Author: Matt Croydon

Red Hat Install

My first impression is: Those are the sharpest fonts I’ve ever seen under Linux, and this is during the installation.  Everything is cleaner and more refined.  I checked out CD’s 1-3 using the CD checker, which I think is a great idea.  Hopefully I won’t need CD’s 4 and 5.  Selecting groups and packages are much easier.  Instead of having to go package by package after selecting the groups you want, you can just click on ‘details’ and select the packages you need.  That right there feels a lot like Windows’ Add/Remove control panel.  The icons are cute too.

Some of their defaults are a little screwy.  Under ‘text based internet’ in the Custom installation, Lynx and Pine are not selected.  How the hell else would I surf and read mail while sshing in?  🙂

Too bad I don’t get to play solitare during the install… Well I can, but I have to do a little KVM switching…

[… more to come …]

ZipZap Update

Just about every Radio Shack in the DC Metro area is out of those stupid little cars, but somre are expecting new shipments tomorrow.

I can also see a big modding community growing quickly.  I wonder if the Lexan bodies I had for slot cars back in the day will fit this chassis.  The plastic bodies on these things are kinda heavy.

As a sidenote, I love the ball bearing sets available on the Kyosho Mini-Z’s. 

ZipZapUpdateUpdate: The Kyosho cars are great, but they weigh in at about $100US.  You can get your foot in the door with a decent Tamiya or similar 1/10 scale RC race for about twice that.  For spending that kind of money, I would really suggest going 1/10.  They’re far more tweakable, and you can sink far more money tricking them out.  I had a Tamiya TA-02 Opel Calibra (no longer made) that was extremely fast along with an F-1 (here’s something similar) and a Mini Cooper.  I blew waaay too much money on these badboys.

Also, I installed a stiffer suspension in my eclipse, and it seems to handle a little better.  Repeat after me: I will not hand wind a motor…

Greg Klebus:

I’ve got my shiny brand new SV25 server.

The rest of his post includes some notes about keeping power consumption and noise down.  For instance, he’s chosen a Via C3 866Mhz chip.

Once he gets his new server up and running, he’ll be switching his blog to http://greg.klebus.com/blog/.  As soon as the new blog goes live, I’ll switch my link over, as it’s generated on the fly from my subscriptions.  I’ll be interested to see what other cool fun stuff he does once he has a dedicated box to play with.

If you code Java and aren’t reading his blog, shame on you.

Matt Raible:

Installing Red Hat, Part 1. I decided to start installing Red Hat 8.0 with disc’s 1 and 2 – and hopefully 1) I won’t need disc3, or 2) it’ll be done downloading by the time I do. The coolest part so far – they actually have a test at the beginning so you can test your CDs. What a lifesaver – I’ve installed Linux many times and found out on disc2 that my CD or iso image was bad.

I’ll probably start installing RH8.0 this evening.

Rob Fahrni: Pet peeve #8,910,023:

Touching a .h file that causes the entire world to rebuild.

Mark Pilgrim: There are four lights:

One year ago today, my (now former) manager told me to shut down my weblog and remove all traces of it from my server. He tried to convince me that the Internet was too small to mix the professional and the personal.

ZipZap RC Cars

These things are crack.  They’re “micro-rc” cars.  They’re called ZipZaps and you can get them for $19.95 at Radio Shack.  Of course, you also have to get The Fast and the Furious street tuner kit.  Well, you don’t have to, but I did.  I’ll have to save a video clip for another day, but here are some pictures of my tricked-out rig.  Yep, that’s the green eclipse from TF&TF.

If anyone in the DC metro area wants to race, my car is a 49Mhz model, so get a 27Mhz model and drop me an email.

Keep an eye on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog for coverage of the O’Reilly OSX conference.  His keynote coverage is here.

Ask Bjørn Hansen on Google:

Did people ever worry that Yahoo was too powerful? I can certainly see how you can worry that Google is getting too important. What would you use if you couldn’t get to Google? Bookmarks again? I didn’t think so.

 I use bookmarks.  It’s called my weblog.  🙂

I saw linkage somewhere to the T-Mobile Sidekick, the cool and trendy cel phone-palmtop-PDA thing.  It’s out now.  Who will be the first Sidekick weblogger?

I’m still not done downloading Red Hat 8.

I’m confused.  IBM announced the Deskstar 180GXP today.  I thought that they sold their hard drive business a few months ago?  Oh well.  Specs are here.  After the problems that their previous hard drives have had, I can’t say that I’d put one in a 24/7 box.

Jeremy Zawodny has a great entry about his experiences with MySQL on both FreeBSD and Linux.

If you don’t have a preference, use Linux. You’ll be happier. Trust me.

David M Johnson has some interesting thoughts on blogging tools as commodities:

Anyway, this made me start thinking about weblogging software as a commodity. If it is a commodity that means you can’t really make money selling weblogging software. You might be able to make money selling weblogging related services as weblogger.com does, or you might be able to make your existing software more valuable by adding weblogging features to it. Seems to me that weblogging features would make sense in an HTML editor/publisher, portal software, or even an e-Commerce suite. I wonder what other categories of software would benefit from weblogging features.

Sam Ruby announces Apache Axis 1.0-RC2:

I’m pleased to announce release candidate 2 of Axis release 1.  All unit and functional tests pass with this release.  The SAAJ and JAX RPC TCK tests pass.  All bugs reported as of this morning targetted for the 1.0 release are resolved in this drop.  Pending feedback from people like yourselves, this might very well be it!

• What is it?
• Where can I find it?
• What is the plan?
• Where should I send comments?

Axis is the Apache Group’s implementation of a SOAP server.

Russell Beattie:

Can’t…. post….

no…. bandwidth…. downloading…. Redhat… 8.0….

-Russ

I wish this were the case for me, I’m only getting about 20k/s out of my download.  🙂

Inbox Buddy: J. Scott Johnson’s latest project.  It’s a spam detector, color coded organizer, and a lot more For Outlook.  He’s also Blogging the product.  Great stuff!  I’d definately download it and try it out, except I don’t use Outlook at all.  I’m in front of so many boxes during any given day, that I find it easier just to deal with all of my email over a web-based interface.

Uche Ogbuji at WebServices.Org: “The Past, Present and Future of Web Services, part 1.”

Web services are somewhere around the crest of their hype cycle and currently the darling of the prevalent media. This cresting is like that of other technologies in that it precedes full development and maturity. Web services, an undoubtedly important technology regardless of media interest, have a good deal of development ahead of them. Those who find success using Web services will be those who understand the technology fundamentally: its motivations, the reasons why some components are winning out over others, and the likely course of maturity.

I’ll read the entire article this evening, but so far it looks like a very worthwhile read. [via Loosely Coupled]

See what David Carter-Tod is reading: He has posted his Amphetadesk page.  Voyeurism at its finest!

MIT Open Courseware went live today. [via Serious Instructional Technology]