Matt Croydon::Postneo

Busy making things: @mc, notes, tinycast, github, links, photos.

  • test.py: Self-Testing Test Script Runner

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    Garth Kidd has introduced a self testing test script runner called test.py.  It tests itself and makes sure that the modules for your tests can be imported before testing.

    Bravo!

  • 10 Python Pitfalls

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    10 Python Pitfalls was pointed out by several people last night and early this morning.  I’ll read up on it later, but a quick skim looks promising.

  • Wi-Fi Wants to Be Free

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    It’s true.  Paul Botin’s piece in Wired about free Wi-Fi access has been making the rounds lately, but a title from the Seattle Post Intelligencer’s weblog says it like it is:

    Wi-Fi wants to be free.

  • Nikon Coolpix 3100: Don’t Buy

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    DPReview:

    Just posted! Our full in-depth review of Nikon’s entry-level zoom Coolpix 3100. This three megapixel three times optical zoom digital camera was announced at PMA earlier this year and is aimed at beginners or those on a budget, it’s pocket sized proportions and cute rounded styling make it a great go anywhere camera which won’t break the bank. Read the full review to see how the Coolpix 3100 performed in our tests.

    I would personally advise against purchasing a Nikon Coolpix 3100: It runs on one really expensive, non-rechargable, CR-V3 battery.  You of course have the option of purchasing seperately rechargable NiMH AA batteries, but at the $299 price range, a digital camera should include a rechargable Lithium Ion battery.

    Using non-rechargable CR-V3’s is a recent trend that doesn’t make me very happy.  It screws the consumer while allowing the manufacturer to lower the all-important price point another few bucks.  A single CR-V3 battery can cost over $15 here in Washington, DC.  For $15 you can get anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or so of usage.

    It’s not just Nikon.  Some recent models that I’ve seen from Samsung, Olympus (they make one that requires TWO CR-V3’s!), Kodak, Pentax, and others use this non-rechargable battery.

    Make it stop.

  • Slow

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    Wow, windowsupdate.microsoft.com is really slow tonight for some reason…

  • Amok! Amok! Amok!

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    Symantec has released a quick and easy fix for the nasty little worm running amok.

  • Google Calculator

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    Via Dave Winer, the Google Calculator rocks.  Of course it handles all the weird an imaginary numbers quite well:

    …And much fun was had by all.

  • Wi-fi At Panera Bread

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    Mac Central:

    Bakery-cafe chain Panera Bread Co. is one of the newest food chains to announce that they’re deploying Wi-Fi access. Unlike many of the other companies that have announced plans for wireless networking access, however, Panera’s doing it for free.

    Wow, that is great news.  The list of wi-fi enabled stores doesn’t include the one closest to me, but honestly, I wouldn’t mind driving a little out of my way to eat food and surf for free.

  • Athlon 64 Logo

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    Now that is a logo.  Did I mention that I love the color orange?  The Register has details, and of course, all we need now are the actually Athlon64’s.

  • Realtime Video Editing in Linux: Cinerella

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    Cinerella 1.1.7 is out.  It is movie editing on crack for the Linux platform.  Here’s what’s new:

    Improved playback through firewire. Importing of dvgrab and lavtools AVI files. Changing parameters for PCM works more often. A virtual file system for renderfarms. Time stretch based on overlapping windows instead of FFT. Integrated mpeg2enc, toolame, and LAME encoding as libraries. The default configuration should run on a stock Red Hat 9.0 system.

    It requires some beefy hardware, but from the screenshots it looks like it’s all worth it.  The integrated clustering also looks awesome.

  • RSS Owl 0.51b

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    RSS Owl is a Java three paned RSS aggregator written using SWT.  The latest version is 0.51b.  I saw this come across the WAP aggregator the other day, but I had no way of blogging it.

  • GCC 3.3.1

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    It looks like I missed the release of GCC 3.3.1 the other day.

  • Mono Python Bindings

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    Yes, my plane was supposed to be on the ground around 11pm.  Yes it’s about 3:30 and I’m just settling in at home.

    I’m hopelessly playing catchup, but there’s some interesting mono/python news from a few days ago:

    Brian Lloyd has announced the availability of his Python binding to .NET. This works with .NET and Mono. For more information about it, see Brian’s site at http://zope.org/Members/Brian/PythonNet/

     

  • Florida Moblog #2

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    Today was MGM Studios and will be after hours night at the Magic Kingdom. Right now I’m off to the top of The Contemporary Resort for dinner. Later.

     

  • Florida Moblog #1

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    It rained a good bit of today in orlando. I caught up on some feeds today, but was mostly offline. Check out my moblog for a few pictures. Back to some vacation…

  • Pre-Flight Roundup

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    I’m getting on a plane in a few hours, but I’ve got to clear out some news first:

    • ABCNews: “After at least two months of studying ways to help wartorn Liberia, President Bush has decided to send six to 10 American troops to assist West African peacekeepers, defense officials said Wednesday.”
    • ITWorld: “Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has agreed to purchase the Information Appliance business unit of National Semiconductor Corp. for an undisclosed amount, adding chips for thin-client devices and set-top boxes to AMD’s portfolio, the companies announced Wednesday.”
    • Infoworld: “Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is showing off a reference design for a PDA (personal digital assistant) based on its Alchemy Au1100 processor running Linux at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, according to the company.”
    • TheServerSide: “Macromedia is de-emphasizing and may be planning to drop or sell off JRun Application Server. It has been reported that most of the JRun team in Newton, MA, have been laid off.”
    • Sean Bonner: “This is a simple request to anyone with a blog and an RSS feed. One of the most powerful aspects, as least in my mind, is to run an aggregator, download everything to my laptop, then read much of it a little down the line, perhaps when I go get lunch or when I’m somewhere without an internet connection.”  I’m a full-post kind of guy.  Radio’s aggregator doesn’t handle the <![CDATA[ in Sean’s feed, so I only saw an excerpt.  The data’s there.
    • Via Russ on IRC, VS HTTPD is a web server for your Series 60 cel phone.  Whose phone can we slashdot first?
    • Mobiletracker has the dirt on the NTT DoCoMo 505i series phone.
    • Jeremy notes Google News Alerts, which emails you when new news items are posted on a perticular topic (as defined by a search string).  Rock on!

    Of course the exciting stuff happens while I’m going to have limited connectivity.  It looks like I’ll have quite a bit of catch up to do when I get back.

    I’ll be moblogging at my textamerica moblog, and might even set up a webserver while I’m at the airport.

  • Radio Silence

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    Rick Klau:

    You know you’re slacking when your Dad gives you shit about not posting to your blog in a week.

    I’m going to be away from my weblog for the next few days.  I’ll be following some news on my WAP Aggregator, but will do my best to mostly unplug.  I’ll be back late Sunday and I plan to start catching up Monday morning.

  • Pie/Echo/Atom 0.2 Snapshot

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    Mark has released an Atom 0.2 Snapshot.  It includes some changes from the 0.1 snapshot, and also omits some things that are still in flux on the wiki.

    I was able to produce a valid Pie/Echo/Atom feed in just a few minutes using MovableType.  All I did was grab Mark’s template, two plugins: UTCDate and LastModified, and rebuilt my indexes.

    It should also be trivial for TypePad to deploy Atom 0.2 feeds system wide.  I would assume a blosxom (or similar) template wouldn’t be hard to put together either.

    It just gets better from here.

  • Dell To Build Really Big Computer

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    Infoworld:

    The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) plans to use more than 1,450 Dell Inc. servers in a powerful Linux supercomputer that will be used for everything from predicting the demise of the universe to discovering new drugs to keep you alive until that happens.

    With all of the recent supercomputer news, it looks like the Top 500 list might have to be shuffled around a bit.

  • Apache J2EE Project

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    An open letter from Greg Stein as posted in The Inquirer:

    The project (tentatively named “Apache Geronimo”) builds upon the many Java projects at the Apache Software Foundation. In addition, the project is bringing together leading members of the Castor, JBoss, MX4J and OpenEJB communities. We would like to extend an open invitation to everyone involved in the J2EE space, both commercial entities and talented individuals, to join the community and build a world-class J2EE implementation.

    This struck my by suprise, but I haven’t been paying too close attention to J2EE rumblings as of late.  It’s an excellent project to undertake, and I wish the Geronimo developers good luck.