Year: 2003

Leo:

Call for Help and The Screen Savers will be dark today – we’re showing re-runs instead – so we can all go see X2. It’s in my contract.

Remind me to write that into the next contract I sign…

The Jabber Developer’s Handbook [amazon] by Dana Moore and William Wright will be coming out in the next couple of months.  I’m really excited about it.  It looks to be oriented toward machine to machine communication (messaging, RPC, etc) using Jabber.

I looked at Instant Messaging in Java, which looks great for creating chat clients.  I’m going to take a closer look at Programming Jabber, but at first glance it seemed to be all-perl.  That’s not a bad thing, I just seem to have a hard time wrapping my head around perl stuff sometimes.

Big things will happen in the future with Jabber/XMPP as the transport protocol, and I’m not talking about Ronnie and Kim trading gossip over IM.

Via Sam Ruby, Matthew Thomas muses out loud about the ideal GPL blogging system.  I can’t say that I agree with absolutely all of them (I’m with Sam, the database might not be neccesary) but he hits on many good points.

Sam Ruby:

A Python implementation of Gump is proceeding, this time with a GUI.

I’ll definately have to check this out.

Linux Today, Slashdot and others are reporting on Red Hat’s x86-64 “Technology Preview.”  Here’s the press release from Red Hat, release notes are here.  You can grab it from the main Red Hat ftp site or one of the various mirrors.

CNet:

Akamai and IBM plan unveil a service Thursday that they say will speed delivery of Web-based business applications.

[…]

By creating copies of a company’s Web-based applications that are closer to customers or partners, businesses can improve the performance of these applications.

Woohoo!  Distributed web services.  Be 110% buzzword compliant.

I saw an Acura TSX on the road this afternoon.  My first impression was “overpriced Civic.”  Turns out that it’s built on the Accord platform.  It’s tiny though.

After checking out the Acura TSX website, the 200 horsepower inline 4, available 6-speed manual tranny, and 17 inch rims almost justify the $28,000 pricetag.  Almost.

For the record, you can get a Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V with a 175 horse I4 for $10,000 less.  A Jetta GLI with a 200 horse V6 is about $5,000 less.

Jon Hadley has set up moblogging.org, a site dedicated to moblogging software, hardware, news, links, and all things moblog.  Jon also has a weblog/moblog.

The content at moblogging.org is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, with an RSS 0.91 feed here.

Mobloggers and moblog enthusiasts should check the site out.

Rafe:

I just think it’s totally cool that Tomcat 4 Clustering (which is backported from Tomcat 5) uses IP multicast to share session info across multiple servers in a cluster. I think that approach is totally ingenious.

Dave Johnson:

Wiley has purchased 35 or so of the WROX titles and APress has purchased the rest. So there is still some small hope that Apress will help Professional JSP 2.0 to see the light of day.

I forgot to mention it last night, but OpenBSD Journal announced the release of OpenBSD 3.3.  Of course I promtply downloaded the 3.3 release song: Puff the Barbarian (lyrics here).

My alltime favorite OpenBSD release song has still got to be the 3.0 song: E-Railed (OpenBSD Mix).

ABCNews/AP:

Bethlehem Steel Corp., the mighty company that made the skeleton of Rockefeller Plaza, beams for the Golden Gate Bridge and armor plate for countless warships, faded into history Wednesday with the stroke of a pen.

The bankrupt steelmaker’s executives and lawyers began signing paperwork transferring ownership of the company’s mills to International Steel Group, a new steel company based in Cleveland.

It was a quiet end for an American industrial icon once considered indestructible.

Having spent some time in both Bethlehem, PA and Youngstown, OH while growing up, news like this saddens me.  Of course, the people who loose most from this are the former workers.

Via Lockergnome, PCWorld notes that WPA will replace the weak WEP for WiFi encryption:

WPA is a subset of the IEEE’s more complete 802.11i security standard, which remains some 15 months away from certification and may require changes in hardware. The Wireless Ethernet Alliance decided to support WPA with a certification program partly because its members did not want to wait so long for a fix to vulnerabilities in Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), the existing Wi-Fi security algorithm. Also, members wanted a security upgrade that a software upgrade could in most cases provide.

It looks like this is a decent compromise until 802.11i gets rolled out.  Good to know though.

I didn’t catch this when it was released back in Feb, but JEP-0072, currently labeled ‘experimental’ outlines how to send SOAP messages over Jabber.  Jabber::RPC, an XML-RPC over Jabber module for Perl has been around for some time.

Yet another thing to keep an eye on.

Cool, Rogers Cadenhead is working on a Radio book:

Now that the book has been announced by the publisher, I can finally start talking about what I’ve been working on lately: Radio UserLand Kick Start will be published this summer by Sams Publishing.

There’s a first.  My main XP box decided to reboot as soon as I hit the ‘post’ button.

Eerie.

Mikel Maron:

Timo Maas, you are almost forgiven for destroying my hearing last weekend, with the hardest set I’ve heard in San Francisco.

Wow.  That’s excellent.  After picking up Loud, I’ve wanted to see him live.

Damn Small Linux is a great name for a compact, business card sized (~50MB) Linux distro.  It is derived from Knoppix and features about as usable an X desktop as you could expect in 50 megs.  Lots of minimalistic goodness.

For those keeping score, Lessig bet his job on anti-spam legislationon in his blog January 1, 2003.  The mainstream tech media (Infoworld, ZDNet, PCWorld/IDG) noticed a few days ago, a time delay of almost four months.

The Inquirer:

One integrator told the INQ today: “The Intel compilers are by far the best for optimising X86 but of course do not recognise an AMD Opteron.”

He continued: “The Opteron has SSE2 support, but to get a binary calling SSE2 one has to compile the binary on a Xeon machine. Move the binary over to the Opteron box and it flies.” Further – the integrator, who sells Intel server machines too, he claimed that the SMP performance is excellent on the Opteron platform. He said: “Typical SMP benchmarks in HPC show about a 30% gain with 2 CPUs over one on a Xeon/P4 platform. The same tests on Opteron show an 80% gain”.

Cross-compiling: It’s not just for the embedded market anymore.