Author: Matt Croydon

CNet: Microsoft unveils new Web services tool

Microsoft is scheduled to formally announce Content Management Server 2002 at the Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, Calif., where the company also plans to reveal more details about the next versions of Outlook and Exchange.

And pricing:

Content Management Server 2002 will retail for $42,000 per processor. Companies running multi-processor servers could pay considerably more for the product. Microsoft said the software would be generally available by the end of the year.

That would get expensive on my quad Xeon box.  Ha!  Just kidding.

Blogging has been slow over the weekend as I have a ton of stuff to get done before the Web Services Devcon.

Joe Walnes: Extreme Programming, lego style.

I was lucky enough to attend an Extreme Lego Workshop last week. It was a three-hour session to give teams the feel of doing XP. It’s designed for members of a delivery team (developers and managers) who are interested in experiencing the XP process first-hand.

Gred Klebus has put Red Hat 8.0 on his Shuttle SV25:

I must say I’m impressed with the new Red Hat. The best looking Linux desktop I’ve ever seen. Fonts are looking decent, even the Postscript ones. Loads of application, including Open Office, new Mozilla, etc.

I just wish one day Java JREs would be shipped with every Linux distribution…

I’d really like to see a good stripped-down install of Red Hat 8.0.  We all know it is one of the prettiest Linux distros out there (currently), but how is this going to perform on a headless server?  I’m glad to see a standard GCC3.2 (I think) and not the GCC2.9x-redhat stuff that many people were not happy about.  What else is under the hood?  How does it stack up?

Joe Walnes has a good wrapup of CVS goodies.

Brian W. Carver:

Imagine a company, the Rio Idiota Acaparar Agua (RIAA) bottled water company which sells bottled water.  Now the RIAA is extremely worried that people who have bought their bottled water may drink it, fill the bottle back up, and then share it with their friends and neighbors.  The RIAA insists that their customers’ friends should buy their own bottled water, and that sharing water, even if it is of a lower quality than the original, is a violation of the RIAA’s right to be the sole distributor of Rio Idiota Acaparar Agua bottled water.

There’s more in this analogy for you.  The sad thing is, bottled water was mentioned more than once at the Cato debate I attended. [via Greplaw]

David Johnson reports in with Russell Beattie’s situation:

Russell Beattie has had a tough week, but he is OK – at least in the physical world. In the digital world of cyberspace, however, he is not doing so well. First, he lost his client by accidentally installing Linux over his Windows partition. Next, he lost his server because his ISP, CWIHosting.com, has mysteriously shut down his account. CWIHosting tells him this is because of “police reasons.” The CWIHosting support people told him that he needs to email the CTO and CEO to get any further information. Unfortunately, they are not responding to his emails. He is a little worried that he might not be allowed to get into his account and rescue his weblog archives. That is a scary thought.

Russell thinks that “police reasons” might be actually be a mis-spelling of “policy reasons” and perhaps he simply overloaded his shared Java VM by misconfiguring something when he set up OSCache. I hope that is the case. Anyway, Russell is setting up a new account at JohnCompanies.com ISP and hopes to be back on line by Monday or Tuesday. Good luck Russell!

I hope Russell is able to get things sorted out as quickly as possible, I miss him already.  One of my old bosses has a website at CWI, and I haven’t heard anything bad about them up until this point.  Here’s hoping Russell is able to get in to rescue his data.

David Johnson is finishing up Roller for a 0.9.6 release.

Videoblogging

I think Leo Laporte has the right idea about videoblogging.  He has recently posted video clips from his show and video clips from an appearance at Arundel Mills.  It’s interesting to see how this is different from Jeremy Allaire’s experiments with Flash-based video blogging.

Jeremy’s flash-based video blogging seems to be pretty easy to use and is an excellent proof of concept.  I think the problem lies in the content.  I think I’d rather see geeks out in the field, at an event, covering a topic, rather than seeing them in front of their computers.

Charles Miller:

To anyone working in a software company. My computer is my own. You do not make assumptions as to how I want to use my computer, nor do you make assumptions as to how much I want to use your product, just because I happen to be installing it.

Paolo announced today that Evectors is distributing an Italian localized version of Radio.  Cool!

Steve Loughran: The Wondrous Curse of Interoperability. [via Sam Ruby]

Dave Winer:

Kevin, who works at Apple, says we should wire RSS up to Rendezvous. Basically when someone pops on the network who has an RSS feed, this info would be available to all people on the network. Of course as a Windows user I wanted to know if this would work for me. We’re going to look into it.

I want one.  I haven’t looked at the code or the docs, but with Apple open sourcing the Rendezvous technology, it shouldn’t be impossible to implement it and extend it on *BSDs, Linux, and even Windows.

DPReview posts their Photokina 2002 report:

Just posted! Our updated Photokina 2002 Show Report covers twenty two manufacturers over five pages of images and product detail, links back to news articles and manufacturers websites. Photokina 2002 was another huge show, but this time had a much stronger digital influence.

Would the Chemistry Grad Students Bar the Doors!

The 2002 Ig Nobel’s have been distributed.  You can look at the telecast.  I usually catch it on public radio (Friday after Thanksgiving).  It’s a blast.

Werblog:

That’s two spams a day for every person on the planet.

Mark Pilgrim: The History of the Tilde.

In fact, Jukka has written a lengthy treatise on why the tilde should not be used in URLs, a treatise which, I feel obliged to point out, contains a tilde in its URL.

Clearly, the tilde is underappreciated.

As with every piece Mark writes, you should read it.  Now.

Ingo Rammer and several other people that will be atending the Web Services DevCon will be at the Boston .Net Users Group meeting Wednesday night.  My plane gets in at about 4:30 Wednesday.  Murphy willing, I might be able to attend Sam Gentile’s .NET/COM interop guest spot.

Russell Beattie is recovering from his data loss:

I feel like I’m using someone else’s computer. I’ve re-installed everything I can, but it’s far from the same. I’ve lost total momentum – though in a weird way, it does feel good to start from a clean slate. But I seriously spent the day in mourning… I’m such a geek. It’s just data, right? (Yeah, but it was MY data).

Both Sides of the Fence

Sonia Arrison released a new article today at Tech Central Station.  It’s titled “Source Socialism.”  (Observant readers of my weblog will also note that Sonia Arrison also wrote the piece that was the opposite of James Miller’s Let Hollywood Hack.)

“How can I make a living if everyone is using free software?” asked one student. That’s a good question, and Mr. Perens didn’t offer much of an answer. There is some employment in the open-source market (in service and support), he said, and he also argued that some forms of proprietary software wouldn’t go away.

The article also links to Bruce Perens’ new organization, Sincere Choice.  From the Sincere Choice website:

We believe that there should be a fair, competitive market for computer software, both proprietary and Open Source.

Back to the article now:

Open source software products are usually free of charge and are created and altered by many different individuals. The Linux operating system, which can be used instead of Microsoft Windows, is an example of an open source product. Linux is popular with many technical folks because of its quality, but not all of them have political feelings about it.

I’m always getting myself in the middle of things.  When I was growing up, I was constantly mediating arguments between friends.  And here I am again.

I program in Java using Eclipse, an open source IDE.  I also program in C++, usually in either Visual Studio 6 or Visual Studio .NET.  I also do some VB.  And some PHP.  I run Windows, Linux, and various *BSDs.  Now that’s a mix from both sides of the fence.

And so I’ve come to appreciate both sides.