Author: Matt Croydon

I saw Lost in Translation today.  I’d give it a solid three to three and a half Thauvin stars.

It’s been slow so far today, though there are lots of things going on at BloggerCon:

• Fortune interview Bill Joy.
• OSNews covers the Axentra Rumba Server.  Aparently it will be a “do everything” appliance running on a Mini-ITX platform.  Prices are rumored to be around $500.
• Kevin Marks has a bootleg feed from BloggerCon.  Also check out #BloggerCon on irc.freenode.net
• Python 2.3.2 is out.  Squash them bugs!
• Gander is an extremely lightweight app server for Python.
• The Creative Commons weblog notes major changes to the cc site.  They added an Artists corner and a Devlopers section along with major updates all around.  Check out their tech challenges and give them a hand.
• Jarno Virtanen reminds the hackers and tinkerers out there to have their HTTP behave decently.

Here are a few quick links that I’ve been looking at this morning:

• Kendall Grant Clark takes the pulse of XML editing tools on O’Reilly’s XML.com.
• Bill Humphries looks into GPS receivers with Bluetooth.  From my experience, Garmin seems to be a little clueless about Bluetooth.
• Java Server Faces: mental note, read up on this at some point.
• Charles Miller would like to see a guide to securing JBoss.  You know the answer: Buy the book! 🙂
• MobileTracker points out Frodo, a Commodore 64 emulator for Series 60 phones.  I’d also love to see a Coleco Vision emulator out there, as I wasted a few hours of my childhood on that platform too.  At some point I should try to figure out exactly how much more powerful my 3650 is comared to my family’s first PC: the IBM 8088.
• TLDP has a HOWTO on traffic control under Linux.
• Linux Journal posts a HOWTO for a once NIC NAT.
• Screenshots for the latest BloGTK release look good.
• Phillip Pearson is posting his linkdumps to “crash.”  It looks like linkdumps are back in style.
• Rob Flickenger posts an excerpt from Wireless Hacks: Do it yourself wireless access points.
• Does anyone know one way or another if these accusations about Liebermann, Inc are true?  It certainly looks like a good hoax, but the tech is so cool that I’d rather that it be real.
• Netcraft makes sure that wildcard DNS does not taint its Survey.
• “Would the graduate students please bar the doors!” The Ig Nobels rule.
• Via NewsForge, TSL is TSL.  Trustix Secure Linux is now Tawie Secure Linux.
• Pyblosxom 0.8.1 is out.

Xen:

Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. We have a fully functional port of Linux 2.4 running over Xen, and regularly use it for running demanding applications like MySQL, Apache and PostgreSQL. Any Linux distribution should run unmodified over the ported OS.

This is excellent news for those of us who would like to tinker with server/OS virtualization but don’t have the dough to throw down for VMWare Server or other high dollar software packages.

Aparently you can run pretty much any Linux distro on top of Xen, and they are also very close to a port of WindowXP that would work on top of Xen.  You can download a demo CD and check it out.

This is truly cool stuff.

Reuters:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Online DVD renter Netflix Inc. on Wednesday said during the third-quarter it boosted subscribers by 74 percent even as it faced competition from retail heavyweights like Wal-Mart entering its business.

“Hi, my name is Matt, and I’m a Netflix subscriber.”

Leigh Dodds has released FOAF-a-matic Mark 2 Beta 2 today.  I must say that it is quite beautiful.  I haven’t looked at the FOAF that it produces, but like many, I started my FOAF file with the original FOAF-a-matic. FOAF-a-matic was definately a good base, as my FOAF doesn’t piss off Rosco even after tons of hacking in a text editor.

Cheers Leigh!

Dealmac links to the BlueTrek Bluetooth headset, which is currently $40US after rebates ($100US before).  Erik managed to find a favorable review of it at MobileBurn.  You can also pick up the JibberJim approved Jabra model for $75US.

Now we’re talking!

My laptop was last spotted near Memphis, TN.

Go FedEx, go!

Update: Dulles, baby!

CNet reports that Sun announced heavy losses today.  In a seperate report, CNN Tech reports that Sun is ready to announce a new breed of processors that could be up to 100 times faster than current chips.  The article is not technical, but promises major improvements of semiconductor to chip and chip to chip communications.

Sun might be able to recoup some money by renting out their IP:

Sun already holds seven patents on the new design and will seek to capitalize on them commercially, a Sun spokesman said.

If they take the IP rental route, they won’t even have to manufacture chips in order to make money.  They could definately use a fincancial breakthrough, and this might be it.

Mobiletracker confirms rumors from Mobile Burn (as much as said rumors can be confirmed).  The Nokia 3660 is possibly on its way, replacing the 3650.  There will also be a gimpy version for the US called the 3620.

The only obvious difference is the still funky yet closer to normal keypad.

Users can only hope for MIDP 2.0 and sockets that work.  I’ll be crossing my fingers.

Alan Green has to watch what he downloads each month.  Luckily he has a couple of gigs left over at the end of this month so he can download a few extra things.  I downloaded The Fanimatrix without a second thought this morning (using BitTorrent of course).  It’s not uncommon for me to download the latest release of a bootable Linux distro and not checking it out until the next release is out.  Of course I can’t use the old version, I’ve got to download the new ISO!

In the land where SUVs rule, we take unlimited banwidth over broadband for granted.  How much longer is it going to last?

Last night I ordered a new laptop from HP.  Erik was hoping that I’d pick up the widescreen eMachines M5312, but after playing with it in the store, something just didn’t feel right about it to me.

I picked up the HP ze4430us, which is toward the higher end of HP’s ‘just around $1000’ range of notebooks.  It has a Mobile Athlon XP 2400+ (1.8GHz) processor with 512k of cache (Barton, baby!).  I’m an AMD guy at heart (though I’ve got a good bit of Intel gear), so I went for the Mobile Athlon over the Celeron 2GHz that seemed to be in most of the laptops in my price range.

It’s really amazing how much laptop you can get for just over a grand nowadays.

Rounding out the specs, it’s got a non-widescreen 15 inch display, 512 megs of RAM (2×256 of course), an ATI Mobility chipset with 64 megs of shares memory, a 40 gig drive (perfect for running multiple operating systems) and built-in 802.11g (Broadcomm chip) with a little button to turn it on and off.  It’s only got one PCMCIA/Cardbus slot, but it seems like that’s the way budget notebooks are heading.  It’s got the usual required USB ports (for my bluetooth dongle!) as well as a firewire port, along with various other connections.

I have not found any showstoppers about this model yet, though in an ideal world my laptop would have built in Bluetooth.  Until Broadcomm 802.11g support is added to Linux, I’m going to have to use a PCMCIA card for Wi-Fi under Linux.  Wide screens are the new geek chic, but besides the eMachines laptop, most of the widescreens cost at least a little bit more.

From a quick search, it looks like at least SuSE will run on this particular model, and once the laptop arrives (hopefully Wednesday) I’ll see which distros will take.