Year: 2003

Mobiletracker dishes about the Nokia 6108 pen-based camera.  Mobiletracker has more rumors about the phone which probably won’t be anywhere until Q3 2003.

Estimated time until this phone hits the United States: Forever.

Via OpenBSD Journal, for those on the bleeding edge, NTFS support has been commited to the OpenBSD cvs.  It’s read-only for now, but is definately helpful.

• I was in a store at the mall the other day and noticed that Playstation 2’s are down to US$179.  I’ll probably wait for the newest incarnation (some chip redesigns) which is expected to ship with the broadband adapter for $199 in June.
• Wordlog 1.3: “Wordlog is an weblog written in PHP and backed by MySQL. It is entirely ASCII based and standards compliant. Features include: multi-user support, a threaded reply system, on the fly administration, user profiles, and more!”
• Greg has the NewsGator 1.2 release details.  Check it out!
• Phillip Greenspun: “After two days of touring Wales, a country that apparently has yet to discover the mixing faucet, it has become apparent that there is better mobile phone coverage in the remotest sheep pasture or coastal outcrop than in downtown Boston. How can such an otherwise backward place be so far ahead of the U.S. technologically?”
• This Gizmodo piece makes me think, “But mommy, Mickey says I should see the Tiki Birds two more times!”

CNet:

A new version of Amazon.com’s Web services tool allows third parties to embed Amazon’s shopping cart technology into their own Web sites.

Other new features in the latest version of the tool, due out Monday, include a chat function and the ability to search by price range.

Check out the Amazon Web Services page for more info.

Greg has something up his sleeve for NewsGator 1.2:

Tomorrow, May 20, 2003, everything changes.

MacCentral:

Toast maker Roxio Inc. today announced that it had acquired Sony/Universal’s Pressplay online music service. The company plans to use Pressplay as the basis for its relaunch of Napster. A joint venture between Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music Entertainment (SME), Pressplay has been acquired by Roxio for US$12.5 million in cash and 3.9 million shares of Roxio stock — a purchase valued at about $39.5 million.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from The Washington Post:

Apart from its Friday-Sunday total (the usual measure of Hollywood success), “MR” collected another $42.5 million between its late-Wednesday sneak previews and its official Thursday opening, pushing its five-day gross to $135.8 million. The Wednesday-Thursday total very likely means the movie collected more at the box office on Thursday than any other in history, according to Dergarabedian.

Not too shabby at all.  My $9 contributed to the wed-thur totals.

CNet:

Microsoft will license the rights to Unix technology from SCO Group, a move that could impact the battle between Windows and Linux in the market for computer operating systems.

I thought April was last month.

Seriously, though.  SCO is pretty much running around causing problems in hopes that someone will buy them.  Will Microsoft license the technology and integrate some source code into Windows?  The whole SCO thing hurts my head, so I have no idea how to read this.  Speaking of hurting my head, check out this paragraph from the article:

AT&T sold the Unix intellectual property to Novell Networks, which in turn sold it to the Santa Cruz Operation. Caldera International, a seller of Linux, then acquired from SCO the Unix rights and two SCO products, OpenServer and UnixWare. Then last year, Caldera changed its name to SCO Group to reflect the fact that most of its revenue came from its SCO business and not from the Linux products.

The whole thing confuses me.

• Rael has released Blosxom 2.0 RC3.
• Chris Brumme has an amazing theoretical entry about various memory models.
• BBC News: “For instance, looking up “monkey” and “tennis” on Google produces 109,000 hits. By contrast, searching for “monkey tennis” as a phrase returns only 2,200.”
• I downloaded a Mozilla Phoenix nightly build a week or two ago and it hasn’t crashed on me yet.  I’ll snag the 0.6 release at my earliest convenience.
• Minicom 2.1, a bugfix release is out.  I used Minicom a ton back in the day (Slackware, Pentium 60, no X), so I’ve got a bit of nostalgia built up for it.

Infoworld/IDG:

The top speed of Ethernet could hit 40Gbps within the next two years, a senior Cisco Systems executive said Wednesday.

• Congrats to Mark on his big day.
• Gizmodo flashes two new [kickass] Zaurus handhelds from Sharp. Current release plans are for Japan only.
• Kenneth notes that Firebird (the browser not the database) 0.6 (Glendale) is out.
• Ed Cone: “Elijah is learning how to create PowerPoints in fifth grade. He already sees how dumb and reductive they can be.”
• Dave Johnson released TechnoratiJ, Apache licensed, as a Java wrapper for the Technorati API.
• Charles Miller: “Agent Smith has re-licensed himself under the GPL.”

Chris Sells has announced the lineup for Applied XML Developers Conference 2003 West near Portland, OR.  The lineup is amazing, the conference is an amazing deal ($295 for 2 days!), and is guaranteed to ROCK!

Update: I’m going to do my best to attend this awesome conference, though I don’t know if I’m going to be able to swing it financially.

Wi-Fi Networking News:

The Wi-Fi Alliance has its Wi-Fi Zones search up and running: You can search by many parameters for hot spots that have opted into the Wi-Fi Zones branding program. (Anyone know anything about axcess2go, which appears to suddenly have a dozen locations in Seattle?)

See also EZGoal Hotspots, Wifinder and 802.11hotspots and of course Boingo and T-Mobile Hotspot.

Jabber Journal #11 has hit the virtual newsstands.  It’s a roundup of what’s been going on in the Jabber world in the past month or so.  You should definately check it out if you’re keeping up with things in the Jabber world.

Diego:

The clevercactus public beta has been released–along with the website and the formal announcement of the company and Paul Kenny’s role as a co-founder. Paul has been working with me for the past several months; he’s a great guy, and with tons of experience with technology startups.

Congrats all around.

RootPrompt points to an OSNews article:

When you think of platforms upon which you would deploy a Java Application Server, FreeBSD probably isn’t the first one that comes to mind. However, Tony Arcieri hopes to show in this tutorial how easy it is to deploy Apache Tomcat on a FreeBSD system, complete with a native build of the JDK.

It looks like the current version to Tomcat in the ports tree is 4.1.24.  This it much better than the last time I considered running Tomcat on FreeBSD.  Back then the only available version was something in the 3.x series.  Cool, thanks guys.

I don’t think they’ve officially announced it yet, but the Washington (DC) Apple Pi’s Semi-Annual Garage Sale is being held on June 14, 2003.

They seem to get a little smaller each time I go, but there’s always some piece of junk that I need.  Last time I ended up with a bunch of Sparc stuff and some random stuff.

Don Box (with a new look):

I had to have one, so I drove down to Incredible Universe (a consumer electronics mini-chain whose assets were eventually bought out by Fry’s Electronics).

Ahh, Incredible Universe.  What a year or so that was.  I think I shopped at Incredible Universe twice.  Both times were at the Incredible Universe near Potomac Mills in Virginia.  The first time I scoped things out, the second I bought a (musical) keyboard.

Incredible Universe was of the biggest (and arguably ugliest) of the big big box stores.  The shell still sits outside of the mall, though I’m pretty sure they painted it a more mundane color.  They even painted the weird UFO-looking structure that was out front.

Olivia Barr, a DC-based photographer has an awesome picture of the loading docks at the Incredible Universe on artnet.  More information about her can be found at her Conner Contemporary Art page.

From the PHP QA department:

PHP 4.3.2RC3 has been released. This is the third and final release candidate and should have no critical problems/bugs. Nevertheless, please download and test it as much as possible on reallife applications to uncover any remaining issues.

Yesterday Mike Sax wrote a great entry about a concept that I was not familiar with previously, extreme optimization:

My brother Jeffrey has started a new consulting business, based on the concept of Extreme Optimization.  To illustrate a few extreme optimization techniques, he wrote a Code Project article that looks at the problem of mapping an IP address to a country code.

He takes already optimized C# code and applies Extreme Optimization, reducing memory requirements from 10MB to only 3MB, and making it 13 times faster!  The article and all the C# source is on Code Project.

Thanks for pointing that out, Mike.