The Blog




Distinctly strange story. DMCA Declares Serial Cables Illegal? I've recently had an interesting run-in with the DMCA... apparently, US Customs has rejected entry of a PCSega Dreamcast serial cable into the US, supposedly due to copyright violations. [thanks, kuro5hin.org]

Ars Technica: Microsoft .Net - Page 1 - (2/2002) : In a remarkable feat of journalistic sleight-of-hand, thousands of column inches in many "reputable" on-line publications have talked at length about .NET whilst remaining largely ignorant of its nature, purpose, and implementation. Ask what .NET is, and you'll receive a wide range of answers, few of them accurate, all of them conflicting. Confusion amongst the press is rampant.

No change there then.




What is Vista? A Universal IM client that also lets you play games (such as Chess), take part in cross IM protocol conferences (Some Jabber, MSM and ICQ users all talking to each other) and display RSS news. Interesting. And it supports Jabber.


If a customer support agent is uncomfortable giving me an off-script answer, send me to a "rogue agent" (Sarah's phrase), someone explicitly positioned as a source of creative ideas and information that may not work but that may get me out of my predicament. A rogue agent would be permitted to say things like, "Yeah, I heard about that problem once before, and I saw on a Web site that if you uncheck PPPoE it should work, which makes sense to me. On the other hand, there's a small chance it might fry your Linksys box, so don't come crying to me, ok?" Obviously, rogue agents should be patrolling the Internet, to learn and to teach. Sounds like a cool job to me. [thanks, JOHO the Blog]

That's a pretty good description of exactly what I do. Now will somebody please pay me for it! sad. But actually there's a lot of us on the net. It's the old net philosophy of helping others.

Wouldn't it be neat if when you installed an Instant messaging client, it would respond to web links that looked like this. jabber:jbond@myjabber.net by starting a chat session to the named target? Now I can fix the registry in MS Win to do this, but it needs to be global both for all IM clients and for all browsers/platforms/OSes. What would that take? It's just the sort of thing that the Jabber client dev community could start and promote.

I asked this question originally about MS Messenger. I was a bit surprised that there was no IE, MSM standard for doing this. It's the sort of thing that MS typically just starts doing. And after IM, what about things like Netmeeting, or VoIP. or whatever next month's must have client is going to be?

TeleSym : TeleSym's first product, SymPhone, delivers high-quality voice communications on Pocket PC mobile devices, such as the Compaq iPAQ, and 802.11b wireless IP networks. Who needs G3?

What is Six Degrees ?




Free E-Mail forwarding. There's just one catch. You can have whatever you want left of the @ sign (as long as it's not taken) but the domain name for your new identity will be fuckMicrosoft.com, fuckWindows.com, fuckWindows2000.com, fuckWindowsXP.com, windows-sucks.com, fuckBillGates.com, fuckBillGates.net or fuckBillGates.org Could come in handy when you need a Passport or MS Messenger name.

Laundry: A Quantum Mechanical Approach The story of the missing socks and excess lint.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/apparel/595d.shtml
SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue>0
0 rows returned.




Now here's one to make you think. Especially in light of the Mono project.

Halcyon Software, Inc. Announces InstantNET - iNET - .NET for Java : iNET includes an IL2JAVA converter, which generates Java class files or Java source code from the Microsoft .NET Intermediate Language (IL). iNET also provides a full Java implementation of the .NET class libraries that runs on all Java-enabled platforms

Heinz plans chocolate fries. [thanks, Sam Ruby] This should go down a storm in Glasgow. That'll be two deep fried Mars bars and chocolate fries to go. 




Simon Fell : Sam raises some good points on what its going to take to talk to .NET My Services, it uses SOAP, SOAP Headers, WS-Routing [aka SOAP-RP], doc/literal style requests, kerberos authentication, encryption and signing. It'll probably use DIME and DIME over TCP binding as well. This is so far ahead of getCurrrentTemperature and the average use of SOAP today, and the obvious response is going to be look at all the unneeded complexity, but its seems to me that you can't get away with much less, given the requirements.

MSDN Online - Messenger APIs. Hmm? Blogging instead of bookmarking?




Welcome to the Microsoft Corporate Web Site : Microsoft acquired Redhat
After months of secret negotiations, Microsoft finally acquired Redhat. In the coming months, Microsoft will be integrating the RedHat Linux distribution in its .NET environment. Core subsystems of Windows XP will be integrated in the new Linux.NET distribution. XFree will probably disappear as well, Microsoft has been secretly porting its own desktop environment to fit the upcoming Linux.NET. Sales will start in mid March. Current owners of RedHat Linux 7.2 and RedHat Linux Professional will receive a discount when upgrading.
heh-heh! If only... Doncha just love these hacked websites? happy

http://www.trustworthycomputing.com/. Inspired use of Google to find only 800 entries.

PBS-Cringely: Hi-speed wireless for tree-dwellers? [thanks, Robot Wisdom] Cringeley's at it again. Last time it was getting DSL from a neighbour down the valley via a couple of converted satellite dishes and 802.11b. This time he's up a tree on a mountainside zip tieing a back to back pair of yagi aeriels to the top of an oak tree. One points at an 802.11b service in downtown Santa Rosa, the other points at his house. 2Mb access bounced off a mountain!   




And here's Slashdot's take on all this. Rolling DSL and Wireless Access Out In One Swoop

Put these three blog entries together from Hack the Planet: |  MeshLAN ad-hoc routing software MeshNetworks is demonstrating its MeshLAN ad-hoc routing software for standard PCs with 802.11 cards | An ISP named Vista Broadband is offering Internet access using Nokia's Rooftop ad-hoc wireless system. | NetGear and D-Link are shipping relatively low-cost 802.11a equipment. This is a mind bombingly huge, disruptive technology.

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