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Why should I work at amazon.com? If Barnes and Nobles strikes them down, Amazon will just become more powerful than Barnes and Nobles could ever have imagined. WordNet 1.6 is a lexical database for the English language. Here's a dictionary running on Apache/Linux. NY Times: Is AOL Big Brother? You have mail! Hey they found the book at Barnes and Noble! They also have Matt Neuburg's book at Barnes and Noble. They could use a few reviews. Hint hint. This Web page is a front end to a sophisticated expert system incorporating the latest breakthroughs in natural language and neural network research. Right now, I am the only woman in a store full of horny and immature perverted boys doing a inventory count and they are pissing me off to no end. Should I take them out to the parking lot and beat the living crap out of them? Barbie says: You are a mean person and I'm not going to talk to you any more.
Michael Lawley: "I thought, wouldn't it be cool if Frontier could use XSL templates rather than forcing me to use its own scripting language." My mind bends! Question: Is there an open source English dictionary? Script Meridian tutorial on table renderers. Simon St Laurent: Bringing the File System into the File. Arnold Lesikar, Ken Dow: The Polite Spider. Feed: The Little Engine That Couldn't. Ars Technica: Hands-on preview of the SGI Visual Workstations. How do you turn lead into gold? Melt the lead and stir and don't think of the word rhinoceros. Too bad this book is out of print.. What's the difference between a dream and a vision? This dictionary has gotten really good. Here's a definition for object-oriented programming. Jim Collins: Spyrographica. Shockwave. Paul Haeberli: Paper Folding Project. Newsweek: War of the word. Official resigns because others don't know the language. This country is sick! Dictionary.com: niggard != nigger. Marc Ramsey said sarcastically: "Absolutely, Dave, the country was so much healthier 30 years ago when you could call a 'nigger' a 'nigger' and still get elected to the highest office in the country." I hate sarcasm, it's just as demeaning as racism. Boston Globe: SuperBowl Ads. You'll see a lot of Internet ads on the SuperBowl tomorrow.
DaveNet: Microsoft and XML-RPC. I've been getting a steady stream of email on XML-RPC, this is great because it's getting the attention I hoped it would, and the questions/comments are coming from people who are really implementing it, not just coffee-housing. Bob Atkinson, a key architect at Microsoft, and co-author of the XML-RPC spec, comments on the evolution of XML-RPC. Two more Atkinson comments: #1, #2. Simeon Simeonov posts comments from Allaire. I'm going to wait till tomorrow to post my comments. I want to start with a fresh mind tomorrow, today has been a very exciting day, and it's left me more than a little wiped out. Technography: I asked Bernie what 'Technography for Dummies' would look like, given existing tools, what's the minimum hardware, software, furniture and net connection? Brad Pettit, one of the members of the original MORE team at Symantec, has written a MORE-to-Text translator. We will be able to read these files in Frontier 6, so you can move text from MORE to Frontier's new wrapping headlines outliner. Mozilla's open directory is available in RDF. InfoWorld: HP to build Oracle thin servers. CNN: Gates appeal to keep testimony secret rejected. Robert Chang started a discussion on Frontier as an email client. It's going somewhere. That's good! InfoWorld: Bluestone marries XML and Java. MacWEEK: Connectix responded to a copyright infringement lawsuit from Sony by shipping an updated version of the software in dispute. TechWeb: Greenspan on tech stock valuations. sally@kins com asks: "What kind of wild economy is this when Geocities goes for almost as much as Volvo?" USA Today: At Home, gold mine or bomb? We moved around servers last week and broke the RPC Debugger, XML Syntax Checker, and the Random DaveNet pages. They're fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience, still diggin, of course. Here's a funny DaveNet piece that makes me laugh!
Austin Chronicle: Is the Constitution Just a Screenplay? NY Times editorial: Scripting the Last Act. We got a nibble on our invitation to clone our XML-RPC-based search engine interface on Unix. Let's go all the way on this. Unix makes a great search engine platform. Let's wire it up to content management software running on Mac/Windows. I wrote a sample script that submits today's Scripting News to Stephen's search engine running in New Zealand (and Apache) and it worked! I'm one happy dude. SF Chronicle: Sony sues Connectix. Wired: Amazon raises $1.25 billion in convertible debt. InfoWorld: XML Data Architecture Debate. News.com: Bluestone to ship an XML server. "What Bluestone does is allow you to ship and generate XML on the fly. But what's missing in the middle tier is persistence," said Viddorio Viarengo, Object Design's Excelon product manager." Incorrect! Frontier 5.1 is a persistent XML object database. It's been shipping since mid 1998, the underlying object database has been shipping since 1992, and now Frontier 6 is around the corner. We also do content management. Check out Paul Howson's XMLTR suite. The other guys can't touch it. ODI can try to slice up the market, but the customers are too smart for that to work. Hopefully the reporters will get a clue too. Do a little digging, don't believe everything you read in ODI press releases. Red Herring: EOffering Shakes Investment Banking. "EOffering, in proposing to undercut the seven percent IPO fee, is clearly attempting shake up the marketplace's hierarchy." Great news for entrepreneurs! Mike Swaine wants to know what's going to bring the web down? SJ Merc: Yahoo to buy GeoCities. MacInTouch: Bell Atlantic ADSL Saga. Ian Beatty likes the new net-based-2click feature, and sees it as a harbinger of what's-to-come. I think he's right. We have a pretty full pipe right now. Lots of new stuff in testing.
Tech-nó-graph-y, n. The collective employment of one person as computer operator for the purpose of arriving at a collaboratively-authored document. Reminder: Frontier Newbies Toolbox. How to run a search engine query by alt or option double-clicking text in Frontier. Full-time net-connection recommended. Wired: HP and SGI Pick up Linux. SiliWare: Jini Servlet Programming. Internet Weather Report has been renamed for legal reasons. TechWeb: Competition in Search Engines. SJ Merc: Apple's SuperBowl Ad will cost $3 million. "You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you, Dave? Dave? Can you hear me, Dave?" Wired: The Electronic Brown Bag. Yes, it's just about sex. Like everything that's interesting. PC WEEK: Push Presses On in New Guises. Fortune: The Edison of the Internet. Can you believe the hype?
Dan Gillmor: Pentium III threatens privacy. "Now think about how you'd feel if your VIN included a transmitter, which sent out a signal giving your location at all times. Intel's plans were a rough equivalent for people who wanted to travel around the Web." Hmmm. That's not the way it works! Software, a web browser or emailer, would have to transmit the serial number. Intel did a good thing, but marketed it dishonestly. That's what's really going on. USA Today: The Great Firewall of China. [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "responderAttributes".] Josh Lucas is reviewing the Jini spec, which is only available in PDF. (Arrrrgh!) "The Jini system is Java technology-centered. The Jini architecture gains much of its simplicity from assuming that the Java programming language is the implementation language for components." Grrrrreedy! An InfoWorld forum on Jini. Norman Walsh: What is XML? I wonder if Jini is XML-based. No. Stating the Obvious: Welcome to "My" Parlor. "A friend at Excite scoffed at this model, noting that they tried outside linking once, only to discover that Wall Street cares about two key portal statistics: page views, and the length of time users spend at the site." Tim Bray: XML Namespaces by Example. InfoWorld: New ORB integrates CORBA and COM. Slashdot's Jon Katz is a moron. Upside: Y-Does-My-Computer-Crash-Three-Times-A-Day.
Buried in a PC Week article: "Microsoft wants to ship clean-room Java and has asked U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte to clarify whether it can do so. A hearing is scheduled for Feb. 5. Microsoft in March licensed Chai, HP's clean-room Java Virtual Machine for the embedded market." Wired's Steve Silberman tuned out on the Clinton impeachment and trial. Too bad for him! I've been following the Senate trial, every step of the way, and have learned a lot about the US government, at a technical and at a human level. CamWorld: Anatomy of a Weblog. Cam forgot to mention Lawrence Lee's Tomalak's Realm. And Cam points to Wes Felter's Hack The Planet site. Wes is still looking for a girlfriend, and he's still a total catch! He says "I think the emotional part of a relationship is more important than the physical part." Yeah. Uh huh. Does that line still work?
[Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "responderAttributes".] If things go according to plan, my next DaveNet piece is going to propose that we work with other developers on other operating systems to establish a standard XML-RPC interface between content management software and search engines. Stanford: The world's smallest web server. Red Herring: Syndicating the Web. Interactive Investor: Andreessen to be AOL CTO. Today's Scripting News in XML. This might make Lynn's bell ring. I always like to see an example of something theoretical. InfoWorld reports on the work we've been doing with Allaire. Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the Mac. I was there fifteen years ago.. Were you? Slideshow about Frontier 6. It's getting a little out of date, but it's a good time to link back to this. Phil Suh's new FAQman Renderer. It comes with music! CBS Marketwatch: February Tech IPOs. An Oracle slide-show on XML. American Scientist on Ice-Nine. News.com: Apple's Y2K Ad. It'll probably feature Dave in a supporting role. John Faughnan is looking for a way to move his MORE 3.1 files to Windows. We may have something for him soon. Red Herring: Allaire doubles; Vignette troubles? Yet another Internet keyword site.
Holy Cow! The hits keep comin! Now James Spahr has an XML-RPC library for Shockwave!!! Excuse me while I faint! If you've been looking at XSL, check out Paul Howson's tutorial for XMLTR, a Frontier suite that provides rendering rules for XML-authored content. This is really important stuff. The ball keeps rolling! Now there's an XML-RPC server for Java. frontierStartupCommands.txt is a new easy-to-understand feature coming in Frontier 6. It's important when you're fighting a denial-of-service attack, or an agent script is doing something you don't understand. In these situations you can't use Frontier to edit a startup script until you've stopped the agent from running, or stopped the web server from handling incoming requests. ContentServer 2.0b8 includes source code and removes limit of ten users. The Alpha text editor has been very nicely integrated with Frontier. Apparently, cnn.com doesn't use a content management system. The source for their HTML has comments indicating that they hand-code the stories. We would love to automate the CNN site. This is going somewhere! A reader sent me a pointer saying that CNN Sweden will be using an environment called Neo Interaktiv, from a developer in Norway. Here's a case study that might help CNN in Atlanta see how we could make their site more effective and make better use of the time of their development people. XSA is an XML-based system that allows anyone who is interested to discover new versions of software products as they are released automatically by polling XML documents describing the products. It is mainly intended to help software index maintainers keep their indexes up to date. EE Times: Apple Draws Fire from Firewire Licensing. Jakob Nielsen: Print Design vs Web Design. October 1999: WebNet Worldwide Conference. Reminder: DocServer for the Future.
InfoWorld: XML poses data architecture debate. "Anyone who says XML `belongs' anywhere in particular doesn't understand what XML is about." Right on! In this memo for the Script-Meridian community list, I hope to provide a update, a status report for Frontier developers on what UserLand has been doing in the latter part of 1998 and early 1999. Here's a great idea. A search engine that indexes IETF RFCs. Jigsaw is W3C's leading-edge Web server platform. InfoWorld: Fresh off the acquisition trail, Ardent is using XML as a means of unifying all of its own recently acquired technologies. Tomalak now has an Avantgo version.
Bernie's meeting checklist. Food for thought. Are you using technology effectively in organizing your meetings? If so, you're working with each other electronically before, during and after meeting. On the new technography site, a sneak preview of what the Frontier 6 outliner looks like. Note the wrapping headlines. It makes a world of difference! Microsoft: Paul Maritz' written testimony in the "other" trial in Washington. Andrew Clinick: Microsoft's spin on Perl. Stephen Mohr: XML in Microsoft Office 2000. CBS: Allaire surges on IPO. "This is a great company, and a way to play the growth of the Internet without the volatility of a pure Internet company," said Paul Bard, analyst at Renaissance Capital. InfoWorld: Allaire goes public. Donald Larson, a Frontier developer who now works for IBM, is looking for developers who use Frontier wih Lotus Notes. XML-RPC spec revised. Clarifications, <base64> tag added. As the dust settles on the last round of work on XML-RPC, I'm getting new perspectives on what it is and where it's going. News.com: Symantec looking for a new CEO. Record sales and profit at SYMC. Dev/Linux interviews the author of GhostScript. ALLR now shows up. Today must be the real IPO day for them. Good luck! On the Script Meridian Community list, Steven Ivy complains about the deletion of a message on our Discussion Group. The deleted message was an ad for a product that was unrelated to the discussion. The reason you don't see spam on the DG is that we delete it. Once again there are lots of free-for-alls and spam-filled cesspools on the net. We will not host one of those. Thanks for listening.
Updated: XML-RPC Spec. Paul Haeberli: C Library for Writing Flash Movies. Doug Brewer has a beef with UserLand. Now we know why it's been so quiet in the USA! Linux Weekly News: Zope Roadmap. InternetWorld: Real-World XML. sfwow: Top 25 Women on the Web. PalmPower: Outliners for the Palm Pilot. Think is a Gnomified outliner.
PalmPower: Outliners for the Palm Pilot. Think is a Gnomified outliner. Don't forget the Avantgo version of Scripting News. Arranger is an outliner for the Palm Pilot. Dan Shafer: A new vision for builder.com? Reuters: Vatican praying for bug-free millennium.
DaveNet: To Give or Not to Give? Ooops! We fixed a bug in the Trial version of Frontier 5.1.6/Windows. Sometimes I forget how cool ContentServer is. PC WEEK: Intel to embed serial numbers in chips. iMacWorld: Formac defies Apple's mezzanine edict. Mozilla.org: The Open Directory Project. "The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites can't keep up with submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their directories has suffered. Link rot is setting in and they can't keep pace with the growth of the Internet." That is so true! Here's the actual directory. http://www.miningco.com/ is another alternative to Yahoo's directory. Now that we have XML-RPC working in Python, Perl and Frontier, we're thinking about Apache, Delphi and Dreamweaver. David Weingart is looking for other people at Cornell who are using Frontier. The trend, exemplified by OnSale, of cutting prices all the way to the bone, doesn't bode well for Carlick's vision. Allaire is set to go public today. When they do, their symbol will be ALLR. Go Allaire go! Here's the other side of my good buddy Bernie. On one side he's the evangelist of more effective meetings thru technography. On the other side he's the promoter of fun in the workplace. He has the credentials, as a game designer at Ideal Toys and Mattel and Sesame Street. He's a "fun professional". Seriously! A few member profile pages, chosen in a semi-random fashion: Amy Wohl, Anita Rowland, Bruce Jorgensen, Bernie De Koven. Is XML-RPC a scripting environment? I'm not sure! Hewlett-Packard: A community of coders. Excellent article! Wally, we're venture capitalists. We want to invest in your web-based business. USA Today: Become a free speech advocate. BrainForest is an outliner for Palm Pilot, Mac and Windows. Wired: Fat pipes and Internet ads.
Writing for Searching is an anthem for evolution. Kurt Egger suggests an obvious enhancement to our search engine. We already thought about it and came up with a more sneaky (and workable) solution. Fredrik Lundh posts the source for a Python XML-RPC server. These Python guys are amazing! I love the energy. Then Skip Montanaro posts a Perl XML-RPC client. My head is spinning! What a day! Now there's a Perl XML-RPC server. Believe it or not, Marc Canter made headlines in the Trieste paper today! I wish I read Italian. What does it say? InfoWorld's Industry Achievement Award discussion. On slashdot.org, Jeremy Lee talks about the future of the Open Source community. The piece gave me goosebumps. They're figuring it out in OpenSourceLand! Here's a quote. "Look at Silicon Valley. It's a case in point of what to avoid. The defining characteristic of the Executive Suit is the search for power. They look for the biggest game in town and muscle in at the top using the forceful application of money and the law. Can you say 'Venture Capital'?" Now they're starting to talk sense. Read this piece from 1996 for more clues. I've spent 20 years in Silicon Valley. I've had my nose rubbed in their shit so often. I want to work around them now. RightDoc documents are "XML-based smart entities that encompass the concepts of conditional processing and conditional formatting to any degree that document authors may require." Pet peeve time: Where's the screen shot? Here's a site that lets you choose a display theme. Wired: Microsoft is a $20 billion company, earning almost $8 billion in profit on an annual basis. Paul Nakada has started a news site for PocketMail users. Lotus Notes R5 runs JavaScript. InfoWorld reports on a slew of new Internet products and services at the Showcase conference. News.com: OnSale to sell PCs at wholesale. They would make money on ads. Fascinating! Press release: Excite and @Home to merge. Congrats to Chris Nolan at the SJ-Merc for getting this story first. I'm not taking any more private email on the subject of what's appropriate on Scripting News. You may post your opinions on your website, with your name, affiliation, and email address, and I probably will point to it. But don't expect accolades. Scripting News is influential for a reason, it takes a stand, it isn't passive, it isn't Barney the Dinosaur. I think the meddlers will learn something about themselves thru this exercise, not about me. Broadband, ADSL, working around the VCs, Excite on @Home, OnSale selling PCs at cost, limits on editorial control, it's all about the same thing. Fast full-time net-connections and new kinds of content flow. The demand for content-aware fractional horsepower HTTP servers is growing every day.
Are you a Frontier developer? We often get requests for pointers to excellent developers. Please tell us about your Frontier work so we can help make connections. Andrew Clinick, the scripting program manager at Microsoft, asks about features coming in Windows Scripting Host 2.0. Bernie De Koven reveals the secrets of technography. "Even if the technographer could type at the speed of speech, it wouldn't help. Neither you, nor anyone else would be taking responsibility for the words. The faster the technographer types, the less attention people pay to what gets written. The less attention, the less ownership, the less successful they will be at creating a meaningful, useful product." A personal note. I'm getting pressure from a small number of UserLand customers to only express views they agree with on Scripting News. I want Frontier users to know that they may not attempt in any way to influence the views expressed on this site. We did not sell you editorial control when we licensed our software to you. Such pressure is totally unwelcome, is unfair, unethical, and will not be tolerated. A Python-based XML-RPC server from a posting on the UserLand DG. Hot team! Ooops! Looks like we have competition. Fredrik Lundh asks about public XML-RPC services. Got any? According to CNN, Allaire is slated to IPO on Wednesday. What a great time to be in this business! We wish our new friends at Allaire the best of luck on their IPO. Kick butt!
NY Times: Saying Goodbye to Silicon Valley. This really struck a chord with me. I'm always thinking about leaving the valley. But where to go? A preview of some of the hype for Frontier 6's workstation component and its relation to XML and my current thinking on what we need in writing and editorial interfaces for the web. This will be refined into the marketing document for Frontier 6. Jakob Nielsen: Why marketwatch.com is overvalued. Unique visitors are a poor measure of user loyalty. Also, future users are late adopters and not likely to all patronize current popular sites. So beware of over-valuing Internet stock because you think that current user counts predict future success. [Data] "The alien ship has just opened its forward hatches and released thousands of humanoid shaped objects." If you want to measure the performance of your server from the outside using something slightly more accurate than a browser, check out Apache JMeter. Allaire has started a thread on their site on XML-RPC integration with WDDX. Dan Gillmor is keeping an eye on encryption. InfoWorld forum on DSL. 56% of WebReview poll participants would not leave their jobs to chase aliens. But 44% would. There's hope for the world! PC WEEK reports that it's going to be sticky to get server managers to upgrade to Windows 2000. He could be any passenger waiting for a flight, sitting patiently on a red plastic bench in Charles de Gaulle Airport's Terminal One, luggage piled neatly by his side. At least today's NY Times editorial page, which I've been reading every day, doesn't trash the Republicans. From the Does Not Compute Department. The Democrats are spinning "If you call witnesses it's just going to drag on and on and on." But Clinton is a Democrat, right? If he had told the truth, any time before now (and even now!) we would save lots of time. I admire the restraint of the Republicans. The Democrats are throwing fuel on the partisan fire every time they try talk. My belief, if people were willing to focus, just for a moment, on what the President did, they'd conclude in a single day that he must go, and it would be over. We are much better than Clinton, and much better than the nasty Dems. They may be just right for the mass of Americans, but Americans who have minds and have the courage to look at the cynical corruption of Clinton are becoming Republicans, at least this is American voter is.
This was quick! Brent Simmons did a XML-RPC to WDDX converter. Looks like the barn-raising is happening fast. Good work Brent! I put together a little guide for exploring Brent's code using a web browser. Not everyone has Frontier! They should, of course.. Ramon Felciano has a solution to yesterday's geometry puzzle. Scroll to the bottom of the page for a hint and the solution. MacWorld takes a first look at Apple's new G3 desktop.
Bookmarklets are simple tools that extend the surf and search capabilities of web browsers. Help needed from the Frontier community. Simeon from Allaire has been working on a WDDX to XML-RPC translator, and now the ball is in our court, can we produce some code that goes the other way, so Frontier apps can talk to apps that speak WDDX? We need the brains and muscle of the Frontier community to work on this one. It's a barn raising, a potluck, a chance to earn bragging rights and virtual golden keychains. Wired: Big money backs MP3.COM. Updated: www.xml-rpc.com. Now links to Allaire's WDDX site and to Python, Perl and Java XML-RPC clients. News.com: Lotus still leads in groupware. News.com: Ellison says the net will break Microsoft. I've heard that before! Now, what about Oracle? Let's get him! Bergen Record: Trial poses risks for both parties. "Even James Carville, one of the president's staunchest supporters, said, 'Who knows when public opinion could turn?'" Our friend Mr. Nitpicker asks questions about parameters and XML-RPC, and I attempt to answer them on the DG. Ask and ye shall receive! Yesterday I saw a neat trick on the CNN site that would work well in Frontier's website framework and today, David Carter-Tod has it ready for download. This is an incredible community! Another coool Frontier-generated calendar is on this German site. A test version of betty.rpc.client that could make it possible for Frontier apps to connect to Java servers. Red Herring: Morgan Stanley to back Marimba's IPO. Press release: Critical Path raises $33 million for email outsourcing services. News.com: Apple licensing FireWire, for a fee. Adaptec: What's the difference between i.LINK and FireWire? A bizarre geometric puzzle. Where did the hole come from? I swear I've seen this one before! Kevin Newman has the solution. No peeking until you figure it out! Here's a neat trick that kind of works.
Hey Big News! Frederik Lundh is working on an XML-RPC module for Python! Wowowowowowo! W3C: XML namespaces allow multiple apps to store and pick up info from an XML tree without interfering with each other. I started a new website to explore Allaire's WDDX format. ScriptMeridian: DOODADS is back. News.com: IBM says PC is on its last legs. "The era of the PC as king is over," Horn said. "We are entering an era of 'pervasive computing' in which we will see a dramatic increase in the use of the application-specific handheld and [other specialized] devices to conduct e-business and simplify our lives." Look at the calendar on this page. I bet some Frontier users could use a macro that turned an outline into a calendar like this. Move your mouse over the days. See how the text changes? That's an interesting effect.. (Heads-up, we already have calendar code for our website. I was thinking about other Frontier users, not UserLand.) We've identified three options for compatibility between WDDX and XML-RPC. Cold Fusion and Frontier developers will find this interesting, as will other developers working on distributed computing applications. Dave Aiello continues the Scripting on Windows thread. "Nearly everything I build today is delivered through a Web Server." Same here. MSNBC: Impeachment trial enters next phase. Prosecutors' opening statement begins at 10AM Pacific. CNN: Killer bees arrive in LA. SunWorld: The Safety of Scripting. http://www.searchtools.com/. ; namestake.com: Domain name and trademark searches. Wired: Where web phantoms roam. "You're at a place where there are no presidential impeachment hearings. Where Monica Lewinsky does not yet exist. Where Bill and Hillary Clinton are smiling and still building that bridge to the 21st Century." We have a few phantom websites too: 24, AutoWeb, Clay, MIDAS, Colors, coolsites, stop211.
Important Security Advisory for systems running Frontier as a web server or as a web scripting environment with user-accessible interfaces to the website framework. We've started the negotiation between XML-RPC and WDDX. I exchanged lengthy emails this morning with Allaire CEO Jeremy Allaire, and this afternoon Simeon Simeonov, Allaire's WDDX architect posted a proposal on our discussion group. We're going to look at supporting both object serialization methods, the one in XML-RPC and WDDX. It's less than optimal, but that's life! I'm going to give it some thought before responding on the DG. Dan Gillmor asks if you bought PacBell's ADSL service in the last few days. Here's your chance to be famous! Dan writes a column for the influential San Jose Mercury-News. BTW, our investment in software that builds on fulltime net connections seems to have been a wise one. All those ADSL users coming on line! Hmmmm. Tasty! Ross Nelson, the author of the HTML-Refresh IETF spec, posts a message on our DG, explaining why he didn't go with W3C. John Dvorak: Death to Beige PCs. Apple: $152 million quarterly profit. Builder.com: Drumbeat 2000 Demo. Press release: TAG '99. ScriptMeridian: Regex 2.0. Allaire: WDDX FAQ. "XML-RPC mechanisms, such as DataChannel's WebBroker, are focused on providing a full distributed object protocol using XML and HTTP. Alternatively, WDDX is focused on providing a simple, light-weight data exchange mechanism for Web programming languages. However, it is straightforward to layer an RPC style capability on top of WDDX/HTTP based interactions. A number of developers are doing this already, and we expect standard semantics to emerge to support this kind of application of WDDX." On XML.COM, Lisa Rein describes the difference between XML-RPC and WDDX. "Unlike XML RPC, WDDX does not rely on remote procedure calls, but it does seek to describe distributed objects using XML." To this I would add, we could easily unbundle the object serialization part of XML-RPC. It's easier to go backward than it is to go forward. [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "responderAttributes".] WebDeveloper: Just one more acronym, page 3. "Nor does [WDDX] use the elegant, but complex, set of similar technologies that have emerged to make it easier to communicate between different object-based systems by passing remote procedure calls (RPC) as XML. These solve different problems than WDDX." Pardon me, but that's a crock. Our object serialization formats are actually quite similar. WebDeveloper: A Deeper Look at WDDX. The Bay Area Cold Fusion User's Group meets tomorrow at Macromedia in SF to talk about WDDX. Jesse Berst: Superfast cablemodems. Hey! Our XML Syntax Checker app still works. News.com: Oracle to announce VC fund. $100 million. What happens to domain names used to promote movies? News.com has an interesting story about www.inandout.com.
DaveNet: Let's Get Technical! [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "responderAttributes".] Dewayne Christensen's list is the most comprehensive. Philippe Dambournet urges Frontier entrepreneurs (and UserLand) to think translation! Are there any public servers that speak WDDX that we could test against? (Part of the Windows scripting thread.) Eclectic Consulting: WDDX examples. These examples are not legal XML. There's no XML VERSION="1.0" header on the examples. I don't know if this is a problem with WDDX or just a problem with this site. Paul Howson: Xmltr Suite for Frontier. [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "responderAttributes".] Wired: All-Electronic IPOs. CNN: Child's play or sexual harassment? Pacific Bell: ADSL for millions of Californians. $39/mo. Bell South: ADSL for millions of Southerners. $49.95/mo. Ameritech: ADSL for a suburban Detroiters. $49.95/mo. US West: ADSL for the Pacific Northwest. $59.95/mo. Bell Atlantic: ADSL for Philadelphia. $59.95/mo. ADSL for Washington DC on the Mail Page. ADSL for Ontario. We're going nuts here. Keep em comin! InfoWorld: Southwestern Bell readies ADSL rollout in five western states. News.com: Y2K bugs come in with a whimper. NY Times: Email on impeachment slows Senate servers. SJ Merc: Internet stocks defy gravity? Single-day gain of as much as 60 percent.
Microsoft's Robert Hess has been working in the DNA group for the last few months studying system-level scripting on Windows. He asked for our input, and we said that filling in the gaps in application scripting interfaces was the biggest issue. Windows has enough scripting architecture in the OS for now. We need to build real demo apps, sample code that solves real problems that come up on customer LANs, to be sure the apps have enough of their functionality covered thru their scripting interfaces. Also we should do menu sharing on Windows. I miss it! [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "responderAttributes".] I would like to thank everyone who participated in the Discussion Group today. InfoWorld: US Web founder quits. "..many of today's high-tech discoveries are actually products of the government using reverse engineering on materials discovered at the site of a supposed UFO crash in Roswell, N.M., in 1947." In March 1997, working with Apple, we did a survey of the Mac Internet tools market. I wonder how many of these products are still moving, and how many of these developers have a realistic idea of where Apple is going? Hey that trip down memory lane is interesting. Look what we were able to pull off when we decided to work together. We're still here. Many of the people we worked with at Apple a couple of years ago are gone. But the will to work together is still here. Jakob Nielsen: Collecting Feedback From Users. CNN: Microsoft OEM Pricing in Dispute. Gamelan interviews Sun's Lew Tucker. IETF: HTML Refresh Language. News.com: Dell has a new Latitude. It's not beige! InfoWorld: SGI's new NT Machines. Looking for a next-generation system for creative and technical visual workers? It could be that SGI's machine runs all your favorites, including Frontier. More apps than Apple's next-gen OS? Almost certainly. PS: Their machines have floppy drives. From MacInTouch: Apple today is holding an "invitation-only" developer briefing in Cupertino with an "all-star cast" for a day of sessions covering the Mac OS, QuickTime, Java, AppleScript, hardware and "I/O technologies." That meeting was attended by scabs who we're going to throw out of the software developer's union when we take over. Boca or Bucha!
Milestone: We can now do multiple DGs per server. ScriptMeridian is back on the air with lots of new links. Phil Suh reports that Frontier helped MacWEEK fight the hacker last week. James Clark: Expat 1.0.2. Seen on the net: "If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet." WebTechniques: XML to JavaSript Object Converter. I get private emails like this all the time, and Upside pays for them! (A career option for the depressed?) Today's NY Times editorial page echoes yesterday's DaveNet piece, up to a point. Senators working together is a plain old good thing. How could the Times know their motives? Maybe they just care about their country? To people who say politics has no place on Scripting News, I have some advice: Start your own website. The only way to be truly powerful is to organize and act. The web is wide open. Get off your butt and start writing.
DaveNet: The Light Side of Y2K. Yesterday I spoke with John Wolpert at IBM's alphaWorks. InfoWorld: Red Hat goes with Gnome. Palo Alto Weekly on Printer's Inc closing. Lawrence Lee found this fantastic article from the Palo Alto Weekly, 8/10/94, on the encroachment of chains on local booksellers. The Palo Alto Weekly was one of the first newspapers on the web. SJ Merc: Internet and software redefining the valley. Upside: P.T. Jobs' Macworld Circus.
How are we doing? If you've upgraded from Frontier 5.1.4 to 5.1.5, did we fix important bugs? Is it performing better? Are you using guest databases? What features are you looking for in Frontier 6 and beyond? David Carter-Tod: winDialog suite. Design dialogs in Visual Basic that run in Frontier. WebL: A programming language for the web. Learning systems are a hot topic again. I wrote about this almost a year ago in a DaveNet piece. That's when I realized that to grow to a new level we needed a better networked writing environment. That has been the central focus for Frontier 6. Josh Buchanan reports problems with MSIE/Mac 4.5 and Frontier 5.1.5 and menu sharing. If you are Frontier-savvy and live in or close to Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, please contact Jim Roepcke. InfoWorld: Microsoft goes after Jini. "Universal Plug and Play" is based on TCP and XML. Wired: Palo Alto's Printer's Inc is shutting down, a victim of online book buying. I have to admit I haven't bought a book at Printer's Inc in a long time. Will Kepler's be the next to go? No! Please! Reuters: 45 Billion Galaxies Discovered, thanks to the Hubble space telescope. And they said it was a waste of money!
WebMonkey connects Apache and DreamWeaver. Taylor, one of the authors of this piece, writes: "Since Dreamweaver uses the W3C DOM internally for all its extensions (as of 2.0) you could probably write a slick extension to use Frontier in Dreamweaver." InfoWorld: DreamWeaver connects to WebObjects. Wired: Top level Think Tank goes Public. John Simms: telnetServer 1.0a6. Philippe Martin: AutoSaver 1.0b6. eMediaWeekly reviews Director 7. Walt Mossberg: Search Engines. This is a back-issue of his column in the Wall St Journal, which is a for-pay site that I don't link to (I subscribe to the print WSJ). Well, the WSJ decided to loosen up a bit and let Walt play on the web. So I can read these columns on my computer, now I can point to them too. This is a good, small step forward. Compaq's Jeffrey Harrow loves USB. Builder.com: What to expect in 1999. WebTechniques tutorial on XSL. CNN: Senate trial begins. Today will be a light day on Scripting News. We're having all-day meetings here today.
MacWorld's photo gallery from the Expo floor is a Frontier application. Earlier today Bob Bierman from UserLand demo'd Frontier 5.1. Audio is available on this page. MacWorld: Eddy Awards for 1998. Special congratulations to AppleScript for winning Technology of the Year. Scripting technology has long been overlooked as a differentiator for the Mac platform. It's good to see AppleScript get the recognition it deserves. Wired: Games come back to the Mac. "When Amelio came in, the game developers didn't hear from anybody, because that wasn't the direction," said Kathy Tafel, partnership manager for games at Apple. InfoWorld looks at IBM's AlphaWorks group. Fascinating. I'd love to meet someone from this group. Pointers? PC WEEK: Microsoft wants OEM pricing info sealed. InfoWorld: Microsoft email calls cross-platform software a disease that would undermine Windows. A new easy-to-remember URL for the palmtop version of Scripting News. News.com: Palm Computing to name new CEO. Here's a table that compares Avantgo versions of news sites with the main version. Let's see which ones are in synch and which aren't. NY Times: Yogi and Steinbrenner shake hands. Carmen Berra said she believed Steinbrenner's visit had nothing to do with business and everything to do with a clear conscience. "With the year 2000 coming, everyone is thinking about the future, about peace, about making things right," she said. CNN: NBA season saved, Stocks move toward record. Wired: Death to beige boxes. They're serious! My wish: less app breakage as Apple goes forward and more performance for the Mac OS. This trivial crap turns me off. Sure beige boxes are ugly. So make them smaller, make them disappear. Think laptops. (They're not beige.) CIO interviews Disney's visionary Bran Ferren. News.com: Netscape wraps AtWeb buy. $212.3 million. Starr Wars. Clinton humor!
DaveNet: MacWEEK and Frontier. Correction: In today's DaveNet I said MacWEEK is a unit of Ziff-Davis. In fact, MacWEEK is published by a joint venture between Ziff-Davis and the International Data Group. WoW! A Telnet server for Frontier. This could be very useful! Red Herring on Apple. "He thought the NetBoot feature would appeal to schools and colleges outfitting computer labs." Very true. A sidebar to the MacWEEK story, for developers of apps that plug into content management on the Mac. Wired: Security hole closed at MacWEEK. Hacker cooperates. "I have no interest in making them suffer too much," he said. New release: MSIE 4.5/Mac. Macintouch: Henry Norr reviews MSIE 4.5. News.com: New designs for the New Year. InfoWorld: Jobs gets warm reception from Mac crowd. News.com: iMacs come in colors now. "We think one of the most important questions now is 'What is your favorite color?'" Jobs told thousands of attendees during his Macworld keynote. "This is far more important than the mumbo-jumbo associated with buying a computer. People don't care about that stuff. What they care about is, 'I want to express myself.'" I think he's serious. Microsoft MacTopia. InternetWorld: Browser wars move to standards focus. "While differences between capabilities across platforms and browsers will continue--cell phones just aren't going to ship with 800-by-600 super VGA screens, sorry--adjusting a page to the client will be the job of a media-dependent style sheet, not a $150-per-hour developer." InternetWorld: XML enters widespread development. 1/12/98: XML User's Group meets in NYC. Salon profiles Apple's Steve Jobs. News.com: WalMart sues Amazon and Kleiner. NY Times: AOL and CBS News.
DaveNet: Welcome to 1999! UserLand Software is a proud sponsor of MacWorld Expo. Scroll to the bottom of the page for our logo. ScriptMeridian: RegEx 2.0. No doubt, this story wins best headline of the year! So far. Press release: Adobe buys Golive. InfoWorld, eMediaWeekly stories. The big news of the holiday period on SN: MacWEEK becomes a Frontier site; eMediaWeekly sneaks Frontier 6, we're getting ready to serve PalmPilot users; Frontier 5.1.5 was released and Frontier/Win can host lots of scripting languages. Press release: Industry's First XML Data Server. Why do they keep saying they're the first? In what way are they the first? PalmPilot users: Comments, suggestions? Something interesting is happening in PalmTopLand. Channels, an idea promoted by Marimba, Netscape and Microsoft two years ago are the way of the world on palmtops. This leads to some interesting questions for web pubs, and suggests an area where developers of content systems, such as UserLand, could quickly adapt their content, in real-time, for reading on palmtops. But it raises thorny legal issues. Observation, much of the content for PalmPilot users has no advertising. Here's an example from www.news.com. What's writing like on a palmtop? DaveNet: Soundbites from 1998. RealBasic 1.1. Mac. James Clark: XP, An XML parser in Java. Edge.org: Most important invention of the last 2K years? Our dynamic server continues to hum along! The alternate home page soooooon will become the real home page. Still diggin! InfoWorld: Lotus ships SameTime. News.com: AOL reports $1 billion in holiday shopping. CNN: Euro makes strong debut. Wired: Minding the bitz at the Ritz. MacWEEK: If you'll buy a Mac in 1999, buy a PowerBook.
The Linux kernel archive mirror system. This gives me technology envy! What an accomplishment. Congrats to Lawrence Lee. Tomalak's Realm is hummin right along, right thru the holidays. Keep on truckin Lawrence. NY Times editorial: The Limits of Technology. "We need to remember that the measure of a civilization is not the tools it owns but the use it makes of them."
AP: Rabbi says it's OK to delete 'God'. Seattle Times: Is it time to bail on Amazon.com? Osho: Are idiots trained or born? NY Times: Internet speculators target politicians. Brian Rodgers, a real-estate broker in Austin, registered the domain name GeorgeBush2000.com because, he said, "I don't want George Bush to be president."
Welcome to 1999! Home pages for PalmPilot users: Wired. Lots of different approaches. Prototype of Scripting News for PalmPilot users. The URL for this site will change. If you have comments or suggestions, post them here. Avantgo: Authoring Hypertext Content for the PalmPilot. Palm Computing: Palm OS Emulator for Win/Mac. The Bean Factory: Java/XML Tutorial. NY Times editorial: Why the Millennium Counts. "The things that bind us, however artificial, are worth noting and making a fuss over." Restrooms of the Future. A news site for restroom fans. LC Rees: Learn XML in 11.5 Minutes. The Wired Digital Crystal Ball. "I've got a Word file and she's got a database, and he's got his logs from his server. We all wanted to trade this stuff, but nobody knew how." Approx 364 days before 12/31/99. Tick tock.
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Bernie De Koven: 
