Category: Web Services

The BBC reports that the Dow Jones Index is over 10,000 for the first time in 18 months.

Update: what goes up must come down.

Keith points to a MSNBC quiz about your Digital IQ.  I’ll only admit to scoring over 200.

• David Thomson points out XPlanner, which looks like a great web-based XP project tracking tool.
• Christoph Cemper points to two excellent subversion tutorials.
• My-Symbian has spooted an excellent mobile game deal: 5 MGS games for $30.
• Doc brings up a nasty bug in Ximian Evolution that slams some RSS feeds every 5 minutes.
• Gizmodo brings news of a Wi-Fi Blackberry, an Asus phone that looks strangely like a Px00 among other mobile gear.
• Ask Bjorn Hansen considers GPRS useless.  SSH routinely times out on me (if it allows me to connect at all), the speeds are slow, the latency high.  But gosh darn it, it’s a connection!
• Newsforge: Ensim to support Fedora.  I hope that Plesk will follow suit, though ideally (if money were no option) you would run these atop Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• 71.48 mile Wi-Fi link using two DSS dishes across The Great Salt Lake.
• Newsforge: XFS merged in to 2.4 kernel.
• Blogshares is coming back?
• Is the Wi-Fi cantenna bubble next?
• Mark Derricutt and others note a new major release of IntelliJ IDEA EAP.

I saw The Last Samurai tonight.  I would give it a solid 4.5 Thauvin-stars.  It is easily one of the best movies that I have seen in quite some time.  This is one to see in the theatres and own on DVD when it comes out.

On a related note, I hope you’re feeling better, Erik.

InfoSync is excited.  The Siemens SX-1 is reportedly ready for a Christmas delivery.  Of course, that might mean December 24, or Siemens could back up the release date again.

I would consider this post by Ewan a Good Sign that they are on their way soon.

MobileTracker:

Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post reviewed the Motorola MPx200 and was quite impressed. Slated to be published tomorrow, the review praises the low cost of the smartphone and its ability to do a lot, but not too much. It knocked the device for being a little rought around the edges.

The review should be showing up in dead tree version at the front door in a few hours.  I’ll check it out.

Thunderbird 0.4 is out.

This Slashdot story that points to an article at HotHardware declares that DVD burners have hit the important $100 barrier.  The reviewed model is a DVD+R/DVD+RW AOpen.  You still have to spend more (at least $150 after rebates) for something that is DVD+/-everything.

The $100 barrier is an important one.  I bought my first CD burner shortly after they hit $100.  It was an off brand 2x burner.  Yeah, the specs are pathetic a few years later, but at the time it was a big thing for me to be able to back up my data to CDs.  My first CD burner still sits in one of my servers, and I use it every few weeks to run backups.

I’ve been telling myself that I would start looking at DVD burners as soon as they reached that $100 mark.  Well there they are, though I will probably wait until I can pick up a DVD+/-everything for around $100.  I’ve heard that LiteOn and other OEM-style burners can be an excellent deal.  It sure beats fronting $250 for a burner that will cost $150 “after rebtates”

I ordered pizza for lunch today over the internet.

That sounds like such a dot-com era thing, but it’s not.  It actually got here quicker than if I had phoned it in, and I did not have to deal with the standard “Thank you for calling Papa Johns, please hold” greeting.

Yum.

Ask Bjorn Hansen writes up his experiences with T-Mobile GPRS and OSX.  T-Mobile’s naming scheme seems a bit weird.  They tend to apply “T-Zones” to many different things in many different contexts.  In my part of the US, they don’t even offer any non-T-Zones plans.  I pay $10 a month for unlimited T-Zones which includes all of the GPRS that I can use, a couple hundred extra SMS messages, and access to the T-Zones portal.

I wish that T-Mobile would get off their butts and remove the references to Voicestream that I keep running in to.  My t-zones homepage was set to wap.myvoicestream.com when I signed up with T-Mobile, though honestly I’m more likely to start out at the t-mobile.co.uk wap page.  It has cute little icons whereas the US wap site is just an ugly list of stuff.  Of course what T-Mobile really needs to do is start migrating to an XHTML-MP site as the number of devices that are XHTML-MP-aware are rising quickly.

Ewan posts about a new version of the OPL runtime for Series 60 devices.  The OPL Dev Primer on the OPL Wiki is making it much clearer what has to be done to start developing OPL on the PC platform.  Expect many cool new things on the wiki in the near future.

Steve Olechowski posts an extensive roundup of the major wireless carriers in the US.  He lists both positive and negative points for each carrier.  I have either direct or indirect experience with all of the carriers on the list, and I must say that his points are extremely accurate.  I think he’s being a little too kind to Sprint, but that’s just my personal opinion.

Great roundup, Steve!

Rael mentioned unlocking mobile phones yesterday.  I followed the link trail to UnlockMe.co.uk. I downloaded the code calculator and fired it up.  I typed my IMEI number in and then hit google for the correct MCC+MNC number.  Eventually I ended up here which said that T-Mobile USA uses MCC+MNC number 31020.  After plugging that in to the program, I hit Calculate and tried the first code.  It worked like a charm.  ‘Restriction removed.’

Be careful about trying to unlock your phone, it looks like you only get 5 tries and then you have to unlock it with a cable.

Legal disclaimer: I did not perform any of the actions described above.  The above account is complete fiction.  Yes, the DMCA scares the crap out of me.

Imaging Resource links to a Nikon press release about the D70, Nikon’s answer to the Digital Rebel.  Nikon is late to the party (though they don’t mention it in their press release).  They are expecting to ship their cameras by Spring 2004.  With Nikon’s track record, we could see the camera in Sprint 2004 or it might not make it ou until sometime mid-2005.

This is in stark contrast with the launch of the Digital Rebel by Canon.  They kept a tight lid on the project, announced it, had catalog numbers a few weeks later, and about a month after that there were a good number of them hitting the street.  The camera is still on allocation, meaning that whenever cameras come in to the country, the regional reps decide who gets how many.  The cameras are trickling in though.

Nikon’s announcement is much more vague than Canon’s was, which tells me that they are much further behind in the manufacturing process.  They probably don’t want to release any/many specs because they are still in flux.  Hopefully they will use a high quality/high megapixel sensor (6+ megapixels).  They list the magnification factor as 1.5x, which means that they are at least using the same size sensor.  If they’re smart, they’ll either use the same chip that ships with the D100 or go with a similar quality chip that is a little less expensive to produce.

They will probably develop a consumer DX lens akin to the 18-55 that ships with the Digital Rebel.  Nikon does have a nice lineup of DX lenses designed exclusively for their digital cameras.  They have an ultrawide fisheye and a pair of ultra wide zooms.

It is too early to tell what the price point is going to be, but it is going to have to come in under $1000 with lens in the US in order to avoid laughing stock status.  If Nikon is smart they will be able to set a new price point when they introduce the camera.  By the time they get D70’s on the streets, the Digital Rebel will have been out for some time, and should be selling for at least a hundred bucks less than its initial $1000 pricetag with lens.

The entry level digital SLR lanscape just got a lot more interesting.  Expect more detailed specs at PMA in February.

Update:

DPReview thinks that it will come in at $999 for body only.  I hope for Nikon’s sake that this number is wrong.

All of this negativity would lead one to think that I’m anti-Nikon.  I’m not.  I happen to own Canon equipment, but that is because an amazing deal on some used equipment fell in my lap several years ago.  If I had not picked up my Elan II rig, I would have probably saved up for a Nikon N90s, which along with the F3 is one of my favorite SLRs.  My problem with Nikon is that they’re constantly shooting themselves in the foot.  I feel bad to see a company do that, and it often comes out as cynical negativity.

ZDNet:

Sybase Chief Executive John Chen agreed on Tuesday to join Walt Disney’s board of directors, following the stormy resignations of two Disney board members, including the founder’s nephew, Roy Disney. In a clash with Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner, Disney quit the board on Sunday followed by fellow director Stanley Gold.

I’ve got Roy’s back on this one.  I hope he manages to get things under control (again).

From the Seattpe PI Blog:

Ever wonder just how Washington state comes up with your driver’s license number? Alan De Smet explains. He even wrote a tool to generate them (and a warning to anyone contemplating using it for fraudulent purposes).

He also has algorithms for a couple of other states, including Maryland.  It works.  Quite scary.

MobileWhack: It’s the new mobile site from Rael and the gang.  The site runs on enterprise blosxom (and by that I mean it uses blosxom).  The site is also designed to look good in your browser and with a mobile browser such as Opera.  Of course what would really rock would be an XHTML-MP version of the site for those of us who never quite have enough free memory on our phones to run the Opera beast.

Wow. Roy Disney resigned today. That is big. (Blogging in traffic)

Later:

From the looks of things, Roy was very upset with a lot of things that Eisner has been doing, and some general issues with the poor performance of the comany in several key areas (Animation, ABC, theme parks).

He could probably usurp Disney from Eisner if he came up with the right replacement.  As a sidenote, he installed Eisner as CEO in a sort of coup almost 20 years ago.

Who would be the perfect Disney CEO?  Steve Jobs of course.  He already heads Apple and Pixar, two of the more creative companies out there.  Disney owns a part of Pixar.  It makes perfect sense.  Of course if I were Steve Jobs, I wouldn’t touch that position with a 39.5 foot pole, but still, how cool would that be?

Back to reality…

WebDAV is one of those things that I’ve been meaning to set up and use for awhile but I have never actually done it.  It’s so cool though.  Someday…

Cake:

CAKE is a networking protocol in which all messages are addressed to a public key, and are signed by the source public key. Public key identifiers are treated like IP addresses. They represent the destination or source of any particular message.

Cool idea.