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I wanted to retrieve a local copy of my online XML course. I instructed the technical staff to serve the XHTML files as application/xml. I believe this was to work around the limitations of Internet Explorer. In any case, I stumbled upon a wget bug! Wget won’t process XHTML with the mime-type…
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Just bought a cheap Creative Labs Instant webcam. These things are supported by the spca5xx driver. To install the driver under gentoo, do: emerge spca5xx To see if your device is detected after connecting it up, do: lsusb You should see a line similar to this one: Bus 002 Device 006: ID 041e:4034…
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IBM UDDI Shut down
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Semantic Web Services Challenge 2006
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I have an old an dusty 3Com HomeConnect webcam. Until a few minutes ago, I thought it was dead. Not so! I plugged it in the USB port, and did lsusb and voilà : Bus 001 Device 019: ID 04c1:009d U.S. Robotics (3Com) HomeConnect WebCam [vicam] Ah! so Linux recognizes it and suggests the vicam driver,…
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From Standard Deviations, I learned about IBM shutting down their public UDDI registry. Here’s is what Parand had to say about it: It’s about time. I can tell you the exact point I lost interest in UDDI: it was the second advisory board meeting and I was struggling with the enthusiasm…
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The Semantic Web Services Challenge 2006 is organized by Stanford University. Phase I will be held March 8-10, 2006 whereas phase II will be held June 15-16, 2006. The goal of the SWS Challenge is to develop a common understanding of various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of…
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What are the good conferences?
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Women desert IT in droves
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I wrote a new page on this blog called Where are the good places to publish? I use simple metrics and attributes to compare Computer Science conferences. One tool I suggest we use is scholar.google.com. Please comment.
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Nearly two thirds of women working in IT have left or are about to leave the profession, according to research by recruitment firm Hudson UK. (…) More than half of the women questioned are frustrated at the lack of flexible working times, and over three quarters are angry that they are unable to…
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In Memoriam, Alberto Mendelzon
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Alberto Mendelzon died this summer. He was the original author of the OLAP and Data Warehousing bibliography I maintain. While I never got to meet him, or at least, I don’t think so, he was a great researcher and an inspiration. Owen points me to a page at the University of Toronto in Memoriam of…
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Up until recently, udev, was a mystery to me, but I’m starting to learn. Udev is a service you probably want running with recent kernels. What it does is to create a node in the /dev directory whenever a new device is recognized. So, if you plug your m500 Palm Pilot and press the sync button,…
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By mistake, I typed “http://\w”. Surprise! It actually goes to the White House! Here are more results: “http://\a” goes to http://www.lemonde.fr/ “http://\b” goes to http://www.b-rail.be/main/F/index.php “http://\c” goes to http://www.caducee.net/ “http://\d” goes to…
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This morning, I wrote a small script to record audio using my USB microphone. I need the audio to be recorded using one channel only and to be compressed as a MP3 file. Here’s the script: echo "Recording now. Press Ctrl-c to cancel" rawrec -c 1 -d /dev/dsp1 temp.raw lame -x -m m…
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Google mail allow you to view attachments as HTML
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Linux 64 bits: lessons learned
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I noticed recently that Google mail allows you to view attachements as HTML. This is a great feature. The last thing I want to do when reading an email in my browser is to launch Word. Google mail allows you to view the following file formats as html: .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rtf, .sxw, .sxc, .sxi,…
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I recently destroyed my 2 years old AMD Athlon PC while trying to beef up its RAM. The guys who sold it to me put down 1 GB of RAM on paper, but (shame) it took me 2 years to find out that there was, actually, on 256 MB of RAM in the machine. So, I went out and bought a new machine. An AMD Athlon…