Category: Web Services

Rael reports that Jeff Bezos survived a helicopter crash.

Gizmodo:

Bluetooth’s just barely gotten a foothold in the world of technology, and already Intel, Sony, Philips, Texas Instruments, Samsung and others are working on a new wireless standard to replace it. There’s no catchy name for it yet (just the designation 802.15.3a) but it’ll use ultra wideband and be 100 times faster than Bluetooth.

I object on the grounds that I haven’t been able to purchase ANYTHING that is bluetooth enabled yet.  No phones, PCs, cameras, nothing.  I know they are out there.  I could pick up a T68i and a bluetooth USB adapter.  I’m sure there are a handful of other bluetooh-enabled devices out there.  I’m a fairly gatget-aware person, perhaps my budget is the problem.

Bluetooth hasn’t frickin’ penetrated the marketplace yet.  Let’s replace it.

Not.

(Aparently some things have to scroll by twice before they register with me)

I don’t speak Hungarian, but Mobloggolas looks like it covers the basics of the Wired/CNet/Slashdot piece that was floating around.  It was published March 1, though somehow I had not noticed it in my logs until now.

I was happy to see that they used one of my screenshots later in the article.

CNet has a roundup of Intel Centrino and Pentium M laptops:

From the start, notebook vendors have raced to speed up their notebooks but almost always at the expense of battery life: faster processors meant limited time away from an outlet. Thankfully, times change. Rather than throwing more megahertz at computing tasks, Intel’s new Pentium M processor, which makes its long-awaited debut today, significantly increases notebook battery life. One notebook we tested–IBM’s ThinkPad T40–hit the seven-hour mark.

There are also seperate reviews of the seven models.  The first three are Centrinos, they run Pentium M’s with the 855 chipset, and they have Intel’s wireless pro (802.11b) chipset:

• Toshiba Tecra M1: 1.6 Pentim M, 60 gig hard drive, DVD burner, bluetooth, 5 hour battery life.
• Acer TravelMate 803LCi: 1.6, 60 gigs, 512 megs RAM, 64 meg video card, 15 inch screen.
• Gateway 450: 1.6GHz PM, 60gigs, 256megs,32 megs ATI M7.  It’s light, thin and sexy.  They have an entry level model for $1499

The rest of the pack runs Pentium M but not one of Intel’s other required components.  Consider this corporate BS more than anything else.  Anything that runs Pentium M should have pretty swet battery life:

• Compaq Evo N620c: 1.5GHz PM, 40 gigs, 512megs, 32 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 7500.
• Dell Inspiron 600m: 1.6GHz PM, 40 gigs, 512megs, 64 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 9000.
• Dell Latitude D600: 1.6GHz PM, 40 gigs, 512megs,  32 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 9000.
• IBM Thinkpad T40: 1.6GHz PM, 80 gigs (4200RPM drive tho), 512 megs, 32 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 9000. 

There is also a product comparison chart that does a really good job at not actually comparing the models.  Also, if you click on the ‘specs‘ tab of the review, you don’t actually get any specs.  You just get a few disclaimers.  Haha, joke is on you.

Overall I was quite dissapointed with CNet.  I had major user interface issues and the complete lack of any information beyond superficial oohs and aahs pissed me off to no end.  In order to find out basic specs on these machines, I had to scroll down to the bottom of the ‘battery life’ page of several reviews.  Blegh.

It looks like the Pentium M computers will be $300-500 more expensive than their P4m counterparts.  That’s okay though.  If I can get 5-7 hours on a standard battery with a small sleek laptop, I think it’s worth a few extra bucks.  I would definately like to see a more detailed roundup done by one of the more hardware oriented sites.  How it looks is only a portion of what is important.

John Burkhardt on Mitch Kapor’s exit from Groove:

It is a tough issue and one that I’ve struggled with personally.  I have no details, nor will I, of what exactly Poindexter is doing with Groove.  But I don’t quite see it as the same moral dilema as that of creating the atom bomb.  From our perspective we are building collaboration software.  What people end up collaborating about is their business – not ours.  Maybe that’s niave.  Its hard for me to know where to draw the line.  Should Bjarne worry that the project uses c++?  Should Tim Berners Lee worry that it uses html?  What if it uses email?  The telephone?  SQL?  Groove provides a secure and decentralized communications infrastructure.  It doesn’t specifically help the government spy on us.

Every time I chat with Kenneth Hunt, it’s like a realtime weblogging linkfest experience.

Kenneth jogged my memory about LinuxWorld Expo.  I spoke to a couple of Sun guys pimping JXTA software, and they showed me a really slick Groove-like collab app.  It’s called Momentum by InView Software.  It’s not quite as portable as the Sun guys led me to believe, it’s currently only available for Windows, though a Linux version is due out soon.  Theoretically it should run on any platform with a decent JRE.  It could even run on OSX in theory.

When I really get serious about learning Japanese, Kenneth suggests Pimsleur.

He also motivated me into playing around with speex and speexdec.  Pretty amazing for the crazy compression rates.

I agree with Matt Raible:

Red Bull at lunch and I feel like I got a full night’s sleep!

Also worth checking out is Struts from Scratch by Kevin Bedell, which covers a struts install from zero to productive.

Sam Ruby nudges us gently with his new essay, Topology.

Lessig:

So as the cruel master of fate would have it, on the day that the Eldred case officially ended, I was at Disney World. I was tricked into going to Disney World. I thought the conference was “in Orlando.” But Orlando has apparently morphed into Disney World, and so when yesterday the Court refused a request to rehear the case (totally expected), I learned the news while drinking coffee from a Mickey mug.

I still believe that nobody could have argued the Eldred case better than Lawrence Lessig.  Hopefully we’ll be hearing more from him in the near future.

This just came down the .netwire:

Chris Kunicki discusses how to build a research library, a cool new feature of Microsoft Office 2003 that allows the easy research of external resources from within Office.

Here’s the MSDN article.  I’m not sure if the final version of Office 2003 will be as ugly as these screenshots, but I hope not.  It looks like the Easter Bunny got in a fight with Office 2003 and Office 2003 lost.

Juha Haataja is working on an essay about the weblogging community:

Currently there are three classes of bloggers: A, B and C class. The ‘A-class’ gathers most of the page-reads and referrals. There are perhaps 10-50 bloggers in this class. The ‘B-class’ consist of bloggers who once in a while get wider notice, perhaps thanks to the attention of an ‘A-class’ blogger. There may be 100-1000 bloggers in this category. And the ‘C-class’ contains therefore about 999000 bloggers (if the estimate of a million bloggers is correct).

Yes.

Via Freshmeat, mod_mono:

mod_mono is a module that interfaces Apache with Mono and allows running ASP.NET pages on Unix and Unix-like systems.

This release was updated to work with Mono 0.23. A bug that forced all Apache requests to be served through mod_mono was fixed.

Simon Fell:

I know someone recently was ranting about the casing of attribute names in OPML htmlUrl vs htmlurl, but I can’t find the post now. Anyway Chris Pirillo ran into a problem trying to import his OPML into blogToaster, so it will now happily accept either htmlUrl or htmlurl. Enjoy!

Is one usage or another the ‘defacto’ standard?

Of course, the answer is the age old be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send.  Send only the correct usage, but be prepared to accept any variation on the standard.

Tom Stoppard:

Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?

I don’t usually post QoTD’s, but Stoppard is the man.

Jon Udell is confused with an RSS feed with a version number of PI.  The offending prankster is Mark Pilgrim.  Here’s the offending RSS feed, which of course validates as RSS.  And of course I wrote all of this before looking at the second screenshot that explains everything.  Disregard.

It looks like I’ll be missing James Robertson’s talk at XP DC tonight.  I’ve just got too much work to get done.

OSNews:

MozillaQuest has an exclusive mini-interview with Linus Torvalds regarding the SCO-IBM law suit.

Diego explains why the spaces beta isn’t out and also outlines the work that he is doing on the storage system.  It looks like he is going to sacrafice a little bit of disk space in order to use less than 64 megs of RAM:

The new version will take up maybe 10-20% more on disk (with a higher peak usage as well), but will have upper bounds on the RAM used. The goal is, again, never to breach the default maximum JVM heap of 64 megabytes when the number of items stored (email, RSS, calendar entries, etc) is 100,000 (yes, one hundred thousand items).

Roogle got slashdotted today.  Congrats, Scott.

I was hoping to find interesting comments below the article, but alas.  Normally I can’t verify how little the angry slashdot readers actually know, but in this case I can.  It’s obvious that they know very little about RSS, weblogs, the development process of Roogle, and how cool it really is.

Sad, really.

Removing the logo was probably a good idea though.

Matt Raible:

Well, I went ahead and ordered the Communicam from AT&T and it should be hear in 3 days or so. Julie thinks I’m crazy, and she’s probably right that the camera sucks, but I want to be a moblogger. I want to post pictures and blog, in real time. My first adventure? I hope to mophoto Erik at the Denver JUG meeting a week from today. That is, if I get the camera and figure it out in time.

Good luck, moblogger.  The camera will probably suck, but that’s half the fun.  You get to enjoy some of the great crappy photos that toy camera enthusiasts strive for.  And it won’t have Barbie or Nickelodian plastered all over it!

I have decided to pick up the first Symbianish/Java/Bluetooth/Camera/etc phone that I can get my hands on for a reasonable sum.  I’m leaning towards something like the Nokia 7650 or a Sony Ericsson T310 or P800 or so.  I’ll probably have to jump ship from Sprint PCS in order to do so, but I haven’t been impressed with any of their ‘PCS Vision’ phones yet.

Sprint is holding my phone number hostage, and they extract a ransom every month for it.