Year: 2003

Via freshmeat, KMLDonkey:

KMLDonkey is a project that aims to fully integrate the mldonkey P2P software into the KDE desktop.

I need to find the snooze button on the kittens.  🙂

• Roller 0.9.7.2 is out.
• Rick: “Just for S&G’s I hacked Sam’s Wx3pa.py script and wrote a 2 paned aggregator.”
• Russ: “BlogPlanet is a new Java-based moblogging app that came out a week or so ago… What a kick ass little MIDlet!”  It looks quite slick.
• Dave Winer: “One of the things we talked about at dinner last night was the stupidity of forking RSS among the little guys.”
• Sam Ruby: “I can make sure that the RSS validator checks for compliance.”
• Colin Fahey [via Slashdot]: “But, OH NO!  I actually answered two questions correctly on the test!!”  He’s got tons of other geeky stuff at his website.
• PC World: “Microsoft later this year will offer new pricing for its Xbox Live online gaming service, raising the price of its “starter pack” by $20 and offering a new monthly subscription option for $5.99, the company announced Thursday.”
• CNet: Sun Microsystems and Oracle plan to attend the first meeting to discuss a proposed Web services standard, despite their support of a rival specification.”  They’re talking about BPEL: Business Process Execution Language.
• Dave Winer: “HP: Semantic Blogging. PDF.”  The demo blog feels a lot like blosxom/blojsom etc.  I don’t know what to make of it either.

Happy birthday to Ed Cone’s weblog.

My weblog birthday is coming up in July, though my LiveJournal goes back to September, 2001.

From the Tiki home page:

Plenty of good news; install script added, notable performance improvement, less memory consumption, and alot of new features! This version also fixes several bugs found in Tiki 1.5 and 1.6RC1 users that want to enjoy the new features are encouraged to upgrade.

You should be able to check out the latest version at the tiki test site.  This project has come a long way since I first stumbled upon it.  Congrats to the Tiki team!

That’s my Homie.  They’re awesome little palstic thugs that you can buy in gumball machines.  I took his picture with a Canon Powershot G2.  Did I mention that feedster now does images?

Via NewsForge, Rob Flickenger at O’Reillynet has a great weblog entry/article about using Rendezvous under Linux:

This is one reason why I love multicast DNS service advertisements (and Rendezvous, in particular). My Linux Jukebox and Wiki are now announcing themselves like an old-time barker at the county fair. Wireless users at the cafe across the street (or anywhere within a block or so) can find my local services any time just by looking at available rendezvous sites. As if that weren’t enough, my streamer is even advertising itself as a DAAP stream, so iTunes 4 users can see that it’s available from inside iTunes itself.

Here’s how he did it:

First, get a multicast DNS advertiser. I found Apple’s own Posix implementation to be more than adequate. (You can download it after a free registration on Apple’s site.) The application you’re after is mDNSProxyResponderPosix, in the mDNSPosix/ directory. It built cleanly and without so much as a warning under Linux 2.4.20. Once it’s built, install it somewhere handy (like /usr/local/bin, for example.) There are a couple of other multicast DNS projects floating around (like mdnsd), but Apple’s example code seemed to work easiest out of any of the responders I tried.

This is excellent, and it looks like Rob is using this power for good and not evil.  Next time I’m in seattle I’ll try to hunt down his Seattle Wireless node.

Scientific American:

A report published today in the journal Nature moves scientists one step closer to electronic newspapers and wearable computer screens. It describes a flexible electronic ink display just three times the width of a human hair that can be viewed from almost any angle.

The Register:

Infogrames is to change its name to Atari when NASDAQ opens for trading tomorrow. It will trade as ATAR.

Sadly the Infogrames/Atari target market has probably never played on an oldschool Atari.

Wired News:

Granted, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Gates doesn’t have quite the crazed charisma of Apple’s CEO Jobs. But the new prototype computer Gates was fondling in front of hundreds of hardware developers on Tuesday looked so much like a Mac that it was impossible not to draw comparisons between the two men and their machines.

Great looking stuff.  Palladium is now known as NGSCB: Next Generation Secure Computing base.

CNet:

Market researcher Evans Data on Tuesday said 52 percent of software developers surveyed use Visual Basic today, but 43 percent of them plan to move to other languages, including Java and C#, a Java-like language developed by Microsoft.

There used to be a huge learning curve difference between Visual C++ and Visual Basic.  Now it’s just about as easy to learn C# as it is to learn VB.NET.  VB.NET has become more complex and C# is much easier than C++ (at least at first glance).

From the Mono homepage:

We have released Mono 0.24 which includes our new code generation engine. A list of the new features is available here.

Packages for Windows, and various Linux distributions are available on our download page. We are shipping Gtk# and MonoDoc packages for the first time.

IBM Alphaworks:

CodeRally is a Java-based, real-time programming game based on the Eclipse platform. It uses the Eclipse platform and a very simple API that allows users unfamiliar with Java to easily compete while they learn the Java language.

Cool.  Think of it as a user friendly RARS, in Java, using Eclipse.

The Washington Post:

U.S. savings bonds, a time-honored gift for children, will be available for sale in paper certificate form for only a few more years, the Treasury Department announced yesterday.

The thought of a savings bond existing only inside a government database scares me a little bit.  Sure, with online banking and such a lot of our money is stored in databases, but this is different.  This is a US Savings Bond.  It’s the thing that you buy when you don’t really care about making the most from your money, you just want security.  You want to clutch the paper in your hand.  The last thing you want to do (or would be willing to do) is order it from a website.  How willing would a grandparent be to hop online to buy a savings bond for their grandchild?

Progress, baby!

I installed Blojsom this evening in hopes of trying out Blojsim, which enables blogging from AIM/Jabber.  (Of course, it’s the jabber part that I’m psyched about).  The problem that I’m encountering is that there are no installation instructions (that I can find).  I’m sure that it’s obvious to someone who is familiar with the blojsom codebase, but I’m just a stupid end user here.  I’ve submitted a feature request on the sourceforge site.  Hopefully someone will write up some quick installation instructions.

I was amazed at the Blojsom installation.  It “just worked” and was as simple as a blosxom installation (assuming Tomcat or similar is already purring along)

BBC:

US media giant Clear Channel Communications is hoping to beat the bootleggers, by launching a venture to sell CDs of concerts minutes after the show ends.

As much as I dislike the giant that is Clear Channel, this is a really good idea, and will probably make them tons of money.

According to the Netcraft weblog:

Ironically, Richard Stallman best known for the creation and relentless advocacy of the Gnu Project Licence, has for many years run his own site using software produced under the more generous BSD licence. www.stallman.org switched from FreeBSD to Linux during April.

Dogfood consumption is always a good thing.

Wil Wheaton:

“Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”

It’s been a slow weekend, blogging-wise.

We’re +1 kitten this afternoon, bringing the current kitten count to 2.  His name is Tigger.  Hopefully we’ll get a peace treaty signed by sometime tonight.

Update: Hopefully the cease fire will hold this time.