My Archives: July 2001
Monday, July 30, 2001
Photolib is a web-based photo gallery program, but unlike all other galleries, this one is aimed to be a library rather than a standalone program. This way, users can take the Photolib library and easily plug a photo gallery into their own Perl-based site. They are also free to easily create their own look and feel to the gallery through regular Perl and HTML, rather than some complicated theme generator.
Posted by Elmer @ 09:38 PM EST [Link]
Tracking Bloggers With Blogdex
MIT's Media Lab is experimenting with a tool for indexing the most popular hypertext links across thousands of weblogs and has ambitious plans to turn it into a resource for the mass media.
Launched last week, Blogdex is like a search-engine spider that visits about 9,000 weblogs a day looking for hypertext links.
It extracts the links and ranks them by popularity. The top 10 are published daily on the Blogdex site.Posted by Elmer @ 06:20 PM EST [Link]
I have developed html2fo because I had to create a new server driven printing solution for an client-server-based application. The previous printing solution was using Microsoft Word mailing function for importing data and printing. As everybody knows - Word is not platform independent. But this was the main goal for the new printing solution. We have chosen PDF as platform independent document format and I had to convert about 40 documents with about 100 Sheets altogether. I used StarOffice to convert from .doc to .html because Word is in HTML export not as good as StarOffice. (There are worlds between them...) After using html2fo for converting to xsl:fo, a manual processing and rendering to PDF using FOP from Apache - Now I have a new printing solution.
Posted by Elmer @ 01:40 PM EST [Link]
FOP is the world's first print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects. It is a Java application that reads a formatting object tree and then turns it into a PDF document. The formatting object tree, can be in the form of an XML document (output by an XSLT engine like XT or Xalan) or can be passed in memory as a DOM Document or (in the case of XT) SAX events.
Posted by Elmer @ 01:39 PM EST [Link]
Try this helpful workaround for a Linux/Win2K dual boot
You thought ahead when installing Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional on your test machine, partitioning the hard drive so that you could put Linux on the same machine.
Then you took your copy of Red Hat Linux 7.1 and installed it on the partition you created. When you got to the point in the installation where Red Hat asks you where to put LILO (the Linux loader), you just clicked through, allowing it to be put on the default%u2014the master boot record (MBR) of the machine.
But when you rebooted the machine after the Linux install, you had no way to get to your Windows 2000 Professional. The nice graphic list showed up, but the only choice on it was Linux. Whoops!
Posted by Elmer @ 09:00 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, July 29, 2001
developerWorks : Linux | Open source : Common threads -- OpenSSH key management, Part 1
Many of us use the excellent OpenSSH (see Resources later in this article) as a secure, encrypted replacement for the venerable telnet and rsh commands. One of OpenSSH's more intriguing features is its ability to authenticate users using the RSA and DSA authentication protocols, which are based on a pair of complementary numerical keys. As one of its main appeals, RSA and DSA authentication promise the capability of establishing connections to remote systems without supplying a password. While this is appealing, new OpenSSH users often configure RSA/DSA the quick and dirty way, resulting in passwordless logins, but opening up a big security hole in the process.Posted by Elmer @ 09:29 AM EST [Link]
iptables is a command implemented in the 2.4.x kernel series, and is provided as a replacment for the old, and now rather obsolete 'ipchains' from the 2.2.x kernel.
iptables basically represents a set of rules for making your own firewall, by seting your own, or by using pre-made rules. More information about the iptables command can be found by typing 'man ipchains' or by clicking here.
Posted by Elmer @ 09:25 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, July 28, 2001
VideoLAN - MPEG and DVD for every OS, free !
VideoLAN is a project of students from the École Centrale Paris. Its main goals are MPEG and DVD playing and broadcasting on the campus, but it also features a standalone multimedia player that can read DVDs and MPEG files. It will also eventually support streams from a satellite or from an MPEG2 compression card. VideoLAN is free software, and is released under the GNU General Public License.
Posted by Elmer @ 07:45 AM EST [Link]
Friday, July 27, 2001
Many Web developers prefer MySQL - Web Building - CNET.com
Change is the operative word in the IT business. If management asks for a list of database recommendations, chances are the items on your list will become outdated before you can implement them. Subsequently, you may need to reconsider the software and hardware that you:
- use to get your work done
- purchase so that others can get their work done
- develop so that others can get their work done
No matter how up-to-date your information, something on your list will usually be obsolete before you can route your suggestions and deposit any checks. Fortunately, there's no blame or recriminating complaints--it's simply the nature of the beast at work. Database technology often changes before you can even integrate it.
To cope with the fast pace of evolution in database technology, an increasing number of programmers are deliberately switching from desktop database applications, such as Microsoft Access and SQL Server, to MySQL. Although MySQL isn't serious competition for SQL Server, many service providers now support MySQL as an inexpensive and effective alternative.Posted by Elmer @ 08:55 AM EST [Link]
Brief: Online library in public beta testing | Computerworld News & Features Story
Business and economics texts from some of the best-known publishing companies are now available online for free.
Random House, McGraw-Hill, Pearson PLC, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, MIT Press and Yale University Press have agreed to put some of their copyrighted book titles online through an agreement with Ebrary Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., and The Learning Network, a subsidiary of Pearson, an international media company. There is no subscription fee and no charge to view texts online. However, a fee will be charged to copy or print text. There are also links to sites that sell the books.
Visit the library.Posted by Elmer @ 08:36 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 26, 2001
IBM UDDI Registry is a UDDI-compliant registry for Web services in a private intranet environment. (UDDI stands for Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration). Web services developers can publish and test their applications in a secure, private environment for internal business applications. This registry is geared toward activities such as Web services development, testing, and deployment for internal business applications, and therefore it has different requirements and characteristics than public UDDI registries.
Posted by Elmer @ 09:29 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, July 25, 2001
ZDNet: Interactive Week: Linux Takes On Big Jobs
At a time when Microsoft is warning of the perils of open source code, Korean Air is mounting one of the biggest mission-critical deployments using Linux open source software.
Korean Air said last week that it has moved its flight crew scheduling and daily revenue accounting systems to Linux running on an IBM mainframe at its Seoul headquarters. The 3,000 pilots and flight crew members will query the mainframe system to check the status of their assignments. In September, 5,000 users will be getting their scheduling information through the system, which can be accessed via a Web browser.
"This is one of the most high-profile uses of Linux in a mission-critical system," said Bill Claybrook, Aberdeen Group's research director for open source code. He estimated that there are a dozen mission-critical systems now in use on mainframes.
Posted by Elmer @ 10:53 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, July 24, 2001
Weblogging: Another Kind of Website
One day in mid-March 2000 Raymond Yee of the Interactive University[1] thought it would be a good idea to buy and experiment with Manila, a web server application capable of supporting literally thousands of weblog websites. A bargain-priced education license was purchased, and Catherine Yoes downloaded and installed it on a rather ordinary NT server. Within weeks the IU experienced a revolutionary change in thinking about what a website is, how they're hosted, what they're used for, how they're built, and who owns them. A year and a half later all of the IU's websites are being produced using weblog technology, our team communications and sharing has been vitally enhanced, a number of our team members are regularly writing on the web, as are many of our University/K-12 projects and the K-12 teachers we work with.
What is a weblog? A weblog is easy to use but less easy to explain, a technology that is becoming more widely used but still remains little known, and a writing tool that supports practicing writers and previous non-writers. Weblogs have a relatively recent but intense history[2], with implications for web publishing, journalism, and education.
Posted by Elmer @ 07:50 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
InternetWeek > In Depth > High-Speed Networking > Internet2 Puts Broadband To The Test > July 18, 2001
Imagine a more robust public network--one that runs at multigigabit speeds end to end, with an infrastructure that supports multicasting, quality of service and IPv6 features such as enhanced security and 128-bit address base.
It sounds a little like pie in the sky. But there is such a network out there, although it's not yet available for commercial use.
Abilene, built by researchers with the Internet2 project, is a test bed for what's in store for the future of the Internet. It offers promising glimpses of the kind of videoconferencing and distance learning applications that may be mainstream at businesses and educational institutions by mid-decade.
"For IT managers, Internet2 is a snapshot of what will be here five years down the road," says Steve Corbato, director of backbone network infrastructure at Internet2.Posted by Elmer @ 08:45 AM EST [Link]
Welcome to the Clara OCR website! Clara OCR is a free (GPL) OCR for systems that support the C library and the X windows system (e.g. most flavours of Unix). The development platform of Clara OCR is 32-bit Intel running GNU/Linux.
Clara OCR is intended for large scale digitalization projects. It features a powerful GUI and a web interface for cooperative digitalization of books. Clara OCR development started in 1999 and we're approaching production level.
If you're just curious about Clara OCR, take a look on the screenshots and read the FAQ. Basic and advanced information can be found on the Documentation section below. To test it in your computer, download the source code, compile it and follow the tutorial.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:35 AM EST [Link]
Posted by Elmer @ 05:30 AM EST [Link]
Don't look back - Die Deutsche Bruce Springsteen Homepage
The following page is specially dedicated to the early years of Bruce Springsteens career. It covers the time from 1965 until 1971 in wich Bruce formed different local bands, on the way to his own musical identy. Most of the stuff on this webpage is copyright protected, so please don't use it without permission for other projects.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:07 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, July 17, 2001
"Sopranos": Chase Takes the Fifth
Bada Bing. It was just that simple for The Sopranos (news - Y! TV) godfather David Chase.
The Emmy-winning creator and executive producer has signed on for a fifth season of HBO's mob hit, in what was by all accounts (pardon the tired mob cliché), an offer he couldn't refuse. Chase will make anywhere between $15 million and $20 million to return to the series after next season, according to Hollywood trade reports.
Meanwhile, shooting on season four will begin in October. And to satiate fans until next year, HBO will air all 39 episodes from the first three seasons on Sundays at 8 p.m. starting August 12.
Posted by Elmer @ 04:19 PM EST [Link]
Mike's Scripts
A number of neat Perl scripts including a photo album.Posted by Elmer @ 11:17 AM EST [Link]
.:[packet storm]:. - http://packetstormsecurity.org/
Posted by Elmer @ 10:05 AM EST [Link]
Technology Review - A Standard for e-Comments
Got a few choice thoughts about what you see on the Web? Enter Annotea, a new technology that lets you annotate existing Web documents with commentary of your own.
Annotea is an open-source initiative sponsored by the non-profit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the closest thing the Internet has to a governing body. Built into W3C's Amaya browser, Annotea allows third parties to append information to existing Web pages. The annotations are stored on a separate server, invisible to the viewer unless Annotea is activated.Posted by Elmer @ 10:03 AM EST [Link]
Cablinux is a program that can create Microsoft cabinet files.
Although originally programmed for Linux, it seems to work fine under Windows too. I only tried to compile it with GCC for Windows (MS VC++ 6.0 sucked ass for this).Posted by Elmer @ 09:54 AM EST [Link]
Gehrig@l - Webmin Layout-Navigation-Project (Theme)
Lots of other good webmin stuff here, too.
Posted by Elmer @ 09:52 AM EST [Link]
developerWorks : Web services : A Primer for HTTPR
The delivery of messages using a reliable transport mechanism is a fundamental component for middleware in e-business systems, and a needed technology in enterprise computing. However, in the wider context of the Internet, synchronous transport protocols such as HTTP do not currently provide those facilities. Reliable HTTP (HTTPR) addresses these deficiencies by proposing rules that make it possible to ensure that all messages are delivered to their destination in their exact form and only once. In cases where the message delivery fails, the protocol will reliably report the message as undeliverable.
Posted by Elmer @ 07:03 AM EST [Link]
Monday, July 16, 2001
The Festival Speech Synthesis System
Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system developed at CSTR. It offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques. It is written in C++ with a Scheme-based command interpreter for general control.
Posted by Elmer @ 02:01 PM EST [Link]
Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq
When Internet stocks began their free fall in March 2000, the Internet was finally put in its proper place. It was nothing more than a fast delivery service for information -- that was what serious people who had either lost a lot of money in the late stages of the Internet boom or, more likely, failed to make money began to say now. The profit-making potential of the Internet had been overrated, and so the social effects of the Internet were presumed to be overrated. But they weren't. Speeding up information was not the only thing the Internet had done. The Internet had made it possible for people to thwart all sorts of rules and conventions. It wasn't just the commercial order that was in flux. Many forms of authority were secured by locks waiting to be picked. The technology and money-making potential of the Internet were far less interesting than the effects people were allowing it to have on their lives and what these, in turn, said about those lives.
I have already written here about Jonathan Lebed, the 15-year-old boy in the New Jersey suburbs who used the Internet to transform himself into a stock market manipulator. Jonathan's story suggested that you couldn't really understand what was happening on the Internet unless you understood the conditions in the real world that led to what was happening on the Internet -- and you couldn't understand those unless you went there in person and looked around. Once you did that, you came to appreciate all sorts of new truths. For instance, the Internet was rock 'n' roll all over again. Not rock 'n' roll now, but rock 'n' roll in the 1950's and 1960's, when it actually terrified grown-ups. The Internet was enabling a great status upheaval and a subversion of all manner of social norms. And the people quickest to seize on its powers were the young.
This article talks about a 15 year-old from California who became the #1 legal expert on AskMe.com. It is a very good article that brings up indirectly several points about the future of law and legal education. What happens when this kid goes to law school? What happens when John Q. Public gets access to all the legal information they can swallow?Posted by Elmer @ 06:02 AM EST [Link]
PHP Classes Repository - Class: Metabase - Database independent access and management
Posted by Elmer @ 05:53 AM EST [Link]
phpDBForm creator - Home
2 things of interest - phpdbform and phpwebthings.Posted by Elmer @ 05:52 AM EST [Link]
Internet worm purports to be a Microsoft security alert | Computerworld News & Features Story
A bogus Microsoft Corp. security alert is apparently being used by crafty hackers to spread the latest version of a computer worm on the Internet.
In an announcement on its Symantec Antivirus Research Center (SARC) Web site, Symantec Corp. said that the W32.Leave.B.Worm is a variant of the W32-Leave.worm identified several weeks ago by the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center.
What's new, said Patrick Martin, SARC's development manager, is that this is apparently the first time that a virus or worm has been distributed using a faked Microsoft security bulletin. "It's a sneaky way to get on your system," Martin said. "We've just never seen them use the tactic of a security bulletin as a guise."Posted by Elmer @ 05:43 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, July 15, 2001
XNSORG
XNS, or eXtensible Name Service, is a new Internet service that lets individuals and businesses establish a global online identity and address, exchange self-updating business cards, use a single sign-on name and password, automatically exchange and synchronize common types of data, and manage the use of shared data under XNS privacy contracts. XNS works through a globally distributed network of XNS agents and agencies.Posted by Elmer @ 01:21 PM EST [Link]
Friday, July 13, 2001
Posted by Elmer @ 03:42 PM EST [Link]
zcast.tv - Auburn keeps online classes virus-free
E-learning is a fast, efficient, cost-saving means of delivering training -- and, unfortunately, computer viruses.
It's always important to keep training materials up to date, but for Auburn University, whose customers consist mainly of the military bases around Montgomery, Ala., it's just as important to make sure that continuing and distance education materials are secure. Auburn is using THINQ's TrainingServer@Online product to allow its customers to register for IT courses and certification over the Web.
Posted by Elmer @ 02:14 PM EST [Link]
NewsForge | NuSphere: MySQL.org needed because MySQL AB won't accept code
There's a new trademark dispute brewing in the Open Source community, with the founders of the MySQL database project, who operate MySQL.com, claiming MySQL support company NuSphere is trying to confuse users with its new MySQL.org site.
MySQL AB, the Swedish company that owns MySQL, issued a press release today (July 12) saying the MySQL community is "threatened by obscure .org Web site."
But the souring relationship between former partners MySQL AB and NuSphere, which makes several MySQL commercial products that include proprietary pieces, seems to have as much to do with a licensing disagreement, dueling lawsuits and who controls the MySQL code as it does with MySQL AB's annoyance over NuSphere's launch of MySQL.org.
Posted by Elmer @ 02:04 PM EST [Link]
Posted by Elmer @ 11:06 AM EST [Link]
ht://Check - More than a link checker / Home Page
ht://Check is more than a link checker. It's a console application written for Linux systems in C++ and derived from the best search engine available on the Internet for free: ht://Dig.It can retrieve information through HTTP/1.1 and store them in a MySQL database, and it's particularly suitable for small Internet domains or Intranet.
Its purpose is to help a webmaster managing one or more related sites: after a "crawl", ht://Check gives back a very useful result, including broken links, anchors not found, content-types and HTTP status codes summaries, etc.
Posted by Elmer @ 11:02 AM EST [Link]
Flinch link checker documentation
Flinch is a powerful and flexible web link checker that will make your life as a web designer or web server admin easier. Flinch is implemented in Perl and released under the GPL (GNU General Public License). It can be used to check all the external links on your web pages periodically and produce HTML reports of its findings. If a web resource at the end of a link has not been reachable for a few days, Flinch can send you an email.Posted by Elmer @ 10:58 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 12, 2001
Linux PR: MYSQL COMMUNITY THREATENED BY OBSCURE .ORG WEBSITE
Open source software company MySQL AB today announced that an unauthorised party has set up a website on www.mysql.ORG in direct violation of the trademark rights of MySQL AB and with the apparent goal to confuse the huge worldwide community of MySQL users.
Michael "Monty" Widenius and David Axmark, co-founders of MySQL AB and the creators of this world-leading open source database software commented "We normally welcome new sites that focus on the MySQL server, but this one violates our trademark and may lead users to wrongfully believe it represents the people behind the MySQL server. We were not contacted about this website and it operates without our authorisation. We cannot recommend anybody to visit that site."
The .org site is registered to Nusphere Corp. I smell a rat in the Nusphere camp as they try to sell their own customized version of MySQL, called Enhanced MySQL, that includes a customized table type that makes MySQL and ACID database.
Posted by Elmer @ 11:48 AM EST [Link]
DEMARC is an all-inclusive network monitoring program that allows you to monitor an entire network of servers from one powerful web interface.
Instead of having one program perform file integrity checks, another program monitoring the connectivity and health of your network, and yet another monitoring your network for intrusion detection attempts, DEMARC combines all three services into one powerful client/server program. Not only can you monitor the status of the different machines in your network, but you can also respond to changes in your network all from one centralized location.
Security is already a full time job in any network, and sometimes the burden of monitoring the reports from multiple programs across dozens of servers can result in information overload. The human mind can only process so much data at any given time before it simply becomes too much to analyze. DEMARC centralizes the reporting and analysis for the entire network and allows you to more easily weed out the important data from the superfluous background noise, thereby targeting your efforts where they really belong.
Posted by Elmer @ 06:24 AM EST [Link]
Tech Tracker is a web-based IT tracking system. The goal of the project is to provide a simple to administrate and use, yet powerful IT tracking system. The interface should be usable even over slow connections and with any web client (works with Lynx).
Tech Tracker is written in Perl, runs under Apache, and currently supports the PostgreSQL database.
Posted by Elmer @ 06:22 AM EST [Link]
Visual Tcl Homepage - Stewart Allen
Posted by Elmer @ 06:20 AM EST [Link]
Yahoo - Microsoft Announces Greater OEM Flexibility for Windows
Microsoft Corp. announced Wednesday that it is offering computer manufacturers greater flexibility in configuring desktop versions of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system in light of the recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The company said the changes would not affect the Oct. 25 launch date of Windows XP.
``We recognize that some provisions in our existing Windows licenses have been ruled improper by the court, so we are providing computer manufacturers with greater flexibility and we are doing this immediately so that computer manufacturers can take advantage of them in planning for the upcoming release of Windows XP,'' said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. ``Windows XP represents a revolutionary step forward in personal computing, and computer manufacturers and consumers are looking forward to this product with great anticipation.''
Posted by Elmer @ 05:39 AM EST [Link]
JavaScript behaviors within PHP
Both JavaScript and PHP are popular tools for the Web developer, but putting them together may be less straightforward than you might think. While writing a PHP script for a portal site recently, my team ran into an interesting issue trying to integrate external JavaScript files and PHP. I%u2019ll start by explaining the problem we ran into trying to integrate the two; then, I%u2019ll how you how we worked around it.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:28 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, July 11, 2001
Scientific American: Feature Article: The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer: August 2001
IN THE WELL-KNOWN STONE SOUP FABLE, a wandering soldier stops at a poor village and says he will make soup by boiling a cauldron of water containing only a shiny stone. The townspeople are skeptical at first but soon bring small offerings: a head of cabbage, a bunch of carrots, a bit of beef. In the end, the cauldron is filled with enough hearty soup to feed everyone. The moral: cooperation can produce significant achievements, even from meager, seemingly insignificant contributions.
Researchers are now using a similar cooperative strategy to build supercomputers, the powerful machines that can perform billions of calculations in a second. Most conventional supercomputers employ parallel processing: they contain arrays of ultrafast microprocessors that work in tandem to solve complex problems such as forecasting the weather or simulating a nuclear explosion. Made by IBM, Cray and other computer vendors, the machines typically cost tens of millions of dollars--far too much for a research team with a modest budget. So over the past few years, scientists at national laboratories and universities have learned how to construct their own supercomputers by linking inexpensive PCs and writing software that allows these ordinary computers to tackle extraordinary problems.
Posted by Elmer @ 08:02 PM EST [Link]
"Sopranos" Chasing Down Fifth Season
Just when he think's he's out, they keep pulling him...back...in.
The Sopranos' godfather David Chase is in talks to commit to a fifth season of HBO's critically acclaimed mob hit, despite previously hinting that he would leave after the upcoming fourth season to pursue film work.The creator and executive producer agreed last March to a two-year, 26-episode deal, initially intending to pass off the series to someone else once his contract expired. But the Hollywood trades report Chase is now ready to take a whack at a fifth season, and he's back at the negotiating table with the cable network and Brad Grey Television.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:26 AM EST [Link]
The Register - WinXP Product Activation decoded and analysed
German techies Fully Licensed GmbH claim - convincingly - to have unravelled the Windows Product Activation (WPA) system used in the latest versions of Microsoft software, including Office XP and Windows XP. The bottom line, according to the company, is that WPA is not particularly intrusive, does not invade anybody's privacy, and is a lot more forgiving of hardware changes than has been speculated.
That speculation is, as Fully Licensed points out, entirely Microsoft's fault, as the company has been intentionally vague about the precise nature of the sending and checking carried out. As Fully Licensed says: "The current public discussion of Windows Product Activation (WPA) is characterized by uncertainty and speculation. In this paper we supply the technical details of WPA - as implemented in Windows XP - that Microsoft should have published long ago."
Posted by Elmer @ 05:21 AM EST [Link]
InformationWeek > Web Analytics > Baseball Ramps Up Its Web-Analytics Effort > July 10, 2001
Major League Baseball has made a lot of changes to its Web presence this year, and now it wants to know what those changes are yielding. MLB's Internet arm, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, has turned to NetIQ Corp.'s WebTrends Live service to get an idea of how fans are interacting with the league's MLB.com portal, as well as the 30 individual franchise sites. Through the service, MLB Advanced Media now has Web-based access to analytics that provide a snapshot of the visitor experiences, current to within the last 15 minutes.
In the past several months, the league has reorganized its Internet operations under MLB Advanced Media; launched a video-archiving feature built around technology from Virage Inc.; cut a deal with RealNetworks Inc. to create revenue from online radio broadcasts of games; and introduced E-commerce, promotional, and community features to its sites. WebTrends Live is giving the league a better idea of what features fans are accessing most frequently, letting it respond quickly by tailoring its sites to fans' tastes.
Kristen Fergason, marketing manager for MLBPosted by Elmer @ 05:01 AM EST [Link]
Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links (Jul 10)
Posted by Elmer @ 04:56 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, July 10, 2001
A Summer Potpourri of Tools and Books
One of the "fun" things I did last year in my summer holiday was install a mail server that would read to me aloud the sender and subject of incoming e-mails through the speakers inside and outside my summer house. I like to stay outside and tend to the flowers and vegetables while listening to music, but at the same time I don't want to miss urgent e-mails.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:37 AM EST [Link]
PCWorld.com - Recordable DVD Wars Heat Up With New Entries
This week's TechXNY (aka PC Expo) brought both good news and bad news to those who want to record their own DVDs.
First the good news: Real products exist both for your PC and your living room that will let you create DVDs with your own data or video--and that video can be played in your living room DVD player. Prices, although still high, are starting to come down. And a host of new products are coming this summer and fall.
The bad news: You still have to deal with several incompatible versions of re-recordable DVD.
DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, and DVD-R are all standards developed by the DVD Forum, an industry group with more than 250 members, though it is not a regulatory standards body. Yet another format, DVD+RW, has been developed by an alliance of major companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Philips. And yes, it is confusing even to those who follow the industry closely.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:21 AM EST [Link]
Southwest pulls flight data to hinder Orbitz | Computerworld News & Features Story
Southwest Airlines Co. has upped the ante in its fight with Orbitz LLC by withdrawing its flight data from the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. (ATPCO), a company that supplies airline flights and fare information to travel agents, airlines and travel Web sites, including Orbitz.
"We are doing this to send a clear message that Southwest doesn't want to be associated with Orbitz, a site that we feel seeks to eliminate consumer choice through its exclusive agreements with the carriers it is supported by. It seeks to become a monopoly," said a spokeswoman for the Dallas-based economy airline.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:15 AM EST [Link]
XML-RPC Interfaces on this site
The goal is to create a web service demonstration, and a module for the ACS that would let any site call over to an ACS site and ask that ACS site to "search itself" for something. In the long run, I would hope that would yield better results than a google search of the site, and it might expose to the searcher, closed off portions of the site.
The other use would be to let cooperating community sites (that is, different websites) integrate a little bit more. If you've ever used Michael Cleverly's Community Uber-search, well, this is the kind of service I want to provide, but a bit better. Michael has a crawler up and when you type in your search words, and designate which AOLserver/ACS/Tcl/Postgres sites to search, it goes out and searches each of them. It's wonderfully useful.Posted by Elmer @ 05:07 AM EST [Link]
Microsoft stumbles with XP preview
As if Microsoft didn't have enough services trouble this week with the MSN Messenger outage, the company stumbled in its delivery of a preview version of Windows XP to more than 100,000 testers.
Microsoft unveiled the Windows XP Preview Program on July 2, issuing the first of two final testing versions--or release candidates--to those willing to pay to get it. But eight days later, many of the people who plunked down $10 for the right to download the approximately 500MB file said they have not received the e-mail containing a user ID and password that would allow them to do so.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:02 AM EST [Link]
Monday, July 9, 2001
Do Tivo, ReplayTV style things with your PC.Posted by Elmer @ 01:43 PM EST [Link]
Report: Webvan to seek bankruptcy - Tech News - CNET.com
Financially troubled Webvan is reportedly planning to announce Monday that the online grocer will cease operations and file for bankruptcy protection.
KTVU-Channel 2, a Fox television affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area, showed employees clearing out their possessions from the company's Oakland, Calif., warehouse and discussing their severence pay.
In addition, the company posted a message on its Web site Sunday that said: "We're sorry. Our store is temporarily unavailable while it is being updated. It will be available again soon."
Posted by Elmer @ 05:12 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, July 7, 2001
FreeMind
If you are not interested in the internals, you can see FreeMind as a Mindmapping tool. All FreeMind users currently use it as a Mindmapping tool. But keep in mind that FreeMind is even more than that.Because FreeMind is written in Java, it will run on virtually any computer. Just try it! :-)