Significant *nix release of the morning: NMap 3.00 stable.  NMap is an excellent tool that you can run on your local network to see what ports are open, and which machines might be vulnerable to an attack.  If you’ve got a linux box on your network, I’d suggest running it just for the learning experience.  It’s nice and will even guess which OS each box on your network is running, with some degree of accuracy.  The 3.00 gzipped tarball is here and the freshmeat page is here.

Office toy warfare round up: Oh yeah!  Scroll down to the crossbow, that’s my favorite.

Also in todays freshmeat box is Simple Web Journal, with a little PHP and MySQL.  A demo site is here.

Microblogger: A weblog tool written in straight-up bash script, 2k worth.  How cool is that?  You can grab it via a gzipped tarball here.

MicroBlogger, as the name implies, is a small, simple, flexible, reliable weblog engine written entirely in bash script. It has absolutely no dependencies on any other programs–No PHP, no SQL, no CGI, no Perl, nothing. MicroBlogger is self-regulating, self-maintaining, and ready to fly straight out of the box. Just unpack the archive in your web directory, add a greeting, and whammo, you’re all set! MicroBlogger’s simplicity has another advantage; its fast, stable, and easy to customize!

I don’t know if I like it or if I’m scared, but the Slashdot story about Bruce Sterling’s speech on open source hit the web two days after I heard about it. I guess reading multitudes of primary sources is A Good Thing.

Is your website KISS compliant?  Gerry Patterson is right on with how the Keep it Simple, Stupid philosophy works for web sites and web design, and that it works well:

Occam’s Razor has become the cornerstone of post-Renaissance scientific philosophy. The infamous razor can be applied to systems analysis and software design, where it is usually referred to as KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).

KISS is an excellent design strategy for websites. KISS websites can work, can work fast, can work with all browsers and can get listed with the search engines.

What more could you possibly want from a website?

I didn’t understand the term ‘warblogging’ until I started clicking around the blogging ecosystem.  I didn’t know they were out there, and I wish I hadn’t found them.  Ick.

What are the goals of CMS? Column two answers.

ZDNet UK:

 While the processor’s design is still under wraps, the companies say Cell’s capabilities will allow it to deliver one trillion calculations per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz

The ‘Cell’ will most likely be the chip behind Sony’s Playstation 3, and might also creep into servers from IBM and set top boxes from Toshiba.  There are a lot of generic technical specs in the article that sounds pretty cool as long as everything pans out.

Clemens Vasters:

Transactions are for pessimistic cynics. I love transactions.

Let’s change Java again!  Here’s an article running on O’Reillynet.  I agree that Java is aging, but I can remember how frustrated I was starting to learn Java 1.1/AWT just to have to learn everything over again 6 months later with 1.2/Swing.

Clear Channel sucks again:

You know, the one who calls himself Mark in the Dark or Dangerous Dick and breaks into the “50-minute music hour” to tell you about the county fair and the Red Cross blood drive?

Odds are he’s not around, so don’t even think about calling the request line. The chances are pretty good that the man behind the voice lives in another time zone, appears on stations in four states, and picks up local color by reading newspapers online. He may even have taped his show last month then gone on vacation to some exotic locale he’s never visited. Like, say, your town.

But Clear Channel shows no signs of losing its devotion to voice tracking. With the help of technology, the company is creating mini-chains of stations that share the same nicknames, logos, formats and personalities. Twenty-five Clear Channel rock stations are named “Mix” — from Mix 102.9 in Dallas to Mix 102.7 in Sandusky, Ohio — and 46 rock stations called KISS litter the country from Casper, Wyoming to Savannah, Georgia. [Wired]

MattSchwack: dude, I got linked!  🙂
crawford131313: ooo…cool <checks it out>
crawford131313: nice.  rock on
MattSchwack: hehe yeah.  I almost freaked out this morning cause I was catching up on news, and it was like seeing yourself on the 11 o’clock news, except not.  It was weird.  I partied.

Mark Nottingham’s site about web caching, web services, and a bunch of other stuff. Who needs bookmarks when you have a weblog?

Reptile: A good RSS info/development site.

Excellent RSS -> email bridge in perl. simple. elegant. I might just put this to use while I’m on vacation so I can keep up without having to check my aggregator every hour…

Error Wear! Http, BSOD, and classic gaming errors. I have to order one!

Rounded Corners!  Sweet looks that work almost everywhere.  From (dive into) mark.

OmniOutliner: It looks like The Omni Group is at it again. This one is for mac users only though. Apparently they’re also working on OPML support.

QT#: C# bindings for the QT toolkit.  It should fit in nicely with mono and dotgnu.  Keep up the great work.  [via NewsForge]