share)