From the Mono page:
Mono 0.20 has been released. Check out the release notes for an overview of the changes. You can get it here. There are no major features in this release, mostly bug fixes and performance improvements.
It looks like an impressive release, with remoting bits, threading tweaks, the beginnings of System.Security, System.XML fixes, Mono.Posix, lots of refactoring and bugfixing.
I’ll be upgrading my Mono install soon.
BBC News picked up the mobile weblogging story today. It seems to be very close to the article that Wired ran earlier this week. It’s interesting to note that I’m getting more conversions (people going from the wapblog page to other places on my site) from the BBC article than I did with the Wired piece.
Running low on disk space again, this time filling up 200 megs. I might have to cut down or eliminate cross posting to categories.
Russ has something here:
Okay, I didn’t look this up to see if someone else is doing it, but I was thinking about Moblogging and the idea of real world annotations – where you can mark a space using GPS and then someone else can “see” what’s happening at that space when they run into it with their cool high-tech mobile phone.
I love the idea of tagging a unique number or identifier to a place and then being able to access it later. I don’t know how well little stickers with numbers would be recieved by law enforcement, government, and tree huggers. Damn tree huggers.
In a system set up like this, I’d also love to see many ways to get at the data. Cel phones would be able to access it via WAP/WML, MMS, SMS, etc. I’d also like to see clients for Java-enabled phones and possibly native Symbian-OS clients. I’d like to see XML-RPC, SOAP, REST, and other web service interfaces to the motagging data so that we can get at it in the way that is easiest for any particular situation. (Sorry, it seems that when I get excited, alphabet soup tends to happen)
Laptops on 802.11b would offer a richer interface to the data, possibly with links to or geographical representations of other nearby tags. There would be a tagpop top 40 which would monitor the most popular tags across the globe so that we can see where new and exciting things are happening, and finding out where in the world is ‘so last week.’
You could pop up an interface on your phone to find any tags that are within three city blocks of you. Eventually the tags would cease being little stickers posted everywhere and the technology would fill in with GPS other next-gen phone features.
I’d love to see MoWiki’s pop up, though they’d have to be easy enough to annotate (read: easier and less intimidating than current wikis) and the wholse system would have to be resistant to abuse.
I would claim ownership of the tag at the sub shop down the street and tell people that the pizzas taste great if there’s a line out the door but are not so good when it’s slow, or to get the Chicken Suvlaki on a sub roll, but watch out cause it’s messy. Someone would chime in a week or two later and say that the meatball and cheese sub is a little bland but great for $3.50.
It would be really hard to filter out tag spam. Signal to noise ratio might be an issue.
The idea has tons of potential.
From the canon-digital-rumor-sales-rep-knows-nothing dept:
My Canon sales rep and the local tech rep stopped by. The official unofficial word is that there is indeed a replacement for the canon D60 digital SLR. It will most likely be announced around the 27th.
The sales rep isn’t saying much, claims not to know much, but Canon is flying all the sales reps into Vegas two days before PMA starts. This is significant because Canon usually sends their sales reps to PMA one day before the big show starts.
We’ll see what happens.
Headache and homework means that I probably won’t be writing anything today.
Oi. Strange things have been happening with the internet connection here.
Looks like everything is at least okay at this point.
Erik pointed to an entry by Warner Onstine about why he became a programmer.
The first thing that struck me about his blosxom-powered weblog is the navigation at the top. Sure it gives me nightmares about dealing with MS Access, but it’s quite slick and flows with the directory-based categorization of blosxom.
I’ve subscribed to Warner’s RSS feed.
Wi-Fi Networking News has the scoop on Vivato:
Yesterday at Demo, Vivato announced the details of their first Wi-Fi phased-array antenna/switch, an indoor office system that can serve up to 150 users at 11 Mbps at distances up to 300 meters for about $9,000.
The emphasis above is on antenna/switch, which is quite different than an antenna/access point.
You can’t blame older Web developers if they are overwhelmed when considering all the new Web services standards on their way. For example, in mid-December 2002, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, RSA, SAP and VeriSign announced a new set of specifications on top of WS-Security: WS-Policy, WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation. Next, in January, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Oracle, Sonic and Sun announced WS-Reliability to try to bring rhyme and reason to Web services’ transport infrastructure.
Wet Wet + Cold Cold = Bad Bad.
It looks like things are going to get interesting.
Scott Hanselman wonders:
My real question is, did God put these constants as a readonly field in a static constructor or a singleton pattern, or assuming parallel universes, a factory pattern?
Ingo points out some corrections and notes (absolutely hilarious).
Some of the mysteries of the universe have been hard coded. for example, here’s a one-line code snippet from some ugly parts of the Reality implemetation:
return 42;
Did God write tests first?
Russ points to a wicked VNC-like app for his Nokia Series 60 called Remote S60. That’s really, really cool.
Ugh. I just got back from a soda run at our local 7-11. I ended up waiting in line for about five minutes because someone in front of me wrote a check. It required both employees’ attention for several minutes.
I think they typed her number in about six times: five incorrectly, once correctly. The clerk hadn’t figured things out by the time I left.
I didn’t know that 7-11 took checks.
They shouldn’t.
CNet:
That’s the conclusion two Cornell University computer scientists came to after finding that computer networks tend to be “selfish” when each tries to route traffic by the fastest pathway, causing that path to become congested and slow.
If the routers that direct the packets of data could be programmed with some altruism, the information might be able to reach its destination a little faster while allowing other packets to also move more quickly.
This is really interesting. Sending packets down a route that is not neccesarily the fastest would result in better overall performance. That’s awesome. Where’s the altruism button on my router?
Seriously though, I think that more research in this area could definately help the traffic jam that is the internet.
Lets do more research and then apply that research to the next generation of Cisco (and other) routers, mmkay?
Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was put down on Friday afternoon, after developing a progressive lung disease.
Dolly’s birth six-and-a-half years’ ago caused a sensation around the world. But as many sheep live to twice this age, her death will refuel the intense debate over the health and life expectancy of cloned animals.
The type of lung disease Dolly developed is most common in older sheep. And in January 2002, it was revealed that Dolly had developed arthritis prematurely. She was cloned using a cell taken from a healthy six-year-old sheep, and was born on 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, Scotland.
<Insert moral, ethical, and scientific implications here/>
Michael Radwin got his slick new business cards today.
I wonder if his yahoo mail account gets as much spam as mine does. 🙂
CNet:
Struggling video game maker Sega announced Thursday that it plans to merge with another Japanese company that specializes in pinball machines.
Sega did not provide financial details but said the merger with Sammy, Japan’s largest maker of pinball machines for pachinko parlors there, would take place in October.
Interesting. Sega!
There is no ‘split’ between J2EE and .Net — the whole point of web services is to bridge the gap between the two. Tom Welsh explains why in a cogent opinion piece on The Register yesterday. I was amazed to hear recently from a leading manager at a big systems integrator that the biggest issue facing his firm’s clients was consolidation, as if putting everything on a single platform will solve everyone’s IT problems. Far better to concentrate on getting them to work in synch, I would have thought, and as Tom identifies, that’s the real objective of web services. So if .NET does one job well and J2EE does others better, then you can deploy the right platform to do each job without landing yourself with a horrendous integration headache.
Rael:
Per Dash’s and Kottke’s suggestion, not to mention finally having two moments to rub together, I’ve integrated comments and TrackBacks on my weblog. Just a few mods to MovableType’s standalone TrackBack implemention and I’ve comments and TrackBacks a la TrackBacks.
