After doing some text messaging and IMing on a T9-enabled phone, I can’t go back to my old phone.  Here’s why.  If I were to type This is an example on a T9-enabled phone, I would type:

8447 47 26 3926753

For a non-T9-enabled phone, like my SCP-6200:

844(space or wait)4447777 4447777 266 339926755533

Granted, every once in awhile I have to cycle through a word combination to get to the word that I’m actually looking for with T9, but 97% of the time, it’s right on.

This is a no brainer.

CNet reports that Sun is dropping its own version of Linux in favor of forming alliances with Linux distributors.

When they put Sun Linux on their workstations for LinuxWorld, they didn’t even bother to replace the red hat at the bottom left of the screen, so it was fairly obvious what Sun Linux was.

“We will not be supporting the customized version of Sun Linux. We’ll be moving to standardized distributions of Linux,” said John Loiacono, vice president of Sun’s operating platforms group, in a meeting with reporters here. The change will take place as soon as possible, he said–“way before the end of the year.”

I’m also not suprised that Red Hat isn’t really excited about the whole Sun Linux thing in general:

Red Hat declined to comment for this story. However, in February, the company indicated Sun won’t have an easy time forming an alliance. “We don’t see why we should get any cozier with them,” said Mark De Visser, Red Hat’s vice president of marketing.

Congrats to Ingo, now a DMer.

Charles Miller on why testing private methods is a bad thing:

I don’t test private methods. Being able to quickly create, move around, and change the functionality of private methods is vital to remaining agile while developing.

For the last few days, The Washington Post has been printing the Business section in black and white.  I’m not sure if this is to save money on ink for the new War in Iraq section or if it’s a commentary on the state of business in Washington.  In any case, it’s eerie.

The Washington Post held out with black and white longer than The Washington Times.  They started with a color front page, then color seeped through the rest of the paper.

Now we’ve got a Business section in black and white.

OpenBSD Journal:

A recent OReilly Network article gives an example of how to use NFS for networked backups. It includes a couple of example scripts you can use to build small backup commands. Backups are lifesavers, and I’ve found it worth the brief time of setup and testing to make regular backups.

This method, NFS, is essentially what I do when I have an NFS server available in my environment. While I use rsync with ssh when I don’t have an NFS server around, when I do have one I use rsync and NFS. My basic backup command mounts the NFS volume to the right place and executes my rsync command to copy the information I need to the server, and then unmounts the NFS system. It’s a simple setup, but it’s saved me hours of rebuilding. Check out the article for some ideas.

Sam Ruby has implemented the CommentAPI with a few tweaks:

If the request comes in with a SOAP envelope and/or rdf:RDF element, I will respond in kind.  That’s just the kinda guy I am.

Via Sam Gentile and Simon Fell.  Congrats to the Mindreef guys on their Jolt Productivity Award.

Twin is:

Twin is a text-mode windowing environment: it draws and manages text windows on a text-mode display, like X11 does for graphical windows. It has a built-in window manager and terminal emulator, and can be used as server for remote clients in the same style as X11. It can display on Linux console, on X11 and inside itself.

Here’s what’s new for 0.4.6:

Several bugs were fixed, including a buffer overrun in twdisplay, a memory leak in ‘Reload RC’, a missing stdarg.h includ in the libTw headers, compilation errors in hw_tty.c, and a problem with cut and paste pasting when clicking on the window border. getpt() support was added along with better error reporting in the pty code, ‘make uninstall’, a new shinyMetal_6x13.xpm theme. The twdisplay now autoprobes module HW drivers, support for utf8 on the Linux console was added, and more libTutf character sets were included. ‘make install DEBUG=y’ no longer strips binaries.

It’s an interesting project.  The screenshots bring back memories of the menu-driven DOS days.

NPR:

Host Bob Edwards details a century-old lightbulb that keeps burning and burning. The hand blown bulb is only four watts, but it’s been burning in a California fire station since a neighbor donated it around the turn of the century.

This is something really cool that I stumbled upon while searching for something on NPR’s site.  There is more information at the Livermore Centennial Light web site.

Praise good searches gone bad!

Mark Pilgrim:

Embracing HTTP error code 410 means embracing the impermanence of all things.

Slashdot:

CNet is reporting that Germany has placed EA’s newest Command & Conquer game ‘Generals’ on its restricted list, which means it may not be advertised or displayed on shelves although it may be kept under store counters and sold to adults. The reason according to Elke Monssen-Engberding, director of the Ministry for Family Affairs: ‘It portrays war as the only way to resolve conflicts.

Well, any game that gets this treatment is probably a good game.  I’ve played C&C:G a few times.  The engine is amazing: It’s all 3D all the time.  The cut scenes are not compressed video like in the past, they’re rendered in the game engine.  You can go seamlessly from a battle to a cut scene that unfolds another part of the mission, back to battle.  There were even a few matrix-like 3d freezes.

The only problem is that it was just about as fun as the original Command and Conquer that I played on the family Pentium 60 when I was in middle school.  Sure, it’s fun for a bit, as C&C has always been, but it seemed to get old fast.  I would think that a fully 3d engine would awe and wow me, but aparently it’s something that I’ve just come to expect from games.

I haven’t tried multiplayer yet, which might be its killer feature.  I played the original C&C in multiplayer mode via modem a few times, which was mind blowing at the time.  Now if it’s not massively multiplayer, it’s not buzzword compliant.

Haiku review:

3D graphics are amazing
So good that it’s restricted
Buy it, but on sale.

Joi Ito via Chris Prillo:

Steven Frank has composed a song about blogging called Ben and Mena. He blogs about it here, and the 3.8MB mp3 file is here. Probably interesting to hardcore bloggers only, but VERY funny. 😉

Send me a ping… send me a trackback.  I promise I won’t complain…

The Register via LinuxSecurity:

Until Unix and Linux programmers get over their macho love for low-level programming languages, the security holes will continue to flow freely, argues SecurityFocus columnist Jon Lasser.

[…]

To be sure, some software must continue to be written in lower-level languages: Database servers such as MySQL will inevitably be written in lower-level languages for legitimate performance reasons. And it would be both unlikely and counterproductive for the Linux kernel or the system library to be rewritten in Perl, Java, or Python.

But none of those concerns justify writing an IRC client in C. And if it seems unimaginable for a print server to be rewritten in a high-level language, the reality is the benefit would be substantial and the performance costs negligible.

Infoworld:

IBM landed a major foundry deal expected to be worth over $100 million Wednesday, agreeing to manufacture the next generation of Nvidia’s GeForce graphics processors at its fab in East Fishkill, N.Y.

Linux Journal:

XMLTP/L, or XMLTP Light, is a lightweight RPC protocol that uses XML to encode the stream of data. XMLTP/L has been designed to do fast RPC calls over an intranet, within an enterprise. More specifically, the first purpose of XMLTP/L is to forward transactions (RPCs) to a database server. But, it also can be used to do method calls to any server that follows the common RPC technique introduced by XML-RPC and older client/server protocols.

I’m torn between wanting to know more and being horrified about YAWSP (Yet Another Web Services Protocol).  It looks like it has its uses though,

Lessig:

Is promoting Hollywood really what the Mexican Congress is for?

Derek Willis:

Paul DuBois has an article on migrating from MS Access to MySQL, complete with links to other resources, including a script that helps export Access files for replication in MySQL. DuBois, who wrote a MySQL book, has a collection of similar articles. (via Sanjay’s Coding Tips)

Cool.  Thanks for the tip, Derek.

NewsFactor via Roland Piquepaille:

The creation of an unusual flat lens may finally resolve a long-running controversy about the existence of materials that have metaphysical qualities — so-called “metamaterials” — that transcend the laws of nature.

Roland also got the article up on Slashdot.