John Robb:

Heads up:  I do not work at UserLand anymore.

I spent most of the weekend offline, and here is a roundup of links from the 4th to the 6th:

• IDG Interviews Tim O’Reilly.
• The Mono Project releases a coverage analysis tool.
• RFC 3549: Linux Netlink as an IP Services Protocol.
• Squishdot has implemented server side trackbacks and links to tblib for the client side.  Cool!
• Buzzmachine: AOL blogs!  You’ve got to find the tiny ‘no thanks’ button in order to view them though…
• Ray Ozzie: Extreme mobility.
• Robin: a remote desktop using XUL.
• Wil Wheaton: Truckin’.
• Kilic rally photoblog.
• Erik Hatcher is eating his own dogfood and making his blogging activities blogscene-powered.  Check out his new site and his new feed.  Subscribed.
• Leo Laporte reflects on the original ZDTV hosts.
• John Burkhardt considers a new laptop: “Small, cheap, fast. Pick two.” I don’t think he can go wrong if he chooses anything from that list.  I played with a Sharp Aticus in the store and it’s amazing.  It’s a lot of money for a 1GHz laptop, but it’s tiny.

I don’t usually post press releases, but this one is pretty cool:

PORTLAND, ORE. – (July 7, 2003) – Two open source companies, Pogo Linux Inc., a Linux hardware vendor, and MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, announced today a partnership to build the first MySQL® database appliance, a pre-configured, fully-integrated hardware/software offering optimized for speed and value. The jointly developed database appliance, the DataWare 2600 Server, will be a turnkey solution that leverages the cost savings, reliability and performance of MySQL’s leading open source database. Both companies are previewing the system at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) on July 9-10, in Portland, Oregon.

Hopefully some OSCON bloggers will be able to check this out and report back.  Of course, it wouldn’t take too much to convert commodity hardware into a database appliance using free software, but I’m sure that this administration interface and the ‘just works’ nature of it will be worth the money.

MacSlash points to some leaked screenshots of Photoshop 8 for the Mac.  The filter gallery looks pretty cool, and the keyword feature looks interesting.  I wonder how similar the PC version will be.

CNet:

“I’m planning on starting the so-called ‘pre-2.6’ series in early July, and that is kind of a beta series,” Torvalds said Wednesday in an interview. He and Andrew Morton, the programmer who will maintain the 2.6 version, “are talking about starting a pre-2.6 series next week,” Torvalds said.

O’Reilly has an excellent tutorial on using the PEAR SOAP module in PHP:

Web services allow you to exchange information over HTTP using XML. When you want to find out the weather forecast for New York City, the current stock price of IBM, or the best-selling DVD according to Amazon.com, you can write a short script to gather that data in a format you can easily manipulate. From a developer’s perspective, it’s as if you’re calling a local function that returns a value.

Joe Gregorio has posted an RFC for a (not)echo-based API.  It is a streamlined, simple (yet extensible) REST-based API.  It is beautiful.  It is good.

I’m sure that little things will change while the format matures, but if the API looks as simple, clean, and useful as this, I’d endorse it 100%.  I hope that such a simple yet robust system can work for all involved.

Think technical, not political.

Leslie Walker at The Washington Post has a great article on a recent Ebay convention:

ORLANDO — Gary Neubert made sure everyone knew his eBay trading name; all the better to sell to them later. The Tampa shipping-supplies dealer walked around the floor of eBay’s user convention here last week in a polo shirt with his auction-trading ID imprinted in large letters on the back.

The article is an outsiders view of some of the most elite sellers on Ebay.  These are the people that started off selling on Ebay part time and now have employees below them to handle their flow.  We’re talking people with 10,000, 30,000, and even 300,000 postitive feedback points.

The article also has a photo gallery from shots that Leslie took around the conference with her digital camera.  Yes, that really is “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Leslie is almost a reporting weblogger, posting pictures from her digital camera on the website of a major newspaper.

Most webloggers fall in to the opposite category.  We’re reporting bloggers.  We were there, we took pictures, we observed what happened, we might have some insight.  We post it on our sites.  Others link to it.  There is a discussion.

It’s no suprise that the lines are becoming even more blurred.  She gets paid, we don’t.  Or do we?

I could stare at the UseCases of echo for hours.  If this thing is done right, it could end up pretty much everywhere.

Sean Bonner’s mobile photo blog is absolutely amazing.

It’s fine art among fingerpaintings.

Also check out his main blog.

I’ve subscribed to both his main and moblog feeds.

CNet:

Advanced Micro Devices released software on Monday aimed at speeding up mathematical calculations on its Opteron processor and other future chips that use the AMD64 64-bit instruction set. The new Opteron is popular with high-performance technical computing users. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company hopes the new tool will make it easier for programmers to create software for financial, engineering, mathematical and scientific tasks.

It’s interesting to note that Blogger is scrapping their already-complete Blogger API 2.0 in favor of an echo-based API.  More information can be found on their site.

It’s interesting to note that Joel’s RSS feed currently weighs in at 14181 bytes, while his experimental (not)echo implementation weighs in at 18878 bytes.  Both feeds offer full content.

I thought I’d double check as I noticed that the format is a little bit more verbose about post authors and such.  It’s no big deal, as you could easily gzip your feed and make the size difference a non-issue.

Sam Ruby:

I’ve taken a 2003/07/01 snapshot of the maximal example of the format previously known as echo.

Joel has an example up, as does Mark.  I get good vibes when I read these example feeds.  They’re clean.  Zen.  The question is, when this format stabalizes, will we be able to parse necho feeds in a simple way using a namespace-aware parser?  Is everyone going to produce well-formed and valid necho?

We shall see.  Looking at this spec freeze, I’m quite happy.  All of the political BS aside, this is good.  We have RSS, an entrenched syndication format that will most likely be used for years to come.  We also have (not)echo, a bleeding-edge format that will do syndication as well as posting and comments.  All is well in the world, at least for this brief moment.

Thanks to Clarity for mentioning it: Linux to Symbian file transfer.

very cool.

Mark Pilgrim:

Update 2: I have removed the namespaced elements from all of my RSS feeds. Since there is no way in RSS 2.0 (as-is) to specify both the excerpt and the full text of a post, the feeds now only contain excerpts. Also, I switched from using link to using guid for item permalinks, as discussed recently.

I look forward to publishing a feed in the new format (once the physical model has been nailed down) that will be as complex and feature-rich as my needlessly-complicated-RSS feeds used to be.

Aparently in reaction to praise from Dave Winer, Mark has rendered his RSS feeds fairly useless to most people.  See Scott Johnson’s blog for details.

Kids: Don’t make me turn the internet around!

Mobiletracker notes some software speedups that could change mobile phone internet access here in the States:

Cingular has launched the world’s first EDGE network, oddly enough in Indianapolis Indiana. EDGE stands for Enhanced Datarate for Global Evolution and is a software tweak to GPRS . Data speeds peak out at 170 kilobits per second and average at 75-135 Kbps.

That’s significantly more throughput than I can get on my 3650.  Aparently EDGE phones will also be able to work in a vanilla GPRS environment.  Quick slick, actually.

MyHeadlines 4.2.2, a security release, is out.  MyHeadlines allows you to embed content from sites via RSS using PHP and MySQL.

Intel officially released six new Itanics today.  SFGate:

The Santa Clara chipmaker is offering three versions of its new Itanium 2s, each running at 1.5 GHz, 1.4 GHz and 1.3 GHz. Their wholesale prices are $4, 226, $2,247 and $1,338 respectively.

[…]

In addition, Intel is also releasing three new Xeon MP microprocessors, each running at 2.8 GHz ($3,692), 2.5 GHz ($1,980), and 2 GHz ($1,177).

Where did I put my Hammer, er, Opteron?