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February 18, 2003

EJB Cookbook

There's a new chapter of the EJB Cookbook (on logging using log4j) up for review over at TheServerSide.com. It's in Word format, and I'm not sure if it will still be available once the book is formally released.

Posted by Brian at 10:30 AM |

February 16, 2003

Don't Install TurboTax!

I've been a regular TurboTax user in the past few years, but I will never use their product again, after reading that they write to the boot track of your hard drive to store their copy protection crap!!! How on earth they can justify this is beyond me, but installing it means you run a very strong risk of destroying any boot loaders (such as LILO or Grub) that live in the boot track. I used TurboTax's web-based product last year, and probably will again this year, but I'm not about to ever install their Windows product again.

Posted by Brian at 1:57 PM |

History of Anime

Two great resources on the history of Anime, both in the U.S. and internationally. I've been slowly getting into more and more anime ("Akira", "Princess Mononoke"), but I'm still very much a newbie, so these pages are great for me.

Posted by Brian at 12:17 PM |

February 14, 2003

MacOS X.2.4

Also in the new release category is MacOS X 10.2.4, available now through the Software Update control panel. Quite a few improvements, including both bugfixes and new features.

Posted by Brian at 1:53 AM |

MovableType 2.6

The latest version of MovableType, the software I use to manage this weblog, has been released. Looks good.

Posted by Brian at 1:49 AM |

February 13, 2003

Revenge of the Nerds

Mostly for my "to be read" pile: an article by Paul Graham entitled Revenge of the Nerds, talking about various programming languages (mostly as compared to Lisp).

Posted by Brian at 11:13 AM |

William Gibson interview

Salon.com interviews William Gibson about his new book, "Pattern Recognition". I just picked it up last night, and so far it's much, much better than his more recent work.

Posted by Brian at 10:50 AM |

Where's Chimera 0.7?

Apparently, the reason there hasn't yet been a 0.7 release of Chimera (the Mozilla-lite browser for MacOS) is that they can't come up with a good name to replace "Chimera". Looks like they can't call it that anymore for (most likely stupid) legal reasons.

Posted by Brian at 10:48 AM |

February 12, 2003

Tom's Hardware on DVD Burners

Tom's Hardware takes a look at the different DVD burner standards (DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, etc.) and reviews several burner models, including the one I desperately want: the Sony DRU-500A.

Posted by Brian at 10:09 AM |

Old Mac Resources

Found a very cool list of resources for old Macintosh computers (links to service manuals, old versions of the OS, ancient web browsers, etc. I forsee this being very useful if I ever dig out my old 7200/75.

Posted by Brian at 10:05 AM |

Client-side Table Sorting

Matt Raible has a very cool demo of using Javascript and the DOM (Document Object Model) to create tables of data that can be sorted on the client side (without a separate trip to the server). Very nicely done.

Posted by Brian at 9:49 AM |

Garriot and Spector interviews

Slashdot links to two interviews with well-known game designers, Richard Garriot (a.k.a Lord British, of Ultima fame) and Warren Spector (designer of Deux Ex and a bunch of other games).

Posted by Brian at 9:47 AM |

Sun enters the blade market

Looks like Sun is jumping into the server blade market with the new Sun Fire[tm] Blade Platform. Looks pretty impressive, with both SPARC and x86 compute blades, along with specialized SSL Proxy and Load Balancing blades coming soon. I wish the shelf module had connectivity for more than just NAS storage, though. Having FC-AL or SCSI would make it much easier to connect something like a T3 or an A1000.

Posted by Brian at 9:40 AM |

Apple 12-inch Powerbook

Several new articles about the Apple 12-inch Powerbook that was recently released: two reviews, from ZDNet UK and OSnews.com, and a developer technote (PDF link) from Apple describing the new notebook.

Posted by Brian at 9:37 AM |

DBD::google

Now THIS is a cool use of Perl: DBD::google is a DBI driver module that lets you use Google as a standard SQL data source. It encapsulates the Google web service API and lets you use the standard DBI API instead to query and iterate over the results. Exxxxxcellent.

Posted by Brian at 9:33 AM |

February 8, 2003

New Eclipse Release

There's a new release of the Eclipse IDE available (milestone M5 for release 2.1). Lots of new features in this release including some very useful changes to the Ant integration.

Posted by Brian at 11:23 AM |

February 6, 2003

Pure Java SSH implementation

j2ssh and JSch are two pure-Java implementations of the SSH2 secure shell protocol. These are API's for writing applications using SSH, as opposed to MindTerm, which is a Java applet that implements an SSH client.

Posted by Brian at 7:23 PM |

Linux on iPod

In the "because it's there" category: a hacker has gotten a rudimentary install of Linux to boot on an Apple iPod mp3 player. Not incredibly functional yet (it can't play mp3's yet due to the lack of a floating point unit), but still a very very cool start.

Posted by Brian at 7:19 PM |

Ken Case interview

Ken Case is the CEO of OmniGroup, makers of OS X applications such as OmniWeb and OmniOutliner. OSNews has an interview.

Posted by Brian at 7:14 PM |

February 4, 2003

db.apache.org

db.apache.org is a new umbrella site for many different database-related projects from the Apache Project. Lots of good stuff here, like Torque, the ObjectRelationalBridge, and the commons-sql (some projects are still moving onto the new site).

Posted by Brian at 7:02 PM |

John Perry Barlow interview

MotherJones.com has an interview with John Perry Barlow, online activist, former Grateful Dead lyricist, and co-founder of the Posted by Brian at 9:56 AM |

February 3, 2003

OpenEXR image format

OpenEXR is an open-source release of the image file format used by ILM (LucasFilm's visual effects arm) for storing digital film images. It looks to be a VERY interesting format, purported to offer higher dynamic range and color precision than existing formats and multiple lossless compression algorithms. This is the format ILM has used when creating effects for movies like Harry Potter, Men in Black II, and Signs.

Posted by Brian at 10:23 AM |

mail2blog.pl

mail2blog.pl is an add-on script for the MovableType weblog system that allows you to post via email. While there are several email-to-web schemes out there, this one uses PGP/GPG signatures to ensure that the inbound messages are authorized and authentic. Slick.

Posted by Brian at 10:18 AM |

Python Crypto options

Deadly Bloody Serious gives several options for doing crypto in Python including GPG/PGP-compatible public-key and a more general library for various algorithms and protocols.

Posted by Brian at 9:55 AM |

Sony P800 review

CNET.com has a review of the new Sony Ericsoon P800 PDA/phone hybrid. Looks like a hit, but it's a GSM phone so I'm out of luck (just signed a 2-year Verizon contract, since they're evil but they have the best reception in Atlanta -- better the devil you can hear than the devil you can't).

Posted by Brian at 9:52 AM |

Sony PacketPC

David Galbraith writes in his weblog about a new product coming from Sony, the "PacketPC" -- an iPod-sized bootable disk that is WiFi-enabled for enterprise remote backups. Very very cool stuff.

Posted by Brian at 9:49 AM |

VMware GSX Server 2.5

VMware has released a new version of their GSX server product for building virtual machines. Supports up to 64 virtual server instances on a single physical box, with up to 64GB of RAM and 32 CPU's split across the virtual machines.

Posted by Brian at 9:41 AM |

February 2, 2003

USB 2.0 HDD Enclosure w/ Built-In Encryption

This is pretty cool: an external USB 2.0 or Firewire hard drive enclosure that features built-in decryption. Stick a regular IDE hard drive in it, and you have an encrypted device, with an external security key that you can remove and take with you. Slick.

Posted by Brian at 3:45 PM |