Year: 2003

Congrats to Steve Makofsky, his forthcoming Pocket PC Network Programming is now officially “coming soon“!

I used check 404 out of my checkbook the other day.  There was only one thing that came to mind.

MacCentral:

Apple’s Darwin team has released the Darwin 6.5 source code, which is designed to work with the just released Mac OS X 10.2.5 and includes a large number of source projects.

Dave Johnson released Roller 0.9.7 today with all the goodies.

Sam Gentile on Brad Abrams on Whidbey, the next .NET release (not Everett):

There is a lot implied in your paragraph.

Lots of goodies indeed.

LWN:

Theo de Raadt has sent out a note stating that the DARPA funding for the improvement of OpenBSD has been withdrawn. There are guesses as to why that has happened, but DARPA is not saying. Meanwhile, OpenBSD looks like it’s going to be stuck with a big bill for next month’s “hackathon,” which was to be partly funded by the DARPA grant.

This is definately a blow to the OpenBSD hackers and OpenBSD community.

Greg Klebus lets us in on apache (httpd) and tomcat cohabitates on his blog box.

CNet:

The Opteron 240 will run at 1.4GHz and cost around $340 in volume quantities, said sources, while the Opteron 242 and 244 will run at, respectively, 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz and cost around $800 and $900. Prices could change, sources cautioned, and, historically, wide discrepancies have existed between AMD’s posted price and the actual prices that the chips sell for.

While the chip speeds fall within the range of expectations, the pricing underscores the confidence AMD has in the chip’s selling power and performance.

Hmm.  I might be waiting for Athlon64, though hopefully street prices will end up being less than this.

Hack The Planet:

Meld is a diff/merge tool for GNOME that looks a lot like the one in CodeWarrior.

I saw it scroll by on freshmeat and thought it was cool, but if I see something like that mentioned again within 24 hours, it’s probably worth looking in to.

Hummer H2 vs. Volkswagen Golf

I was killing some time at a Best Buy this afternoon before class.  I parked my car, browsed for a bit, and came out to find a brand new Hummer H2 Soccer Assault Vehicle parked next to me.  I took a step back to view how absurd this looked.  To the right you’ll see my ’98 Volkswagen Golf.  You’ll notice that the bottom of the mirror on the H2 is above my roofline.  The top of the brush guard on the H2 is a few inches below my 5’10” shoulder height.

It’s funny but scary.  I’m in that car on the highway with these H2’s.  Down the road when I’ve got kids in my car, I’m going to have no choice but to become part of this arms race and buy something bigger and safer.

If I lived in the UK, I’d probably be running around in a Lupo GTI or some other small zippy fun car.  Now I’m rethinking this whole compact car thing in the States.

Bill Kearney has an excellent piece on using compression for your web sites:

As pages get larger and sites become popular the drain on available bandwidth can become a problem. The worst thing that can happen to a site is for it to become suddenly popular. Or an RSS feed gets pulled repetitively by dumb aggregator programs.

Eventually I’ll be migrating this blog to a server that supports mod_gzip or mod_deflate, and you know that I’ll take advantage of it.  Definately check out the rest of his entry for links to tutorials and many other great points.

Scott Johnson has a great idea about spicing up automated administrative emails.  He added a fortune to the bottom of an email containing df -h information:

We all get way to many automated things via email and if you at least make them interesting then you might bother to read them.

Speaking of Firebird (the database), they released 1.5RC1 today.

Something tells me that Phoenix will only be named Firebird for a short time.

CNet:

The new UPS-developed Delivery Information Acquisition Device (DIAD) has a record number of ways to wirelessly connect, believes telephone industry analyst Jeff Kagan, who couldn’t recall any other handheld that connects with infrared, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) and two cell networks: CDMA1x and GSM/GPRS.

Michael Radwin:

Ask Yahoo!, a daily column that features Q&A with Yahoo!’s expert team of Surfers, is now syndicating its content via RSS.

I just hope that this will last.  I loved the Y! Finance RSS beta, but I missed it a ton after it was discontinued.

TheServerSide:

Breathing new life into Netware, Novell is making the news with announcements of its Netware 6.5 operating system beta this week, which will include Apache Tomcat and its J2EE 1.3 exteNd application server. In addition, Netware 7 (to be released next august) will offer the choice of a Linux or Netware kernel for its OS.

Doc Searls:

Sputnik has come out with its first hardware product: The AP 120 wireless access point. It’s an enterprise thingie with auto-configuration (plug one into your LAN, it figures out where to get control commands, puts up a dynamic firewall, and immediately becomes a smart but unobtrusive member of the corporate hive — all while putting out a nice little wi-fi signal). Dave Sifry (Sputnik co-founder and main tech guy) tells me the $185 price gets you the equivalent of a Cisco number selling for $800 or so. Sputnik is selling it even more cheaply to OEMs and giving away the firmware for free. I’m sure a market will follow.

Wow.  The only catch that I can see is that the $185 program is a limited release, and you’d probably end up buying Sputnik Central Control Version 2.1 when it’s out.

If they can keep the price point right for their final release, they’d have technie geeks like myself running them at home in addition to their corporate clients.

Don’t underestimate the geeks.

Dave notes that Scoble is leaving NEC to work for Microsoft as a technical evangelist.  Congrats.

WiFi Network News points to a CNet article announcing that Apple has shipped 150,000 Airport Extreme base stations during the first quarter.

WiFi Network News (it used to be 802.11b News) has recently switched to MovableType, which makes linking to it much easier than their old template.

From the Washington Post Business Section this morning:

Behind the meat counter at Mercadito Ramos II, Jaime Medina lifted a bag of dark-pink iguana meat to the silver scale. The headless, skinless lizard registered 3.3 pounds. “Forty dollars,” Medina said in Spanish.

Since the iguanas began arriving at the Langley Park store last month, Medina, a 23-year-old Salvadoran who runs the store for his father, has sold them at $12.50 per pound to Central Americans hungry for a taste of home. There the meat is a delicacy, a cure-all and an aphrodisiac.

#ifdef SLOW_NEWS_DAY
/* Publish Iguana Story */
#endif