Matt Croydon::Postneo

Year: 2003

  • Using Informative Blog Entry Titles +1

    Jeremy Zawodny:

    If you’re using a cute title rather than one which summarizes your post, I’m unlikely to click and read it. You probably don’t care, but I wanted to mention it.

  • CLIX.EXE

    Tomas Restrepo has been diving into the rotor source, starting with CLIX.EXE.  I can’t wait to hear more.

  • Groove 2.5

    I upgraded to Groove 2.5 this morning.  Thanks go out to Paresh Suthar for mentioning it.

  • Ximian Desktop 2.0

    NewsForge notes that Linux and Main‘s Dennis Powell actually fit inside that tiny little hut (along with other people!) at the Ximian booth at LinuxWorld.  He also managed to sneak a peek at Ximian Desktop 2.0.

  • Dumpster

    Here’s another reason why I love Kuro5hin:

    Dumpster diving, rather than the physical diving implied by its name, is actually more along the lines of fishing – it is as relaxed or competitive as desired, follows many seasonal trends and localizations, is an excellent social activity, and may just leave you with something interesting or tasty. Dumpster diving consists largely of rummaging about through others’ trash. It at once allows you to challenge and take advantage of the fact that people as a whole are very, very wasteful. And while poking through your neighbor’s trash this very moment would be a perfectly acceptable, if perhaps somewhat awkward, dive, there is a fair amount to know in order to keep the diving experience safe, enjoyable, and fruitful. For many, the thought of going anywhere near a smelly dumpster, let alone touching, wearing, or eating something from inside of it, is revolting. If you find yourself with interests duly piqued and revulsion to a minimum, then read on for a guide to the excellent world of dumpster diving.

    And a quick note to Chris Heilman: I believe that it’s pronounced Kuroshin, as if the ‘5’ were a l33t ‘s’.  Beware, though, I have heard it referred to as Kuro-five-in.  Congrats on 365 of 101-365!

  • ReiserFS

    Linux Orbit goes over ReiserFS basics. [via Linux Today]

  • Interview with Alan Cox

    ZDNet OZ has a quick interview with Alan Cox. [via NewsForge]

  • How to be a Programmer

    Earlier today, Slashdot pointed to How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive and Personal Summary.  It’s well written and makes a lot of sense.

  • AOL–

    This CNet headline just about sums it up:

    AOL loses Ted Turner and $99 billion.

    File that under ‘O’ for ‘Oops!’

  • tblib in Action

    Here’s a shot from the trackback section of a MovableType weblog I have running behind the firewall:

    tblib

    For the record, implementing these functions in Python was trivial.  The source for tblib is pretty darn short even with a bunch of comments.  I could compress it a bit, but I’d like to keep it as readable to the newbie as possible.  Perhaps grokking the source to tblib would be the next logical step for a newbie after reading my ftplib example.  After they read Dive Into Python, of course.

  • tblib 0.1.0 Released!

    I managed to pick up tblib this evening and start working on it again.  I implemented some basic error checking and autodiscovery.  (Yay!)  The previous version of tblib would just consume the XML that resulted from a trackback ping.  Now it parses the xml with a really simple regular expression (thanks Steve!).  If it was a successful ping, self.tbErrorCode will be 0 (which is a good thing) and self.tbErrorMessage will be None.  If something went wrong, self.tbErrorCode will be 1 and self.tbErrorMessage will hopefully help you a bit.

    Here’s an example for you:

    >>> import tblib
    >>> tb = tblib.TrackBack()
    >>> tb.autodiscover('http://Queue/weblog/matt/archives/2003_01.html#000007')
    >>> print tb.tbUrl
    http://Queue/weblog/mt-tb.cgi/7
    >>> tb.blog_name = 'My Weblog'
    >>> tb.title = 'This Post Will Ping That Weblog Entry'
    >>> tb.url = 'http://postneo.com'
    >>> tb.excerpt = 'I released tblib 0.1.0 today.  It supports autodiscovery...'
    >>> tb.ping()
    >>> print tb.tbErrorCode
    0

    Here’s the source: tblib-0.1.0.py.txt.  To use it, save it (as tblib.py) to a directory, create a script in that directory, and put import tblib at the top.  It doesn’t use anything bleeding edge, but I’m pretty sure you’ll need Python 2.x.  See my original tblib weblog post for additional info.  It is currently licensed under the GPL, though if that is stopping you from including it in your project, email me and I can dual-license it or something.  Also use that email link to send me any questions or comments.

    Eventually, I’ll code a setup script for tblib, and I still owe you a command line trackback client using tblib.

  • Limited Weblogging

    Rogers Cadenhead:

    Scott Johnson has hit the 20MB limit on Radio UserLand’s server, which can happen if you’re publishing a lot of images or multimedia files.

    I use Radio to upstream to an external server.  I just hit my 100MB limit on my web provider, so you can only imagine how long ago I would have reached my 40MB limit with Radio.  I actually only used Userland’s servers for a few days, because I already had web hosting.  Besides, I’d rather not be a number.

    I am a URI, damnit.

  • Java.OSDir.com

    O’Reilly’s OSDir now has a Java section.

  • Parsec to Go Open Source

    Slashdot:

    The Parsec creators have announced today that they are going to release the Parsec project source code early next month.

    Parsec is a 3-D space shooter.  The screenshots look impressive.  It looks like it is set up to be massively multiplayer.  It looks like it has potential.

  • Palm VNC 2.0

    Plam VNCnf0:

    PalmVNC 2.0 is a high resolution VNC client for palm. It looks really nice, guess i’ll give this a try soon.

    Wow.  It’s even GPL’d.  I haven’t found a whole lot of open source software in the Palm/Pocket PC arena.  Props are due to Oliver Gerardin, author of the program.

  • Return Union.State();

    Dane Carlson points to the full text of the State of the Union.

  • MovableType 2.6 Soon

    Michael Radwin notes that MovableType 2.6 is nearing completion.  It looks like MT users have a nice set of features to look forward to in 2.6.  I installed 2.51 in order to test TrackBack stuff, and it looked really nice.

  • The Middleware Company Learns About Java

    TheServerSide reports that The Middleware Company has released a white paper about J2EE best practices.  I guess they learned the hard way.

  • Oracle: 1.5 Gigs of Stuff + Apache

    Phillip Pearson:

    Installed Oracle last night (to see what it’s got over MySQL) and found that, along with about 1.5 Gb of other stuff, it installed a perfectly functional copy of Apache/1.3.22 (Win32), with mod_perl, mod_ssl and mod_fastcgi, (along with mod_oprocmgr and mod_plsql, which presumably let you get at Oracle’s internals a little better).

    Been there.  That 1.5 gigs of ‘other stuff’ takes quite a bit to install.

  • XP Bashing

    TheServerSide did a little bashing of eXtreme Programming this morning.  If you’d rather not apply XP and pair programming to your project, take a few things out from the XP philosophy (use Ant, integrate continuously, generate tests, etc) and apply it to a traditionally managed project.

    I think you can get a lot out of taking just one or two things from the XP philosophy.  Even if you’re one programmer on an assignment, generate tests and run them constantly.  Use JUnit to test your Java stuff, other test frameworks for other platforms.  Think about giving the customer something useful quickly, then adding features.

    You might not be pair programming, but it just might help.