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Has Microsoft peaked? NY Times: "Employees, whose options from previous years are now under water, become restless. To keep them happy, Microsoft last week awarded 70 million new stock options at $66.625 each. The indicated value of the grant: $1.9 billion." 5/12/98: "If their internal developers become inefficient compared to those outside, it's possible for them to let go of that model and shift to a new one." A SOAP Scanner? Talking with Bob Bierman on the phone this morning, I say I want a scanner, I've been asking him to get me one for over a year, but every time we talk we hit the same problem. Neither of us think that I would be willing to put up with the amount of work needed to get my scans onto the Web. I asked if anyone had developed an HTTP-based scanner as I described in Sept 1997. "Put a piece of paper into the scanner. Press a button on the machine to scan the paper. Open up my web browser on my desktop machine. Open the home page of the scanner. A list of GIFs appears, in reverse chronologic order. Click on the top one. A GIF appears in my web browser. Do a save-as, or drag-drop to get it into Photoshop." When a group of Stanford researchers helped a group of students upload their pictures for a science fair, they tripped across the Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server idea. Bob says that you still can't get such a scanner. I find that amazing. He said we might be able to do something like that with Frontier, but what communication protocols do the scanners use? Of course, a sensible protocol would be XML-RPC or SOAP. I want ZopeFish ZopeFish Architecture and Problems: "It works fine if I'm logged in to Zope with someone who has the Manager role, but doesn't allow access (it prompts for a password) to anyone who is not logged in to Zope." Pike and Zope working together is mission-critical for The Two-Way Web. Please help if you know Zope and we'll help with the Pike side. Music & more InfoWorld: "Rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers." Amen! The new CD Player in Windows 2000 has a live connection to tunes.com, so I can see that it's playing Dire Wolf by the Grateful Dead. (Screen shot to come.) Jakob Nielsen: Internet Client Design. "Napster connects many users to many servers and basically allows users to view the entire Internet as a collected resource for getting music (or, potentially, other content and services). At the same time, Napster also encourages users to contribute back to the richness of this resource by making their own music collection available as a small part of the whole. So Napster is also an example of a two-way user interface to the Internet. " An interesting discussion, how would a separate Internet Explorer company make money? This leads somewhere. Imagine for a minute that Yahoo doesn't have a browser in development. How likely is that? I like to see this. Andre is looking at docs that explain how to embed Python. The move went well Good morning, and welcome to UserLand's new land of many servers running at Exodus. The move went smoothly. We aimed for the gutters and Murphy was kind. "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy." For some reason a hard disk in Seattle went out during the move. Totally died. A completely random event? Oh sure. If you believe that I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn I'd like you to consider buying. Murphy works in strange ways. There was a configuration error on our Mail Transfer Agent (easily fixed). At 10:49PM all the servers came back online. Wes Felter was the first to update his ETP site. Makes sense. Now keep an eye out for breakage. How does the new LAN perform? We can't blame it on Conxion anymore. Good deal. Down the street at Qube Quorner, Luke Tymowski likes the new Exodus performance of his site. "The static version of this site used to take 5 seconds to render, the dynamic version 15 seconds. Now the static version takes 1 second, the dynamic version 2 seconds." (Of course the rendering takes the same amount of time, on the server side, but the Internet gets in the middle of that. I guess Luke is saying that his path to Exodus is faster than his path to Conxion.) Another change. After moving all the apps off the old Nirvana machine, I had to quickly come up with another name for the server last night in the middle of the move. I decided to call the machine "mainResponder". Nirvana was the codename for mainResponder. It was 1.0 a long time ago. So as we retired the Nirvana name (it now points to a folder of static files on our Linux server to keep breakage to a minimum), my new experimental machine keeps the family name going. You'd have to be a Frontier geek to appreciate this, perhaps. One caveat, until I get DSL installed at my home-office, I will still be using Conxion's T1 line to connect to the Internet. So if there's an outage, it will knock me and only me off the net. One final note, I guess I am pretty confident in my team. While I was waiting for the move to finish I fell asleep and didn't wake up until 5AM. Oh geez. Did they do a great job? Yes they did! I have the best team in the world. What's our secret? Good engineering and lots of prayer. Next milestone: Birthday #45, on Tuesday. Pinky and the Brain songs here.
Many UserLand.Com services will be offline between 8PM and 11PM Pacific including Weblogs.Com, EditThisPage.Com, the UserLand Store. Scripting News will remain online. Microsoft played all the angles NY Times: Breakup of a Giant Is Seen Reigniting Competition in the Software Business. "There is all kinds of gobbledygook coming out of the Justice Department," said Randy Komisar, "They are hoping that by creating an applications company as aggressive as the OS company, the new company will do things like make bets on Palm and Linux. That way they will crack open the operating system market." First, Microsoft's apps are already available on Mac OS, which is the only other large-installed-base desktop system, after Windows. So that part of the argument is weird, Office has already been ported. Would it make any sense to port Office to Palm? Hmmm. The screen is much smaller and there's no keyboard. That makes a pretty big difference. Microsoft has been trying to create a suite of palmtop apps for quite sometime, without much success. Then, why would I want Microsoft's apps on Linux? I totally see Linux is a server OS. Long way to go before it's ready for people who use Office. What does this proposal do to help Linux get more apps that aren't from Microsoft? Further, from what I know of MS (I've been visiting them for almost 20 years), if there were a market for the Office apps on Linux, they would be there. Where are the software historians? Did you see how they undermined MS-DOS by moving to the Mac in the 1980s? They taught the rest of the industry to stop tying one product to another. Lotus refused to support Windows in the early days, they didn't want to help Microsoft, and learned the lesson that Microsoft taught so well. Stop believing your own bullshit. Same with IBM and the tie-in between PS/2 and OS/2. Microsoft was unique in that they played all the angles. They are the original jump out of the plane with no parachute people, as far as I'm concerned. Excise the browser, embrace WINE Again, imho, the best remedy is to split out the browser, and only that, into a separate company. Windows must forever ship without an HTML browser. A one-click install screen, baked into Windows, with a set of choices approved by a panel of independent Web developers. The first choice in the list could not be the former Microsoft HTML browser, for three years. No more than ten choices would ever be offered. That would fix any problems caused by the untimely demise of Netscape, which any reasonable and impartial person would have to admit was at least somewhat caused by mismanagement at Netscape. Here's another thing we could ask Microsoft for. Make WINE really work. Make it easy for all Windows apps migrate to Linux, not just Microsoft's. It totally makes sense. Open the floodgates Bill. Show them how easy it is to turn the software industry upside down, without wrecking your company. Fun and games I updated the new SOAP weblog with comments by Andre Radke on yesterday's IBM/Java SOAP 1.1 release. I also added a FAQ page for SOAP. Todd Blanchard is confused about parts of SOAP. Another way of looking at the hard side of our sites. A complete backup fills four writeable CDs. This is called "content". Frontier 6.2b10 released. Fixes in threading, XML parser, XML-RPC implementation, new NT kernel verb for serving files super-fast, fixes to Mac TCP implementation. New demo app: Scripting MailToTheFuture through XML-RPC. The Tech Info page on MailToTheFuture.Com is now up to date. Frontier users can download mailToTheFuture.root, and you can even open it in Pike, which is in public Beta (and free). Added limits to the MTTF application to prevent it from being used to send spam. No more than 10 messages can be sent in any 15 minute interval and no queue can hold more than 100 messages. "It's even worse than it appears" I watched a bunch of roundtables on TV last night about the Microsoft breakup plan, there wasn't a software person in sight, and certainly no Web developers. Politicians, attorneys, journalists and professors have taken over. They're turning our industry into fodder for Larry King and CNBC, really dumbed-down stuff, and software is complex. It may be time, once again, to consider making pottery and sailing the Meditteranean, which seems relatively simple. "I know the rent is in arrears. The dog has not been fed in years. It's even worse than it appears."
PS: Andrea and Andre finished their trip log today. So sad!
DOJ to Judge: Split up Microsoft MSNBC: U.S. seeks to split Microsoft in two. "The proposal, submitted to U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson Friday, calls for Microsoft to be divided in two, with one company to house the Windows operating system, and the other to include everything else in the Microsoft universe." Dan Gillmor: "An operating system should be modular enough to allow competition for things like displaying Web pages." ZDNet: "Forget the DOJ breakup. If you want to figure out how Microsoft will morph over the next few years, the elusive NGWS is the real key." Other reports: News.Com. Seattle Times, Reuters, PC Week. US DOJ: Plaintiff's Proposed Final Judgment. AP Hates the Internet?
To AP with all due respect, why not offer a deal to the artists who created this? Grant them a license to use the images, and sell t-shirts, coffee mugs and mousepads with the images on them. Make friends with users of the Internet? It couldn't hurt. AP: South Park Parodies Reno on Raid. Murphy! You can help the Internet by downloading this zip file and putting it on a static server.
IBM first to ship SOAP 1.1 implmentation IBM released a Java implementation of SOAP 1.1. Wow that was fast! ZDNet: Microsoft cleaning up with SOAP. "It's obscure, but the Simple Object Access Protocol is at the heart of Microsoft's future plans." The Java Lobby discovers SOAP. Homero Leal: "I think that Sun should embrace SOAP as a way to offer the externalization of web services for EJB servers. RMI and IIOP are pain in the firewall." Kal Ath: "If you are worried about SOAP then you really are an idiot!" This is why I like the Internet. Read all the press reports, and you never get the truth. Open up a discussion group of developers, read a few messages, and the answer is very clear. ComputerWorld: Microsoft pitches new app interoperability spec. "IBM this week will post a Java implementation of SOAP on its AlphaWorks Web site and provide source code, Sutor said." ZDNet: Industry consortium to challenge Microsoft, Sun "Intel, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Oracle have joined with several smaller companies to form OpenServer.org, which plans to create a 'vendor-neutral environment' to ensure the compatibility of applications developed according to open Internet standards. This is the first I've heard of this, not sure what they're doing. OpenServer.Org is not open yet. A reporter called to ask what's the significance of IBM's co-authorship of SOAP. Aside from the fact that they install a lot of networked systems all over the world, and they do Notes, which we want to connect to Manila and esp Pike; consider that IBM is a leader in the Java world. Until Sun signs on, the Java community has an opportunity to take charge. That's why I'm involved, I think, because I point these things out. BTW, another big-name company with an investment in Java is joining the SOAP bandwagon. Looks like Python, Perl, Tcl and even Frontier get to play in the same networked sandbox as Java. It's only fair! 9/12/99: "The goal, simply put, is to create a high-level way for machines to call other machines, with the Internet as the wire that connects them." News bits Karl Dubost asks if it makes sense to have a Manila/Frontier dinner in Amsterdam during WWW9, May 15-20. Jeff Cheney has pictures from last night's Industry Standard second anniverary party in San Francisco. A minor correction. On Wednesday, after eating Spicy Noodles, I asked Lance if they matched his expectations. He said "That, and more." I asked "Can I say 'that and so much more'?" He said "Make it up as you go along." PacBell in the loop I spoke this afternoon with Bill Chubb, VP Broadband Services at PacBell. The escalation through Davos worked. (Thanks Lance!) He did something that Conxion has failed to do so far, he apologized. Even though we are not his direct customer. What a pleasure to have a real business person enter the loop who understands the value of the C word. Even though tomorrow is the last day that we depend on PacBell-Conxion for mission-critical services, I'm still helping route Chubb into Conxion's service people so that they can upgrade the service for Conxion's remaining 40 customers who use PacBell to link to the Internet. Ask not what the Internet can do for you. But I'll tell you what Conxion can do for me. Apologize for the unbelievably rough treatment and offer us a credit for all the money we're wasting doing this conversion and for the lost business during March and April. And then thank us for continuing to help. The analogy I use for what we will do tomorrow. Imagine setting up my six lovely servers at the end of a bowling alley and making me take a shot. Do you think something will break? This transition should have been done slowly, thoughtfully and carefully, with understanding from the ISP. Once again, I gotta say it, every Conxion customer should be aware of what happened here. You could lose your service on 17 days notice, after a month of outages, as we did, and get no apology or credit. The brain-stem is still breathing So tomorrow evening the subhonkers move to Exodus. In preparation, we're doing a review of all the sites hosted on all the servers. And we've emptied out the very first mainResponder server, Nirvana, so I can have a server to play with after the move. All its parts are being distributed. An interesting process, the brain-stem of Manila is still breathing, it's there and working, and of course the higher level stuff wouldn't work if it didn't.
News.Com: "IBM's support means that SOAP will be a real factor in interoperability between different programming models."
Angus Glashier posted a screen shot of him editing his site in Pike. He says "outliners aren't the most intuitive writing interface, and UserLand's implementation feels a little odd compared to the text editors I'm used to. Still, the ability to remain in the editor while saving updates back to the site is damn useful, and the ability to structure text is ultimately worth while." Angus, this points out the need for competition. We make outliners at UserLand. It's a very specific kind of writing tool, it's perfect for template design, presentations and scripting. The ability to edit in sections and easily move the sections around is key for me as a weblog writer. But we know it's not a mainstream writing style, and that a great simple wizzy HTML editor will be incredibly valuable here. (I could see wanting to use a spreadsheet on certain Manila pages and sites.) CamWorld: Four Men in Hats Brain Teaser. MacInTouch report on MS Office 2001/Mac. WSJ: Pentagon cracks down on PowerPoint. "Just as word processing made it easier to produce long, meandering memos, the spread of PowerPoint has unleashed a blizzard of jazzy but often incoherent visuals."
Andrew told us about a JavaScript outliner he's working on that plugs into Manila through XML-RPC. I went over to the whiteboard and revised the XML vision to include his outliner in addition to ours. NY Times: "The joint state-federal plan calls for breaking Microsoft roughly in half. One-half would be the operating-system company, the other would hold everything else, including Microsoft's applications software, such as the word processor Word and the spreadsheet program Excel, and the Internet properties." What will this do to increase competitiveness in web browser software? Another question. If Microsoft didn't own Word, would their web browser be a better text editor by now? This came up in our discussion with Lance yesterday (see below). Word has a limited ability to save to the Web. What if there were a company that only did web browsers? What if that company had retained its sanity and focused on giving users and developers what they wanted? The race started six years ago. Where would we be now? Imho, that's the question the attorneys should be asking. How can we get this very vital software category moving again? Another opinion. It's easier to compete with Microsoft as it's currently configured. A breakup would throw the industry into massive confusion for years to come, possibly a generation. This is not something to do casually, without a lot of thought. Survey: "How do you feel about this proposal as it relates to the Worldwide Web?" Nick Sweeney: "People have said that there's a difference between open source, which is theoretically easy to modify but often impractical to do so, and and open architectures like Frontier, which may hide its source but bear its technical soul. It's about time that Windows became an open architecture. Transparently so." Joel Spolsky: "Another thing users have trouble with is using the mouse. Even if they are adept mousers, using the mouse precisely can be difficult." What the heck is going on here? Two websites for the price of one. Robert Brook found encoding schemas on xmlsoap.org, which is a Microsoft domain. Yesterday I got a phone call from Dan Gillmor about this essaylet I wrote. The call came in the middle of the SOAP announcement, which I knew was coming, but I didn't know when. Dan was concerned that people would read the piece and conclude that he wrote about Conxion because we are friends and because I asked him to. Only Dan can say why he wrote about it, I can't read his mind, but I never in a million years thought he would do it because there's a friendship. I'm still trying to understand how people who do what he does do their thing, how they define integrity is deeply interesting to me. I find myself repeatedly defending his integrity. How does he get me to do that? I changed the copy to suit him, but I still told the truth, and got back to the SOAP rollout. Later I thought that Dan's definition of integrity as it relates to friendship is so vague to me, and might not be compatible with the culture of the Web, where reciprocal links are a way of life. If I point to someone repeatedly, I expect attention, in the form of links. If the links don't come, I tend not to link. Kind of like peering deals in the ISP world? I see a balance between Dan's site and mine, in fact, in this space, my site is bigger, there's more content, and more hits. In my value system, a pointer from me is worth more than a pointer from Dan. However, there's extra ooomph from a Dan-pointer, because some people place more value on it. Steve Ballmer, a super-busy guy, made time to have dinner with Dan. Conxion has an idea that the Merc is important. The Merc carries clout that my web writing doesn't. Where this comes from is somewhere in Dan's mind. He has a clue that I don't. So I guess I'm asking to be clued in. What is it about the Merc that gets people to listen? Dan Gillmor posted his his thoughts on the DG. "Dave's right that this new medium raises all kinds of questions. It will be fun, and useful, to explore them as the medium grows." Thanks for working with me on this, we'll figure it out, it's so cool we can have this discussion in public.
At 1PM we're meeting with people from pop.com, to talk about Manila hosting for Hollywood pros. That is going to be an interesting meeting! I sold lots of software in Hollywood in the 80s. Now those guys run the industry?
BTW, when I demo'd my Klaus Schwab impression he said it sounded more Israeli than Swiss. I guess the glow fades. We also talked about hooking our new outliner, Pike, up to Manila to do PowerPoint-like slide shows. We'll do this for sure. That'll make a big difference, imho, at the Pentagon, another place we sold a lot of Macs to in the 80s. Lance runs WorldLink, Davos Newbies and numerous other Manila sites.
It's public! SOAP 1.1 Specification. Authored by DevelopMentor, IBM, Lotus, Microsoft and UserLand.
We've started a SOAP weblog. I hope this will become a place where developers help each other getting SOAP deployed on as many platforms and in as many environments as possible. What about XML-RPC? It's still the most widely deployed and simplest XML-over-HTTP protocol. What's next? There will be a lively discussion about this stuff, for sure, at WWW9 in Amsterdam, next month. Mid-day news John Dvorak: The Coming Depression. News.Com: "RealNetworks is using portions of Mozilla.org's open-source browser code in a private-label version of its media player and server created for Web broadcaster Global Media. This version lets RealNetworks' system stream and display Web elements including HTML and Macromedia Flash animation files." PC Week: The basic failure of XML is its premise. "The automakers chose to bypass BizTalk and OASIS to develop proprietary (but published) schemata. Every big organization will do the same, and though some of their XML work may feed back up to OASIS or BizTalk, every one wants standards for their cliques only."
Early Morning Edition
Joel Spolsky: "Hotel bathtubs have big grab bars to help disabled people, but everybody uses them to get out of the bathtub. They make life easier even for the physically fit."
Gordon Eubanks: "Microsoft has never been weaker in recent years. The future is Web-based computing and that is not where Microsoft's core competence is." Zeldman: "Getting over a two-day DSL blackout is like recovering from a cold. The instant you feel better, you're running hatless in the rain, choking on Chesterfields, and partying 'til all hours. We spent at least eight hours yesterday putting out fires instead of getting work done." Same here! Grant Rauscher, an engineer at Broadband Mechanics, responds to Brian Behlendorf. On some days, like today, the story is finished at 7AM. Look at how it flows. We work around the brain-dead browsers; Joel, a former Microsoft employee says that we have to design for users who don't care (true); Dan Gillmor quotes Steve Ballmer pleading for his right to dominate us; Gordon Eubanks says it doesn't matter because the Web isn't in their blood; Zeldman and Rauscher, true web developers, ground us in the reality of our day (open source people are equally clueless, and you can't buy a decent net connection). It's all a matter of point of view. Awakening happens when we consider the validity of other povs.
Simple Gifts: "Til by turning, turning, we come round right."
Dan's on a roll today. He took a whiteboard shot of Microsoft's vision for XML. So I did one of UserLand's vision. Frontier 6.2b9 change notes. Andre says: "The Mac version comes with a new TCP layer, completely rewritten from scratch. If you have been reporting TCP-related stability problems with previous versions of Frontier/Mac, you should probably give this version a try. Initial feedback from testers has been very positive." Tim O'Reilly: Beyond the Book. "My efforts have strengthened the relationship between O'Reilly and Amazon.com, and Jeff Bezos has joined me in my campaign for reform of the software patent system." Survey: Do we want to work with Tim? Results so far. 100 percent of those responding say yes. A social experiment. Duffer: Why is a Domino/Notes geek working on a Manila site? "I thought you'd never ask. Answers soon." Doc Searls posts his report from last week's Futurize West event in Napa Valley. XML-RPC: Derek Jones is having trouble getting AppleScript to talk to Python. PS-HTTPD - a Web server written in Postscript. An email that's either a virus or sent by an idiot. Watch out for this kind of stuff. Don't run email enclosures unless, well, I can't really think of a good exception. Opilio is a web crawler, search engine and categorical directory built in Frontier. Andrew Wooldridge update on XML-RPC in Mozilla. Susan Kitchens in Panama: "I'm taking my computer with me. I'm taking my digital camera with me, too. I've checked out digital cafe sites in Panama City. But I reserve the right to live in the moment and abandon this site altogether for the time I'm gone!" Excellent!
And yes, I have always been a proponent of browser integration with the OS. As an engineer I know that it can be done through a driver interface that's open to all. It's not difficult engineering and not unprecedented.
Before yesterday's outage some really interesting stuff was happening on the discussion group. Oliver Breidenbach has been working on the design of his site. Interesting template! Very nice. Rael Dornfest works at O'Reilly and is doing their Meerkat RSS scanner. Scripting News via email update Murphy struck hard! No mail went out at 10PM. The roll out was a dud because of the outage. Oy. I care so much about this feature. Please subscribe. It'll be worth it. Time to reflect An outage is an incredible opportunity for reflection. I had planned twenty small tasks that couldn't be done while the net was down, at first I was grouchy, then I went for a walk, and came back energized. The net was still down. I went for another walk. That's unusual for me, very, at least when I'm in California. When I'm traveling I walk all the time. Here's what I realized, I don't like reflection. I don't like hearing how my thoughts reflect on others. A says something to B. I don't really want to hear what B heard. Now once I realize I don't want something, I choose to follow the advice of an old girlfriend who used to say "Then that's what we'll do!" Her voice is still very with me. What a great teacher. In this Hall of Mirrors that we call the Web, most of what you see *is* reflective. I say what I see when Tim O'Reilly organizes the Open Source community. The response is their standard party line. My response would have been my party line if I hadn't had time to reflect and hear my own words, and then imagine how they play in OpenSourceLand. Tim and Brian aren't random Slashdotters. By feeding back to me, they helped me understand. This is what I worked on, on my second walk. I'll try to do better. I want to open doors for communication. That means I'm going to have to do the A-B-A thing. Yesterday I suggested that we open embassies in each others capitals. That was premature. First we have to figure out what exactly we are doing here. We need a clear statement like the one that ESR wrote for Open Source. We'll do better than he did, because we will leave out the exclusive stuff. But we haven't done it yet. The WebApps conference was premature. DaveNet didn't yield many standalone pieces. The outages and angst with Conxion raised integrity issues. I think perhaps all this needs to be organized and presented clearly before we can ask for help from any other community. Next steps: Time for Zopefish? Yesterday's outage Our PacBell T1 line was down from 10:45 AM Pacific through sometime before 6AM today, an incomrehensibly long outage. The discussion group, EditThisPage.Com, and Weblogs.Com were down. More than UserLand was offline, but it was just Conxion customers coming through PacBell. This is embarassing and productivity-stopping. We had a really good thing going on Monday. On Saturday all the servers running behind PacBell-Conxion move to Exodus. Heads-up. We're changing how DNS works for all of UserLand domains. This is part of the move off Conxion. Eatonweb: "Is it just me, or has the web been totally dead today. No email, no interesting stuff, no news, no good memes." I had the same experience!
Washington Post: US, States Favor Plan To Split Up Microsoft. "If Microsoft is divided into three companies, sources said, the third would be an Internet company that would get the browser and the Microsoft Network, which is the Internet service provider and Web portal that competes with America Online Inc. and other companies." The plan is confusing. Putting the browser in the network services company is like leaving the fox in the hen-house. News.Com: Microsoft shares dive on downgrades, breakup reports. "Microsoft stock fell $11.94, or 15.12 percent, to $67 in early trading, after several investment banks lowered their outlook after the software maker posted third-quarter revenue that grew less than anticipated. The company also took a hit after several newspapers reported that the government was considering a plan to break up Microsoft to prevent any future antitrust violations." Scripting News via email roll out OK, it's Monday, so it's time to roll out a new feature. The Scripting News-via-email feature is ready for broader use. I did a review of the code and watched it send out 1200 emails yesterday. It appears to work.
Does Amazon consider this infringement? I'd love to hear from them. If they do, we'll probably back down and make it more complicated. You will get a chance to tell Amazon what you think about that, if it should happen. And we will not file a patent on this, so if you're a developer and want to use this process, go ahead. But a pointer to the permanent archive for this page would be nice. Thank you for the flow. Scripting News is not just about scripting. It's also about patents vs freedom. My goal is not only to make the best software I possibly can, but also to help users see the value of freedom. We'd all like email subscriptions to work better. It's clear how they can. I don't mind if others use my ideas, in fact I want them to. I also want to learn if Amazon and others will stand in the way. To me, the users are the real issue. So far they haven't felt the impact of patent mania. The sooner they do, imho, the better. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this feature, this way. Freedom of expression. See how the writing and software are integrated? Survey: How did it go? Were you able to subscribe? Are you comfortable that you will be able to easily unsubscribe? How do you feel about the feature? Update: I added a fourth response for people who can't receive HTML email. Sorry, this feature can only work if you can receive HTML email. Other stuff XML-RPC: Manila RPC Changes. Two new handlers were added to facilitate email distribution of Manila-hosted home pages.
Netscape job opening: Product Manager for Netscape Gecko Embedding. If you get the job, remember that Netscape makes Web browsers. Web browsers. Web browsers. Web browsers. Web browsers. Web browsers. Web browsers. Web browsers. Web browsers. Here's an essay I realize what I'm doing now is concentrating all my writing into one flow. I'm writing the docs for new features on the home page. No hops. I'm also concentrating the flow of all emails into this page. And at the same time I'm inviting people to speak here, but doing it awkwardly and ineffectively. Think of it this way, that's all that was happening with Conxion. I'm sure that if they had the time (they don't) to get to know the community here, they would have something to say to them, like use our service! Their ads are trying to reach the people we already reach. But their ads are fearful things. "You will lose, you will be punished," etc. Here, they could say, "Look at all we do to help Dave, we'd like to do that for you too." (Of course they must stop reselling PacBell's miserable T1 service, I'd support that fully.) Anyway going back before Conxion, I tried to get VA Linux to come talk with us. That failed. Who else? I'm sure I'll think of others. Doc is so right, the Web is about conversation. If Brian Behlendorf, who is surely a very busy man with his own community, would only say hello in a friendly way! Such incredible things could happen. Like we could make all our software work together, plug and play. Now I could never write this in DaveNet. It would make no sense. It barely makes sense here. There's kind of a loose hub. We link to a churning pot of weblogs, but they are independent of us. We host thousands of free sites, mostly run by professionals, people who know a lot and want to share it. There's also a vast library of syndicated XML content which cares not whether you use bloated open source software or bloated commercial-ware to read it. It just doesn't care. Have fun. And then there's Pike, the biggest juiciest invitation to Apache ever. Make Apache work with Pike and there's a revolution. Why? Open interfaces between writing tools and servers. Embrace the desktop, don't wait for it to show up on Linux. It's already there on Mac and Windows. Microsoft gets this. I doubt if anyone in ApacheLand does. (I feel like Paul Revere.) Now how can I seduce a really bright guy like Brian to spend some time learning what we do, and explain it in a context that makes sense to Linux developers, open source or whatever? That's what I gotta figure out. It doesn't have to be Brian. Help me figure this out. Final note. I'm sure some people don't like the evolving format of Scripting News, but I really do. My whole way of writing for the web is shifting. And I really owe it all to Pike. What a trip it's been. The goal has been to get a decent writing tool that could connect directly to the Web, cutting the number of steps to revise to a minimum. I edit Scripting News just like you would edit a text document on a local hard drive. But the server is out there, not right here, and I don't have to use HTML, but I can. If you write for the Internet, you're going to be doing it this way. The only question is will it be only with Microsoft's software or with software from others as well? Right now, as far as I know, only UserLand and Microsoft are working in this area. Think about that.
Sorry if you don't like pride, but I think Scripting News is becoming a killer app!
WebReview: An Editor's Guide to Writers: "In the coming digital milieu, the editor will reign supreme, the lord and master of content. All the more reason to hone to a glittering rapier's edge one's skill in dealing with troublesome, headstrong writers. Either that or brandish a handgun." Ouch. 4/4/00: "Free the MSIE development team at Microsoft. Cut it loose. Give it a lot of money. Let someone outside of Microsoft drive it. Someone that Web developers, including Microsoft, could talk with. And make it a profit center, so that it will enable competition." Dan Gillmor: "Another nutty proposal would require Microsoft to sell off the browser software." Why nutty? Dueling weblogs. Dan sent me an email, and said it would be easy for the OS company to screw the browser company, but I disagree. The OS company would not be free to compete in browsers. Easy to enforce. The only way they could get HTML rendering is through third parties, such as the MSIE company. And if it's hard for the OS company because of sloppy engineering, well them's the breaks. (Get a Mac.) BTW, Dan's proposal that they split between OS and Office is nutty. (Sorry I couldn't resist.) Washington Post: Write Here. Libel There. "Americans may not always like how the First Amendment protects others (their neighbors, TV tabloids, Matt Drudge), but they care deeply about their right to free expression. They may take it for granted that this right will follow along with the words and images that they now send effortlessly (and sometimes inadvertently) across national borders. They shouldn't." Chuck Shotton posted the source for his BIAP Chat Applet. Later in the week he'll release the source for NetEvents. BTW, BIAP stands for brain-in-a-pan. NY Times essay by venture capitalist Tim Draper. "Creative marketing doesn't have to be expensive, but I know that when a company has a breakthrough and customers are anxious to buy, it is time to pour in the rocket fuel." Hey Tim, if you've got a minute, here's an idea for you. Think about starting a worldwide ISP that has really high integrity and big pipes with replicated data and automatic switchover when there's an outage. And one other very important thing. No interest in the content it carries, so we can resell the service, without adding impossible limits to our user agreement. Now that would be a viral app! (Futuristic too, all the vendor agreements we've seen so far take out all 4000+ of our sites if one of them breaks the agreement. Not something an Internet entrepreneur can build on.) Hey email works. Dan Lynch forwarded my email to Ellen Hancock, and she responded. Good! BTW, I didn't get a response to my email to Conxion's John Seamster. Less than a week until we move the remaining servers to Exodus. We're reviewing all the scripts that make up UserLand.Com and finding code that depends on IP addresses beginning with 206.204.24. Put this on the best-practices list. No more hard-coded IP addresses, just symbolic names. In the meantime, if you're running an ETP site, think if you have any of these in your sites. They won't work after the switchover. And if you want to know why we do it, why we go through all this angst and michegas with ISPs, read this DaveNet piece. The writer's web. We are the only software company who cares to build systems for writers. From top to bottom, soup to nuts. You know why information about outages is so scarce? Because the people who are out can't talk. And when they come back online they're so busy catching up they don't have time to document the experience. I got an idea, Weblogs.Com might be able to spot outages elsewhere. I whipped up an outages page that shows the weblogs it thinks are currently out. As you might imagine, it shows problems with the weblogmonitor app too, not just with other servers and ISPs. Investigating.. blivet: "The ISP services in Las Vegas really are in sore need of some competition" DSL Reports reviews ISPs and monitors outages. Speaking of outages, everyone wants to know what happened to Carpe Diem. No posts since March 17. Christopher Hanson, the first baby born in our community, is starting to look like a person. Sheila took pics at Seattle's Safeco Field, which is very much like PacBell Park in SF. PacBell sucks. Philly Future: Sports Stadium Update. I spent much of the afternoon rebuilding the Scripting News-via-email server. I'm fairly confident the emails will go out at 10PM tonight. More attic cleaning, came across this hilarious animated gif. Marc Canter in Trieste.
You can help XML-DEV get back in the groove, and perhaps learn about current-best-practice in mail servers. Cryptome "learned last evening that Exodus Communications, a major US service provider, ordered last Sunday the removal of a Web site, www.mathaba.net." Joel Spolsky: "Good UI designers use consistency intelligently, and, though it may not show off their creativity as well, in the long run it makes users happier." I finally figured out how to stop flame-fests once and for all. A new weblog from "the world of help desks and support specialists." Survey: Approximately how many hours has your work net connection been down this year? Wired: "While 5 percent of the survey respondents said they bought Stephen King's e-book, Riding the Bullet, less than 1 percent claim to actually have read it."
Salon: "Paul Allen spent $100 million on Interval Research. Now there's nothing left to say about the company that no one could say anything about." Quark: "We're pleased to announce that avenue.quark, the intelligent way to resue your QuarkXPress content, is now shipping." Hmm. I don't have any QuarkXPress content that need resuing. I'm not even sure that's a word. Jorn Barger: What's the deal with PhilG? "I'm interested to hear what people think of PhilG, why he's doing what he does, why the major media pay him scant attention, which of his resources you find most useful, and which you wish were different?" I just realized this is from November 1999. Terra Institute is a Manila site. Spicy Noodles has a new orderly look and new features. I am very happy to see Andre adopt the My.UserLand story flow. Pictures from Seder2000. I was the last guest to leave Marc's seder last night, which seems to be a tradition. Marc and I talk, in a kind of relaxed way. He said: "What will I panic over now that the seder is over?" I used his web browser, and noticed that he had Good Morning Silicon Valley bookmarked. Interesting, I said, let's go there. I scanned it, and my eye caught this quote from Eric S Raymond. What was that doing there? What bluster. Yuck. "God'll get him for that," I said. I think that was a big line in All in the Family. Just curious, did the editor put that there because it was so blustery, or because he believed it? BTW, when Doc Searls calls for an end to intellectual property, this is where he and I depart. It is not morally wrong for me to "own" my writing, whether it be software or prose. Otherwise there could be no free speech, as soon as I wrote something someone else would take it and say they wrote it. How could we ever communicate? I'm sure Doc meant it in a thoughtful challenging way, "here think about this." I'm not so sure about Raymond, he seems to be a true zealot. First Amendment to the US Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." 9/10/98: "There's the bug!" I have more work to do today on Scripting News via email. The mails didn't go out last night at 10PM. I think I know why. In the meantime, I keep thinking of more 1-Click type ideas. You want to know what I'm doing with them? I'm implementing and shipping them. I removed comments about patents that were here this morning. I want to give it more thought.
Passover Some thoughts as I head out to Marc Canter's Passover Seder tonight in San Francisco.
People are smelly and personal. It's like accepting my trees as the true owners of my "property". Jews have been through a lot of shit. Somehow we're still here. Yes, we make trouble. Always. Everywhere we go. But we also make beautiful movies, and write great books and websites and invent and discover new stuff, and we study, study and study. We Jews think we're smarter than everyone else. Everyone else has a problem with that. So what else is new? 6.2 Feature #1 -- Choose a Language The first of two big features we're working on for Frontier 6.2. In 6.2 you'll be able to choose a language for a Manila site. If you choose German, for example, all the prompts and menu items will be in German. Just like real software. The two languages we'll ship with are English and German, the two languages we speak at UserLand. This will put an end to the terrible dance that non-English webmasters have to do whenever we update. A beautiful German Manila weblog. 6.2 Feature #2 -- News Items Feature number two is "News Items". The first command in Manila's Editors Only menu will be News, just before Stories and Pictures. Click on it to see a list of pending (unpublished) news items. At the bottom of the list is a link to create a News Item. Enter a title, a URL, a description, and choose a category. A configurable approval process. A rendering template for news items. A discussion link for each news item. The underlying format (invisible to the casual editor) is XML. News Items are editable in Pike. We intend to bring the SlashDot metaphor into Manila. This is one of the top feature-request items, and it was a very tricky design problem. But it seems to work! This feature will not wait until the release of 6.2, we hope to have this online for UserLand-hosted Manila sites next week. Exodus It appears we had a 16-minute Exodus outage this morning. We moved two servers to Exodus late last year. I'm going to send an email (a friendly one) to Ellen Hancock, suggesting that we meet to talk about how we're going to work together. No doubt there will be problems. What we want to avoid are the kinds of human-level disconnects we've had with other ISPs. I want to make sure they know that we have lots of users, and that we care about whether they get through or not. In fact it's mission-critical to us. (To put it mildly.) Exodus' profile page for Ellen Hancock. Hancock was considered a possible CEO of Apple in 1997. Random stuff Survey: If you're knowledgable about Internet connectivity, would you prefer Scripting News be co-located at Exodus or AboveNet? (Later, I added Level 3 and Frontier Globalcenter to the choices.) AboveNet: "AboveNet will investigate complaints regarding inappropriate material on Web pages transmitted using AboveNet services, in its sole discretion, require that the material be removed or take action as outlined in 1.02 above. If you do not agree to be bound by these Acceptable Use Guidelines, please notify AboveNet Customer Service so that we may initiate a closure of your account." Deal-stopper. Tommy Williams looks at Service Agreements. "I don't know if you're going to be able to find a hosting facility that doesn't include some variant on the basic principle that, if there's something offensive or illegal on your site, they're going to shut you down." People thought I was talking about tools for writers yesterday, but I asked about companies for writers. "Watch as Adobe and Macromedia roll out web services for their users." B2B. Earlier this week, on the Weblogs2 mail list, Amanda Holland-Minkley wrote a longish post from a woman's point of view, about the attention she attracts where ever she goes, and how annoying it is. I wrote a response, which turned into a short essay I want to keep. MozillaZine: "Mozilla isn't a platform? Mozilla shouldn't be a platform?" OK. Now, if Mozilla isn't a browser, and it is a platform (see how agreeable I can be) where are we going to find a browser to compete with MSIE? I started an outages mail list on eGroups. I've become a focal point in these discussions, I want to spread out, so we can help each other. Let's figure this stuff out, it can't be that hard. Jeff Veen on new browser releases. Doc Searls: Abolish Intellectual Property Laws. That's a little further than I would go Doc. Robert Cassidy, UC Irvine, on Napster: "The universities are in a tough spot. We'd prefer to support such products as they would be fantastic tools in the distribution of legal materials and we tend to strongly encourage free speech. We don't support copyright violation but we feel that you need to actually target the violators, not cast a wide net over anyone that might be a violator." Jacob Levy: Dispatch #2 from the Napster and Gnutella Front. Brock Meeks took a ride on Air Force One with POTUS. Everyone's buzzin about Wes's DG. In case you didn't notice, I sorted the links in the navigation section, to the left. (The sort was by URL.) I'll probably play with the order some more, weed out some older sites, add newer ones. It's amazing to me how people tune into changes in the list. Hey the stock markets are closed today. Excellent. I'm in blue chips. Whew. Scripting News via email followup Murphy strikes again! We screwed up. (Actually I screwed up.) The emails did not go out at 10PM. I fixed the problem, set the time-to-send to 5AM, and watched them go out. Need to fix some bugs. Bugs in programs that send email suck. Hard to test without annoying a lot of people.
Today's weird thought: My.Mozilla.Netscape.Com? Another weird thought. Why do artists have their own software companies (Adobe, Macromedia) and writers use Microsoft? New Frontier verb: tcp.getMail. I asked Jeff Cheney if he would start a Frontier Developers For Hire site, and he did. Thanks! Ken MacLeod: Converting XML-RPC to SOAP. Common Dreams: "We believe that objectivity is, in fact, a myth -- that everyone has a bias, everyone has an agenda -- and that corporations like major news corporations have a corporate bias." Jon Udell: Web UI On The Cusp Of Change. O'Reilly has been improving Meerkat, their "open wire service". Today's Conxion news Through Dan Gillmor, Conxion's John Seamster responded and I posted a response to his. 5PM: Private, constructive email has been going back and forth between UserLand and Conxion as a result of these two pieces. In my first email to Conxion I said. "It's really good to have Dan Gillmor act as an intermediary. The issues and disconnects are coming up. Why it took so long to begin this conversation is something worth thinking about, imho." This is what I had hoped would happen if Dan took an interest, he could stay neutral, but help the two companies get back to their common principles of excellent engineering. This, as far as I'm concerned has never been in doubt, for either company, and it's been the basis of the relationship. I pointed out to Dan that we are still a Conxion customer, and that means something. Anyway, the ball is rolling in a positive direction now. Whooosh. SOAP SOAP SOAP Consider the role that XML-RPC will play as this area of technology develops. The computer media thinks in terms of corporations. This has been a constant theme here. It's a disconnect. In fact, most innovations, if not all, come from small groups of developers working in obscurity, sometimes within large companies, but most of the time, not.
In the end, I very much support SOAP because it's what the big companies can agree on, but I am still pushing for them all to support XML-RPC too, because it's the kind of protocol that small companies and open source groups can wrap their heads around. No more uber-operating systems, and at the same time, let's embrace the beauty of small groups of engineers working for love. Momentary self-centered thought follows. Isn't it weird, we're participating in developing the next-level architecture for the Web, and we can't get a decent link to the Web? Zeldman: "The nice thing about running an Internet business while disconnected from the Internet is that ... uh ... um ..." A theory follows. The reason many people think I'm semi-retired is that all they ever heard from me was DaveNet. I often sound relaxed in those pieces, because I generally write them when I am relaxed. I multi-task well, but most people never stop to think that I actually am doing the things I write about. That's why I want them to come to the Web. And I don't care if they think I left them behind, because in a true sense, that's what happened. Scripting News via email Thanks to the early adopters for signing up for Scripting News via email. Apparently all the emails went out at 10PM, as they were supposed to. Now we're going to start transitioning to the service, it'll become a permanent feature in the "chrome" of Scripting News. We're going to build this service one step at a time. Yesterday's Scripting News was more like a DaveNet for me. I suspect it will become more and more like that over time. Why now? I use Pike to write Scripting News. It's easy. Lovin it. BTW, the daily updates feature uses XML-RPC to get the updates from the content system. It's absolutely not hard-coded to any particular site. It could work with any Manila site, or for that matter, with any content system that was minimally scriptable. Survey results Yesterday's survey had some interesting results. The top three choices were Manila, Blogger and homegrown. Of course we'd expect a skew towards Manila, and a bunch of Blogger users read this page. But I was surprised to see so many homegrown content systems. Well, maybe not so surprised. This is Scripting News after all. In September of last year Cameron Barrett compiled a comparative table of content management systems. A lot has changed since September! (Internet Time and all.) It would be great to have a similar table for various blogging tools, from Cam or elsewhere, so the homegrown people could see what features they could get if they switched to one of the tools. It's best if an objective person does such an analysis, and that they get feedback from the vendors. Napster and Gnutella News.Com: "Napster will block access to people who are identified by copyright holders as violators," said Napster's attorney, Fenwick & West's Lawrence Pulgrum. Jacob Levy: Dispatches from the Napster and Gnutella front. Hey I'm full of weird thoughts. Why doesn't one of the artists make lemonade out of the Napster lemon, and release a low-res scan of one of their songs, a demo, with a link to a website where I can purchase the full-res scan, downloadable as an MP3 of course. One song for one artist. I bet you'd make a boatload of money. People want the music, lo-res is fine. For songs I play all day for a couple of weeks I'd pay $3 for the high-res version. The first one to do it would get huge flow. I'm surprised AOL hasn't done a toe-dip with this. Start with a Grateful Dead classic like Box of Rain or Truckin. Today's song. "Come, we have work to do." Weblogs.Com improvements
BTW, the Weblogs.Com favorites cache works properly now. A Jewish-Chinese joke (Heard on NPR) A rabbi, walking down the street in NY, sees a sign. Moishe Teitelbaum Chinese Laundry. Puzzled, he goes inside. An old Chinese man stands behind the counter. "Do you own this laundry?" the rabbi asks. Yes. "And your name is Moishe Teitelbaum?" Yes. "If you don't mind my asking, how did you come by such a name?" "When I came through Ellis Island, the man before me said his name was Moishe Teitelbaum. "When my turn came, the man asked my name and I said Sam Ting." Happy Passover One and All!
Survey: If you run a weblog, which tool do you use most often or are most satisfied with? A new weblog covering SOAP. vunet: "Gartner predicts that 70 percent of e-services will use SOAP by 2003." Don't miss the value of connections between desktop apps and servers through XML-RPC and SOAP. 9/12/99: An end to the Uber-Operating System: "More concisely, the purpose of XML-RPC is to end once and for all, the idea that there can or should be one operating system for all. No more über-operating systems, and no press releases claiming über-ness! Thank you very much." Joel Spolsky: "Everybody in Silicon Valley seems to be talking about Charlie, the gourmet cook at Google who used to work for Jerry Garcia." New My.UserLand Channel: Linux Magazine. News.Com: Apple beats expectations, splits stock. Wired: ICANN Inches Toward New Domains. Oh good, something else to fight about. Question: If Apache is MS-DOS, what is Lotus 1-2-3? Perl.Com: What's New in 5.6.0. "Everyone's favourite Swiss Army Chainsaw is coming up to thirteen years old now, and would be about to show the world a brand new face for the new millennium if that didn't start next year instead of this one." Macromedia: Dreamweaver Exchange is "the place to get easy-to-install extensions, learn how to get the most out of them, and even create your own." Cameron Barrett is looking for one or two more Mozilla developers to help with the Mozilla weblog. David Carter-Tod has $5K he has to spend by Friday. He needs your help. iStockphoto.com has royalty-free stock images. Oliver Briedenbach started a WWDC weblog. Another thought. I'm thinking of starting Dave Winer University. We would teach community oriented software engineering. There would be one class to start. UI Design Tools 701. We would start with a working C source base and I would teach the class how to create an innovative software product. Free tuition. Prereq: Advanced C programming. Eric Soroos: Seattle MPFUG Meeting April 25. Browser Security Hole in MSIE5/Mac? "It appears this bug came back in Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Macintosh." Chaz Larson narrows it down to MRJ 2.2. Companies I like to work with Even though we have a long-term working relationship with Microsoft in distributed computing (some might call it a partnership), I have never felt that that relationship was jeopardized by pointing out problems in their products, or otherwise criticizing them. With other companies, I go ahead and say what I think, but many of them won't work with UserLand as a result. Sometimes it seems as if criticism brings Microsoft closer. This is one of their strengths. They aren't scared of criticism. My philosophy, probably shared with Microsoft, it doesn't matter so much what people say about you -- it matters what you actually do. If I point out an opportunity or problem, and you act on it, it makes you stronger. Therefore, intelligent criticism is a good deal, a win-win. I like it because it gives me leverage on my intelligence. I can't do everything, and I know it. But I get pleasure from using good products, and I like the feeling I get when I helped make a product work better. I'd like to create a list of companies that agree with this, those are the companies I want to work with. BTW, based on recent experience, I'd say that Cobalt Networks falls into this category. I'll give them more coverage when they come through on their promises, but let me say this, if they do, we'll have more interesting stuff about Cobalt and other Linux vendors here, starting early summer. Now, more discussion of Conxion 10:55AM: I got a response from Steve Martin at Conxion. Dan Gillmor: "If Conxion is getting rid of a customer because of the customer's statements, that's not smart business for Conxion in the long run, even though it's legal." More comments. First, we not only make the software that runs Dan's site, we also host it. So an ISP outage like the one with Conxion could have knocked Dan off the air too. Second, Conxion has never given us a reason for the termination. We've heard about their statements from reporters, which varies widely depending on who they're talking to and when, but their April 12 letter doesn't provide a reason, and there has been no response to the email I sent or the postings here. Third, if it is, as they said to Dan, an issue of economics, why the abruptness? Why not a grace period for a long-term customer who has to make a forced transition? Dan also says: "I'm working on a column discussing the power of ISPs relative to their customers." I suggest that Conxion empower someone to work out an amicable exit here, so we can say that Conxion, in the end, did the right thing.
I like to close with group hug stuff Joshua Brauer: "Possibly the first "group hug" on the Internet was the Oklahoma City Bombing Sympathy Card. BTW it's a site that was made possible by Frontier, especially when the original ISP shut it down, Frontier made it easy to move it to my own server which I ran by that time. People really said some beautiful things in those pages." Thanks to Sheila, this news from Reuters reminds us that in Vienna, they have excellent Wiener Schnitzel.
At 10PM we'll send out the contents of today's Scripting News to people who subscribe. It's beta. Hannes Wallnöfer: XML-RPC for Java 1.0b3. If you want to get a sense of how much work this community does, check out the images folder on our static server. Doing some closet-cleaning preparing for the move, and just rummaged through another attic full of memories. It's the contents of a very old static server that we're not going to move. Remember this one? Quicktime. In February, Glenn Davis of Project Cool was knocked offline. Wired: "The head of a major Internet consulting firm predicts that many dot-com companies will soon be exposed for what they really are: hollow, half-baked schemes without much hope for long-term success." We got a mention from Infoworld's Robert X. Cringely. WSJ: "Blame the IRS. With investors suffering unprecedented capital-gains shocks this year, some Wall Street watchers say investors' stock sales to pay their tax bills probably played a part in last week's markets sell-off." My.UserLand: "This page lists the 20 most recently approved channels." Karl Dubost: "I'm managing a website about Normandy which is hosted in Mountain View for convenient reason. If one my contributors made an false assertion on the websites, publish racism sentences, the French justice could condamn me for hosting this kind of words, even if the author is known." 9:18AM: I just got off the phone with Dan Gillmor. It was an excellent conversation. I expect great things to come from it. Nick Sweeney says the Irish ISP business is set to explode. "From what I can see, the new E-Commerce Bill provides ISPs with a defence of having acted in good faith in accordance with their obligations to customers." W3C: The next generation of Web forms. "As the cost and size of Web servers continues to shrink, single chip implementations are now practical, and we can soon expect to see all kinds of devices with embedded servers. HTML will be used for controlling such devices, reducing the need for custom device drivers. XForms is being designed to provide the richer user interface these applications will need." I'm surprised to see that FireDrop is not participating. Eric Soroos provides a pretty good reason to skip the UK on our next European trip. Humor aside, basically there can't be any journalism on the UK web. Same with Conxion's little piece of the Web. Any time the carrier has an interest in the content they carry, integrity is lost. Dan Gillmor, for example, is lucky that due to a random event, we decided to host his site (at no charge) on our Seattle LAN and not on the one served by Conxion, otherwise his integrity, something we know he cherishes, could have been challenged too. Too bad Dan didn't rise to the occasion because he could shut down Conxion (which is in the Merc's territory, Santa Clara), and that would have helped us get their attention in a way that matters to them. We could have averted our exodus, avoiding wasted time and money, but more important, we could have shown that Silicon Valley doesn't stand for the kind of bullshit that goes over in the UK and elsewhere. A chance to take a truly high road, missed. The April 13 Scripting News archive, where the shit hit the fan with Conxion. I had been protecting them, by not revealing the letter they sent on April 4, warning that they took an interest in what I said on Scripting News. I promise you, my readers, never again will I shelter any attempt to control what's said and not said on this page. It doesn't matter how much it costs UserLand to provide this guarantee. I asked Lance Knobel, publisher of WorldLink and my partner on DavosNewbies, for his take on the UK situation. "Utterly astounding, I agree. I'm writing this from China, however, which does give one a perspective on Web censorship! (And I think it's China's weird firewalls that force me to go through MSN, rather than the Forum server to send out email.) Despite the problems here, there are extraordinary Internet entrepreneurs that I've met in the last two days. Really encouraging. The UK situation will, I hope, be resolved by the government giving ISP common carrier status. You can't sue the phone company if someone slanders you on the telephone." This is good news. We have a friend in the UK who can help. BTW, Lance gave us his support on April 13. "In the bad old days, car companies wouldn't advertise in magazines or newspapers that gave their products bad reviews. But they realised that they were only cutting themselves off from that medium's readers. Let's hope Conxion sees its action is both commercial and political bad judgement." UserLand isn't as casual as the UK courts or a random Silicon Valley ISP, that's why we can carry voices like Dan's. We don't take an interest in the content we carry. Unfortunately we haven't gotten very much support from the people who benefit from this. Still learning.
Now, we're placing a big bet on Exodus. We've heard complaints about connectivity and support from other Exodus customers. But I'm willing to, reluctantly, bet on the character of their CEO, Ellen Hancock, who I knew from her days at Apple. Also Dan Lynch, the founder of Exodus, is a thoughtful, freedom-loving person. But here's a question for you to ponder. Why should I have to care about the character of the CEO of a big ISP? And what about you? Do you know any Silicon Valley CEOs? I think Ellen and Dan would respond professionally to my concerns. Would they even know who you are? And why should this matter? (These people are just carriers, not publishers.) Here's the graphic we ran when the Communication Decency Act was overturned in the courts. Yes, we won, then. But the battle continues.  Discuss: "As far as I can tell, the issue of integrity on the Web has never been covered. What are the unique requirements? How are the protections different? Why isn't lack of editorial interference marketed as a benefit of using one ISP over another? How can we create an environment that lasts for a hundred years, and is not subject to laws like the one in the UK? Could we create an Akamai-like company that added a new kind of reliability to the Web?" NY Times: Election Regulators Dismiss Complaint Against Bush Parody Site. "If that means that my case is closed, that's good for me," said Exley, who is a computer consultant in New York. "But the issue is still open, and that means that the FEC still has to do the right thing in the end." WSJ: Many web retailers are making money. "Don’t sound the death knell for online retailers just yet. Despite the stock market’s recent trashing of Internet retail stocks, a new study shows 38% of Web retailers are actually making money. And a surprising 72% of catalog companies that have moved onto the Internet have Web operations that are now in the black." Greg Knauss, 11/2/98: A Standard for Site Organization. I am actually quite pleased to find that this domain name is taken, and (apparently) well-deployed.
Survey: Do you have a weblog? We've been working with Doc Searls on a new design for his weblog. A news-oriented home page, three subordinate pages. Easy for new people. I asked Doc for permission to point to the site with the understanding that this is just a mock-up. We're mainly interested in knowing which browsers it breaks. With these caveats, here's the test site. Unusual phone call: "They want to get together to talk about the history of this business, but they don't want the usual story, the folklore so often repeated, Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marc Andreessen, etc." WSJ: Stocks jump amid tentative rebound. "Stocks rallied late Monday to close near the day’s highs as investors stepped cautiously into the market after last week’s dramatic losses to seek out some bargains." Oddly, this British site is hosted in the US. Apparently some British person doesn't like them, and that's enough to get them knocked off. Keeping the record up to date, today we sent payment for May to Conxion. I sent this email to Steve Martin explaining why.
NY Times: "There's financial alchemy for you. Take one big profitable company. Dissect it. Get two unprofitable ones trading at absurd prices." I just got an email from Firedrop inviting me to a user's group meeting. Of course the email was a zaplet. Nice! But you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. And look at the message carefully. They included the email addresses of people they were inviting. Patent pending! You know what's wrong with patents? What if you patent something and no one uses it? That must be a bummer. There were only about 35 names on the Zaplet email. One was from Uruguay, so it wasn't just local people. And the names were all over the alphabet, so I don't think it was just all the D's. I imagine the $50 million sitting in the bank and them sitting around wondering if they could pay people to be excited about their product. Send everyone to DisneyLand? Would that require a non-disclosure? An EditThisPage site that uses gems. William Crim: Is there or isn't there a "Digital Divide"? Chris Langreiter loves REBOL. Jacob Levy: "There are many more sellers than buyers." Jacob points to the Smart Money MoneyMap Java app. Fantastic. I had never seen this before. David Adams posted an RFC for the xml-rpc interface for his web app spell-checker. Andrea posted a map of their vacation route. "The map was composed from 16 smaller maps provided by Expedia using Adobe Photoshop 4.0." J William Gurley: Can Napster be stopped? No! A brief history of the PC business. Distribution was everything. Retailers everywhere. BusinessLand. Shakeout. What was left standing? Softsel, Micro-D and Ingram. Then Egghead and Dell. Retailers morphed into VARs. Distribution was squeezed to nothing. How will Internet e-commerce shape and shake?
NY Times: Opening Bell Could Be a Test Case for the Lessons of 1987. "Nearly 13 years ago, investors stunned by the worst stock market week in memory spent the weekend pondering whether a great bull market was over. On the following Monday, so many of them decided to sell that the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 22.6 percent, or 508 points. Oct. 19, 1987, became known as Black Monday." AP: Asian Markets Open Sharply Lower. "Asian stock markets plummeted as they opened Monday, reacting to the record losses on Wall Street last wee | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
