Go, Dave, go! Harvard Gazette: “He’s a preacher with a projection screen.” [Scripting News]
Archive | April, 2003
Home A/V center plans
ExtremeTech features an article entitled “Build-It: Save Money with a Linux Media Jukebox” by Dave Salvator that described a home audio-video central server. The 80 Gb hard drive is probably too small for someone with lots of audio and video to store, but the concept is great. Whil Hentzen suggested in an editorial last year that he wanted one of these machines in his basement to store all his A/V, and then the ability to call up the album of DVD of his choice in whatever room of the house he happened to be in.
WineX 3.0 Released
A Wine emulator specially configured for DirectX games like EverQuest was released in version 3.0. My son would try it out, but I have such lame video an Uber-Gamer like him would be put off. Winex 3.0 Released from Slashdot
Newbie thrashing
Rats. During the first operation of my newly-installed intranet Twiki, I got the following message:
During save of file TWiki.TWikiPreferences an error was found by the version control system. Please notify your TWiki administrator. /usr/bin/ci -q -l -m'none' -t-none -w'guest' /var/www/twiki/data/TWiki/TWikiPreferences.txt 2>&1 ci: /var/www/twiki/data/TWiki/TWikiPreferences.txt,v: Permission denied Go back in your browser and save your changes locally.
Attempts to resolve the problem with perl, chmod and chown only compounded the problem until the Twiki wouldn’t even recognize its own configuration. Time to walk away and try it again another time. Sheesh.
Craig Berntson’s CrysDev book almost done…
Wired: Beyond Wi-Fi. “The 5 next big things.” [Scripting News]
Craig Berntson’s CrysDev book almost done…
Craig writes that “CrysDev is another step closer today. I reviewed the galley sheets and sent my changes back. The book should be at the printer this week. What I have left to do is collect the sample code and package it up.”
Congratulations, Craig! More info here.
Visual FoxPro Success Stories
The Central Pennsylvania Foxpro User Group is hosting a page of Visual FoxPro Success Stories. Great idea!
Jon Udell: The Semantic Blog
“I’ve long dreamed of using RSS to produce and consume XML content. We’re so close. RSS content is HTML, which is almost XHTML,… ” says Jon Udell: The Semantic Blog. via Scripting News
The joy of HTML is the simplicity of typing <b> for bold; the curse of HTML is that style and presentation is inseparable and almost indistinguishable from content. The medium is not the message, the content is. I know from writing a couple of screen-scraper HTML-to-RSS feeds, that the separation would be a Good Thing.
Jon’s description of feeding XML right into a database and mixing XML and SQL and XPath is pretty intriguing as well. Looking forward to having that access in my database program of choice.
Microsoft profits up, Intel down slightly
In a down economy, a $50 million increase in profits over the same quarter last year is not a bad thing. “Microsoft profits up, Intel down slightly. Microsoft beat earnings forecasts but warned of continued decline in corporate IT spending. Intel earnings were slightly down compared to the same period last year.” from Computerworld News
Microsoft’s press release is here for folks who love to crunch through the details.
It’s as much about the links as the logs….
James R. Regan linked to my Social Software on Meatball Wiki link. Thanks, James. He, in turn, had an interesting article on “Blogs, dialogue and identity building” from Lilia Efimova’s site, which in turn leads to the KM Wiki and to Ton Zijlstra’s Inter Thoughts. While I was at it, there were interesting side trips to WikiWebPIM, the IAWiki with this great picture of Post_Web Information System Design and Tim O’Reilly and Adam Turoff having a great conversation on developer communities for Open and Closed Source projects.
Obviously, a lot of time and effort has gone into the discussion of “What are blogs?” and “How do they help things?” and “What’s The Next Big Thing?”
While blogs may serve, in the day-to-day chronological sense, as a dialogue between peers, a discussion group, the ability to archive them turns them into a knowledge base, although one difficult to search and navigate. A reader can follow, days, weeks or months later, a conversation that may have gone back and forth, but they may step into the conversation in the middle, or lose the final conclusion. A mechanism to summarize and group these related conversations together is needed. Relevance scoring is always welcomed.