Matt Croydon::Postneo

Author: Matt Croydon

  • NovSUSEian: Novell Acquires SuSE

    Via EntLinux, Novell is picking up SuSE:

    PROVO, Utah — Nov. 04, 2003 — Novell today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire SUSE LINUX, one of the world’s leading enterprise Linux companies, expanding Novell’s ability to provide enterprise-class services and support on the Linux platform. With the open source expertise of SUSE LINUX and Novell’s world-class networking and identity solutions and support, training and consulting services, Novell will be able to deliver Linux and all its components – from the server to the desktop – and give organizations a secure, reliable and mature Linux foundation. Novell will pay $210 million in cash to complete the acquisition. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and the winding up of shareholder agreements. Novell expects the transaction to close by the end of its first fiscal quarter (January 2004).

    I must not have been paying attention, because I didn’t see that one coming.  I really hope that Novell manages to do well with Ximian and SuSE, kicking butt in the enterprise without forgetting the little guy that runs SuSE in his basement…

    More coverage:

  • From VPNs to Leona Naess

    So many links, so little time:

    • Wi-Fi Networking News points to HotSpotVPN.com for $8.88 per month, it’s worth every penny.
    • Ken Pugh on pair programming.
    • Sean and Scott show the code to slurp all of the PDC materials.  A Python port of that would rock! 🙂
    • Fedora screenshots.
    • Edd’s P800 keeps him sane in the boring cold.  He pointed to Leona Naess, who has a new new cd (which is different than the old new cd).  It turns out that she is playing two nights in the DC Metro Area.  I’m going to do my best to see her.
    • I have installed OggPlay on my 3650 but don’t have any Ogg Vorbis files kicking around to test it.  The app runs, which is a plus.
    • Monologue aggregates mono weblogs.  It also has RSS.  Note to self: subscribe.
    • Ewan writes up the nice Nice Series 60 seminars.

  • Fog Creek Redesign

    Joel announced the redesign on Fog Creek Software’s web page by Dave Shea.

    I like it.

  • November Netcraft Survey

    According to Netcraft, it looks like a lot of people jumped ship from IIS to Apache.  Apache gained 2.8% of the market, while MS/IIS lost 2.44%.  Here’s why:

    Apache has a significant percentage gain this month as register.com, a leading domain registrar with a domain parking system serving responses for over one million domains eliminated its Windows front end, and reverted to Linux and Apache which it ran previously. Barely weeks ago its largest rival, Network Solutions made a similar switch from Microsoft-IIS back to SunOne, nee Netscape-Enterprise, for its own domain parking system.

  • Addicted to Pensacola: Wings of Gold

    Hi, My name is Matt, and I’m addicted to Pensacola: Wings of Gold.  It comes on at 6am on TNT in the DC Metro area.  I’m usually up anyway, and it is one of those things that I can watch without devoting 100% of my attention to it (most of the time).

    P:WoG was around for 3 seasons.  Season 1 is more action oriented and centered around the Sea Dragons.  Seasons 2 and 3 seem to be a lot more soap-ish.  Either way, I can’t seem to stop watching it.

    I wonder if season 1’s rantings started to slip, as only the main character played by James Brolin continued on the second (he was an executive producer).  I’m sure that there are all kinds of continuity issues lurking about, but I choose not to think about it.  It makes great background for multitasking at 6am.

    Linkage:

    Now back to your regularly scheduled geekblog.

  • Snonews: Text-based RSS Aggregation

    Snonews is a GPL’d text-based aggregator that uses libxml2 and ncurses.  It can handle RSS 1.0 as well as 0.9x and 2.0.  Of course there’s also the Ruby-based Raggle for those you you seeking a 3-paned experience.

    Sometimes low-tech just rocks.

  • Freevo 1.4rc2

    Freevo 1.4rc2 is out. A few features, more translations, bugfixes, and more are in this release.

  • OpenBSD 3.4 Released

    OpenBSD 3.4 has been officially released.  Of course I’ve been rocking out to the release song for a few weeks.  I should probably upgrade my Sparc Classic…

  • MOTOCODER October Update

    The October 31 MOTOCODER Newsletter is out.  It hit my mailbox sometime between 5am and 8am.  Here are a few interesting things from the newsletter:

    Moto looses points in my book though:

    <meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 5.0″>
    <meta name=”ProgId” content=”FrontPage.Editor.Document”>
    <title>New Page 1</title>
    <title>Newsletter</title>

    It announces itself as “New Page 1” at least in IE.  Oops.

  • Blogging and Mobile Blogging

    Diego has posted a monster blog entry about blogging.  If you want to learn about blogging and/or start a blog, go read it.

    Jonathan Knudsen at Sun has a write up about mobile blogging.  It is a good roundup of mobile blogging in general, and also accessing/updating blogs from the J2ME environment.

  • Humorous Ant Antipatterns

    Hani at TheServerSide has written up some Ant anti-patterns.  My favorite so far:

    8. Ask users to prove their loyalty and dedication to your cause by demanding they add jar files to ANT_HOME/lib. For extra points, do not tell them what these jar files are. It can be a test of the true faithful to see if they can figure it out from an ant stacktrace and find out what jar to download from where.

  • Developing For Longhorn

    Sam Gentile takes us through building your first app on Longhorn.

    Update: At least we will still feel at home with Longhorn BSODs.  Actually, Virtual PC seems to be the one to blame.

  • Great G3 Desktop Deals

    Dealmac has two excellent deals on older B&W G3 Macs: a G3/300 (128/6/CD/Zip) for $299.95 and a G3/350 (192/6/DVD) for $349.99 from MegaMacs.  Both of these come with 17″ Studio Displays.  I consider both of these excellent deals and would jump on one of them if I were liquid for it.  I’m trying to scrounge together enough to get my hands on something to properly run Panther on. 

    XPostFacto for Panther should make it work on my 8500 soon, but it’s going to be dog slow if it will work at all.  I’m hoping that something really cheap crops up on my local craigslist.

    If anyone else out there is looking for user Macs, Baucom Computers is another great source.  Right now they’ve got some attractively priced G3 and G4 desktops.

  • Coolest. Stroller. Evar!

    I just saw the Cadillac of strollers: the Chariot Cavalier 1.  It is a lot like your typical joggersport stroller, but it’s just a little bit more beefy and a and just looks so cool in person.  It has the required handbrake and all the goodies.  It’s really sturdy but only about 21 pounds.

    My kids are so going to roll around in something like this.

  • Drooling Over Whidbey

    These Whidbey screenshots definitely evoke a Pavlovian response.  Previous versions of Visual Studio .NET have been some of the most pleasing to work in.  Hopefully Whidbey will feel even better.

    Of course the more powerful client-side apps will be the ones taking advantage of the Longhorn SDK. [Via Scott Hanselman, who has been covering the PDC extremely well, as have all the other bloggers at the PDC]

  • Skype 0.94

    There is a new Skype beta out.  More news can be found at Betanews.

  • BBC News on Multimedia Mobiles

    I was reading a BBC News article on multimedia mobile phones via BBC’s WAP site this evening.  Jo Twist gave an excellent overview of Series 60 phones and also hinted at the enhanced capabilities of Series 90.

    I’ve got a 3650 in my pocket, but I have seen the light, and it is tinted Series 90.

  • MIDP 2.0 Examples on Series 90

    I’ve been going through the examples included in the Wireless Toolkit on the s90 emulator.  I’m starting to jive with the emulated interface.  Of course I should expect it, but it’s nice to take a stock MIDlet and have it conform to the sexy Aqua-like s90 interface.

    In order to run your MIDlets on the s90 emulator from within the WTK2.0, just copy the Series_90_MIDP_Concept_SDK_Beta_0_1 directory in to the wtklib/devices directory of your WTK2.0 install.  When you restart the application, you should be able to select the Series 90 emulator.

    At first glance, I thought of this device as a high end taco.  After tinkering with the Emulator, I think that it is going to be a whole lot more.  Hopefully the 7700 will be the first in a fleet of Series 90 devices.  That would rock.

  • When Weblogs Go Down

    Russell Beattie’s weblog and Mobitopia were down this morning.  The guys on #mobitopia were trying to get in touch with him to let him know, but we should not have been worried:

    <RussellB> My *Mom* called me at 7:00 a.m. this morning to tell me

  • Hello World on Series 90 (Nokia 7700)

    I was curious how much it would take to get a Hello World style app running on a Series 90 (the platform that the Nokia 7700 is based on) emulator.  The answer is just the following three downloads:

    I took the code from Getting Started with MIDlet Development, built it, packaged it, and ran the emulator with emulator -classpath HelloSuite.jar HelloMIDlet.  Once everything was downloaded and installed, the Hello World process took just a minute or two.  It was well below the 5 minute threshold that Russ has deemed neccesary for wireless development.

    You’ll note that on the emulator, the thumb buttons and keypad are reversed from those on the 7700.  The emulator/SDK release is versioned 0.1, so beware.  I’m sure that some things will change before the official release of the 7700.

    I have a feeling that we are going to see a ton of apps written for Series 90 and the 7700 in particular.  My guess is that we will see lots of J2ME apps, but the killer apps will be built using C++.  In skimming the docs, it looks like I have at least limited access to the camera, wireless messaging, mobile media, and bluetooth.  This is much different than the super sandbox that is MIDP 1.0.