Wednesday, January 30, 2002

[Hack the Planet] Chris Rapier from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has discovered that Kazaa traffic volume is much more volatile than Web traffic. I suspect that this could be because there isn't enough Kazaa traffic for the law of large numbers to smooth things out. Except... Joe St. Sauver of the University of Oregon showed that Kazaa is about 25% of Internet2 traffic, making it the largest application. He thinks the lack of traffic diversity could cause problems. He has some advice for people configuring traffic shapers. 10:45:09 PM

Java Native Compilation Examined [Slashdot] 10:41:15 PM

JavaScript XML parser updated (NewsForge) [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 10:38:48 PM

Skipping Dot Net: Open Source Databases Linkfest.   Actually, there are several good "linkfests":  Jabber, RSS, Weblogging, and Extreme Programming. 10:14:01 PM

[diveintomark] Mark had pointers to another blogging package (Greymatter - runs on Apache/Perl) and a hosting service he liked (CornerHost.com - also provides a CVS server and Tomcat if you want).  He had to ad RSS support on his own tho (here). 9:51:21 PM

[Hack the Planet] Fred von Lohmann: Threat to P2P: MediaSignature. and to think, at a past employer, we had a product like this partially built about three years ago. I hear from a friend who studied acoustic signal processing that matching the song probably by the acoustic fingerprint probably wouldn't be that hard... 4:26:55 PM

A series of articles at Ars Technica on Mac OS X, which I hear is good, if somewhat critical. I still sorta can't believe that the Macntosh has a full Unix environment hidden underneath it. 2:44:43 PM

The Motley Fool had an interesting posting on .NET, Web Services, and Apple. The gist is .NET is interesting to corporate developers who write VB. And that makes it interesting to everyone else. But, the technology, in and of itself, isn't that interesting. On the consumer side, Apple already has full Web Service support built into the OS and exposed via AppleScript in most applications. Not sure I buy that you can totally seperate the two markets as this guy asserts. 12:59:33 PM

[Slashdot] The SEC and Fake Investment Sites interesting idea. not sure how effective it will be. i guess every little bit helps 12:50:07 PM

[Slashdot] Sony Announces Version 1.0 Of Linux for Playstation 2 8:15:33 AM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] K-Logs in action.  Looks like Paolo is building feed directories and key word aggregators for his employees at eVectors who are using Radio.  Nice.  Notice the use of category-based publishing with Radio that enables users to create project or customer specific knowledge streams.  Also note the "lighter side feed" for employees to have a little fun.  As a new employee it would take all of a couple of hours to find, read, and subscribe to the category specific K-Logs that related to the projects I would be working on.  No time spent casting about looking for information, points of view, documents, e-mails, etc on those projects.  Wow!  Real ROI out of the box.  I should probably do some calculations on this. 8:09:31 AM

[Slashdot] The Amazing $5k Terabyte Array  The posting talks about how you can now store *everything*.   True enough.   So much software has been written to conserve and manage disk space.  It'll be interesting to see the new forms these packages take when people take another look the right way to solve those problems now that disk space in abundant and cheap. 8:07:48 AM

[ZDNet Tech News] IBM: Linux is paying off. At LinuxWorld, Bill Zeitler, head of the server group, says the $1 billion IBM invested in Linux last year has already been recouped through increased sales and services. New software, hardware and open source news. A ZDNet I think IBM is one of the few old time companies to realize that RMS was mostly right -- software is mostly a service.   So, if you're in the software service business (or if you sell hardware), Open Source is an incredible boon.    It lowers the bar for them and their customers and broadens their market.   Whatever IBM has given away to projects (Linux, Apache) and standards (Java, XML), they have easily recouped in opportunities, image, and industry mindshare. 8:00:38 AM