Sunbeams, Rare Goats Edition

Grok Headline matches for Sunbeams, Rare Goats Edition

Sunbeams, Bow Wow Wow Edition

Sunbeams, Bow Wow Wow Edition 09/05/2004 11:35 AM
Starting on a serious note: Onno Kluyt runs the Java Community Process, which makes him a VIP, and he’s got a pointer to its scholarship program; this is how you go about getting the seal of approval on your software if you’re a non-profit or an OSS hacker who can’t afford the regular process designed for organizations like IBM and BEA. Check out the recipients. Next, Dave Johnson, who qualifies because he’s about to start working here, wrote a nice picture/analysis of the inside of Rome. With Rome and the Pilgrim Universal Feed Parser, the world has two full-function general-purpose syndication feed wranglers. How many do we need? Hopping over to the other side of the world, Chandan has a neat little piece on pricing in India; if you read to the bottom you’ll find a nastily amusing picture. Tor Norbye asks an obvious question: what is the caps-lock key for and why don’t we just get rid of it? In the eye-candy department Willys Ingersoll posted some remarkable pictures of Shanghai. Will Snow, who’s always worth reading, has a scary story about how to get yourself in big trouble real fast by shifting sun.com infrastructure. In the warm-glow department, check out ML Starkey on working the holiday weekend. And finally... well, this is a little weird, and we all know what they say about what nobody knows on the Internet, but apparently one of our Sun bloggers is a dog.

Sunbeams, Pink Edition

Sunbeams, Pink Edition 07/23/2004 06:16 PM
Mostly nontechnical today, so let’s do the geeky stuff first: Chet Haase talks up ImageIO and he’s right, it’s coolio, I’ve used it too. Greg Reimer draws a persuasive analogy between conspiracy theories and Internet Worms. Then, Chris Calkins gives us an almost-all-pin k day including a huge picture of a terrific flower; definitely my kind of stuff. Jason Schroeder has a wonderful I-hate-airlines rant, every frequent traveler in the world will be saying “Amen!” And to end the week on a light note, here’s a posting reproduced without permission from the Sun internal Mac Users mailing list: “And it came to pass in those days that they did iPodify their bimmers, yea even unto the those of them that had already more toys than they knew what do to with...” I mean, if iPodifying bimmers isn't a sign of the End Times, well, I just don't know what is.

Sunbeams, Father’s Day Edition

Sunbeams, Father’s Day Edition 06/21/2004 02:31 AM
A few days back, Jim Dillon pointed out that on the face of it, Google and its ilk are violating the spirit of the GPL. Obvious once you read it. Man-Ching Wong is griping too, but in a mild way about pulling a customer-support shift on the weekend. It’s obvious that a company like Sun must have a ton of people like MC, but this is the first exposure I’ve had, it’s a different world. On the Solaris front, we have Eric Schrock showing cool Solaris tricks that I would have killed for back in my integration-geek days; how the hell do they do that? Then you might’ve heard something about Solaris and Open Source? On that subject Andy Tucker is da man (well, one of ’em anyhow) and he’s wrestling with what Solaris OSS means, don’t miss it. Finally, Norm Walsh has a lovely photo-essay; and if the pictures aren’t enough for you, start poking around a little bit in Norm’s site and read how he does it, maybe you think you’ve ever done deep metadata? Norm’s way ahead of you.

Sunbeams, Transylvanian Edition

Sunbeams, Transylvanian Edition 08/10/2004 12:25 PM
Our own Bryan Cantrill, world’s most enthusiastic kernel engineer, shares one of the world’s most sickening sensations—a live demo that goes bad—and still manages to be funny. Janos Cserep gives us a Transylvanian travelogue, with lots of colour and some decent pictures too. While in Europe, Daniel Templeton has been running first-rate series of posts on the subject of Germany from the viewpoint of an American expat. Torrey McMahon has some offensive imagery in the context of cheesy seventies glam-rock, what’s not to like. Finally, Dan Baigent reports a story that caused quite an internal stir; some ignorant blogger writing up LinuxWorld 2004 and claimed that the Sun booth was full of Windows boxes. (What actually happened was that someone was fooled by all the Linux and Solaris boxes running JDS, which from a distance does look quite a bit like Windows.) Dan’s take is light-hearted, but you should see the internal mailing lists. If you really want to get a bunch of our engineering Linux and Solaris geeks mad, accuse them of running Windows.

Sunbeams, Trash Talk Edition

Sunbeams, Trash Talk Edition 06/21/2004 08:24 PM
Yow, DME cranked up the numbers at Planet Sun, so I got kind of buried when I went by there this morning; he’s got some interesting stats. Let’s open with a nasty political joke (the best kind). New today, a couple of Javaphone geeks speak up: Jeff Solof on the ultracoolness of Voice Connect and Hinkmond Wong on wireless snitching. For a side trip into philosophy, M. Mortazavi talks up Dreyfus’ On the Internet and makes it sound like a must-read. Finally, I hate it when life online veers into nastiness about personalities and politics and that kind of stuff, but hey, engineers are competitive, and I have no problem with a little my-tech-is-better-than-yours; so in this corner we have Eric Schrock seriously dissing Linux troubleshooting capabilities. I’m sure there’ll be someone in the other corner before too long.

Sunbeams: Treasure from Boiled Liquid
Edition

Sunbeams: Treasure from Boiled Liquid
Edition 06/24/2004 02:53 AM
Let’s start with Phillip Wagstrom’s deb ut: If you've got something with a Sun logo on it that's not working right, you call me; once again, a window into a world I don’t know. Moving on, David Ogren gives us tasty little bite of blog-propaganda. Jon Haslam shows us how to use the incredibly-advanced features of Solaris to torture tcsh users, but then spoils it by admitting to being a miserably-deluded ksh devotee (Everybody Knows bash is the One True Shell). On the lighter side, Steve Lau calculates the cost of commuting, and Henry Jia survives some tests including “pass through electric grid” and “get treasure from boiled liquid”—with these guys on our side, how can we lose? To end on a serious note, Simon Phipps points to a remarkably beautiful video (watch it more than once) and Alec Muffet reflects on, well, life and how to live it.

Sunbeams: Writhing Like a Vast, Salted
Slug Edition

Sunbeams: Writhing Like a Vast, Salted
Slug Edition 06/26/2004 05:44 PM
[Editorial note: I’ve gotten a bit of pushback on Sunbeams, from a prominent journalist and my Mom among others. Fair enough, I think the Sunbloggin’ ecosystem has had the necessary leg up. However, I am (for the nonce) still reading them all, and there is some good stuff there, so for the next little while I’ll do a Sunbeams once each weekend. Jeepers, I just looked, there are now 355 accounts on blogs.sun.com.] On the musical front, the Welblogger has a piece on The Arlenes which includes a pointer to a beautiful MP3, and Warren Strange saw The Hip in a small club in Calgary (I’m green with envy). The greimblog useful ly contrasts two categories of religiosos, JXnuts and XCnuts (he compares the Web to the slug in the title). Will Snow, who runs sun.com, gives us a slice of life leading up to Java One. Edward Tufte is one of my intellectual heroes, and this week both Ric hard Kenyon and Martin Hardee have Tuftean outings, the latter with a priceless direct quote that I’d never heard before. Finally, Norm Walsh gives us the lighter side of standards-committee meetings: “What we need are anti-namespace nodes.”

Rare Edition of 'Hamlet' to Be Auctioned
(AP)

Rare Edition of 'Hamlet' to Be Auctioned
(AP) 04/13/2004 05:09 PM
AP - A rare edition of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" could fetch well over $1 million when it is auctioned at Christie's in New York.

What's So Great About Goats Anyway? or
More Goats for K5

What's So Great About Goats Anyway? or
More Goats for K5 04/02/2005 11:03 PM
Goats are wonderful animals, not least because of their close alliance with Satan, all-powerful Lord of Darkness to whom we give all obeisance. With their amazing horns, fantastic hooves and spectacular goatees, goats really are strong contenders for being the greatest animals ever. Want a farmyard pet that butts into things? Get a goat. Want an animal reputed to eat tins though it probably doesn't really? Get a goat. Want an animal that bleats like a sheep yet knows its own mind? A goat is your ally, my friend, just like it is Satan's ally in all things. Within I have collected some of the foremost examples of goat-related pages from around the web, as well as some marvellous pictures of these truly awesome and delightful creatures in various attitudes of repose or non-repose. What more could you ask for?

CNN.com - Dilemma as rare birds devour
rare fish - Nov. 13, 2003

CNN.com - Dilemma as rare birds devour
rare fish - Nov. 13, 2003 11/15/2003 03:28 PM

Sunbeams

Sunbeams 07/06/2004 08:23 PM
Well, I said once a week, and it’s been longer than that, but we’ve all been busy. To start on a cheerful note, here’s Jeff Solof on child sacrifice and theological page-turners (really). Staying nontechnical, Josh Simons writes about rare digital books, which will get any bibliophile’s heart pounding; Geoff Arnold points us at an amusing note from Neil Gaiman and adds a chuckle to it. Moving to technology, Br yan Cantrill worries about keeping Usenix relevant. And last week, one big news story was the open-sourcing of Java3D. I am one of the few living humans to have actually shipped a working J3D app, so this turns my crank a bit, if you need 3D I doubt there’s a smoother API in the world for it; check it out. I’m going to have to go revive my Pseudobabyloniana project, should be a snap to move it from Perl to J3D.

Get more Goats

Get more Goats 05/21/2004 02:14 PM
If you were reading this blog earlier this year you may recall my recently kindled enthusiasm for the music of The Mountain Goats. This enthusiasm has not waned as I have explored the back catalog of this "band" of (mostly) one. It has, if anything, waxed.

As I wrote about my delight in this discovery I uncovered the existence of kindred spirits here at Salon, including our jack-of-all-trades editorial operations director Max Garrone, who swears by "The Coroner's Gambit," and our Renaissance-man IT support manager, Jim Fisher.

Perhaps you've read some of Jim's in-depth reportin g for Salon on technology and the environment, or some of his great poems that we've published. (I'm not the only one who thinks highly of his work; he has recently won a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.)

Anyway, I learned that last year Jim had written an in-depth critical essay on the music and lyrics of the Mountain Goats and John Darnielle. For various reasons the essay never got published in Salon. It is perhaps of more interest to those already hooked on this work than those not yet familiar with it. But the piece deserves a home on the Web, so I've published it in this blogspace, here.

Jim's piece was written months ago, at the time of the Mountain Goats' release of "Tallahassee." Earlier this year saw the release of "We Shall All Be Healed." I'm not sure Jim agrees with me on this, but I think that album fulfills the prediction at the end of his essay of an "all-studio masterpiece" from this artist, much of whose previous work was recorded direct-to-boombox.

Sunbeams, June 10

Sunbeams, June 10 06/10/2004 01:14 PM
I’ve subscribed the aggregated feed over at Planet Sun, mostly in curiosity at how this experiment turns out. Since we’re now somewhere around 300 contributors and growing fast, I won’t be able to keep up down the road; but at the moment I do see a lot of interesting stuff go by, and what I’ll do is aggregate the bits that catch my eye every little while here under the label Sunbeams. Today’s take includes Moazam Raja on Omniscient Debugging (I’ve subscribed to Moazam separately, he’s essential), Hung-Sheng Tsao on all sorts of geeky sysadmin stuff, Frank Lagorio’s scorching smackdown of marketing in Sarbanes-Oxley space, Ron Ten-Hove on JBI (the programmer’s-eye view into Web Services), Josh Simons’ adorable albino squirrel (I’m not kidding, check it out), and finally MCWong’s must-read guide to Kopi in Singapore.

Sunbeams, June 13

Sunbeams, June 13 06/14/2004 12:26 AM
Herewith the latest harvest from the Sunbloggin’ posse: John Clingan is on a bit of a roll; his top quote questions the whole “technology analyst” ballgame, and second from the top, he washes some dirty Sun laundry in public (who says we don’t let it all hang out?). Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart does some basic consciousness-raising about J2EE and Application Servers. And Martin Hardee writes about the horrendous difficulty of keeping something like Sun.com organized and (ideally) useful; that’s a problem I wouldn’t be brave enough to anywhere near.

Sunbeams, June 16

Sunbeams, June 16 06/17/2004 03:48 AM
Simon Phipps’ FISL: In Translation is an elegant argument for expanding your language repertoire and your mind; Richard Giles has one nifty little piece about bass vibrato and Google and another on how his new self-publishing podium has opened some doors for him. Ron Ten-Hove gives us a small, densely-written essay about metadata in the Web Services context. Brian Cantrill’s remarkab le opening outing dives deep, with a metaphorical side-trip through cerebral malaria, into dtrace, which is causing some heavy heartbeats among kernel-weenies. On a lighter note, our GNU Desktop Mechanic pens an ode to Bloomsday from Denver, Dave Edmondson gives his car an enterprise-clas s audio upgrade (you have to see this to believe it), and Scott Hudson takes home a Star Destroyer. (No, ongoing is not going to turn into BoingBoing, I miss writing the longer bits and will again, it’s just that between coding furiously on the Zeppelin and den-mothering the Sunblogfloggers well I’m busy.)

The Goats Who Ate Christmas

The Goats Who Ate Christmas 01/16/2004 10:58 AM
"Soon after the first goat, another goat came, then another -- and soon a stampede of goats, shaped like a boats prow, was aiming at and ultimately engulfing the houses. The all-seeing, Sauron-like Goat-Mind soon located all of the houses -- and we truly had swarms." (01-12)

Erhm...goats?

Erhm...goats? 12/09/2003 08:39 PM
Things I should be doing right now would include my Media Studies project. 4th period lunch sucks like ass unless...

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats 04/07/2005 10:17 PM
David Pescovitz: I just finished reading Jon Ronson's latest non-fiction book The Men Who Stare At Goats and it was brilliant, absurd, scary, deeply freaky, and lol funny. The cover of the book says it's a story "about what happened when a small group of men--highly placed within the United State military, the government, and the intelligence services--began believing in very strange things." Some of those odd beliefs include: psychic spying (aka "remote viewing"), Jedi powers, subliminal sound weapons, and the ability to kill an animal just by looking at it (hence the title). As demonstrated in his previous book, "Them: Adventures with Extremists," Ronson has an amazing talent for seeking out individuals on the fringes of reason and enchanting the reader with their (truthful?) tales of high weirdness. Forget any questionable conspiracy theories about the US military--the truth is far stranger. From the dust jacket:

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror. 'The men who stare at goats' reveals extraordinary - and very nutty - national secrets at the core of George W Bush's War on Terror.

Link

Man Charged With Torturing His Goats
(AP)

Man Charged With Torturing His Goats
(AP) 01/17/2004 10:48 PM
AP - A prominent Wisconsin goat farmer has been charged with animal cruelty for allegedly slicing open a conscious mother goat giving birth and helping burn a goat alive.

Sunbeams, in Simultaneous Arabic and
Hebrew

Sunbeams, in Simultaneous Arabic and
Hebrew 07/16/2004 05:19 PM
Let’s open with something heartwarming: the simultaneous launch of the Arabic and Hebrew OpenOffice localizations. On the technical front Val Henson introduces Crash-Only Software, another thing that’s obvious when you think about it, only I hadn’t. Ted Kim goes way deep on Infiniband, not omitting the politics. Alec Muffet, it turns out, is the father of “crack”, which has been a fixture in the security landscape as long as I can remember. Paul Lamere, who writes about computer speech, illustrates the problem with a charming and horrifying poem about English orthography. New face Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine deserves notice for his name alone, and his material is very promising. On a lighter note, while Sean Gallagher doesn’t work for Sun, the title of his article about us having sold JDS to Allied Irish Bank is just too good to pass up. Finally, I discovered Richard Friedman, and if you follow only one pointer out of today’s Sunbeams, go look at his pictures. Wow.

Helena to Lease Goats to Get Rid of
Weeds (AP)

Helena to Lease Goats to Get Rid of
Weeds (AP) 06/14/2004 01:05 PM
AP - This city is going decidedly low-tech get rid of its weed problem. Officials plan to spend $11,000 to lease 850 goats so they can eat the Dalmatian toadflax, leafy spurge and spotted knapweed that choke Mount Helena.

Nev. Town Enlists Goats to Eat Weeds
(AP)

Nev. Town Enlists Goats to Eat Weeds
(AP) 06/07/2004 05:42 PM
AP - More than 100 goats have been enlisted to eat their way around the northern Nevada mining town of Ruth to rid it of weeds.

Turning to goats to stop wildfires
(Reuters)

Turning to goats to stop wildfires
(Reuters) 06/24/2005 09:57 PM
Reuters - Move over Smokey the Bear. In California, thousands of goats are helping prevent wildfires.

Company euthanizes genetically modified
goats

Company euthanizes genetically modified
goats 11/19/2003 10:28 PM
USA Today Nov 19 2003 9:47PM ET

Sheep and goats turned into drug "mules"
(Reuters)

Sheep and goats turned into drug "mules"
(Reuters) 03/14/2005 06:13 PM
Reuters - Question: How do you turn a goat into a mule? Answer: Make it swallow several kilos of narcotics.

Yahoo stock test separates the sheep
from the goats

Yahoo stock test separates the sheep
from the goats 11/02/2003 07:33 AM
San Francisco Chronicle Nov 2 2003 6:43AM ET

RailPower and CSX Announce Hybrid
Locomotive Trial of Three Green Goats

RailPower and CSX Announce Hybrid
Locomotive Trial of Three Green Goats 01/22/2004 09:56 PM
BC Technology Jan 23 2004 2:13AM GMT

Commemorative Trilogy DVD Edition
Figures: ESB Edition

Commemorative Trilogy DVD Edition
Figures: ESB Edition 06/01/2004 12:03 PM
Pictures of the second Commemorative Trilogy DVD Collection set have surfaced, this time featuring Chewbacca, Princess Leia, and Han Solo from The Empire Strikes Back. Click here to check out this auction for more details.

A rare individual

A rare individual 02/11/2004 05:51 AM
You'll recall, I hope, that in the last issue I almost despaired of finding an answer to the problem of implementing identity projects over the irrational fears of non-technical, even technophobic, people. Most of the replies I'd gotten to the problem stressed the ability of the technology to protect data ownership as well as data security and privacy. We're all aware of that, but we still need to convince people in the enterprise that there is benefit to giving up control of the flow of data.

Rare for DS Nintendo

Rare for DS Nintendo 05/19/2004 01:22 PM
JANE PINCKARD -- UK developer Rare - which was purchased by Microsoft a couple years ago - has confirmed that it is developing at least two titles for the new Nintendo handheld. Nintendo fans of the old school variety (which these days means pre-N64 I suppose) will remember that bad-boy...

Rare Exports, Inc.

Rare Exports, Inc. 12/27/2003 11:24 AM

Finland exports more than just Nokia phones and this short film details the production of the most rare of Finnish exports. The large version [66mb] is worth the download if you have a highspeed connection. Yanks with a hang-up about naked male bums should likely refrain from watching this film. It's utterly delightful and narrated in English. [from PIE.]

Rare and Exclusive iTunes?

Rare and Exclusive iTunes? 05/12/2004 08:27 AM
This Wired article profiles Apple's efforts to bring out of print music onto the iTunes Music Store. The search for new songs/albums appears to be ...

Venus set for rare performance

Venus set for rare performance 06/07/2004 07:05 PM
globetechnology.com Jun 7 2004 10:34PM GMT

Rare Botany Books

Rare Botany Books 12/22/2003 07:50 AM
The Missouri Botanical Garden Library has scanned and posted 46 volumes of its rare book collection. 16,133 pages and 2,050 beautiful illustrations are currently available.
As an example, see this engraving of a foxglove by Pierre Vallet from 1608.

Rare 'Hamlet' to be auctioned

Rare 'Hamlet' to be auctioned 04/13/2004 06:24 PM

Md. School to Be Built Around Rare Toad
(AP)

Md. School to Be Built Around Rare Toad
(AP) 07/16/2004 08:24 PM
AP - It has a green snout, bleats like a sheep and is rarely seen in St. Mary's County. Despite its elusiveness, county planners have agreed to build an elementary school in a way that will accommodate the mating habits of the eastern narrow-mouthed toad that state naturalists say lives in the surrounding marshes.

IS 2004 provides rare insights for CIOs

IS 2004 provides rare insights for CIOs 07/30/2004 08:31 AM
Express Computer India Jul 30 2004 12:37PM GMT

Pollution damages rare UK plants

Pollution damages rare UK plants 04/19/2004 01:53 PM
One of the UK's most vulnerable plant families, the stoneworts, are at risk from pollution caused by high levels of nutrients.

Breeding success for rare kakapo

Breeding success for rare kakapo 03/26/2005 01:21 PM
Volunteers looking after one of the world's most endangered birds are celebrating some new chicks.
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Sunbeams, Rare Goats Edition

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