Matt Croydon::Postneo

Category: Web Services

  • GoFish: A low-usage gopher server.  The world needs more gopher servers, I miss them.  I’d love to see a post-apocalyptic world in whcih we access the web or the net with gopher…

  • Highlight 1.2: Turns source code from pretty much any language into HTML, XHTML, RTF, or LaTeX.

  • OpenMOSIX:

    The openMosix 2.4.19-2 release includes Robert Love’s memory over-commit protection patch (ported to openMosix), making the OOM killer optional, a significantly faster load balancer and reduced kernel latencies (vs. openMosix 2.4.18).

  • Gran PM: web-based project management.

  • Moodle: A web-based tool for creating and administrating courses online.

  • Pub Etiquette: A great and well-written guide to survival in a British pub.  This is written for the uptight American, and is worth a read.  It has killed quite a bit of my morning downtime at work.

  • Back in the day:

    Back in the day, something started. Or maybe it was there all along, for some other people, in some other space; virtual or not. Whatever it is, it’s still going now, and I’m still trying to figure it out.

  • Here are a few quickies before I head off to work:

    • Cool iBook art: High end look, very cool.
    • The Seminole Webserver: A freshmeat find, looks like it is intended for embedded applications.
    • Mac.fryke.com: Rael pointed out this beautiful blosxom blog about OSX.
    • Mozilla IE Skin: I read about this last night, you can make Mozilla look and feel exactly like IE, except it doesn’t crash…
    • Get Your LaTeX on: Just linkage to the official homepage of LaTeX.
    • Phillip Pearson’s bzero: a commandline based blogging tool that allows you to publish to a RCS or pycs server.
    • Flight Gear: I played around with it a little yesterday, it’s a great open-source flight sim, though the docs left me wanting to get FSPro2002.
    • Linux Scholar Challenge: Hack a linux project, win a Thinkpad?
    • Long Live Sneakernet! Wired News reports that sneakernet is reborn with cd’s and other portable media.
    • Trackback: “We also have plans on releasing more in-depth TrackBack documentation (about the system itself and how it can be implemented), along with a standalone version of TrackBack that does not rely on Movable Type. These will be released soon–we have a few more changes to make to them.”
    • Tara Sue’s new website: Manilla of course, and Dave’s on the case.

  • I have a cold.  *Cough Cough*

  • Andre Torrez:

    But I’ll tell you what: ideas are fucking worthless. Anyone could do FilePile. I could write MetaFilter in a day. The only thing special about the code is that it was written. The only thing special about the sites are the users.

  • Krzysztof Kowalczyk:

    The way you define problem determines how you’ll approach solving it. Sometimes that makes a big difference. Let me give you an example: writing RSS aggregators is now en vogue (I see a new one every day). But those programs never go out beyond solving “I want easily aggregate RSS feeds”. But is getting RSS feeds really a core problem? No. The problem is bigger (and less well defined): we want to get new information on topics of interest to us. RSS feeds are a partial solution, but it has weaknesses. You have to actively look for feeds that match your interests. RSS feeds usually cover more topics than you’re really interested in but the burden of filtering uninteresting news is on you. What would happen if people tried to write “news gathering/filtering software” instead of “RSS feeds readers”? In my opinion we would get better software.

  • Oldskool Quake: Tenebrae has released a mod of the Quake source code to enable per-pixel lights and stencil shadows, allowing an oldskool game like Quake to take advantage of some of the newer graphics technologies.  It is definately a cool hack.

  • GKrellM goes 2.0.0: It is now compatible with GTK 2.0, and the new version also has client/server capabilities.  It is one of the best system monitors out there, for *nix or any other plaform IMHO.

  • Past my bedtime, news has accumulated and will be posted in the morning.

  • Setting up a Site Server with Jaguar: An O’Reillynet article about some of the open-source stuff under the hood of OSX 10.2.

  • The Weblog Election: Tara Sue Grubb is running for congress on her weblog against Coble.

  • jCIFS: A CIFS/Samba implementation in pure Java.

  • John Robb:

    Just to point out the disparity of costs between decentralized publishing and centralized publishing.  Say you have 100,000 people that you want to enable to publish a weblog.  Given that these are weblogs and not simple homepages (like GeoCities) that are published once and forgotten, a couple of things change.  People use the functionality daily, if not several times a day.  They also build massive sites.  Compared to a one or two page “designed” personal home page on the last generations site builders, the user of a weblog system will quickly find themselves publishing sites with hundreds if not thousands of pages.   They get big fast.

    He has a little more to say about p2p/distributed weblogging, and I think he’s on target with what next-gen publishing/weblog systems will have to be in order to succeed.

  • CompactBSD: Roll your own lightweight/embedded OpenBSD-based solution.

  • Bitkeeper: The source managing system of Linus’ choice is thinking about changing its license.