Busy making things: @mcnotestinycastgithublinksphotos.

  • Moblogging HOWTO

    David Davies has set up a moblogging guide:

     Mobile blogging is easy. Don’t let anyone tell you different. All you need is a mobile device such as a mobile phone or a wireless lap/palm top. In fact it doesn’t matter what hardware you’ve got as the important thing is it must be able to send an email message. Most mobile phone service providers will either let you send an email directly from your phone or they’ll operate an SMS > email gateway where you send an SMS message to a special access number that in turn routes your message out to email.

    He covers the basics well, though if you want to add pictures to the mix, you should take a look at Manywhere Moblogger for pictures and text.

  • Python Desktop Server

    Python Desktop Server:

    The Python Desktop Server is a combined Weblog authoring tool, XMLRPC/SOAP server, and news aggregator. It allows one to read RSS news feeds, post to a community server (such as Radio Userland or any Python Community Server installation), and includes tools for Weblog and homepage management. It features a Web interface, a built-in Web server, extensibility through scripts that connect via XMLRPC or macros, and a plugin architecture.

    I found this via freshmeat this morning.  This looks like a great addition to other free tools like bzero and PyCS.  Congrats all around.

  • matt.sleep(many_hours);

    Man, that’s the last time I try reading a comp sci book in bed.  I must have zonked out, cause now it’s 4am.

  • PyPI: Python Packages Index

    Python Packages Index, a sanctioned listing of Python packages is online now.

    Where can I get the recent updates RSS feed?

    Update:

    Josh, a.k.a. nf0, and Richard both note that an RSS feed was in front of my face.  The ultimate lazyweb in action, I didn’t even have to send a trackback to the lazyweb.  Needless to say, I’m subscribed now.

  • No Time For Websites: Gimme My RSS

    Brad Wilson:

    At this point in my life, if a site doesn’t offer RSS, I don’t have the time to consume it.

    Yep.  Props go out to the people who offer multiple feeds: excerpt feeds for people who like it that way and full feeds for people like Brad and I.

  • Via’s 1GHZ Mini-ITX

    The Register notes that Via has released a 1GHz C3 processor-based Mini-ITX motherboard/CPU combo.  My Via Eden Mini-ITX is still chugging along with Red Hat 8.0, though the built-in nic burned out a few months ago.  For more CPU-intensive stuff I can see the 1GHz C3 rocking.  Of course, for massive horsepower, the Shuttle stuff is top notch.

    It also looks like this version has a heatsink/fan combo, whereas my Eden is silent with just a heatsink.  It doesn’t make much of a difference though, given the drone from other machines running in the background…

  • Jakarta Commons Net

    TheServerSide:

    This is an Internet protocol suite Java library originally developed by ORO, Inc. This version supports Finger, Whois, TFTP, Telnet, POP3, FTP, NNTP, SMTP, and some miscellaneous protocols like Time and Echo as well as BSD R command support.

    It looks like some of the implementations might be a little more low level than some of us might want to deal with, but that’s a ton of protocols to have at your disposal.  Rock on, Jakarta.  Get yer goodies here.

  • PyCon Speakers

    The list of speakers at PyCon DC 2003 has been posted to the PyCon Wiki.

    I’ll be registering when I get paid on Friday.

  • Audioblogging/Moblogging

    CNet weighs in on the audioblogging/moblogging trend.  I had a quick chat over IM with Paul Festa this evening.  He was trying to figure out if this whole moblogging/audioblogging thing is going to be huge or if it’s a passing fad.

    I think we’re all trying to figure that out.

  • Google API Violation?

    Rogers:

    Anil Dash describes an unusual side effect of the Google-Pyra deal: All the Google API users on Radio UserLand weblogs may be in violation of the license, which prohibits use with any product or service that competes with Google.

    I suppose that one could take that to its logical conclusion and declare that Movable Type, Blosxom, and any other weblogging software both free and for profit using the Google API would be in violation of the license.  Even if it’s free, it’s still competition to Blogger.

    I’m really hoping that Google will handle this in the Right Way and not the Wrong Way.

  • Slashdotted

    Holy shit!  Now slashdot?

  • Mono 0.20

    From the Mono page:

    Mono 0.20 has been released. Check out the release notes for an overview of the changes. You can get it here. There are no major features in this release, mostly bug fixes and performance improvements.

    It looks like an impressive release, with remoting bits, threading tweaks, the beginnings of System.Security, System.XML fixes, Mono.Posix, lots of refactoring and bugfixing.

    I’ll be upgrading my Mono install soon.

  • BBC News: Moblogging

    BBC News picked up the mobile weblogging story today.  It seems to be very close to the article that Wired ran earlier this week.  It’s interesting to note that I’m getting more conversions (people going from the wapblog page to other places on my site) from the BBC article than I did with the Wired piece.

  • Does Python Need a CPAN?

    I have seen some stir recently about implementing a CPAN work-alike for Python.  I think that Python doesn’t really need a CPAN.  First off, take a look at the Python Standard Library.  There have been several instances where I was looking for some python code to do something, say parse a url string into several parts.  Guess what?  Python has a built-in module called urlparse that does it for you.

    Sure, there are things that the Python Standard Library can’t do.  For that, distutils makes it really easy to distribute and install Python packages or modules.  All the end user should have to do is python setup.py install. Most of the time, required libraries or modules will be included or linked to on the web or in the docs.  It’s true that with distutils you don’t have a way to travel down the dependency tree to install things in the order neccesary, but with all the goodies in the Standard Library and distutils, that’s not usually an issue.

    I have a feeling that a CPAN workalike would duplicate a ton of work that has already been done in the Python community.  It probably also won’t help all that much.

    Also, many of the modules that you might use to argue the neccesity of a CPAN-like archive should alternatively be folded in to the Python Standard Library.  They’d probably be a lot more useful there.

    I have a feeling that there might be some discussion about this at PyCon DC, as I think someone mentioned it on the PyCon Wiki at some point.  Just a quick thought/pseudorant.

  • Teaser: rss2wml

    I’m working on a python library/script to convert an rss file to a browsable wml file.  Right now it can be used as a library and run from a cron job, though I’ll release a cgi example at some point too.  No source code for you yet, it’s still too ugly.  Here’s a picture of my cel phone browsing the WML of my RSS feed before this post:

    rss2wml

    It’s not clickable or really functional yet, but right now you can see a list of titles from my RSS feed at the time I ran the script.  It uses Mark’s RSS parser, which does all of the heavy lifting as always.

    Expect more over the weekend (read: sunday).

  • Low Disk Space

    Running low on disk space again, this time filling up 200 megs.  I might have to cut down or eliminate cross posting to categories.

  • Motagging

    Russ has something here:

    Okay, I didn’t look this up to see if someone else is doing it, but I was thinking about Moblogging and the idea of real world annotations – where you can mark a space using GPS and then someone else can “see” what’s happening at that space when they run into it with their cool high-tech mobile phone.

    I love the idea of tagging a unique number or identifier to a place and then being able to access it later.  I don’t know how well little stickers with numbers would be recieved by law enforcement, government, and tree huggers.  Damn tree huggers.

    In a system set up like this, I’d also love to see many ways to get at the data.  Cel phones would be able to access it via WAP/WML, MMS, SMS, etc.  I’d also like to see clients for Java-enabled phones and possibly native Symbian-OS clients.  I’d like to see XML-RPC, SOAP, REST, and other web service interfaces to the motagging data so that we can get at it in the way that is easiest for any particular situation.  (Sorry, it seems that when I get excited, alphabet soup tends to happen)

    Laptops on 802.11b would offer a richer interface to the data, possibly with links to or geographical representations of other nearby tags.  There would be a tagpop top 40 which would monitor the most popular tags across the globe so that we can see where new and exciting things are happening, and finding out where in the world is ‘so last week.’

    You could pop up an interface on your phone to find any tags that are within three city blocks of you.  Eventually the tags would cease being little stickers posted everywhere and the technology would fill in with GPS other next-gen phone features.

    I’d love to see MoWiki’s pop up, though they’d have to be easy enough to annotate (read: easier and less intimidating than current wikis) and the wholse system would have to be resistant to abuse.

    I would claim ownership of the tag at the sub shop down the street and tell people that the pizzas taste great if there’s a line out the door but are not so good when it’s slow, or to get the Chicken Suvlaki on a sub roll, but watch out cause it’s messy.  Someone would chime in a week or two later and say that the meatball and cheese sub is a little bland but great for $3.50.

    It would be really hard to filter out tag spam.  Signal to noise ratio might be an issue.

    The idea has tons of potential.

  • Homeland Security Web Service

    I was thinking about creating a web service that would spew out the current terrorist threat level.  When it got to the implementation phase, I decided that it was probably not wise to poll a web site at whitehouse.gov in order to parse out the current threat level.  I thought about it, did it a few times, got it right, and decided not to deploy it.

    Secret Service Agent: “Can you explain why a machine on your network has polled the whitehouse.gov exactly every hour for the past two weeks?”
    Matt: “Uhh…”

    Needless to say, I was quite happy to find out at xmethods that RBailey at Tinetics has recently released a security level service.  Here’s my quick (less than 2 minute) app utilizing this service:

    Security Level XP

    The code behind this in C# is a joke (after importing the web reference using the WSDL for the service:

    homeland.securitylevelService s = new homeland.securitylevelService();
    string alert = s.getsecuritylevel();
    lblAlert.Text = "Current homeland security level is: " + alert;

    There’s a switch statement after that to color code the label’s background color based on the result.  Nifty.

    Yes, I was bored in class.

  • Lindows Laptop

    Man, I want a Lindows Laptop.

  • D60 Replacement

    From the canon-digital-rumor-sales-rep-knows-nothing dept:

    My Canon sales rep and the local tech rep stopped by.  The official unofficial word is that there is indeed a replacement for the canon D60 digital SLR.  It will most likely be announced around the 27th.

    The sales rep isn’t saying much, claims not to know much, but Canon is flying all the sales reps into Vegas two days before PMA starts.  This is significant because Canon usually sends their sales reps to PMA one day before the big show starts.

    We’ll see what happens.