Author: Matt Croydon

Incorporating Rendezvous into Your Cocoa Applications, Part 2 by Mike Beam is now online at O’Reillynet.

Today we’ll build the Rendezvous service publisher and browser, and in the next column I’ll show you how to give the application the ability to talk to other instances of the application on a network.

OpenBSD Journal has a roundup of webmail solutions, including Squirrelmail, IMP, Aeromail, and TWIG.

Infoworld:

While Web services’ dynamic nature will make management a higher priority than some client/server technologies, the focus on managing solely the Web service layer will invite some pioneers into the management market. Gartner says Web services brokers and network vendors will provide most of the early management tools as the need grows and the market matures.

I’m going to the premiere of Washington Interns Gone Bad tonight at Art-O-Matic.  My older sister, pictured in this Washington Post article, has a role in the low budget movie.  The production even has a weblog.  Rock!

In local news, a parking garage under construction partially collapsed a few miles away from where I work.  The Washington Post reports:

Two people are dead in the partial collapse of a parking garage being built in Rockville.

Montgomery County Fire spokesman Pete Piringer said another person is missing, while a fourth has been pulled to safety and taken to Suburban Hospital.

More as it happens. [Mapquest location of collapse] [Google News roundup]

Greg pointed this out:

Just found Flock—a J2EE RSS Aggregator (similar to Amphetadesk). I will give it a try, I definitely need one of these things. And it’s Java after all…

CNET:

IBM on Friday unveiled a set of programming tools specifically designed to bring Web services to mobile devices.

The new Web Services Toolkit for Mobile Devices (WSTK) provides developers with tools and Java-based runtime software for building Web services applications that can be accessed on three mobile devices: Windows CE-based Pocket PCs, Palm devices and BlackBerry handhelds from Research In Motion.

It’s not Java, but I’ve got pocketsoap on my PocketPC 2002 PDA, and it kicks much ass.  I’ll probably give it a whirl though.

I’ve been looking into developing for the Sharp Zarus lately.  It looks like my options are dealing with a minimalistic QT environment (I’ve never done any *nix GUI programming) or work with the equivalent of Java Applets on the Zarus.  I have a feeling that I might not be satisfied with the level of control and robustness of the Java solution.

Who knows?

Xmlenc 0.13 has been released:

The xmlenc library is a light-weight XML Encoding Library for Java. It fills the gap between a light-weight parser like SAX, and a heavy-weight XML output library, like JDOM.

Changes:

This release removes all deprecated methods and fixes a bug introduced in 0.12.

Here are the details: [homepage] [freshmeat page] [sourceforge project page]

Oh no!  Jeremy Zawodny is being sent to the bullpen!

Charles Miller goofed:

I meant to type: dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/fd0. I typed dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/hda. I have utterly destroyed the partition table on my primary hard drive. I have no backups. I am so completely fucked.

Don’t drink and su.

But later, Linux made it all better:

I overwrote the first megabyte of my primary hard drive. That’s the boot sector, the partition table, and a large chunk of the start of my root filesystem. I have now recovered to the point where I believe (believe, but have not tested) I can reboot the system and have it come up in one piece. I’ve recovered my partition layout and built a new table. I’ve fscked the root filesystem and restored the obvious damage. I was even able to backup /home to another drive, just in case the recovery hasn’t been as successful as I thought.

Respect the OS:

Ask any Unix system administrator, and they’ll tell you about the one time they stopped respecting the OS. Unix respects you, it trusts you, because the only way to gain trust and respect is to offer it yourself.

Congrats for a successful recovery.

David Gammel points out some wicked things that the US House of Representitives has been doing with XML:

Check out xml.house.gov to see what the U.S. legislature has been up to with XML. If you are in DC, there is a presentation next week about their efforts as well.

Hmm, it’s next Wednesday evening.  The funny thing is that I was thinking of attending a DC-LUG meeting next Wednesday for the first time.  You know you’re a geek when two really geeky things conflict in your schedule…

Brad Wilson is on the ball tonight.  He pointed to several things that are on the money:

Chris complains that Linux is ugly. Sam says that Windows installations have a half-life (something I truly believe was brought about by the invention of the registry). Robert thought Linux would come up and challenge Windows on the desktop, but was surprised when Apple became cool again.

My thoughts are, in this order: Try Red Hat 8.0.  That’s pretty.  Yes, Windows installs do have a half-life, I just never thought of it that way.  Apple is cool.  Here’s another one:

Are you listening, Apple? Make a tablet, make it sexy and hella-fast, and we’ll be there.

Ahh yes, the iPad.  Is it just a matter of time?

Thanks, Greg, for the encouragement.  🙂

The Register: Sun’s missing Xeon-killer discovered.

Linux and Main: Metrowerks, the Motorola subsidiary, is expected to announce that it is acquiring the embedded Linux company Lineo. The announcement could come as soon as Friday. [via NewsForge]

O’Reillynet: Use Metadata to Improve Your Pictures.

Aaron Swartz will be at Comdex. on a panel called: The Computing Re-Revolutionaries: Business, Consumers, or Both?

That is all.

Chris Sells has been cranking out the content lately.  Tonight’s installment is WinForms Data Validation.   It’s a good quick tutorial on validation for all the .NETters out there.

I wonder if this weblog is in any way undesirable to both Java/Open Source people and .NET people.  I’m an all of the above kinda guy, but do potential .NET readers get turned off by my Open Source/Java stuff and vica versa?  I know I should really set up channels so that people can tune out the noise and only focus on the topic that interests them, but I’m lazy.  It’s on my list of someday, which was listed as right after the recent template shift.  We shall see.

Coverage by Paul Festa at CNet on recent activities at the W3C:

The Web’s leading standards group on Thursday issued a trio of documents on the architecture of Web services and launched an unprecedented effort to standardize Web services lingo.

Here are the docs:

• Web Services Architecture (working draft)
• Web Services Architecture Requirements (working draft)
• Web Services Glossary (working draft)

Uche Ogbuji’s article on proper XML output in Python went live today:

The main problem with simple print is that it knows nothing about the syntactic restrictions in XML standards. As long as you can trust all sources of text to be rendered as proper XML, you can constrain the output as appropriate; but it’s very easy to run into subtle problems which even experts may miss.

WebServices.Org points to two interesting articles this afternoon.  The first article from rediff.com contains a quote from Bill Gates:

“Tablet PC and XML Web services on .Net will bring about a revolution in using the converging technologies to such an extent that in the current digital decade, the use of paper and other intermediaries will become minimal,” Gates asserted.

The second article is from IDG’s IT World.  It highlights some proof of concept projects and some gosh darn useable applications of the Google API.

Alexandre Dulaunoy at Advogato has released a draft paper entitled ” Good security practice for a Free Software release.”

As everybody knows, a lot of trojaned Free Software has been found. A vast majority of them are not using OpenPGP signed checksum file. I’m currently trying to make a basic HOWTO to make a Free Software release including OpenPGP signature. This can minimize the risk (as long as the user is checking the signature ;-). Here is a draft in PS and PDF format.

Don’t hesitate to provide comments and feedback following your own experience of the issue. (I hope to include the chapter in the Software Release HOWTO afterwards)

There’s a review at Slashdot of Java Development with Ant by Steve Loughran and Erik Hatcher.  I’m about halfway through the book myself.