Matt Croydon::Postneo

Busy making things: @mc, notes, tinycast, github, links, photos.

  • New Kids On the Blog

    Posted in

    There’s a story in the .com section of The Washington Post today called New Kids On the Blog.  It started out as a nonarticle, but picked up nicely on page E6.  While reading the article, this popped out as quotable and thought provoking:

    While blogs are a significant publishing phenomenon, I see them as entirely different from professional news organizations, which have paid staffs that ferret out and vet information according to established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth.

    There is always tension between traditional reporters, BigPubs, and the weblog community.  However, she did manage to quote both Evan and Dave, which tends to be par for the course in the “Yet Another Weblog Article” formula.

  • Top 100 Music Videos of 1995

    Posted in

    While I was installing and rebooting and updating and rebooting this evening, I popped in a VHS tape makred “MTV.” It turns out that the tape is about half of the top 100 videos of 1995 (100-50ish). It was great to see some old videos and hear some old songs. It made me remember the days of flannel and long hair.

    1995 was the year that I saw David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails from the mosh pit. I was in a band. At our first practice, we tried horribly to cover Soul Asylum’s Misery.

    What struck me most wasn’t the videos, it was the commercials. The commercials told more about 1995 than anything else on that tape. Sure it was a big year for REM, Hole, Collective Soul and Hootie and the Blowfish. The thing that intrigued me most is that the Sega Saturn was being advertized for “Just $299.” I saw a few ads for Super Nintendo games. That annoying ad for the overpriced retro store down the street (which closed down several years ago) played a few times.

    Today we’re so quick to skip the commercials, TiVO that stuff right out of our viewing experience. I think that if you still have a functioning TiVO eight years from now, you won’t skip the commercials when you watch that old show.

    They’re a wonderful snapshot of who we are.

  • GCC 3.2.2 Released!

    Posted in

    KernelTrap notes that GCC 3.2.2, a bugfix release, is out.

  • MoinMoin Updates

    Posted in

    I spent some time this evening chatting with Thomas Waldmann on #moin at irc.freenode.net. MoinMoin is currently at 1.0, though 1.1 is just around the corner. Hopefully 1.1 will include some caching support which should speed things up (Slashotting a MoinMoin wiki is not recommended) a bit. 1.1 should also bring compatability with persistance, such as the Twisted Framework and mod_python. More details on that can be found at the mailing list archives. Planned features for 1.2 include some darn smart internationalization. Linking WikiNames across languages sounds like a headache, but there is a working demo up and running.

    Aparently Thomas isn’t much of a Python guy, but he loves MoinMoin and is pleased to be working in Python.

  • Tweaking the ASP.NET Web Services Test Page

    Posted in

    Scott Hanselman: “A reminder from Sairama that editing the DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx page in CONFIG underneath the .NET Framework directory allows you to customize the Web Services test page. Even if only to change the default textbox to a textarea, it’s a useful tip.”

  • Automating EJB Unit Testing

    Posted in

    O’Reillynet: “Adopting Extreme Programming (XP) requires programmers to have automated unit tests for most of their code. Achieving that with Enterprise Java Beans presents some difficulties. One reason is that EJBs must be deployed before testing; another reason is their intrinsic relationship to the database. Using JUnit and Apache Ant, JiRong Hu shows a simple solution to automating EJB unit testing — moving one step closer to true XP.”

  • PyCon DC 2003 Registration Open!

    Posted in

    Excellent! You can now register for PyCon DC 2003.

  • XP

    Posted in

    I loathe critical updates.

  • Jeremy Allaire Moving On

    Posted in

    Jeremy Allaire: After eight years with Allaire and Macromedia, I’ve decided to move on. What a ride its been, and will no doubt continue to be.

    Good luck, sounds like the new gig will be tough but fun.

  • Gnome 2.2.0

    Posted in

    LWN notes that Gnome 2.2.0 has been released.

  • After Groove Web Services

    Posted in

    John Burkhardt after releasing his baby into the wild: “Ok guys, what’s next?”

  • Mono Doc 0.1 Released

    Posted in ,

    From the Mono site: “A preliminary release of the Mono Documentation Browser is now availble. Release notes“

  • Temporary Fix

    Posted in

    I’m posting this from a temporary install to make sure that I gather all the neccesary bits from my hard drive.  I figured that if I went to all the trouble, I wouldn’t loose anything, but if I just trusted everything to be backed up, I’d forget something.

    Hopefully I’ll get everything double backed up and restored later this evening.

  • Blojsom Picks Up Calender-Based Navigation

    Posted in

    Quickie: Blojsom now supports calendar-based navigation.

  • Main Box Hosed

    Posted in

    It looks like I’ve hosed my main XP box.

    One second I was playing a demo (that shall remain nameless to protect the thing that hosed my OS) and the next it was locked up. I hit the reset button, and have been booting with various options, using the XP recovery console, and trying other fun tricks ever since. All is not lost, as all of the crucial stuff is on a different drive and/or backed up.

    Do not worry, Radio is not on that box, so I’ll be able to bitch and moan throughout the reinstall process 🙂

  • Jetty 4.2.7

    Posted in

    Jetty 4.2.7 has been released:

    Jetty is an Open Source HTTP Servlet Server written in Java. It is a full featured HTTP/1.1 server and a Servlet container. It is designed to be small, fast, embeddable and extensible. It supports HTTP/1.1, servlets 2.3, and JSP 1.2.

    This release upgrades the JSSE libraries to fix a security vulnerability found in the reference implementation of SSL. SSL users are advised to upgrade to this release or update their SSL jars from JSSE 1.0.3_01.

  • Next on VH1’s Behind the Weblogs

    Posted in

    Mark Pilgrim:

    Pretty soon we’ll have a privacy policy and a mission statement, and it’s all downhill from there.

  • Blosxom OSX Installer

    Posted in ,

    Rael:

    After much futzing and a few hints dropped along the way ;-), I’m happy to announce the Blosxom Installer for Mac OS X.

    This is good news for OSX users.  I’ll still have to use the ‘less than 5 minute install’ process 🙂

  • ASP.NET Without C#: Why Bother?

    Posted in

    I was looking at ASP.NET books over the weekend, and I found that the majority of books that cover ASP.NET choose to do so using VB.NET rather than the relatively easy and extremely powerful C#.  I wonder why this is?  Oldskool VB was definately easier than C++.  Today VB.NET is almost as (if not just as) complex as C# (IMHO), while C# seems to be more simple and elegant.

    I picked up ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials and Code at MicroCenter over the weekend (for $4.99!) and it tries to cover both VB and C#, though it is extremely biased towards VB.  I’m really not going to complain for what I paid, but if it had been any more than five bucks, I probably couldn’t justify it.

    Doing ASP.NET in VB seems like buying a Bentley with a four-banger.

    On a related note, I also picked up Building Web Services with Java: Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI for half off at a computer show.

    I’ve been doing some skimming of both books, but I’d really like to dive in.

  • PyBlagg == Spycyroll

    Posted in

    V. Satheesh Babu:

    Apparently, my quick and dirty news aggregator is found useful by others too. So, we have setup a sourceforge project to host this. At the moment, it is still the same code base. We’ll add more features to this.