Author: Matt Croydon

Sony DSC-FX77: Europe will get a 4 megapixel bluetooth enabled digital camera with a Carl Zeiss lens.  It means that you can take a picture and have it stored on a computer in the area, thereby bypassing internal storage media problems.  However, there is a gotcha: a 4-megapixel image takes 47 seconds to download.  A 640×480 only takes a reasonable 1.5 seconds to download, though the bluetooth camera may be a little more proof of concept and a little less practial than it is being touted as. [via Slashdot]

The announcement today by Sony Europe of its first Bluetooth enabled Digital Still Camera represents a significant advance in the design and operation of Sony digital cameras. This advanced feature lets the user share information with a range of computers and other devices supported by Bluetooth BIP (Basic Image Profile) from a distance of up to 10 m without any cable connection. Data transfer between the camera and a range of devices is smart, fun and convenient. As more and more peripheral devices develop BIP Bluetooth interfaces, the future vision of a wireless world comes closer to being reality.

Cape Science: A free [as in beer but I don’t think as in speach] WSDL editor.  It appears to be easy to use from the screenshot.  There is also an article on webservices.org about it.  Here’s a blurb:

The WSDL Editor is a graphical tool that enables you to create and edit WSDL definitions of Web services. It facilitates the creation of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files and manages your WSDL file syntax and validation. This enables you to generate and maintain Web service descriptions rapidly and accurately.

Millstream Software: A good article about setting up an openbsd box on DSL.

The Doc Searls Gnomedex Roundup:

I lost her card, like I lose everybody’s card–I have a positive business card valence.

That just made me laugh out loud.  The article is a great wrapup of what happened at Gnomedex.

Internet Traffic Report: It looks grim out there.  Currently the index is at 19, the lowest I have ever seen it.  I actually brought up the site while I was at school this morning and thought that the numbers were way low.  A quick spot check revealed that at least a few of the routers reporting a 100% packet loss responded fine to me.  I have a feeling that these extremely low numbers might be on the Internet Traffic Reports’s end, though I have heard a few people mention that they have had problems throughout the day.

Harvest: An open source search system that can search darn near everything.  For some reason I have ignored it coming down the freshmeat train until now.

Harvest is a system to collect information and make them searchable using a web interface. Harvest can collect information on inter- and intranet using http, ftp, nntp as well as local files like data on harddisk, CDROM and file servers. Current list of supported formats in addition to HTML include TeX, DVI, PS, full text, mail, man pages, news, troff, WordPerfect, RTF, Microsoft Word/Excel, SGML, C sources and many more. Stubs for PDF support is included in Harvest and will use Xpdf or Acroread to process PDF files. Adding support for new format is easy due to Harvest’s modular design.

Call For Help: Leo’s weblog has a hot tip– if you want to be a caller on The Screen Savers, your best bet is to call in this week:

We’re taping shows all week to air the week of September 16 and since we’re not live we’re having trouble getting calls. In fact, if you call us this week, Morgan says you’re pretty much guaranteed to get on.

Call 1-888-989-7879 toll free…

Wed 9/4, 7-8:30p Eastern (call as early as 6p)
Thurs 9/5, 7-8:30p and 9:30-11p Eastern
Fri 9/6, 7-8:30p Eastern

Oh yeah and They Might be Giants (TMBG) will be appearing on The Screen Savers (TSS) this Friday.

Russ Lipton on non-dead tree publications about weblogs:

First, really good content about Radio will find an honorable audience willing to pay to keep more stuff coming. (One reason I refuse to use Blogger or MovableType is that they cut away the ground for a revenue-based aftermarket, even with professional versions).

Second, I’ll bet that only a relatively small percentage of that audience will share my sweat with others without paying for it.

If users will pay $5.95 or $7.95 or $9.95 or $12.95 for a useful text, I’ll write another … and another … and another. If they don’t, I won’t. It’s really not going to be very complicated.

Bring it on. [via Dave]

RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters: An introduction to RSS for non-webloggers. [via Mark Pilgrim]

The Great Debate

Ed Cone (and pointed to by Dave):

Howard Berman will be a participant in this debate on intellectual property issues at the Cato Institute in DC on Sept. 19. It’s free, and you even get lunch. This might be an interesting thing to blog–is there someone in that area who can go?

Registered.  I live just outside DC.  I hope the event will get some coverage from a more talented weblogger, but I will definately attend and cover it.

Forgot the time? NIST has the geekiest solution possible.  Here’s an example for US Eastern Time.

Watch calculating pi:

This is the visual simulator for the Pi calculator using SHM. This program simulates an SHM without using trigonometric functions, and displays it as #s on the screen (a must see for all geeks, fond of watching films on text mode). This program does NOT calculate the value of pi. If you want the program that calculates Pi using SHM, or are a new visitor check out the previous release first.

ewok:

ewok is a web content management system (CMS), written in Perl (Embperl), and released under the GNU GPL (see Licence). It attempts to significantly lower the bar for content creation by non-technical users, while simultaneously offering web gurus the kind of extensibility and flexibility they need to create serious content. Using Embperl, it allows (properly permissioned) pages to execute arbitrary perl code, allowing integration with just about anything. It is suitable for use in intranet environments, internet website content creation, and ISP contexts.

Fake-AP: “If one access point is good, 53,000 must be better.” [via Aaron]

Intel Slashes P4 prices: ZDNet covers the price cuts. [via PCLinuxOnline]

Intel lowered the 2.4GHz processor price by 52 percent, from $400 to $193. It dropped the price of its 2.2GHz and 2.26GHz Pentium 4 chips by 20 percent, from $241 to $193 each. Meanwhile, the 2GHz Pentium 4 dropped 16 percent from $193 to $163, and the 1.8GHz went from $163 to $143.

More BBC RSS Feeds: 39 to be exact.  Some regional, educational, entertainment, biz, tech, and more.

Slashdot is running a story today about Worldwide (read: California) WarDriving Day on Aug 31.  The story also linked to some wardriving swag:

• )(WARDRIVER Stickers
• Wardriving is not a crime t-shirts

Get your wardriving swag now before it’s too late.

David Johnson’s Blogging Roller gets a JIRA boost: Atlassian’s JIRA is now powering  Blogging Roller’s issues and bugs.  JIRA’s ‘dashboard’ is pretty slick.

Epson debuts silliest-named printer ever: The 10600.  Huh?  Who got paid what to think of that?  (Update: If you pronounce it Ten-Six-Hundred, it’s not so bad)

Built using the same print engine as the 10000, the 10600 model sports Photo Accelerator Technology, which offers full performance when outputting RGB-based image files.

Tara Sue Grubb for Congress:

Candidates have been e-mailing me about the blog.  Some have or are planning to start their own blog.  Let us hope it will be used effectively and honestly.

As Dave would say, Bing!