« November 2001 | Main | January 2002 »
Palm has released a
public beta version of the Palm Desktop 4.0, which includes MacOS X support!
The FTP server is currently slammed, so I haven't been able to download it yet, but
I'm very excited. Hopefully, it will at least support my Sony Clie through the serial
cradle if not the USB one.
David Jones is one of the core
kernel hackers who seems to deal with all kinds of low-level CPU support issues. There
is a great interview with
him up at KernelTrap, and you can get
more information by reading his diary.
Things are somewhat dead around here, as I've been travelling
for the holidays. Posts should resume today or tomorrow.
There's a new version of BBEdit out for the Macintosh. Looks like lots of bug fixes and
some new features. Release notes are
here.
Mark Pilgrim has a nice
writeup
on his weblog about the Model/View/Controller design pattern (Sun has another good
document
on this pattern specifically applied to J2EE).
UNIX Review has an
article giving a nice introduction to Sun's fssnap feature for creating UFS
filesystem snapshots. When I was working with
Network Appliance filers at my last job, the snapshot feature was one of the most
useful tools I'd ever seen. Veritas also
offers snapshots with their VxFS product, but that's nice and expensive and adds quite
a bit of complexity to your systems (especially with their restrictive hostid-based
licensing).
With the new Apple December 2001 Developer
Tools, it is now possible to
run shell commands directly from an AppleScript.
I need to play with this and see if I can make GPG
work with Entourage.
A good article on security from Security Focus:
A Simple Oracle Host-Based Scanner
discusses a simple tool to ensure your Oracle
database is reasonably secure, mainly by
checking for some of the default options that many
SysAdmins and DBA's don't change when they
install the database..
Lots of good MacOS X information to be found at Stepwise.
Perl Service for Mac OS X is a plugin for the Services menu in MacOS X that will evaluate the current text selection as Perl code and replace the selection with the results of the expression.
There's a new version of Apple's iTunes software
available via Software Update. Maybe this version
will fix my sound quality problems when playing mp3's
over SMB.
I'm now managing this site using the awesome
Movable Type
personal publishing system by Ben and Mena Trott. Written in Perl,
runs local to the web server, and chock full of features.
Perl.com has a nice introductory article on testing in Perl and the Test::Harness module. Unit tests are a good thing.
From O'Reilly's Mac Devcenter comes An Introduction to AppleScript on MacOS X. I can't wait for AppleScript Studio to be released for download so I can play with building GUI apps in AppleScript.
More articles by Nick Christianson I need to read: One ISP's Response to the Problem of Spam, Large News Systems (BayLISA talk transcript), Adding RCS to the System Administrative Toolkit.
Terrific article (with links to others) from Paul Graham about writing ViaWeb, the e-commerce package that is now Yahoo Store. It's written in LISP!
A very cool look at London's Post Office Railway, an underground rail system designed for moving large amounts of mail around the city daily.
Somewhat tech-related: Gibson (the guitar maker) is apparently developing guitars with built-in ethernet. Pretty cool, but it looks like they're not actually using Ethernet straight out of the guitar. From the article: "Gibson did this by modifying the Ethernet networking protocol to link instruments to the mixer and eventually straight to the listener...Gibson's Magic carries up to 64 signals per cable, thus saving space and time."
LinuxWorld has posted a followup to their article (blogged here previously) on the mutt mail reader. The addendum covers scoring and working with SMTP servers.
Is Your Son a Computer Hacker? -- I really hope this is a joke. I'm pretty sure it is, but Adequacy.org is one of the strangest sites I've seen in a while. It's either really subtle satire or really bone-headed news.
From Slashdot, a fairly technical article on Salon's subscription for their Premium service. It looks like they use a mix of Java and Perl, running on both MySQL and Oracle databases. A pretty good look at both the technologies and the design decisions behind them.
This will come in handy for my new laptop: Apache Web-Serving with MacOS X -- part one.
A funny and interesting interview with Bill Gates, given by a 15 year old girl from the Children's BBC. Nice to see Bill's computer crashes too!
Cool interview with Richard Garriott, a.k.a Lord British, of Ultima fame. He talks about his new games Lineage (which is supposedly a monster hit in Korea), and Tabula Rasa, and what he's been up to since Origin imploded.
Not really technology-related, but it definitely falls into the geeky realm: an interview with Frank Miller, author of the amazing Batman graphic novel "The Dark Night Returns" and the new sequel "The Dark Night Strikes Back."
Continuing the Python theme, the Python Milter Project lets you write mail filters for Sendmail's "Milter" API. We use PerlMX from ActiveState to do the same thing in Perl.
The Python IAQ is a list of "Infrequently Asked Questions about various programming tasks, such as "Can I do ++x or x++ in Python?"
Interesting article from Wired regarding security for the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Some additional information about the technology at the Games is available from the official site.
From New Zealand, an article about 3d software called "Massive," which renders huge crowd scenes consisting of intelligent agents that react to their surroundings. Unfortunately, Weta Digital (the effects house doing the work) doesn't seem to have any more technical information available about the technology on their site, but there's some information available on the net avout the LotR digital effects in general: from Digital Producer, and ringfaq.com.
Found an interview with Paul Everitt, VP and Co-Founder of Zope Corporation (formerly Digital Creations). I met Paul when I was working at Cox Interactive. Very nice guy. Lots of smart things to say.
Lots of good stuff in this speech by Bruce Sterling on cryptography and the intellegence community.
The DNS One from InfoBlox looks to be an excellent DNS/DHCP appliance. It appear to run an embedded version of Linux and supports all of the common DNS/DHCP functions you'd normally run on a standard server. Interesting. One of their employees is a former Sapient guy, so I'll be calling them up to get more details.
Salon.com has a story entitled "The Second Coming of Lord British," about what Richard Garriot (creator of the famous "Ultima" series of games) is up to these days.
It's the 10th anniversary of Apple's QuickTime technology. Here is an article from the San Jose Mercury News about the anniversary. The Friends of Time site has a great collection of historical QuickTime artifacts and information.
Ximian has released the 1.0 version of their Evolution mail and PIM software. I played with some of the Evolution betas, and was most impressed. It's an Outlook clone, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Also interesting is the news that Ximian will be developing software to all Evolution to act as a true Exchange 2000 client. Now if they could just release a Mandrake 8.1 version of the Ximian Desktop, I'd be a happy camper.
Interesting article from IBM about how they setup a highly-available LDAP authentication server cluster running Linux. Lots of good technical information on Linux HA.
I installed Fink over the weekend on my Powerbook G4. It's a project that uses tools ported from Debian Linux to maintain various UNIX tools for MacOS X's Darwin core. I now have most of my favorite Linux apps running on my laptop, such as GIMP, Python, Gaim, and XMMS. That last one is especially useful since Apple's iTunes mp3 software skips like a stone when playing off my mp3 server over the AirPort.
From Wired Magazine, an older article about software engineer at NASA (specifically, at the group that writes code for the Space Shuttle). Lots of yummy info on process and validation. These guys just don't release buggy code (which is a good thing, since someone could die).