Year: 2003

I found this with Feedster this morning:

Roadside assistance was never more fun.

Trunk Monkey…it’s a little big so if you have a slow connection you may want to skip it.

I so need a ‘trunk monkey’ button in my car.

Russ@Mobitopia points out why many 802.11b hotspots in a confined area can make things suck.

Apparently WiFi is a little too popular at CeBIT, with over 76 hotspots.  The problem is, they were all interfering with each other, bringing effective range to a few meters and slowing down transfer rates like crazy.  It looks like bluetooth made it through unharmed, though.

Carlos Perez points to MIT’s Haystack Project, a “universal information client” that looks like it has a clean and useful GUI interface.  It was written with SWT.

CNet:

A new proposal from a group led by IBM and Microsoft could conflict with an earlier plan for reliable Web services messaging.

A few notable Slashdot articles today:

Mozilla 1.3 has shipped.  Grab it here.

Mandrake will release Corporate Server 2.1 (based on Mandrake 9) with x86-64 support.  The press release is here.

Also, Red Hat announced several enterprise-level operating systems, including AS (advanced server), ES (entry level), and WS (workstation).

Long story, but I’m not feeling too well today.  Hopefully things will improve.

Scott announced the official launch of feedster, the RSS search engine formerly known as Roogle.

I miss the voyeur tab, though I’m sure it screamed for abuse.  I’d be really interested in a periodic summary of metadata ala the Google Zeitgeist, as I’m still curious about what people are searching for and how much data from RSS feeds are being indexed.

CNet:

The chipmaker on Thursday announced a new matrix of model numbers for its forthcoming 64-bit chips for workstations and servers. Instead of using a four-digit model number, similar to the scheme for its Athlon XP processor for PCs, the company chose to identify the new chips with a three-digit model number–resulting in models such as the AMD Opteron 140 Series–as a way to depict each particular chip’s capabilities.

Dude, does your box have a Hemi?

Roger got me interested in BitTorrent this evening.  I was curious about the anatomy of a .torrent file, so I dug into bencode.py from the BitTorrent source distro.  It’s all in python (with wxPython for GUI), so I felt pretty comefortable.  I put together a tiny little script that pretty much uses bencode to grab a .torrent file, analyze it, and print it to the screen:

C:/py/torrent>python btinfo.py http://www.turok.info/bt/a.u.s.a.s01e06.walters.first.law.suit-ftv.torrent
Connecting to http://www.turok.info/bt/a.u.s.a.s01e06.walters.first.law.suit-ftv.torrent
Announce: http://tracker.powerpuffgrrlz.com:9696/announce
Name: a.u.s.a.s01e06.walters.first.law.suit-ftv
Piece length: 262144
File Info:
 Path: ['AUSA-1x06_-_get_the_latest_episodes.txt']
 Length: 342
 Path: ['a.u.s.a.s01e06.walters.first.law.suit-ftv.mpg']
 Length: 220427748

Here’s btinfo.py, released under the MIT license, which is the same license as BitTorrent itself.  It requires bencode.py from the source distro to be in the same directory as btinfo.  It’s a few dozen lines of code and is dumb simple to use:

Usage: C:/py/torrentbtinfo.py url.
Example: C:/py/torrent/btinfo.py http://url.com/file.torrent

I’m planning to play around with BitTorrent a little more in the future, stay tuned.

Steve Makofsky:

Could it be? A PC manufacturer designed a cool looking laptop, with all the bells and whistles? A Powerbook-like laptop for PC users!? Check out the new Sony Z1 laptop:

Based on Intel Centrino, 1.3ghz
4.7 lbs, 40gig, 256MB-1024MB RAM
14.1″ screen at 1400×1050!!!
Slim built in CDRW/DVD
Built in 802.11b, 10/100BT Network, Modem
Built in VGA connector
PC Card slot, 1394, USB 2.0
6 hr battery life (12hrs w/ double capacity battery)

The Sony Japan site indicates it has Bluetooth aswell. There’s even a teaser video now available.

Im drooling. I think I just found my next laptop.

I caught some teasage the other day, but it’s nice to see some specs.  It’s also nice to finally see ultralight ultrathin notebooks that don’t run Pentium III 800’s.

Slashdot:

AMD now offers three categories of processor for notebooks grouped under the Athlon XP-M brand. It labels them “desktop replacement,” “standard,” and the new “low-voltage”. AMD plans to make a desktop replacement in the notebook computer market using the Barton Core, a technology designed to double the CPU Cache.

Rael reports that Jeff Bezos survived a helicopter crash.

Gizmodo:

Bluetooth’s just barely gotten a foothold in the world of technology, and already Intel, Sony, Philips, Texas Instruments, Samsung and others are working on a new wireless standard to replace it. There’s no catchy name for it yet (just the designation 802.15.3a) but it’ll use ultra wideband and be 100 times faster than Bluetooth.

I object on the grounds that I haven’t been able to purchase ANYTHING that is bluetooth enabled yet.  No phones, PCs, cameras, nothing.  I know they are out there.  I could pick up a T68i and a bluetooth USB adapter.  I’m sure there are a handful of other bluetooh-enabled devices out there.  I’m a fairly gatget-aware person, perhaps my budget is the problem.

Bluetooth hasn’t frickin’ penetrated the marketplace yet.  Let’s replace it.

Not.

(Aparently some things have to scroll by twice before they register with me)

I don’t speak Hungarian, but Mobloggolas looks like it covers the basics of the Wired/CNet/Slashdot piece that was floating around.  It was published March 1, though somehow I had not noticed it in my logs until now.

I was happy to see that they used one of my screenshots later in the article.

CNet has a roundup of Intel Centrino and Pentium M laptops:

From the start, notebook vendors have raced to speed up their notebooks but almost always at the expense of battery life: faster processors meant limited time away from an outlet. Thankfully, times change. Rather than throwing more megahertz at computing tasks, Intel’s new Pentium M processor, which makes its long-awaited debut today, significantly increases notebook battery life. One notebook we tested–IBM’s ThinkPad T40–hit the seven-hour mark.

There are also seperate reviews of the seven models.  The first three are Centrinos, they run Pentium M’s with the 855 chipset, and they have Intel’s wireless pro (802.11b) chipset:

• Toshiba Tecra M1: 1.6 Pentim M, 60 gig hard drive, DVD burner, bluetooth, 5 hour battery life.
• Acer TravelMate 803LCi: 1.6, 60 gigs, 512 megs RAM, 64 meg video card, 15 inch screen.
• Gateway 450: 1.6GHz PM, 60gigs, 256megs,32 megs ATI M7.  It’s light, thin and sexy.  They have an entry level model for $1499

The rest of the pack runs Pentium M but not one of Intel’s other required components.  Consider this corporate BS more than anything else.  Anything that runs Pentium M should have pretty swet battery life:

• Compaq Evo N620c: 1.5GHz PM, 40 gigs, 512megs, 32 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 7500.
• Dell Inspiron 600m: 1.6GHz PM, 40 gigs, 512megs, 64 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 9000.
• Dell Latitude D600: 1.6GHz PM, 40 gigs, 512megs,  32 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 9000.
• IBM Thinkpad T40: 1.6GHz PM, 80 gigs (4200RPM drive tho), 512 megs, 32 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 9000. 

There is also a product comparison chart that does a really good job at not actually comparing the models.  Also, if you click on the ‘specs‘ tab of the review, you don’t actually get any specs.  You just get a few disclaimers.  Haha, joke is on you.

Overall I was quite dissapointed with CNet.  I had major user interface issues and the complete lack of any information beyond superficial oohs and aahs pissed me off to no end.  In order to find out basic specs on these machines, I had to scroll down to the bottom of the ‘battery life’ page of several reviews.  Blegh.

It looks like the Pentium M computers will be $300-500 more expensive than their P4m counterparts.  That’s okay though.  If I can get 5-7 hours on a standard battery with a small sleek laptop, I think it’s worth a few extra bucks.  I would definately like to see a more detailed roundup done by one of the more hardware oriented sites.  How it looks is only a portion of what is important.

John Burkhardt on Mitch Kapor’s exit from Groove:

It is a tough issue and one that I’ve struggled with personally.  I have no details, nor will I, of what exactly Poindexter is doing with Groove.  But I don’t quite see it as the same moral dilema as that of creating the atom bomb.  From our perspective we are building collaboration software.  What people end up collaborating about is their business – not ours.  Maybe that’s niave.  Its hard for me to know where to draw the line.  Should Bjarne worry that the project uses c++?  Should Tim Berners Lee worry that it uses html?  What if it uses email?  The telephone?  SQL?  Groove provides a secure and decentralized communications infrastructure.  It doesn’t specifically help the government spy on us.

Every time I chat with Kenneth Hunt, it’s like a realtime weblogging linkfest experience.

Kenneth jogged my memory about LinuxWorld Expo.  I spoke to a couple of Sun guys pimping JXTA software, and they showed me a really slick Groove-like collab app.  It’s called Momentum by InView Software.  It’s not quite as portable as the Sun guys led me to believe, it’s currently only available for Windows, though a Linux version is due out soon.  Theoretically it should run on any platform with a decent JRE.  It could even run on OSX in theory.

When I really get serious about learning Japanese, Kenneth suggests Pimsleur.

He also motivated me into playing around with speex and speexdec.  Pretty amazing for the crazy compression rates.

I agree with Matt Raible:

Red Bull at lunch and I feel like I got a full night’s sleep!

Also worth checking out is Struts from Scratch by Kevin Bedell, which covers a struts install from zero to productive.