Close Of Week

Leafed through a couple of books, took some photos (see the Photos section for updates) and surfed for random rants. Spotted Eduardo's mention of the design competition I had mentioned earlier (the outcome was exactly what I predicted, by the way).

Atomic Warfare

I've been following Russell's view on Atom, and after taking an initial stab at hacking RecentChanges to provide an Atom feed, I eventually thought "why bother" and dropped it in the bit bucket.

The reason? It doesn't provide any added value for the kind of publishing I do, and I'd be darned if I'm going to follow a fad - especially one that, after all the initial hoopla and disclaimers, now looks like it's being pushed by a small counter-lobby (in the sense that they set out to "fix RSS" in their own view, therefore falling into the usual pattern of committee/lobby design).

Mind you, I think it's a great idea for remote publishing - a SOAP-based API makes sense, but Russell is right on the way HTTP PUT and DELETE are used - it's liable to cause all kinds of problems.

Broadcom is going to demo a set of convergence chipsets for GPRS, Wi-Fi, WCDMA, etc. at the 3GSM conference next week. The interesting bit is the first press mention of an 802.11g follow-up to the GC79, which makes sense (the first GC79 I got my hands on had "universal" Broadcom drivers for their BCM2050 chip).

The Jujitsu Method Of Converting from Windows To Linux. Spotted on del.icio.us - the title (and the rationale behind it) was too appealing not to click.

I've never liked the UFO series of games, but the original Laser Squad was a great turn-based strategy game that I played over and over more than a decade ago. The ZX Spectrum version is freeware now, and it looks like just the thing to test Pocket Clive: