Goodbye
My grandmother passed away this evening. She had lived about eight years after a major stroke. I saw her this afternoon and she was sleeping, tired. She was ready. I’m sad but I understand. They say she wasn’t in pain. She left so many good memories behind. She will be missed and remembered.
If my blog becomes sparse any time in the near future, this is why. If I post more than I usually do, it’s a coping mechanism.
Phosxom: A php-based version of blosxom. Awesome stuff!
The Cocoa Files: Gobs of tutorials and musings by Andrew Stone.
The Washington Post: A quick history of ThinkGeek, though it fails to mention OSDN or VA Linux, er, VA Software.
Fairfax-based ThinkGeek, founded in 1999 by a group of four friends, grew out of $25,000 in proceeds from a previous business that never took off. The founders designed the site themselves, wrote and created most of the products on their own, and spent evenings packing and shipping orders while running the “real” business, an Internet service provider, during the day.
Webmin: The web-based control panel for Linux destined to save your ass goes 1.000 today. Here are the changes in this version from freshmeat:
This release adds a Linux Firewall module for configuring iptables, renames the old PPP Usernames and Passwords module to PPP Dialin Server and adds support for configuring mgetty and setting PPP options, adds the Voicemail Server module for configuring vgetty, improves Irix support for NFS, disks, and filesystems, quotas, and file manager, adds ports to RedHat 7.4 and UnitedLinux 1.0, adds support for JFS filesystems, and includes lots of other minor bugfixes and features.
If you run your own Linux box, webmin can save you tons of time. Sure it’s not maintaining your system by editing hundreds of files in vi. It’s not for purists. It saves tons of time tho. I’ve been using it since the 0.790 days or so, and it hasn’t caused me more than one or two headaces over the years. It has definately saved me tons of time, though.
IBM: Securing Dynamic Web Content.
This article details how to secure dynamic content on an Apache Web server. Topics covered include general security issues pertaining to dynamic content, securing Server Side Includes, configuring Apache’s Common Gateway Interface, and wrappering dynamic content. The article is targeted primarily at Webmasters and system administrators responsible for maintaining and securing a Web server; however, anyone with a need or desire to server dynamic content will benefit from the topics covered. A basic understanding of Linux commands, permissions, and file structures is assumed. [via #Rootprompt.org]
Aaron Swartz: “The Wayback Machine Adds Diff” Great stuff. To see Dave’s live-editing technique, here’s a diff from last year.
If you find you need it in two different classes/apps you should make it into it’s own class. Reuse should never be underestimated.
Your code isn’t nearly as cool as you thought it was when you wrote it. Be sure to fix it next time you’re in there.
Exhibit 13: A Blue Man Group project that displays pieces of paper that flew into the Bronx after that World Trade Center attacks. It’s well done. [via The Desktop Fishbowl]
Slashdot: Canon made a mistake and announced an 11-megapixel camera two weeks too soon. PC Magazine covers it and I’m sure that as soon as it’s “official,” DPReview will have a writeup on it.
IBM Alphaworks: IBM Alphaworks announced IBM Lightweight Services:
IBM Lightweight Services (LWS) is a J2EE (JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) application that provides an event-driven hosting environment for lightweight services. Lightweight services are persistent, transactional, server-side programs developed in lightweight programming languages such as JavaScript and Python. Developers of these services have high-level, extensible access to IBM middleware, enabling services that communicate via Web services, Sametime instant messaging, and high-performance publish/subscribe. The LWS development tools, paired with a flexible deployment and administration model, allow rapid composition, installation, instantiation, and debugging of server-side applications.
The screenshots look great, it looks like an extremely easy to use application. The page also features links to scritpting tutorials and example agents. [via Newsforge]
Brent Simmons: An XML-RPC demo using Cocoa on OSX 10.2:
Mac OS X 10.2 includes a new WebServicesCore framework which allows one to make XML-RPC calls from Cocoa apps. (And Carbon apps, too, by the way.)
This article will demonstrate making a very simple XML-RPC call and getting back the result. This article assumes you’re familiar with Cocoa: I won’t go through the steps involved to create outlets and actions and so on.
Note: I haven’t seen any documentation for the WebServicesCore framework yet. This article is based entirely on reading the header file and building an application that works. Please email any corrections or clarifications to me (brent at ranchero dot com).
ESPN: Johnny Unitas dies of a heart attack at 69. The hall of fame quarterback will be missed.
Infoworld: “AvantGo CEO quits as company is delisted.” Suck!
ComputerSurplusOutlet.com: It looks like a great source for that junk you don’t have that you need to complete a project. A 3 gig notebook harddrive for $30? Hell yeah. Thanks go out to Kenneth Hunt who pointed to an article called A Very Manual Debain Install.
Strange Attractors and TCP/IP Sequence Number Analysis – One Year Later:
The goal of this follow-up is to evaluate any subsequent security measures implemented by the vendors in this field since the release of the original publication, and to evalute several systems that were not covered earlier. For the purpose of this document, we assume that the reader has read the original publication, and has an understanding of the methodology and terminology used.
This article is only for the hardcore network geek, but the illustrations show rather blatantly which OSen have hardened TCP/IP stacks and which don’t. [via Slashdot]