Author: Matt Croydon

Adrian Lamo, often refered to as the homeless hacker, is set to be sentenced today.  He faces 6-12 months or so and up to $70k in damages.  Via Marketplace, the bestest thing on the radio at 6pm Eastern.

Via Slashdot, CNN reports on a trial run of software vending machines in CompUSA stores.  It could be revolutionary, it could be a dud.  Time will tell.

Business World Ireland:

Mobile phone giant Nokia today slashed its first quarter sales guidance and cut its forecast for EPS to the bottom of its indicated range on weaker-than-expected handset sales.

Expect Nokia shares down for the day.  I hope that this doesn’t effect handsets in the pipeline, but I’m confident that Nokia will find a way to do better next quarter and please the kids on Wall Street.

Information Week:

MicroStrategy Inc. on Monday debuted software that lets people with little or no technical expertise use Microsoft Office desktop applications to access business intelligence and reports generated by MicroStrategy’s analysis software.

I’m suprised that MicroStrategy is still around and capable of releasing a product.  MicroStrategy was one of our local dot com bomb scandals.  They used to have a huge building in Northern Virginia, their stock was high, the money rolling in.  And then somebody found out that they really didn’t have much of anything.  Crash, boom, bang.  We heard about it quite a bit because it was a local story.

Anyway, congratulations to MicroStrategy, rising from the ashes to release a new product.

El Washington Post and the rest of the known universe reported yesterday that three stocks will be dropped and three added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  The three stocks to be dropped are International Paper, AT&T, and Eastman Kodak.  They will be replaced with Pfizer, Verizon, and American International Group (an insurance company).

I’m not suprised to see Kodak go.  It’s a sign of the digital times.  They are times that Kodak is having a hard time dealing with.  International Paper owned Ilford for some time, but sold them back in the late ’90s.  The AT&T/Verizon swap seems to be clean and bell for bell.  I’m sure that Vodafone is happy with the announcement…

Forbes/Reuters:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 31 (Reuters) – Search engine Google Inc. said on Wednesday said it will begin testing a new search-based e-mail product called Gmail.

ZDNet appears to have a little more information about Gmail.  It is currently in testing, and will allow users to search their email (of course) but will also provide a more generous amount of storage than competitors such as Yahoo or Hotmail.

“The idea is that your mail can stay in there forever,” said Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google. “You can always index it, always search it, and always find things from the past.”

That’s pretty cool.  Imagine your email sitting on a few dozen Google shards scattered throughout the world.

Interesting note: the top search result for gmail (besides the google news stuff) is Gmail, the open source project.

CNet and others are covering the official announcement of the Xbox price cut.  It’s been pretty much a given since late last week.  Of course some analysts would have liked to see it drop a little further, but not just yet.

As the price of the Xbox approaches zero, the chances of me purchasing one approach 1.

Subvocalization is one of those things that often show up in Science Fiction stories.  Characters usually subvocalize to interact with their computers or communication systems.  According to p2pnet, that technology is close to becoming a reality.  Check out more info about it at Gizmo.com.au.  The tech is far from becoming everyday reality, but NASA is working on it.

Yep, I’m up at 5am on a Sunday.  That could mean a few things, but today it’s a Hamfest/Computerfest.  I’m meeting up with some geeky friends and we’re planning on being at the gates near Baltimore by 8am.

I watched the X-43a test flight on NASA TV.  Everything seemed to go well.  The X-43a was launched with a booster rocket from a B-52.  The X-43a then seperated from the rocket, and a few seconds later they gave it fuel, and it seems to have functioned properly.  After about 10 seconds, they cut fuel, and it’s currently coasting around Mach 5.

Whew.  I was worried that keeping a SuSE system up to date without employing their awesome YaST graphical administration was going to be hard.  After finding the right keywords to google, it looks like that’s not going to be a problem.  Enter your SuSEian friend, online-update. According to this page about Yast Online Update, online-update is a cronable command line program that allows you to keep your system patched and up to date.  My guess is that keeping up to date will look something like this:

online-update -u ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/ security recommended

I might set up a little script to run once a day with -s and email me with a list of patches if the output changes.

I’m really stoked, as I need to replace a Red Hat 7.3 server running a bit of software that only runs on certain platforms (plesk).  My choices are RH9 (not viable long term), RHEL3 ($$$), Fedora Core 1 (Core 2 will be out soon, this is a quickly moving distro, not the greatest for server stuff), Mandrake 9.2 (more of a desktop distro), and SuSE 9 (a desktop distro, but runs great on my lappy).  I’d love to be running Debian on this particular box, but that’s unfortunately not an option.  I’ve already shelled out the bucks for Plesk and I’ve already got some stuff running on the existing installation.  This is the second of two major upgrades that I’ve recieved at no extra cost, so I can’t complain.

I’m installing SuSE 9 on a testbed now to see if I can get this stuff to play nice with it.  We’ll see how it goes.

Update:

It looks like online-update isn’t installed by default on SuSE 9, so I’ll have to check that out.  Running you from the command line gives me a nice curses-based system for downloading updates though.  It feels very similar to the graphical version.  Cool!

Via IT Vibe (and others), it looks like Wi-Fi in airplanes will finally become commercially available.  According to a press release by Boeing, they’re getting in to the wi-fi hotspot business.

Pricing is honestly not that bad: $30 for 6+ hour flights, $20 for 3-6 hour flights, and $15 for shorter flights.  I’d pay that in a heartbeat to have broadband access from my seat in steerage.  They also have a pay as you go system, starting at $10 for 30 minutes.  If only I could get my laptop to last through the flight.  Someday I might be able to redeem my airline miles toward the elbow room and power outlets of business class…

I love how all of those evil radio signals are suddenly safe.  I do remember reading about a wi-fi test by Boeing several months ago.  I’m glad that they’ve fast-tracked this idea.  Lufthansa will be the first commercial carrier to offer the service.

I really hope that airlines in the US jump on this.  It’s an awesome opportunity, and I’m sure that a certain percentage of tech-savvy could make travel decisions around the avalability of Wi-Fi in flight.  I would sure consider it.  (Psst, United: I really don’t want to fly on another airline just because they’ve got Wi-Fi.  Get it now!)

Slashdot:

Comcast has purchased TechTV. They plan to merge the station with G4.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Also mentioned in the Slashdot report is the announcement of Leo leaving as host of The Screen Savers.

This is really bad.  I’ve been watching TechTV on and off for several years now.  Granted they play a lot of reruns and have airtime that they could fill, but I can’t see the purchase by Comcast as A Good Thing.  Right now I tend to catch the previous nights show as a rerun at 8am.  It’s great background, and often dive deeper in to stories that I’ve skimmed about the previous day.

I’m just worried about something good like Tech TV falling through the cracks of an ever growing media company.

I’ll have to start catching Leo’s weekend tech radio show in order to get my fix.  It looks like for the time being he will continue hosting Call for Help and will be contributing to The Screen Savers.

I heard a modern day audio story of John Henry last night during All Things Considered on my drive home.  It’s the story of a drummer vs. a DJ with turntables and a drum machine.

I’d highly recommend a listen.