A press release that caught my eye:

BEDFORD, Mass., Oct. 7 /PRNewswire/ — Sonic Software today announced that it has contributed standards-based enterprise-class SOAP messaging capabilities to Apache Axis, the next generation of Apache SOAP 2.0. With the acceptance of source code for inclusion in Apache Axis 1.0, Sonic delivers its market-leading reliable, asynchronous Web services expertise to the largest open-source Web application community.

Is it just me or does the Boston/New England area seem to feel like a web services hotspot? [via Newsforge]

Some things never change

A few days ago, I snagged the GTK+2 version of GKrellM, probably the best system monitor that I have ever used, regardless of platform.  I love that everything is right there in front of you.  I was curious to see how the new version might take advantage of the new GTK+2 libraries.  It does not appear any different than it did before, and I don’t think that’s really a bad thing.

You can find plugins to monitor many services and tasks at a glance, and it’s fully skinnable.  If you use a *nix or *BSD running with Gnome libraries, you should probably at least have access to it.

I still love Bluecurve.  It’s been rock solid both idle and under stress.  I don’t have killer uptime because I’ve had borrow parts from it over the past couple of days, but I’m pretty sure that it is capable of it.

I still want to see one in a production environment.

Both Mongomery County and Prince George’s county schools are on lockdown now.

Here’s the google news roundup of the middle school shooting.

Update by email– Shots were reported in a Walmart parking lot in Bowie, Maryland. Nothing has come up yet, and nobody appears to be injured.  It looks like nothing major happened there.

A child was shot outside of a Bowie, Maryland school this morning.  Police are not sure if it is connected to the recent sniping spree.  The child has been rushed to a local hospital and will be transported via helicopter to a trauma center.  More as I hear it.

CNet: HP introduces a new Compaq laptop well equipped at $899.

I would like to know why I can’t spend a couple hundred bucks and get a decent but slower laptop.  Pentium 166 notebooks go for $200 and more all the time.  That’s annoying.  At least HP is lowering the bar for entry level laptops.  Maybe I’ll be able to afford one to replace my ancient laptop.

Then again…

CNet: Microsoft unveils new Web services tool

Microsoft is scheduled to formally announce Content Management Server 2002 at the Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, Calif., where the company also plans to reveal more details about the next versions of Outlook and Exchange.

And pricing:

Content Management Server 2002 will retail for $42,000 per processor. Companies running multi-processor servers could pay considerably more for the product. Microsoft said the software would be generally available by the end of the year.

That would get expensive on my quad Xeon box.  Ha!  Just kidding.

Blogging has been slow over the weekend as I have a ton of stuff to get done before the Web Services Devcon.

Joe Walnes: Extreme Programming, lego style.

I was lucky enough to attend an Extreme Lego Workshop last week. It was a three-hour session to give teams the feel of doing XP. It’s designed for members of a delivery team (developers and managers) who are interested in experiencing the XP process first-hand.

Gred Klebus has put Red Hat 8.0 on his Shuttle SV25:

I must say I’m impressed with the new Red Hat. The best looking Linux desktop I’ve ever seen. Fonts are looking decent, even the Postscript ones. Loads of application, including Open Office, new Mozilla, etc.

I just wish one day Java JREs would be shipped with every Linux distribution…

I’d really like to see a good stripped-down install of Red Hat 8.0.  We all know it is one of the prettiest Linux distros out there (currently), but how is this going to perform on a headless server?  I’m glad to see a standard GCC3.2 (I think) and not the GCC2.9x-redhat stuff that many people were not happy about.  What else is under the hood?  How does it stack up?

Joe Walnes has a good wrapup of CVS goodies.

Brian W. Carver:

Imagine a company, the Rio Idiota Acaparar Agua (RIAA) bottled water company which sells bottled water.  Now the RIAA is extremely worried that people who have bought their bottled water may drink it, fill the bottle back up, and then share it with their friends and neighbors.  The RIAA insists that their customers’ friends should buy their own bottled water, and that sharing water, even if it is of a lower quality than the original, is a violation of the RIAA’s right to be the sole distributor of Rio Idiota Acaparar Agua bottled water.

There’s more in this analogy for you.  The sad thing is, bottled water was mentioned more than once at the Cato debate I attended. [via Greplaw]

David Johnson reports in with Russell Beattie’s situation:

Russell Beattie has had a tough week, but he is OK – at least in the physical world. In the digital world of cyberspace, however, he is not doing so well. First, he lost his client by accidentally installing Linux over his Windows partition. Next, he lost his server because his ISP, CWIHosting.com, has mysteriously shut down his account. CWIHosting tells him this is because of “police reasons.” The CWIHosting support people told him that he needs to email the CTO and CEO to get any further information. Unfortunately, they are not responding to his emails. He is a little worried that he might not be allowed to get into his account and rescue his weblog archives. That is a scary thought.

Russell thinks that “police reasons” might be actually be a mis-spelling of “policy reasons” and perhaps he simply overloaded his shared Java VM by misconfiguring something when he set up OSCache. I hope that is the case. Anyway, Russell is setting up a new account at JohnCompanies.com ISP and hopes to be back on line by Monday or Tuesday. Good luck Russell!

I hope Russell is able to get things sorted out as quickly as possible, I miss him already.  One of my old bosses has a website at CWI, and I haven’t heard anything bad about them up until this point.  Here’s hoping Russell is able to get in to rescue his data.

David Johnson is finishing up Roller for a 0.9.6 release.

Videoblogging

I think Leo Laporte has the right idea about videoblogging.  He has recently posted video clips from his show and video clips from an appearance at Arundel Mills.  It’s interesting to see how this is different from Jeremy Allaire’s experiments with Flash-based video blogging.

Jeremy’s flash-based video blogging seems to be pretty easy to use and is an excellent proof of concept.  I think the problem lies in the content.  I think I’d rather see geeks out in the field, at an event, covering a topic, rather than seeing them in front of their computers.

Charles Miller:

To anyone working in a software company. My computer is my own. You do not make assumptions as to how I want to use my computer, nor do you make assumptions as to how much I want to use your product, just because I happen to be installing it.

Paolo announced today that Evectors is distributing an Italian localized version of Radio.  Cool!

Steve Loughran: The Wondrous Curse of Interoperability. [via Sam Ruby]

Dave Winer:

Kevin, who works at Apple, says we should wire RSS up to Rendezvous. Basically when someone pops on the network who has an RSS feed, this info would be available to all people on the network. Of course as a Windows user I wanted to know if this would work for me. We’re going to look into it.

I want one.  I haven’t looked at the code or the docs, but with Apple open sourcing the Rendezvous technology, it shouldn’t be impossible to implement it and extend it on *BSDs, Linux, and even Windows.