Year: 2003

Sam Ruby nudges us gently with his new essay, Topology.

Lessig:

So as the cruel master of fate would have it, on the day that the Eldred case officially ended, I was at Disney World. I was tricked into going to Disney World. I thought the conference was “in Orlando.” But Orlando has apparently morphed into Disney World, and so when yesterday the Court refused a request to rehear the case (totally expected), I learned the news while drinking coffee from a Mickey mug.

I still believe that nobody could have argued the Eldred case better than Lawrence Lessig.  Hopefully we’ll be hearing more from him in the near future.

This just came down the .netwire:

Chris Kunicki discusses how to build a research library, a cool new feature of Microsoft Office 2003 that allows the easy research of external resources from within Office.

Here’s the MSDN article.  I’m not sure if the final version of Office 2003 will be as ugly as these screenshots, but I hope not.  It looks like the Easter Bunny got in a fight with Office 2003 and Office 2003 lost.

Juha Haataja is working on an essay about the weblogging community:

Currently there are three classes of bloggers: A, B and C class. The ‘A-class’ gathers most of the page-reads and referrals. There are perhaps 10-50 bloggers in this class. The ‘B-class’ consist of bloggers who once in a while get wider notice, perhaps thanks to the attention of an ‘A-class’ blogger. There may be 100-1000 bloggers in this category. And the ‘C-class’ contains therefore about 999000 bloggers (if the estimate of a million bloggers is correct).

Yes.

Via Freshmeat, mod_mono:

mod_mono is a module that interfaces Apache with Mono and allows running ASP.NET pages on Unix and Unix-like systems.

This release was updated to work with Mono 0.23. A bug that forced all Apache requests to be served through mod_mono was fixed.

Simon Fell:

I know someone recently was ranting about the casing of attribute names in OPML htmlUrl vs htmlurl, but I can’t find the post now. Anyway Chris Pirillo ran into a problem trying to import his OPML into blogToaster, so it will now happily accept either htmlUrl or htmlurl. Enjoy!

Is one usage or another the ‘defacto’ standard?

Of course, the answer is the age old be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send.  Send only the correct usage, but be prepared to accept any variation on the standard.

Tom Stoppard:

Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?

I don’t usually post QoTD’s, but Stoppard is the man.

Jon Udell is confused with an RSS feed with a version number of PI.  The offending prankster is Mark Pilgrim.  Here’s the offending RSS feed, which of course validates as RSS.  And of course I wrote all of this before looking at the second screenshot that explains everything.  Disregard.

It looks like I’ll be missing James Robertson’s talk at XP DC tonight.  I’ve just got too much work to get done.

OSNews:

MozillaQuest has an exclusive mini-interview with Linus Torvalds regarding the SCO-IBM law suit.

Diego explains why the spaces beta isn’t out and also outlines the work that he is doing on the storage system.  It looks like he is going to sacrafice a little bit of disk space in order to use less than 64 megs of RAM:

The new version will take up maybe 10-20% more on disk (with a higher peak usage as well), but will have upper bounds on the RAM used. The goal is, again, never to breach the default maximum JVM heap of 64 megabytes when the number of items stored (email, RSS, calendar entries, etc) is 100,000 (yes, one hundred thousand items).

Roogle got slashdotted today.  Congrats, Scott.

I was hoping to find interesting comments below the article, but alas.  Normally I can’t verify how little the angry slashdot readers actually know, but in this case I can.  It’s obvious that they know very little about RSS, weblogs, the development process of Roogle, and how cool it really is.

Sad, really.

Removing the logo was probably a good idea though.

Matt Raible:

Well, I went ahead and ordered the Communicam from AT&T and it should be hear in 3 days or so. Julie thinks I’m crazy, and she’s probably right that the camera sucks, but I want to be a moblogger. I want to post pictures and blog, in real time. My first adventure? I hope to mophoto Erik at the Denver JUG meeting a week from today. That is, if I get the camera and figure it out in time.

Good luck, moblogger.  The camera will probably suck, but that’s half the fun.  You get to enjoy some of the great crappy photos that toy camera enthusiasts strive for.  And it won’t have Barbie or Nickelodian plastered all over it!

I have decided to pick up the first Symbianish/Java/Bluetooth/Camera/etc phone that I can get my hands on for a reasonable sum.  I’m leaning towards something like the Nokia 7650 or a Sony Ericsson T310 or P800 or so.  I’ll probably have to jump ship from Sprint PCS in order to do so, but I haven’t been impressed with any of their ‘PCS Vision’ phones yet.

Sprint is holding my phone number hostage, and they extract a ransom every month for it.

Here’s an idea that I had earlier this afternoon while playing real life frogger in traffic.  (Aside: I’ve had similar productive thoughts in similar situations, I’m not sure why.)  I was pondering the easiest and best possible way to go about putting a gallery of images online.

Yeah, it’s been done a million times, but I haven’t seen a solution that seems to work for me.  I shy away from Gallery and other similar dynamic overkill projects after seeing a few sites get hijacked.  I liked Russ’ Scrapbook, but it’s still too much work for me (I’m lazy).

So, I guess I’m proposing that it would be really cool to have a blosxom-like photo gallery.  I have a feeling that this could be accomplished with a blosxom 2.0 plugin, though I haven’t looked into it enough to see if it would elegantly work or not.

One thing I’m worried about is violating the blosxom zen.  A blosxom module should be fairly standalone, easy to install, without heavy dependencies and stuff like that.  I just don’t know how much native image support there is in Perl.  Most of the image manipulation stuff I have used in the past have just been wrappers around standalone programs that a user might not have in a hosted environment.

I’d really like to just plop some fullsize jpegs in a folder and have an index with thumbnails generated on the fly without me having to do anything.  Something like that sounds like it could be a resource hog.  Maybe the plugin/program could save or cache a copy of the thumbnail, that would make most of the CPU intensive stuff only happen once.  That’d be cool.

I just wanted to get these thoughts down before they trickled out of my head.  If someone else ends up tackling this before I get around to it, cool.  Otherwise I’ll try to work on it in my ‘copious spare time’ and let you know how things go.  If someone else has already done this, let me know and I’ll point to it.

Someone should hire Les Orchard.

The J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.0 seems to have taken a lot of headaches out of J2ME development.  I messed around with the Wireless Toolkit 1.x a few months ago, but didn’t get much further than the basic demo.

I really like that I don’t have to drop to the command line in order to build or deploy.  I don’t have to write a jad in a text editor, it’s generated for me.  All of the basic properties are easily accessable.

Of course, if I were working on a project in a production situation, I would probably use Antenna, a collection of ant tasks for Ant 1.5.x that allows you to build, preverify, create JADs, and do all the other stuff that all the cool kids are doing.  It’s released under the LGPL.

I’ll definately have to look into this.