Related link: https://news.com.com/2100-1017-848353.html

The Yankee Group discards dotcom-era buzzwords for its business units: New E-conomy Planning Service becomes Telecommunications Strategies. According to Yankee Group analyst Harry Tse: “Some of the names were kind of stupid.”

Related link: https://www.raelity.org/computers/internet/weblogs/blosxom/

Blosxom [pronounced “blossom” or “blogsome”] is a lightweight (to say the least — it’s <30 lines of code) Weblog-in-a-jiffy Perl CGI script for (but in no way limited to) Mac OS X. Blosxom simply nabs text documents (written in your text editor of choice) from a particular directory and displays them (in reverse chronological order) as a Weblog. Simplistic — but a potentially useful spot of fun nevertheless.

Related link: https://toolbar.google.com/dc/faq_dc.html

If you’ve got Google’s Toolbar installed in Internet Explorer, they’ve added a wonderful new feature: distributed computing. From their FAQ:

“By turning on this feature, you allow your computer to work on complex scientific problems when it would otherwise be idle. The work it does is automatically sent via the Internet to researchers who combine it with information sent by thousands of other users.

The first beneficiary of this effort is Folding@home, a non-profit research project at Stanford University that is trying to understand the structure of proteins so they can develop better treatments for a number of illnesses.”

Related link: https://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,50688,00.html

The iPod is Apple’s 5 Gig portable hard drive that connects easily to the digital hub. This Wired story describes how it is being used to steal software. According to the story, a kid walks into a CompUSA store in Dallas, plugs his iPod into a floor model Mac and downloads Office X.

Related link: https://developer.apple.com/techpubs/java/ReleaseNotes/java131update1/

Apple has released an update to Java 1.3.1 via their Software Update application. The download notes say:

“This update delivers improvements for text, mouse, and printing components in the Java 1.3.1 implementation for Mac OS X, and improves its overall stability and compatibility.

Many printing issues have been resolved including multi-page printing and clipping issues.”

Check out the URL for more information.

Related link: https://www.macslash.com/Interview/02/02/24/1817215.shtml

David Pogue, NYT tech columnist and author of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, responds to MacSlash readers’ questions.

It’s that time again. Time to go to Software Update and download the latest and greatest set of bug fixes for Mac OS X. There’s more support for CD burners and digital cameras, a new version of OpenSSH, and much more.

Other improvements:

• SSL Encryption suport for Mail
• WebDAV support for Digest Auth
• LDAP improvements
• iTunes full screen visualizer improvments
• PowerBook mirroring on by default
• DVD playback on external VGA displays on Titanium PowerBooks

As always, if you find a problem file it at https://bugreport.apple.com/.

What’s been your experience with 10.1.3?

Related link: https://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/index.html

“The authors conducted an exhaustive empirical study, with the aid of custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques, in order to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. For example, certain numbers, such as 212, 486, 911, 1040, 1492, 1776, 68040, or 90210, occur more frequently than their neighbors because they are used to denominate the phone numbers, tax forms, computer chips, famous dates, or television programs that figure prominently in our culture.”

Related link: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22274

For quite a long time now, an innocent little Bugzilla entry entitled “[INLINE] Too much space (for descenders) under image elements” has given a lot of people grief (myself included). Ranging from “IE does it right” to “don’t use this DOCTYPE” to “read up on CSS, mofo!”, it recently reached more than 130 comments, most of which are duplicated bug reports. A well-written explanation of this potentially far-ranging issue was recently released over at Netscape’s Developer site.

Have you run across this in your own development? Have you worked around it, or redesigned and rethought your pages?

Related link: https://arstechnica.com/paedia/n/net/net-1.html

Ars Technica rolls up its sleeves and delves into the nitty-gritty of .NET.

Related link: https://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1584

AnandTech takes a gander at Intel, from the inside out. “This article won?t cover any NDA information, it won?t reveal secrets about Intel?s roadmaps for 2002, rather it will serve as a bit of insight into how Intel operates at the engineering level.”

Related link: https://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/14/1545246

In case you missed yesterdays cornucopia of .NET news, articles, and releases.

Related link: https://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/relnotes.html

Sun has released version 1.4 of the Java 2 SDK, sporting some much needed built-ins among its new features and enhancements, including XML (DOM, SAX2, XSLT) and java.util.regex (list reflects an unabashed Perl/Python POV). /. has, of course, much discussion.

Related link: https://news.com.com/2100-1001-836322.html

Kodak files a patent-infringement suit against Sun over object technologies underlying Java. This has evidently been going on quietly for some time, but the two parties have not managed to come to any agreement on licensing. News.com has the story (what there is of it) and pionters to the appropriate Kodak patents.

David Anderson of SETI@Home and United Devices and John Kubiatowicz of OceanStore propose an Internet-scale operating system (ISOS).

Vision: “Mary’s computers are moonlighting for other people. . . . Mary earns a little cash, her files are backed up, and she gets to watch an indie film. All this could happen with an Internet-scale operating system (ISOS) to provide the necessary “glue” to link the processing and storage capabilities of millions of independent computers.”

Architecture: Anderson and Kubatowicz advocate a government- or consortium- funded and run centralized core OS for allocation, scheduling, accounting, and process distribution. ISOS clients running on end-user machines manage availability, usage, and job processing.

The Scientific American article, “The Worldwide Computer,” provides a nice P2P overview for the uninitiated and a modicum of grist for ongoing Internet Operating System conversations.

Related link: https://www.groove.net/extras/vsnet/?tip=dev

Groove Networks announces support for Windows Forms and a Groove Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET affording Windows developers a hook into the Groove distributed platform. The PDF white paper includes a soup-to-nuts programming preview.

Related link: https://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/02/11/020211opcurve.xml

“Lotus may still command respect and worldwide market share, but the IBM subsidiary no longer captures the high ground for innovation mind share. . . . The Lotus brand has slowly faded into the blue during the past few years.” Steve Gillmor ’s “Ahead of the Curve” examines the accelerating disappearance of Lotus, their slow acceptance of P2P and Web Services, and the general P2P state of mind at Microsoft, Sun, and IBM/Lotus.

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons intends to produce “flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work.” SF Gate Tech has the in-depth story.

Both Lawrence Lessig and Molly Van Houweling, Executive Director of Creative Commons, will be participating in the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, May 13-16, 2002 in Santa Clara, CA.

• “Creative Commons: Using and Sharing Emerging Technologies to Enrich the
  Public Domain”, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling and Lisa Rein.
• “The Future of Ideas”, Lawrence Lessig, Carl Malamud, Tim O’Reilly, Dr. David P. Reed

Related link: https://www.google.com/programming-contest/

I’ve always hated the term “first annual” — it implies that this thing we are trying for the first time will be repeated each year. Never-the-less, take a look at Google’s “first annual” programming contest. Forget about the potential prize if you win; you get an opportunity to play with up to 900,000 pre-parsed web pages along with a ripper provided by Google. Have an idea for an application that would do something interesting with all that data? You might want to enter. The deadline is April 30th — the link leads you to more info.

Code can be written in Java, Python, or C++. I’m thinking the winner will probably be a Java developer working on a TiBook. Those people tend to “Think Different”ly in cool ways.

I didn’t get it at first. Last month at MacWorld SF the new iMacs were unveiled. Derrick Story got one of the first pictures as he, Terminal guru Chris Stone, and I played with the new machines. Our first impressions were contained in the O’Reilly keynote write up’s hardware section. But I still didn’t get it. Check out the picture in the article and maybe you’ll see what I didn’t.

Let’s start with the extra USB port. The new iMac has three USB ports where the old iMac had two. Before you make plans to attach your devices to this digital hub, consider plugging in a second keyboard. “Aha, ” you say, “I’m beginning to see.”You could run the iMac with two keyboards and a pair of matching mice.

That’s where the size of the iMac begins to matter. It’s tiny. It’s been described as the size of half a melon. It’s smaller than you think. My brother’s first impression of it was “it’s nice, does the rest of it go under your desk?” There is no rest of it. That’s all of it. Two people sitting together at a desk each with their own keyboards and mice and nothing under the desk to get in their way. You don’t have to sit awkwardly to avoid the bulky CPU that’s where your knee wants to be.

Oh, and then there’s the screen panel. If you want to see how many columnists just copied down everything that Steve Jobs said and reported it as their own impressions, check how many articles reported the screen as “floating”. (In a long lost weblog Rene DesCartes asserts “I blog, therefore I digress…”) The screen doesn’t float but moves to just where you need it. It could even be adjusted to work for two programmers sitting side by side. The one typing can budge the screen easily in one direction and then the other programmer can slide it back the other way when the turns switch.

Those unfamiliar with Extreme Programming may wonder what all of this has to do with XP. First, let’s get one thing straight — long before Microsoft decided to co-opt XP to stand for their operating system, Extreme Programming has been using XP as the short hand for their methodology. Ron Jeffries holds the rights on the XP logo that predates the MS release. I was teaching a seminar on XP at a local University when MS made the announcement of their choice of name. So if a Windows user types XP into a search engine and comes across a headline that leads them to believe their beloved OS runs on a Mac …

One of the practices of XP is pair programming. The new iMac is made for pair programming. The other thing that Apple did, however, was put a G4 into the new iMacs. This means that iMacs will have the power you need to do your development. You can network several together and perhaps purchase a dual 1 GHz machine as your integration machine and you’ve got a great XP workshop.

Buy enough memory ,install your favorite IDE and be productive. As for other XP practices, many of the IDEs are beginning to support refactoring. The Mac comes with CVS so you can easily support continuous integration. JUnit works great on the Mac so test first is covered. You can automate your builds with Ant. Now I get it.