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Lots of nice free open source web page designs at Open Source Templates. Great resource.
- jim 6-23-2006 11:01 pm [link] [add a comment]

Mapulator is a mash up of the traceroute utility and google maps. Traceroute, for the non geeks, is a command line program that takes a destination URI or an IP address and outputs a list of all the IP addresses that a packet passes through on it's way from the source (your computer) to the supplied destination. Mapulator does this as well, but instead of giving you a list of IPs, it geo-locates the IPs and plots them on google maps so you get a visual of the route.

Very interesting. For instance, right now, data between my computer (in NYC) and tulip (in California) is going through France. Data between my computer and ash (also in NYC) is going through Kansas and North Carolina.
- jim 6-22-2006 11:26 pm [link] [add a comment]

Wow. Impressive dhtml painting application. This AJAX stuff is getting really sophisticated. Well, okay, that isn't actually sophisticated at all compared to a stand alone program like Illustrator, but because this wasn't possible to do on the web a short time ago (without using Flash that is, or a java applet,) it's pretty cool. Notice your drawing is being recorded on the right, and you can press play at any time and it will recreate your drawing over time.

Personally I'm not very interested in making drawing applications, and I don't want to use these techniques at all for creating publicly facing web pages (mostly because I like to always think about supporting small wireless devices where this stuff isn't going to work well.) But for administrative, and other behind the scenes pages, AJAX allows for some serious improvements.

I'm going to work with the dojo toolkit. Here's the general wikipedia page for Ajax:

Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.

- jim 6-20-2006 10:00 pm [link] [5 comments]

First post from the treo 700p. Pretty nice.
- jim 6-18-2006 2:36 am [link] [add a comment]

On search bots and binary trees:

2,147,483,647 web pages ('nodes') were numbered and arranged in a binary search tree.... For each page the traffic of the three major search bots (Yahoo! Slurp, Googlebot and msnbot) was monitored over a period of one year (between 2005-4-13 and 2006-4-13).... Every node shows an image of three trees. Each tree in the image visualises which nodes are crawled by each search engine. Each line in the image represents a node, the number of times a search bot visited the node determines the length of the line.

- jim 6-07-2006 10:58 pm [link] [add a comment]

Wired has an article on Ettus Research and their $550 USRP. From the Ettus website:

The Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP, is device which allows you to create a software radio using any computer with a USB 2 port. Various plug-on daughterboards allow the USRP to be used on different radio frequency bands. Daughterboards are available from DC to 2.9 GHz at this time. The entire design of the USRP is open source.
The USRP works with GNU Radio, a free-software (open source) framework for the creation of software defined radios.


I've written before about software defined radio. Nice to see it actually getting out into people's hands.
- jim 6-06-2006 1:44 am [link] [add a comment]

A howtoforge.com article on installing mod_cband bandwidth limiting module for Apache 2. Great! I've been waiting for some bandwidth limiting module to step up (and for someone to write a nice clear installation article.) This is one of the things I feel like I lost by going with Apache 2 over 1.3 - the older version had much better bandwidth limiting modules. But hopefully that is no longer the case. This gets moved way up towards the top of the list.
- jim 6-01-2006 8:51 pm [link] [5 comments]

Supposedly Nokia is releasing an S60 Symbian port of the Apache webserver, along with a gateway that will allow for the addressing of a mobile webserver with a regular web address (URI.) Wow. To me that's some sort of geek litmus test - if you really want to run a webserver on your phone you are a geek. Or at least a web geek. Sign me up. I want a Symbian phone so bad, but the new models take so long to reach the U.S. I will never understand the wireless carriers here. You couldn't move any more slowly if you tried.
- jim 6-01-2006 7:35 pm [link] [add a comment]

I've written about Joi Ito before. He seems like a very interesting guy. It's sort of hard to figure out exactly what he does - I guess mostly because he does a lot of different things. But they add up to him being a very influential figure in the computer scene. He's an expert networker. He puts people together with other people, and money together with projects, and just generally seems to make things happen.

Interestingly, I never knew about his Tim Leary connection, but here is a post of his on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of T.L.'s death, which explains just how important that relationship was.
- jim 6-01-2006 7:24 pm [link] [add a comment]

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