Jon Allen made a beautiful new perldoc site. We are hosting it at perl.org so there's little chance this one will mystically go away.
Check out the clever dhtml bookmark / label feature on the right side of the page.
(it used to be at perldoc.perldrunks.org, but it was starting to use too much bandwidth so Jon asked us if we could give it a more permanent home. A permanent perldoc site being long on our todo/wishlist we were happy to help!)
Yesterday Ken and Jeremy sent me an invite to Yahoo 360 within a couple of minutes of each other (thanks!). So now I have a blog entry over there ranting about their system. Oh, notice the URL. Why not use http://360.yahoo.com/askbjoernhansen/blog/2005/03/30/something? They need to read Cool URIs don't change for inspiration over there.
Send me an email or leave a comment with your email address here if you'd like an invitation to try it out. Don't want to bother sending out invites anymore, thank you. If you really want an invitation to the site, paypal me $5 or something like that to show proof of your interest.
Apple hired someone who used to work for the XBox Live subscription service, so AppleInsider are speculating that Apple is considering a subscription model for the iTunes music store.
I think it's more likely she's working on the Apple iFlix DVD subscription service (Codename "Celluloid"). With the DVD subscription service you "rent" movies in H.264 format (Apple FAQ, Wikipedia) via an iTunes like program and play them on your Mac Mini in your living room.
You can have 4 movies "out" at the same time. Or 5, I don't know. Or maybe a lower number would still be attractive because the subscription client (iFlix) could download the next movie in your queue in advance but only activate it when you have disabled/deleted one of the previous movies so you'd have no waiting time.
Maybe the pre-seeding happens via the BitTorrent protocol. You can disable it, but then you won't get the movies downloaded in advance. Or maybe not. The pre-seeding can happen at night or some such making the bandwidth potentially cheaper. And DRM would get more complicated.
Will the next revision of the Mac Mini have a S-Video out or will Apple just wait for everyone to have a DVI compatible viewing device (ie a projector or HD TV)?
Curtis Poe got his credit cards stolen:
This morning, I found out that thousands of dollars of charges had been made on two of my credit cards in the past two days. Now, the identity thieves are sitting in jail. This is how it happened. It involves identity theft, a careless thief, one pissed-off Ovid and lots of luck.
Awesome!
The friendly UPS guy dropped off a Soekris 4801 today. I haven't had time to even plug it in, but I'm hoping I'll get FreeBSD installed on it over the weekend. It's amazing to think how this tiny completely silent box is vastly more powerful than the big noisy computer I used to run my BBS on. 128MB ram! I was happy to have 16MB for OS/2.
One surprise was that the standard case they sell really is that funky green color from the pictures. It's roughly the same color they use as the background on the site. I thought the pictures were just taken with a really sloppy white balance setting. I'll have to buy my first spray paint can soon. :-)
I want to build a router/ethernet bridge to the DSL connection to manage the bandwidth better. In particular making sure interactive connections (ssh and VoIP) doesn't get to suck when we download something.
Getting it reminded me of another latent project: Build a startum-1 NTP server! For that I'd need a Soekris box (maybe the same, maybe a 4501 -- they're ~$180 including the case!), a GSync/T and a low profile RS-422 PCI card (I could save that but it'd restrict the cable lengths from the GPS antenna to the Soekris). Thanks to phk for pointing me to the GSync/T and the little RS422 card last year (had to dig through my email archives to find the RS-422 card again).
I don't really understand if I'd also need a Rubidium frequency standard or if that'd just help to add a few nanoseconds to the precision.
I'm sure I can dream up a reason for having a stratum-1 time source at home if I sleep on it. The truth is, of course, that it's just a case of technology for its own sake. But I wouldn't have to admit that if I could just dream up some reason ...
In completely unrelated news we went skiing (and snowboarding) last Saturday (it was raining; the risk/pleasure of skiing in Southern California I suppose) and it's only today I can't feel it in my legs anymore. Hopefully we'll make it to Mammoth for a weekend again before the season is over...
Jamie Zawinski points out that the time will soon be 1111111111.
I know it's goofy to get excited about this sort of thing, but here I am.
I have this running in a terminal window now to try catching a glimpse of the big moment second.
perl -we '$|=1; use Time::HiRes qw(sleep);
while (1) { $t = time; $l = 1111111111 - $t;
print scalar localtime($t), " ($l) - ", $t, "\r";
sleep 0.25 } 'We made a Powered by Perl button with the new Perl logo some time ago.
This is the only version of the onion that you are allowed to use and it must link to www.perl.org.
<a href="http://www.perl.org/">
<img src="http://i.perl.org/powered/perlpowered.png"
border="0" width="134" height="48"></a>The Onion is a trademark of the Perl Foundation (like O'Reilly owns the camel). In the not too far future there will be usage and trademark information page for the onion logo at perl.org or the TPF site. But, at least until then - no using the onion logo for your Perl Monger group. Or anything else. Only use the "powered by Perl" button, please. :-)
Copy the .png to your own server, or use image on the i.perl.org server.
Wrrooom, wrrrom. A couple of years ago Volkswagen showed their Concept R (higher resolution pictures) at an autoshow. VW Vortex says that they are going to build it. And that it's going to be cheap. They are talking about competing with the Mazda Miata.
The Porsche 911 got nice round headlights again instead of the oval blobs and is just amazingly beautiful. I like the look of the VW until I see a picture of the 911. I can't imagine spending ~30 PowerBooks worth of money on a car though.
