Posts

The Power Mac G4 stinks. Here’s an interesting development–Microsoft has purchased Visio, the makers of the diagramming tool that of the same name. I honestly think Microsoft can make Visio a lot better, it’s one of the worst applications I’ve ever used. But more interesting to me is the fact that Visio’s CEO has defended Microsoft on any number of occasions when people charged them with being monopolists. It will be interesting if Microsoft will use their purchase of Visio to launch an attack on Rational Software, one of their other staunch defenders. ...

If you’re interested in manipulating XML with Perl, you should read the Perl XML FAQ. It also references the Perl-XML mailing list, which is an excellent resource. Personally, I haven’t started doing anything with XML yet, although I have lots of ideas about creating a publishing system with it. Handspring’s new PalmOS-based handhelds will be announced today. I assume you’ll be able to look here for details after the announcement is made. I wonder if there’s any chance Palm and Handspring would merge after Palm is spun off, since Handspring was founded by the guys who originally founded Palm in the first place. ...

There’s talk that Microsoft is about to start parting out MSN to get rid of sites that aren’t a good fit. Didn’t they do this once already when they got rid of all of their “shows” and replaced them with these newer consumer-oriented sites. I guess that’s not working either. Interestingly, MSNBC’s pathetic Web site gets more hits than CNN. MP3 continues to let a thousand flowers bloom. One of the latest entrants in the MP3 arena is garageband.com, which allows musicians to upload their songs, and then allows listeners to rate them. ...

In response to recent attacks, the Army has been working to beef up the security on its Web site. The first thing they did was move their site from Windows NT to a more secure platform … the Macintosh. The Army’s Web site was defaced through the big Cold Fusion security hole that was discovered not long ago. The one where the exploitable Web application was installed as part of the Cold Fusion examples and documentation. ...

The Economist has an article on how computing has affected the growing wage gap in America. Tired of your spouse spending too much time on the computer? Get one of these. Upside.com has an interview with Bruce Perens, the former leader of the Debian project. His current project is technocrat.net. Marc Andreesen is out as Chief Technology Officer at AOL. He’s sticking around in some bogus part time position, but that’s not really important. I thought he had such a bright future ahead of him after that Miller Lite commercial. ...

An analyst at the Gartner Group says that migration costs for moving to Windows 2000 could be as much as $3,100 per PC. Thomas Dolby took some time out to attack the major record labels at a music industry conference. There’s certainly a lot of talk of a music industry revolution these days, and I hope it comes to pass. Some people are investigating the high prices payed for EverQuest characters and equipment on EBay, and discovering that many of the sales at high prices have been the result of “bid padding,” where one person enters the bidding simply to inflate the price. Since the padder and the seller are in cahoots, if the padder wins the auction, they just cancel the transaction. So, as it turns out, those multi-thousand dollar sales of characters are probably just a myth after all. ...

Handspring has finally announced their Palm clones. Of course, they haven’t yet met the vapor test, but they’re supposed to be cheap and really cool. They have an expansion slot too. No pictures yet. More hardware news: IBM is about to start selling thin servers that run Linux. Unfortunately, they’re going to cost about $4,000. When is someone going to come out with a tiny server for about $500 that I can use at home for IP masquerading and perhaps mail relaying? I could get a perfectly capable desktop PC for that price, but I want something really small I can stick on a bookshelf. ...

ICQ is so lame that the contact list is stored on your local computer and isn’t stored on the ICQ server. I want to use the same ICQ account at home and at work, and I want to share the contact list between them. The solution? Copy the contact list and manually send it to the other computer. Weak. (By the way, Yahoo Messenger has this figured out already. Your contact list is stored on the server.) ...

You can view the listing for Bill Clinton’s new house online. I’ve written a lot of code in Cold Fusion lately, and I’ve discovered that a big problem is maintainability. Because of the way Cold Fusion code works, it’s difficult to write really structured, readable code. For example, there’s no easy facility for writing things like subroutines. As an alternative, I’m looking into Python, which has a reputation for making it easy to write maintainable code. ...

I installed Red Hat 6.0 on a Compaq desktop today. The installation was an absolute no-brainer, I was up and running in no time. I also noticed that with this release, they’ve done a lot of good work in the general “Make the desktop look like a non-Unix geek would expect it to look” department. In other words, the font in the Netscape Location box isn’t all jaggy and strange, and the screen widgets look better than they used to. The next step is to get rid of Enlightenment and start using my beloved WindowMaker. ...