Feb 2003
Fri, 28 Feb 2003
Mono ASP.net Works On Apache Linux With mod_mono
As I was saying in my previous post, I had read that ASP.net was working on linux via mod_mono. So I downloaded and installed the RPMs and ran the samples. I'm pleased to say that the samples work on Redhat 8. The temperature sample looks like this.
Screenshot of ASPX Temperature sample running on Redhat 8 Linux
Again, this team is doing fantastic work. I'd like to join the development team and help write some tests or doc or something. Hmm... Now, if I could just get SOAP or Charles Cook's XML-RPC.net working, I'd be on my way to nirvana. ;->
Posted at: 01:20 | permalink
Mono 0.21 Brings VB.net To Linux
The Mono project is making great progress with the .21 release of the compiler(s) and FCL as well as a 0.8 version of GTK#.
Notably, VB.net is now compiling basic GTK GUI apps cleanly. For instance, after a quick install of the mono binaries using the RPMs on Redhat 8, this program can be compiled by typing:
mbas gtk.vb -r gtk-sharp
The executable can then be run by typing:
mono gtk.exe
which produces a single button in a parent window:
This doesn't look like much, but the required infrastructure is relatively large and it stands as a testament to the ground breakinig work that this team is doing. I'm not a fan of VB per se, but if you'd have told me five years ago that people would be writing VB code on linux, I'd have thought you were possessed by the devil.
I'm planning on looking at ASP.net next, but that'll have to wait till the weekend.
Posted at: 00:00 | permalink
Thu, 27 Feb 2003
Business Week On Linux
Business Week has an entire series of articles dedicated to Linux market trends. Some of them are quite good.
Posted at: 07:46 | permalink
Fred Rogers Dies
Fred Rogers died after a brief bout with stomach cancer at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 74. I was fond of his show as a child. At a time when the world was virtually consumed by the death of character, Rogers defined character. His show wasn't as popular with this generation as it was with mine but his contribution remains unchanged. He will be sorely missed.
Posted at: 07:18 | permalink
Tue, 25 Feb 2003
P0rn goes mainstream
From MSNBC: It's all a bit odd.
Posted at: 07:45 | permalink
Starjewel Goes Movable Type
Starjewel is converting to movable type but it's not going so well. Good luck. It takes a little time, some sysadmin, and a small cauldron. The movable type forums are fantastic, as you've probably discovered. There are enough people running movable type in this town to have you up in a flash so don't hesitate to ask. We're waiting patiently.
Posted at: 07:37 | permalink
Irrational Exuberance
Seen on a vanity license plate:
DOW 16K.
Whoops.
Posted at: 07:18 | permalink
Sun, 23 Feb 2003
Norah Jones Wins Best Pop Vocal Album
Norah Jones has won best pop vocal album at this year's Grammy's. I figure it's only a matter of time before somebody starts crying that it wasn't a pop record in the first place, which is a debatable point - Jones herself admitted to being shocked that she won the pop category. But here's a more interesting question: has a Blue Note artist ever won a pop Grammy before? If so, when?
Norah Jones Live in New Orleans DVD is out in two days!
Posted at: 21:07 | permalink
Thu, 20 Feb 2003
Fonts Matter: Anti-Aliasing Mozilla on Redhat 8
I've been running Redhat 8 as my primary desktop operating system at home since it was released. I run Redhat on my Dell Inspiron 3700. I've been generally happy with the performance and usability of this configuration with one glaring exception: fonts.
The fonts in Gnome or KDE desktop are quite nice, but unfortunately, the mozilla browser that shipped with Redhat 8 is not built with anti-aliased font support.
Fortunately, rpm-packaged versions of mozilla are available. The xft rpm builds of mozilla are available here. If you download all of the packages, you can install by uninstalling mozilla 1.0 with rpm -e --nodeps mozilla and then force the install of the 1.3a packages with rpm -i --force moz*.rpm RPM will complain about evolution relying on certain mozilla libs, but I can tell you that the aforementioned RPM hackery can be completed without breaking evolution.
Finally, the Microsoft TrueType core fonts are available here. The instructions look a little daunting at first but I can assure you that they work reliably as I've completed them on two radically different machines. These fonts help when web pages don't have sensible font maps available and previously poor substitutions were made. The end result is compelling.
In the following screenshot, you can see a big difference between Opera's handling of the fonts in this zdnet webpage and mozilla's. Notice how big a difference the anti-aliased fonts make.
Opera 6 vs. Mozilla 1.3a at 1600x1200
Posted at: 17:42 | permalink
Ashcroft Lawsuit Helps Spread Suicide Message
The numbers are very small, but it appears that the Ashcroft lawsuit against Oregon's assisted suicide law is helping spread the word, even amongst Oregonians.
Posted at: 11:13 | permalink
Pilgrim - Burton Cage Match on PPV
Kevin Burton and Mark Pilgrim are having a long and freakin' ugly argument about whether NewsMonster should honor robots.txt when downloading content from web servers.
The crux of the matter is whether NewsMonster is defined as a user agent, a bot, or both. Various parties are falling out on all sides of the argument.
I believe Kevin Burton is on the west coast. I believe Mark Pilgrim is on the east coast. I recall there being an east-west rap war of sorts back in the 90's. You can make your own conclusions about the culture, but it's quite funny to read this article while replacing the words "rap" and "rapper" with "blog" and "blogger". Actually, the real fun begins with more replacements but I don't have time for that right now. Maybe later I'll try to do that treatment and produce a derivative work.
Posted at: 10:43 | permalink
Wed, 19 Feb 2003
NewsMonster
Russell Beattie lets the cat out of the bag on NewsMonster. I installed from source, modded the script for my JDK 1.4 and to set proxy in the JVM properties and voila, it ran and generated most of it's html. I say most because the GUI stopped counting at 31/32 or some such. It is beta. But what's there looks slick and certainly has the potential to give amphetadesk a run for it's money.
I believe one of newsmonster's stated goals is to help the user discover new blogs. I discovered this blog at RIT and subscribed. I didn't know there were, like, real academics with blogs. Cool.
Posted at: 23:53 | permalink
Divine Explores Strategic Options
In what has to be described as one of the most spin-filled Chapter 11 announcements ever, Divine Interventures has gone to it's rightful resting place. The stock is trading at $0.14. I'm frankly surprised that it's above a dime.
Posted at: 14:15 | permalink
Today is Dad's Birthday
He's 62. When asked about his retirement, he gives a long and rambling dissertation about why he can't stop working right now. He has as much trouble stopping work as I have starting. If we could just switch places that would be great. Anyhow, we'll have a nice meal and talk about it. I'm envious of retired people. Happy Birthday to the elder one!
Posted at: 09:54 | permalink
Teoma Has A Lot To Learn
So Dave Winer's going on about how Teoma can bludgeon Google and I'm saying I've heard it all before. For the umpteenth time, if you think that a company that requires this kind of labarynthine and costly registration to add a site to it's crawler is going to beat Google, who has no such wacky registration, you need your head examined. I'd be willing to bet it's not the PhDs search wizards who made the decision about the wacky pay-for-crawl registration, but the marketing people. Go figure.
Posted at: 09:39 | permalink
Follow The Rules And People Die
If you're a doctor riding a Port Authority Transit bus in Pittsburgh, you might want to arm yourself with a crowbar in case the bus happens to run into somebody who needs assistance, because you're going to have to smash out a window to get out. [pittsburgh post gazette] Let's all follow the rules now, if we didn't, there'd be anarchy.
Posted at: 09:11 | permalink
Mon, 17 Feb 2003
Drug May Prevent Diabetic Retinopathy
MSNBC reports that a synthetic form of vitamin B1 used to treat nerve problems shows promise in preventing retinopathy in diabetics.
Posted at: 22:47 | permalink
Rainy Days and Mondays
You know the song. In this case, it's not raining, but it is monday. The official snowfall count in Pittsburgh is at 15 inches. My wife, who was in Jersey for the weekend, is now stranded in King of Prussia. I would normally be at work, but my car is dead in the driveway. The flatbed that was coming to pick it up went into a ditch and they had to call a tow truck to get the flatbed out of the ditch. I walked out to get the mail and discovered that the snow plow had hit my mailbox and knocked it over. It's gonna be a long day here at home. At least there's heat. The wind's howling about 30 MPH and the drifts are high enough that discerning sidewalks, driveways, and roads is quite difficult. I took some pictures but they mostly look like a vast white canvas and don't really deliver the reality of just how bad it is. Best I've seen thus far has been this picture at sajnin.net. At this rate, I'll be lucky if I get to work by wednesday.
Update: MSNBC reports that Seven Springs ski resort (within 2 hours of my house) has recorded 40 inches of snow during this storm.
Posted at: 11:40 | permalink
Sat, 15 Feb 2003
Audi A4 Ignition Coils Horribly Broken
So I get in the A4 today to take the dog trail running and find that the car is firing on only 2 or 3 cylinders and that the MIL or check engine light has begun blinking. The car sounds like a Harley V-twin - a new racket to impress my neighbors. I come back in the house and sit down at the laptop and head over to Audi World and search on "MIL".
Indeed, there's a long thread about owner experiences with ignition coil failures. I guess I'll be at the dealer monday morning picking up a loaner while they replace the coils. Sigh. It turns out that Audi has decided to issue a recall but I had not been notified.
Perhaps someone would like to explain to Audi marketing that NEVER FOLLOW™ is quite difficult to do when the car has half it's normal horsepower and torque. Caveat Emptor.
Update: It's kind of funny, even new car articles, like this one on boston.com are pointing out the problem.
Update: mylemon.com has exhaustive coverage of the 1.8T ignition coil problem.
Posted at: 18:13 | permalink
Thu, 13 Feb 2003
Divine Problems Attract Press
It's not quite Enron, but it could be. Boston.com picks up the story on Flip Filipowski and Divine Interventures. Lawsuits and losses - oh my!
Thanks to my friend Tom Green for the forward via email.
Posted at: 09:27 | permalink
Problems With Workspot Continue
So I mentioned the other day that I was having problems with my old workspot account now that they've relaunched. I'd like to report that they got it fixed, but unfortunately, it looks even more horribly broken than it was before. In short, I can login as before, but gnome is gone, replaced by a blank X desktop that doesn't respond to left click, right click, or center click.
Hmm... as I said before, it ain't worth it folks. These people need to get a clue before anybody hands their money over. If I had paid money for this, I'd be really pissed.
Posted at: 09:20 | permalink
Wed, 12 Feb 2003
Copeland Says You've Got To Visit Dixmont
Dave Copeland advises all you mambie pambie sociopathic-wannabees to get out there and visit the asylum formerly known as dixmont before Wal-Mart has it's way with the property. I, for one, am envious.
Posted at: 01:05 | permalink
Random Acts Of Software
Russell Beattie is moaning about what a pain it is to publish open source and in some regard, he's right. I feel his pain. It's the pain of somebody that obviously takes his work very seriously and has a hard time saying no. But that shouldn't stop anybody from making a contribution, even if it's a small one, to the larger community.
Most of us probably don't have the stamina to take our basement hacking exercise quite as seriously as our day jobs and so I propose a lesser class of open source - Random Acts Of Software. This phrase pretty well describes what I do, which is not an entirely organic process but rather one of synthesizing the means to an end. I'm interested in the end, not the means, and so my source sucks. It is a heinous morass of square pegs jammed into round holes but you know what? I don't give a damn. It runs - and that's a good enough standard of completion for my little hobby projects.
In just less than a year since I released swingin' google, I got exactly one request for the source code, from a college kid in South America. I spent several emails explaining to this kid that it was a horribly monolithic mess that demonstrated that it is indeed possible to write non-object-oriented code in java and that you wouldn't want to design a curriculum in GUI programming around that swing code, but it still was a joy to have somebody that was interested in anything that I do. I, being an old man, forget that these kids have access to an amazing treasure trove of code on the web that in my day in school, had to be learned from a much smaller, less educated, group of peers.
That's been a recurring theme in my work lately. This has led me to seek out tools and environments that put the joy back in code like the good ole' days of hacking personal pascal on my atari ST. In that spirit, I've been spending more and more time exploring Mono and finding it increasingly joyful. Why? Because I can guess ... er .... infer a lot of the class names or method calls that I need without even needing the doc browser. And that's saying something. In my retro-primitive vi -> mcs -> mono development cycle, being able to guess correctly saves time and makes the experience more like scripting than working with a compiler. I think that's why Petzold dedicates the preface in his book to saying how much he likes the new system.
Anyhow, getting around to the code... 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.
In this example, I set out to implement an RSS news aggregator in the style of amphetadesk. I've used amphetadesk for quite a while but what I wanted was slightly different in that I like to be able to expose the transformed content to the world without people being able to add or remove feeds. I'm perfectly happy editing that stuff in vi, as I don't change it much once it's set. Thus, this application is driven off of a single text file called mysubs.txt that has one feed per line such as
This code works with mono 0.19 on linux. Get it here. YMMV. The original RSS parsing code originated here and the web server bits were extracted from here. I am indebted to niel bornstein and imtiaz alam for the original code which I hacked to work with mono.
You'll find the code here.
Posted at: 00:00 | permalink
Mon, 10 Feb 2003
Dude, I'm Gettin' Arrested
Maybe the dell dude should get together with Ellen Feiss. They couldn't agree on computers, but they've got something else in common.
Posted at: 22:45 | permalink
Slip Sliding Away
I found myself thinking that while I've enjoyed the winter weather this year, we hadn't quite seen a mind blowing monster of a blizzard like I used to see in Boston. That was a mistake. I left work this afternoon and things seemed a bit icy in the parking lot but just your garden variety dusting and some icy buildup, nothing particularly alarming.
By the time I got halfway home, the squalls were so severe that it was a white-out and I couldn't see virtually anything and was slowed all the way to 5-10 mph - and this from the guy who brags about driving 2x the posted speed limit all the way to work. I turned the fog lights and the 4-ways on and passed only a single truck in the 3-5 mile stretch of country road that looked like something out of an attempt on K2.
I made it home in one piece but it sure is nasty out there. Funny thing is, the intensity of the squalls here are not really reflected in any of the local forecasts that I've seen. There was a winter weather advisory for certain areas, but mine wasn't one of them. Go figure.
Posted at: 20:26 | permalink
Mellon Jazz Festival Mercy Killing
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette laments the sudden death last week of the Mellon Jazz Festival. It was really a sad state of affairs for several years. I can't remember exactly the last year that I had attended though it was somewhere around 1995 or 96. In those years, it was big enough to draw serious fusion players such as Pat Metheny and the Yellowjackets, amongst a broader list of more traditional stuff; I recall seeing Miles Davis there somewhere in the early 90's. But as long as the people doing the planning think that jazz started in 1930 and ended in 1950, there won't be much of an audience. Sigh.
Posted at: 09:16 | permalink
Sun, 09 Feb 2003
iBlog
Mac-Mike points to a new blogging app called iBlog. Very cool. Wish I had a mac to try it out.
Posted at: 13:24 | permalink
I am Palm OS
I guess I should be flattered. I admit to being a Jeff Hawkins fan.
Posted at: 09:57 | permalink
Sat, 08 Feb 2003
Workspot Is Back Online (with bugs)
Scripting News reports that workspot is back online. Being an early user of their system several years ago, that's great news! However, the news for users this time around isn't so good. They have a $9.95 per month subscription fee and worse yet, no free trial. Their marketing guru has obviously seen fit to explain their approach in the FAQ:
Why don't you have free demo accounts?
We feel that $9.95 is a reasonable fee for a month-long demonstration of an extraordinary service! If you try to make the most of it, we think you'll find it indispensable. Otherwise, you can think of it as an indirect way of supporting the Free Software movement.
Unfortunately, the words "extraordinary service" don't seem to apply to my experience using workspot his morning.
After logging in, workspot responded by throwing no less than a half dozen of these message boxes:
Then, when I tried to add a system monitor utility to the gnome toolbar, I got this crash:
So I get 5 days to figure out whether this experience is worth ten bucks a month. Let's see, that only took 5 seconds. No!
I loved the kind of triangulation that workspot provided, being able to ssh from work to my home system through the company firewall was a real boon. It beats the hell out of doing the same over an http tunnel. Also, being able to run a web browser for testing outside the firewall was equally handy. I can think of lots of reasons why workspot was just amazing.
You want me to pay, you've got to provide something worth paying for. The old service was worth a healthy 5 bucks a month. This service isn't worth 5 cents a month.
One last question, does anybody know what happened to the talk about open sourcing the workspot souce code?
Posted at: 10:23 | permalink
Fri, 07 Feb 2003
Do Your State's DOT And Roads Suck?
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that Penn DOT's stream of expenses and credit cards is so ludicrous as to be laughable:
As part of the audit, Casey's Office of Special Investigations raised concerns because 588 PennDOT employees possessed 1,097 Commonwealth Purchasing Cards -- credit and charge cards tied to providers like American Express Co.
Terrific. As if it's not bad enough that we've got the worst fucking roads in the country, we now find out that while these nimrods should be out fixing the roads, they're shopping at Wal-Mart with 2 Amex cards per employee! Maybe they'd like to come over and pay for my car's wrecked suspension with one of those spare amex cards?
All this from the organization that admonishes us not to think of it as road construction but a labor of love (you'll see the signs along the turnpike - yet another bad use of taxpayer dollars). Give me a fucking break! If this was a real gig, they'd have been fired ten mistakes ago.
Posted at: 00:18 | permalink
Wed, 05 Feb 2003
There Is Hope
My rant about application server choices drew a few thoughtful responses. I'm pleased to report that the manager in question told us today that we were going to investigate our alternatives more seriously before proceeding. I was ecstatic. I'm not sure whether he reads my blog, as Mark suggests, or whether throwing such harsh thoughts into the universe has any causal effect on bringing this sort of change full circle, but regardless, it's a welcome change. The point about trust made by Winters is correct. The enhancement of trust from subordinates gained by that simple decision to further evaluate products before proceeding is immeasurable. I didn't think we'd get here, but regardless of the outcome, I'm glad to see a move in the right direction.
Posted at: 00:48 | permalink
Tue, 04 Feb 2003
Dem Dare Nucular Weapons
I wonder if our highly educated president shops walmarks too? [star tribune via daypop]
Posted at: 13:50 | permalink
Mon, 03 Feb 2003
PHP Works With Mono
Sam Ruby reports that Sterling Hughes has PHP working with Mono.
Posted at: 23:41 | permalink
Productivity Gains? What Productivity Gains?
Of all the software projects that I've worked on over the years, they can generally be categorized into two groups - those in which the toolsets were largely marketing-driven and those in which the toolsets were engineering-driven.
I have been happiest when the toolset was driven by engineering. Thus, my current state of unhappiness with being told to use a bunch of garbage.
Why do I say a bunch of garbage?
I've watched for a month now as an entire team of engineers has failed to successfully install an application server and it's portal tools on a variety of platforms. These are bright people. I've been on the periphery of it myself and can attest to the frustration level with the myriad segfaults and bizarre shit.
Just to annoy the hell out of everyone, one afternoon I decided to bring up cocoon's portal solution. It took me all of an hour to get the stuff running on my redhat 8 box at which point I sat there looking all smug and saying, "if a bunch of open source guys can get this right, why is it so hard for a big commercial outfit to do the same"?
The answer to that is complex but it's clear that big commerical product teams can learn a lot from examining the build-install-config processes of the best open source projects. One could even argue that open source projects benefit from a lack of marketing people.
But management has a variety of reasons why the app-server-installation-from-hell-is-a-character-building-exercise must go on. Yeah, I've read Crossing the Chasm.
Whatever. I have a strong feeling that the gains in productivity as a result of technology that have been described by economists are entirely consumed by poor decision making at an executive level.
An unencumbered team would have coded the thing from scratch by now.
Mark Pilgrim's no clock piece resonates with me. Thank you and good night.
Posted at: 23:37 | permalink
Walking In A Winter Wonderland
Not sure why, but this looks fun to me.
Posted at: 00:09 | permalink
Sat, 01 Feb 2003
Trust-Worthless Computing
Bill pushes tablets while Redmond burns. Wa ha ha ha!
Posted at: 10:59 | permalink
Space Shuttle Columbia Breaks Up Over Texas
All of the major news outlets are reporting that the space shuttle columbia has broken up over Texas.
Posted at: 10:46 | permalink
Telecoms Sell Distraction
Russell Beattie has an interesting piece on US vs. European cell phone usage. The perception seems to be that US telecoms and for that matter, consumers, just don't get the wonderfulness of cheap cell and ubiquitous 3G.
I haven't been to europe so I'll take Russ' word for it since the story's been repeated so pervasively. The larger issue that I see here is the death of attention. Stepping back from it, if I had a child, would I want that child's attention drawn away from whatever it is (s)he's doing when there are already 8000 things to distract my child? Isn't that a disturbing trend when we've pumped all the kids up on ritalin to keep them from being distracted?
In a sense, isn't that what the telecoms are really selling - distraction? Have you listened to what the average teenager says in a cell conversation or an SMS message? I'm obviously way too old to get it, but if I have the option of reading a good book or having meanless conversation on my cell phone (or in person for that matter), I'll take the book, thanks.
So the question remains - have any of these enthusiastic cell users in europe stepped back from it long enough to look at the long term effects on their children?
Posted at: 10:44 | permalink
