Every Monday through Friday-ish, we post a new Monkey Bite on our frontdoor for your edification. This could be a little news item, a link to a useful site, a handy coding tip, or just some random piece of information we think might be of interest to Web developers. Expired Monkey Bites are stored right here, growing tastier and more sophisticated with each passing day.
This month's Monkey Bites:
04/30/02
Apple, it seems, has waded into the longest-running Net battles of all
time. No, not the classic "Starship Enterprise vs.
Imperial Star Destroyer" usenet thread — we're talking about the big
brouhaha between superstar UNIX text editors vi and emacs. As for
Apple? Well, with yesterday's release of the school-oriented eMac, which includes an OS X
port of emacs, it looks as though Cupertino has chosen a side.
04/29/02
Hot on the heels of Flash MX, Macromedia announced the release of
Dreamweaver MX, Fireworks MX, and ColdFusion MX today (try downloading free trials). The entire MX suite
features prettied-up looks/feels, solid integration between all of the MX
products, and a healthy dose of new whistles, including tools for .NET and
PHP application development. All this and Mac OS X support, too. MXcellent!
04/25/02
One of Webmonkey's favorite OG websters, Leslie Harpold, has been robbed! Armed with little more than a fax machine and falsified letterhead (and the complicity of lame, lame NetSol/VeriSign), some wily German named Hubert has managed to steal her domain, "hoopla.com." The kids over at Metafilter have been ranting about it for awhile now, and the consensus seems to be, "Watch out, this could happen to you." So, so gross.
04/23/02
Rob Flickenger, the systems administrator over at the O'Reilly Network, came
up with a relatively simple hack to boost an 802.11b wireless network signal
using, among other things, a Pringles can! Try this at your own risk,
because once you POP3, you can't SMTP! Or something like that.
04/22/02
OQO's Ultra-Personal Computer measures slightly less than 5 x 3 x 1 inches, weighs nine ounces, comes with a ten-gig hard drive and 256 MB of non-expandable RAM, and could be yours by the end of the year for about ten benjamins. Also in the works: a low-powered FM radio transmitter that broadcasts MP3s on the UPC directly to your stereo.
Looking for a little validation in your life? Or just living to find flaws
in the work of others? The "multivalidator," one of many webdev-friendly bookmarklets featured in
Favelets, submits whatever page you have loaded in your browser to
the W3C's HTML, CSS, and HREF validators, all in one fell swoop.
04/09/02
Does the artistry of software design deserve its own
MFA program? It does if you think of programming as not just science-y but creative, too, like writing fiction or putting on a play (a play such as East Village Inky's dad's Urinetown, say).
04/08/02
Listen up, Mac-o-phile Monkeys: The alt.browser category is really heating up these days, what with
new fave Chimera (a browser that blends the indubitable Mozilla rendering
engine with fine OS X-native widgetry) releasing a new
binary at just about the same time as OmniWeb (a browser with even
nicer widgetry, but a sub-standard rendering engine).
04/04/02
According to the Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter (which charts the number of times "X Rules" and "X Sucks" comes up in an AltaVista search), Windows sucks even more than Linux rules.
04/03/02
Having trouble locating a domain name that's still available, and not all hyphen-tastic or .bizzy? Maybe NameBoy, with its mighty phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics powers, can help.
04/01/02
Everyone here at Webmonkey HQ has been laugh-rioting over The Onion, a sort of parody site that puts a hilarious spin on world news and current events. Other recent "Add to Favorites": eBay, where you can bid on hard-to-find items (or auction off some of your own!) and the Internet Movie Database, an amazing collection of cross-referenced data about movies and actors — the perfect place to settle all those "Corey Haim or Corey Feldmen" arguments!
