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I am still trying to keep a grip on all the comment spam here, so I have neglected, so far, the other issue of referrer log spam. But that's on my list as well. Here's a post on clone blogs and referrer log spam that is interesting and frightening.

BTW, this site has been running for 5 years, with over 20,000 comments in the database. We've only been getting spam comments for a few months, but already we have deleted, as of this moment, 11,745. They should overtake real comments in number in another few weeks. Those are some industrious spammers.
- jim 11-30-2004 6:38 pm [link] [368 comments]

All Things Considered audio segment on Bit Torrent. Good basic introduction to the technology and to the legal issues involved with peer to peer technology.
- jim 11-29-2004 9:00 pm [link] [add a comment]

Buttress "is a broadcatching application to automatically download and run .torrent files from RSS feeds, without user input." This is what I want, but unfortunately I can't get it to work yet on OS X. I think it should though, not sure what I am doing wrong. It scans the RSS feeds okay, but then complains that it can't start up my Bit Torrent client.

The Buttress download contains an .exe file for windows users. Unix people should be able to run the .jar java file, although like I said I haven't been totally successful yet on OS X. I'll comment below if I ever get it working. Windows users may want to give it a look.


- jim 11-27-2004 1:19 am [link] [add a comment]

Wow. Technorati This favelet/bookmarklet. Handy.
- jim 11-26-2004 8:29 pm [link] [add a comment]

Russel Beatie continues to make his case that mobile handsets are where the action is:

Apple shipped 4 million iPods in the past quarter, Palm shipped 1.5 million Treos and Dell shipped 8 million PCs..... Very nice, but Nokia shipped over 50 million handsets in the same timeframe.

- jim 11-26-2004 8:27 pm [link] [1 ref] [5 comments]

The good folks at Downhill Battle have released Blog Torrent, a PHP project that simplifies offering Bit Torrent downloads from your PHP enabled website.

[W]hat blogtorrent does is give users "easy download" links in addition to links to the torrent files. The "easy download" link gives them the torrent file they want wrapped in an executable installer. The installer just installs Bittorrent, asks them where to save the file, and starts getting the torrent they want.
This isn't brain surgery. It's just installing the Bit Torrent client invisibly when (windows users, for now) click on the download link. But even though that isn't much (can't people install the client themselves? Well, sometimes not...) it should help. And it makes uploading Torrents easier too. Something to watch for sure.
- jim 11-25-2004 6:08 pm [link] [add a comment]

Internal IBM interview with John McCalpin: On the POWER7, Simultaneous Multi-Threading - and the true origins of AIX. (via HTP)

POWER7? Good God these guys plan ahead (POWER5 is the cutting edge at the moment, while Apple's G5 is a simplified version of the POWER4.) Super geeky, but interesting if you are into such things. I love the "Level: Introductory" label applied to the article. Yeah, "introductory" if you are a hardware engineer working for IBM.

Also liked this exchange:

dW: That is a shame. I have one more on the subject of OSes -- was AIX really designed by space aliens?

McCalpin: I hadn't heard that one....
Hmmm. Classic non-denial denial? The truth is out there.
- jim 11-24-2004 8:03 pm [link] [add a comment]

KISS: Keep It Simple and Sloppy.

Adam Bosworth has been writing some interesting posts lately. He used to work at Microsoft where he was responsible for developing Microsoft Access PC Database, the HTML engine for Internet Explorer 4 and 5, as well as directing most of their XML development work from 1997 to 1999. He later worked as Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of Advanced Development at BEA Systems. And he now works at Google. (Slightly out of date bio link.) In other words, he knows a few things!

He recently spoke at the 2nd International Conference on
Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC04,) and reprinted his speech on his weblog. It's long but very interesting. Well, okay, interesting to me at least. He is able to look at where the web is going from a very high altitude without losing touch with the finer details of implementation.

If you think about web architecture you should read this piece. It is basically the same as my philosophy of how to build things, except I'm not so smart or experienced (understatement of the year) to have put it as well as he has.
- jim 11-19-2004 6:53 pm [link] [2 refs] [add a comment]

The Treo 650 is on sale now directly from Sprint (warning: link to very dorky treo message board.) Might possibly be only available to current Sprint customers (there is some mixed experiences here.) $599 with $150 rebate for Sprint customers of 18 months or longer.

Okay, this phone rocks. The question is: does it make any sense at all to buy such an expensive mobile device when it can't be used on any of the new high speed wireless networks?
- jim 11-18-2004 7:34 pm [link] [2 comments]

Mobileburn has an article, with lots of pictures, comparing the output of some 1 megapixel camera phones. The phones are the Sony Ericsson S700i, the Siemens S65, and the Motorola V710, with some extra shots from the Nokia 7610 and the Sharp GX30 thrown in at the end.

The Motorola definitely proves that more pixels don't always equal good pictures. The others do a pretty good job though. The S700 seems particularly good. Of course now I can't wait for the 2 megapixel untis shipping in the 2nd half of 2005.
- jim 11-17-2004 5:29 pm [link] [add a comment]

I have been eagerly awaiting the debut of the Treo 650 cellphone. It has been officially announced, but isn't on sale yet. The big disappointment with the specs is that the camera did not increase in resolution. It's still just a VGA (about 1/3 of a megapixel.) When I first heard this I thought it was a deal breaker and I started to look for other possible phones (more on that later,) but now I am not so sure. It may turn out that the sheer number of pixels the camera can resolve is not the only factor.

Palm (who makes the Treo,) said they had planned to include a 1+ megapixel sensor, but could not find one that operated well in low light conditions. As the owner of a Treo 600, I can say that this was that cameras greatest failing. It is basically useless when not in bright sunlight. So Palm stuck with the VGA sensor, but they say it is different, and that the second generation VGA sensors, combined with a new lens, and new software, make for a better camera than the first generation 1 megapixel sensors that are out now.

Here are some side by side comparisons of pictures from the 600 and 650. It really does seem much improved. And the 650 shoots very small videos as well.

Now I am back to undecided. Certainly seems very usable.
- jim 11-17-2004 5:16 pm [link] [1 comment]

Still working on the new layout. Not that I care too much, but I am trying to use my page to learn non table based CSS design. I made something I really liked, but then it turns out that it is completely borked in IE. So I dropped back to this non-design for the moment.

This is the madness of designing for browsers. It's not as bad as it used to be (specifically because you can safely forget about the hell that was Navigator 4,) but it is still a pain. For anything but the most simple design you probably have to do some browser sniffing and serve up different CSS files for different browsers/platforms. That is a change I had sort of wanted to make anyway (putting the CSS into a separate file rather than including it inline,) but it will be a slightly more involved operation to do it this way.

Yeah, I know, pretty interesting...
- jim 11-17-2004 5:04 pm [link] [6 comments]

The new page design is still coming, but since I want to start blogging again I'm not going to wait for that. Here are some things I have been thinking about, and what I suspect this blog will focus on:

Serious bandwidth is on the way to the end user. Both fixed (like fiber to the home,) and wireless. I know it has always been the case that this is "on the way," but it's really true now. Honest. Here is a pricing page for Verizon fibre service. 30Mb/s!!! This is already deployed in some areas, and some non trivial number of people in NYC will have access to this in 2005. A lot more on this, as well as 3G wireless rollouts (also happening as we speak,) in the days ahead.

The one true device is sort of limping towards us. I wish this would go faster, but it is happening too. I mean the convergence of your computer, phone, audio/image/video player/recorder into one device you can put in your pocket. The U.S. is maddeningly behind much of the world on this, but we'll see some big strides in 2005. Something more than SMS has to fill up all that 3G wireless bandwidth. The Treo 650 and the S/E K700a are pointing the way, even if both are crippled in serious ways. Soon we are going to be able to take it all with us. Lots more on this.

And while this might not seem connected, the rich web application has arrived ahead of time. I thought we had to wait for entirely new sets of standards (like what WHAT-WG is working on,) but it turns out that today's browsers, CSS, serious javascript/DHTML magic, and even the first judicious use of Flash (!), have all ushered in the rich web application: websites that have the look, feel, and usability of a standalone desktop application. Google Mail and Flickr are leading the charge, but there are a ton of other very interesting things out there (del.icio.us, bloglines, etc...)

And finally one that I don't have a good name for yet. Something like the convergence of weblog communities with smaller, private, P2P networks. Bit Torrent and RSS are heavily involved. I guess I think of it as the dawn of the tribal age on the net. This is spurred to some degree by oppressive legal actions by those in power, but I am mainly going to steer clear of politics. Perhaps I am overly pessimistic at this point in time, but I just don't think it matters any more. Building safe, private, transparent networks of friends (extending the connections blogs have provided to connect not just words, but all media, and all the content on each of our computers,) is what I want to focus on.

Lots of bandwidth, pocket sized always on computing/media devices, rich user interface web services, all connecting people into increasingly private networks. That's how it looks from here.

So, yeah, more on all of that to come....

- jim 11-15-2004 6:28 pm [link] [add a comment]

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