Month: October 2003

I am here.

Test to make sure mail-to-weblog still works.

I’m heading to San Francisco in a few hours.  I’ll be moblogging up a storm at my textamerica moblog.  If I go silent here, check for me at mattcroydon.com/blog (my movable type backup blog).

It looks like Russ will also be in town later this weekend.  This is going to be fun.

Lots of little things are happeneing all around:

• Russ has been looking into the latest ECMAScript, which is much more object oriented.  Jeremy Allaire has noticed Russ’ recent interest in Flash.
• V. Satheesh Babu went down to to an Oracle 10g launch in DC yesterday.  Lots of marketing types and everyone stalking government employees.  It’s a good thing I didn’t know about it.
• Jeremy Zawodny shows you how to roll your own Yahoo! News RSS feeds.
• Steve Makofsky tried and cancelled unlimited GPRS on his MS Smartphone.  Unlimited GPRS is $9.99 a month here, and I’m on the plan.  Granted, GPRS coverage is spotty in some suburban/rural areas around town, but most of the time I will be able to moblog a picture via email or hop on IRC if I’m bored.
• Steve Makofsky: “As always, .NET Rocks makes time at the gym go by pretty quick. I’m just glad other people don’t know what i’m listening to on my iPod.”
• Webunit 1.3.2, a web application testing framework for Python is out.
• InfoWorld takes a look at developers shunning the latest and greatest in web application frameworks.
• CNet:”Internet phone providers have won the first round in a clash with state regulators, providing needed momentum for the upstart industry.”  Go go VoIP!
• Ewan puts his thoughts on the future of OPL development on Series 60 down on virtual paper.  I listened in on the hoops required to compile and package an OPL hello world app into an installable .sis file.  It’s currently insane.
• Six Apart launched Typepad officially after their preview release.  They also were interviewed [quicktime] on CNN.  Congrats!

Wi-Fi Networking News notes that The Wi-Fi Alliance has launched a WAP site as a companion to their Wi-Fi Zone program.  The URL for their WAP site is http://wap.wi-fizone.org.

The site allows users to search for a certified Wi-Fi Zone from their mobile phone.  The interface is quite clunky, but it’s oldskool WAP.  There’s something to be said for the lowest common denominator.  Finding a local Wi-Fi Zone was a little tedious.  Here’s the series of clicks that I had to go through to find local access points: wap.wi-fizone.org -> Search -> United States -> MD -> multipage list of cities to choose from.

Here’s where the usability of the WAP site begins to approach zero.  I tried several cities in my area and found nothing bust listings for hotels.  I don’t want to go to a hotel for my Wi-Fi.  There are a bajillion Starbucks stores in my area with Wi-Fi.  Every Borders book store in my area has Wi-Fi.  Wi-Fi is all over the place, yet only hotels are listed in the Wi-Fi Zone WAP site.

Is a business traveler going to cancel his or her hotel reservations just to stay in a hotel that they just found out has Wi-Fi?  I seriously doubt it.  If you’re not helpful to technology-minded folk looking for a hotspot (and willing to pay!), and you’re not all that useful to business travelers, how useful are you?

I hate to bash, because this site is totally a step in the right direction.

Note to Wi-Fi Alliance: Get those Starbucks, bookstores, and other spots with Wi-Fi listed in your Wi-Fi Zone program.  You’re probably going to have to convince T-Mobile that a Wi-Fi Zone certification is “A Good Thing.”  Add a ‘search by zip/postal code’ box to your front page.  Speaking of your front page, it’s quite sterile.  Spruce it up a bit.  Think about adding an XHTML-MP site for all those technofolk with a laptop and a Nokia 3650 looking for some commercial Wi-Fi.  Expand.  Make it easier.  Make it better.  Now you’ve got something.

It’s definately fall here in the DC Metro area.  Lets warm things up with some links:

• Atari800 is an emulator for 8 bit Ataris.  The first time I saw BASIC was on the family Atari 800.  The cartridge games were fun, but the games that came on tape and took forever to load were the best.  Well, they ruled when they worked anyway.
• Russ shares his mobile links.  In OPML too.
• The Jabber Architecture Blog goes a little deeper into blog syndication with Jabber.  Pub/Sub, baby!
• Chris Gulker likes SpamAssassin on his Linux desktop.
• Ingo Rammer‘s latest endevor: Architecture Briefings.  Go read them!
• Jeremy Zawodny turned his 14 hour TiVO into a 145 hour TiVO.  Rawk!
• Jim Hughes has a roundup of N-Gage reviews.
• I’m downloading the Xen demo via BitTorrent.  Just about 200k/s and another great example of legitimate BitTorrent use.

I saw Lost in Translation today.  I’d give it a solid three to three and a half Thauvin stars.

It’s been slow so far today, though there are lots of things going on at BloggerCon:

• Fortune interview Bill Joy.
• OSNews covers the Axentra Rumba Server.  Aparently it will be a “do everything” appliance running on a Mini-ITX platform.  Prices are rumored to be around $500.
• Kevin Marks has a bootleg feed from BloggerCon.  Also check out #BloggerCon on irc.freenode.net
• Python 2.3.2 is out.  Squash them bugs!
• Gander is an extremely lightweight app server for Python.
• The Creative Commons weblog notes major changes to the cc site.  They added an Artists corner and a Devlopers section along with major updates all around.  Check out their tech challenges and give them a hand.
• Jarno Virtanen reminds the hackers and tinkerers out there to have their HTTP behave decently.

Here are a few quick links that I’ve been looking at this morning:

• Kendall Grant Clark takes the pulse of XML editing tools on O’Reilly’s XML.com.
• Bill Humphries looks into GPS receivers with Bluetooth.  From my experience, Garmin seems to be a little clueless about Bluetooth.
• Java Server Faces: mental note, read up on this at some point.
• Charles Miller would like to see a guide to securing JBoss.  You know the answer: Buy the book! 🙂
• MobileTracker points out Frodo, a Commodore 64 emulator for Series 60 phones.  I’d also love to see a Coleco Vision emulator out there, as I wasted a few hours of my childhood on that platform too.  At some point I should try to figure out exactly how much more powerful my 3650 is comared to my family’s first PC: the IBM 8088.
• TLDP has a HOWTO on traffic control under Linux.
• Linux Journal posts a HOWTO for a once NIC NAT.
• Screenshots for the latest BloGTK release look good.
• Phillip Pearson is posting his linkdumps to “crash.”  It looks like linkdumps are back in style.
• Rob Flickenger posts an excerpt from Wireless Hacks: Do it yourself wireless access points.
• Does anyone know one way or another if these accusations about Liebermann, Inc are true?  It certainly looks like a good hoax, but the tech is so cool that I’d rather that it be real.
• Netcraft makes sure that wildcard DNS does not taint its Survey.
• “Would the graduate students please bar the doors!” The Ig Nobels rule.
• Via NewsForge, TSL is TSL.  Trustix Secure Linux is now Tawie Secure Linux.
• Pyblosxom 0.8.1 is out.

Xen:

Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. We have a fully functional port of Linux 2.4 running over Xen, and regularly use it for running demanding applications like MySQL, Apache and PostgreSQL. Any Linux distribution should run unmodified over the ported OS.

This is excellent news for those of us who would like to tinker with server/OS virtualization but don’t have the dough to throw down for VMWare Server or other high dollar software packages.

Aparently you can run pretty much any Linux distro on top of Xen, and they are also very close to a port of WindowXP that would work on top of Xen.  You can download a demo CD and check it out.

This is truly cool stuff.

Reuters:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Online DVD renter Netflix Inc. on Wednesday said during the third-quarter it boosted subscribers by 74 percent even as it faced competition from retail heavyweights like Wal-Mart entering its business.

“Hi, my name is Matt, and I’m a Netflix subscriber.”

Leigh Dodds has released FOAF-a-matic Mark 2 Beta 2 today.  I must say that it is quite beautiful.  I haven’t looked at the FOAF that it produces, but like many, I started my FOAF file with the original FOAF-a-matic. FOAF-a-matic was definately a good base, as my FOAF doesn’t piss off Rosco even after tons of hacking in a text editor.

Cheers Leigh!