Matt Croydon::Postneo

Author: Matt Croydon

  • GPL’d NDIS Wrapper (Broadcom 802.11g in Linux)

    Via Slashdot, NdisWrapper provider a free beer/free speech way of using Windows drivers for Broadcom chipsets under Linux, similar to the Linuxant wrapper.

    File this under w00t, with a caveat.

    It’s great that I can now get the Wi-Fi built in to my laptop to work.  The bad news is that NDIS isn’t going to allow me to do some of the cooler things that you can do with Wi-Fi under linux.  The motivation for someone to write Linux-native drivers just went down the tube.

    This is great, but it’s bad.

    Update: NdisWrapper requires kernel 2.6.0-test8 or higher, so it is not for the weak of heart.

  • Croydon’s Law of Internet Connectivity

    I came to the following conclusion this morning:

    Croydon’s law of internet connectivity: Do not praise your ISP, as your connection will go down shortly thereafter.

    Luckily remote sibling protocol came through and everything is up and running again.

  • HP’s $1200 AMD64 Deal

    CRN:

    HP is attempting to position the 8000Z below its low-end Itanium-based machines and above its most robust Pentium-based PCs. The 8000Z will be available for purchase Wednesday for around $1200 plus or minus $100 depending on the rebates available. The Athlon 64 is manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices.

    Wow!  That’s a pretty good deal considering that the AMD64 chip alone costs over $400 on the street.  AMD64 motherboards don’t cost a ton more than their XP counterparts.  The rest of the required components are pretty much the same as a regular desktop machine.

    It’s those chips.  They’ve got to come down in price before myself and the many other homebuilders are going to start buying in any significant quantity.

    A desktop with a $1200 price point is definitely the first step.  Thanks, HP.

  • Thank You Comcast!

    Comcast has been slowly upping the download bandwidth on their cable customers across the US.  I received a hot tip yesterday that I should run some bandwidth tests to see if the new faster firmware had been pushed to my cable modem.  Sure enough, it has.  Right now I’m pulling down about 2782kbps.  The thumbnail above links to the full sized table.

    Thanks, Comcast!

  • theKompany GPLs Rekall

    theKompany announced today that they were releasing Rekall under the GPL.  Rekall is an Access-like database system that sits atop many standard SQL servers, including MySQL and PostgreSQL.  Rekall allows users to do pretty much what Access can do: create forms and reports in a simple and easy way.

    Lately theKompany has been focusing on the embedded market, and having a GPL’d version of Rekall is definitely a win for Linux users.

    There is a community site called Rekall Revealed has all of the information including download and installation information.  There is an rss feed for the site.

  • Eclipse Visual Editor Project

    Newsforge:

    The Eclipse consortium tomorrow will announce the establishment of the Visual Editor Project, a new effort to create and deliver an open visual GUI construction and editing platform. The project is designed to generically work with any user interface framework and programming language Eclipse supports; ultimately, it will implement a reference GUI builder for the Java Swing/JFC and SWT graphical user interface frameworks.

    It’s good to see competition for Project Rave even before its release.  The VEP looks like more of a simplification of GUI design than anything else.  Of course creating GUIs in Swing or SWT is one of the more common grumbles about Java development.  Every bit helps.

  • IBM Powers Every Next-Gen Console

    El Reg:

    IBM has its finger in every next-generation home console pie: Sony, Microsoft and now Nintendo.

    Wow.  That’s what I thought.  Go IBM!

  • Upgraded to Rawdog 1.6

    I upgraded my aggregator to Rawdog 1.6 today.  I was previously using 1.4.  The new version fixes some bugs and allows some global and item level templating.  It was pretty much a drop in replacement and it’s running via cron quite happily.

  • DC Area Sniper Convicted on All Counts

    Washington Post:

    VIRGINIA BEACH, Nov. 17 — Jurors reached guilty verdicts on all four charges Monday morning in the capital murder trial of accused sniper John Allen Muhammad after approximately 6½ hours of deliberations.

    It took the jury just over 6.5 hours to come to that conclusion.  The jury now decides John Mohammad’s fate.  Mohammad and Malvo terrorized the DC Metro Area for weeks last year.  One of the shootings took place about a block from where I work.  We pumped our gas in fear of being the next victim.  We were afraid to leave our homes.  Some of us died doing our everyday chores.

    It looks like Malvo’s defense is going to focus on saving him from the death penalty rather than trying to set him free.  Mohammad may not be so lucky.

  • Disney Ditches Animation Project

    The Washington Post:

    The Walt Disney Co. has shut down production on its animated feature “A Few Good Ghosts,” a decision likely to lead to more layoffs at its beleaguered Florida animation facility.

    The project was a mix of traditional and computer animation and honestly doesn’t sound like it had a whole lot going for it if Disney was trying to make money/break even on it.  The article also mentions a trail of layoffs in Disney’s animation division.

  • isbn.py

    Via Pythonware’s Daily Python-URL, isbn.py is an ISBN formatter.  It also allows you to strip non-ISBN characters, verify that a list of numbers is a valid ISBN, and also verify the check digit.  See the authors entry for other open source code dealing with ISBNs.

  • Nokia Series 90 MIDP SDK Now For (Red Hat) Linux

    Nokia’s Series 90 MIDP SDK now supports Linux.  And by Linux, the release notes mean Red Hat Linux 8.0.  It was tested secondarily on RH 7.2.  No mention of Red Hat 9, Fedora, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

    This whole Linux thing is just going to get more complicated.

  • Google Ads Invade textamerica

    It looks like logging in to textamerica last night to edit an entry updated my template to include google ads.  It also changed the template to one of the new default ones.  I guess I’m complaining about a free service which rocks, but I am a little annoyed at the sudden appearance of google ads on my moblog.  I’ve always had the few required linkbacks in my template, and recently each entry in my RSS feed adds some links to textamerica.

    I went poking around the footer template, and the div containing the Google ads is required.  I can’t remove them or alter them or else I am A Bad Man (and probably violating ToS).

    It is understandable that textamerica needs some way to fund their site whcih has gone from a few hundred users to probably thousands and thousands in the past few months.  It has always been a free service, and I’ve never quite been sure how they’ve been paying for it.  They sell ringtones, but it obviously is not making them enough money.

    My suggestion to textamerica: offer a for-pay ad-free account option.  Maybe a couple of bucks a month ($2.95-$4.95) would cover it.  I would definitely consider the option.  Right now I’ve got a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, so I’m thinking about moving on to self-hosted moblogging.  Textamerica has definitely got a lot going for it: When I first signed up with them, I went from zero to moblog in just a few minutes.

  • Groovy?

    Must check out Groovy  at some point.

  • Linuxant Offers WLAN Drivers for $19.95!

    Newsforge:

    DriverLoader licenses for end-users have been affordably priced at USD $19.95 and can now be purchased online from Linuxant’s web store (https://www.linuxant.com/store). Upgrades to future versions will be provided at no extra charge for at least one year or longer. Free 30-day trial licenses also remain available. Due to significant development/support costs, and inconclusive discussions with hardware vendors, it is not possible to make DriverLoader completely free for end-users at this time.

    This is ka-huge.  I’ve been using the trial version of the Linuxant drivers on my Laptop.  It allows me to use my otherwise unusable Broadcom 802.11g chip under Linux.  I hope that eventually the wlan-ng project will support the chipset, but the Linuxant drivers are worth every penny of that $19.95.

    So far the Linuxant drivers have been working just fine under SuSE 9 and I will definitely be picking up the $19.95 full version of the drivers.  Sure, I could stick in my Linksys 802.11b card, but that totally kills the all-in-one nature of my laptop.  I was worried that Linuxant would price the drivers out of the range of normal users, but they managed to keep prices below what I am willing to pay.

  • The Future of J2EE

    Tod Nielsen at CNet:

    J2EE is as powerful as any developer could ever dream. But with power comes complexity. All the J2EE specifications put side by side easily take a yard of shelf space. While I have a hard time visualizing enterprise technology becoming “easy” in my lifetime, it can–and should–be easier. If J2EE is to achieve mass adoption while maintaining what makes J2EE powerful, it must become easier.

    Overall Nielsen seems pretty sure that J2EE will rock if issues of complexity and changing standards.

  • CyberGuard Nabs SnapGear

    ZDNet:

    CyberGuard, a manufacturer of security and networking hardware, announced a plan to acquire a competitor called SnapGear, which builds Linux-based products, the companies said Thursday. Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based CyberGuard will pay $16 million, $1.6 million of which is cash and the rest of which is stock, in a deal expected to close by the end of the current quarter.

    And two Linux-based VPN/firewall companies become one.

  • Commodity Web Hosting

    Netcraft has posted an interesting analysis of ultra cheap “commodity” web hosting.  Go Daddy is introducing hosting for as little as $3.95.  More info can be found on the Go Daddy hosting page.  $3.95 gets you 25 megs of space and a gig of transfer a month.  Of course there are many places that you can get a whole lot more for an extra couple of bucks a month, but for some people $3.95 will be a quite attractive price point.

  • LOAF Wiki Launched!

    My self-proclaimed Official LOAF Wiki launched this evening.  It needs a bit of refactoring, but it is positioned to serve as a LOAF clearinghouse.  Also check out the LOAFful badge to the right (generated by the Kalsey button maker)

  • White Box Enterprise Linux

    Via PCLinuxOnline, White Box Enterprise Linux is derived from the open source SRPMs from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.

    What would motivate someone to undertake a project such as this?

    White Box Linux’s initial creation has been sponsored by the Beauregard Parish Public Library in DeRidder, LA USA out of self interest. We have several servers and over fifty workstations running Red Hat Linux and were left high and dry by their recent shift in business plan. Our choices were a difficult migration to another distribution or paying RedHat an annual fee greater than the amortized value of our hardware. So we chose a third path, made possible by the power of Open Source…. White Box Linux.

    Check out the notes section of the site for some interesting quirks between the SRPMs and RHEL.  Be considerate, download over BitTorrent, and keep it to yourself, mmkay?  At the very least don’t tell Slashdot! 🙂