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January 31, 2003

New iTunes and iPhoto

Apple has released new versions of their iPhoto and iTunes applications, as free downloads via their web site or the Software Update service in MacOS X.

Posted by Brian at 5:50 PM |

DirecTV DSL Going Dark

It looks like DirecTV's failed DSL service (of which I was a happy subscriber) is finally going dark after giving users a 6-week grace period to find a new provider. I'm now a very happy Speakeasy customer.

Posted by Brian at 5:49 PM |

Powerbook G4 12" Dissection

From a Japanese-language site comes an outstanding photo documentary of a new Apple Powerbook G4 being dissected down to the component level. I would not be brave enough to attempt this. Bravo.

Posted by Brian at 3:40 PM |

An Intro to Reiserfs

An Intro to Reiserfs: "To begin with, the Reiserfs filesystem is more efficient with all sizes of data files. It's especially efficient with small sized files due mainly to its ability to write blocks of any size. For example, under an ext2 filesystem, a file that's actually 50 bytes in size takes up a block of space allocated by ext2 as 1024 bytes, or 1 KB. Under Reiserfs, these small files can be written in only space needed by the file, which can save you quite a remarkable chunk of disk space."

Posted by Brian at 3:17 PM |

Larry Ellison Interview

Linux Magazine has a great inteview with Oracle chief Larry Ellison, in which he's bth typically-opionionated and typically-super-smart.

LM: But there are open source databases that people are using -- in the Web tier, for example. They already seem more widely adopted than, say, alternatives to Microsoft Office.

ELLISON: But no one in their right mind would use those things for anything real.

I imagine Yahoo would beg to differ.

Posted by Brian at 3:14 PM |

The Pragmatic Programmer

If you're at all involved with software development, or want to be, go out right now and pick up The Pragmatic Programmer, it's one of the best non-technical books for programmers out there, along with books like The Mythical Man-Month and Code Complete. Lots of good stuff in there, like chapters titles "Test ruthlessly and effectively," and "Avoid the trap of duplicating knowledge."

Posted by Brian at 2:58 PM |

New Release of Hibernate

There is a new release of the Hibernate java persistence framework availabe (1.2.3). I've been playing mostly with Torque for persistence, but Hibernate is definitely on my list of things to try.

Posted by Brian at 2:54 PM |

AliasMenu for OS X

AliasMenu is an add-on for MacOS X that lets you add arbitrary custom menus to the menu bar, corresponding to folders on your hard drive ($25 shareware).

Posted by Brian at 2:51 PM |

Customizing Verity Ultraseek

CustomUltraseek.org is a community web site dedicated to customizing and working with Verity's Ultraseek search engine (formerly by Inktomi, and not to be confused with Verity's own K2 search technology).

Posted by Brian at 10:35 AM |

January 30, 2003

Graffiti 2

Palm is replacing Graffiti on their new Palm devices with a new handwriting system based on Jot (due to legal problems with Xerox). Here is a look at the new system and how it compares to the original.

Posted by Brian at 7:07 PM |

Tips for Making Pirating Harder

Slava, over at unsanity.org has written an article listing some tips for programmers that want to make their software more difficult to pirate. Personally, I'm a fan of the "open source it" method, but that's just me (and I'm not trying to make a living off selling my code).

Posted by Brian at 7:05 PM |

Sony Clie PEG-NZ70 handheld

Wow, the new Sony PEG-NZ70 Clie looks really cool! I only wish the newer Clie's weren't so incredibly expensive. $400-600 is just too much to pay for something you could sit on or leave on the bus.

Posted by Brian at 7:02 PM |

Jaron Lanier interview

Coding from Scratch: A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier, Part One -- an interview with the man who coined the term "virtual reality" back in the 1980's.

Posted by Brian at 6:58 PM |

Xbox Linux Cluster

Some guy has created an XBOX Cluster, using 3 mod-chipped units running Mandrake Linux.

Posted by Brian at 3:37 PM |

John Carmack on new NVidia and ATI cards

John Carmack has posted his thoughts on the new NV30 and R300 video cards, based on their performance running the new Doom game under development at id.

Posted by Brian at 3:32 PM |

January 14, 2003

Secure passwordless logins with SSH

HackingLinuxExposed.com has a great three part series of articles detailing how to setup secure passwordless logins using SSH, including how to setup restricted accounts to run sysadmin commands without giving full access to run any command. Very handy for backups and other tasks you want to automate across a network of machines.

Posted by Brian at 3:27 PM |

January 13, 2003

Graffiti is Dead

It looks like Palm is going to discontinue the use of Graffiti in all future versions of PalmOS due to patent problems with Xerox. Instead, they'll be using a version of the Jot handwriting recognition software.

Posted by Brian at 4:48 PM |

Relativity in Four Letter Words

Einstein's Theory of Relativity explained using only words of four letters or less. A bit verbose, but actually pretty easy to understand.

Posted by Brian at 12:03 PM |

Creating a Web Application with Ant and Tomcat 4

O'Reilly's OnJava site has an article that describes the process of buliding a simple web application using the Ant build tool and the Tomcat servlet container.

Posted by Brian at 8:44 AM |