Shares of International Business Machines Corp. IBM.N were halted on Monday in over-the-counter trading, pending news.
IBM said in a statement shortly after the halt it is the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
It said the probe is related to revenue recognition in 2000 and 2001.
Crap. I hate to see bad stuff happen to good companies. I really really hope that their books are clean.
The Motley Fool states the obvious: Finding Nemo rocked, Pixar rules, and Disney hasn’t put out a decent movie on their own in quite awhile.
A visit to the Walt Disney Pictures site doesn’t look very promising either. The preview for Brother Bear looked good, though it felt like a bad rehashing on The Lion King. If I see another animated film this summer it will probably be Rugrats Gone Wild. The Wild Thornberrys rule.
I’m glad to see that Liam Lynch‘s My United States of Whatever is popular in the mainstream. The Screen Savers had a cool interview with him this morning.
I’ve been running around saying “Whatevah!” and shouting the chorus of the song since I saw it on Sifl and Olly back in the 90’s. So there.
The normal people are finally catching up.
Game maker The 3DO Company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California. The company is best known to Mac gamers as producers of the Heroes of Might & Magic strategy game series.
Chris Brumme has a great piece up about application domains and other lowlevel bits about possible future directions for the .NET platform.
We saw Finding Nemo last night.
Much fun, go see it.
OSNews notes the release of Python 2.2.3.
Wow, I’ve been Scobleized. I feel honored.
Denise Howell has posted Bill Gates’ and Steve Jobs’ remarks on her weblog. Should I post my own coverage soon, now that Denise (and others in the audience) are filing their own stories? Why shouldn’t I?
Another example of professional level coverage by a weblogger, and information getting out that otherwise would not. Here’s a permalink to her coverage.
But, beyond that, it’s the same drug available to geeks anywhere. Build something cool and ship it. That’s the true drug. All the rest is just artificial sweeteners.
True. True.
MacCentral notes the demise of Bryce on the Mac.
Via Jim McGee and BoingBoing: Bumperactive.
Must. Create. Geeky. Customized. Bumper stickers.
Via Freshmeat, PHPX 1.0.0 (PHPX Lite) has been released.
From the freshmeat description:
PHPX is a Web portal system, blog, Content Management System (CMS), forum, and more. It is designed to allow everyone to be able to have feature-rich, interactive websites even if you do not know a bit of programming. Some key features include fully-integrated forums, downloads, an image gallery with slideshow and auto-thumbnailing, support ticket system, a GUI interface for Web page content management, news with topics and instances, and a whole lot more. It allows you to fully customize the look of your site.
PHPX has good clean lines in a not quite *nuke kind of way.
CNet notes that AOL’s Nullsoft has pulled the download link for Waste. Email me at m croydon (one word) at comcast dot net (my main email is down) and I’ll get a copy up and point a link. Does anyone have the Linux version stashed?
Update: Dave has the windows version online. Does anyone know AOL’s motivation for pulling it, besides the obvious one?
I’m slowly reading a Slashdot interview with Fyodor, the creater of nmap. It is by far one of the most detailed interviews I have ever read on Slashdot.
I’d highly suggest reading it if you’ve got even a minor interest in computer/network security.
Over 2700 bugs were fixed in J2SE 1.4.2. This article tells you about the most important ones, as well as about the long-awaited upgrades to the user interface, toolset, and look-and-feel. There’s also support for Active-X Bridge and Linux ALSA!
Also note that Sun is monitoring how much traffic they get from their RSS feeds. Observe the following URL: http://servlet.java.sun.com/logRedirect/rss_java_highlights-PARTNER/http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/releases/j2se1.4.2/.
I wonder if someone has to justify the bandwidth that their RSS feeds consume. I hope not, but it wouldn’t suprise me.
Gizmodo notes rumors of a Canon G5 (5 megapixel G3 replacement). Nikon just announced their Coolpix 5400 (5mp/4x/$799).
Time for Nikon and Canon to go head to head again!
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Land use changes in the United States are responsible for a significant portion of the country’s temperature increase over the past five decades, says a University of Maryland study published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. The findings suggest that land use changes are responsible for more of the rise in global temperatures than scientists previously had thought, say authors Eugenia Kalnay and Ming Cai, scientists in the university’s department of meteorology.
If correct, it’s not great news, but it’s always nice to hear about research coming out of College Park.
This morning I wrote up a quick tutorial on producing XML with Python. There seems to be many resources on parsing XML in Python, but very few articles/howtos on actually creating it. Here’s the sample code from the first part of this hopefully multipart tutorial:
from xml.dom.minidom import Document
# Create the minidom document
doc = Document()
# Create the <wml> base element
wml = doc.createElement(“wml”)
doc.appendChild(wml)
# Create the main <card> element
maincard = doc.createElement(“card”)
maincard.setAttribute(“id”, “main”)
wml.appendChild(maincard)
# Create a <p> element
paragraph1 = doc.createElement(“p”)
maincard.appendChild(paragraph1)
# Give the <p> elemenet some text
ptext = doc.createTextNode(“This is a test!”)
paragraph1.appendChild(ptext)
# Print our newly created XML
print doc.toprettyxml(indent=” “)
You can find the output of this program and some links in the article. Murphy willing, more will follow.
Update: The code listing should be fixed.
Victor Marks at IBM Developerworks takes a look at AirTraf, a GPL’d wireless sniffer and security audit tool. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Enter AirTraf. AirTraf began as an open source (GPL) project for gathering and decoding packets sent via 802.11b. With information received from detected access points, it then calculates the bandwidth and signal strength of each individual wireless node. These are the standard sorts of things you would expect a wireless utility of this nature to be able to detect and log. It’s like heart surgery: still highly difficult to implement, but commonplace.
This package performs a number of tasks, such as determining the Service Set Identifier of the access points, and the channel it is operating under. It can tell how many wireless nodes are connected to a given access point, as well as that point’s total load, and also the amount of bandwidth being utilized by all the connected wireless nodes. AirTraf is capable, too, of polling a number of sniffers through a central polling server in order to collect the most current information, which can then be saved for analysis for just a few days, or up to an indefinite period of time — years, even.
Good stuff. I need to find some more inexpensive 802.11b gear.