Busy making things: @mc, notes, tinycast, github, links, photos.
Slashdot notes that the second installment of the Animatrix is available for consumption.
Personally, I’d be nice to their servers and let their pipes cool down a bit. I’ll probably download and watch the super big version in a few days. I saw teh first one, and I was quite impressed.
Sony Ericsson’s card supports three GSM bands, GPRS Class 10, and 802.11b, and will allow roaming when more of the backend components are built. This card would allow a carrier to bill using EAP SIM, which encapsulates messages over the GSM network to allow Wi-Fi network authentication using the SIM authentication module. I’m unclear whether this will use simple MAC address clearance — your MAC address sent over GSM and then the hot spot unlocking access for that address — or something more sophisticated. If just MAC address unlocking, it’s easy for someone with a sniffer to clone your address. According to IETF presentations a few months ago, all of the EAP-plus-method flavors lack cryptographic binding between network layers, which allows address spoofing, but not necessarily network access.
So when can i get my 802.11a/b/g/etc, Bluetooth, GPRS/CMDA/GSM/everything else card? I’ll take two. This is really cool tech though.
Scott Hanselman brought up an interesting question:
Also, is it a sin to screen-scrape the bible?
And Moses said, “Thou shalt not scrape screens, especially when the Bible is involved.” Everyone looked confused, but decided that it must be good. Moses continued, “If thou needest quotations from the Bible, thou shalt invoke a web service. Thou may use XML-RPC, SOAP, REST, or whatever suits your situation.” The people looked around and smiled, for they knew nothing about web services.
I might be setting myself up for a good smoting. Oh well.
CNet:
Sun’s Jxta software, introduced with great fanfare nearly two years ago, has been downloaded by more than 1 million users, the company said. Sun also noted that there are 12,700 members of Project Jxta, an open-source development organization led by Sun.
[…]
On Tuesday, Sun said it has updated the Jxta specification in what it’s calling Jxta 2.0. The updated software lets developers create a “super peer” on a network that can handle more of the network traffic than less powerful devices.
Sun has also made the Jxta code more modular so that developers can more easily download and use what they want. The first instance of Jxta 2.0, which is available for download, is for Java programmers.
Very cool. I putzed around with JXTA shortly after they announced it. Has it been over two years now? While I was at LinuxWorld Expo, I spoke to a couple of Sun guys that were demoing JXTA apps. One was a shared space app ala Groove, but it ran on any platform supported by a recent version of Java.
Go, JXTA!
Mostly to get a feel for what development with wxWindows is like, I mocked up a three paned aggregator using ActivePython, wxPython, and Mark’s ultra-liberal RSS parser.
Very cool, worth looking into indeed. What if the killer aggregator isn’t three paned? NetNewsWire looks really easy to use, although I’ve never had a chance to use it (8500 with a G4 card doesn’t like OSX). I like my one paned aggregator for reading up over the web, though I keep thinking that there must be a better solution to the problem lurking out there somewhere.
Russell has set up mobitopia, your one stop multiblog for mobile news. I’m definately going to subscribe once things slow down at work a little bit.
The community is also open to submissions, which I think is really cool. If I get really motivated, I might send Russ an email later so that I can submit entires.
This just in from The Register:
There will be no price increases (as such) when Microsoft ships its next server OS, Windows Server 2003, on April 24th, but there will be a new budget-priced version of the product aimed squarely at the web server market. Server 2003 Web Edition comes without client access licences, with a 2gig limit on memory, 2-way SMP, and is $399.
Head over to Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 comparison chart to see exactly what you’re getting for $399. Look at all the empty circles. The $399 is a hard sell to web hosts and ISPs who can put Linux on there for free. I think that the pricing for this is just above the sweet spot, but not by too much. For example, an unlimited domain copy of Ensim that runs on top of Red Hat 7.2 will run you $399, but there are 30 and 300 domain versions available for $199 and $299.
I’m quite curious to see how well Windows Server 2003 performs. I took a look at RC1 back when it was called .NET server, and I was quite impressed. It was as stable as some of the highest uptime Windows 2000 servers that I have known. I think after the initial config, I rebooted it once or twice in my trial, and that was to pull some hardware. It was easier to administer than 2000 and has all of the .NET goodies. It never crashed on me. Everything just worked.
Sanjiva confirms my earlier thoughts that WSDL1.2 can’t really describe SOAP encoded messages. Please Please provide a consistent set of features across the specs, either drop SOAP encoding from SOAP 1.2, or add soap encoding support to WSDL, but don’t leave us with different specs doing different subsets. Shouldn’t the WSA folks be keeping these things all lined up and pointing in the same direction?
Sam Gentile’s new Managed C++ article is up at O’Reillynet:
Welcome back! Last time around, in the first article of the series, I focused on what Managed C++ was, some of its advantages and roles, as well as scenarios in which it excelled. One of those scenarios is the focus of the second article of this series: the ability to mix managed and unmanaged code in the same module. This is an ability that is unique to Managed C++; no other Common Runtime Library (CLR) language possesses this capability. In this article, I will explore why this is important to you as a working developer, and how to make use of this capability.
After doing a little bit of googling, I have decided on the Dynatron DC1206BM-R1 for my 1U cooling needs. It got a favorable review at FrostyTech, which seemed to have more 1U cooling reviews in one spot than anywhere else that I have seen.
It’s made of solid copper, with more fins than any of the other coolers I looked at.
It is available for $18 + shipping at some random Yahoo store in California.
What Memory?
I’m not sure which memory to go with. Crucial says that it can take straight up PC100, ECC, and ECC Registered. I don’t have enough server experience to know which one to go with. My gut says ECC Registered because it’s a server platform and that is the most expensive stuff available. Any thoughts? Is Registered ECC worth the $17 per 256MB stick difference over straight PC100? I dunno.
The requirements keep changing. I’m trying to hit a moving target. An undocumented moving target.
Pull!
I have a decent little cel phone, an SCP-6200 from Sanyo/Qualcomm. I paid way too much for it right before Sprint dropped the price and just before a bunch of color phones came out. That’s okay, I was going to wait for a ‘real’ color phone anyway.
I’ve had the phone for awhile now, so I decided to do a little research about what phones are available in my area. Some carriers have launched GPRS support, so I was hoping for the best. Unfortunately, none of the cool phones that Russ has been blogging about lately are available in the states.
I wasn’t able to find anything that runs the Symbian OS besides the klunky Nokia Communicator. About the coolest thing I’ve been able to find that is available now in my area is the Sony Ericsson T68i. No supercool P800, just the T68i. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a sweet phone, it’s just that Russ has got me craving some Symbian.
About the coolest thing I can get out of Nokia is the 7210. Its specs are nice too, GPRS, MMS, some Java, but again, no Symbian. This one doesn’t even have bluetooth.
What the hell is a motechnophile going to do?
I know that the P800 is due out soon (someday?), but I haven’t heard any talk of unleashing the cool Nokia phones on the States. I guess I’ll have to keep waiting, eh?
CNet:
Dell’s Inspiron 1100 will start $899, a lower price than most desknotes. Its standard equipment includes a 2GHz Intel Celeron processor, a 14-inch display, 128MB of RAM (random access memory), a 20GB hard drive and a CD-ROM drive. Upgrade options include a 15-inch screen and 2.4GHz Pentium 4.
.NET Alerts Software Development Kit 5.01. Microsoft® .NET Alerts is a message and notification routing service that makes delivering customer communications easy and helps avoid the negative perceptions associated with junk e-mail. This SDK provides several components that help you implement .NET Alerts on your Web site. [Microsoft Download Center]
Burn to the Brim is a “Utility for grouping files and folders together in the most efficient way to fill up an entire CD (or other medium)”. It runs on the Windows platform and could be useful if you’ve got gigs to back up:
The program analyses the files and folders in a folder you specify, and groups them in the best possible way. Most likely BTTB will find a near-perfect solution for you within one second, and a perfect one in just a couple more.
Pivot, a lightweight php-based GPL’d weblogging tool, looks promising. It doesn’t rely on a database backend, which is nice for some of those $4.95/mo hosts that don’t have MySQL in the plan. The Pivot weblog also contains an RSS feed, which is a very good sign.
The setup process appears simple, but I had a few problems with it. I was unable to end up with a working installation, but I only tried it on a testbed and not a server configured for production. I’m impressed with how clean the interface is.
It looks like our good friend Den Beste has succeeded in using his position as a well-known blogger to cow a less well-known blogger into removing content. Way to go, Steven! Unfortunately, I think this kind of groupthink enforcement will become ever more common as the class distinctions in the weblog community become more like those in real life.
From the looks of things, Den Beste didn’t ask the author to remove the entries. It also looks like the author didn’t remove them from his archives yet either. I had quite a nice rant ready to go about censorship, I even found a google cache of the offending entries. The end of this entry contains a modified mini-rant on censorship.
For now, your best bet is to avoid reading warbloggers in general. Oh, and watch out for public radio. Last time I turned it on, I got WAR-FM instead.
Here are the good bits that still apply from the rant that was not to be:
True censorship is hard these days on the web. If you’d like to take a peek at the posts that have now been removed, all you have to do is pull up a google cache. This applies to pretty much anything that is censored on the web. I’ve seen it happen in the past, and we’ll see it happen in the future.
Sure, I’d be pissed off if someone wrote a post slamming me, though as long as I don’t have any legal ground, there ain’t a whole lot that I’m going to be able to do about it. At least in the states, you’ve got your free speech, go ahead and use it. As long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others, enjoy.
I spent some time offline over the weekend playing pool. I lost a lot, but it was fun. I also brought along my digital camera.
I apologize for posting so many, but I think these are the first decent photographs I’ve taken in awhile.
The first rule of Project Orion is that you do not ask questions about Project Orion.
The second rule of Project Orion is that you do not ask questions about Project Orion.