Tuesday, 6 August 2002

The next step for email Spam is overwhelming Hotmail. 80 percent of the mail that makes it through Hotmail's spam-filters is spam. Link Discuss (via /.) [Boing Boing Blog] Is it just me that see's a certain amount of irony here? The other thing that is becoming blaringly obvious is that email is dying. I get much more spam than real email. The last time i saw something on the internet go that way it never really recovered. I think the real answer here is going to be an evolution in user interfaces of email clients. White list creation implied from user actions, for example. 7:29:25 PM

802.11b Retro 802.11b serial connectors. A California company is shipping a wireless RS232 serial-cable-replacement that runs over 802.11b. RS232 is the generic serial connector, the thing you connect to your burglar alarm or GPS with. Now you can control 'em from a distance of 1200 feet! Link Discuss (via Oblomovka) [Boing Boing Blog] I can imagine so many uses for this. Pity most of them are either stupid, or illegal. :> 7:20:22 PM

The bits are almost all in place Useit.Com: Making the Physical Environment Interactive. Soon, many more physical objects may become interactive, and they're likely to contain much more broadly defined and subtle user interfaces than the primitive toe squeezing that Interactive Barney pioneered. [Tomalak's Realm] I am hungering for a lego mindstorms style kit of this stuff with 802.11b connectivity so I can control it from my laptop. 7:16:50 PM

Pygame Pygame 1.5 released. Pygame is a set of PYTHON modules designed for writing games. It is written on top of the excellent SDL library. This allows you to create fully featured games and multimedia programs in the python language. The package is highly portable, with games running on Windows, NT4, MacOS, OSX, BeOS, FreeBSD, IRIX, and Linux. [Thierry's Corner] [dws.] Best thing to relax after a hard day of meetings? Hacking on your own RTS in pygame. It's fun. It's addictive. And it is piss easy to roll your own win32 binaries if you want to mail bomb friends. ;) 7:12:38 PM

Das Guru Yep :-). Truely it isn't that easy always (really?), particularly when you have a familiy. But look at this: In the chinese vocabulary the word for crisis and opportunity is the same. Nice or? That's true! While the others are blocked by their fear of loss one's livelihood you have always the opportunity to start something new. Should I become a guru? :-) [Gerhard Froehlich] Heh, we always need another guru-with-blog. It makes life more fun. :) 7:08:53 PM

View to Windward, part 2 A view to windward.. Brett Morgan thinks I'm overstating the case about programming moving off-shore. In fact I don't think you are over-stating the case. If anything, you are understating the case. When my dad started in the IT industry all the banks had buildings full of account clerks adding up your monthly bank balance. Most businesses didn't know what their end of year position was until half way through the next year. Shipping companies had no idea where your goods were. These days, there are no account clerks. Companies can close their books on a daily, or hourly basis. Shipping companies track objects with gps transmitters. The last decade changed the labor supply too. The number of highly skilled, multilingual programmers is growing offshore exponentially along with the capacity to train. The rate of fresh U.S. computer science grads is flat or falling. Bangalore demonstrates increased rigor in hiring, better tooling, and more attention to quality and best practices. Their pool is growing and getting better. You assume something here - that different countries IT pools are in some form of geo-political war. I have an interesting observation - I am an Ozzy located in Sydney. I was part of the outsourcing boom in Sydney when Silicon Valley couldn't cope. Yet I am as much a part of this community as you are. The real story here is that there is no geographic distinguishers anymore. That bit about the destruction of distance is true - I was sysadmining 6 e450's located in co-lo racks in San Hose from Sydney using ssh and vnc. Flight (shift into another line of work), Fight (become world class) or change the rules. [a klog apart] Flight? You can't, this is going to affect all industries. Change the rules? You can't, as anyone fighting this change will be routed around. Become World Class? Absolutly. 7:02:19 PM

XUL Apps XUL applications. Two words: XUL applications. Sure sound neat, but like I said, I don't trust myself with raw software right now. [markpasc.blog] This crashes my MozNightly. :/ I'll have to remember to retest with a newer nightly, and throw this in bugzilla if required. [Later...] Hey whaddya know. The newest nightly doesn't crash and burn. Woohoo. 6:42:17 PM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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