Author: Matt Croydon

Greg Klebus found a sweet case for the Via Eden:

I ran accross this and fell in love at first sight with the design. Just imagine a computer in a semi-transparent blue plastic breadbox from IKEA ($6.50). Way cool! If not for the nasty CD-RW drive, it would be a perfectly clean design (very iMacish).

Matt—if you’re reading this—I’d definitely go for this solution if I had a spare case-less VIA Eden.

Speaking of Matt and his VIA Eden: he seems to have lost the onboard network card due to power outage. What a bad luck. It would be a disaster for me and my Shuttle SV25, as having 2 NICs (onboard and PCI) is crucial for my box being a proxy server for other machines at home.

That’s a really slick case that doesn’t look like it would take much time to reproduce.  I should just take my Eden to Ikea some day and see what kind of fun things it fits in.  Someday 🙂

I’m a little confused about the right sequence of steps that I need to take in order to get Apache Axis to run successfully on my Linux server.  I’ve installed the JDK, Jakarta, and Axis.  The happyaxis.jsp page is quite happy, but I can’t build any projects using the Axis libraries.

I have followed the documentation to the best of my abilities.  I’m a little dissapointed at the docs, as I wasn’t really able to figure out what was going on.  I’d be referred around from one fragment of documentation to another, not sure what to do.  If I ever do get things figured out, I’ll try to post/publish/donate a howto or something like that.

Am I the only one frustrated with installing Axis?  I tried Gump, but ran into some problems getting it to run.  I’m probably misinterpreting something in the Apache docs.  Oh well.

Red Hat 8.0 Server

I installed Red Hat 8.0 as a server configuration last night on a PII350 with 128MB of RAM.  A nice install of server stuff without X, Gnome, KDE, and other stuff I don’t need on a server ran about 900MB.  Not too bad.

Dane Carlson pointed to a bunch of cool stuff yesterday and today, including a color pallete chooser, The Art of Software Development at DevShed, If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers, and Bloggers Proverbs.

Greg Reinacker: Web Services and Schema Validation.

There was a lot of talk at the DevCon about writing your web service interface first in WSDL, and then implementing it in code.  This is in contrast to the method that the current tools tend to encourage; for example, with VS.NET, you can write your code, decorate the methods with [WebMethod], and automatically generate the WSDL.  I wholeheartedly agree with the first way – define your interface first, and implement second.  There are things you can do this way that the tools just won’t do for you.

I agree, writing your WSDL first, generating stubs, and then filling them out makes tons of sense.  Read the rest of Greg’s post for more about restricting values, validating and all kinds of fun stuff.

Mikel Maron pointed to OEOne, a company with a pretty slick looking dashboard/desktop that looks slick and simple.  They have a standalone version which is an everything-in-the-box kind of thing.  They also have a desktop version which can run on top of RedHat 7.x, Mandrake 8.2 or 9.0.  Unfortunately it doesn’t run on Red Hat 8.0.  I’m booting up my Red Hat 7.x box to check it out.

The install procedure starts out pretty easily (as root):

$ lynx -source http://install.oeone.com/ | sh

or

$ links -source http://install.oeone.com/ |sh

Then a pretty easy to use wizard pops up.  It walks you through setup, detects what packages you have, which packages it might have to delete (double check this!) and what packages it is going to install.  It installs a modded Mozilla 1.0 among other things, and the full install totalled just under 100MB for me.  It’s currently slurping RPMs over the net.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.  Install, install, install.

It changed a lot of stuff on my system, I wouldn’t reccomend it to anyone who’s already using Linux.

OnLamp: Beginning Python for Bioinformatics.  This article wins todays prize of wtf title of the day.  It makes sense, Python seems like such a ‘glue’ language to me at times, but at first glance, I didn’t understand why Python and bioinformatics were in the same sentance.

Bioinformatics, the use of computers in biological research, is the newest wrinkle on one of the oldest pursuits–trying to uncover the secret of life. While we may not know all of life’s secrets, at the very least computers are helping us understand many of the biological processes that take place inside of living things. In fact, the use of computers in biological research has risen to such a degree that computer programming has now become an important and almost essential skill for today’s biologists.

I wonder if I’m included in the fifteen or so mySubscriptions sources in the RSS Explorer Tool beta or if the script is smart enough to check for your own file.  I’ll assume the latter until I find out otherwise.  🙂

Dave Winer:

A milestone for Uncle Davey today. I released my first beta since May. It’s a brand new piece of software, written with absolutely no cigarettes. Not one. My secret is to keep a jar of Planter’s unsalted peanuts in the kitchen. Whenever I need to pause and think before implementing something I get up and get a handful of peanuts. The little walk is important for some reason. When I come back I eat the peanuts one at a time. It takes about the same amount of time as a cigarette. I used to smoke to set a pace. Now the getting up and peanut eating does the job. Anyway, I’ll link to the beta tomorrow, it’s the RSS Explorer Tool. It’s going to build a new kind of community, and should get more exposure for feeds that aren’t in the top 100.

The next Real Time & Embedded Computing Conference will be in Tysons Corner on October 31.  I went to one in Maryland a few months ago, and while there were a lot of sales pitches, there was also quite a bit of good info for free.  There are several sessions on embedded Linux, embedded Windows XP, and some other stuff.  I probably won’t be able to make it, but if you’re in the area, it’s free.

Samba 2.2.6 Released

Release Notes indicate that it is mostly a bugfix.

This is the latest stable release of Samba and the last planned release of the Samba 2.2. branch. This is the version that all production Samba servers should be running for all current bug-fixes.

Those crazy kids are also working on a 3.0 version, which is currently in the alpha stage.

I love the Samba logo and I use Samba everyday.  I should really order a t-shirt.

Dave Winer: Beta: RSS Explorer Tool.

From the RSS Explorer page you can view lists of subscriptions from other Radio users. Each channel or “feed” has a checkbox to the left of its name. If it’s checked, you’re already subscribed. You can choose to subscribe or unsubscribe by clicking on the Subscribe button to the right. To see a different list, choose a name from the popup menu, below, and click on the View button. [via Radio Dev]

ITWorld:

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) said Thursday will add two seats to its board of directors, a move that may help heal a rift between the group and Sun Microsystems Inc.

Wired News:

Conference organizer IDG World Expo gleefully announced on Thursday that Macworld Expo is returning to Boston, its traditional home. But Apple rained on the parade, saying it will not be taking part.

I wonder how this will impact their product release cycles.  I have gone to a few satellite downlinks from MWNY, and they seem to have at least some new products for MWNY and MWSF.

Developer.Apple.Com: Using SOAP with PHP. [via Brent Simmons]

OnJava has an article about WSIL (Web Service Inspection Language) which generated some buzz from the sources I read via RSS.

Dane Carlson:

No more tears: “Onions that taste as good as the original but do not have you weeping over the chopping board are now a possibility, say Japanese researchers.”

I saw this fly by the LED display at the MVA (Maryland’s equivalent of a Department of Motor Vehicles).  It was one of the few items that scrolled across in newsticker fashion that didn’t involve fatalaties.

John Robb:

I really actually like Wired’s new redesign.  My only problem is that for some reason it takes 40-80 seconds to load.  Apparently, nobody else is getting this problem.  Any ideas?

I love the redesign!  It feels like a weblog.

FeedParser:

feedParser was created due to the lack of a good, flexable, classed based RSS feed parser for PHP. It has been built as a class and currently handles RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 feeds. For channels it grabs the title, description, link, and creator. For items it grabs the title, description, link, and date. It also provides a form of the date converted into the local timezone to facilitate cronological sorting of items. The dates are provided in UNIX timestamp format for easy manipulation by other PHP functions.

It requires xmlParser:

xmlParser was created due to the lack of a good, namespace aware XML parser for PHP. It is written as a PHP class. It functions as it is, however, many more features are planned. This class is still in the development phase. As it functions now, it will accept XML data as a string and present it as a struct.

Both programs are GPL and look like they could form the basis of some advanced projects in a shared hosting environment.  Props go out to Reverand Jim, the author of the two projects.  His weblog is here, his livejournal is here, RSS 1.0 feed is here, while his RSS 0.91/2.0 feed is over there.  Oh yeah, and RSS subscribed.

Werner Vogels and his CS students at Cornell are working on a project that could change the way that people collect, report, and view news.  Here’s a snippet from the abstract/intro:

The NewsWire project is to deliver a peer-to-peer system for collaborative real-time delivery of news items through a publish/subscribe interface. The systems is build using the Mariner system from the Astrolabe tool suite, a versatile tool for ultra-scalable and secure distributed state management. Astrolabe uses epidemic techniques and information aggregation to achieve the scalability and robustness needed.

It caught my eye at first because it sounds similar to NetNewsWire, but the project has a very high cool factor on its own.  Here’s another snippet I like:

Our premise is that current push solutions fail to take advantage of the collaborative power of the Internet. The solutions are often proprietary, and employ a one-to-many model where the producer is expected to deliver “personalized” content directly to each of the consumers. The approach clearly has scalability limitations. Yet despite these problems, there has been little activity by publishers of the many real-time news sites to provide a coordinated solution for this problem. We believe that the time has come for an Internet-wide infrastructure for efficient real-time content delivery.

I have subscribed to Werner Vogels’ RSS feed to keep up with the project and the other stuff that he’s working on/thinking about.  I think I originally found a link to his blog from Peter Drayton.