Archive | October, 2003

Final Matrix Set for Synchronous Release [Slashdot]

An analysis by Perseus
Development Corporation says that blogs are abandoned at a very high
rate, not surprising for free services. Like many free, cool internet
things, folks with free time, little cash and curiosity (teenagers) are
the primary users — the scouts of what will be cool later, risking the
equivalent later embarassments of polyester leisure suits. I wouldn’t
be surprised if there are similar statistics for free mail servers,
too. Unsurprisingly, Andrew Orlowski of the Register paints this in the
worst light possible.
It’s an amusing read, if you don’t mind reading slanted, biased and
bitter opinion mixed with the news. He writes well, at least.

My bad, partially. I called the FoxCentral.Net RSS feed as broken. In
fact, it seems to work fine in Internet Explorer, just not in Mozilla.
The line in question is:

<table border="1" style="border-collapse:collapse" bgcolor="#FF0000">
<tr>
<td style="color:white;font-weight:bold;font-size:8pt;cursor:hand" 
onclick="window.navigate('foxcentralRssFeed.fc')">RSS</td>
</tr>
</table>

where it is depending on the window.navigate function. Don’t know why they just don’t make it an anchor tag.

The link for the RSS feed is http://www.foxcentral.net/foxcentralRssFeed.fc if you want to access it directly. The authors will still need to do a little tweaking to get a feed that validates in FeedValidator though the Radio validator thinks it’s okay.

Congratulations to FoxCentral.Net at announcing their new RSS feed.
However, while the authors created the button, the link is not yet
active. I hope they also consider RSS auto-discovery, which will make it far easier for automated search engine bots to discover and register the RSS feed. Here’s the announcement:
“FoxCentral.Net available as RSS feed.
FoxCentral.Net can now be loaded into any RSS compliant news feed
reader. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is becoming a standard format for
Web sites to publish their content using a common simple XML format
that can be aggregated easily in various news feed readers. To access
the RSS feed, visit the FoxCentral.Net site and click on the RSS link
in the sitebar. You can use this URL with any RSS news aggregator. [FoxCentral]”

Some cool hardware. Definitely a candidate for the next home office upgrade…
Linksys Ships VPN Server.
“Linksys ships the WRV54G, which offers up to 50 VPN connections in an
office: This $230 device could replace much more expensive equipment
for managing VPNs. It handles just the IPsec-over-L2TP method, as far
as I can figure out from the extremely detailed user manual. It looks
like just the ticket for an office that needs robust security without
the complexity of managing a high-end server. This could transform the
cost and politics of VPNs….” [Wi-Fi Networking News]

A follow-up on the posting from last week: Geer Comments On Firing From @Stake. A great quote:

But Geer isn’t convinced. The company said Geer’s last day as an
employee was Tuesday, but the announcement wasn’t made until Thursday,
the day after the paper was published. Geer went on a conference call
with reporters Wednesday morning and identified himself as an @stake
employee and added that the opinions in the paper were his own and not
the company’s.

“The Venn diagram of facts doesn’t intersect. The intersection of all of those statements is the null set,” Geer said.

From Slashdot