Author: Matt Croydon

Infoworld:

The developers of the open-source Samba file server product are urging users to upgrade to the latest 2.2.8 stable version of Samba after discovering a potentially critical flaw in earlier versions.

Lots of great stuff is going on at Mobitopia today:

• Russ debunks MMS as a bloated, slow, and expensive thing.  I seriously doubt that it is ‘the next big thing.’
• Russ also points to Motocoder, which offers a free license of Metrowerks CodeWarrior Wireless Studio.
• Jim Hughes: “How long will it be before mobile devices (phones, PMGs, PDAs, whatever) are able to automatically determine which of the available connectivity methods are the most appropriate and select the right one?”
• Erik is trying to figure out the best way to get wireless internet access on his new Zarus.

Sean and Scott:

After a six month intense integration efforts, senior consultants at B2BIntegrationInc have been unable to get a plastic spork from service provider Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) to interoperate with an IBM Mainframe.

now there’s legacy and then there’s legacy.

WiFi News also points to a Washington Post article about Verizon Wireless’ EvDO high speed wireless:

Verizon has apparently acquired enough spectrum (and cheaply) in enough markets to roll out EvDO, a third-generation (3G) cell data technology that could allow from several hundred Kbps on the go to 2.4 Mbps for stationery use. I can’t wait to see if those are real-world speeds, or full-shared circuit speeds: that is, 2.4 Mbps is the available per-cell speed, split among users of that cell. (The same story misreports that Verizon is rolling out Wi-Fi service to hotels and airports; rather, they’ll resell Wayport service under their own brand.)

An IBM press release via WiFi News

In the latest update on truck stop wireless hot spots, Columbia Advanced Wireless will deploy 1,000 truck stops with wireless networks for truckers to stay on top of their loads and schedules. So far, they have two locations listed; watch for the 998 to come. (Truck stops are a reasonable place for non-truckers to stop, too, given that these wireless networks will most likely be in areas with otherwise limited broadband capability.)

Yes, I know.  This is a techblog, not a warblog.  The event should probably be marked though.

It looks like Bush has spotted Hussein 48 hours.

For the record, I turned the TV off as soon as his speech was over.  I wanted to be informed about what was going down, but I’d rather not hear it rehashed until the late news is over.  As a techblog reader yourself, you’ll be happy to know that my comments on the subject are over for the evening, and hopefully for awhile.

Aaron Swartz has put together two articles in his series: How to Do Stuff.  First up are How to Do Version Control with CVS and How to Do Live Streaming.

Speex rocks for encoding and decoding speech with mad compression rates.

The Register confirms that Wrox is no more.

IT publisher Wrox Press is set to close following the collapse into liquidation of US owners Peer Information last Friday.

Bummer.  For the record, I’d be more than happy to pay for some material from Professional JSP 2.0.

A note to those of you who were screaming at the customer service reps at Verizon Wireless this afternoon in Columbia, Maryland:

If you had read your contract before you signed it, you would understand that the terms of your warranty stipulate that a warranty replacement may include a refurbished phone.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve managed to break three phones already, you’re not getting a brand new phone.  It is refurbished.  No amount of yelling at the customer service rep or disturbing customers in line will get you a new phone.  Really.  It didn’t work for the guy yelling twenty minutes ago, and it’s not going to work for you.

You can call and complain, he is the manager on duty, and you can’t have a new phone, it’s refurbished.

Clemens points out:

Sam Gentile has blogged a compact overview on the IIS 6.0 process model. Because pictures say more than a thousand words, I recommend that you get this PPT file from Bill Staples (Group Program Manager for IIS at MS) in addition to reading what Sam has to say.

Sam Ruby has written a new essaylet on Noun vs. Verb:

Perhaps it is time for another essay.  A short one, this time.

Here’s a quote from his essay, emphasis mine:

RSS could benefit from an explicit schema. RSS could benefit by more explicit rules defining whether HTML is allowed in titles or relative links are allowed in descriptions.  RSS could benefit from a more clear separation of metadata from data.  RSS could benefit from an ability to explicitly mark what items must be understood, and which are optional.

Sam has said as much in his essaylet, but exactly why don’t we put together a schema for site syndication?  I know something like this has to be approached carefully, as you have various RSS camps.  The whole RSS1.0/RDF vs. RSS0.9x/2.0 thing seems worse than Mac vs. PC.

So why not?  Would it be possible to set up a schema that at least the vast majority people could agree upon?  Could it be possible to have a syndication format that you could actually parse because it is well formed XML?  Would it even be RSS then, or would it be something completely different.

XSS (XML Site Summary|Syndication)?

Maybe I’m missing the point.  It sounds a bit like reinventing the wheel.  Everyone complained when RSS 2.0 came out.  They would probably freak out about something like this.  At the same time, it makes sense.  RSS has evolved a lot.  A whole lot.  Perhaps we need to take a step back, evaluate what we have, and clean it up a bit.  Take what is defined as valid RSS and formalize it.  Schema it up.

Something like this would probably solve our metaweblog/blogger API/etc problems.  We could send a raw XSS item over HTTP with some authentication headers.  We could send a raw XSS item or items over SOAP with some authentication   Throw some XSS over Jabber.  Do whatever you want with it, because at this point, it’s just data.

It would be important not to tolerate poorly formed XSS.  Part of the problem of parsing RSS now is that we stay true to ‘be careful what you send and liberal in what you recieve.’  The problem is, aparently not everyone has been very careful about what gets produced.  Now we’re regexing instead of parsing XML in order to get the job done.  I’m not quite sure how this would be done, besides through a community effort.  If John Smith’s blog produces invalid XSS, we would have to rag on him.  We couldn’t do what we did in the past: make an exception and add some code to our RSS parsers so that we can read it.  At that point, it would begin to dilute just as RSS has.

Just thinking out loud, taking Sam’s thoughts to their logical conclusion.  Why not?

Danny Ayers comments that RSS 1.0 has a schema.  That’s great.  Unfortunately, RSS is not RSS 1.0.  RSS is all versions of RSS that are in the wild, including 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0, etc.

Ed Cone covers the painful Maryland loss last night:

Syd and I attended a memorable Tar Heel win last night. No way Carolina was going to beat bigger, deeper, more experienced Maryland…until they did, decisively.

I knew they were going to loose when I heard that they were ahead at the half…

. . . I think I’ll move to Australia.

Freshmeat:

R3R is an RSS reader that can retrieve and display RSS 3.0 feeds.

And here I thought that RSS 3.0 was a joke.  Then again, if Raging Platypus supports it, it must be good.

Steve:

[Larkware] A couple of weblogs have reported that Wrox is going under. Although at the moment this has to be classed as “credible rumor,” it really doesn’t surprise me, on two fronts. First, it seems to me that Wrox’s strategy for the past year or so has been mainly “throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks.”

I really really hope not.  I was looking forward to Professional JSP 2.0…

I found this with Feedster this morning:

Roadside assistance was never more fun.

Trunk Monkey…it’s a little big so if you have a slow connection you may want to skip it.

I so need a ‘trunk monkey’ button in my car.