The Register: No Windows XP SE as Longhorn jettisons features Every day we inch a little closer to 'I told you so'.

Every day there's more to like about the Analog Devices Blackfin DSP. Today the big wins are DMA transfers and built in libraries. DMA So what is DMA? If you aren't familiar with DMA, it's the ability of the processor to transfer memory to or from other memory locations or peripherals without the attention of the CPU. This means that there is a separate DMA engine sitting inside the chip acting like a gremlim, moving things about while no one is looking.

RealPlayer sucks. Not the actual technology, which for a long time had a complete lock on audio and video streaming over the internet, and of which I used to be a happy consumer, but two things happened to erode Reals dominance. The first is that Microsoft saw a market that they didn't have 99% market share in and decided to start leveraging their monopoly on the desktop to try to squeeze out Real.

Tim Bray: Is this the future? Is the emperor dressed?

When I first setup this PC I accidentally logged in as a local user and then installed all the apps and tweaked, etc then realized I wasn't logged onto the domain. Oops. I was crushed. I knew I had a serious problem. You see, Windows NT, and by extension Windows XP, has this odd idea of a user and what constitutes a different user. Logging into the domain under my user name is a totally different account from logging into the local machine with the same exact name.

In the past I've talked about my experience with TI and their support for their DSPs. Given that experience I am now looking at Analog Devices and their Blackfin line of DSPs. Compared to the TI part this has turned out to be a breath of fresh air. The Analog folks look like they've put a lot of effort into thinking about, and talking to, their customers and how they use DSPs, and that's reflected in their newest line of DSPs.

I just installed AIM. Yes, just. I have used IRC on and off over the past two years, but apparently the vast majority of people use AIM. This is suprising to me. Suprising because the people I need it to talk to are internet savvy people that are using a closed, proprietary, centrally controlled protocol, when I was expecting a preference for an open protocol like Jabber. It's not a big deal, I just found it odd.

It's that time of year again, with spring in the air I've refreshed the style of BitWorking. Press 'refresh' if you see the same old styling. If you have a decent browser you can switch back to the old look as I've left it as an alternate stylesheet. Putting together a new style was easier than in previous attempts. Two things in particular made it easier, the first was using the Web Developer extensions for Mozilla FireFox, a nifty tool that:

I actually recognized the first speaker on this NPR Radio Postcard by his voice and not his blog. See how many of the voices you can identify.

A humorous review of current car ergonomics at Car and Driver. Where else are you going to see the phrase, "it's like operating a toaster with your toes." [via Bruce Sterling] Though I contend as bad as Quest's usability is, I've got a DVD remote that will put it to shame.

Don't tell Trevor, but this a feature of a cranky old part of the internet called FTP. Now obviously BitTorrent has it's advantages, just funny to see old ideas become new again. Sideloading has nothing to do with which transfer protocol you're using. It's just a user interface hack for online gathering/storage services which allows them to take net load off of their users' connections and provide a handy service from their browser UI.

Character encoding is hard. Really. If I could point to one thing that causes feeds to be invalid more than anything else, it would be character encoding. When I first started working with RSS I was always suprised at the energy Bill Kearney put into character encoding. If there was one thing you could count on, it was Bill would always jump into a conversation on character encoding. Two years later and I am finally coming to that place.

Essentials are tools that you pick up and then ask yourself how you ever lived without. I have several of those, including rsync, subversion, and libxml2. GNU screen is another one of those programs that changes you forever. Here is a great introduction to screen on Kuro5hin. Zeroconf (Zero Configuration Networking) looks fascinating. From the abstract of the requirements: Many common TCP/IP protocols such as DHCP [RFC2131], DNS [RFC1034][RFC1035], MADCAP [RFC2730], and LDAP [RFC2251] must be configured and maintained by an administrative staff.

Tim Bray has taken a job with Sun. Love his ultra-short job description: next gen tech and standards development at the intersection of RSS, XML and advanced search technologies. Congrats!

Now I initially tried doing all this with PuTTY and pageant, and any tips on how to get it working would be appreciated. I wanted to use subversion and host the repository on my hosted site, but running the dedicated server, or the running it thought WebDAV are basically out of the question. The dedicated server isn't allowed by policy and while Michal, the owner of cornerhost is a great guy and probably would have worked with me to get the WebDAV server up and running, I didn't want to tie up his and my time setting it up.

I really need a link blog. Besides, all the cool kids are doing it. Already linked to death, but Dave Shea has an excellent css crib sheet for debugging css design. [via Mark Pilgrim] Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years [via the Fishbowl] VIM:Seven habits of effective text editing [via 0xDECAFBAD] I am now the number one result for the google search naked operating table valium. The only reason I know this is because I found it in my referer logs.

If the documents use English tag names (say XHTML or DocBook or SOAP) in conjunction with Asian PCDTA, the difference is even smaller. At one point I experimented with switching between UTF-8 and UTF-16 depending on language, and was surprised to find it really didn't make a big difference. For one real world example, I looked at the Japanese translation of the XML specification included in the W3C XML test suite.

Infosets are bad, except when they're not so bad, but temper your opinion with these caveats. Listen closely, in 5 years we'll replace XML with some new whizbang format, and make all the old mistakes in totally new ways. Posted by anonymous on 2004-03-08 Just testing. Sorry for the interruption, but comments were broken earlier. Should be fixed now. Posted by Joe on 2004-03-08 Another format or another data model.

The NYTimes has an interesting article on a team of electrical engineers at the California Institute of Technology creating a single chip with all the functions of a radar system. Not only can it be used for typical radar uses, it can also be used for high speed communications. "D.S.L. can go to several hundred kilobits, and fiber can go to several gigabits per second," Dr. Hajimiri said. The radar chip can achieve bit rates up to a gigabit per second, partly because of the concentrated nature of the beam, he said.

"Austin", the three year old says to the eight year old around a mouthful of oatmeal, "I'm not liking your attitude."