Year: 2003

I imported the 250 some RSS feeds that I follow regularly into SharpReader this afternoon.  The threading and interactions are really wonderful.  I found myself just exploring the interactions for awhile.  (Mental note: the community needs a way to visualize these interactions graphically or some other way to be able to easily wrap our heads around it.)

My favorite part is that you can click on a collection of feeds and then keep tabs on all of those feeds at once.  That’s crucial when you’re keeping track of a ton of stuff.  The only problem that I can see so far is avoiding the temptation of hitting the refresh button every 5 minutes or so.

The sad thing is that my workday revolves around the top of the hour when my news aggregator updates.  That is not going to change, as all the machines at work are Widnows 98, so no SharpAggregator there.  I’m giving SharpReader a test run at home though, and so far I like it.

I know that I have just violated some kind of techblog taboo, but above is Collin, our new kitten.  I’ll be quiet now.  In fact, to counteract such kitten silliness, here’s a picture of my 1U server before I put the heatsink/fan on:

My babies.

John Udell:

The world’s full of smart people who have, collectively, a lot of the intellectual bandwidth needed to absorb and master open-source infrastructure. It’s the scarcity of expertise with the software that has made open source uneconomical in a lot of cases. As people in India and Russia and elsewhere dig into open source technologies, they can broker that expertise and help bridge the gap between the theory and the practice of reuse. [Full story at InfoWorld.com].

Typo fixed.  Oops.  Thanks, Will.

Adam Curry:

In the first few days, BitTorrent delivered over 10,000 copies of the Red Hat 9 ISOs.

I4U reports that when 5.1 audio on your computer isn’t enough, go 7.1:

Japans M-Audio announces availability of its Resolution 7.1 sporting a 192kHz/24bit DAC.

The Revelution 7.1 features 7.1 DVD digital output. It uses the new Envy24HT audio controller.
The Card supports Dolby AC-3, Dolby DTS, Dolby Pro-Logic and Dolby EX, SRS TruSurround and SRS Circle Surround II.

Additionally it supports the following software systems. DirectSound3D, A3D1.0, and EAX1.0/2.0.
The Card supports Mac OS X and Windows XP with Windows Media Player 9.

The anticipated price, 16,625 Yen, is about $140USD or about $130 Euros.  Not too shabby.

This is a cool project that I stumbled upon at freshmeat today:

Darwin’s Tic Tac Toe uses simple evolutionary techniques to evolve a set of randomly-connected Neural Networks, with random weights, to play Tic Tac Toe (Norts and Crosses). To speed up the process, it has been written in a client-server architecture. Clients can connect to the server and grab a small batch of neural networks, do some processing, and send the results back to the server.

Wow.  Via Sam Ruby, Sharpreader looks like it has potential.

If falls under the YA3PA (Yet Another 3 Paned Aggregator) category, but I like the threaded comment feel to it.  Screenshots that contain my name (this one is on a comment) are also a bonus.

Warning:

We picked up a kitten today.

You have been warned.

I forgot to enable devfs in the kernel I compiled yesterday.  The system booted fine but told me that it would be much happier with devfs compiled in.

I’ll make it happy this afternoon.

Update: Kernel is recompiled, I rebooted the box and it came back up SSHable.

Mental note: when running a Gentoo machine that will never run X, change your USE statement to USE="-X" which will make sure that stuff like Xfree86 isn’t installed when you try to install PHP.  Oops.

OSNews reports that Steve Jobs is the highest paid CEO in the US.

Of course, in 2001, he got paid $1 and a jet.

Slashdot:

The director of the Army’s simulation technology center said that Ender’s game influenced how and what they will build for future training.

Scary, but at least it comes from some great sci fi.  For the record, I haven’t had a chance to read Shadow Puppets yet, but I will as soon as I stumble upon a hardcover deal or it comes out in paperback.  I’ve read everything else in the Ender series.

I’m also looking forward to reading Darwin’s Children, the sequel to Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear.  Darwin’s Radio was a bit technical but read as quick as a Crichton novel for me and was great.

eWeek:

Microsoft Corp. unveiled on Wednesday its planned six-SKU lineup for Office 2003.

The six editions on tap are Professional Enterprise, Professional, Standard, Students and Teachers, Small Business, and Basic.

Computerwire:

IBM Corp is to work on behalf of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to build a 1 petabyte data storage grid that will support CERN’s efforts to better understand the particle physics behind the Big bang theory.

InformationWeek via Google News Sci/Tech:

The pending launch of Windows Server 2003 will be a milestone not only for Microsoft, but for the other half of Wintel, too. It’s been eight years since Intel got into the server market and two years since it shipped a 64-bit processor, the Itanium. On April 24, a 64-bit version of Windows that takes advantage of Intel’s 64-bit design will become generally available.

Erik Hatcher keeps us up to date about what’s going on with Ant 1.6:

Ant 1.6 is trundling along, nobody is in a rush to ship anything, as Ant 1.5.x is good for most people’s needs. You can get on the developer mail list if you want to take part in the next generation of Ant.

Ant 1.6 will be different internally from Ant 1.5. It has reworked its classloading, parses big build files faster, and, by popular vote, will only run on Java1.2 or later. Supporting Java 1.1 was getting too painful: it was time to move on. You can still build Java 1.1 code using <javac target="1.1"> and setting up the classpaths to point at the appropriate runtime. Same for <java>; you can run on 1.1 by requesting a different JVM and pointing to the other version of Java 1.1.

Ant1.6 in CVS has some experimental new features for big projects, an <import> task to import build file fragments from other files, the nice feature being you can now use Ant properties to select the files to import. While <subant> is lining up to be a bulk means of calling a target in sub-project – imagine ant with fileset support.

I’ll admit it up front: I’m a moron.

Before leaving for work, I did an emerge system.  I SSH’d in this afternoon to configure and make the kernel and do the other random stuff that must be done before the install is final.  For the record, I chose metalog as my system logger and vcron as my cron package.  Metalog looked a little more robust and higher performance than my other options.  I chose vcron cause the docs told me to.

I chose GRUB, just because I have not had issues with GRUB and LILO and I have had issues in the past.  (I managed to trash the family Pentium 60 a few times thanks to my ignorance and LILO.  I was in middle school at the time, so cut me some slack.)

Everything is ready to rock, so I unmounted everything and rebooted.  The machine didn’t come back up on the network.  I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out which part of the install went wrong, what I could have done wrong or set incorrectly.

Then it hit me: There’s a boot CD in the CD-ROM drive and the BIOS is set to boot from CD first.  *SMACK*  I (hopefully!) have a functional system on that hard drive, I just can’t get to it.

Someone really needs to come up with a remote remove CD from CD-ROM over SSH protocol.

Reverand Jim:

Having been married for almost a week now, I am officially an expert on the subject.

Congrats.

According to Slashdot, 4 days after Duke3D was released as GPL, you can play it on Linux.

Rock, guys.

Ed Cone has the story:

Congressman Howard Coble has withdrawn as commencement speaker at his alma mater, Guilford College. The N&R reports that “about a third of the graduating class of about 160 students presented him with a petition Wednesday asking him not to speak at graduation.” Students were dismayed by Coble’s rationalization of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and also by his support of the war in Iraq, which some complain is at odds with Guilford’s Quaker traditions.

Mark:

This assumption gives us the willies, and the dangers of said assumption have been brought up in numerous meetings and have been the subject of numerous CYA memos, but for now we are simply going to proceed without worrying about it.