Matt Croydon::Postneo

Author: Matt Croydon

  • No Fluff, Just Stuff

    Erik Hatcher will be speaking at a No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium in Northern Virginia in late March.  I’ll try to rustle up the cash to attend.

  • Case Mod Backlash

    NewsForge, broadcasting a press release:

    Qli Technologies writes “Qli Linux Computers is proud to announce our newest product, dubbed “Pre-Modded” Linux Computers.

    This begs the question: what are bleeding edge geeks to do now that case modding has gone mainstream?  You can buy pre-windowed cases at CompUSA or via mail order through major companies.  You can buy your computer with a cold cathode glow preinstalled.

    I predict a back to basics push in the case modding community.  A beige-box grass-roots effort.  They’re going to do something with those old four foot high server cases.  They will be works of art, albeit minimalistic.

    Zen and the art of computer case modding.

  • Geek Girl: Linux or .NET?

    Geek GirlWired News:

    For her part, Sullivan has a theory about the mystery woman’s true geek roots.

    “I think she’s a Mac user,” she said.

  • 1200 bps

    Reverand Jim:

    Yes, that’s right, 1200 baud.

    I used an HP 1200bps external modem.  To connect to BBSes.  When I was in elementary school.  I remember tearing through the latest Focke’s BBS list.  It was the definitive guide to DC-metro BBSes.  I’d print it out on my Okidata dot-matrix printer on fan-folded continuous feed paper with the holes on the sides.  Then I’d grab a pen or pencil, mark up some interesting BBSes, fire up Procomm and try to connect.

    Fidonet.  LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon).  TradeWars 2002.  SysOPs.  Wildcat!  WWIV.  RemoteAccess.  Renegade.  Fidonet.  Commander Keen.  Wolfenstein 3D.  Lemmings.  1200.  2400.  9600.  14.4.

    *Sigh*

  • Baby

    Good luck Sam and Sue.

  • Wireless Automotive Area Networks

    Wi-Fi News:

    See the USA with a Wi-Fi array: I’m trying to hard to fit the jingle to the story, but automotive Wi-Fi may take off, with units in the car talking to mobile components to transfer music, misc. Imagine having a gateway in your car that provides an Car Area Network (CAN). Imagine bridging the CAN to GSM/GPRS as needed. Imagine bridging the CAN to a hot spot location when you’re near one. Imagine that you can do that today with…a Macintosh running OS X or a Windows XP box with the right hoo-ha. But in-car, permanent components would be better. [via TechDirt]

    I wouldn’t use CAN, as CAN in Automation has that acronym covered.  I wouldn’t use CANOpen either.  I stumbled across the technology which is usually carried over an RS-232 or similar connection and usually connects components and sensors at a very low level.

    Random: I found out about the stuff at a real time and embedded conference several months ago.  How about WAAN?

  • Nokia Battery Life

    Russ:

    Be smart and have longer battery life. Works for me.

  • Mono Debugger Released

    Here’s the scoop from the mono site:

    • After six month of extensive development, Martin Baulig has released the first version of the Mono debugger. The Mono debugger is written in C# and can debug both managed and unmanaged applications, support for multiple-threaded applications and should be relatively easy to port to new platforms.
    • Details of the release are available in post.
    • The debugger contains both Gtk# and command line interfaces. The debugging file format used in Dwarf (its already supported by our class libraries and the Mono C# compiler; To debug C applications, you need a recent GCC, or to pass the -gdwarf-2 flag to gcc).

  • 802.11__insert_something_here__

    Wi-Fi News has some greate coverage of the future of 802.11(insert something here).

  • Newest Red Hat Beta

    OSNews:

    Late last night Red Hat made available on its ftp web site a new beta of its upcoming Red Hat Linux 8.1 distribution, codenamed Phoebe 8.0.93 (they used the same codename as in the first beta a month ago (8.0.92)). ISOs here, documentation, release notes.

    I’ll hold off until 8.1, but from the looks of things, it shouldn’t be too long.

  • Phoenix Themes

    Wow, there are a lot of themes available for Phoenix. [via Sean & Scott]

  • Secure Mail Relaying

    Jeremy Zawodny has set up a mail relay using Exim that he can access from anywhere using SSL.  Nice!

  • LinuxWorld Hype

    CNet:

    Linux advocates will convene at a trade show in New York this week to promote their wares, tout customers, swap business cards and make their case that the operating system is growing up.

    We’ll see.  Recent ‘trade shows’ that I have attended in recent years have been a poor imitation of conferences past.  This holds true for PhotoPlus East and PCXPO.  Linux is getting bigger and bigger though, so I’m not sure how the show will be.

  • Usability

    Jeremy Zawodny:

    Controls in the cockpit that do very different things should look and feel different. Ask and usability expert abou that one.

  • My New Digital Camera

    DSC-U20I finally did it.

    After years of having several (broken) toy digital cameras, I actually bought a real one.  It’s frickin’ tiny, made by Sony, and shouldn’t suck too much.

    The batteries are still charging.  I’ll definately be using it to cover LinuxWorld Expo this week.

    <happy digital camera dance/>

  • Downloading FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE

    I’m downloading FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE on the off chance that I’ll get some free time to play with it.  I really like the Early Adopter documentation, it makes me feel cool.  The release notes are also fun to read while downloading.

  • NetBSD Gets pThreads!

    NewsForge:

    Jan Schaumann writes “Jason Thorpe has merged the nathanw_sa branch with -current. NetBSD now has a high performance, modern kernel thread implementation using Scheduler Activations in the main source tree. This work was performed by Nathan Williams with contributions by several other developers.”

  • FreeBSD 5.0-Release

    OSNews covers FreeBSD 5.0-Release:

    The OSNews mailbox has already been flooded with submissions that the FreeBSD 5.0-Release is already present on many mirrors around the world (i386 USA mirror, Europe one), but the CDs are not present to all mirrors as we type this. 5.0-Release is the next-big-thing for FreeBSD as it includes great new features (some not even found on other OSes) like SMPng, KSE, UFS2, GEOM, MAC etc. Read here for a quick explanation on what is what. The release has two CDs, and for the minimalistic, there is a mini-distro (225 MB) with only the essential tools in it (e.g. no X11). This version will also see FreeBSD supporting more platforms, like the IA64, SPARC-64 etc.

  • 25 Years of Animal Magnetism

    Megnut:

    “For years, our customers have asked us to make and sell various items with our animals on them. We are pleased and proud to present our first collection of official O’Reilly animal swag.” So, if you’re a geek and you know it, um, buy a t-shirt (and clap your hands if you want to, too).

  • Groove Web Services: Almost There

    John Burkhardt:

    It looks like we’re really close to shipping Groove Web Services. Things have turned out quite well. Between the beta and v1 we were able to move closer toward the feature that Jon Udell mentioned. It was tricky and it makes programming to GWS a bit harder, but the benifits are huge. Basically all we did was to move the user information out of the service URL and into a header. (Yes, more SOAP headers. Yummy!) What this does enables is the ability to share URLs obtained from GWS with other users. As long as the other user has authority to access the same resource in Groove they will be able to resolve the URL.