DPReview:

Nikon has today announced the new five megapixel four times optical zoom Coolpix 5400 (the Coolpix 5000’s sucessor). The Coolpix 5400 is especially interesting because it offers a wide angle 28 mm equiv. four times zoom compared to the typical 35 or 38 mm equiv. Other noteworthy specifications include 1/1.8″ sensor (the Coolpix 5000 used a 2/3″), ISO 50 – 400 sensitivity, up to 10 minute Bulb exposures and front or rear flash sync. I can’t however see RAW format support, which is a pity. Available “Summer 2003” with a list price of $799.

I was telling someone yesterday that with $200 in rebates, the Coolpix 5000’s days were limited.

Darik’s Boot and Nuke:

Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.

Here’s what 1.0.0 features:

This release features a graphical user interface which lets users interactively choose the devices they wish to wipe. Also included are the DoD 5220-22.M standard wipe, the RCMP TSSIT OPS-II standard wipe, the PRNG Stream wipe, additional verification modes, and a rounds option.

Use with extreme caution.  Don’t blame me.

CNet:

AMD lowered the prices of its desktop and mobile Athlon XP processors as much as 35 percent Monday, while Intel cut the cost of its desktop Celeron chips up to 18 percent Sunday night.

Yesterday I pointed my browser to Amazon to look for something.  On the page that popped up, above the fold, was a note about a Gap sale (t-shirts and shorts 25% off).  It featured a particular orange t-shirt that I happened to have purchased in the store the day before.

Amazon, you’re too good!

TheServerSide:

Eclipse has released a plan for version 3.0, skipping on from its 2.2 branch. Version 3.0 requires J2SE 1.4, and is breaking some compatibility with its 2.x counterpart. The Eclipse consortium also elected a new supporting member, INNOOPRACT, a German company that creates Eclipse plugins.

The full details are on the Eclipse site.

CNet lets the cat out of the bag:

Going by names like eDonkey and BitTorrent, many of the latest generation of file-swapping tools have been designed specifically to increase the efficiency and speed of transfer for large files such as movie files. Some of these tools have been in development for several years, but are just now reaching the critical mass needed to make a dent in the file-trading world.

Let’s hope the script kiddies and kazaa-heads aren’t paying any attention.  The geeks have a good thing going here.

Couldn’t the spotme thing be done with commodity hardware (like bluetooth/802.11b PDAs or cel phones) and open source software?  I’m sure it could be.  The idea is great, but man does that look expensive.

Nelson on BitTorrent:

BitTorrent is pregnant hackerware – it works great but is still poorly documented. And the apps aren’t well integrated. Someone could build a killer tech company out of it. Some extra info is available in Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and the BitTorrent Wiki.

Joi “Evil” Ito:

Got my Technorati bot done this morning. It checks technorati through the xml api every 10 minutes for my cosmos. If there is a new inbound link to my blog, it sends me an email and a jabber chat message with the details. Used technorati.py by Mark Piligrim and jabberpy0.4-0. Now I can make jabber bots. Beware beware. 😉

Kottke:

An earthquake and a series of aftershocks hit Japan on Monday evening (local time). Some reactions to the quake from folks on the scene: Cerebral Soup, Toyko Tidbits, AkuAku SF, and Vu Deja?.

Here are links that have come to dominate the taskbar over the holiday weekend, from left to right:

• Timothy Appnel on web services, weblogs, and what’s next.
• Port 80 Software on URLs.
• Zawodny has an obituary of PageRank.
• Maximum Galoots Atypical PHP Soapbox hilights a PHP threading class.
• Ed Cone notes that Orson Scott Card is writing the story for a video game.  He’s got a guaranteed customer here.
• After a few good IPOs, my Blogshares portfolio is doing decently well.  BS$16k is pathetic compared to some, but I’m happy with it.
• Via Slashdot, P45.net has linkage to the source code used in an Ireland election.
• What is Rael up to with all of these test posts?
• Slashdot BSD: “FreeBSD’s Dag-Erling Smorgrav reports the successful cross-world build of the amd64 tree (A tinderbox is system designed to test builds and report failure. In the FreeBSD case, tinderboxes build world [the base system], GENERIC, and if applicable LINT kernels. Dag-Erling Smorgrav currently runs all the tinderboxes by cross-building from i386).”
• PIL, the Python Image Library, 1.1.4 is out.
• JXHTMLEDIT “is a cross-platform WYSIWYG HTML/XHTML content authoring tool, a very small Java applet based on the Java 2 Platform.”
• python-crack “is a module that provides Python programs with the ability to evaluate password strength. It uses the well known cracklib toolkit, hence the name.”
• CNN reports that Enter the Matrix sales have already topped 1 million in about a week and a half.
• According to Yahoo Movies, Reloaded has grossed approximately $209 million.  It’s approaching the $300 million or so that was spent on Reloaded and Revolutions combined.
• I think that Revolutions is set up to blow us away while raking it in at the box office.  Reloaded has been called the most hyped movie of the year.  Revolutions comes out in November.  It’s too big a movie to be a sleeper hit, but it’s going to be huge.  Many were dissapointed with Reloaded, but Revolutions has the ability to piggyback and slingshot off the current release.

Nelson:

The trailer for Half Life 2 from E3 is so beautiful it’s humbling. The download is 500 megs of Quicktime, but worth it.

OSNews:

Project Mono, an effort to create an open source version of the Microsoft Corp. .Net Framework, expects to release version 1.0 of its software this year, probably in the fourth quarter.

At Lessig‘s suggestion, I’ll try to snap a photo at Starbucks this weekend.

You should too.

John Burkhardt:

Check out the new Groove DevZone, complete with rss feed.

V. Satheesh Babu:

Kalsey’s button maker interface for Bill Zeller’s brilliant button maker application is pretty sweet. Here’s my button!

Cool button love.

Also a link from Slashdot today, ExtremeTech takes a look at F#, a new .NET language that draws from OCaml and C# (which in turn has roots in Java, C++, etc).

When Microsoft runs out of letters to put # next to, will we start seeing languages like Bb (B flat)?  🙂

Slashdot has a pointer to a Computerworld article noting that the new supposedly final standard has a much lower throughput than the 54 megabits that current hardware runs.  Here’s CowboyNeal:

It’s been moved from 54Mbps all the way down to 10-20Mbps, more than just a slight change.

It’s going to be a tough sell to get customers to update their 54g firmware if it is going to reduce their throughput that significantly.

The Nikon D100 is moving from professional digital dealers only to NAS/NCP digital dealers.  What does this mean?  It means that more stores will be able to sell the D100.  Another major thing is that the D2 and D2x are in the pipeline, though I don’t know exactly where, and should be officially announced in the near future.

No ETA on delivery.

While at a bar last night, the thought came to my mind that there really needs to be a drink called the Slashdot.  I don’t know what it would contain, but the ingredients would have to be geeky.

Someone I was with took it to the next level: “Helper monkey: Slashdot me.”