Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: November 17, 2003

  • theKompany GPLs Rekall

    theKompany announced today that they were releasing Rekall under the GPL.  Rekall is an Access-like database system that sits atop many standard SQL servers, including MySQL and PostgreSQL.  Rekall allows users to do pretty much what Access can do: create forms and reports in a simple and easy way.

    Lately theKompany has been focusing on the embedded market, and having a GPL’d version of Rekall is definitely a win for Linux users.

    There is a community site called Rekall Revealed has all of the information including download and installation information.  There is an rss feed for the site.

  • Eclipse Visual Editor Project

    Newsforge:

    The Eclipse consortium tomorrow will announce the establishment of the Visual Editor Project, a new effort to create and deliver an open visual GUI construction and editing platform. The project is designed to generically work with any user interface framework and programming language Eclipse supports; ultimately, it will implement a reference GUI builder for the Java Swing/JFC and SWT graphical user interface frameworks.

    It’s good to see competition for Project Rave even before its release.  The VEP looks like more of a simplification of GUI design than anything else.  Of course creating GUIs in Swing or SWT is one of the more common grumbles about Java development.  Every bit helps.

  • IBM Powers Every Next-Gen Console

    El Reg:

    IBM has its finger in every next-generation home console pie: Sony, Microsoft and now Nintendo.

    Wow.  That’s what I thought.  Go IBM!

  • Upgraded to Rawdog 1.6

    I upgraded my aggregator to Rawdog 1.6 today.  I was previously using 1.4.  The new version fixes some bugs and allows some global and item level templating.  It was pretty much a drop in replacement and it’s running via cron quite happily.

  • DC Area Sniper Convicted on All Counts

    Washington Post:

    VIRGINIA BEACH, Nov. 17 — Jurors reached guilty verdicts on all four charges Monday morning in the capital murder trial of accused sniper John Allen Muhammad after approximately 6½ hours of deliberations.

    It took the jury just over 6.5 hours to come to that conclusion.  The jury now decides John Mohammad’s fate.  Mohammad and Malvo terrorized the DC Metro Area for weeks last year.  One of the shootings took place about a block from where I work.  We pumped our gas in fear of being the next victim.  We were afraid to leave our homes.  Some of us died doing our everyday chores.

    It looks like Malvo’s defense is going to focus on saving him from the death penalty rather than trying to set him free.  Mohammad may not be so lucky.

  • Disney Ditches Animation Project

    The Washington Post:

    The Walt Disney Co. has shut down production on its animated feature “A Few Good Ghosts,” a decision likely to lead to more layoffs at its beleaguered Florida animation facility.

    The project was a mix of traditional and computer animation and honestly doesn’t sound like it had a whole lot going for it if Disney was trying to make money/break even on it.  The article also mentions a trail of layoffs in Disney’s animation division.

  • isbn.py

    Via Pythonware’s Daily Python-URL, isbn.py is an ISBN formatter.  It also allows you to strip non-ISBN characters, verify that a list of numbers is a valid ISBN, and also verify the check digit.  See the authors entry for other open source code dealing with ISBNs.

  • Nokia Series 90 MIDP SDK Now For (Red Hat) Linux

    Nokia’s Series 90 MIDP SDK now supports Linux.  And by Linux, the release notes mean Red Hat Linux 8.0.  It was tested secondarily on RH 7.2.  No mention of Red Hat 9, Fedora, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

    This whole Linux thing is just going to get more complicated.

  • Google Ads Invade textamerica

    It looks like logging in to textamerica last night to edit an entry updated my template to include google ads.  It also changed the template to one of the new default ones.  I guess I’m complaining about a free service which rocks, but I am a little annoyed at the sudden appearance of google ads on my moblog.  I’ve always had the few required linkbacks in my template, and recently each entry in my RSS feed adds some links to textamerica.

    I went poking around the footer template, and the div containing the Google ads is required.  I can’t remove them or alter them or else I am A Bad Man (and probably violating ToS).

    It is understandable that textamerica needs some way to fund their site whcih has gone from a few hundred users to probably thousands and thousands in the past few months.  It has always been a free service, and I’ve never quite been sure how they’ve been paying for it.  They sell ringtones, but it obviously is not making them enough money.

    My suggestion to textamerica: offer a for-pay ad-free account option.  Maybe a couple of bucks a month ($2.95-$4.95) would cover it.  I would definitely consider the option.  Right now I’ve got a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, so I’m thinking about moving on to self-hosted moblogging.  Textamerica has definitely got a lot going for it: When I first signed up with them, I went from zero to moblog in just a few minutes.