Matt Croydon::Postneo

Author: Matt Croydon

  • Doc has nailed it:

    Having KDE or GNOME on a Linux server is like having a fancy dashboard, comfy seats and air conditioning in the cab of an 18-wheeler.

    Tractor trailers are not as popular as cars. But nobody is calling them a failure in the marketplace. That’s kind of like Linux’ situation.

    It’s a red herring, this stuff about whose desktop is most biggest. It’s about dicks, frankly. Look at Microsoft! Whoa! Nobody else’s dick is that big! Not even close! That’s your default mainstream desktop story.

  • Freshmeat gem of the day: A C++ cryptographic library called Botan that does quite a bit, including public key, block and stream ciphers, hash functions, checksums and more.  It runs on several platforms, inlcuding x86 and Sparc Linux, Windows, OSX, Tru64, and Irix.  The site also contains linkage to a listing of other cryptographic libraries, which will probably lead to more surfing and less productivity on my part.  From the Botan FAQ:

    5.3 What new features are you planning?

    In the near term, I’m mostly concerned with getting things set up for the grand 1.0.0 release. This is taking up most of my (sober) free time.

  • MS Word error:

    wvError: (decode_simple.c:514) Alert, insane repeat "insane" paragraph structure, making wild stab in the dark to attempt to continue

    [Via (Polonius -> The Desktop Fishbowl)]

  • The state of Linux Audio: OSNews has a great roundup of the latest in linux sound apps, including ReBorn, a workalike of the infamous ReBirth.  A similar story also ran on Slashdot today.

  • Gear that might change things: PC Magazine’s roundup of some of the cool stuff on the horizon.

  • Samba needs your help: They have recenty set up a paypal donation button so you can send them money.  They are getting by just like everyone else, but they’ve got expenses and they’re also looking at the possibility of moving their hosting from donated space to commercial space.

  • Ellen Feiss Mania! [Wired]

  • Pyra: What are they doing?  Here’s a status report, it looks like they’ve got several cool things up their sleeves.

  • TAM 1 launch successful!  The RC plane is on its way across the Atlantic.  You can check out the latest telemetry data and current location here.  Congrats to the team, I hope it makes it to Ireland!

  • BPWS4J: IBM released tools to deal with Business Process Execution Language for Web Services in Java.

  • I missed the presentation that Christian Crumlish made on The Screen Savers this evening, probably by just a few minutes.  Don’t worry, I’ll catch it on a rerun over the weekend.

  • Roll Your Own .Mac: Alan Graham shows you how to put the bsd core of OSX to use.  He covers Apache, connection decisions, DNS issues, firewalls, and more.  It’s a great overview that makes you crave more.

  • FuzzyOffice/PHPLarge: J. Scott Johnson has done it again.  He’s going to write an uber-app.  Details are available as to what exactly he intends to do.  It looks like an ambitous project.  Executive summary looks something like:

    Basically it’s PIM software that inverts the P (personal) and assumes that most stuff is shared.  Even if no one else in the universe ever uses it, it’s dramatically improving the productivity that Gretchen and I have and that’s wicked cool.  Also everyone else that I’ve run the idea by seems to like it.

  • The 5k Winners Announced: It’s amazing how much markup and script people can fit into less than 5k of disk space.  That’s what the design contest is all about.  There is some amazing stuff and some bleeding edge design in these entries.  My favorites:

    You’ll have to visit the site to see for yourself, there is a lot of potential time lost there.

  • Oops!  Worldcom misplaced another 3.8 billion.

  • CNet: Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems plan to announce new specifications Monday that the companies hope will help drive adoption of Web services.

  • Do you have a php-enabled website?  Would you like to add some RSS feeds to it?  CafeRSS makes it pretty darn simple:

    include(‘cafeRSS.php’);
    $rss = new cafeRSS();
    $rss->display(‘http://example.com/rssfeed.xml’);

    That’s it.  If you want to cache stuff, it gets slightly more complex, but all in all it looks like a slick and easy to implement. [Via Freshmeat]

  • J. Scott Johnson: VI.  It’s like crack.  A little taste and then you’re jonesing for more.

  • Two O’Reilly goodies showed up from Amazon this evening:

    I’m looking forward to reading both of these.  Using Samba and Programming Web Services with SOAP are in the queue (or more accurately, the linked list).

  • The Power of the Weblog

    I was browsing around the computer book section of my local Barnes & Noble this evening.  I picked up an O’Reilly book off the shelf called C# Essentials.  It was written by a guy named Peter Drayton, among others (Ben Albahari and Brad Merrill).  What struck me at that moment was, “Oh, this was written by Peter.”

    That’s it. With weblogs we can associate with people on a first name basis that we would never run into otherwise.  We think of people who live on the other side of the country or the other side of the world as our friends.  We wait to hear what the top people in many fields have to say about their work, their projects, their observations; not as the top people in their fields but as the people that we know and trust.

    And then there’s Dave.  He’s the reason I started blogging with radio.  He kept me up to date with the latest happenings in scripting, the weblog world, programming, news, privacy, and everything else.  Then his webpage didn’t update.  Then I heard from Rael via Meerkat that he had suffered from a heart attack.  What followed felt like eternity, but eventually he picked up a laptop and began blogging again, about what happened, about his recovery, and his smoking withdrawal.  All of this from a man that I had never met, CEO of a software company.

    When I first started frequenting BBSes I was in elementary school.  Through my 1200 baud modem, I could be anybody that I wanted to be.  Other users did not have to know that I was a kid; as long as I acted like an adult, I was treated that way.  Then the internet came.  I could be whomever I wanted to be, wherever I wanted to be it.  I could talk to people all over the world on just about any subject I wanted to over IRC, usenet, and mailing lists.  The same rules applied: act like an adult and be treated as such.

    And now with weblogs, I can sit at the dinner table with some of the biggest people in the tech world.  I can hear what they say.  I can comment on their weblog or send them an email.  I can find out what conferences they’ll be attending.  I can read their books but refer to them by their first name.  And maybe, someday, I can be one of them.