This is an Internet protocol suite Java library originally developed by ORO, Inc. This version supports Finger, Whois, TFTP, Telnet, POP3, FTP, NNTP, SMTP, and some miscellaneous protocols like Time and Echo as well as BSD R command support.
It looks like some of the implementations might be a little more low level than some of us might want to deal with, but that’s a ton of protocols to have at your disposal. Rock on, Jakarta. Get yer goodies here.
The list of speakers at PyCon DC 2003 has been posted to the PyCon Wiki.
I’ll be registering when I get paid on Friday.
CNet weighs in on the audioblogging/moblogging trend. I had a quick chat over IM with Paul Festa this evening. He was trying to figure out if this whole moblogging/audioblogging thing is going to be huge or if it’s a passing fad.
I think we’re all trying to figure that out.
Anil Dash describes an unusual side effect of the Google-Pyra deal: All the Google API users on Radio UserLand weblogs may be in violation of the license, which prohibits use with any product or service that competes with Google.
I suppose that one could take that to its logical conclusion and declare that Movable Type, Blosxom, and any other weblogging software both free and for profit using the Google API would be in violation of the license. Even if it’s free, it’s still competition to Blogger.
I’m really hoping that Google will handle this in the Right Way and not the Wrong Way.
Holy shit! Now slashdot?
From the Mono page:
Mono 0.20 has been released. Check out the release notes for an overview of the changes. You can get it here. There are no major features in this release, mostly bug fixes and performance improvements.
It looks like an impressive release, with remoting bits, threading tweaks, the beginnings of System.Security, System.XML fixes, Mono.Posix, lots of refactoring and bugfixing.
I’ll be upgrading my Mono install soon.
BBC News picked up the mobile weblogging story today. It seems to be very close to the article that Wired ran earlier this week. It’s interesting to note that I’m getting more conversions (people going from the wapblog page to other places on my site) from the BBC article than I did with the Wired piece.
I have seen some stir recently about implementing a CPAN work-alike for Python. I think that Python doesn’t really need a CPAN. First off, take a look at the Python Standard Library. There have been several instances where I was looking for some python code to do something, say parse a url string into several parts. Guess what? Python has a built-in module called urlparse that does it for you.
Sure, there are things that the Python Standard Library can’t do. For that, distutils makes it really easy to distribute and install Python packages or modules. All the end user should have to do is python setup.py install. Most of the time, required libraries or modules will be included or linked to on the web or in the docs. It’s true that with distutils you don’t have a way to travel down the dependency tree to install things in the order neccesary, but with all the goodies in the Standard Library and distutils, that’s not usually an issue.
I have a feeling that a CPAN workalike would duplicate a ton of work that has already been done in the Python community. It probably also won’t help all that much.
Also, many of the modules that you might use to argue the neccesity of a CPAN-like archive should alternatively be folded in to the Python Standard Library. They’d probably be a lot more useful there.
I have a feeling that there might be some discussion about this at PyCon DC, as I think someone mentioned it on the PyCon Wiki at some point. Just a quick thought/pseudorant.
I’m working on a python library/script to convert an rss file to a browsable wml file. Right now it can be used as a library and run from a cron job, though I’ll release a cgi example at some point too. No source code for you yet, it’s still too ugly. Here’s a picture of my cel phone browsing the WML of my RSS feed before this post:
It’s not clickable or really functional yet, but right now you can see a list of titles from my RSS feed at the time I ran the script. It uses Mark’s RSS parser, which does all of the heavy lifting as always.
Expect more over the weekend (read: sunday).
Running low on disk space again, this time filling up 200 megs. I might have to cut down or eliminate cross posting to categories.
Russ has something here:
Okay, I didn’t look this up to see if someone else is doing it, but I was thinking about Moblogging and the idea of real world annotations – where you can mark a space using GPS and then someone else can “see” what’s happening at that space when they run into it with their cool high-tech mobile phone.
I love the idea of tagging a unique number or identifier to a place and then being able to access it later. I don’t know how well little stickers with numbers would be recieved by law enforcement, government, and tree huggers. Damn tree huggers.
In a system set up like this, I’d also love to see many ways to get at the data. Cel phones would be able to access it via WAP/WML, MMS, SMS, etc. I’d also like to see clients for Java-enabled phones and possibly native Symbian-OS clients. I’d like to see XML-RPC, SOAP, REST, and other web service interfaces to the motagging data so that we can get at it in the way that is easiest for any particular situation. (Sorry, it seems that when I get excited, alphabet soup tends to happen)
Laptops on 802.11b would offer a richer interface to the data, possibly with links to or geographical representations of other nearby tags. There would be a tagpop top 40 which would monitor the most popular tags across the globe so that we can see where new and exciting things are happening, and finding out where in the world is ‘so last week.’
You could pop up an interface on your phone to find any tags that are within three city blocks of you. Eventually the tags would cease being little stickers posted everywhere and the technology would fill in with GPS other next-gen phone features.
I’d love to see MoWiki’s pop up, though they’d have to be easy enough to annotate (read: easier and less intimidating than current wikis) and the wholse system would have to be resistant to abuse.
I would claim ownership of the tag at the sub shop down the street and tell people that the pizzas taste great if there’s a line out the door but are not so good when it’s slow, or to get the Chicken Suvlaki on a sub roll, but watch out cause it’s messy. Someone would chime in a week or two later and say that the meatball and cheese sub is a little bland but great for $3.50.
It would be really hard to filter out tag spam. Signal to noise ratio might be an issue.
The idea has tons of potential.
I was thinking about creating a web service that would spew out the current terrorist threat level. When it got to the implementation phase, I decided that it was probably not wise to poll a web site at whitehouse.gov in order to parse out the current threat level. I thought about it, did it a few times, got it right, and decided not to deploy it.
Secret Service Agent: “Can you explain why a machine on your network has polled the whitehouse.gov exactly every hour for the past two weeks?”
Matt: “Uhh…”
Needless to say, I was quite happy to find out at xmethods that RBailey at Tinetics has recently released a security level service. Here’s my quick (less than 2 minute) app utilizing this service:
The code behind this in C# is a joke (after importing the web reference using the WSDL for the service:
homeland.securitylevelService s = new homeland.securitylevelService();
string alert = s.getsecuritylevel();
lblAlert.Text = "Current homeland security level is: " + alert;
There’s a switch statement after that to color code the label’s background color based on the result. Nifty.
Yes, I was bored in class.
Man, I want a Lindows Laptop.
From the canon-digital-rumor-sales-rep-knows-nothing dept:
My Canon sales rep and the local tech rep stopped by. The official unofficial word is that there is indeed a replacement for the canon D60 digital SLR. It will most likely be announced around the 27th.
The sales rep isn’t saying much, claims not to know much, but Canon is flying all the sales reps into Vegas two days before PMA starts. This is significant because Canon usually sends their sales reps to PMA one day before the big show starts.
We’ll see what happens.
But this ain’t Kansas anymore. Blogging is growing up, and when we look back, the Google-Blogger deal will probably be seen as an inflection point, perhaps *the* moment when it all changed.
Oh, hi. Welcome to my home page. My name is Ev.
I’m a little busy right now, retooling for a different life. So I’ve taken the blog offline to clear my head.
Yep. Now he’s writing notes to himself:
As the sole user of your work “Communist Aggregator”, I’m writing to ask you to fix a few bugs and add a few features.
I wonder if he’s going to ignore himself or add features and tweak the UI like the angry user, er himself, suggests. <grin/>
Here are two good links from .netWire this morning. The first should give the various .NETWeblogs some flow:
If you are the kind of person who just can not get enough .NET information, we have just what you are looking for.Many fellow members of your .NET Community have decided (for one reason or another) to start blogging about their experiences with .NET, Software development, and a little splash of life at .NET Weblogs.
The second looks promising for ASP.NET developers:
The ASP.NET Starter Kits are sample ASP.NET applications that provide code to accomplish common Web development tasks. Each sample is complete and well-documented so that you can use the code to kickstart your ASP.NET development projects today.
It sounds like I missed a cool blogger meetup last night:
The blogger meetup was pretty cool. There were only 4 attendees (including myself), but it was agood crowd. It was also neat that the Lehrer Report (PBS) had a crew there to interview us – they are doing a story on bloggers, and wanted to talk to us about what we do and why we do it. They got the crowd they wanted – none of us do political blogs – there’s mine (Smalltalk), an economic blogger, and one on web advertising.
I’ll have to catch it next time around.
The meteoric rise of weblogging is one of the most unexpected technology stories of the past year, and much like the commentary that populates these ever-changing digital diaries, the story of blogging keeps evolving.
One recent trend is “moblogging,” or mobile weblogging. New tools like Manywhere Moblogger, Wapblog and FoneBlog allow bloggers to post information about the minutiae of their lives from anywhere, not just from a PC.
Congrats to Russ for the Wired linkage. I’m personally quite stunned to be on the recieving end of Wired linkage.