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How is it that I've never run into RT before. It's an excellent web and email-based trouble ticket system, based on Apache, MySQL, and mod_perl. As soon as I get a new Linux box setup, I'm definitely going to start playing with this.
From the MIT Technology Review, a look at 7 recent startups that have grown out of university research and into the marketplace.
Wow, check this out. It's a Sony Vaio laptop (running the Transmeta Crusoe processor) with a built-in digital video camera. Looks like a transformer (more than meets the eye!)
Outstanding interview with Lawrence Lessig, of the Stanford Law School, called "The Death of Innovation." He talks about the RIAA, DMCA, and other legal issue facing the Internet and the technology industry in general.
Found this article on the UnixReview site, although it also appears in this month's SysAdmin magazine. It gives a good introduction to Oracle database concepts from the perspective of backups.
Interesting interview with Joel Spoelsky, of Joel on Software.
Found on Talking Moose, a great "insider" weblog from a Microsoft program manager: Better Living Through Software.
There are new beta releases of Mandrake Linux 8.1 and RedHat Linux 7.2 available.
There's a new version of the open-source AbiWord word processor. Very useful for reading Word documents on non-MS systems.
Found a good interview with former "hacker" Kevin Mitnick over at TechTV. Only half of the interview is available in HTML format. The other portion is video. (source: BoingBoing)
Good article from Linux Journal on configuing Sendmail to use transaction layer security (TLS). Lots of detail on both the theory and the implementation.
Doh! The company that runs the computer facilities for about half of the banks in Norway (EDB Fellesdata AS) was adding disks to their primary Hitachi storage array. Instead of initializing only the new disks, they initialized all of the disks -- they wiped out their entire data warehouse. I can't imaging having to restore that much data frombackup (they were adding 280 new disks, so who knows how many terabytes the existing array held). (from comp.risks)
The latest edition of Phrack magazine is available at their web site. Contains a very technical (and very interesting) article on fingerprinting remote servers using only ICMP.
Bruce Schneier eviscerates Chantilly Data Security in the latest Crypto-Gram Newsletter.
According to recent studies, developers using Java will outnumber those coding in C or C++ by next year. From ZDnet by way of the Davenetics list.
Incredibly, in 1995 all of the computers in the world contained a total of 200 terabytes of storage (204800 gigs). Now that companies like Maxtor and IBM are releasing 75-100gb commodity IDE hard drives, you could store that entire amount on 2000 PC's or less. Amazing. I have 100gb of storage in my main system (20 + 20 + 60), and I'm planning to setup mirrored 100gb disks in my mp3 server soon. (Source: IP
Also from Interesting People, an article about problems that AT&T and other telcos are having with securing the rights-of-way to lay their next-generation fiber optic networks. It seems that permit management is rapidly eclipsing technology issues as the biggest hurdle to overcome when building a long-haul network.
Here's a very interesting article (from David Farber's Interesting People mailing list about the quality of education in U.S. schools vs. foreign countries, and the effects on the technology industry due to the quality of new young adults entering the workforce. Other articles in the thread are here, here, and here.
I have an American Express Blue credit card with am embedded smart chip. I've never, ever, had any reason or opportunity to use the "smart" features of the card. This article (NYT, free registration required) indicates that pretty much no one else has, either. (from Phil Agre's RRE list)
Test post from the JBlogger user interface.
I've seen this posted several places, but it's cool so I'm posting it here as well. :-) Transmogrify is a Java refactoring tool. I used to be really into refactoring and extreme programming when I was coding full-time. I should really spend some time catching up on the latest developments.
Good article article from Sun's Dot Com Builder site on best practices for tuning Oracle on Solaris.
First Northpoint, then Rhythms, and now Covad have all gone bankrupt. I'm very, *very* glad my DSL local loop is through BellSouth. One good thing about monopolies is that they tend to stick around.
Very useful, if somewhat unwieldy, chart comparing the syntax for various tasks (length of a string, get the date, send an email, etc.) in different programming languages. (src=sapphireblue)
I've always been a fan of screensavers like xfishtank and After Dark that put lifelike rendered fish on your screen. Now a startup has come up with the next evolution of the concept: a P2P application that creates a "networked fishtank" -- where a fish on your screen swims off the edge onto another user's screen hundreds of miles away. Not expecially practical, but very cool regardless. (src=everywhere)
I really need one of these -- a retractable, all-in-one, phone and network cable thingee. Much more useful than carrying around the tangle of cables currently in my tool bag. (src=boing boing)
You know, the scary thing is there's presumably someone out there who thought "You know, I wish I could write GTK-based desktop applications in PHP.
Whoa, even though I have an N64 I almost never use, I'm tempted to buy a Nintendo Game Cube if only to be able to play Metroid Prime. What glorious graphics. (src=danelope)
Cool! I remember playing with Bryce way back long ago when I still used a Mac at home. I was rather terrible at it, but it was still fun. Anyway, Bryce version 5 is out. (src=narilka)
The slacker personality test. I'm almost afraid to take this one. (src=narilka)