Year: 2003

Kerneltrap:

Murray Stokely announced today the availability of FreeBSD 4.8, following October’s 4.7 release [story] by 6 months. Included in 4.8 are “conservative updates” of a number of software programs from the base system, several known security fixes, initial Firewire support, HyperThreading support, and support of “other new hardware technologies“.

Murray notes, “This release does not include all of the new technologies that were introduced with FreeBSD 5.0 in January. FreeBSD 4.X releases offer a more conservative platform than FreeBSD 5.0 at this time.” In other words, 4.8 is currently considered to be the -stable production release, whereas 5.0 [story] remains the development or New Technology release, as reflected here. More information about 4.8 can be found in the release notes and known errata. Murray’s full announcement follows.

I booted up the 1U this evening.from the basic iso.  I followed the install docs and have been bootstrapping a system that is optimized to my hardware.

Oh, here’s the great thing: After I got a few things in order, I hit up /etc/init.d/sshd and have been doing the vast majority of the install over SSH.  No that I’ve been doing anything really.  I haven’t touched it since I edited make.conf.  It’s been humming in the background while I’ve been working on my Windows box.

I tried Gentoo shortly after it was announced an available for download, but I ended up getting frustrated at network configuration.  I was quite happy to find that the correct modules were loaded and after a menu-driven network config script, everything just worked.

Thanks for all the hard work to make mybootstrapping and installation painless so far.  I’m curious to see how zippy this system will end up.

I installed Red Hat 9 on the 1U server last night, though I think I’m going to try installing Gentoo from scratch just to do a little stress testing on the hardware.

Congrats to Steve Makofsky who is now part of the Microsoft XML Messaging Team.

Sean and Scott:

Apple announced today their plans to put a new G4 Tablet Computer on the market. The unit will be very small, weighing in at just under 2 pounds, and will have a 10 inch screen. The unit will also contain an 80Gb hard drive, and 1Gig of RAM. Video on the unit will be powered by a GeForce4 with 128Mb of Video RAM. Pricing on the unit will run in the $500 to $1000 dollar range, much cheaper than current Windows based units.

Running Mac OS X the unit will have handwriting recognition based off the Inkwell technology. No tests have been done to see how this compares to Windows, but we should know within the month as Steve Jobs has promised to perform the tests himself. I’ve posted a picture of the unit in the discussion forum post for this news item. Overall the unit should be a real kicker; it will be interesting to see how this plays out. [8D]

If they can build this tablet with the specs mentioned above for 500 to 1000 bucks it is going to put some serious pressure on the tablet pc makers.  But I’ll believe it when I see it.

Well, they do know their tablet stuff.  I was expecting it to be posted on the first, but this looks like at least a legit rumor.  I found a mention of it at geek.com on the first, though MacRumors posted about it on March 30.

In related news, the brushed metal look still sucks.

Brent had a scary referrer this afternoon:

http://homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp?record=235270

According to Slashdot, the Mozilla roadmap has changed dramatically.  They’re cutting the bloat and embracing the zippiness of Phoenix and Minotaur.

Here’s a great quote from the CNet article:

“Mozilla has become stable but bloated,” said Matt Croydon, an undergraduate in computer science at the University of Maryland. “Users wanted something that was extremely fast, extremely lightweight and stable. I’m glad to see that the Mozilla team is embracing the trend of lightweight and agile browsers. Mozilla is much better off embracing the trend rather than trying to compete with it. It will be interesting to see how this will affect the AOL/Netscape browser, as it builds in more features (bloat) than a default Mozilla install.”

Disclaimer: Of course I’m going to think that it’s a great quote, as it’s a quote by me.  I’ll try not to be as long winded next time.

I am really psyched that Paul Festa sent me an IM this evening asking if I had anything to say on the new roadmap.  He contacted me via IM once before to ask me about that Moblogging thing.

Are we at a tipping point?  Reporters are going to webloggers and geeks in the trenches for the full story.

CNet:

Next-generation cell phone networks are arriving in Africa, a region some carriers view as an enormous business opportunity, despite widespread poverty.

This just in.  The vast majority of phones in the US still suck.

Here are links to several RSS feeds from Dave:

• Apple has four new RSS feeds. Thanks to Steven Garrity for the pointer.
• Fast Company has an RSS feed too. Bing!
• Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds. Latest News Releases, Content Networking, Partner, Routing, Security, Software, Standards, Storage Networking, Switching, Voice, Wireless, Features.

I’m teetering on the edge of information overload, so I don’t know if I can afford to subscribe to any of these.  When I started weblogging, I tried to get my hands on as many primary sources as possible (Currently monitoring 243 sources).  I would filter out the drek and report to the world my findings.  Nowadays I have to rely on other webloggers, most of them more intelligent than I, to filter through the drek and report back to me what they have found.

Finding the intersection of primary sources and intelligent analysis is key.

TheServerSide:

In a recent interview, Cape Clear CEO Annrai O’Toole criticizes appserver vendors for convincing people you need fancy orchestration and transaction mangement services (of an appplication server) to build service oriented architectures/web services. He also claims that javascript is all you need to maintaining workflow and transactional integrity.

That’s right kids.  All you really need to host web services are a box and some free software.  You can put together XML-RPC, SOAP, or REST services with Perl or Python through CGI.  You can run Apache Axis on top of Tomcat or another free server.  Things don’t need to be as thick or as complicated as you are making it.  Take a step back and stop spending so much money.

Wired News reports on the iBox, a potential $250-$350 barebones Apple-compatible platform assembled from replacement motherboards.  I’ve wanted a low-cost entry into OSX for some time now, but my 8500 doesn’t take it, I haven’t found an iMac cheap enough, and the G3/G4 towers are still a little too expensive for me.

The design of the box itself is very good.  It almost looks like it was born at 1 Infinite Loop.

LWN:

In accordance with our errata support policy the Red Hat Linux 6.2 and Red Hat Linux 7 distributions have now reached their end-of-life for errata maintenance. This means that we will no longer be producing security, bugfix, or enhancement updates for these products.

Erik Hatcher on dress code:

Make your impressions with the code!

Kerneltrap:

Jeff Roberson recently announced a new 1:1 threading implementation that has been merged into FreeBSD -current. The effort builds upon the work done so far on KSE [story], offering SMP scalability and working proof of KSE’s design. Jeff explains, “This code works in parallel with KSE and does not break it in any way. It actually helps bring M:N threading closer by testing out shared bits.“

Clemens Vasters:

Get over RPC. Think messages. Get over coding and programming models. Think data.

Keith Devens:

Via BitWorking, MSDN has RSS feeds!

Dave Winer:

I think open source is to programming as pro bono work is to lawyers. Programmers are by their nature generous beings. But we also have mortgages, need health insurance, have kids who want to go to Harvard, and occasionally want to take a vacation (I know that’s unreasonable).

He will be keynoting the conference which runs that runs May 28-30.

When will people start linking to weblogs that they happen to own BlogShares of?

I put up a page about my new rackmount server.  I know that it’s sad, but I did it anyway.

I wasn’t able to start downloading Red Hat 9 on my BitTorrent-optimized machine until this morning.  I’m currently pulling down about 130k/s and giving back about 15-20k/s.  I’m about halfway done and I’m going to keep BitTorrent open so that I can share it with the rest of you.