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Announce: UserLand will join W3C. $5000. Further: I will speak at WWW9 on XML-RPC. Priceless. ZDNet: Dave Winer doesn't believe in software patents. "What if software developers called a daylong moratorium on coding to protest patents?" David Carter-Tod: CHI-WEB has been discussing web apps and are having a meeting about them April 1-6 in the Hague, Netherlands. Klaus Schwab: "To conclude, you have in front of you the 1,000 most influential business leaders. What would be your single, most important wish towards them, at this moment?" array: "kevin drennan of the santa fe institute and i are arranging the first annual meeting of frontier users here in santa fe." The Webapps mail list is starting to get interesting. Bill Machrone: "If Amazon wants to fight, let it fight on a thousand fronts. Let it be nibbled to death by ducks." Jeff Cheney has lots of great links on editorial integrity. Can you find the black dot? Warning, it may drive your eyes crazy. On the W3C xml-dist-apps mail list, Jeremy Allaire gives a status report on WDDX. 46 sites on Weblogs.Com. I really like the look of this one. Making Zope Zoooom. "Frontier has that wide-open wild-ass thing too, but focusing the functionality for writers was the single best thing that ever happened to Frontier. I suggest the same can and should be done for Zope. In other words, if there were a Manila-compatible mode for Zope that might be the secret sauce that makes Zope zooom." Real world: Two Way Web White Board. Wow. Photos of whiteboards are in my space now. As I was posting the picture above, Marc Canter sent me this picture of him in a virtual sea of whiteboards. Since Andre is returning to Germany tomorrow, I wanted to take some pictures of his workplace, also known as Spicy Noodles West. Andre's been working pretty much round the clock. But all you have to do to get Andre to wake up is say Wiener Schnitzel! I tried to sneak up and take a picture of the Frontier source code but Andre says "Not Open Source!" Ironically Andre uses his Mac and BBEdit to review Dr Watson error logs. "For some reasons it's the only editor that works," he said. What is Constructor? WSJ: Microsoft enters uncertain era. "Is the company as aggressive as it was two years ago? When asked, Mr. Silverberg, a former Microsoft senior vice president who oversaw Explorer and two versions of Windows, just smiles and asks: 'Have you ever met Steve?'" Joel Spolsky: Painless Software Schedules. ZDNet: "Patents are not just being used as another revenue stream, but as a way to block rivals from competing in the market." Mike Donnelan, the editor of blackholebrain is a sign designer. That explains a lot (I think) about the colors and style he uses on his sites. Yesterday on a follow-up mail list to the patent meeting at Esther's earlier this month, Tim O'Reilly told us that he's going to Washington next week with Jeff Bezos to meet with legislators about web patents. Esther responded saying she was going to be at the White House the same day for an event that she would tell us about later. I asked the group if any inventors were in the loop here. Not much of a response. I thought to myself, would they pass legislation revolutionizing medicine without involving doctors? Wouldn't that be considered an obvious question? I concluded later that software designers and inventors don't get much respect. They'll find out later how dependent they are on us when the systems *really* stop working. Lawyers controlling software? I'd rather not be their beta testers. BTW, as far as I know Jeff Bezos is not a software designer. Before starting Amazon he managed a hedge fund. He's an investment banker, not one who sweats pixels. I also talked on the phone at length yesterday with Gordon Eubanks of Oblix. You may recall that Gordon was my partner in Symantec in the late 80s. We talked about many things, including the Microsoft antitrust situation. Gordon testified in Microsoft's defense in the current trial. My position has shifted, I now favor some action by the DOJ. Not because I dislike Microsoft or are "against" them, but because a one-browser market is not workable. I asked Gordon if the industry could do anything to overcome this situation without help from the government. I asked the same question of Steve Ballmer earlier this month. He said it's not his problem. I guess so, but in a larger sense, I think it actually is his problem. One of books which I'm reading very slowly and in pieces is Fire in the Valley by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger. I'm finishing the part on MITS and Ed Roberts, Bill Gates and Paul Allen; and starting the part about Gary Kildall and Gordon Eubanks. I sometimes forget that Gordon was one of the very first personal computer software developers. Being in the US Navy and being in Monterey were the common denominators. CP/M was their operating system, in many ways it was the Linux of its day. (In culture, not economics.) I went poking around the companion website to Fire in the Valley, and was really disappointed. This is one book that should be on the Web in its entirety, indexed by search engines. It would be easy to do with current technology, and damn, you gotta buy the book if it keeps turning up in my search queries, which it would, probably within a few months. There are so many people-connections in this book. I'd love to get that in XML and browse the network. That would make an interesting BBS. I keep pitching book authors and publishers on this simple idea, and you'd be amazed at how scared they get. But we know, Mr and Ms Web Reader, that the computer screen is no substitute for a reference book and the prices of books these days pale in comparison with the price of our time. Think about it. People are so expensive. Why not buy the book? (Esp if Jeff Bezos would let us 1-Click to buy it, and I'm still boycotting Amazon, so don't even think about me pointing to your stupid friggin site.) Lance Knobel: Put the book on the Web. "Dave, there are a few publishers that have seen the light." Anyway here's my current problem. Yesterday, the store coughed up at least a few hairballs on registrations for WebApps 2000. If you tried to register yesterday and the system failed, first many apologies, and please try again, and if it doesn't work, send me an email with a phone number and we'll take the registration the old fashioned way. This suggests one topic for discussion. How to test e-commerce web apps. Arrrggh! In an email to Ric Ford at MacInTouch, cc'd to me, Chuck Shotton says there's a flaw in MSIE5/Mac. It doesn't like to talk to servers running on the same machine as the browser. Chuck says: "The connection can take up to 10 times as long to complete as when using IE4.5 or any version of Netscape." I agree with Chuck that this is a serious concern. We just shipped Pike last Saturday. It's a Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server, among its many other talents. Without a clean fast connection to the local browser, that functionality is pretty useless. Speaking of Pike, last night I was talking with Andre and asked if he thought people were doing wildass development with Pike yet. (It's got a scripting language and object database and website framework and HTTP server.) Andre said he didn't think so. I asked why. He said that I haven't told people that it was OK. Oh. OK, it's OK. Go go go. Andre also taught me how to count to ten in Cherman. Eins, svei, drei, fir, fumph, etc.
UserLand is hosting the first WebApps 2000 meeting on Wednesday April 19, in Palo Alto, CA. The meeting opens with a dinner on April 18. It's a full-day event. There will be brief presentations, and lots of time for small group breakouts and one-to-one meetings. US$750. Dale Dougherty: Viola Is a Repository of Prior Art. "Patent 5,838,906 has to do with controlling embedded hypermedia applications inside a browser. A person named Michael Doyle applied for this patent in 1994, and he got the patent in 1999. Now he is suing Microsoft (going after the big fish first) saying that ActiveX controls among other things infringe on his patent. The lawsuit set Microsoft off on a search for prior art and they uncovered Viola." Pei Wei: Viola Home Page. A Web browser from 1991. The first to support graphics! And many other things. O'Reilly Associates is a sponsor of WebApps 2000. Thanks! WebApps 2000 will be held at Hyatt Rickeys. Weather in mid-April in Palo Alto is likely to be perfect. Highs in the 70s, possibility of some rain, but not likely. We're going to use the outdoors as much as we possibly can. Jacob Levy found Netscape 6 Preview Release 1. Edd Dumbill: "Where does my personal data actually live? Does it live a place where all the Web Apps I use can get at it?"
If Bryan Boyer makes a billion dollars on his Web App startup, I have a feeling he'll know what to do with the money. We hope Bryan will be there. He says that his company's app will be public by then. Curious! We're also working on scholarships for deserving Web App entrepreneurs who are cash-strapped. It happens. We want your brain and ideas, even if we can't get your money. Some rich companies will be there. So there are sponsorship opportunities. Feel free to email me with offers or requests. Chip Brookshaw: Sorting Out a Web Spreadsheet. "I think almost anyone who uses BrainMatter will be amazed at how it looks and acts like a typical spreadsheet, with all the basic calculating, sorting and formatting functions you would expect." I'm still filling out the background reading page on the WebApps 2000 site. I want this to grow huge. Send me links to your apps or articles you think others would find interesting. NY Times: Federal Agency Rethinks Internet Patents. This page counts page reads for Weblogs.Com hosted sites, starting on 3/30/00. The stats are recalced once a night at midnight Pacific." This page lists the 20 most recently updated home pages hosted at Weblogs.Com. A change in length of at least 50 characters is required for a page to appear on this list." MacInTouch Reader Report: MSIE5 and Outlook Express 5.02 for Macintosh. InfoWorld: Beta of Netscape 6 due April 5. Web Patents: Heard, by the USPTO. UserLand as a publisher: "In my opinion, there's no silver bullet here. He would have a conflict of interest, but all pubs appear to be crossing this line now. Editorialists no longer take an oath of poverty, nor should they, imho." Matt Neuburg: A Gentle Introduction to XML-RPC. How to Make Money on the Internet: "[Klaus Schwab] has an interesting way of introducing speakers, one which I've never seen before, that I will try the next time I moderate a panel. He addresses the speaker not the audience. For example he would say "Tony Blair, you are the Prime Minister of Great Britain. In your six years in office you have had many successes in bringing your country into the new global economy. You were a Global Leader of Tomorrow, inducted in 1989. We are very proud of our association with you.""
DaveNet on Hiatus. Shift Happens! We planned to open registration for the Web Apps conference for April 19, but it got pushed back because of a technical glitch. We'll have the site up tomorrow. W3C: XML Protocol Comparisons. Milestone. USPTO: Business Methods Patent Initiative, An Action Plan. David Adams' Speller web app is an important idea! O'Reilly: Why is the Jini Bottled Up? AP: Judge OKs deep hyperlinking. 8/12/99: InfoWorld and Deep Linking.
After many months of trouble-free operation, the Qube finally crashed, leaving this cute Weblogs.Com screen shot. It's back up now. News.Com: "VA Linux Systems has signed on two new customers that together will buy hundreds of its servers." David Rothgery reviews Pike. Gary Secondino: Pike sign survey. LA Times: Outlining Brings Meeting to Order. AP: Supreme Court limits nude dancing. "Ruling says laws can require pasties, G-strings." I didn't know that! 5/24/98: "Then one evening, quite surprisingly, I saw a fat naked woman dancing at an amateur talent show. I had to look. She was good! Her big fat body had the rhythm of the music. Her huge breasts swung to the beat. A big funky happy smile on her face! It made the point. If a big fat naked woman can dance so beautifully in public, what do I have to worry about?" WSJ: Patent Office to change its tune. Via Will Cate via Lawrence Lee via ZDNet. "Syndication," says Lawrence. Internet.Com: Macromedia Flash SDKs. "Using the code, developers are able to both play Flash files from within their programs, as well as export Flash comptible SWF files." Larry Yudelson: It's August in March! "Remember Byte's August language issues? I remember as a high school kid, wrapping my brain around Pascal and structured programming, Smalltalk and object-orientation, Forth and threading. Reading that issue was an amazing experience -- a whole new paradigm (wrapped within a wonderful cover) for me to struggle with." Powazek redesigns his weblog. Much better. Qube Quorner: Manifesto. I think it's time for the Scripting News community to give a Big Group Hug to Luke and the Qube Qrowd. I think it sucks that Cobalt points to Slashdot from their site and ignores Qube Quorner. When are those guys going to take a ride on the Cluetrain? Dan Gillmor wrote a glowing piece about Cobalt. He interviewed me for it, I said they're smart, for sure, but they're blowing it with the Qube. A brilliant product, ahead of the time, but they're letting the market catch up with them. Perhaps they can make more money on RAQs, but we will remember them for the Qube. A company with a huge hoard of cash can afford to build a market! Hello. $1000 is a nice pricepoint. The Qube Quounts. Every Mac LAN should have a Qube. Hello Qubetrain! Conclusion: All the Linux guys are rushing to grow to compete with Dell. I think Dell will win that one. Zig don't zag. Now a message to Dan Gillmor, who I just heard interviewed on NPR. Dan, we help you, please help us. In this world reciprocity counts. It's not compromising to your editorial integrity to include your experience in the web world in your presence in older media, where they like the credibility that comes from being part of a major news pub. Help Luke help Qube users. Why not? When you talk about revolutionary trends in technology mention the web, and the boom in easy to use authoring tools. Anyone can gush with ease when it comes to gigahertz processors. You lament the lack of innovation in software. Hello Dan! OTOH, Luke must take some of the responsibility for the lack of support from hardware vendors. He made a big mistake by incorrectly stating my point of view with a rep of VA Linux. Too bad. I'm more interested in getting an easily scriptable version of PHP with the right macros in standard distribution by Cobalt and VA. We should have integration between Manila and the runtimes on the servers, not necessarily with UserLand software. That's why we did xml-rpc. Luke incorrectly guessed our motive and plan, and made the mistake of telling that to the VA guy w/o checking with me. At the time we already had Manila static rendering working! Oy. The VA guy was was concerned that I'm a random huckster with compromised integrity, even though Doc Searls had already told him otherwise. Luke fed right into his fear and he ran away, that was the last we ever heard from him. So Luke, why don't you tell the story publicly and say what you learned? It will make us all more effective at gathering the support we want. Now a question for everyone. It's The Year 2000. There's a brand name up for grabs. If you believe in the power of web community, what does that make you? It's a puzzle. Figure it out. Hint: Too bad this name is taken. AP: Reform rabbis back same-sex unions. Excellent! Will Cate quotes a report in today's WSJ. "Amid a growing debate over patents that stake out broad claims for basic methods of doing business on the Web, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is expected Wednesday to unveil an overhaul of the way it examines applications and awards patents for many online practices." Happy! We'll watch for this announcement, can't point to the WSJ article, it's behind a for-fee firewall.
Frontier 6.2b1 is released. Major database performance enhancements. This is a beta, deploy with care. Important: UserLand will host an all-day meeting in Palo Alto on Wed Apr 19 for developers of web applications to talk about the market, partnerships, compatibility, standards and whatever else this new industry would like to talk about. Limited participation -- 100 people. Developers only, no press. UserLand will host this meeting, in cooperation with IBM and O'Reilly. We'll have a new website open tomorrow with more information. T-shirt included at no extra cost. Frontier: html.refGlossary callback. Social Ecology: ManilaPalooza Chat Transcript. NetDyslexia: "Most of the NetDyslectics were born in a socialist country: in the G.D.R. (East Germany). So we know what it means to live in a dictatorship."
Joel Spolsky: Software NDAs and contracts that you should never sign. "I recently signed this clause in a 3 page NDA by a startup company that consisted of exactly two founders, and no employees. So the founders, by putting this clause in the NDA, are doing nothing but guaranteeing that if their business doesn't work out, none of the people they met while working on the business will be able to give them jobs." Jim Matthews: Carbon-compatible menusharing.c? ZoneAlarm sounds like the perfect companion to Pike.
2/9/98: Mason on Working With Dave. I've been saying this for quite a while. The Cluetrain goes in both directions. I must remember to talk with Doc about this. That said, the current Pike-button approach is far from the only configuration Pike will support. But give us a chance to rest and regroup! Thanks for listening. Eating tutorial for men, primarily: "As you're eating, visibly enjoy the food. Get some on your shirt. Laugh. Say thank you 18 times, but not all at once. Save the onions for last. Eat a few, get up from the table, declaring yourself completely satisfied, and go around the back of the house and make digestive noises, outside where they're appreciated more." What is LinkBack? Salon: Why leave your marks online? "A bevy of companies wants you to move your bookmarks from your browser to the Web, but it's not clear how you'd benefit." InSite is a free site management tool written in Perl. News.Com: Akamai, CacheFlow team for caching speed. "The deal highlights the increasing number of alliances being struck as companies strive to avoid sluggish or even embarrassingly inaccessible Web sites due to heavy traffic. Companies across the high-tech landscape--including computer makers, network equipment makers, Web site hosting firms and telecommunications firms--are forming partnerships to make sure information is delivered quickly." WSJ: Outlook for settling antitrust case dim. "Microsoft Corp. and the government continued working toward a possible settlement, even as a federal judge prepared to rule soon if the effort fails, people close to the case said." Static rendering was released last night to Frontier developers and system managers. Four pages of docs -- an overview with instructions for Manila MEs, a howto for server managers, a case study, and a guide for people who want to customize their static renderings. After much discussion and a demo about static rendering at ManilaPalooza on Saturday, we decided to release it first to Frontier developers so they can have static rendering for their Manila sites. Used in this mode, Manila becomes a multi-user staging server. Very powerful combination. It's going to be difficult to transition individual ETP sites to static rendering without link breakage. We're going to start with some of the high-flow sites, like Matt Garland's music site. Each site will teach us something. However it's easy for *new* sites. So we may open an all-static hosting server on UserLand.Com. Still puzzling this out. Adam Engst reviews MSIE5/Mac. Breakage fixed. In switching to Pike for editing Scripting News we broke the
Pike Beta: Browsing your Manila site in Pike. "A new version of the Pike menu allows you to view your Manila site locally. This should be an eye-opener for people who have never seen what a Manila site looks like behind the scenes." New Manila feature: Linking to archive from the News Day template. "Jason Levine implemented a cool feature that was catching on in the weblog world on his Queso web site, and I said 'This is going to be in Manila' and implemented it on Scripting News, and now it's on EditThisPage.Com, and when Brent is ready to distribute it, it'll be on all other Manila sites." Pics from ManilaPalooza: Susan Kitchens, Jake Savin, Jeff Cheney. NY Times: Talks in Microsoft Case Continue as Judge's Decision Looms. I'm busting with pride over this site. I've been working with Dale since last summer and the seed planted then is popping through the earth now. We have a very ambitious project in the works with O'Reilly. I think it's going to work. Happy! One thing remains constant across source code systems, net outages, and the patent system, Murphy's Law. But sometimes things work that you don't think will. For example, I tried typing this URL into my browser, and hot damn, it worked. Edd Dumbill: "And you never tried /edd/?" 1/29/00: "At dinner last night I told the story of my company and likened the last year to jumping out of a plane with no parachute. One of my dinner friends said that's crazy. So I said OK, you have a parachute. Later I thought about it and realized that there is no parachute. Not only do you have to create the parachute while you're in free-fall, you also have to invent the damned thing!" Followup to yesterday's escalation through WEF to management at PacBell. Lance Knobel contacted the exec in charge of worldwide operations of SBC, the parent company of PacBell. We use routers in the human world too! I forwarded Lance's email to the NOC mailbox at Conxion, asking them to get ready to work with SBC. Susan Kitchens on new slogans she learned at ManilaPalooza, including Biermania, which will be the name of Bierman's new weblog, starting sooon, we hope. Too bad Susan doesn't want to share her mother's secret slogan that gets people to laugh when she's taking their picture. Survey: Should I reveal Mrs. Kitchens' secret slogan? 100 yes votes required. I was searching for a smiley face collection on Google and to my surprise one of the top hits was a Manila site. Excellent! OK, we got the hundred votes, thanks everyone, so here's the secret slogan. Enjoy! Press release: MSIE5/Mac. WSJ: An ex-reporter tackles the future of Net media. "In the mid-1970s, Jonathan Sacks was a reporter at the tiny St. Cloud Times in Minnesota. Today, he’s got an audience of 22 million at one of the most powerful media companies. His title is senior vice president and general manager of America Online Inc.’s Interactive Services. That means he is in charge of programming and commerce for the giant AOL online service, the Aol.com Web site and the AOL Instant Messenger tool for chatting online." I know Jon Sacks. I saw the video of his speech. He was arrogant back in the 80s, but tolerable. Today he's unleashed! MacWEEK: Internet Explorer 5 ships. Ryan Szekeres has screen shots of MSIE5/Mac. Tom Clifton sent a screen shot of XML in MSIE5/Mac. Wired: "Microsoft's 11th-hour stab at settling its antitrust case is going nowhere fast." On Friday, NPR's Talk of the Nation covered software patents. According to William Krzysko, who heard the broadcast, "Q. Todd Dickenson, Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks was on the show, discussing technology patents. When asked about the Amazon 1-Click patent, he suggested that people request a re-examination of the merits of the patent, which could result in its cancellation." Wow, listening to it now. They think that baseball's double play could be patented if it wasn't already being done. Geez Louise. Let's hope Wired nukes the latest redesign soon. I can't read articles this way. My mind doesn't work this way. I wonder if they're trying to kill their pub? David Humphreys: "We've been using weblogs at Organic to try to start a community diary around a given project. It's a new program -- a week or two old -- but we're definitely going there." Optimem: "Scientists from the European Media Laboratory in Heidelberg, working together with the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Mannheim, have demonstrated that 10 gigabytes of data can be stored on a roll of conventional adhesive tape" WSJ: "Microsoft Corp.’s offer to settle federal antitrust charges frees computer makers to embed competitors’ software into Microsoft’s Windows, one of several major concessions that could form a basis for resolving the case, people close to the settlement discussions said. Under the proposal, personal-computer and software makers would be allowed to modify the secret “source code” underlying Windows to add rival products such as Internet browsers or media players."
Dack.Com: web economy bullshit generator. Blogger gets permanent links.
2/20/95: "The Department of Justice is powerful. They're part of the US Government, which has a huge army, navy, air force, and nuclear weapons. How will this faceoff be resolved?" I guess we found out. They blew up the Kingdome. Ooops! NY Times: "Since digital photography is essentially an electronic form of instant pictures, Polaroid is either in a unique position to move into this field -- or uniquely suited to be rendered obsolete by it." Michael Rose explains how he got Pike to work with his Frontier server. Weblogs that point to PikeBeta. Andre Radke on ManilaPalooza: "For me, probably the most interesting part of the event was to discuss the possibilities of embedding Python in Frontier with Frederik Lundh of Pythonware." Denise Caruso: "For the last couple of months, Doerr, the venture capitalist, has been redefining success from an even broader perspective. In public forums, he has been encouraging a shift in focus from mercenary to missionary, asking executives to think about starting companies and building products that they believe will change the world, rather than merely amassing wealth." According to Brent the word of the day at UserLand is Wiener Schnitzel, and yesterday was Brent's 32nd birthday! Happy birthday Brent and pass the Schnitz. Wiener Schnitzel, the national dish of Austria. With over 300 restaurants, Wienerschnitzel is the largest hot dog fast food chain in the world. Salon: Keep a Web journal, get fired.. or worse. blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog. The word "blog" makes me want to blog.
To ManilaPalooza People: You're Totally Awesome. Thanks! David Weinberger, one of the Cluetrain authors, is looking for examples of people who use weblogs in business. "I'm trying to illustrate the point that the Web is changing the old rules about the presumption of secrecy." Dan Gillmor: Cobalt Networks is emblematic of valley evolution. This was a week of outage and escalation. One very big one, lots of aftershocks. Now I've gotten used to the Ten Minute Outage. One happened in Cupertino, just before my demo. Luckily the line stayed up through ManilaPalooza. And now, we've bonded with the Conxion people, and this week I learned more about escalation, watching Steve Martin waste huge amounts of time looping. PacBell is not taking responsibility. In the ISP world, when that happens, you escalate. But Conxion can only go so high up the hierarchy at PacBell. I said "It's a shame they're not really part of our industry, because I can usually find a way to get through to the CEOs of high-tech companies." Then I realized that I could escalate to the PacBell CEO through Davos. So this is a public note to Lance Knobel at WEF. Lance, how would we go about contacting PacBell? They have a serious issue, and could take leadership in a very important area for world economic growth. How can we network to the right person at PacBell? BTW, DavosNewbies is served on our Seattle LAN, so it did not go out when PacBell started heaving our packets. In a way (a small one!) it's unfortunate that this site was not served through PacBell, because then the CEO would instantly care if he looks bad. Imagine a Davos site behind all that michegas in the PacBell cloud!
To Wes Felter's question -- we're not there yet with all the features you asked for. What more can I say? Our focus in 1999 was on ease of use and writing tools. We've delivered, now we're in refinement mode on those things, and lookin for the next holes to dig. We're going to hire more engineers soon. And partnerships are a distinct possibility. No company can do everything, right?? BTW, to Wes, we sent a Frontier T-shirt to Austin for you with Craig Jensen. And thanks to Robert Occhialini for the wonderful shirts! And we gave out Frontier 1.0 manuals. There's still a palette of those in my garage, so I don't think they'll become collector's items any time sooon. Ideas for Manila plug-ins: Presentation bullet charts, Blue Mountain Arts. And we met Fredrik Lundh, I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to introduce him. Fredrik was instrumental in the adoption of xml-rpc, after we released the Frontier implementation, he made it work in Python. He says: "Writing the first version of Python's xmlrpclib took me about 20 minutes." Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, this was one of the most powerful 20 minutes in history. Lundh's implementation bonded us to the Python community, and it precipitated all the other xml-rpc implementations. Danny O'Brien from NTK was there too. I explained what "It's even worse than it appears" means in the context of ETP. I realized immediately that I had stepped in it. Other regrets, I gave a hint to the cluelessness of VA Linux. We offered to make them kings of our world, but they'd rather be whores to the corporate bosses. Not great profit margins there. We're not hucksters folks, we just want to help you make the products we want. Thanks for listening. Keynote Systems: Free Performance Appraisal of Your Web Site. "Are you losing customers or revenue because your web site is too slow or slower than your competitors?"
ManilaPalooza 1.0 is over! Great time see you on the web tomorrow. Here's the ManilaPalooza chatroom! And the webcast. What is Pike? "Pike is an outliner that's been custom-fitted to plug into Manila sites. You can create and edit stories with Pike. You can use it to edit your home page. And you can also use it to edit the myriad of templates that define how a Manila site is rendered. It's both a writing and design tool." Of course there's a Pike-Beta mail list. Basic things about Pike. 1.You must have a Manila site you can write for. Without a site, Pike is useless. It *only* works over the net. 2. Pike is a free public beta. No need to grovel. Everyone gets one. (This list will be added to.) Screen shots of Pike being used to edit a weblog, template, story, XML and the home page of the Pike-beta site. This screen shot would probably mean the most to MORE and ThinkTank users. Yes yes yes we're going to webcast ManilaPalooza. ManilaPalooza began for me last night. While Brent and Andre fixed bugs, did a security checkout and got the downloads and license agreement ready, Sheila and I went for a walk, and then did a little web work, and then drove to Palo Alto to get Spicy Noodles takeout (a first!) we talked about weblogs, community, outages. I had some comments here about design vs cheese, but based on email I think I'll wait till next week to explore this stuff. IP Law: Bar Reacts To Bezos Patent Reform Plan. New channel: Exploring XML from Webreference.Com. The NY Times reviews Cluetrain. "A manifesto should be full of hyperbole, and while this one often strains credulity in the particulars, the general thrust is on the mark." Letters from readers on Doc's weblog. Nick Petreley: The dope on Zope. I didn't know that there's a Netdyslexia book. Written by E. Norma Cheese! Tom Clifton's webScheduler Manila plug-in. Bing! Mr. T has something to say about all this weblog stufff. Today is a day of celebration. Whether the demo goes well or not, today is a day when writing for the web becomes easier than it's ever been. There will be many more of these days. I want to change the tagline for Pike from The first Web outliner to The Web's first outliner. Subtle but important difference. We are part of the web, our success is the web's success. When we win the web wins. That's part of the Ask Not philosophy.
Tomorrow is a very big day for me. I'm so psyched! My imagination has run wild. I think of Matt Neuburg racing north on his BMW motorcycle. And Susan Kitchens humming tunes driving up 101. Ken Dow flying in from Ottawa and Eric Soroos from Seattle. Zoom zoom. People from Organic and Macromedia sipping lattes and thinking about the stock market. So this is what Silicon Valley looks like? Jacob Levy getting ready to say "Let's see Pike already!" Oooh ooh ooooh. Who will be the most surprising?? And how many digital cameras will there be? And will the webcast work? And perhaps the most vexing question of them all.. Survey: What's the song? Sheeela Simmons is sitting next to me and I'm interviewing her. Sheila. What will be your next issue after they implode the Kingdome on Sunday? I don't know. Would you like a suggestion? Sure. Well, you could always blow up the Space Needle! No way, can't be done. Ohhhhhh. XML.Com: Portable Site Information. "XML can be used to model the actual structure of a web site." True. Erik Barzeski: "Many people believe that CodeWarrior will be dead by the summer of 2001." InfoWorld: Perl 6 to debut in August. "Perl 6 is a ground-up rewrite using the object-oriented C++ language." NY Times: "The Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation into whether White House officials illegally suppressed large numbers of e-mail messages subpoenaed in investigations of Clinton administration campaign fund-raising and other activities." Now, you already know I'm working in an outliner. As Jerry said, what a long strange trip it's been. A few years ago I did all my Scripting News writing in an outliner. Then I had to master writing for the web in a browser. That's how we figured out how to do Manila. Now that that works, I can use an outliner again to edit this site. One advantage of using the outliner is that I can quickly edit and re-order the items. It's faster than the web browser, it reduces three steps to two. Edit-Change-Post becomes Change-Save. However there's more I can do, and probably will, to use more than one level of the outline. The key is in adjusting the rules so that it renders in a sensible way. Here's a screen shot of today's editing environment, with the Pike File menu pulled down. Speaking of strange trips, this is the new File menu I was speaking of in May of last year. BTW, now that you have seen the new File menu, I expect complaints about the What is This? command. What does it do? It opens a page in your browser that explains what it is. We figured this would be the place to put the uber-help command, that this would be the place where confusion would expect a quick answer. (And there is no New command in the menu, which is what usually appears in that slot. The menu looked wrong with Close as the first item.) The day after ManilaPalooza, Seattle will blow up the Kingdome in celebration. Make sense to me. They ought to blow up the other stadium too. News.Com: Former Beatle's publishing house sues MP3.com. Andrew Wooldridge wonders if Pike could be used to edit XUL. My answer is basically yes. "Outliners are good design tools for all hierarchic languages and data structures." Tom Clifton volunteers to plan tomorrow's dinner. Thanks! Jim Roepcke reports a new email virus. OK, B2B is hot, somehow we missed that boat, so let's start another one. W2R. What does that mean? Writers To Readers. The next big growth area! Update. The next growth area after B2B and W2R will be F2F, or Face-To-Face. So today's hot stock market tip, invest in companies that run conferences that make it easy for people who meet in cyberspace to meet in person. Joe Clark: Usability at epinions.com. BTW, the Joe Clark link was added using Manila Express connecting to Pike. Since epinions is for writers, they could support the same interface as Manila and then Pike would be able to submit stories to epinions, and of course everything that's compatible with Pike would work too. (So far there are no Pike-compatibles, but anything that is will get a big fat link on Scripting News.) This is how non-dominant web apps companies can work together to empower users and make the Web more powerful. Like Brent, I am editing my home page in an outline! This is even cooler than email. Now Brent is working on making Manila Express work with Pike. I'm getting ready to use it! LA Times: "[Microsoft has] identified seven key categories that will represent the core components of the emerging system, known as Next Generation Windows Services. These categories--billing, publishing, relationship management, directory, communications, personalization and storage--will require intense problem-solving to make the transactions and communications over the Internet work among different computing systems." Ianus Keller: "Is it coincidence or a global weblog feeling, but those Dutch Weblogs that have already been mentioned on Scripting.com have decided to get together for a virtual 'instuif' (gettogether) as well?" It is a global gettogether feeling! The Netherlands is my second home. I miss you guys. See you in May! Can you tell I'm using an outliner? (I can.)
Survey: Will you be at ManilaPalooza? We made some changes to the Manila-RPC spec as we zero in on the first beta of Pike. BTW, we will also release Frontier 6.2b1 on Saturday, Murphy and PacBell-willing. Your humble servant. I have a wish list item for people who like to play with PhotoShop. Remember those THINK signs that IBM used to give to all its employees. I want one of those, but for the web. It was one of the things I liked best about IBM (I was an IBM kid, my dad worked in Armonk. Did I say that before?) Any company that sent that message to all their employees had something good going, Dave The Kid used to think. There's that word again! One of my best products ever was called ThinkTank. Pike of course, is very much like ThinkTank, but it's for networked writing. We used to "hack culture" as Doc says Chris Locke does. I wanted an IBM-style sign back then too, but instead of saying "think" it would have said "tank". My ad guy for ThinkTank was Dave Carlick, who went on to do Netscape's first website, and founded the now notorious DoubleClick. His slogan for ThinkTank was Cogitank Ergo Sum, loosely translated to "I ThinkTank therefore I am." Eric Soroos is coming down from Seattle. This will be the gathering of the millennium. Can you believe I've already forgotten how to spell millennium?? Making up for lost time on the Pike beta release. Working on taglines. Four so far:
Here's how it all comes together (at least in my mind):
When was the last time you listened to a song that used to be a favorite 25 years ago? Meeting Across the River, from Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run album, just gave me the chills, like a time capsule. It used to define, in a way, what it meant for me to be a man, or more accurately, a developing man. Living at the edge of the law (if we blow this one they ain't gonn be lookin for just me this time) he has time to express his love for his brother (Change your shirt, cause tonight we got style). "But Eddie, man, she don't understand, there's two grand practically sitting here in my pocket." BrentNut: "Hey -- I'm editing this page in an outliner!" No doubt the first of many such exclamations. Also note the weird URL on Brent's page. How did that happen??
We like to stay current on what Microsoft is doing in network systems, web user interfaces, XML, distributed computing, standards, OSes. For the last six months or so, we have been in the wrong PR flow, getting briefed on consumer stuff, MSN, Radio Shack, etc and not being briefed or included in important (to us) rollouts in XML, operating systems and browsers. Any Microsoft marketing/PR people tuned in? I have tried every other means to get this corrected. I'm sure it's just an administrative thing. O'Reilly's Meerkat is an "open wire service". It's kind of hard to find the actual Meerkat page on O'Reilly. Comparable to My.UserLand, they wrote their own aggregator that reads (a subset of?) the same files My.UserLand reads. Reuters: Cisco Briefly Tops Microsoft in Value. 7/9/96: Cisco Systems. "The two companies are like Amtraks on a collision course. Why? Simple. Cisco makes software for networking, and wants to make tools for content. Microsoft makes tools for content and wants to make software for networking." New features in changes.xml on Weblogs.Com. Peter Miller: Representing Tables in XML-RPC. Two new weblogs: Digital Photography and AppleScript. "Gee it's great to be back home!" Susan Kitchens: "Glad the network is fixed!" Garret Vreeland: "Hey, we're alive again!" Jeff Cheney: "Wow! I didn't really know how much I love EditThisPage until I had to live without it for a day." Three mini-outages this morning, 10, 20 and 30 minutes, during which there were no hits on the servers, and I couldn't get out. They're like aftershocks of earthquakes. I totally don't have my sea-legs now. Linux1 and the Honkers: The California LAN gets bigger. Now there's a Linux machine in the cluster, and the new 700 Mhz Subhonker1 is added to the mix, along with a MacUser Eddy award for Frontier 2.0. Outage Images: "While we were cooling our heels waiting for the Internet Gods at PacBell to give us juice, I played with pictures on my laptop, reviewing unpublished pics, and coming up with this random selection which I call Outage Images." Press release: Cobalt to Acquire Chili!Soft. "Chili!Soft enables developers to use Microsoft tools to create dynamic Web pages." According to Jean-Paul Smets, the European Patent Office has granted Amazon a patent for 1-Click.
The outage also meant that we couldn't get out, and it couldn't have come at a worse time, because everyone was here for our onsite in preparation for the ManilaPalooza meeting on Saturday. Or maybe it was for the best. Instead of working at a breakneck pace, we had to slow down. Both Brent and Andre were able to get development done, although it was difficult to do without a net connection, it was possible. As noted below, the hardware upgrade for EditThisPage.Com went smoothly, it took 38 minutes, and while the upgrade was happening Murphy tripped the wire at PacBell and knocked us off the air. We took the unusual outage as an opportunity to do software upgrades on most of our servers, and to add 256MB of RAM to Subhonker2, the machine that runs Weblogs.Com, so it should be faster now too. I'm looking for signs of problems related to all the upgrading that happened yesterday, and there may be a problem with static pictures on ETP, but otherwise all looks good. Still probing. From the I Learned Something New Department. Yesterday Steve Martin was talking about Blue Screens of Death on Windows NT. I told him that in three years of running as many as five NT systems I had seen only one blue screen. He told me that that was quite good, he sees lots more of them. Bierman then explained that Microsoft's server software, Back Office, SQL Server, Active Server Pages, etc, tends to use undocumented system calls to get closer to the hardware, and that's why NT gets the rep for bluescreening. My servers don't do this because Frontier plays by the rules, and when there are problems it doesn't bring the OS down. This makes the Cobalt acquisition of Chili!Soft that much more interesting. I assume that their ASP-compatible runtime doesn't do the BSOD thing. Is that true? Luke?
Network problems that started Monday evening have now turned into an outage, our main LAN is disconnected, you can access Scripting News because it is at Exodus, not on our LAN. The EditThisPage.Com upgrade was completed in 38 minutes at 6:08pm Pacific yesterday. We're awaiting word from PacBell and Conxion on when the outage will be fixed. EditThisPage.Com will get a hardware upgrade this evening, going from 500Mhz to 700Mhz. There will be an outage, hopefully no more than one hour, while we do the hardware switchover. I had a phone talk with Brian Biles, VP-Marketing at VA Linux. I'm not sure he understood what I was asking for in the way of a relationship with a server vendor. It's basically the same relationship we offered to Cobalt. Help us form a sub-community of VA users, so we can study the product, understand where they're going and see if it makes sense to go there together. It's such a fluid market, and ultimately marketing through the Web, through all its channels, is how the market will segment. Imho of course. What I want to do with a server vendor is what I talked about in How to Make Money on the Internet. Form a community around the product, learn from the people, and create products to make them ecstatic. In the server market, there is no single outstanding vendor. By this time we should have a single default choice, one company that makes the best servers, who responds when there are problems, and has deep roots in the user community. No such vendor exists, but we're offering to try to help one of them become that. Interestingly, Palm was able to do a stunning IPO and then attract a top-level management team, exploding yet another Silicon Valley belief that you have to form your full management team before raising public money. Upside: A call for universal registration. "For example, if you are shopping online and decide that you'll buy a few things from Gap.com, BattersChoice.com, Amazon.com and 800.com, and you are not a registered customer for each one, you can spend the better part of an hour in dial-up mode just registering yourself. And even if you have registered, all of these sites have different shopping cart implementations, different checkouts, and, sometimes, an assigned user identification moniker different from your real name." Do you doubt that user interface standards are coming? Today we begin a two-week onsite meeting at UserLand. Andre is here, Brent is flying down from Seattle this morning. On Saturday we'll be at the March 25 ManilaPalooza gathering. Then we will have a full week to incorporate what we learned into our development plan for the next few months. The March 25 meeting is free and open to the public. Even if you have a casual interest in our sites and services, you're welcome at the meeting. It's a function of the whole UserLand.Com and Scripting News community. We're there to listen and we'll also speak frankly and openly about our plans to grow our part of the Web. Even if you compete, you are welcome on Saturday. What we will demo: First and foremost, we will demo Pike. We will have a website ready by Saturday so Manila users all over the world, even those who are not in Cupertino, will be able to download and use the software. It will be a free public beta. What is Pike? It is an outliner that's been custom-fitted to plug into Manila sites. You can create and edit stories with Pike. You can use it to edit your home page. And you can also use it to edit the myriad of templates that define how a Manila site is rendered. It's both a writing and design tool. Pike is as easy to use as a web browser but has the common features that web writers and designers need. Undo, Find and Replace, etc. And if you've never used an outliner, a bunch of surprises. Did you know that text has structure? That's the basic premise of an outliner. Further, Pike is also a Web server. And an object database. And a programming platform. It's basically a limited version of Frontier with a carefully crafted user interface designed to hide the details, but if you know how to poke it, it's a full scripting, database, and server environment. Even further, Pike is a homecoming, in so many ways. For me, it's the final step in a loop that began for me 22 years ago when I started working on outliners. To me they were always about groupware. Now, with all the pieces in place, a strong rendering engine and storage system, networking, and hypertext, we're ready to put the cap on the mountain. When Pike is successfully deployed, my lifetime work, from a software point of view, will be done. All that remains is getting the whole world to use it! Not a small thing. For people who still use Frontier 5, the last free version, this could also be a homecoming. Pike is built from the same codebase as Frontier 6.1, and it will track the development of Frontier. We will release new versions of Pike as we release new versions of Frontier. Pike is for Mac and Windows, there is no difference between the two versions. Pike may also satisfy the ever-present request for "Frontier Runtime". Pike will be free, at least in the first release, so it's a chance for everyone who stayed with the free version of Frontier to graduate to all the new stuff. However, if you want to deploy a real server that lots of people can use, you must license Frontier for US$899. What else will we demo? Well, that's still up for grabs. We're basically done with static rendering of Manila sites, which, if you choose to use it, will turn Manila into an editorial system, and offload serving of your site to server software such as Apache, IIS and WebSTAR. I'd also like to demo the connection between a Manila plug-in and a Pike plug-in, showing how Frontier developers can create custom editorial systems with very high-level interfaces. We can't possibly demo all this stuff, and still leave lots of room for the community to speak and organize. So we will focus on things that are best demo'd face-to-face. And face-to-face is what the meeting is all about. When an online community gets together in a room sparks will fly. Hopefully everyone will be in good cheer! If there are any issues you need to raise that might not be in good cheer, I hope we get a heads-up on them *before* the meeting on Saturday. Thanks. Jacob Levy: "I'll be there, but not the whole day. Could we have an agenda so I can plan which part of the day to attend." My answer: "Jacob, it's not a whole-day meeting, it's 1PM to 5PM with an informal no-host dinner at a local restaurant afterwards." Thanks to De Anza College for hosting the March 25 meeting. What a great place, with all that personal computing history, to host the first ManilaPalooza community arts festival!
DaveNet: Was JFK a Hippie? John Foster on prior art for Amazon's 1-Click patent. "I walk up to a soda machine, put in 50 cents, push one button and get a drink." Chuck Shotton discusses turning MacBird into an XML-based UI design tool. News.Com: Hewlett-Packard spends big to woo start-ups. "Traditional companies such as Sun, HP and IBM are eager to trot out start-up partners to demonstrate that they understand the Internet economy and deserve a place in it." HP is spending $1.5 billion on startups. FYI, we contacted VA Linux for a discount on a new Linux server for Scripting News, but got the blowoff. Eventually we will cover servers here, as we have with the Qube, but the manufacturers haven't been helping much. Jakob Nielsen: Test With 5 Users. Chris Locke: Winning through worst practices. I spent a couple of hours on the phone this weekend with Chris. Along with Doc, he's one of the Cluetrain guys. Very interesting conversation. Gary Secondino has a trio of old tomatoes in living color, wrinkles and all. News.Com: Netscape to release browser update next month. David Strom: The hidden privacy hazards of HTML Email. "Hidden inside those fancy, fun-with-fonts and link-filled messages are some sly ways of keeping track of who you are and what you do with this information." WSJ: Shockwave.com signs host of deals to produce exclusive Web animations. The site is owned by Macromedia, and headed by Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess. They hired Joe Shields, who's well-known in the Director world, and made a deal with James Brooks, who produced The Simpsons. Signing up 80,000 new members a day. NY Times: Netscape Browser Faces a Changed World. "After saying little about Netscape over the last year, America Online is now talking up its benefits largely to combat the impression in Silicon Valley, reported in a number of published accounts, that Netscape is in disarray and a shell of its former self." Does Wes have a girlfriend? (She's a cutie for sure!) Wes says that Sarah is not his girlfriend and he's still lookin. Girls, this is quite a geek. A nice guy who knows his stuff. Salon: Don't shoot that iMac! "Online reviewers convince Epinions not to run a TV ad featuring a Mac being blown to smithereens by a PC lover."
Big change on Weblogs.Com. "We've had an internal project for about two weeks to redesign Weblogs.Com and to add a key new feature to the site, the ability to create your own Weblogs.Com site." Thanks to Garret Vreeland and Mike Donnelan who are helping us figure out how to use this stuff. It's confusing, I admit it. But it's always confusing when you first jump out of the plane with no parachute. Scripting.Com regulars will remember our longtime slogan, still diggin, which might be amended now with "still haven't figured out how the parachute works." OK, so you want to get started customizing but don't know where to begin. Here's a kick out of the airplane, a source listing of the Weblogs.Com home page. What are those funny things in curly braces? They're called macros, and when the page is rendered they invoke magic bits of Frontier code called scripts. (That's why this site is called Scripting News.) Those scripts poke around in the invisible object database that makes Manila work and gets things and turns them into HTML which web browsers know how to display. If you do exactly what this page does on your home page, you'll get a home page exactly like ours. If you change the formatting, your home page will contain the same info as ours but it will look different. This is called "customization". Andre chust arrived from Chermanee. Ve might go out for a Spicy Noodles dinner. Andre groans. "Not so soon!". "Why not?" I asked. It's even worse than it appears. US6025810: "...thereby creating an input and output port; and generating a communications signal into the input and output port, thereby sending the signal at a speed faster than light." SJ Merc: "If a site's not constantly under reconstruction, it's just one click short of becoming another 404 error on the cyberspacial roadside." Another place to register your weblog. Jon Arney: "I'm working on an XML-RPC implementation in C++ using the Xerces-C XML library from Apache." Wow, they put a redirect on the original home page of the Web, the site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. From this page he pointed to the new sites as they came online. Unfortunately this site wasn't archived, wouldn't it be great if it were? It would be like the Bible for the Web. In the beginning..
Washington Post: "This is the goose, it laid the golden egg," says Lessig of the system of shared ideas that created the Internet. Left to themselves, corporate lawyers will try to patent the goose and build a legal fence around it--and then wonder what happened to the eggs." Dan Gillmor: "Picture the jaded technology watcher, contemplating a slew of announcements in recent days." This morning one DaveNet member threatened another, a newbie, who did something understandable, but not usual. (I had already sent him a private email gently explaining how it works.) The complainer wanted me to punish the person who offended him, and also rewrite the DaveNet software, and change the culture (visible To: header) because he got one piece of email he considered spam. Oy. I took him off the list with no regrets. If you send me Old Tomatoes, you're off the list, immediately. If you want to give me your pain, look in the mirror instead, and say it to yourself. You'll find a more sympathetic ear, for sure. I did a search for Old Tomatoes, thinking I'd find dozens of pages explaining what they are, but I found none. So here's the definitive graph on the subject. "Old Tomato" is a cute mis-pronunciation for "ultimatum". They don't work and they're easy to avoid. Write down your old tomato. Put it in your wallet. Read it two days from now. You'll very likely find you don't care anymore. Given this data, it's not surprising that oldtomatoes.com is not taken and neither is oldtomato.com. However, whatatomato.com is taken. If you like tomatoes (I don't) you'll probably like this picture. Jeff Cheney: Log Analysis for Manila Sites. If I watched more TV I would know wazzup. True. NY Times: A New Activist Fund Will Test Web's Clout. "We are as close to the Weathermen as you're going to get in the financial world." Electric Dirt Farmer reviews Zaplets.
"It's even worse than it appears."
Before each night is done, their plan will be unfurled, by the dawning of the sun, they'll take over the world. Here's a very cool Java applet that allows the user to implode the Seattle KingDome. Well worth the 500K download. Try blowing up some of the neighborhood for fun! DevX: Distributed Computing With SOAP. David Dodd: The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. Edd Dumbill: Fooling with XUL. Jason Levine: Manila and Daily Links. Thanks for the inspiration! I added the same feature on Scripting News, that's what the little page symbols on each day do, they take you to the archived version of the page. So instead of pointing to the Scripting News home page, now it's easy to point to the archived version. This was a good idea for a UI standard and we're glad to support it on SN and we will support it in Manila as well. Good news, the palmtop version of Scripting News is working once again. Still diggin! I played with Firedrop's Zaplets last night, but I swear there isn't an interesting application in sight. I also received a threatening email from their VC, who I thought was a friend. He said that the little guy needs protection. Little guy? Hello? I think we have a bad connection. According to Firedrop, Kleiner has started companies that are worth $80 billion. I wonder how big they think UserLand is! I also wondered if they would fight us legally, based on a suite of over a dozen patents that might be issued someday, or fight me in the market, which would be be very good for everyone and totally cool. Regardless, I tried to get enthusiastic about competing with them, and haven't managed to muster the juice. Zaplets are boring. Back to the drawing board. However: When a company advertises unissued patents, they're advertising vulnerability. The plan goes like this. Compete. Get publicity and users. Then the patents are issued. Wait for the demand letter. Tell your users "Sorry, we just got shut down." Give them the URL of the government-sanctioned monopoly. See if the monopolist can make them happy. (Doubtful.) John Foster on Zaplets: "I looked into Zaplets after scripting.com made mention of them and gosh, gee, there's it is, another feature from 10 years ago QuickMail from CE Software. We called them 'QM Forms' and they worked two different ways. One was you could use them to send data to a 'collector' account. Useful for gathering name, address, telephone, whatever else information... We got a 'big deal' reaction from customers for these features. Sure they were cool, they made good demos, but nobody used them." Prior Art. Hunting around the web I think I found the genesis of the Zaplet strategy. Press release: IBM Leads In U.S. Patents for Seventh Consecutive Year. While all this patent michegas is brewing, a relationship is blooming between UserLand and IBM. It's actually been blooming longer than I knew, key engineers in their Internet development group have been reading Scripting News and following our advice re XML-RPC. Well what do you know! It turns out they like weblogs too. Oy yoy yoy. Now, IBM, with over $1 billion per year in patent revenues becomes friends with Dave The Hippie who wants to make his users happy and return reasonable value to his shareholders. This is going to be an interesting conversation! Made even more interesting by my long history with IBM. I was an IBM kid, my father worked in Armonk when I was growing up. Later, when I ran a PC software company I made many trips to Boca Raton, to visit the headquarters of the technology world. Yes, that's where it was in the early-mid 80s! (Hard to believe now, eh?) We shipped the first app for OS/2. I met with Bill Gates at the PS/2 rollout in Miami. Everyone shook their head at the lock-in. And we all headed to the Mac. "I will survive." Lock-in kills companies. Just ask IBM. "It's even worse than it appears." -- Jerry Garcia. Alta Vista has a great picture browser that links into the Corbis database. I just spent 15 minutes browsing their Jerry Garcia collection. Some great photos in there! About hippies and software. Long tradition there. It took a lot of imagination to be into software in the 70s and 80s. Until the Mac really took hold, software was thought to be a very unimaginative thing. Meanwhile all the really good stuff was created by people with long hair, beards, loud laughs, they listened to Grateful Dead music, and stayed pretty quiet while the suits took the credit and most of the money.
Reuters: New Internet Start-Up Offers 'Amazon in a Box'. Apparently due to hitting a random milestone, NTK must now move to California. Although it pains me greatly to say this, this is somewhat cool. NY Times: From Geek Improvisers, a $99 Personal Computer. Sheila Simmons is counting the days until the implosion of the Kingdome in Seattle. A little over 8, as of today. Another idea for demonstrating resistence to the rule of patent. A programmer's strike. No code, no support, perhaps we even we shut down our servers, for 24 hours, in demonstration of our opposition to patents rewriting the rules of the software business. Instead of trying to convince the suits that this is wrong, let's show them how dependent they are on us. What do you think? BTW, in all but the most offensive patent-owning companies, such a demonstration would probably have the support of management and ownership. I believe most companies think the current situation is unworkable, at least if you take their comments at face-value. Oliver Breidenbach: "A man comes into a park where he meets a girl with a beautiful dog sitting on a park bench." Forbes: "Sun Microsystems' lawsuit claims that Kingston's primary product, add-on computer memory modules, is infringing on a Sun patent. Kingston, with sales last year of $1.4 billion, is the world's largest maker of the after-market modules, which are used to expand memory in computers." O'Reilly Network interviews Mozilla's Brendan Eich and Mitchell Baker. Tim O'Reilly says patents are OK, he's just against stupid patents. In the spirit of Touch of Grey, Tim man, patents are lock-in of the worst kind. There's no way to route around them. Consider this paragraph from yesterday's DaveNet. "I believe we must take extra steps to guarantee that there's no customer lock-in. It's even more important in the age of the Web when the user might not even have a copy of their own data. One of the cardinal requirements of this market, even before we try to get the UIs compatible, is an export function that leaves un-rendered text and data on the user's hard disk in a format readable by software that's available at a reasonable or no cost." Tim, give it some thought. I'm sure you agree with the paragraph above. But any patent, stupid or not, will create an environment of certain customer lock-in, not just probable lock-in. The only choice, imho, is to watch the Internet revolution wither and die while customers want features and fixes and are told about patents. To paraphrase Doc, this will not be a very happy conversation. The kids will ask what we did during the war. Is it worth going to jail for, as Professor Lessig warns? The day before they put me in jail, for writing software, I'll write one hell of a DaveNet.
To me, being a hippie means having a mind and a heart, and remembering to dance when you get the chance. ***Was JFK a hippie? Hey, if he had lived, would JFK have been a hippie?
"And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." BTW, one of the things I can do for my country is put on a button-down shirt. It's not that big a deal. Thanks to Mike Jamieson for a full MP3 scan of Touch of Grey. What a gorgeous song. Tears running down my face and I'm laughing. "The ABC's we all must face, try to keep a little grace. I know the rent is in arrears. The dog has not been fed in years. It's even worse than it appears." Great email from Deadheads. From Keith Hurwitz, "I started the internal distribution list, deadheads at Microsoft, in 92. I think I still have an extra "deadheads at Microsoft" t-shirt - on the back it has a cool steal your face skull with Windows logo in the center and billg glasses! I'd be honored to send you one if you are interested!" The Dead was a culture that permeated everything in my generation. What's wrong with this picture? 3COM, which owns 95 percent of Palm, has a market capitalization of $22 billion, but Palm has a market cap of $31 billion. In the Old Economy, this would be immediately adjusted, stock traders would do the math and see that 3COM was totally undervalued, it's just math. But one plus one doesn't equal two anymore. Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. I found a RealAudio interview with Jerry and Phil. Great quote about taxes. "The first problem we couldn't deal with by completely ignoring it." Probably not the last! This is a test for my friend Dave Jacobs, a vice-president at Macromedia.
DaveNet: Touch of Grey. First MacWorld, now Jim Roepcke, have dug out quotes from old DaveNets about Apple. Now let me return the favor. Here's what Steve Jobs said in Fortune in 1996. "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth--and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago." WSJ: Success of King’s e-book sparks old-line vs. online controversy. "Simon & Schuster said it didn’t include Fatbrain on the list of vendors for Mr. King’s book because Fatbrain’s encryption systems, which allow readers to download the material twice, wasn’t suitable." NY Times: IBM Makes Breakthrough in Memory for Computers. Susan Kitchens started a roll call page on the March 25 site. Linux Newbies: More On Installing Software. Grateful Dead: Touch Of Grey. 8/21/95 Time: Jerry Garcia dies at 53. "The flags were at half staff in San Francisco, and on one, a riot of colors replaced the traditional red, white and blue. It was the first tie-dyed flag to fly in front of city hall." 4/21/97: Can Apple Survive? Minnesota Public Radio interviews Jesse James Garrett on weblogs. RealAudio. News.Com: "The way Jini has been handled is a classic example of the product-marketing cycles that drive much of today's high-tech industry. To satisfy the relentless demands of competition and Wall Street, companies often hype their products far before a market for them has been created--and sometimes with little knowledge about how their technology will ultimately be used, if at all." Dan Gillmor: "For the first time in years, the installation of a new operating system went without a hitch. With Windows 2000, Microsoft put a lot of effort into this part of the product, and it shows." Steve Yost would like to apply collaborative filtering technology to My.UserLand and Weblogs.Com. What is Everything? Synchronicity. A few minutes ago I sent a follow-up email to John Patrick of IBM, saying that I saw how Sash, their JavaScript UI widgets, could fit into our Two-Way-Web vision, and at the same time, Andrew Wooldridge, editor of the Web Apps site, was pointing to Sash, saying "This is truly interesting." To Manila designers -- I'm sure there's a temptation to regard my call for templates as a greedy request by a huge corporation to get its users to work for free. I've even seen this POV on the web. Or you could view it as a way of giving future Manila users the benefit of your experience, knowing that this will mean they will have more fun, and will get to know you as the design inspiration for their site. We're going to open a new hosting service in the next few days. Right now all we have is the plain It Worked template that's getting kind of stale. We could offer money for the winning design. If we did, would that get you off your butts and coming up with new starter designs? Tim Bray: Patent your DTDs. "It's interesting to note that the DTD is ambiguous and hence technically not XML - I'm sure the USPTO will detect this." Dan Bricklin has some great pictures from Esther's, including me, smiling. One of my best lines ever. At the Web Apps panel on Tuesday, we're talking about building on each others' tools, Evan Williams volunteers that they've already prototyped an XML-RPC connection between Blogger and Manila. "Excuse me while I fall off my chair." It was that kind of session. Good humor, lots of laughs, awe at some of the demos (particularly ThinkFree), and hunger for success. NetDyslexia: Euroblogs. Conversant is a Frontier-based web app. I created a Conversant site late last week, but only had a few minutes to play with it. I'm interested in starting a discussion on how Conversant and Manila might be integrated, along the lines of the discussion we had in Phoenix (which I haven't written up yet!) about connecting various content servers with editorial tools. Perhaps someone with a Manila site can create a Conversant site for exploring the possible connections between the products. Also this is a milestone for the Frontier development community. This product is at least as competitive with Manila as Blogger is. (As if competitiveness could be measured on a scale of 1 to 10.) Finding a method for co-existence is going to be a bit of a challenge. The two lead developers of Conversant, Seth Dillingham and Brian Andresen, are highly regarded in the community as experts in getting Frontier to do amazing feats and working around its flaws. I bet Conversant works really well. They've been working on the service for many months. Their work deserves a careful review by people who use Manila and Frontier. XML-RPC mail list: "I am working on a business to business portal, which allows members to put up Items to buy/sell on the exchange." Chris Nolan: Why I'm still scribbling for a living. "Silicon Valley is now well on its way to becoming an affluent, fast-paced urban environment, stretching from San Francisco to San Jose. It is sophisticated, it is cutthroat and it is one of the most amazing places on Earth right now." Reuters: Life imitates art in Web confession sites. "This year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival featured an impressive array of Webcam and Weblog site proprietors who are committed to making people see that the Internet as a medium can be more than just an online mall." Tim O'Reilly talks with Richard Stallman on patents. "If only the nontrivial new ideas are off limits for 20 years, that will be enough to keep us 20 years behind the times."
On Tuesday, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft announced a deal with RealNames, but was this a slip of the tongue? They also did a deal with RealNetworks on the same day. (Great quote: "Microsoft is just one of the colors on the globe (in this space)," Doherty said. "Real is still the mapmaker.") In fact they did do a deal with RealNames. "The pact will let Microsoft expand its use of RealNames' technology that lets Web surfers find Web sites by typing keywords like ford explorer in a browser, rather than by using lengthy addresses packed with dots and slashes." The domain name system just took another hit. Will there be an outcry this time? There wasn't the last time it happened. Paranoid vision from yesterday's patent discussion. DOJ negotiates a settlement with MS. Major limitations on what they can do, with real teeth, unlike the last consent decree. A few months pass. Microsoft starts exercising their legal monopolies through their 1000+ patents. Sorry I don't remember who raised this scenario. It's cute. I'm not sure if they would play this tough. I kind of hope not.
Xml.Com: Cool XUL Provides Cross-Platform UI. Brett Glass: Twinkle, twinkle little prime. "The patent on the RSA public key cryptography algorithm is due to expire shortly." People I bonded with in Phoenix (this list will grow): Brian Behlendorf of Apache, David Ellington of NetNoir, Fred Davis and Colette McMullen of Lumeria, Dan Lynch (founder of many net-things), Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Associates, John Patrick of IBM, Evan Williams of Pyra, Ken Rhie of ThinkFree, Lawrence Lessig of Harvard, Tara Lamay of EFF, Doc Searls (who needs no introduction here), Michael Shrage of MIT Media Lab. And get this -- I spent ten minutes with Whoopi Goldberg! We talked about growing up in NY, getting older (we're both 44), her fear of flying (she travels in a bus), and of course I mentioned the problem with patents. I liked talking with her. It gave me a buzz. ***Good morning from Day 3 of PC Forum The Web Apps discussion yesterday was great fun. Lots of different approaches, the room was packed, humor, insights, in a way, the first meeting of members of a new market. Last night an interesting session on patents. As one would expect, two extreme views, one that patents are needed to protect small companies from larger predators, the other that monopolies are not cool, even under the guise of patents. An intermediate viewpoint, that the furor over patents is like Y2K, an imagined crisis, and an idea that the Frontier community could test the law by picking one highly visible yet thin company and meet them in the market, see how they respond. One idea we've been interested in for quite some time is HTML email, so perhaps Firedrop would make a good test case. As you know Manila sends HTML email to subscribers that request it. I know their VCs well, and they know me. From what I've seen it wouldn't take long to build a server app that does what Firedrop does. How would they respond? Well, it's pretty clear that their patents have yet to be issued. Maybe they would just welcome the competition, as a way of helping them refine their relationship with their market. These are just some thoughts from the field. I'm writing this out on the patio, it's a very pretty day, hard to be inside, but it's time to go back in! More news tomorrow, for sure.
AP: Dolly Creators Claim Cloning Pigs. Doc Searls: Patent Death Pending. The 3COM wireless connection is flaky and batteries don't last very long. So updates may or may not be very frequent.
About FireDrop: "The Zaplet Communications Platform required significant technology breakthroughs to leverage the convergence of the web, email, and instant messaging. Breakthroughs that centered around server-based asynchronous communications, and innovations in cross-email platform technology, which are part of the FireDrop suite of over a dozen patents." BYTE: Internet Patents Are Changing The Rules. NY Times: Technologist Gives His Peers a Dark Warning. Firedrop is dropping now. They have lots of patents. "An entirely new communication platform. Email, the web, instant messaging." Their product is called Zaplet. OnePage. Blah blah blah. Because blah new inefficiences, it's a hassle visiting all the websites, to drill down, daily basis, at the end of the day. Bookmarks. It's only getting worse. more necessary, not less. Smaller. It sucks. The internet sucks. At the end of the day fifteen years ago. Today schools register online, blah blah ok blah blah. You lose. They lose. The guy from Time-Warner says "at the end of the day" a lot. Now I am too. Good morning and welcome to Phoenix. Thanks to 3COM I have a wireless LAN connection that I can update from the hall at PC Forum. It's pretty cool to be able to check my email and write for the web while in a conference. It's sort of a very high fidelity webcast. I deliberately sat in the back of the room so the screen would look as small as possible. The CEO of Google is very impressive. I talked with him briefly last night. He's on stage right now with Carl Malamud of Invisible Worlds, and Eric Schmidt of Novell. I've gotten three emails, all not for publication, from Microsoft people saying that they do not have a patent on XML-RPC technology.
DaveNet: What is a Web Application? If I don't respond to your emails or postings it's because I'm on my way to Phoenix. Have a great day, see y'all tomorrow! Last night I put together the schedule for the Distributed Computing Track on Developer's Day at WWW9 in Amsterdam, May 19, 2000. That's quite a mouthful! It was also way late. Sorry to the WWW9 people. Glad it's done now. I like Esther because she gets silly. She thought I should wear jeans to the soiree in Davos. I didn't. But I will wear jeans at Esther's. The official national dress of the Internet. Yaya. Great to see the NY Times in a leadership position covering the patent crisis. At least we can document the Internet boom de-constructing. Let's give the candidates something to talk about, leave a trail for historians to follow.
My love to everyone in Austin. I'm jealous! Have fun!! Be young. ***Other stuff David Burdett: What is XML Messaging? Internet Analysis on Allaire and Vignette.
DaveNet: James Gleick on the Patent Crisis. Weblogs.Com: Members with Favorites. You can also include your favorites, or someone else's, or a collection of them, in any web page, using a <script> tag, of course. There's also an XML version of the favorites structure, it's updated every hour, after the hourly scan, as are the other Weblogs.Com XML files. With this info, other developers can do six-degrees type browsers that should be quite interesting. It's open, have fun!
Jim Roepcke: "I have been a customer of Natrificial for a couple of years now. I use The Brain just about every day. I am very disappointed that you intend to use your patents as a barrier to entry for other people who might create competing products." Jim's comments are interesting, since he's a weblogger, I'm wondering if it would make sense to have an index relating weblogs to products they cover. I didn't know that Jim used The Brain. It would be interesting to get that bit of information recorded in a usable way in the Category Browser in Weblogs.Com. It might also be interesting to have a weblog that "shadows" each company that is active in patents. This would allow someone who wants the full story on the company to get it. The press release was three levels off the home page on the Natrificial site. Neither Amazon or Geoworks are advertising that Amazon is part-owner of Geoworks. On a shadow site this information would be easy to locate. There's more we can do than sign petitions and send emails. Information is key. Until this morning I thought that The Brain was a friendly product. Ask Slashdot, 10/24/99: "I am writing a Linux and PalmPilot clone of a Windows program (The Brain by Natrificial - www.thebrain.com). It has come to my attention that there are patents pending on 'all fundamental aspects of The Brain.' What exactly does this mean for me?" Inspiration and | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
