Fnord.

Behold, the Asus Eee subcompact laptop:

(Best place to learn about it quickly is probably the Wikipedia entry.)

Summary: Subcompact, up to 2G of memory, solid-state disk (2, 4, or 8G), optional VGA webcam, wireless, 10/100 ethernet, 800×480 screen, runs Xandros or XP.

Cost? Between 250 and 400 (e.g. here on Amazon for one configuration), and likely to drop soon since it just hit the market. As this essay points out, its about damn time that the computer market started to get cheap at the low end. (Good essay, by the way.)

The Eee isn’t quite the disposable computing resource I’ve been wanting — they’ll have to shave a zero off the price tag for that — but it’s close enough for now. It does the basics I need, runs portable cross-platform applications and editing open file formats, and if I leave it on a train or sit on it or something my immediate reaction will be to swear, check my backups, and buy another one, rather than to whimper and go talk to my bank manager. Which is as it should be.

I don’t have a compelling need for one of these, but I can think of several people who do - those who want a long-life subcompact, cost-constrained people who want a real machine and so forth. One of these would be perfect for field deployments where space, weight and cost are large constraints.

Cool.

According to EE Times, it’s been delayed until “late summer 2008.”

Guess no 3G for a while…

South Bend, Indiana, at the Chocolate Factory for a caffeine hit with the nieces. They got the double-chocolate muffins. Nice to see snow again!

More pics next week - I forgot the chip reader this time, oops.

Via Anarchia, the magnificent obscenity that is Bourne Shell Server Pages, with the appropriate extension of, yep, ‘.shit’. The author has a definite set of opinions that I found hilarious:

The basic idea behind all server page technologies is this: rather than writing code that generates an HTML document on-the-fly by writing it out as a series of print statements, you start with a “skeleton” HTML document and embed the code right inside it. Voila! Instead of having a tangled, unreadable, unmaintainable mess of HTML embedded in source code, you have a tangled, unreadable, unmaintainable mess of source code embedded in HTML.

Bourne Shell Server Pages are ordinary ASCII text files, with the special extension .shit, which denotes “Shell-Interpreted Template.” The result of invoking the page compiler on a .shit file, is, naturally, a shell script. (It occurred to me that this file extension might seem objectionable to some, but since it quite accurately—if unintentionally—conveyed my sentiments toward Web technology in general, I decided that it should be left unchanged.)

and, I have to agree with him here:

How does the Bourne Shell Server Pages technology fit into the bigger picture of Web Services? It’s a legitimate question. For that matter, what the hell are “Web Services” anyway?

I’ve read quite a bit about Web Services, and have had some in-depth, first-hand experience with the technologies that form their underpinnings. To the best of my knowledge, here is an accurate definition of the term:

Web Services

noun A software development meme that espouses the notion of tying together disparate software components via a crude, non-typesafe, remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism that consists of sending and receiving data encoded in an excessively verbose, plaintext format (XML) over a largely inelegant, stateless file transfer protocol (HTTP).

Whew. That doesn’t sound glamorous or exciting at all. It’s not even object oriented. There must be more to this than just inferior reinterpretations of old ideas? Sadly, there isn’t.

One particularly curious aspect of Web Services is that all communication between components must take place over TCP port 80. The other ports (all 65,534 of them) constitute a veritable Pandora’s Box of perceived dangers, horrors and evils, and so Thou Shalt Not Bind Them. It’s painfully clear that Web Services exists along three distinct axes: a technical one, an emotional one, and a decidedly religious one.

It’s a great essay, and an interesting idea. The code is tiny, too.

A variety of pictures, mostly from the iPhone, of my 3-day SC trip. Silver Legacy hotel, somehow I got a 25th floor room for $69/night, quite the view!

More SC research, the XCPU project from Los Alamos. Not much info online, but the poster is very impressive, perhaps an alternative to Hadoop. Interesting stuff this year.

I just upgraded the 80GB drive in Chris’s iBook to a 250. Unlike my MacBookPro upgrade, it was quite difficult. Note the five pieces of paper with screws on them - those were the spatial maps for each layer. Total time around 4 hours, whew.

Working very well now, but set aside an afternoon for this one. I got instructions from this page and this one too. Both are nice and pictorial.

This is Anna’s fourth solid food meal - the thrill that is rice cereal. It’s kinda messy sometimes.

Person selling coffee at the cart, while explaining her flirtation with random geeks: “Hey, you’ve got teeth and a job, and I live in Reno!”
Ahhh, lowered expectations.

Neil Gershenfeld of MIT- should be good. I have his book and its brilliant. Pretty glitzy stage, though.