Busy making things: @mc, notes, tinycast, github, links, photos.
The clevercactus public beta has been released–along with the website and the formal announcement of the company and Paul Kenny’s role as a co-founder. Paul has been working with me for the past several months; he’s a great guy, and with tons of experience with technology startups.
Congrats all around.
RootPrompt points to an OSNews article:
When you think of platforms upon which you would deploy a Java Application Server, FreeBSD probably isn’t the first one that comes to mind. However, Tony Arcieri hopes to show in this tutorial how easy it is to deploy Apache Tomcat on a FreeBSD system, complete with a native build of the JDK.
It looks like the current version to Tomcat in the ports tree is 4.1.24. This it much better than the last time I considered running Tomcat on FreeBSD. Back then the only available version was something in the 3.x series. Cool, thanks guys.
I don’t think they’ve officially announced it yet, but the Washington (DC) Apple Pi’s Semi-Annual Garage Sale is being held on June 14, 2003.
They seem to get a little smaller each time I go, but there’s always some piece of junk that I need. Last time I ended up with a bunch of Sparc stuff and some random stuff.
Don Box (with a new look):
I had to have one, so I drove down to Incredible Universe (a consumer electronics mini-chain whose assets were eventually bought out by Fry’s Electronics).
Ahh, Incredible Universe. What a year or so that was. I think I shopped at Incredible Universe twice. Both times were at the Incredible Universe near Potomac Mills in Virginia. The first time I scoped things out, the second I bought a (musical) keyboard.
Incredible Universe was of the biggest (and arguably ugliest) of the big big box stores. The shell still sits outside of the mall, though I’m pretty sure they painted it a more mundane color. They even painted the weird UFO-looking structure that was out front.
Olivia Barr, a DC-based photographer has an awesome picture of the loading docks at the Incredible Universe on artnet. More information about her can be found at her Conner Contemporary Art page.
From the PHP QA department:
PHP 4.3.2RC3 has been released. This is the third and final release candidate and should have no critical problems/bugs. Nevertheless, please download and test it as much as possible on reallife applications to uncover any remaining issues.
Yesterday Mike Sax wrote a great entry about a concept that I was not familiar with previously, extreme optimization:
My brother Jeffrey has started a new consulting business, based on the concept of Extreme Optimization. To illustrate a few extreme optimization techniques, he wrote a Code Project article that looks at the problem of mapping an IP address to a country code.
He takes already optimized C# code and applies Extreme Optimization, reducing memory requirements from 10MB to only 3MB, and making it 13 times faster! The article and all the C# source is on Code Project.
Thanks for pointing that out, Mike.
There’s a great link between one of the yet-unreleased Animatrix shorts (I won’t say which one here to avoid spoilage) and Reloaded. It’s truly wicked. Feel free to email me if you’d like to know which short I’m talking about.
Also thanks to Steve Makofsky for a link to the Revolutions teaser [potential spoilage if you haven’t seen Reloaded].
I’m quite upset at the projector jockey at the Regal Entertainment Group’s theatre at Marley Station in Glen Burnie, Maryland. I saw a 10:20 showing of Reloaded (go see it). As hoardes of people left the theatre as the credits rolled, I stayed in my seat. I had read several places that there was a teaser trailer for Revolutions after the credits. Much to my dissapointment, the projecter jockey turned the projector off halfway through the credits. I stayed for a few minutes hoping to file a complaint with a manager, but I couldn’t find anyone that worked there.
I’d just like to say a quick “YOU SUCK” to the projector jockey who decided to go home a few minutes early. We sci-fi geeks live for things like this, and you denied it to us.
I’ll try to complain as far up the chain of command that I can, but I have a feeling that I’ll be wasting my time.
Watch your back, projector jockey.
Go see it.
Off to see The Matrix Reloaded. Who cares if it doesn’t open until tomorrow!
Infoworld reports that the iTunes store has now surpassed 2 million downloads. I don’t know how much money apple themselves are making, but that’s a gross of 1.98 million in just about 16 days.
Not too shabby.
OSNews notes that GCC 3.3 is out [details] as well as Squeak 3.5.
TechTV has some of the best commercials out there.
If you’re a geek, anyway.
Jabber, Inc. has published a whitepaper analyzing XMPP/Jabber and SIP/SIMPLE as potential instant messaging standards. Must reading!
The full whitepaper [48k pdf] compares the verbosity of a SIMPLE message as compared to an XMPP/Jabber message as as well as a SIMPLE presence packet vs. a Jabber/XMPP presence packet. The Jabber packets are considerably smaller due to massive headers used for SIMPLE.
Disclaimer: I’m a Jabber kinda guy, and an open source/open standards kinda guy, so my judgement is clouded. You have been warned.
Blogshares now has an XML-RPC API. It’s pretty darn comprehensive, though perhaps a little complex with the session stuff.
I’d like to get in, grab the info, and get out with as little complexity as possible. I understand that session info would be required for complex transactions over XML-RPC, but what about guerilla web services?
CNet:
The electronics giant, whose PlayStation 2 games console has outsold rivals from Microsoft and Nintendo 3-to-1, announced plans Tuesday for a handheld game player.
Here’s just a taste of the tech that will be behind the handheld:
But Sony apparently has grander plans than a nice game of Tetris. The PSP will have a screen capable of showing 3D images, stereo sound, USB 2.0 connectivity and a custom processor built on cutting-edge 90-nanometer chipmaking technology.
The device will also use a new media format. The UMD disc is an optical disc about half the size of a DVD or CD and capable of holding 1.8GB of data.
Look for it sometime late next year. Expect it to be nearly impossible to find in stores for months.
One of these days I’m going to have a nightmare about a mob of three paned RSS aggregators chasing me.
In trying to write some code to use the new Technorati API, I noticed that all the tools for accessing XML documents sucked. So I wrote my own: xmltramp.
Well suck is a harsh word. Counterintuitive, perhaps. Tons of work to get at a simple XML document, yes. Aarons approach sees to make sense to me.
Now I can not only post to my weblog from within cactus, but I can also repost an email to a weblog entry (after editing of course) and, even better, I can use an RSS feed item as the source. So commenting to other posts on my own weblog is now really, really easy.
Coooooooooool!