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March 29, 2002

war driving

From the O'Reilly Network comes a great article on war-driving -- the act of simply driving around looking for public wireless networks. It also gives a pretty good checklist for making your WLAN more secure.

March 28, 2002

inside slashdot

LinuxWorld.com has an inside look at the workings of Slashdot. Quite a bit of geeky goodness. Update: oops, that article's from 1998, but it still has a lot of good info on how they kept Slashdot running on very little hardware as it got more and more popular.

new vim

Continuing the "new software" trend, there's a new release (6.1) available of the VIM text editor.

camelbones

Awesome! CamelBones is a framework for writing Cocoa applications in C. It acts like the Apple Objective-C to Java bridge and exposes the Cocoa APIs to native Perl code. Now they just need one for Python!

new clie

Oh man, talk about lust. The new Sony Clie NR70 means I need to stay away from CompUSA for the immediate future. What an awesome device. Now if it just had a cellphone built-in I wouldn't have to lust after the new color Treo so much.

python packages

Two useful Python packages I recently found: NormalDate is a package for handling simple date values, and logging is a package for handling logging (similar to log4j for Java).

medusa

Andrew Kuchlin has released an updated version of the Medusa framework for writing socket-based servers in Python.

moin moin

There's a new version of MoinMoin available for download. MoinMoin is a Python-based Wiki product that runs as a CGI script. We use it heavily at work for internal documentation projects, and it rocks.

March 27, 2002

applescript studio book

Apple has an online book entitled "Building Applications With AppleScript Studio" that certainly looks worth digging into. I have this idea in my head that one day I'll have time to do some coding on MacOS X. Heh.

March 26, 2002

contextual menu workshop

Contextual Menu Workshop is a free framework for creating Contextual Menu plugins for MacOS X.

apple sample

Apple has some new(ish) Sample Code showing how to create a dock menu in a Cocoa app. I really need to start hacking MacOS X again (and yeah, I have so much free time to do that.

March 25, 2002

macos syntax hilighting

How to Implement Syntax Highlighting in a Cocoa app by listening for change notifications in a NSTextStorage object. Cool.

xalan xslt

DevShed.com has a good article on transforming XML with XSLT (using the Xalan toolkit from the Apache project).

March 24, 2002

gosling

James Gosling and the Art of Computer Programming -- interview at JavaWorld.

google doodles

The doodles that adorn Google's home page logo from time to time (mostly on holidays) are drawn by a single employee, not a massive art department as some assume.

March 23, 2002

microsoft on unix

The Register has an artlcle on Microsoft's early use of UNIX (actually Xenix) before they got involved with OS/2, NT, and WIndows in general.

March 22, 2002

orbitz

Interesting article from net.architect about Orbitz (the online travel site)
and their use
of LISP on the backend.

google paper

The original paper
that the co-founders of Google wrote while at Stanford, entitled
"The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

March 21, 2002

tangram

Tangram
is an excellent object-relational persistence system for Perl. I
need to play with this for my comics manager toy.

March 20, 2002

akkana peck

NewsForge interviews
Akkana Peck of the Mozilla team, who was one of the original
developers on the project when it "spun off" from Netsacpe.

marcello

There's a new interview
with Marcello Tosatti (current Linux 2.4 kernel maintainer) over
at IBM developerWorks.

March 16, 2002

miguel interview

Nice, long interview
with Miguel de Icaza of Ximian on a variety of subjects, including Mono,
Gnome, and Microsoft.

March 15, 2002

hardening sendmail

Linux Journal has a new article
on Hardening Sendmail when running under Linux.

March 13, 2002

text processing in python

A draft of David Mertz's
new book "Text Processing in Python" is available online.

March 11, 2002

linux & xp dual-boot

LinuxOrbit has a good article
on dual-booting RedHat Linux 7.2 and Windows XP. I have no plans
to install XP any time soon (I'm doing just fine with my Win2k vmware
instance), but it's still nice to know.

March 9, 2002

bouncer

Bouncer is an AppleScript for Microsoft
Outlook Express or Entourage to "bounce" a spam message back to its sender, hopefully making the
spammer think the receiving address is invalid.

March 8, 2002

java 1.4 features

An article
from O'Reilly's "ON Java" site looks at The Top Ten Cool New Features of Java 2SE 1.4

tomcat on OSX

developer.com has a two
part article
about server-side development on MacOS X using the Tomcat servlet engine.

dock shortcuts

From Forwarding Address: OSX, a list of some keyboard
options for when working with the OS X Finder's Dock:


  • option-click to hide current app when switching
  • control-click to pull up a menu immediately
  • cmd-click to show item in Finder
  • cmd-option-click to switch and Hide Others
  • cmd-tab cycles forward; cmd-shift-tab cycles backward; then:

    • cmd-shift to cycle backward
    • cmd-q to quit selected app without foregrounding
    • cmd-h to hide selected app

  • cmd-option-D toggles dock hiding.

new nvidia linux drivers

Nvidia has released new Linux drivers for
their 3D-accelerated video cards.

apple multihoming

Apple's eNews newsletter has an excerpt from "MacOS X: The Missing Manual" that describes what
Apple calls multihoming -- the operating
system automatically picks a networking method (AirPort, ethernet, modem) based on a list of preferences
and on what interfaces are up. I'm using it at home to switch between wired and wireless and it works
really well. I just have to plug in my ethernet cord and my TiBook automatically switches over. Unplug
and it's back to AirPort.

linux optimization

Another good Linux Journal
article on Linux Optimization and Fine Tuning. They're really covering this subject well.

March 4, 2002

history of flash

Awesome article on The History of Flash,
as told by its inventor, Jonathan Gay.

March 2, 2002

mactracker

Mactracker
has been around forever, but that makes it no less wonderful. It's
a complete database of every Macintosh ever made, including
specifications and upgrade options. Awesome.

dead man's switch

Here's a cool (if somewhat creepy) piece of software: Dead Man's Switch
requires you to periodically pull it up and click a "reset" button.
If you don't (within a certain period of time), it can automatically
encrypt your files and send out a notice email or web page
posting. Useful I suppose if you're a spy (or a hacker).

linux tuning pt. 2

Here
is a link to part 2 of Linux Journal's article on tuning Linux to run
enterprise applications such as Oracle.

March 1, 2002

macos AD

MacOS X Hints has a tip
which links to an Apple document on how to integrate MacOS X
with Microsoft Active Directory. By setting this up, you can
authenticate your Macs against AD instead of NetInfo, which is
especially useful if you're a big Win2000 shop.