Matt Croydon::Postneo

Year: 2003

  • Good For Google

    Ovidiu Predescu:

    Tomorrow will be my last day working at HP, I’ve accepted an offer to join Google. While I’m sure I’ll miss a lot of colleagues at HP I’ve worked with, I’m really excited about the new job. I’ll get a chance to work in the most successful start-up in the Valley at the moment, and get to do some really exciting things.

  • Sam Gentile’s Introduction to Managed C++

    Sam Gentile unleashed his Introduction to Managed C++ for O’Reillynet this afternoon.  Congrats, Sam!

  • LinuxWorld Blogger Meetup?

    Update: Please go to my wiki page on this subject.

    I’ll be in New York City to attend the LinuxWorld Expo for probably one (perhps more if it’s worth it, though this poor compsci student only has an expo pass) of the following days:

    • Jan 22 – Matt Croydon?
    • Jan 23 – Matt Croydon?
    • Jan 24 – Matt Croydon?

    I know that there are several NY local bloggers out there and I’m sure that many more will be converging on the Javits center for one or more of these days.  Shall we arrange a weblogger meetup/dinner/gathering?  Something like Spicy Noodles or RTP Lunch for the Linux blogging crowd that will be on hand?  How does does 6ish (1 hour after exhibit hall closes) sound?  Somewhere, I’m not sure where.  Suggestions?

    If you’ll be around one or more of these days in the general LinuxWorld Expo/New York area, drop me an email with when you’ll be around and I’ll add you to the list.

    Any RTPers?  Anyone traveling from the west coast?  Any fellows?  Any Senior Editors at Linux Journal?

    Yeah, yeah, I know this should be done wiki-style.  Perhaps this will be motivation to set one up.

  • Source Code Formatter for Weblogs

    Rogers Cadenhead:

    Useful utility for webloggers: A Source Code Formatter and DeFormatter for publishing source code in a weblog or other site. The formatter converts “<“, “>”, and other characters into HTML character entities that can be safely published (via FuzzyBlog).

  • Graffiti, We Hardly Knew Ye

    Slashdot bears the sad news: RIP Graffiti.

  • W3C Standards

    Mark Pilgrim is fed up with W3C standards:

    I migrated to semantic markup that has been around for 10 fucking years and they go and drop it. Not deprecate it slowly over time, mind you, but just fucking drop it. Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I’m still stuck in a dead end.

    Wait for it…

    Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.

    I’m migrating to HTML 4.

  • metaWeblog Clarification

    Dave posted further clarification on what to do with things like the source element in the metaWeblog API.  Here’s a word of advice to all: even if you’ve read a spec a million times, re-read it before you claim to not understand it.  It will save you from looking like a complete moron.

    Trust me.

  • Sam in Seattle

    Sam Ruby will be in Seattle in two weeks.  On an unrelated note I was in West Virginia last night.

  • It’s Not Just Me

    David Johnson in response to Sam Ruby’s post about weblog APIs:

    It hurts my head too. I’d rather see a SOAP interface where everything is specified by WSDL, or a RESTLog-like interface where everything is drop-dead simple.

    I’d love to see a SOAP interface.  I love parsing some WSDL and ending up with everything I need to use it generated for me.  I’ve done it in both Java and .NET, and it’s wonderful.

    Simultaneously, I would love to see a minimalistic RESTful interface.

    I just hope that the major weblog software vendors go for it.

  • Forecast: Scattered Blogging

    Today will be a light blogging day.  I’m taking my little sister to see Avril Lavigne this afternoon and after that I’m driving my friend Adam to West Virginia.  He starts school again tomorrow.

  • PostgreSQL and OS X

    X-Archetypes:

    Apple’s Internet Developer has an interesting article on PostreSQl and Mac OS X. The PostgreSQL installation on OS X is examined and well as interaction with Java, Perl and PHP.

  • Mark Pilgrim’s CSS Safari Hack

    Mark Pilgrim has been looking into hiding CSS from Safari.  He has come up with a hack that can be used to deal with CSS for Safari only.

  • Nothing

    It doesn’t look like I have anything interesting to say today.

  • Weblog Moderation

    While I was crossing the street (Connecticut Avenue in Kensington, Maryland: 6 lane divided highway) this evening, I thought to myself: why isn’t my weblog moderated? [context is important here]

    I link to a lot of stuff. I write some personal stuff, and then every once in awhile I write something quite worth reading.  Why can’t someone view my weblog at a Slashdot threshold of 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, or -1 depending on what they’re looking for.  If they viewed my weblog at 3, they’d catch some of my better work, probably the stuff that gets me flow from various sources.  I would probably set the default for my weblog to 1, that way the stuff that doesn’t matter would get modded down, but everything else would be 1 or above.

    The stuff deemed useless by my readers would be modded -1 Redunant, Unfunny, Dross or something of the sort.  Users who found a particular post helpful would rank it +1 Insightful, Interesting, Amusing, Funny, Productive, Useful, etc.  It could be done on a per-post basis or someone could moderate several posts at once on the main page.

    Now here’s the kicker for everyone who complains about weblogs always being in reverse-chronological order: There’s a little menu on the sidebar that allows you to view posts by date (chronological or reverse chronological) OR by rank (highest moderated weblog posts first).  This way someone can come to my weblog and view my stuff staring at the most intelligent things I’ve said.

    I can see this easier to implement (in theory) with a dynamic weblog (like Roller) but I’m sure Sam could hack this up in about 6 lines of Perl (I’m being generous) and the obligatory new template.

    Moderators: Please mod this post up.

  • Weblogging Best Practices: Updates

    Reverand Jim is thinking about weblogging best practices as they pertain to updating content.  I tend to link out to external pages for longer standalone content and use an Update: to note changes or updates if they occur recently after the post.  If it’s been awhile (> 1 day) I will usually link back to the update in the present.

    My solution sounds like a 1-2-3 hybrid.

  • San Luis Obispo

    Doc Searls stopped in SLO (San Luis Obispo for those who have never been there) while on a road trip back to Santa Barbara.  The funny thing is that I stopped in Santa Barbara for lunch while driving between LA and SLO.  I don’t think that I knew that Doc lived in Santa Barbara at the time.  I also didn’t try to search out net access in coffee shops at the time.

    Here’s an entry from right before the trip.  I had been blogging with Radio for a little more than a month at that point, though I started Livejournaling in September 2001.

  • Revocable Open Source Licenses

    Nathan Myers thinks out loud about the revocable nature of open source licenses:

    A quick scan through the Free Software licenses I have immediately on hand showed one thing in common: none say the rights are waived perpetually or irrevocably. On the face of it, it seems, I could release a program under the GPL, and then announce five years later that it and all derived works are under my private control again.

    The rest of the article goes into ways to resolve this sticky issue.  IANAL so most of this stuff flies over my head.

  • WebCore in NetNewsWire?

    Brent is looking into embedding WebCore into NetNewsWire:

    WebCore is the framework developers can use to add Safari’s HTML renderer to their applications. There’s a pretty good chance NetNewsWire will use this. Step one for me will be to get it working with a simple test app.

    I really wish my old 8500 (hotrodded with a 400MHz G4 card) were able to (easily) run OSX.  I’m missing out on all this cool stuff.

  • Red Hat 8.1 In April

    LinuxToday confirms what I suspected: Hat 8.1 is due in April:

    Linux software vendor Red Hat plans to fortify its desktop Linux lineup by shipping Red Hat Linux 8.1 in April, a 32-bit technical workstation this quarter and a full-fledged corporate desktop in the next six to 12 months, the company confirmed.

    Today’s Linux Celebrity Deathmatch: UnitedLinux vs. Red Hat Corporate Linux.

  • New Bill Kearney Weblog

    Heads up: Bill Kearney has set up a new weblog.  His new blog also has an RSS feed.  RSS subscribed-a-go-go.