Sep 2002

Mon, 30 Sep 2002

Bush Goes After Oregon Assisted Suicide Law

Via szymona.net: Bush and his best buddy Ashcroft are going after an Oregon law that enabled assisted suicide. I think it's worth noting that the voters of Oregon made the decision to enact the law, not politicians. I'm not sure that I had a strong feeling about this until I watched my brother-in-law suffer and die from ALS. Bush and Ashcroft should walk a mile in the sufferers shoes. What really disturbs me is that this country will put tax payers dollars in lawyers pockets arguing about the issue at the hands of Bush and Ashcroft while they could be funding research that could prevent people from ever needing to consider the choice that they're so deadset against. I can take some solace in the fact that I didn't vote for these morons.

Posted at: 07:45 | permalink

Sun, 29 Sep 2002

Dave Copeland: Unwired!

Dave Copeland's article on wireless has appeared in the Pittsurgh Tribune Review. While generally well-written, we are treated to some questionable opinions such as the following:

Danette L. O'Connell knows mainstream users won't adopt the technology until it's proven secure. While Selley and Milliren may not have sinister motives, there's little to prevent other computer users with access to inexpensive wireless technologies from breaking into computer networks.

Yeah, and nobody runs virus-prone email clients either, right? This is complete bullshit. People are already adopting the technology, security be damned.

Posted at: 22:52 | permalink

Boston.com Struggles To Spell Computer

Editing at boston.com is apparently approaching the level of MSNBC. ;->

Posted at: 21:00 | permalink

Sat, 28 Sep 2002

Dickinson College on The Horizon

We're off to Dickinson College to visit my nephew Ryan today. Should be fun. I've been to Carlisle, but never to Dickinson itself. I'll try to take some pics while I'm there. See ya!

Posted at: 07:56 | permalink

Mandrake Linux 9.0 Dolphin Release

Well, after running solely on Mandrake 9.0 RC2 for the last few weeks, I did a clean install of Mandrake 9.0 on my Dell Inspiron 3700 laptop tonight. The install was absolutely flawless, all of my peripherals worked fresh from the install including my Orinoco Gold 802.11b wireless card. I'd be curious whether Redhat 8 manages a clean wireless laptop install.

Here's a screenshot of my KDE desktop with Quartz window dressing.

Now that I'm up on the latest release, I'll report regularly on my experience with desktop linux. So far, so good. Thank you and good night.

Posted at: 00:02 | permalink

Fri, 27 Sep 2002

Charles Cooper Spears Britney

I came across this piece by Charles Cooper:

Oops, they did it again - Tech News - CNET.com

Memo to Hilary Rosen at the RIAA: I download music at home to try out new stuff all the time. Guess what? When I come across something I like, I buy the CD. Otherwise, I'm just likely to stick with Miles, Mozart and the other stuff I already know and like. Ignorance is bliss.

Same here. But is anybody listening?

Posted at: 17:58 | permalink

Legal Troubles For Blackout Driver

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports on legal troubles for blackout driver.

William Bishop, Jr. said, "There's a compelling need to find a bad guy. But we have to step back and ask ourselves, 'Is this a crime?' "

Yes, it is.

Posted at: 09:26 | permalink

Brian Cantoni's AmphetaMailer

Brian Cantoni has solved the problem of emailing amphetadesk feeds that I wrote about a week ago. Brian's solution sends updates automatically and only sends a new item once. Check it out.

Posted at: 08:36 | permalink

Thu, 26 Sep 2002

Transform RSS with Perl and XSLT

Perl does a great job of simplifying the job of transforming RSS to other formats. Here's a CGI script that uses XSLT to transform an RSS feed into HTML. Enjoy.

Posted at: 23:57 | permalink

Wed, 25 Sep 2002

decafbad Nails Trackback vs. Talkback

I just wanted to give a resounding yyyyeeeessss when I read lm orchard's take on this whole discussion about automated blog interaction mechanisms vs. the human side. His article really resonated with me.

0xDECAFBAD: Automated Pingback vs Human Talkback - Which is more humane?

Of course, I've never been cracked or assaulted by an exploit of my systems. I don't have unwanted stalkers or abusive anti-fans or malicious kids or babbling spammers after me in this space. Perhaps if I did, my systems might not tend toward such openness. I think this is a statement on many things beyond blogs, but that's a post for other days. Maybe some day I'll have these negative elements facing me, and I'll have to revise my systems and their direction to account for them.

Me too. Did anybody noticed how this discussion stratified with Radio users on one side and Movable Type users on the other? Oops, that leaves out Sam Ruby, but Sam runs so many different blog systems, I can't tell which one he really likes. Regardless, it sure seems like you could develop a psychological profile on Radio and Movable Type users.

Posted at: 21:28 | permalink

Just Say No To RSS

Sam Ruby picks up the story of the discord in the RSS community by implementing ESF on his site. If you're going to abandon XML, didn't Aaron Swartz have it right the first time with Radically Simple Syndication? Ubiquity will remain elusive as long as the elite bicker about the format. How many devices would be connected today if every device sent a different TCP/IP protocol?

Posted at: 08:13 | permalink

Tue, 24 Sep 2002

Dave Winer's RSS breaks Amphetadesk

I have been subscribed to scripting news for a while when I came across this tonight in amphetadesk:

There was an error parsing this channel. The parser reported: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 81, column 166, byte 6860 . You may wish to contact the owner of this channel informing them of this XML parsing error, but AmphetaDesk will keep trying to get new updates for you.

It seems dave has seen fit to just convert http://scripting.com/rss.xml to RSS 2.0. Think about it. This is tantamount to converting your website to spit out HTML 4.0 when user agents are still at 2.0. Couldn't he just have spun another file called rss2.xml ensuring continued success for readers of rss.xml? I don't get it.

operator: this is amphetadesk how may I help you?
me: please delete dave winer's horked up RSS.
operator: consider it done.

Update: Dave comments that he has discovered and fixed the problem in the feed and it was not related to RSS 2.0. If you're in the mood for a classic Winer flame war, follow the comments link.

Update: Mark Pilgrim picks up the story of how people are abandoning RSS. I think that's a bit extreme; however, I am in the camp that believes staying at 0.91 is probably the most prudent thing to do at this point. But I can understand the backlash given Dave's ambassadorship.

Posted at: 22:42 | permalink

VWVortex Drives The Volkswagen Golf R32

The folks at VWVortex went to Germany and drove the new VW Golf R32 at Volkswagen's proving ground. 240 HP, 6 speed manual, all-wheel drive - in a, gulp, GOLF! Holy macarel.

Posted at: 09:20 | permalink

The Future Ubiquity of GPS

In another neat post, the shifted librarian reports that Motorola has a chip to put GPS capabilities in small devices such as cell phones and notebooks. It's only a matter of time before that earthmate on my dash goes the way of the dinosaur. Kinda like how the 802.11b card in my PC is gonna go the way of the dinosaur. Speaking of 802.11b, jenny also reports that libraries are going wireless. Cool!

Posted at: 08:36 | permalink

Shifted Librarian: Controlling Hooligans With Music

I never had quite the vision to foresee this when I was in music school in the mid 80's. In what I would call a special form of music therapy, the shifted librarian reports that Boston transit cops are using such disturbing sounds as Gershwin and Sousa to drive troublesome teens away from the subway stops. Excellent.

Posted at: 08:25 | permalink

Dell Linux Cluster Speeds Bioinformatics Research

A Dell Linux Cluster at the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics has the following characteristics:

Gasp!

Posted at: 00:18 | permalink

Mon, 23 Sep 2002

Decafbad Says Pingback One-ups Trackback

Decafbad says that Pingback One-Ups trackback. If that link doesn't work for you, it may be because decafbad is melting down:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: query() in /home/deusx/www/php-lib/decafbad/refer_lib.php on line 78

I coudln't get any of his .phtml archives to load - they just display a blank page. But you can just load the homepage and look for pingback.

My basic reaction is "uh, no". Trackback works. Pingback is a spec with a bunch of links associated which 1) crashed my IE6, and 2) threw a bunch of error boxes and 404-like dead links once I brought up mozilla.

If pingback's so great, where is the demonstrable code? The stuff that I found via the links on decafbad is horribly broken. The idea sounds great, but without working code, all this talk about automatic interoperability is pointless.

I'd ping decafbad's trackback server, but I can't get to that on account of the aforementioned errors. Hope he gets everything working again. I like reading decafbad.

Update I emailed lm orchard and he replied and said that he'd run out of disk. Yikes. Hopefully, he'll get it resolved, as of this morning, I still couldn't get past his home page.

Posted at: 22:22 | permalink

Sam Ruby Has Trackback Working In Blosxom

Sam Ruby has Trackback working in Blosxom. I like the innovative way that Sam integrates trackback pings with comments such that they're nearly transparent. Ironically, that's exactly what I was getting at when I commented on Sam's blog a few days ago. The only problem that I see with Sam's implementation is that the trackback thread only points back to Sam's blog, as if they are all comments from sam's blog, not the individual trackback entries, which are more useful since they are full and not merely excerpted.

Posted at: 18:23 | permalink

RSS Feeds Via Email

Does anybody care about receiving RSS feeds via email? Morbus and I were talking about this last month and I've hacked together enough perl script to grab the RSS and parse it, tranform it into HTML using XSLT, and send it via email with the proper HTML mime type. I'm now at a point where I need some feedback on whether the rest of the world is interested in such a beast. I'm particularly interested in discerning the number of amphetadesk or non-amphetadesk users who are interested in receiving RSS feeds via email. Take the poll. One design that I'm considering would allow you to provide your own XSL skin such that the transform that you received in your email would be exactly what you asked for, or you could use the default.

Posted at: 09:39 | permalink

Sun, 22 Sep 2002

Jorg Grundler's Stunning Photograph

Jorg Grundler's stunning photography takes us back to a time and place that I didn't know photography was capable of doing. Phenomenal.

Posted at: 15:22 | permalink

MIT Puts Everything Online For Free

Congratulations are in order to MIT for bringing to fruition a project that has been talked about for a while now. That project will put virtually all of MIT's educational materials online over the next ten years. [bbc technology]

MIT staff point out that if this initiative is successful, and other institutions follow, it will put the net back on track towards its original goal of sharing information and knowledge around the world, rather than selling CDs and t-shirts.

And that's a worthy cause!

One has to wonder whether Philip Greenspun had anything to do with this and if so, what role he played. He's certainly been championing this kind of publishing for years via his own sites and books.

Posted at: 11:57 | permalink

Pittsburgh ranked 3rd Most Religious Large Metro Area

PittsburghLIVE.com: Pittsburgh ranked 3rd most religious large metro area

The region's strong religious affiliation traces back to two key factors — ethnicity and age, said James Hanigan, chairman of the theology department at Duquesne University.

"People here still identify strongly with their ethnicity," he said. "For many such people, their religion and their ethnicity are somehow tied up, where to be one is to be the other."

With its large number of elderly residents, Pittsburgh also has a comparatively big share of believers from a generation that sees faith as being part of an institutional church, rather than as a purely personal matter that can exist outside organizational walls, Hanigan said.

I'm slowly coming to grips with why I find living here so distasteful.

Posted at: 00:32 | permalink

Sat, 21 Sep 2002

Tastes Like Chicken

A guest post by Craig Maier. ...

I was researching the Helen Brach (candy company) Family Foundation, and I found out that they are a contributor to a little organization known as United Poultry Concerns, a vegan eco-feminist outfit, which (according to The Center for Consumer Freedom) is dedicated to ridding us of eating turkey at Thanksgiving and banning (it's true) rubber chickens. Poultry farming is dirty, unpleasant and heinous work for both the workers and (most certainly) the chickens themselves, but it's interesting to see what happens when academics get ahold of a good cause.

UPC President Karen Davis, who keeps over 100 birds in a bona fide chicken sanctuary (or "Poultry Paradise"), has been quoted as saying: "If it were up to me, there would be no 'domestic' animals, by which I mean there would be no slavery, no animal property, no 'pets.' Other creatures would live their lives, raising their families, having their own projects. ..."

Davis, a Ph.D. in English from Maryland, has written widely, but perhaps her most important essay is entitled "Thinking Like A Chicken," which was published in a peer-reviewed anthology by Duke University Press. A sample, taken from a portion of the essay called "Clucking Like A Mountain":

"Why do you keep putting off writing about me?"
It is the voice of a chicken that asks this.
Alice Walker (1988, 170)

In answering the call of ecologists to think like a mountain, I have to know whether this would conflict with my effort to think like a chicken. For I have chosen with the American writer, Alice Walker, to be a microphone held up to the mouths of chickens to enable them to step forward and expound their lives. I am glad that I have been able to see and identify with a chicken, though I grieve that my ability to communicate what I have seen and have identified with may be limited by profound but obscure obstacles which it is nevertheless my task to try and traverse.

No lies. Honest Injun. Actual scholarship!

Quite interesting, indeed.

Posted at: 15:32 | permalink

Thought For The Day

Moron is no ROM spelled backwards. ROM is Read-Only Memory. Someone with no Read-Only Memory is probably a moron.

Posted at: 09:14 | permalink

Freak Of Nature Or Broken Software

Looking at my access logs: Usage Statistics for www.davidwatson.org - September 2002 I just realized that the number of visits and sites were identical for two days in a row - the 19th and 20th of September, 792 and 505, respectively. Hmm, maybe I should be playing the lottery or something.

Posted at: 01:31 | permalink

Fri, 20 Sep 2002

Dave Winer Asks About Comment Notification

Dave Winer is asking about a feature to do comment notification on a weblog. The dotnet guy provides an answer: subscribe to his newest comments RSS feed. Cool!

Update: Sam Ruby picks up the conversation. Checkout the comment thread.

Posted at: 17:30 | permalink

Volkswagen Touareg Introduced at Paris Motor Show

Two questions: 1) how is anybody ever going to spell or pronounce the name of this car properly? 2) How can VW/Audi execs not expect this car to cannibalize Audi Allroad sales? Regardless, I for one, would like to be able to buy a 313 HP diesel in the United States. 8-D

Touareg - world premiere for Volkswagen's top-class off-road vehicle at Paris Motor Show :: news.kak.net :: your source to audi-news

The Touareg represents a new vehicle concept at the top end of the sport utility vehicle (SUV) scale. Unlike previous vehicles in this segment of the market, it combines the characteristics of a high-class off-road vehicle with the comfort and convenience of a luxury saloon car - and the dynamic attributes of a sports car.
The Volkswagen Touareg is being launched with either a 162 kW (220 bhp) V6 spark-ignition engine or a V10 TDI diesel developing 230 kW (313 bhp). Later, a five-cylinder TDI and a V8 spark-ignition engine, both new designs, will be available. All Touaregs are equipped with 4XMOTION permanent four-wheel drive and a six-speed gearbox (automatic transmission with the V10 TDI engine).

Posted at: 09:50 | permalink

High School Students Build Linux Cluster

In an interesting demonstration of what is possible at the high school level, albeit with a teacher who has a PhD, some high school students in Illinois have built a Linux cluster, and they had virtually no prior experience with Linux! Cool.

Using MPICH to Build a Small Private Beowulf Cluster [linux journal]

A Wayne City High School computer science teacher shares the step-by-step approach his students used to build a Beowulf cluster.

Posted at: 09:39 | permalink

Thu, 19 Sep 2002

Instant Messaging Style Slips Into Formal Writing

The NY Times reports that teachers are now receiving papers from kids written in an informal style derived from their instant messaging experience. "Teenagers have essentially developed an unconscious "accent" in their typing, Professor Donath said. "They have gotten facile at typing and they are not paying attention."

The larger problem is the erosion of consciousness that this entails, not the inability to distinguish between one form of writing and another. Is this writing a choice, or merely like shifting gears in the car, ie. second nature? I'd expect somebody to be doing research on this soon.

Posted at: 08:36 | permalink

Wed, 18 Sep 2002

Marching Band Plays Black Sabbath

Film at 11... so I went to this county band festival up here in the sticks tonight and lo and behold one of the groups there, who shall remain nameless, came out and played Paranoid by Black Sabbath. This was your run-of-the-mill public high school. Then, another group came out and played You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC. You'll have to forgive me. I went to one of those high schools where if you did anything mildly interesting, there'd be a schoolboard scene like the one in Field Of Dreams. What is the world coming to?

Posted at: 22:04 | permalink

Tue, 17 Sep 2002

12 Reasons Developers Shouldn't Worry About The Future

The Joel on Software Forum - If you're good, don't worry: 12 Reasons

My personal favorite is this:

5. Development may involve solving fewer technical problems in the future and more time spent stepping back to say "what are we really trying to do here". A good developer is always doing this. A bad developer just wants to write code. One of the real advantages of experience isn't that it's done right; it's that it's done right without 3 painful iterations.

That's what I did today at work. Anymore, I do that everyday. That's the nature of dealing with a business that 4 years into it, is still nascent. Content management was a phrase that didn't exist when I got involved in that business. I wonder what will be the next nascent business for me? Regardless, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Posted at: 21:53 | permalink

decafbad picks up the Winer-Hemenway Cage Match

I've watched with amusement as the battle over RSS heats up. This morning, decafbad summarized the true nature of it better than I could.

I've spoken with both Morbus Iff and Dave Winer via email on several occasions. I find Morbus much easier to get along with and agree with Kevin Burton's assessment. In the end, despite the fact that the defacto engineering culture would lean toward rationality over emotion, it's emotion that provides the impetus to put products out the door.

And really, does anybody believe that Morbus wants to kill Dave? I don't, but the way he says it is highly amusing, and that amusement could help to defuse a tense situation if people would just relax a little. Surely, I can't be the only one out here that finds joking about my own demise at least mildly amusing. To me, the seriousness that some folks display in considering their own demise is indicative of a larger cultural problem - talking about death being tabboo. I was going to link to Dave Winer's post about it this morning, but he's just edited that away. Sigh. Message to Dave: revisionist PR is going to come back to haunt you.

Posted at: 13:30 | permalink

CMU's Web Services Course

This may not be a revelation, but CMU has a course in web services.

Posted at: 13:07 | permalink

NY Philharmonic Commissions Memorial Piece By John Adams

John Adams, composer of such favorites as Short Ride in a Fast Machine, has been commissioned by the NY Philharmonic to create a piece memorializing 911 [ny times]. I last heard Adams work when the Pittsburgh Symphony did Short Ride about 6 years ago or so. Unfortunately, the symphony's web site seems to have no record of that performance, and I can't recall who was conducting but one of the interesting things that I discovered from the Times piece is that Lorin Maazel is now music director of the NY Philharmonic. Of course, he was music director here first! Yeah, Pittsburgh may suck, but it's symphony is still disproportionately phenomenal relative to the size of the city. I wish I could be in NY to hear this piece. I love Adams work.

Posted at: 08:51 | permalink

Charles Simonyi Leaves Microsoft

The NY Times reports that Charles Simonyi is leaving Microsoft to form a startup that will try to commercialize on his research into intentional programming. Simonyi, among other innovations, is the inventor of Hungarian notation, a shorthand system used by C and C++ programmers to determine what types are assigned to variables without looking at the variable's declaration.

Posted at: 08:04 | permalink

Small Leaps In Genes Battling Muscular Dystrophy

In what seems like a small victory for gene therapy, scientist have succeeded in reversing the effects of muscular dystrophy in laboratory mice [msnbc]. One can only hope to see similar successes in humans. I wonder if similar approaches would yield similar results in ALS sufferers?

Posted at: 00:28 | permalink

Price of Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Dropping Fast

The Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 is getting discounted rapidly by retailers. Buy.com now has the Sharp Zaurus at only $333 which seems like a great deal considering the massive power (linux and java) and options (802.11b and CDPD) combined with awesome usability. Back when I first reviewed the Zaurus, which I believe was about 6 months ago, it was selling for $499 at staples. Staples now has it at $399.

Posted at: 00:22 | permalink

Mon, 16 Sep 2002

New Audi S4 Introduced in Paris

The new Audi S4 has been introduced at the Paris Motor show. Nothing like a 4.2 liter V8 producing 344 HP and 0-62 mph in 5.6 seconds. The new Audi S4 :: news.kak.net :: your source to audi-news

The new car doesn't appear to differ much from the A4 in external appearances save for the checkered grill and what appear to be ground effects on the bottoms of the doors.

Posted at: 20:02 | permalink

BBC Reports on Changing Roles of Journalists

The BBC reports news staff take on tech skills.

"One particular development he noted was the democratisation and liberated nature of news brought to the world by websites that push and pull news from the street, at grassroots level. These sources are unconventional but are often first with the news."

I think they meant to say weblog. Why they didn't say it, I'm not sure. Perhaps that headline should read tech staff take on news skills? Or lack thereof. Heh.

Posted at: 09:10 | permalink

Massive Credit Card Fraud Suspected

MSNBC says that a massive credit card heist is suspected at a small e-commerce company.

'There wasn’t a system in place to say, "you’ve generated 140,000 charges, that’s more than your normal volume," Hynek said.'

Ouch. On the one hand, it'd be nice if the credit card company had a trigger that understood that 140,000 charges of the same amount over many cards was fraud. On the other hand, my sister-in-law tried to buy a computer online last week for about $1500 and the credit card company denied the charge because they thought it was fraud. The amount of time that it took to contact all involved parties meant that the computer was sold out by the time the credit approval was granted. She's not too happy.

Posted at: 00:03 | permalink

Sun, 15 Sep 2002

Norman Mailer On Current Affairs

My friend Jeff Zapotoczny links a fascinating interview with Norman Mailer. It's one of the most thought provoking pieces that I've read in a while. I'm not sure if Mailer teaches, but he taught me a lot here - required reading.

Posted at: 10:52 | permalink

NY Times Overlooks Rap in the Logo Story

How the NY Times can do a piece on logos and brands in the high fashion industry and miss the influence of rap music completely is beyond me.

Posted at: 09:27 | permalink

Linux Journal On Technology Job Market

Linux Journal has an interesting piece on the technology job market. Among the curious observations is a resurgence in C and C++ jobs, particularly for embedded applications involving wireless.

Posted at: 09:20 | permalink

Fri, 13 Sep 2002

Marc Canter and John Robb Argue Multimedia Blogs

John Robb posted an article about the future of multimedia and blogging. Then, Marc Canter wrote a thoughtful response.

Marc says, "Yes $40 a year is about for a blog tool. But that won't include bandwidth access, which BTW should be different for folks who care about publishing out to their old college roomates and family, versus the entire, whole world. Bandwidth costs money and video will never flow out over the 'free Internet'."

I wouldn't be so sure. What John may have been thinking of is the future of the wireless internet. Future, you say, what future? Well, have a look at this. That's a screenshot of netstumbler running on my laptop as we drove to lunch today in a section of Pittsburgh called Shadyside. Over 20 wireless networks in a 3 mile drive. And Pittsburgh is not exactly the tech mecca that the aforementioned left coasters live in. We do have CMU as you can see from the WAP ID's. Nonetheless, I'm not the only one who's discovered the rate of adoption for wireless technology around here.

Now, imagine for a second that I have the digital video camera that allows me to shoot whatever news happens in my 3 mile drive to lunch. Imagine that I have a fully charged battery in my laptop and that I've got a firewire connection and the necessary software and skills to create the stream. There's effectively nothing stopping someone from creating their own mini regional blog collective streaming video TV station right now. Hell, I could have uploaded the video stream from the free wireless connection at Pittsburgh Deli Company where I ate lunch.

I can imagine an even more likely scenario centered around the deli company.It's a unique place, particularly for this locale. You see, not only do they have the best sandwiches in the city and free wireless, they've also got some hip music happening at the bar upstairs. There's a list of the acts playing there on their home page. So I go there with my laptop, record the performance using my favorite music software (with their permission of course), publish the mp3 to my site, and blog the experience, all without leaving my seat at the gig.

Keep in mind, technologically speaking, I could do that tonight if I was so inclined. What we're talking about here is guerilla digital media blog convergence. It's not the highbrow convergence that Marc talks about, it's a much more duct tape oriented approach and that's OK with me. I've been running my blog-cum-digital-audio-and-digital images-site hacked together with a bunch of perl and php duct tape for six months now.

The problem lies on the content consumer's side. It seems to me that bandwidth on the content creators end is not going to be the problem. Rather, bandwidth on the content consumers end will remain a barrier to adoption. We can assume that the alpha geeks will always know where to get cheaper, broader bandwidth but that's not a safe assumption with mom, dad, and grandma. How many of folks outside the early adopter population actually watch streaming video from mainstream sites? Further, how may folks outside the early adopter population know about the coming ubiquity of wireless? In either case, I think the answer is arguably few.

Posted at: 10:31 | permalink

Thu, 12 Sep 2002

Mandrake 9.0 RC2 - Best Laptop/Wireless Install

I'm speechless. After moaning about how bad most linux wireless installs are, I'm pleased to report that, at least on my Dell Inspiron 3700, the latest Mandrake 9.0 release candidate - RC2, is flawless. How flawless? Well, I was able to run the 3 CD install and the installer powered up my PCMCIA Orinoco Gold card and detected it properly. Then the installer displayed the configuration for the card and told me it was assigned to eth1. I made a single change to the configuration which was to set the card's connection type to auto. After the install had finished, the box booted into X Windows, I logged into KDE, started Mozilla 1.1 and was thrilled with 11 Mbps of wireless titillation. A year ago, I was still fairly skeptical about desktop Linux. After seeing this, I'll be getting out my checkbook to support the mandrake effort since I'd like to see them succeed and prosper.

Update: I just realized that Mandrake is now installing open office 1.0 out of the box and they include a built-in JVM so that it starts up cleanly out of the box meaning that it's about as user-friendly as any piece of java code I've seen. I'd been saying for a while that the missing link in this whole equation was a platform that distributed the JVM such that distribution of java apps was a no-nonsense download like it is with a windows executable. Now, all they need to do is put java web start in the distro and configure it to work by default with mozilla and this bad boy's cookin' with gas.

For the first time in my life, I can honestly say I'm ready to move my personal computing experience full-time into the Microsoft-free zone. I've been running my server-side on linux for years, but the desktop move has been elusive, mostly due to my concerns with either device driver support (PCMCIA, USB, etc) or usability. In my case, it's not hatred of Microsoft products that motivates me to do this nearly as much as it is the hatred of Microsoft licenses. From this point forward, I'll endeavor to document my experience so that there's a clear record of just how successful one can be with such an effort.

In the long term, Redmond should be worried - very worried.

Posted at: 07:58 | permalink

Zeldman Gets C++ And Java All Wrong

Zeldman's article is sure stirring up a lot of controversy: Digital Web Magazine - Features: 99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete But when I read this, I couldn't remain silent: "Languages like C++ and Java don't merely encourage proper coding practices, they demand them." And that's when my BS detector went off. This is where you have to emulate the sound of the buzzer going off on your favorite game show. Then imagine Alex Trebec in his most condescending voice saying, "I'm sorry Zeldman, have you ever used a C++ compiler before? Neither C++ nor Java do much of anything to demand proper coding practices." Need evidence? Here's the C++ indictment, and here's the java indictment. Articles aren't enough? Pick up a book. Need surefire ways to hurt yourself in C++? Two words: void star. In Java, it's a little tougher, but I can still write this heinously monolithic pig of a program that's incomprehensible to mere mortals. How those languages demand proper coding practices is opaque to me. Maybe somebody could expound on that for me. Is there anybody out there that agrees with Zeldman?

Posted at: 00:08 | permalink

Wed, 11 Sep 2002

911 - An Anniversary Story

The numerals 911 had significance to me before that fateful day in the year 2001. My wife and I chose to be married on that day in 1999. That wouldn't seem so ironic in and of itself, had we not learned, upon selecting the day, that it was the wedding day of my divorced parents. I, of course, couldn't begin to remember such trivia and I don't come by sentamentalism naturally, so forgive me for engaging in a little bit of it this one day out of the year.

My wife liked to joke that I'd never forget our anniversary because of those fateful numerals. I doubt she knew just how prescient that sentiment was in 1999 - how deeply those numerals would be ingrained on the world only two years after our wedding. People sigh when we tell them about the date, but we're adults; we don't feel nearly as bad as the twins of one of my co-workers who plead with their mother to change their birthday.

Instead, the experience has strengthened our resolve. It's reminded us how very fortunate we are to be able to celebrate our anniversary at all, when so many are left spouseless. It's reminded us to stand up and defend our heritage, when so many would tear it down. Finally, it's reminded me that I still love my wife and no terrorist is ever going to change that.

Update: Of all the 911 stuff I read today, I enjoyed disenchanted's article the most.

Posted at: 00:29 | permalink

Tue, 10 Sep 2002

Boston Surgeon Who Left Patient On Table Arrested For Rape

From the Boston Globe via AP: "The Boston surgeon who left a patient on the operating table for 35 minutes while he went to cash a check was arrested Tuesday and charged with raping a 15-year-old boy."

Posted at: 22:47 | permalink

Tech Culture's Not So Different in Prague

Jeff's started teaching in Prague and his early observations indicate that the tech culture is about the same as he experienced in the US. Hmm...

Posted at: 10:07 | permalink

Jabber Web Page Presence In Perl

I've been looking for a way to handle displaying my jabber presence via a web page for a while. DJ Adams talks about jabber presence and perl in this article. I basically started with his headline delivery perl script and stripped it down to just the presence stuff. I use a surrogate user to subscribe to my presence so that the presence can be queried from the web page. You can see my stripped down script here, only 54 lines of code! My HTML page is using javascript to make the CGI call and in turn the CGI script uses javascript to write back into the calling document. The output is visible in the navbar on the right side of the page that you are reading. I would hope that it could be done with less code but this is working for now, so I'll wait to discover new and better ways. If you've got any, please post them here.

Posted at: 10:00 | permalink

Max Dornseif Has Trackback Server Working In Radio

I received a comment on my blog this morning from Max Dornseif. He's got the standalone Trackback server from Movable Type working in Radio. I'm pinging on this entry to check it out. Great work Max!

I especially like it when the community routes around the person who's dragging his feet to prevent interoperability from happening. Awesome!

Update: Max has even more nifty automagic trackback coming soon. Holy Macarel. That's what I call prolific!

Posted at: 09:28 | permalink

Mon, 09 Sep 2002

Bruce Perens Fired From HP

The NY Times reports that Bruce Perens, who lead the open source fight against Microsoft from his post at HP, has been terminated. Check out Bruce's new competition for Microsoft's Initiative for Software Choice.

Posted at: 08:42 | permalink

Sun, 08 Sep 2002

Distributing RSS with Jabber

Tonight, I implemented DJ Adams perl script for publishing RSS via Jabber. I think the article's been laying around for a while as the current versions of Net::Jabber don't quite work with the script. I figured I'd document my experience here in case anybody's interested in getting this working.

In order to get the script running solidly, the first thing I needed to do was comment out use strict; in /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/Net/Jabber.pm. The script kept exiting with an exception related to hashes not working with the strict option. Once I got past that, the next thing I ran into was that the sub handle_presence wasn't able to retrieve the presence of subscribed users properly. This is documented on DJ Adam's site (see the section titled The Fix); however, the code in the RSS publishing script is not updated to reflect this change in Net::Jabber. Thus, in the aforementioned handle_presence sub, you need to add a single line at the top of the sub shift; to eat the session id on the callback. Once I made these simple changes, everyting started working and I was able to see RSS updates as they happened from WinJab.

The potential here is enormous. I'm now only a few hacks away from integrating this into Movable Type such that RSS would be pushed via the Jabber server as god intended it. Considering that Movable Type, AmphetaDesk, and this Jabber RSS publish-subscribe script are all implemented in perl, the possibilities are endless.

Posted at: 22:09 | permalink

Steve Gillmor: Digital Rights Management and Blogging Editors

In an infoworld article that I found via Roland Tanglao, Steve Gillmor poses some interesting questions. hmm.
Increasingly, the answer is in content creation. Attract the customer via the free, thin browser, but force them to thick Office to create, enhance, and distribute the content. Here's where Weblogs return to center stage. The Weblog architecture relies on the crippled IE edit control for its content creation tools, and it chokes off the virtuous cycle that is at the core of the Weblog tsunami.
AFAICT, there's nothing stopping anybody from wiring openoffice to their favorite blog backend via the blogger API. That work doesn't look like it would take long either. I'd expect an experienced web services developer to pull it off in a weekend. Hmm...
How much more investment would it take to build a blogging editor on top of this stack, one free of DRM limitations? And who better to partner with than Apple, the last remaining engine of innovation? Jobs' Pixar studios leveraged Linux and p-to-p rendering farms to send Disney to the showers in the animation playoffs, after all.
What I can't understand is why Steve seems to be moaning about the lack of a cross-browser HTML editor for blogging when the folks at q42 have had Xopus out for a while now. In a world that seems hell-bent on innovation, a lot of folks seem to be ignoring some of the most innovative work as of late. What's up with that?

Posted at: 10:28 | permalink

Sat, 07 Sep 2002

Seattle Times: Loan To Former Microsoft Exec Questionable

The Seattle Times reports that a 15 million dollar loan from Microsoft to former Microsoft Executive Rick Belluzzo is coming under scrutiny in the current scandalous compensation environment.

Sanford Jacoby, a professor of management at UCLA said, "It's not really a question of whether it's big or small, it's whether it passes the smell test. In the current environment, it doesn't quite smell right. Would a corporate board that is exercising close scrutiny today give its approval to something like that? I'm not sure."

Posted at: 17:20 | permalink

Movable Type 2.5

The Movable Type folks have announced the feature list for Movable Type 2.5. Looks good. The improvements in the variety of pings that can be sent raise the question of blocking on the pings. Can you say asynchronous ping proxy? Thanks to Ben and Mena.

Posted at: 11:35 | permalink

JBoss port 8083 login-config.xml Bug

I documented a bug in JBoss 3.x this morning that appears to be quite a large security hole. If you're running a JBoss 3.x server in a production environment, I'd be very careful with port 8083. Right now, an HTTP GET request to that port, returns malformed XML revealing the data sources, userids, and passwords from login-config.xml. Ouch.

Posted at: 10:42 | permalink

Fri, 06 Sep 2002

Nightline: Survivors

I don't watch much television. Occasionally, it plays in the background as I work on my laptop. Tonight, Nightline ran a piece called Survivors. It was among the most deeply disturbing, emotionally wrenching television that I've ever seen. Basically, it shows us burn victims from the Pentagon in their recovery over the past year. I'm one of those people that doesn't get queasy watching surgery video but this program was designed to reach the unqueasy among us. After watching this, I feel both lucky and guilty to be able to get up and bitch and moan about my commute, my job, etc. The constitution that these people display in their recovery is inspiring.

I, for one, will not forget.

Posted at: 08:58 | permalink

Thu, 05 Sep 2002

Sam Ruby Reports on Axis 1.0 RC1

Sam Ruby says, "Tom Jordahl: The Apache Axis team has released Axis 1.0 RC1."

Cool. Now, I wonder what version of axis is being bundled in JBoss 3.02? Back to work tomorrow to dig up the JBoss 3.02 I downloaded the other day and take a look at axis again. I'm hopeful. My experience with the earlier JBoss bundled axis release wasn't so positive, but I liked a lot of the ideas the axis developers implemented. They just weren't working in JBoss the last time I paid attention.

Posted at: 21:33 | permalink

Jeff Szymona Reports Xbox Going To $150

szymona.net: XBox Price Lowering Again Jeff says, "XBox Evolved reports that the price of Microsoft's big black beast will be lowered to $149 on Sept. 23rd." Now, xbox evolved reports that Microsoft PR says it's a hoax. Dammit.

Posted at: 21:24 | permalink

NY Landlord Trying To Collect From Deceased Tenant

The Globe and Mail reports on a NY landlord trying to collect rent from a deceased worker in the WTC: "A Manhattan landlord is trying to squeeze $27,5000 (U.S.) in back rent from the estate of a Sept. 11 victim who perished days after she signed a one-year lease on an apartment, reports the New York Daily News. One of the complaints filed by Denise Lyman against Danielle Kousoulis, a 29-year-old Cantor Fitzgerald vice-president, was that she failed to give three months' notice she was leaving."

Posted at: 17:37 | permalink

Microsoft vs. Open Source in Government

My friend Alan forwarded a NY Times article on Microsoft's problems fighting open source in government applications. "All we're looking for is a level playing field competitively," said Peter Houston, a senior strategy executive in Microsoft's Windows group. Later in the same article, we have this: "To curb such moves, Microsoft is backing an industry group called the Initiative for Software Choice. The group lists 20 members besides the chip maker Intel, a close ally, most of them small foreign companies or organizations. (Illegally stifling choice, of course, was precisely what the federal courts in the long-running antitrust case ruled that Microsoft did in the market for personal computer software.)"

Oh, the irony.

Posted at: 17:33 | permalink

Brett Glass on Open Audio License (OAL)

In a piece I found via Scripting News, Brett Glass condemns the Open Audio License (OAL) and questions the real purpose of the organization promoting it:
It is this author's hope that, rather than attempting to "patch" the OAL, the EFF will reconsider its decision to become involved in the business of music licensing. The EFF, which has limited resources and important causes to pursue, should cease its promotion of the OAL and instead focus its efforts on an agenda which is appropriate to its organizational mission: ensuring that the public's "fair use" rights endure and are protected in the digital age.
It appears to me that Brett's right, though I'd like to see an analysis of this by someone with a little more legal clue than I have before making a final decision.

Posted at: 09:00 | permalink

Disenchanted: Ambient Interfaces

In an article on ambient interfaces, disenchanted reports, "You get out of bed and stumble into the bathroom. You can tell how much weight you didn't lose because the floor tiles have pressure sensors and there's a display on the first wall you see."

When this really gets interesting is when the ambient device has the good sense to integrate qualitative measures into the display. It's not enough to quantify your weight. The average person can infer whether there's a problem by gazing down at the abdomen. Imagine a device that could quantify your weight and tell you what Barry Sears and Robert Atkins think about your weight - probably not much, since they're both likely to be more concerned about body fat percentage.

I figure that the average person would deal with this system for about a week before they had an ambient system installed to hang themselves when their weight crossed a certain threshold. When the ambient systems get really interesting is when they are combined with mood qualifiers and music therapy. As if insulin shock therapy wasn't bad enough, I can only imagine what the next generation of psychiatrists will do with such systems. Sigh.

Posted at: 08:37 | permalink

John Nash: Quote Of The Day

To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity. - John Nash

Thomas Szasz would be proud.

Posted at: 00:49 | permalink

Thanks To Phil Ringnalda

Special thanks go out to Phil Ringnalda for helping to get my XHTML on my movable type blog to validate. I'm not sure why I care, but some things should not be questioned.

Posted at: 00:45 | permalink

Wed, 04 Sep 2002

Userland Attempted To Trademark RSS?

From winerlog:
So we found it surprising, as did many others, when Luserland software tried to patent the term 'RSS' back in 2000. Here's the patent application.
I'd like to see Dave address this so that we could figure out where he really stands on the subject. Sure looks inconsistent to me.

Posted at: 11:18 | permalink

Audi RS6 Reaches Britain

The Audi RS 6 quattro - Fastest ever road-going Audis reach Britain :: news.kak.net :: your source to audi-news
0-62mph in 4.7 secs
Drool.

Posted at: 08:33 | permalink

Tue, 03 Sep 2002

SAP Makes Linux THE Reference Unix Platform

In an article that I found via Mandrake Linux, SAP reports:
Linux is also the reference Unix for all new SAP developments.

Posted at: 14:25 | permalink

Sam Ruby: Xopus Open Source Is Released

Sam Ruby reports that the Xopus open source version has been released. So much for needing a rich browser-based HTML editor that works across major browser variants. Thanks to Lon and company!

Posted at: 08:55 | permalink

At A Gas Station? Just Immolate Your Aggressor

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette publishes the story of a man who doused a teenager in gasoline and then set him on fire at a gas station. Why is this interesting? Well, for one thing, it seems unprecedented to me - at least I hope so. The other thing is that I haven't seen anybody that looks more like Charles Manson in quite a while.

Posted at: 08:30 | permalink

College Students Cheating Getting Worse

Is it any surprise that we have ethical breakdowns at Enron and WorldCom when the Boston Globe reports that cheating among college students is this bad?
Laraway is among a tiny minority of college students - less than 10 percent, according to a recent national survey - who say they have reported an incident of cheating. Their efforts barely dent an epidemic-sized problem on college campuses: When Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity surveyed more than 2,000 students two years ago, about 77 percent admitted to unethical behavior ranging from plagiarism to sharing test questions.

Posted at: 08:18 | permalink

Mon, 02 Sep 2002

Two American Students Survive Amazon Jungle Ordeal

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports on two American college students who were lost in the Amazon jungle and rescued by some villagers:
A man brought a plate containing 25 rolls. They ate 22 of them and fell asleep. The man returned later with a pot of spaghetti and chicken. Ramsey is a vegetarian, but she ate three plates of it.
Hunger is a powerful motivator.

Posted at: 11:55 | permalink

Seattle Times Reports On Job Finding Difficulties

The Seattle Times reports that job seekers in the state of Washington are finding it increasingly difficult to get past the interview where a single position is drawing 400-800 resumes. Ouch.

Posted at: 10:41 | permalink

Sun, 01 Sep 2002

Norah Jones: Shoot The Moon

Norah Jones sings Shoot The Moon:
The summer days are gone too soon You shoot the moon And miss completely And now you're left to face the gloom The empty room that once smelled sweetly
That describes my feeling pretty well today. How about you?

Posted at: 10:49 | permalink