...more recent posts
Now, don't get carried away. It's not a big deal or anything. Small gifts and professions of undying gratitude should cover it.
Okay, I think the phone is working. Mobile email is not working yet, but I am getting anything sent to that address on my computer (so I still get them, but not as fast.)
Phone update: completely not working now.
I bought Apple's new Airport Express a few days ago. I've been using it exclusively for it's music streaming abilities, forgoing the wireless router and wireless print server functionality. And even that is not so necessary at home, since it is pretty much impossible to be further than one RCA cord away from the stereo in my tiny apartment. But the small size means it can travel. And I've already spent an enjoyable evening sitting at the bar at Alias pretending I am a DJ. This is something I've always wanted to do, but since it is sort of crowded up front where the stereo is located, it was never possible. Same for 71 and aKa, where I expect to be annoying people shortly as well.
Ars Technica has the review. The only thing they don't mention, and I admit it is a minor thing, is that with the new setup you can now preview a song in your headphones while a different song is playing over the wireless link to the stereo. There was never a way to do that before.
Short history of Unix and C from the Economist:
But the [AT&T Bell Labs] were not only the birthplace, in this sense, of modern computer hardware. Much of modern software—computer programs and the special programming languages in which they are written—originated there too. Two instances in particular stand out: the programming language called C, which from the early 1970s has been perhaps the most popular programming language; and the Unix operating system, first booted up in 1971, and still going strong in everything from laptops to airline-reservation systems. Dennis Ritchie, who has worked at the Labs since 1967, was central to both projects. He is revered as the inventor of C, and, with Ken Thompson, as the co-inventor of Unix.
Intel's new FB-DIMM memory. Part 2. Part 3.
360 degree pinhole camera. Gallery of images.
In case anyone is trying to get me, my cell phone is not working. My email here is checked very often.
Super sexy 1.3 megapixel swivel camera phone from Sony Ericsson, the S710a. Should be out by the end of the year, but it will probably be Q1 2005 before it gets picked up by a U.S. carrier. Specifications here, but more importantly, the pictures are here.
Mexico's Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha said he had a non-removable microchip implanted in his arm as a security measure to track him throughout Mexico and to give him access to a crime data bank.
Other high-ranking law enforcement officials who have access to the databank will also receive the chip implants
And similarly, Japanese school kids are to be RFID tagged as well.
The future of display technology is flat, thin… and flexible, thanks to the development of new screens, which could one day - literally - be folded up and tucked away in your pocket....Man, that would really solve a big problem. But I won't be holding my breath for this to hit any time soon (although I did read a highly unlikely - and completely unconfirmed - rumor that Apple has a 10 inch sub notebook in the works that has a screen that folds out - using two side panels - into a 15 inch screen.)
3.2 megapixel 3x optical zoon cameraphone from Samsung that will never go on sale in the mobile backwater that is the United States.
FCC chairman Michael Powell starts a blog.
WHAT-WG is going to change the web. That's the Web Hypertext Application Technology - Working Group.
Here's an explanation of how Apple fits in. And here's a look at the big picture from an Opera developer.
Executive summary: Microsoft doesn't want web technology to advance to the point where web applications can be as powerful as desktop applications because Microsoft controls the desktop and makes stacks of money selling Windows - but they don't control the web and they give IE away for free. So they have stalled development of more sophisticated web technology. Mozilla, Opera, and Apple are breaking away from the W3C to push things forward on their own.
This is going to be fun. I want these new toys so badly. Web Forms 2.0 (a specification being hammered out by WHAT-WG) will give us the tools to make this site much more powerful.
Do mesh networks scale? This is The Big question. The article linked covers recent articles on a few other websites, including a CTO of a wireless mesh networking company who says they do not scale, and two rebuttals to that view.
Until we have some large scale deployments there are going to be debates. I am still holding the view that there are information-theoretic proofs that mesh networks can scale (but since the math required is way over my head this is still just a belief on my part, despite the "proof" part.)
Really nice techno geek gadget blog that manages, somehow, to not overlap 100% with gizmodo and engadget.
Mind-boggling weblog growth rate numbers. "[A] new weblog is created somewhere in the world every 5.8 seconds...."
Sprint releases first 1+ megapixel cameraphone for the U.S. market. Picture of the phone. Priced at a remarkably reasonable $149.
Troutgirl, a friendster employee, details the popular sites migration from JSP (Tomcat) to PHP. Of course this resparked the perpetual holy war surrounding which back end technologies best "scale" to handle very large traffic loads. An exactly similar outbreak of expert opinion happened when Yahoo switched to PHP some time ago. Despite the success of the friendster migration (and the use at Yahoo) conventional wisdom among geeks who have the time to engage in such debates in weblogs has usually been that PHP is something of a toy (it's not compiled!) But perhaps finally the other side is getting their message through. This post sums up the case for the underdog.
But the most interesting part of the discussion, I thought, was someone introducing the site go-gaia.com as an example of PHP's (and MySQL's) ability to scale. Huh? I'd never heard of it either. It is an "online anime and roleplaying community." It's built on top of bulletin board software (PHPbb) but incorporates aspects of game play (including collecting and trading items of value.) Check the numbers:
The site was launched February 18, 2003. 17 months later and they now have over 60,000,000 posts, and are adding over 700,000 new posts a day!
One single thread has 640,000 replies.
On Monday June 28th at 3:00pm they had 12,598 of their 774,027 users on line at the same time.
Here's the hardware:
Hardware config
1 x Celeron 1.3 w/512k RAM, single HD
4 x P4 2.6Ghz w/2GB RAM, single HD
1 x Dual Xeon 2.6 w/4GG RAM, 4 80GB HD running as 2 sets of RAID 0 arrays
1 x Dual Opteron 240 w/4GG RAM, 4 x 15,000RPM 16GB HD as 2 sets of RAID 0 arrays from Raid Array controller, 1 80GB HD for OS
The site is free (billed as an alpha release! They have 60,000,000 posts and they're not even in beta yet!) and very graphics heavy. I shudder to think of their bandwidth bill.
Those are some serious numbers. Clearly PHP can do it, or really, MySQL on a dual Opteron with 4 Gigs of Ram and a 4 x 15,0000RPM RAID can do it.
Here's an interview with the man in charge, and here's a technical thread where he shares some of the PHPbb optimizations he has made.
Just a little geek traffic porn to start your day.
Russell Beattie has more details on Python on Series 60 cell phones.
U.S. court rules that email providers can legally read your email.
Possibly insane use for PHP: Dynamic text replacement. I thought Mark, at least, would be interested in this.
Another shot at a richer web:
In response to demand by users, plugin vendors and web developers for web browser support for an open, secure and scriptable plugin model, the Mozilla Foundation, in collaboration with Apple, Macromedia, Opera, and Sun Microsystems are working to extend the Netscape Plugin Application Program Interface (NPAPI) in a manner that allows greater interactivity with plugins such as Flash, Shockwave, QuickTime and Java, resulting in a richer, more interactive web.
T-Mobile launches a combo WiFi / GSM PDA in Germany.