Category: Web Services

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.

Russ@Mobitopia points out why many 802.11b hotspots in a confined area can make things suck.

Apparently WiFi is a little too popular at CeBIT, with over 76 hotspots.  The problem is, they were all interfering with each other, bringing effective range to a few meters and slowing down transfer rates like crazy.  It looks like bluetooth made it through unharmed, though.

Carlos Perez points to MIT’s Haystack Project, a “universal information client” that looks like it has a clean and useful GUI interface.  It was written with SWT.

CNet:

A new proposal from a group led by IBM and Microsoft could conflict with an earlier plan for reliable Web services messaging.

A few notable Slashdot articles today:

Mozilla 1.3 has shipped.  Grab it here.

Mandrake will release Corporate Server 2.1 (based on Mandrake 9) with x86-64 support.  The press release is here.

Also, Red Hat announced several enterprise-level operating systems, including AS (advanced server), ES (entry level), and WS (workstation).

Long story, but I’m not feeling too well today.  Hopefully things will improve.

Scott announced the official launch of feedster, the RSS search engine formerly known as Roogle.

I miss the voyeur tab, though I’m sure it screamed for abuse.  I’d be really interested in a periodic summary of metadata ala the Google Zeitgeist, as I’m still curious about what people are searching for and how much data from RSS feeds are being indexed.

CNet:

The chipmaker on Thursday announced a new matrix of model numbers for its forthcoming 64-bit chips for workstations and servers. Instead of using a four-digit model number, similar to the scheme for its Athlon XP processor for PCs, the company chose to identify the new chips with a three-digit model number–resulting in models such as the AMD Opteron 140 Series–as a way to depict each particular chip’s capabilities.

Dude, does your box have a Hemi?

Roger got me interested in BitTorrent this evening.  I was curious about the anatomy of a .torrent file, so I dug into bencode.py from the BitTorrent source distro.  It’s all in python (with wxPython for GUI), so I felt pretty comefortable.  I put together a tiny little script that pretty much uses bencode to grab a .torrent file, analyze it, and print it to the screen:

C:/py/torrent>python btinfo.py http://www.turok.info/bt/a.u.s.a.s01e06.walters.first.law.suit-ftv.torrent
Connecting to http://www.turok.info/bt/a.u.s.a.s01e06.walters.first.law.suit-ftv.torrent
Announce: http://tracker.powerpuffgrrlz.com:9696/announce
Name: a.u.s.a.s01e06.walters.first.law.suit-ftv
Piece length: 262144
File Info:
 Path: ['AUSA-1x06_-_get_the_latest_episodes.txt']
 Length: 342
 Path: ['a.u.s.a.s01e06.walters.first.law.suit-ftv.mpg']
 Length: 220427748

Here’s btinfo.py, released under the MIT license, which is the same license as BitTorrent itself.  It requires bencode.py from the source distro to be in the same directory as btinfo.  It’s a few dozen lines of code and is dumb simple to use:

Usage: C:/py/torrentbtinfo.py url.
Example: C:/py/torrent/btinfo.py http://url.com/file.torrent

I’m planning to play around with BitTorrent a little more in the future, stay tuned.

Steve Makofsky:

Could it be? A PC manufacturer designed a cool looking laptop, with all the bells and whistles? A Powerbook-like laptop for PC users!? Check out the new Sony Z1 laptop:

Based on Intel Centrino, 1.3ghz
4.7 lbs, 40gig, 256MB-1024MB RAM
14.1″ screen at 1400×1050!!!
Slim built in CDRW/DVD
Built in 802.11b, 10/100BT Network, Modem
Built in VGA connector
PC Card slot, 1394, USB 2.0
6 hr battery life (12hrs w/ double capacity battery)

The Sony Japan site indicates it has Bluetooth aswell. There’s even a teaser video now available.

Im drooling. I think I just found my next laptop.

I caught some teasage the other day, but it’s nice to see some specs.  It’s also nice to finally see ultralight ultrathin notebooks that don’t run Pentium III 800’s.

Slashdot:

AMD now offers three categories of processor for notebooks grouped under the Athlon XP-M brand. It labels them “desktop replacement,” “standard,” and the new “low-voltage”. AMD plans to make a desktop replacement in the notebook computer market using the Barton Core, a technology designed to double the CPU Cache.