Busy making things: @mcnotestinycastgithublinksphotos.

  • GCC Myths and Facts

    Joao Seabra wrote an article posted at freshmeat about GCC that was enlightning:

    Since my good old Pentium 166 days, I’ve liked to search for the best optimizations possible so programs can take the maximum advantage of hardware/CPU cycles. If I have a nice piece of hardware, why not run it at its full power, using every little feature? Shouldn’t we all try to get the best results from the money invested in our machines?

    It has a lot of interesting info for anyone who’s trying to tailor a build to their particluar hardware.  I like the bits about -march implying -mcpu but the myth debunking section rocks too.

  • Washington (DC) Weather

    Wet Wet + Cold Cold = Bad Bad.

    It looks like things are going to get interesting.

  • Aggie 1.0 RC5

    Simon Fell:

    RC5 of Aggie is now available

    David Gammel notes that Aggie now supports scraping of sites that don’t have RSS feeds.

    Good stuff.

  • Say Hello to Agent Frank

    Les has unleashed Agent Frank, his Personal Web Proxy.  Russ likes the idea, but:

    Later… Urgh! It’s GPLed! Bleh!

    You’ve got to have a good sense of software license humor when you’re in the software/open-source biz.

  • Gods Constants and the Mysteries of the Universe

    Scott Hanselman wonders:

    My real question is, did God put these constants as a readonly field in a static constructor or a singleton pattern, or assuming parallel universes, a factory pattern?

    Ingo points out some corrections and notes (absolutely hilarious). 

    Some of the mysteries of the universe have been hard coded.  for example, here’s a one-line code snippet from some ugly parts of the Reality implemetation:

    return 42;

    Did God write tests first?

  • Remote Control for Nokia Series 60

    Russ points to a wicked VNC-like app for his Nokia Series 60 called Remote S60.  That’s really, really cool.

  • Do Not Attempt To Write a Check at 7-11

    Ugh.  I just got back from a soda run at our local 7-11.  I ended up waiting in line for about five minutes because someone in front of me wrote a check.  It required both employees’ attention for several minutes.

    I think they typed her number in about six times: five incorrectly, once correctly.  The clerk hadn’t figured things out by the time I left.

    I didn’t know that 7-11 took checks.

    They shouldn’t.

  • Selfish Routers

    CNet:

    That’s the conclusion two Cornell University computer scientists came to after finding that computer networks tend to be “selfish” when each tries to route traffic by the fastest pathway, causing that path to become congested and slow.

    If the routers that direct the packets of data could be programmed with some altruism, the information might be able to reach its destination a little faster while allowing other packets to also move more quickly.

    This is really interesting.  Sending packets down a route that is not neccesarily the fastest would result in better overall performance.  That’s awesome.  Where’s the altruism button on my router?

    Seriously though, I think that more research in this area could definately help the traffic jam that is the internet.

    Lets do more research and then apply that research to the next generation of Cisco (and other) routers, mmkay?

  • Dolly Dies

    Dolly had lung cancer:

    Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was put down on Friday afternoon, after developing a progressive lung disease.

    Dolly’s birth six-and-a-half years’ ago caused a sensation around the world. But as many sheep live to twice this age, her death will refuel the intense debate over the health and life expectancy of cloned animals.

    The type of lung disease Dolly developed is most common in older sheep. And in January 2002, it was revealed that Dolly had developed arthritis prematurely. She was cloned using a cell taken from a healthy six-year-old sheep, and was born on 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, Scotland.

    <Insert moral, ethical, and scientific implications here/>

  • Zope 2.6.1

    NewsForge:

    Zope Corporation announced the release of Zope 2.6.1, the latest version of the award-winning open source application server. The new release represents the successful global collaboration of community developers, as it is the first to contain a majority of enhancements from the Zope community.

  • Python3DS: Access 3ds Archives with Python

    Here’s one just for the Pythoneers in the house.  Python3DS:

    python3ds is a small set of Python routines for reading 3ds archives. It features support for animations, textures, and collision detection, and it is compatible with pyopengl and pygame.

    New for the 0.2 release:

    This release adds a new engine for animations, collision functions, exportation of 3ds files to Dict types, and a small demo.

     

  • Open Source in the Java Application Server Market

    CNet:

    Analysts say it’s difficult to measure the extent to which open-source Java application servers, such as Tomcat and JBoss, have eaten into the revenue of commercial providers of Java application servers. But the growing popularity of the open-source application servers is undeniable.

    […]

    Last year also saw freely available open-source application servers such as Tomcat and JBoss increasingly make their mark. While Tomcat is appropriate for less complex applications that serve up Web pages to PCs, JBoss is attracting increasing attention because of its completeness and compatibility with the J2EE specification.

    I’m always glad to see stories like this.  The only downside to JBoss is that any documentation more than a plaintext README or INSTALL seems to be only available in book form.  I know that JBoss Group needs to make money, but I’d like to have enough docs available to me in order to evaluate the product.  Then if I’m running an app on JBoss, I can grab the book to find out how to do stuff.

  • Mark Pilgrim on Movable Type 2.6

    Mark also has some great tips and tricks to get the most out of 2.6.

  • MovableType 2.6 and Blender GPL

    Here are a few news items from Kenneth.  The first is an announcement of Movable Type 2.6:

    Version 2.6 Released movabletype.org: News

    Great, and talk of a summer release of MT Pro…

    Also, Blender 2.26 (GPL) Released:

    Blender

    More options in the growing open source graphics market. Note mulitple platforms.

    the release notes.

  • OSX 10.2.4

    Rael notes that OSX 10.2.4 is out.

  • Mono Developments

    Here’s the new news from the Mono team:

    • Mono now distributes a few new assemblies: Mono.Security.Win32 as a layer to use the crypto functionality on Win32. The Mono.Posix assembly which contains functionality for taking advantage of Unix facilities.
    • There’s a Mono site in Poland.
    • Stubs for the Gtk# documentation have been checked into CVS. If you want to contribute please read this message.
    • Mono development is moving quickly: Tim and Daniel have been improving the Oracle database provider and Sebastien Pouliot has got code signing to work using Authenticode with pure open source and managed code. Plenty of new VB.NET work from Marco (compiler) and Daniel (runtime). Also Jackson has resumed work on the IL assembler and the fully managed library to generate CIL images (Sergey wrote the first Mono.PEToolkit).
  • Buzzwordometer

    Buzzwordometer is fun.  I found it via my referrers this evening.  Here are my stats:

    • My overall buzzwordosity: 749
    • Suit: 321
    • Geek: 928

    That sounds pretty buzzword compliant to me.  Maybe my suit result will increase with more use of the word synergy.  Buzzwordometer has the potential to be a quickly rising and popular meme, catch it before it’s last week.

    It’s interesting to note that Erik’s site scores 814, and an amazing 999 on geek!

  • Network Utilities Module for Webmin

    This module sounds really useful:

    The Network Utilities Module for Webmin features tools like ping, traceroute, nslookup, nmap, whois, dig and an IP subnet calculator.

    I think I’ll be installing that on my linux boxen. [via freshmeat]

  • Mono Aggregator

    Cool!  Russ points to a post by David Watson in which he posts a bit of software that runs on Mono 0.19 and works a bit like Amphetadesk.  I’m definately going to check this out.

    I agree wholeheartedly with what David thinks about Mono:

    I’ve been exploring mono to see what’s possible with current builds of the compiler and runtime and have been blown away by how much progress has been made by this team while maintaining a very high quality level.

  • The Joy of Python: class2dict and dict2class

    One of V. Satheesh Babu‘s joys of Python is coverting dictionaries to classes and back again.  Silly but cool!