Category: Web Services

I’m quite upset at the projector jockey at the Regal Entertainment Group’s theatre at Marley Station in Glen Burnie, Maryland.  I saw a 10:20 showing of Reloaded (go see it).  As hoardes of people left the theatre as the credits rolled, I stayed in my seat.  I had read several places that there was a teaser trailer for Revolutions after the credits.  Much to my dissapointment, the projecter jockey turned the projector off halfway through the credits.  I stayed for a few minutes hoping to file a complaint with a manager, but I couldn’t find anyone that worked there.

I’d just like to say a quick “YOU SUCK” to the projector jockey who decided to go home a few minutes early.  We sci-fi geeks live for things like this, and you denied it to us.

I’ll try to complain as far up the chain of command that I can, but I have a feeling that I’ll be wasting my time.

Watch your back, projector jockey.

Go see it.

Off to see The Matrix Reloaded.  Who cares if it doesn’t open until tomorrow!

Infoworld reports that the iTunes store has now surpassed 2 million downloads.  I don’t know how much money apple themselves are making, but that’s a gross of 1.98 million in just about 16 days.

Not too shabby.

OSNews notes that GCC 3.3 is out [details] as well as Squeak 3.5.

TechTV has some of the best commercials out there.

If you’re a geek, anyway.

Jabber.org:

Jabber, Inc. has published a whitepaper analyzing XMPP/Jabber and SIP/SIMPLE as potential instant messaging standards. Must reading!

The full whitepaper [48k pdf] compares the verbosity of a SIMPLE message as compared to an XMPP/Jabber message as as well as a SIMPLE presence packet vs. a Jabber/XMPP presence packet.  The Jabber packets are considerably smaller due to massive headers used for SIMPLE.

Disclaimer: I’m a Jabber kinda guy, and an open source/open standards kinda guy, so my judgement is clouded.  You have been warned.

Blogshares now has an XML-RPC API.  It’s pretty darn comprehensive, though perhaps a little complex with the session stuff.

I’d like to get in, grab the info, and get out with as little complexity as possible.  I understand that session info would be required for complex transactions over XML-RPC, but what about guerilla web services?

CNet:

The electronics giant, whose PlayStation 2 games console has outsold rivals from Microsoft and Nintendo 3-to-1, announced plans Tuesday for a handheld game player.

Here’s just a taste of the tech that will be behind the handheld:

But Sony apparently has grander plans than a nice game of Tetris. The PSP will have a screen capable of showing 3D images, stereo sound, USB 2.0 connectivity and a custom processor built on cutting-edge 90-nanometer chipmaking technology.

The device will also use a new media format. The UMD disc is an optical disc about half the size of a DVD or CD and capable of holding 1.8GB of data.

Look for it sometime late next year.  Expect it to be nearly impossible to find in stores for months.

Reverand Jim:

phpTechnorati v0.9 has been released. Enjoy!

Rock, Jim.

One of these days I’m going to have a nightmare about a mob of three paned RSS aggregators chasing me.

Aaron Swartz:

In trying to write some code to use the new Technorati API, I noticed that all the tools for accessing XML documents sucked. So I wrote my own: xmltramp.

Well suck is a harsh word.  Counterintuitive, perhaps.  Tons of work to get at a simple XML document, yes.  Aarons approach sees to make sense to me.

Diego:

Now I can not only post to my weblog from within cactus, but I can also repost an email to a weblog entry (after editing of course) and, even better, I can use an RSS feed item as the source. So commenting to other posts on my own weblog is now really, really easy.

Coooooooooool!

Sifry released the Technorati API 0.9, a RESTful interface to gobs of Technorati data.

Phillip Pearson already has a wrapper out for Python.

I just wanted to float some props to David Czarnecki and Mark Lussier.  I posted about the lack of installation instructions for Blojsim both on my blog and at Sourceforge and recieved an email from David just a day or two later and this weekend Mark released Blojsim 0.9.  The new version now includes juicy installation instructions.

It always brings a smile to my face when I get a quick response in regards to an open source project.

As soon as I get a chance, I’ll try installing and playing with Blojsim 0.9.  Thanks to David, Mark, and all the other open source people like them in the universe.

The May 8 issue of Digital ID World is out.

Indi Young at Adaptive Path: Fifteen Tips for Remote Collaboration

Craziness going on in the RSS world.  As usual, a good bit of it is happening over at Sam Ruby’s blog:

• RSS Profile
• Don Box’s RSS Profile
• RSS Identity [See also Ben Trott’s entry]

Big Mono news:

Today Zoltan Varga announced that he got the Eclipse IDE running on top of Mono+IKVM. A screenshot of Eclipse running with Mono can be found here

Via freshmeat, KMLDonkey:

KMLDonkey is a project that aims to fully integrate the mldonkey P2P software into the KDE desktop.