Ugh. I just got back from a soda run at our local 7-11. I ended up waiting in line for about five minutes because someone in front of me wrote a check. It required both employees’ attention for several minutes.
I think they typed her number in about six times: five incorrectly, once correctly. The clerk hadn’t figured things out by the time I left.
I didn’t know that 7-11 took checks.
They shouldn’t.
CNet:
That’s the conclusion two Cornell University computer scientists came to after finding that computer networks tend to be “selfish” when each tries to route traffic by the fastest pathway, causing that path to become congested and slow.
If the routers that direct the packets of data could be programmed with some altruism, the information might be able to reach its destination a little faster while allowing other packets to also move more quickly.
This is really interesting. Sending packets down a route that is not neccesarily the fastest would result in better overall performance. That’s awesome. Where’s the altruism button on my router?
Seriously though, I think that more research in this area could definately help the traffic jam that is the internet.
Lets do more research and then apply that research to the next generation of Cisco (and other) routers, mmkay?
Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was put down on Friday afternoon, after developing a progressive lung disease.
Dolly’s birth six-and-a-half years’ ago caused a sensation around the world. But as many sheep live to twice this age, her death will refuel the intense debate over the health and life expectancy of cloned animals.
The type of lung disease Dolly developed is most common in older sheep. And in January 2002, it was revealed that Dolly had developed arthritis prematurely. She was cloned using a cell taken from a healthy six-year-old sheep, and was born on 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, Scotland.
<Insert moral, ethical, and scientific implications here/>
Zope Corporation announced the release of Zope 2.6.1, the latest version of the award-winning open source application server. The new release represents the successful global collaboration of community developers, as it is the first to contain a majority of enhancements from the Zope community.
Here’s one just for the Pythoneers in the house. Python3DS:
python3ds is a small set of Python routines for reading 3ds archives. It features support for animations, textures, and collision detection, and it is compatible with pyopengl and pygame.
New for the 0.2 release:
This release adds a new engine for animations, collision functions, exportation of 3ds files to Dict types, and a small demo.
CNet:
Analysts say it’s difficult to measure the extent to which open-source Java application servers, such as Tomcat and JBoss, have eaten into the revenue of commercial providers of Java application servers. But the growing popularity of the open-source application servers is undeniable.
[…]
Last year also saw freely available open-source application servers such as Tomcat and JBoss increasingly make their mark. While Tomcat is appropriate for less complex applications that serve up Web pages to PCs, JBoss is attracting increasing attention because of its completeness and compatibility with the J2EE specification.
I’m always glad to see stories like this. The only downside to JBoss is that any documentation more than a plaintext README or INSTALL seems to be only available in book form. I know that JBoss Group needs to make money, but I’d like to have enough docs available to me in order to evaluate the product. Then if I’m running an app on JBoss, I can grab the book to find out how to do stuff.
Mark also has some great tips and tricks to get the most out of 2.6.
Here are a few news items from Kenneth. The first is an announcement of Movable Type 2.6:
Version 2.6 Released movabletype.org: News
Great, and talk of a summer release of MT Pro…
Also, Blender 2.26 (GPL) Released:
More options in the growing open source graphics market. Note mulitple platforms.
the release notes.
Rael notes that OSX 10.2.4 is out.
Here’s the new news from the Mono team:
Buzzwordometer is fun. I found it via my referrers this evening. Here are my stats:
That sounds pretty buzzword compliant to me. Maybe my suit result will increase with more use of the word synergy. Buzzwordometer has the potential to be a quickly rising and popular meme, catch it before it’s last week.
It’s interesting to note that Erik’s site scores 814, and an amazing 999 on geek!
This module sounds really useful:
The Network Utilities Module for Webmin features tools like ping, traceroute, nslookup, nmap, whois, dig and an IP subnet calculator.
I think I’ll be installing that on my linux boxen. [via freshmeat]
Cool! Russ points to a post by David Watson in which he posts a bit of software that runs on Mono 0.19 and works a bit like Amphetadesk. I’m definately going to check this out.
I agree wholeheartedly with what David thinks about Mono:
I’ve been exploring mono to see what’s possible with current builds of the compiler and runtime and have been blown away by how much progress has been made by this team while maintaining a very high quality level.
One of V. Satheesh Babu‘s joys of Python is coverting dictionaries to classes and back again. Silly but cool!
Michael Radwin got his slick new business cards today.
I wonder if his yahoo mail account gets as much spam as mine does. 🙂
CNet:
Struggling video game maker Sega announced Thursday that it plans to merge with another Japanese company that specializes in pinball machines.
Sega did not provide financial details but said the merger with Sammy, Japan’s largest maker of pinball machines for pachinko parlors there, would take place in October.
Interesting. Sega!
Awhile back, I opined that a DC area blog meetup might be interesting. It turns out that there’s a blog meetup clearing house. The next DC area meeting is February 19.
I’ll do my best to make it (I’m a true slacker if I don’t, it’s just a few miles from my house), and if there’s too much talk about Iraq I can always play some video games…
Seriously though, it sounds like fun.
The shadowy, closely-analyzed photo of space shuttle Columbia’s underside was not snapped with cutting-edge military equipment, but by three researchers playing around with an old computer and an ordinary telescope in their free time, officials said Wednesday.
[…]
But contrary to reports last week, the photo was not snapped by one of Starfire’s extraordinarily powerful telescopes, which are designed to spy on enemy satellites and detect incoming missiles.
Instead, it was taken by Starfire Optical Range engineers who, in their free time, had rigged up a device using a commercially available 3 1/2-inch telescope and an 11-year-old Macintosh computer, the researchers said. The telescope was surplus laboratory equipment, kept in a cabinet at the Starfire range.
Thanks to MacSlash for pointing this out, but <rant>SHAME ON THEM for pointing to the printable version rather than the on-screen version. I think that’s bullshit. We’re using their resources (information), and they need to pay for it (ads). I also totally lost any chance of navigation from that story to elsewhere in the site. The other problem with the printable version is that at first it didn’t seem credible. It was text on a blank background with a teeny Washington Post logo. I thought it had been faked. I checked the URL to see if someone had spoofed the address (washing.tonpost.com or similar), and had to remove the ?language=printer to be sure.</rant>
I need more caffeine!
There is no ‘split’ between J2EE and .Net — the whole point of web services is to bridge the gap between the two. Tom Welsh explains why in a cogent opinion piece on The Register yesterday. I was amazed to hear recently from a leading manager at a big systems integrator that the biggest issue facing his firm’s clients was consolidation, as if putting everything on a single platform will solve everyone’s IT problems. Far better to concentrate on getting them to work in synch, I would have thought, and as Tom identifies, that’s the real objective of web services. So if .NET does one job well and J2EE does others better, then you can deploy the right platform to do each job without landing yourself with a horrendous integration headache.
Rael:
Per Dash’s and Kottke’s suggestion, not to mention finally having two moments to rub together, I’ve integrated comments and TrackBacks on my weblog. Just a few mods to MovableType’s standalone TrackBack implemention and I’ve comments and TrackBacks a la TrackBacks.
