Year: 2003

Sam Ruby has implemented the CommentAPI with a few tweaks:

If the request comes in with a SOAP envelope and/or rdf:RDF element, I will respond in kind.  That’s just the kinda guy I am.

Via Sam Gentile and Simon Fell.  Congrats to the Mindreef guys on their Jolt Productivity Award.

Twin is:

Twin is a text-mode windowing environment: it draws and manages text windows on a text-mode display, like X11 does for graphical windows. It has a built-in window manager and terminal emulator, and can be used as server for remote clients in the same style as X11. It can display on Linux console, on X11 and inside itself.

Here’s what’s new for 0.4.6:

Several bugs were fixed, including a buffer overrun in twdisplay, a memory leak in ‘Reload RC’, a missing stdarg.h includ in the libTw headers, compilation errors in hw_tty.c, and a problem with cut and paste pasting when clicking on the window border. getpt() support was added along with better error reporting in the pty code, ‘make uninstall’, a new shinyMetal_6x13.xpm theme. The twdisplay now autoprobes module HW drivers, support for utf8 on the Linux console was added, and more libTutf character sets were included. ‘make install DEBUG=y’ no longer strips binaries.

It’s an interesting project.  The screenshots bring back memories of the menu-driven DOS days.

NPR:

Host Bob Edwards details a century-old lightbulb that keeps burning and burning. The hand blown bulb is only four watts, but it’s been burning in a California fire station since a neighbor donated it around the turn of the century.

This is something really cool that I stumbled upon while searching for something on NPR’s site.  There is more information at the Livermore Centennial Light web site.

Praise good searches gone bad!

Mark Pilgrim:

Embracing HTTP error code 410 means embracing the impermanence of all things.

Slashdot:

CNet is reporting that Germany has placed EA’s newest Command & Conquer game ‘Generals’ on its restricted list, which means it may not be advertised or displayed on shelves although it may be kept under store counters and sold to adults. The reason according to Elke Monssen-Engberding, director of the Ministry for Family Affairs: ‘It portrays war as the only way to resolve conflicts.

Well, any game that gets this treatment is probably a good game.  I’ve played C&C:G a few times.  The engine is amazing: It’s all 3D all the time.  The cut scenes are not compressed video like in the past, they’re rendered in the game engine.  You can go seamlessly from a battle to a cut scene that unfolds another part of the mission, back to battle.  There were even a few matrix-like 3d freezes.

The only problem is that it was just about as fun as the original Command and Conquer that I played on the family Pentium 60 when I was in middle school.  Sure, it’s fun for a bit, as C&C has always been, but it seemed to get old fast.  I would think that a fully 3d engine would awe and wow me, but aparently it’s something that I’ve just come to expect from games.

I haven’t tried multiplayer yet, which might be its killer feature.  I played the original C&C in multiplayer mode via modem a few times, which was mind blowing at the time.  Now if it’s not massively multiplayer, it’s not buzzword compliant.

Haiku review:

3D graphics are amazing
So good that it’s restricted
Buy it, but on sale.

Joi Ito via Chris Prillo:

Steven Frank has composed a song about blogging called Ben and Mena. He blogs about it here, and the 3.8MB mp3 file is here. Probably interesting to hardcore bloggers only, but VERY funny. 😉

Send me a ping… send me a trackback.  I promise I won’t complain…

The Register via LinuxSecurity:

Until Unix and Linux programmers get over their macho love for low-level programming languages, the security holes will continue to flow freely, argues SecurityFocus columnist Jon Lasser.

[…]

To be sure, some software must continue to be written in lower-level languages: Database servers such as MySQL will inevitably be written in lower-level languages for legitimate performance reasons. And it would be both unlikely and counterproductive for the Linux kernel or the system library to be rewritten in Perl, Java, or Python.

But none of those concerns justify writing an IRC client in C. And if it seems unimaginable for a print server to be rewritten in a high-level language, the reality is the benefit would be substantial and the performance costs negligible.

Infoworld:

IBM landed a major foundry deal expected to be worth over $100 million Wednesday, agreeing to manufacture the next generation of Nvidia’s GeForce graphics processors at its fab in East Fishkill, N.Y.

Linux Journal:

XMLTP/L, or XMLTP Light, is a lightweight RPC protocol that uses XML to encode the stream of data. XMLTP/L has been designed to do fast RPC calls over an intranet, within an enterprise. More specifically, the first purpose of XMLTP/L is to forward transactions (RPCs) to a database server. But, it also can be used to do method calls to any server that follows the common RPC technique introduced by XML-RPC and older client/server protocols.

I’m torn between wanting to know more and being horrified about YAWSP (Yet Another Web Services Protocol).  It looks like it has its uses though,

Lessig:

Is promoting Hollywood really what the Mexican Congress is for?

Derek Willis:

Paul DuBois has an article on migrating from MS Access to MySQL, complete with links to other resources, including a script that helps export Access files for replication in MySQL. DuBois, who wrote a MySQL book, has a collection of similar articles. (via Sanjay’s Coding Tips)

Cool.  Thanks for the tip, Derek.

NewsFactor via Roland Piquepaille:

The creation of an unusual flat lens may finally resolve a long-running controversy about the existence of materials that have metaphysical qualities — so-called “metamaterials” — that transcend the laws of nature.

Roland also got the article up on Slashdot.

Rick Klau:

Set up Feedster queries for you, your clients, your competitors, your friends… you get the idea. If anyone is talking about things that matter to you on a weblog somewhere, you’ll know about it. Within the hour.

My friend Mike puts it best:

We did a Ctrl+Alt+Del on Matt’s car 😀

We got the OBD-2 connection to work on my car this evening.  We plugged an old P75 laptop into my 98 Golf, and whadda you know, the check engine light was due to a misfire in Cyl 2 a few days ago.  (I remember it now, I went into second right after starting the car while going up the hill, it was a mistake)  Mike cleared the error, we ran diagnostics again, error gone.

I’m glad I didn’t have to pay the dealer to find that out.

OSNews:

I installed Red Hat Linux 9 (Shrike) to see what has changed between it and the previous major version of Red Hat (8.0). The article features some installation screenshots and of course some post-install screenshots showing Bluecurve in Gnome and KDE (more shots here), user experience and discussion of whether you should upgrade or not.

BlueZ is a Bluetooth stack for Linux.  The list of supported devices includes several lower cost USB models (in the sub-$50 range).  I’m not sure what Bluetooth support might be baked into the kernel or OS itself, but Marcel Holtmann’s Bluetooth and Linux site has gobs of info.

I don’t exactly remember why, but Kenneth got me on that tangent.

OSNews:

Adobe put a page up (named ‘pcpreferred.html’) stating that the PC is preffered to run Adobe products. Adobe, along with Quark and Macromedia, are the long standing allies to Apple, offering the most important products that literally drive Mac sales in the Pro market. For historical reasons mostly, it is now of surprise to see Adobe openly verifying and backing up Digital Producer Magazine’s benchmarks and recommending PCs instead of Macs to their customers (even if PCs have indeed overtake Macs speed-wise the last 1-2 years). This is a blow for Apple, sales and marketing-wise and we will wait for a reaction from Apple towards Adobe.

Slashdot notes that Red Hat 9 will be released to paying customers on March 31st and the general public April 7.