Peter Drayton is moving to Seattle to keep the CLR in check. Sweet!
Author: Matt Croydon
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IM Conversation of the day
MattSchwackAway: You can dream about some weird effed up stuff if you read a computer programming book right before you take a nap.
adam: LOL
adam: oh man, it’s funny you say that. i actually did that just recently too
MattSchwackAway: 🙂
MattSchwackAway: it’s scary sometimes
adam: what did you dream about? (i’m curious)
MattSchwackAway: I don’t remember, but it was event-driven and object oriented.
adam: LMAO
adam: oh man(Adam’s screen name changed to prevent AIM spam.)
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Jeremy Zawodny’s continuing PHPCon coverage, Dirk Elemendorf’s closing keynote:
He then threw us a bit of a curve ball by revealing that a sizable chunk of their PHP code is being replaced by Python. The silver lining in the story is that SOAP is allowing them to keep much of the customer-facing stuff in PHP and the back-end code in Python.
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VIA Eden Invisible Case Mod
I’ve spoken about it several times, so here’s a perfect example of how NOT to run your VIA Eden itty bitty motherboard:
Don’t try this at home, kids. Now it’s back to cleaning up my room.
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Rogue Books
Here are a bunch of books that managed to sneak off my bookshelf and were partying at different parts in my room:
If you can’t read any of the titles, click on the image for a 640×480 version. And yes, they’re sitting on top of a Sparc 5 (170MHz, 128MB RAM, 2+ gig hd). Here they are from top to bottom: Learning Perl, Web Services Essentials, Programming Web Services with XML-RPC, Python Cookbook, Using Samba, Core Java 2, Volume I, TCP/IP Network Administration, AXIS: Next Generation Java SOAP, Java Development With Ant, Java How to Program, Core PHP Programming, Oracle8i: The Complete Reference.
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Keith Devens: PHP one-liner for Weblogs.com for RSS:
XMLRPC_request(“rpc.weblogs.com”, “/RPC2”, “rssUpdate”, array($name, $address))
Of course, that uses Keith’s XML-RPC library.
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Jeremy Zawodny reports on Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHPCon keynote:
On Thursday morning, Rasmus Lerdorf (now working at Yahoo) gave the opening keynote. (Expect it to appear here someday.) He covered physics, rocket science, the web problem, and a little bit of PHP along the way. One of his main points was that the web problem isn’t fundamentally difficult. Unlike complex web software from various commercial vendors, PHP provides the basic tools to need to build solutions to “the web problem” without feeling like you need a degree in rocket science to get started.
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Allie Rogers points out NewzCrawler, which looks like a pretty sweet Windows rss aggregator. The features list is impressive. It also does Usenet and allows you to post to your weblog. Gosh darn cool!
Update: I was able to slurp my mySubscriptions.opml file, and NewzCrawler is now importing all of the feeds that I currently follow. Very cool stuff.
It’s a cute little app, but I found myself going to the ‘make newspaper’ tool, which is basically like what I already have with Radio. The app could use a little refinement, but it’s cute.
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The new toy from Palm: great, but where’s the killer app?
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Tiki: Version 1.0 looks very clean. Here are some additions in this version:
- Blogs (including the XMLRPC Blogger API!)
- Articles and submissions
- Banners system
- Dynamic content system
- Integrated search engine
- New rankings and RSS feeds
- configurable home page
- Editable templates
- Many bugfixes and suggestions
From the Tiki freshmeat page:
Tiki is software written in PHP4 to develop Web sites and applications. It includes a Wiki, Weblogs, a CMS system, a banner system, and a lot of other features. A permission system and admin panel allows any configuration for the application. It is template-based using Smarty and supports multiple languages and themes (CSS). There is complete documentation for users and developers.
This looks like a clean and professional system if you are looking to implement a wiki. Tiki includes a heck of a lot more, too.
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Aiming to kick-start a sluggish market for handhelds, Palm has unveiled two new devices for mobile professionals and businesses.
They’re cool and all, don’t get me wrong. I don’t know if I could justify $500 for PalmOS. If I am going to spend that kind of money, I would probably sink it into a PocketPC. The shot or two of PalmOS 5.0 looks great though. It reminds me a bit of Apple’s Aqua. The high end model has a 166MHz processor. This is great, but isn’t that about a third of the horespower of a similarly priced PocketPC?
They also have a Treo/Blackberry/PDA/Phone model that will sell for $549. Good luck on that one. It’s a great idea, but will people buy?
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There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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Keith Devens asks:
I’ve always wondered this: How does an experienced developer dive into the code of a project he’s never looked at before? I mean, do you look at the makefile, see where the main is, and try to follow the execution of the program? Or do you first look at the file layout to try to get an idea of how the app is structured? Do you just open a file that looks interesting and start reading, following the chain of included files around until you get an idea of what some important files are? How do you start building a mental model of the structure of an application while you still have incomplete information as you’re reading the source, when you didn’t have any documentation in the first place?
You get the idea. I bet people who are accustomed to reading other people’s source on a regular basis have a definite process they go through, and the experience they have helps them grasp the structure of a program quicker than others would be able to. Are there any secrets?
Coffee is required, but beyond that, I don’t know. I have never grokked source in a professional setting, usually for me it is makefiles or a little source if I’m curious.
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Scott Johnson has coverage of PHPCon 2002.
Wow. That and “Outstanding” are pretty much my comments on PHP Con 2002. Not only did they put on a great conference, everyone learned something (and I mean everyone), there were great networking opportunities.
Read the rest if you are a phphead.
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Linux was originally written as a general-purpose operating system without any consideration for real-time applications. Recently Linux has become attractive to the real-time community due to its low cost and open standards. In order to make it more practical for the real-time community, patches have been written to affect such things as interrupt latency and context switch. These patches are public domain and are becoming part of the main Linux tree.
A lot is going on in the embedded Linux community. I attended a real-time and enbedded conference about 6 months ago, and there were several vendors there, each with their own customized toolchain. Several of those vendors also had programmers that worked on kernel code, that then fed back to the community. Good stuff.
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CNet/Michael Kanellos: Dell thinks small.
The OptiPlex SX260 is roughly the size and shape of a standard dictionary. The computer weighs 7.8 pounds and comes with an Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron processor and six USB ports. The computer can be mounted horizontally, vertically, under a desk, on a wall or behind a flat-panel monitor.
[…]
The SX260 (the s stands for small) measures 9.7 inches by 9.5 inches and is roughly 50 percent smaller than Dell’s next smallest desktop. The most basic configuration sells for $599. A typical configuration will sell for $1,499 and come with a 2GHz Pentium 4, 256MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, a 15-inch flat panel and a CD-ROM drive.
And to think that I paid close to three grand for a decked out Dell PII-450 with a 19″ monitor years ago. Markets change.
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Doug Kaye has just posted an essay entitled The Web Services Technology Pipeline. Read it and let him know what you think.
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The Jakarta Commons Digester is a popular open source utility that facilitates XML file processing. This article provides an overview of Digester, followed by an example that uses Digester to parse an XML configuration file. [via NewsForge]
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OSNews/Clinton De Young: Debian 3.0 Step by step (by step by step by step…)
This walkthrough does not cover every last facet of installing Debian, but it is quite thorough, and even painfully detailed. I wrote this with somebody completely new to Linux and Debian, but somewhat familiar with their computers, in mind. I hope people new to Debian find it useful.
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I’m a trebuchet addict, so I had to post this for posterity [metafilter]:
Trebuchets , Trebuchets, Trebuchets: where geeks get medieval on thine ass. Some people have a love of history, spare time and an excuse to buy more tools. (His Earth Viewer is cute, too) Also needed are open expanses–like in Australia. Note: Punkin’ Chunkin’ (©donkeymon 11/03/01) 2002 is coming up in a week. Will Team Banka’s Pumpkin Slayer return? Also, there’s Gulf Wars XII for y’all next March. And, courtesy Nova, for the shockwave addicted, Play Destroy The Castle! Manual here. Also, here’s the Virtual Trebuchet java applet. And last, massive trebuchet linkage.
