MSNBC on the Tech Factor in today’s election:

But will it matter? Below are eight races, including Sanchez vs. Perry, where one candidate has integrated information technology more fully and more smartly than his or her opponent. Many of the candidates with the best technology aren’t on the list — for example Bill Simon and Gray Davis in California — because they are running against each other and cancel each other out. Other interesting candidates aren’t included because they are irrelevant — such as Tara Sue Grubb, a libertarian congressional candidate in South Carolina who publishes a personal blog called tarasue4u.

I’d hardly call Tara Sue irrelevant.  How many candidates will have weblogs next election?

Ed Cone:

11% Reporting; Coble 86%-Grubb 14%
27% reporting; Coble 90%-Grubb 10%
41% reporting; Coble 90%-Grubb 9%

Still impressive numbers for a Libertarian campaigning against the incumbant.  Ugh!  His website uses powerpoint-style transitions… BLEGH!

Solaris the movie, not the operating system.  It looks interesting, starring George Clooney, who doesn’t get enough credit as a good actor.  Looks something like a combination of 2001, Event Horizon, Spehere, Aliens, and something else.  November 27.

Sharks with Frickin’ Laser Beams

BBC:

The US army has shot down an artillery shell in flight, using a high-powered laser weapon.

Mail-From-Aggregator

Dave announced this new feature for Radio on the radio-dev list:

Some people like to read the news that the aggregator gathers in email.

This can be useful if you travel a lot, or want to share news that’sgathered with a group of people who may not use Radio.

The new tool will hit the mainstream tomorrow.  Radio users can follow Dave’s instructions to test it out now.

Mysource:

MySource is a powerful, open source website and intranet content publishing and management system. It is designed to enable technically unskilled users to build and maintain their own web solutions securely, professionally and inexpensively.

MySource written in PHP and requires both MySQL and Apache. Currently MySource is only commercially supported on the Linux platform but an NT version is due soon.

[via Serious Instructional Technology]

Aaron Swartz on Quality Software:

Funny how all the software either runs on OS X or UNIX (including OS X).

He also points to D.J. Bernstein’s software for *nix.

I voted today.  My polling place in Montgomery County, Maryland has those new-fangled computerized voting machines.  There were nine voting stations (if you included the handicapped accesable one), which seems to be significantly less than half the number of older punchcard machines.  Older voters also required some instruction on using the touch screen that resembles an oldskool X window manager.

There were about 8 people in front of me.  I waited in line for about 20 minutes.

All is well.  Democracy rolls on.

The ServerSide:

PushToTest has released a Web Services Performance Kit, an open source benchmark to measure the performance of Web Services running on IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and SunONE Application Server platforms. PushToTest has published initial Performance results on their website and has Sun One in the lead.

Check out Intitial Web Services Performance Kit Benchamark Results.

The real question is did they recieve any money or help from Sun while putting together this test?

Brandon Valentine questions Qwest’s sanity:

[bandix@sting ~]% host 63.146.150.34
Name: qwestdsl-34.150.146.63.in-addr.arpa
Address: 63.146.150.34

That IP found in my logs today. Can someone tell me WTF Qwest can’t find enough change under the couch cushions to buy the O’Reilly DNS book?

Add this to the list of things that hurt my head.

I’ve been peeking at the W3C’s Web Content Accessability Guidelines 2.0.

InfoWorld/Carolyn April: webMethods bundles JBoss.

LOOKING TO FEND off challenges from BEA, IBM, and other rivals, webMethods this week is unfurling a major overhaul of its flagship integration platform that deepens its Java support, bundles in the JBoss open-source application server, and revs up performance and scalability.

This sounds good to me.  I’ve never really played with JBoss because every bit of documentation beyond basic installation seems to be a book available for purchase and has no (free) online equivalent.  I know money must be made, but this has got to frustrate end users as well as me.

Dave Winer:

Arlo Guthrie: “And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it’s a movement.”

You can get anything you want, at Alice’s resturant.

Wired News/Kendra Mayfield: The Rosetta Disk.

Fifty to ninety percent of the world’s languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, according to the The Rosetta Project, a collaborative, open-source endeavor by language specialists and native speakers around the world who are creating a “near permanent” archive of the world’s languages.

Developers of the modern Rosetta disk hope they will help future generations recover lost languages that are now on the brink of extinction.

Very cool idea.  The nickel disk should last at least 2000 years, much longer than digital storage technology.

The Register: COURT PAPERS CONFIRM: FUJITSU SUSPECTED 4.9 MILLION DEFECTIVE DRIVES 18 MONTHS AGO.

The papers lodged with the court in California, in the $50 million action between Cirrus Logic and Fujitsu (of Japan), confirm what observers had already guessed, that – contrary to the blasé denials of any notable problems – there is indeed an officially acknowledged problem with the MPG3xxx series of drives. And Fujitsu knew the massive scale and scope of the problem at least 18 months ago.

Oops.

James Robertson thinks human-readable URLs aren’t just accessable, easy to use, and just better than arguments like ID=66, they also have another nice feature.

They’re indexed by Google, and every other search engine out there.

Kenneth Hunt points out that a new version of SAP DB is out.  SAP DB is a GPL/LGPL enterprise database.

802.11b News Exclusive:

One of the folks involved at Vivato told me (and gave me permission to quote him): One of the demos for the launch (today) is that we’ve illuminated the entire building in SF from inside the building across the street. The other is …coverage of several hotels from the other unit we have mounted to the roof of the building in SF. For instance, the entirety of the Marriott (over a mile away) is illuminated, as well as several other hotels (one side of the Marriott Courtyard, the Avalon, and the ‘W’, are all illuminated.

Am I the only one that is slightly scared by this?  802.11b is great.  Wireless internet rocks.  Many people are now unknowingly giving other poeple access to the internet and their local networks with 802.11b access points.  Now add one of the Vivato antennae wirelessly transmitting enterprise data.  Sure, most installations will be secured, but what about the IT moron that sets it up enencrypted and completely open.

There may no longer be a need for wardriving, we may soon be able to rename it warlounging or warslacking.

Serverwatch notes that the latest Netcraft Survey is out, and nothing has really changed.  Apache is at 60.54% and Microsoft’s IIS is at 28.89%.  Insignificant gains by Apache this month (+0.63%) and similar losses by IIS (-0.29%).  A little tidbit of non-news for your reading pleasure. [via Linux Today]

Diego Doval:

Don mentions that we need zero-install platforms for net-delivery of code:

The Net needs zero-install extensible client platforms. Java WebStart and .NET meets some of the needs, but both require the user to install 6 to 20 megabytes of mostly unused code and lacks the ability to incrementally update and extend the platform

I couldn’t agree more. I have previously commented on the need for Java in particular to streamline its installation process, and the same applies to other platforms (such as .Net). As long as Internet-based installation of software is a hassle, it will be difficult to break the control that Microsoft has through OEMs and such.

Something equivalent to the mysterious “xcopy deployment.”