Year: 2003

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?

Via Kevin Dangoor, The Stairway to Maven [pdf] gives a good powerpoint-style overiew of Maven.

Zawody on really big MySQL tables:

When this happens, the first reaction I hear is “You never told me that MySQL has a 4GB limit! What am I going to do?” Amusingly, I usually do describe the limit when I discuss the possibility of using MySQL with various groups–they often forget or underestimate the impact it will have. Putting that aside, the problem is easily fixed, as that page explains. You simply need to run an ALTER TABLE command.

Kenneth Hunt points to Teamspeak:

15 minutes to deploy an anonymous server on my local lan and connect two windows boxes to the Debian server. Speex codec sounds decent from Plantronics headsets, definitely one to watch! Didn’t get time to dig into adminning the Teamspeak server, but it looks incredibly robust right now. If you’re interested in voip and oss codecs like speex it’s worth a closer look. Check back here for a link to the test server!

This is great.  The Speex codec is quite good for compressing voice to itty bitty.

Wi-Fi Networking News:

SmallNetBuilder gets the story on Linksys pulling the WSB24 signal booster: Pretty simple: the unit is legal to work with just a couple of Linksys devices, and people are using it in other ways too easily. The FCC wants connectors to be hard to use by anyone but the manufacturer.

The hardcore geeks will always do it, I guess they’re trying to get at the casual Wi-Fi performance enthusiast…

Wi-Fi Networking News:

Bluetooth gets revised: The new versions has some small and large improvements, including incorporating the co-existence recommendations for adaptive frequency hopping so that Bluetooth and other standards like Wi-Fi can play nicely together.

The Register [via Dave]:

Linus Torvalds, creator and chief maintainer of the Linux kernel is moving on, ending a six year association with chip company Transmeta.

“I’ve decided to take a leave-of-absense after 6+ years at Transmeta to actually work full-time on the kernel,” he wrote in a posting to the kernel mailing list.

Looks like he’s picking up a gig at the Open Source Development Lab.

Thanks to Erik for the pointer, I just installed WebCalendar on a server and I’m loving it.  Installation instructions are a little hard to find, but I read them here in CVS.

NMap 3.2.8 (stable) is out.  Nothing major, but grab it while it’s hot:

This version fixes several bugs which could cause Nmap to crash, as well as a few less serious ones. All support for SCO operating systems has been dropped. The NmapFE graphical frontend has been updated to reflect newer Nmap options.

Update:

This one’s for Erik: NMap on your Zaurus.  There’s also a graphical frontend available.

Web Matrix 0.6 is out.  Go get it if that’s your type of thing.