Category: Web Services

Scripting News: Straw, a Gnome 2 desktop aggregator gets a plug/linkage from Dave:

Straw is a desktop news aggregator for the GNOME environment. I got an interesting email from the author of the program, Juri Pakaste, asking if it made sense to add features to RSS 2.0 that link to a blogroll and a list of subscriptions. My philosophy is that yes if it makes sense to Juri, then I think it’s cool. Why? Because he’s out there developing software for the format, and he’s friendly about it (even though it competes with my own software). It’s only because we are trying to work out a compromise that I don’t just add the features to the 2.0 spec right now, and add support for it to the Radio serializer. In other words, we could move a lot faster if we didn’t try to placate our critics. (And lots of luck with that, I don’t think they’re looking to settle.)

I’m not sure if Straw actually competes with any of Userland’s products since none of Userland’s products run in a Linux environment.

Dave: A test version of the RSS 2.0 serializer for Radio is out.  I’ll wait until the kinks are worked out, but it shouldn’t break your feed for RSS .9x aggregators.

PHP Journal:

PHP Journal is the only magazine whose sole intent is to help grow the PHP community. PHP Journal expands your reach with in-depth technical articles that allow developers to leverage the language to its fullest and promotes adoption through advocacy by highlighting the language’s versatility.

It looks like Jeremy Zawodny‘s handling the web work.  Subscriptions are available on the website.

Slashdot: Keanu Reeves as Superman? He could probably pull it off, though it would have to have the Keanu, “whoa” line in it.

Ron Lusk:

This explains why an attorney I know responded to my presentation on blogging with, “But that’s not billable time: I have to bill to a client, don’t I?”

Lawyers.

I’m currently putting a dent in Kenneth Hunt‘s bandwidth and snagging Unreal Tournament 2003.

Linux Laboratory: An article/op-ed entitled “If You Port it, We Will Pay.” It’s about Linux and that if commercial software were available for it, Linux users would buy it. This may be true, but there used to be a game porting company called Loki Games, who went  out of business because they were not able to sell enough copies. I don’t have the energy to write much more, but here’s the leadin for the article:

I can’t help but get the feeling that companies like Real Networks, Adobe, Macromedia and yes, even IBM think that us penguins are all just about the cheapest birds on the entire face of the technology ecosphere, or whatever Microsoft is calling it these days (oh yeah, they think we’re cheap, too). At the same time, Linux, one of the flagship products of the open source/free software movement, is such a buzzword that all of these companies – and many others – want to somehow associate themselves with the community. As a result, we see things like Real Player, Adobe Acrobat, IBM’s ViaVoice and other popular programs being ported to Linux. This all sounds great on the surface, but truth be told, these products are only wannabe imitations of their fully functional cousins that work wonderfully under Windows (for as long as you can get Windows to work, anyway).

Robert P Lessard at OpenBSD Journal: A howto entitled, “Setting Up an Openbsd/Samba Fileserver with NT Domain Authentication.”

J. Paul Reed: A freshmeat editorial about why OSX isn’t unix.

Russell Beattie: He’s just found a java applet called Ekit. It’s a WYSIWIG html editor. He’s not into the GPL all that much and I can understand. More on this later.

Unreal Tournament 2003: Go snag the 100MB demo at Infogrames’ website if you’re a game junkie.  Right now I’m playing America’s Army: Operations, which is well done and is totally free.

NetBSD 1.6 is released: Now supporting more architectures than ever before, the new release features a ton of minor fixes.  I guess it’s time to upgrade my 486 netbsd box.

Blogdex has started crawling my blog.

Abbot: An XML based toolkit for building Graphic User Interfaces.

Camero: A webcam system using MySQL, with a web based interface and a portal-like interface for users.

GKrellM 2.0: A new version of the coolest system monitor thingie for the Linux desktop for Gnome2. If you run linux and have Gnome or Gnome2 libraries, you should be running this on your desktop.

Mozilla Calendar: Now with fresh iCal support. [via Russ, whom I shall refer to by his first name]

Mick Bauer: An article at Linux Journal about running Snort and other intrusion detection systems without an ip address.

Russell Beattie: “It dawned on me today as I was talking about my website and projects and such that my “get it done” attitude is great for my personal ambitions and project goals, but it may not be the best plan of action if I’m ever going to show off the stuff I’m writing to prospective employers.”

OSNews: Gentoo user-users vs. developer-users:

The users’ main gripe (except the involved installation process) is that Gentoo takes too long to compile either itself (during installation) or when later compiling big packages (eg. KDE/Gnome) or when updating the system. Installing the system, using the Stage 1 tarball, can take from 24 hours up to 2 days, depending on the power of your system. Also, (un)fortunately, most packages have new ebuilds in the Portage tree every few days or weeks, with fixed bugs. This is of course a good thing. But it is not when you need to wait hours to recompile from scratch all these packages every few days. And when “updating world”, most of the times it would take a while. This is a tiring process.