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Time off June was a great month, one of the best ever. My team shipped a new release of Frontier and I didn't do any of the work. And it's a great release, a real milestone, made sweeter by the accomplishments of the people I am totally proud to work with. A one of a kind corporate relationship blossomed, a project we started two years ago. It saw the light of day, and it's exciting, not just for the technology, also because of its humanity. My theory of the Internet, that the power of ideas matter more than the size of a company, is confirmed for me. Can courageous ideas come from a big company? Yes. A friend died, a puzzling thing, for sure, but new friendships started and old friendships renewed. A baby was born today! And the power of music came back into my life in a new big way. Thanks Napster! And thanks to all the cool musicians who left a trail through my past, that I can now navigate from my desktop. I know you didn't make enough money for all the teaching you do, the inspiration you provide, and I promise to do what I can to help right that. Yes, June 2000 was a great month. And I'm going to begin July, starting tomorrow, by taking some time off. Indigo Girls: "I call on the resting soul of Gal-i-le-o, king of night vision, king of insight." A new baby! Two dear friends, Amy Shelton and Dave Jacobs had a baby today, a healthy boy, Cassidy. I love Dave and Amy, the new boy is sure to be creative and smart and very well loved. Mazel tov! John Perry Barlow: Cassidy. Ah, child of countless trees. Ah, child of boundless seas. What you are, what you're meant to be. Speaks his name, though you were born to me, Evening pointers What does Notes do? Luke Tymowski: "When you use the term Notes you refer to the client. When you use the term Domino you refer to the server." Frontier: Moving from isp.root to 6.2. Rosenberg on Dot-Net Salon's Scott Rosenberg on Microsoft: "Every big technology company today trades in dreams and visions, but no other outfit has been able to come this close to offering an even partially credible plan for delivering on them." I agree. The difference after last week's announcement is palpable. A week before the announcement we had a clear idea of how the Web can evolve to be a platform for new cool stuff like Napster, but Microsoft's support, stated and public, and on the cover of Fortune, created openings that could not be created any other way. Here's why Microsoft's proposal is different from all the others. It really empowers developers, not just the captive ones, but everyone who has a scripting language that can do HTTP and XML. Especially developers who don't use Windows. Now you might think they're doing this just because of the horrendous cloud over their head, but who cares why? It's not my problem to worry about the goodness of their hearts. The door is open now, Microsoft can swarm all over this vision, will other developers? I was struck by Ellison's comments on Wednesday. He says they're doing the same thing Microsoft is. But where's their outreach to developers? What do they want us to do? Are they willing to let us lead them? Morning pointers Microsoft: Digital Dashboard Demo. In an internal memo, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer names sixteen Distinguished Engineers. Reuters: Napster legal brief due Monday. Michael Rose found this screen shot of Tim Berners-Lee's first Web browser/editor. New Manila Tweak: "Sometimes you have a story that shouldn't have a byline, even though you want bylines for the rest of the stories." Yes, that's true. News.Com: Dell to give away NetObjects Fusion. "With the new offerings, DellHost hopes to build beyond the 2,000 customers from its initial growth spurt, said Tim Mattox, general manager of Dell Hosting Group." Nice lookin Python site. Today's Napster playlist. Someday I hope you'll be able to click on this and listen to the whole set. Here's a screen shot of the list, as I edit it on my desktop. Hey we just got a post on the outages mail list. "Speedchoice, now Sprint Broadband Direct, really sucks and I wouldn't recommend anyone else getting it." Keep em comin!
HowTos for Manila sysadmins Now that 6.2 is out and more people are using Frontier to host Manila sites, we're doing a series of HowTos that answer common questions Frontier-newbies ask. The newest HowTo explains how to enable the SOAP server that's built into 6.2, with pointers to programming resources. Another one answers many of the questions people ask about Frontier's built-in Web server. Don't forget the patent WSJ: Six Airlines Challenge Priceline. Priceline has one of the most notorious business model patents. The WSJ article doesn't mention it. PurpleDemon.Com is the teaser site for the new service. (Does Microsoft have a patent on CGI scripts?) The blog within a blog Soup: The Death of Copyright. Advogato: Is SOAP the future or a security nightmare? Rael Dornfest has started a Manila site to work on a "modular" approach to extending RSS. Ed Draper starts a discussion on XML namespaces. I posted an invitation to participate on the Syndication mail list, where namespace advocates are known to reside. Publog is a German community Weblog, running in Manila. A new look for the lunch Weblog. FuckedCompany.Com continues to impress. "Rumor has it that the Manager and Director of BizDev at luxury e-tailer eLuxury, walked out last month. This week the second VP of BizDev, after 2 months, is making her exit. Thus leaving just the UCLA MBA intern unknowingly to run things. He starts next week." Who to hate?
I installed the cute little flash memory disk drive, and it put some software on my hard disk, presumably some of it runs when the system launches. Now the file system Explorer runs at a snail's pace. It takes a minute to refresh a folder listing. It takes five seconds to select a file. It's true I spend most of my time on the Web, not on the local file system, but when I have to deal with a file, my life turns to shit. It could also be Real Jukebox, a piece of software I totally don't trust, that installed some background daemon that's causing the problem. One more complaint. I bought an extra $200 64MB flash card, thinking it could be made to work with the Lyra. So far no luck. The Lyra complains DOS ERROR 1 when I insert the cartridge. Of course this error is not explained in the user manual or on the website. It's no fun being a user! Why we love Napster Reason #1: It works and doesn't install any flaky system software. Here's another reason..
But ultimately Elvis visited Nixon's White House and played in Las Vegas. How long before Napster is singing the tune of the music industry? Hey there's a Napster weblog. Oh Larry! Dan Gillmor: Oracle's Sleaze and Opinion Laundering. A juicy Ellisonism in this NY Times article. "We will ship them our garbage," he said. "We will ship our garbage to Redmond, and they can go through it. We believe in full disclosure." Interesting auction Sotheby's is auctioning an original first printing of the US Declaration of Independence. At 7AM Pacific the top bid is $4 million. It was sold for $8.4 million. Today's song Elvis: Jailhouse Rock. The warden threw a party in the county jail. The prison band was there and they began to wail. The band was jumpin' and the joint began to swing. You should've heard those knocked out jailbirds sing. Bonus song It's a two-song Thursday! Joni Mitchell: For Free. Nobody stopped to hear him, though he played so sweet and high. They knew he had never been on their TV, so they passed his music by.
World Outline The new project we're working on is going forward full steam. Now that 6.2 has shipped, I'm allocating more of UserLand's resources to this project. At its core, we're defining an XMLization for outlines. That's the central thing to this project. There's also a public storage system, along the lines of the XML Store that Microsoft defined in its Dot-Net announcements. And an HTML browser for the outline structures (which can be linked, in very interesting ways), and an outliner browser and authoring tool. Here's a very early outline that conforms to the existing spec, which is being rewritten practically on a daily basis. Rather than expose people to the gyrations, we're holding it back until we feel it's well-designed and won't need a rewrite before wide deployment. I'm learning a lot doing this project. I'll write more later. But here's an interesting conclusion. If TBL had designed the Web around a writing tool it would have been Two-Way from the start. After six years of trying to come up with a writing tool that perfectly fits the HTML Web, now I realize that the only way to get there is to start with a writing tool and add networking to it. It makes perfect sense now, but of course it didn't even just a few weeks ago. Postscript: I got an email reminding me that TBL's first Web browser was a writing tool. I'll have to think about this some more. There's something else going on here. Not sure exactly how to describe it yet. Thinking project: DMOZ to Frontier 6.2 fixes Shipping a new major release is always followed by bug fixes and limits extended or worked around. Frontier 6.2 is no different. Still diggin! New Themes Three new themes from Bryan Bell. Hazard Area, Hazard Area Revisited and Soni. Gary Brickman O'Reilly's David Sims honors Gary Brickman, who passed away at 38. Larry Ellison investigates
(He called this exposing covert activities.) Ellison calls for full disclosure. Hmmm. Why didn't he disclose that he hired a detective to read their garbage? "I just found about it yesterday." Oh, OK. Got it. (Sarcasm.) PacBell sucks (always) BirdBrain: "As my friend E. used to say, 'You have to manage your expectations.'" Microsoft C# Docs They posted the C# docs in HTML. Money or Music? News.Com: Online trading volume sinks. "After surging 70 percent in the first quarter, the number of online transactions handled by online brokers is expected to decline by 33 percent in the second quarter." I have a theory about this. Everyone's playing with Napster now. Opera 4.0/Win Download: Opera 4.0/Win. Outliner user on the Web Laszlo Dienes, a real outliner user, wants to know about generating HTML from his MORE outlines, and has lots of questions about WebArranger from CE Software, written by Scott Wiener (also developer of FullWrite and FullPaint, early Mac classics). XML-hack hack hack hack Oy I could see this coming a mile away. I don't like namespaces. This is based on my own confusion when I see all those esoteric labels all over XML documents. I've been very clear about this all along. Well, anyway, a group of developers wants to bring namespaces into RSS. That's gotta be OK, even if I don't like it. I won't stand in their way. If it gains support from content developers then we have to work with it. A fork? Possibly. It's neither threatening or cold. A difference of opinion on how we should go forward with RSS. What to do? I'm not going to say I like namespaces when I don't. Anyway, read what Eric van der Vlist has to say, it's a good summary of the discussion, with links, but please understand it's just one point of view. Blue arrows for everyone A new feature on UserLand-hosted Manila sites. See the blue arrows on each top-level heading? If you use Pike to edit your home page (or a compatible outliner), you can have them too. There's a new rule, Here's a screen shot of yesterday's Scripting News outline, as I was editing it. eGroups acquired by Yahoo Reuters: Yahoo to buy eGroups. An email sent to eGroups moderators, early this morning. eGroups does a great job, it plays a role in a lot of the work we do. Congratulations on cashing out (presumably) and here's hoping that the great performance continues. Today's song There's more than one song for today. In fact there's a playlist. It's an outline, of course.
Frankly my dear Wired: AOL's Digital Rights Dilemma. "AOL is about to become the world's largest content company. Along with its more than 22 million subscribers, merger partner Time Warner has well over 120 million combined subscribers for its magazines and cable services. Also on the consolidation train is Warner Music, a division of Time Warner, and EMI, a major music label." Reuters: AOL Inks Security Deal with Intertrust. "The companies hope their deal is the next step toward selling digital music, video and text files over the Internet, while protecting copyright material from piracy." NY Times on the InterTrust/AOL deal. What are Frankentoons? "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn whether you've always depended on the kindness of strangers." The music discussion continues The music industry has the same problem the software industry had in the 80s. The presumption of guilt of their customers. Our battle was over the same issue, copy protection. A story. I remember overhearing a water cooler conversation in my 80s company. The people were telling "stupid user" stories. At the next company meeting I told them that all our users are smart. They're smartest people on the planet, because of all the choices they could make, they chose to purchase our product. They pay our salaries. Without them we'd be jobless. If you don't like them and respect them you should work elsewhere. I'd argue that any company or industry whose interest is aligned against the interest of their customers has no future. MacHack hacks MacWEEK: "Created by a group of Apple engineers, it searched all the active AirPort networks at the show (virtually everyone was on AirPort) and displayed any JPG images that were found. They didn't find any porn, but they did uncover a gigantic picture of a marijuana plant in addition to numerous photos of cats." How to suck up to the media Buzz 2000. Top tech reporters tell PR people (and their mindless clients) where to shove it. Come we have work to do in SF, 7/11. RSS Modularization Proposal Rael Dornfest posted a proposal to add modules to RSS using XML namespaces. I not a big namespaces fan. I like new elements that have imperfect names and that are supported in content by leading content providers. Microsoft's Java Killer The Register: "Well, syntactically it's very Java like, and from a distance, the two are practically indistinguishable. Look closer and you get the definite impression that its authors know Java pretty well, but were annoyed by some of its idiosyncrasies." Later in the piece Elliotte Rusty Harold is quoted: "If Microsoft wanted to really challenge Java, they should have gone with Python. I just don't believe it's possible for any major advances in language design to be made while restricting oneself to the mistakes Kernighan and Ritchie made 30 years ago." Gruppo di discussione Manila-Newbies: Multiple Languages. Now that 6.2 has shipped, and we're fully upgraded on all our servers, every UserLand-hosted Manila site has a choice of language, French, German, Italian, Dutch or English. As a temporary demo, I've switched discuss.userland.com over to Italian. It's now a gruppo di discussione. Performance of SOAP A common myth is that SOAP does not perform well enough. I've heard this from people who participated in some way in the development of the low-level protocols of the Internet, things like DNS and SMTP. "It won't scale," they say. "Trust me little newbie, we know." To which I say, it depends on what you use it for. In the early 80s, I never would have done an object database for the Apple II, even though it was an excellent machine with a lot of advantages over the Unix machines I used to use. Even if I had known how to write an object db, it never would have performed. By the end of the 80s, the machines had multiple megabytes of RAM, so some of the ideas I hadn't dared explore in the early 80s were possible. Today with much more RAM and huge hard disks, the bet on object db technology works even better. Same with scripting. In the late 80s, a script that processed a stream of text could only be run once in a while. Today, script code runs faster than assembler code used to in the 80s. And CPUs are getting faster all the time. Which assumptions will we be able to loosen in the coming years? That's what I'm thinking about now, as is every other professional developer. So the "It Won't Scale" argument only holds water if we apply the technology unwisely. Performance is always one of the biggest considerations in designing software. Yes, we design software for tomorrow's hardware, but if the software doesn't run well on today's hardware, it won't gain traction. And today hardware includes the hardware of the Internet. PS: I wonder what the nay-sayers think of GIFs, JPEGs and MP3s. The Internet wasn't designed to carry them either. PPS: Jump out of the plane door. Leave the parachute behind. A new job I am going to moderate a panel for the Bandwidth Conference, in SF, August 17-19. My panel is entitled Hi Speed Fan. "The fan of the future - how will they discover, enjoy, participate in and purchase music? With the advent of new technologies, how the fan experience is changing and will continue to change." XHTML for Web developers A List Apart: Rated XHTML. "XHTML is HTML written according to the XML rules of well-formedness." Come Dancing Today's song is Come Dancing by The Kinks. "Come dancing, that's how they did it when I was just a kid. And when they said come dancing my sister always did." What a sweet song.
Fortune cover story Brent Schlender: Damn the Torpedos. Thanks for the quote in part 4. "I told Bill I thought it was the single most courageous thing he's ever done," says Dave Winer, founder and president of Userland, a small Silicon Valley software-tools company that is a key player in determining XML standards. Winer thinks the cooperation will discourage predatory behavior: "IBM and Microsoft and Sun will keep each other honest," he says. XML storage One of the services Microsoft described on Thursday is the XML Store. This is a very important idea. We're going to move here at Internet Speed. I've got a design, and a connection to our outliner, but that's just one of the tools and browsers that make sense here. It'll be easy to connect up any desktop app that can create or display hierarchies in some way. And there is no special server. It's low-tech, you can use Notepad to build the structures. I've never worked on a juicier project with so many uses. I know this is a tease. But I want you all to get a sense of how quickly the Two-Way-Web can come online now. Frontier 6.2 ships Frontier 6.2 Change Notes. Milestones are on yesterday's Scripting News. Here's the page with links to all the info about 6.2. This page will be updated as the week goes by as more docs come on line. You can get into the Trial Window program here, full info is on the Pricing page. Mac OS X and Frontier
Any lawyers tuned in? The RIAA may be making a big incorrect assumption. Read the following piece and consider the quote. Wired: "'While the Internet and MP3 technology provide budding artists without recording contracts with an inexpensive vehicle for communicating their work to the public, the predominant use of MP3 technology is the trafficking of pirated sound recordings,' said a statement in the written court documents filed by the RIAA." As I understand it, they lost the case against the Diamond Rio because it could be used for lawful purposes. The same is true of the MP3 download sites. If a person who has already purchased the right to listen to the music wants to be able to access the songs over the Internet, what law did they break? And if a person uses Napster to get a computer-playable version of a song they already own, are they doing something illegal? Surely some of these people are past or future customers. Do you think "trafficking of pirated sound recordings" is what their customers do? These guys are in trouble. Did you ever see the movie Beetlejuice? I'm reminded of the scene when the football team comes into the director's office and says "Coach I don't think we survived the crash." Yahoo and HP Motley Fool: "In a bold new venture, Yahoo has teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to help sell corporate portals that will mesh popular software applications with an information intensive home screen." Microsoft unveils C# Microsoft: C# Introduction and Overview. Feature request: Please convert the overview and language reference to HTML. News.Com: Microsoft submits C# to ECMA. David Rothgery, a VB developer: "I don't understand the point of C# at all." Jeremie of Jabber Jabber is an open source chat application, and has a perfect opportunity to be the first widely deployed SOAP router. This would be very cool, because any SOAP-compatible desktop app could provide its own interface to chat functionality. And because it would easily be extensible, we could have higher-level applications running over the same wires. Jeremie Miller, who I met at Netscape in April, is the benevolent dictator of JabberLand. It's so cool that Jeremy is gushingly enthusiastic about connecting up. Thanks to Microsoft for opening this door! They make fun of me for saying it's about love, but that's what it is. Once we want to work together, magic takes over. A sensible application for Napster Ian Thompson: "I got some email from my sister, who's in the middle of a three-week hospital stay, recovering from some fairly major surgery. I'd asked her if I needed to send any CDs, she said no, the patient computer in her area has Napster!" A sensible application for Perl Brian Kelly connects the UserLand.Com back-end to Perl in a simple and colorful application, using XML, of course. Regrets to the East Coast I have to postpone the NY trip. Our ship is coming in, every hour I'm getting more emails from developers who are totally turned on by the Two-Way-Web idea after hearing the same idea coming from Redmond. The power of the bulliest of pulpits. I must stay closer to the backbone with a good net connection. I'll be reporting on some of the developments in real-time, but I'd say SOAP has gained traction now and is starting to boom. I've been trying to balance this against my desire to swim in the Atlantic and eat disgustingly greasy NY Jewish food. My thought is that I can go to NY in August, but right now the stuff I've wanted to happen is happening now, and it's here in the west, not in the east.
Microsoft, leadership, curiosity Seattle Times: Microsoft's Magic. "Even if we're not successful, the world will be better off." Reflect on that Ballmer quote, and savor it. A fundamental change. Over the years much of my criticism stemmed from their bringing a self-induced, mythological and trance-like struggle to survive to the clean friendly space of the Web. I think Microsoft should take that quote and run it full page in the NY Times and the WSJ. It could replace "Where do you want to go today?" To me, this is a statement of leadership, a first in the history of Microsoft, and long overdue. (And very close to the Ask Not statement, the tagline for Scripting News. Would Sun make a similar statement? IBM? AOL? Yahoo? RIAA? USPTO?) Also thanks to Paul Andrews for the quotes. I really like working with him. I had a quote that was pulled from the final rev of this piece, it's worth repeating here. For developers, the Internet is "a different universe" than Windows, noted Dave Winer, a leading Silicon Valley software developer who acknowledged "butting heads" with Apple over the years while finding Microsoft "generally a great partner." It's true. For all the whining I do about Microsoft, they continue to listen and converse and challenge my assertions. There's the greatness in the company, and even if it sputters and is a creaky old thing, at its core Microsoft still is curious. Yes, I pay for music
What a bitch to install. It hates Windows 2000. It's totally dependent on Real Jukebox which is the most awful piece of software ever written. The design is so simple, you copy files onto a Compact Flash card, pop it out of the laptop, and pop it into the player. If only it were so simple to actually do. Anyway, four hours later I'm listening to music, and the sound is fantastic. Jakob checks in Jakob Nielsen on Microsoft's announcements. "The strategy is to stall for time in the law suit and milk the OS as much as possible while preparing for the day of divestiture." What is SOAP? (continued) Jim Whitehead, chair of the IETF WebDAV group, sent an email saying that my statement of definition for SOAP was flawed because it didn't connect with XML. I agreed, and asked him to post his thoughts on the SOAP weblog. It's totally open for discussion. Now is a good time to think about this. A 25-word or less statement that captures what SOAP is would help the idea propogate. BTW, Jim's proposed definition is pure poetry. It's so cool that people can get mystical about this stuff. I like it that way. Later, I posted a revised version. What do you think? Frontier 6.2 Tomorrow, unless Murphy objects, we will ship Frontier 6.2. A bunch of firsts. This version will boot as EditThisPage-in-a-Box. A top level site where your users can create their own sites. Highly configurable, so you can force conformity in look-and-feel, or let your users run wild, or anywhere inbetween. For a very low price you can launch hundreds or thousands of internal or external websites with point and click simplicity. All sites come with free syndication features, and XML-RPC interfaces so you can hook them into your legacy apps and databases. Static rendering is built-in and easily configurable, so it's conceivable that a single NT box could be used, in conjunction with a static server, to be the editing system for as many as 100,000 sites. The ISP opportunities are pretty obvious. And Frontier 6.2 is Europe-friendly, even if your users don't speak English, or prefer to work in their native tongue (as long as it's French, German, Italian or Dutch). (Reminder to self, let's get the Spanish localization done, then we'll be Latin America-friendly.) Aside from bug fixes and the Linux version, 6.2 is the end of the Frontier 6 thread. The next major release, 7.0, will be Dot-Net-Ready, if that's a term, and ready to serve any and all SOAP-based distributed computing visions. (6.2 will include the latest SOAP for Frontier, but it's not wired into all the existing XML-RPC interfaces yet, it's too new.) And with 6.2, we're going to launch our "Trial Window" program. You'll be able to download and install a fully functional copy of 6.2 onto your server and use it for 60 days at no charge. You'll get a serial number, nightly updates, and you'll be in the registration database. After 30 days you'll get an email reminder that there's 30 days remaining in your trial window, and at 60 days a notice telling you that sadly, it's time to uninstall the software, or pay for it. We want lots of people to experience the new power and ease of use of the Two-Way-Web, and we know of no better way to do that than Frontier 6.2. Getting Carbonized Many Mac users will be happy to know that we're working on a "carbonized" version of Frontier 6.2. What does this mean? When the project is complete, Frontier will run as a native application on Mac OS X. We didn't want to say anything about this until we were reasonably sure it could be done. Of course the next question people will ask is when, and to that, I don't know. Like all other projects we want it to be done now. The Music Wars NY Times: "Conventional wisdom says the music industry is under siege, threatened by free music peddlers like Napster. But if things are so bad, why are record companies selling so many records?" Reuters: Major Music Labels Sue MP3Board. The music industry is run by idiots. Napster is a huge gift for them too. Instead of trying to shut it down (and shutting down their users) they should join us in looking for the new business model created by the Internet. I don't want to begrudge them their money, but get out of the way. They were dragging their asses, and the music is so damned compelling. Teasers Isn't it interesting that Microsoft left Yahoo off their list of competitors for Dot-Net? Today's song is in German! What is http://www.wfactor.com/? Wouldn't editthispage.netscape.com be cool? I added a new person to the AskNot graphic. For five points, who's the newbie? Love on the Beach
What is Dot-Net? DaveNet: Dot-What? Microsoft whitepaper. I was quoted in Red Herring saying "This is not going to be Web-like until you let in people you don't like." News.Com: Microsoft brewing Java-like language. A mysterious email from Fredrik Lundh indicates that Loudcloud is working on SOAP-for-Python. Obvious ideas for Napster NY Times: Napster Eyes New Business Models. I've been doing a bunch of background processing on Napster and have some obvious ideas for extending their service. No claim of brilliance here. Collborative filtering is key. They know a lot about my taste in music. They could help me mine the music archives. Maybe they could find something I haven't heard in 25 years? That would make me happy. Another idea. Their database, even minus the locations of MP3s is pretty precious. They have a taxonomy of all the popular music that people alive in 2000 like to listen to and share. Before the RIAA shuts them down, which seems inevitable, please publish the taxonomy. I don't see how anyone could have any proprietary right to this information. Since I started using Napster, I have been so much more open to music and the emotions that come with it. Running errands, I caught this song by Dan Fogelberg on a local station. Wow, it's just a story, set to music, makes the feelings rush up. I wish the music industry could get this, I saw an interview with the CEO of RIAA on TV yesterday. So heartless. All they see are dollar signs. Feature request for Microsoft At Esther's this year, 3COM gave out free wireless LAN cards for laptop users. The room and the conference facility was wirelessly wired. It was only a three-day conference, so this must have cost a lot to build and tear down. But Microsoft's impressive conference facility on the Redmond campus is permanent and probably in use 200 days a year. The feature request is to install wireless networking in that facility, and provide loaner cards to laptop users. Document the feature on the Web, so that people coming to a Microsoft conference know what they have to do in advance to have a Microsoft-ready laptop. Then the next step is to provide visual displays on the screen from people in the audience. And this would give Microsoft people ideas for software created for people who think. Thinking as a group is something computers can help with. A lot more than Microsoft realizes, I think. Using its bulliest of pulpits, Microsoft could show every conference attendee, probably some of the most influential people in the world, how computers and thinking go together.
News Toronto Star: "Outspoken rockster/actress Courtney Love has launched one of the most intriguing and articulate arguments yet on the online music piracy battle." News.Com: Amazon.com hits new 52-week low. "We believe that the combination of negative cash flow, poor working capital management, and high debt load in a hyper-competitive environment will put the company under extremely high risk." 2/28/00: "I own 100 shares of Amazon.Com, and I wonder if you can tell me what it is exactly that I own." LA Times: Concocting Satiric Counterpoint to Conventions. What is ShadowConventions.Com? Greg Aharonian on British Telecom's linking patent: "This patent's strength is up there with wet spaghetti." WSJ: Napster talks with record labels. "Any payments by Napster to record labels presumably would be higher, since users would be, in effect, buying the music at the same time they were downloading it." Hmmm. They should check their assumptions. Napster can easily be used to download music that the user has already paid for. The role of outlines For twenty years I've been waiting for Microsoft to take an interest in developing tools for people who think. They've worked all around this area. Everywhere they look they see hierarchies. But they've never thought to organize the whole user interface around an outliner, which is nothing more than a hierarchy browser/editor. Now they're going to say that they did that! Their file system browser is an outliner. The Registry Editor is an outliner. So are Excel and PowerPoint, as are their development tools. But if we're starting anew, why not start simple. Let's create a sharable, browsable World Outline and let people link into it, anywhere they want. That's where you hook in your tools. And of course we'll use XML, which by the way, is an outline too. This is the Next Generation Web, imho. An investment in core technology here would propogate to every corner of their product line with huge power. And this is a place where we could use Microsoft's "bulliest of pulpits" to get the world's attention. Of all the companies they mentioned yesterday (and Linux which is not a company), Microsoft is uniquely positioned to understand this idea. What is SOAP? On the SOAP weblog, Kishore Balakrishnan asks a fairly obvious question that has not yet been answered. I think I can do it, in 28 words, not 25. (Note this is derived from the answer to the question on the XML-RPC website.) "SOAP is a specification and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet." Next question: What is a procedure call? 7/14/98: "Inside every computer, every time you click a key or the mouse, thousands of 'procedure calls' are spawned, analyzing, computing and then acting on your gestures." Dan Gillmor Now, please go read Dan Gillmor's piece on Microsoft's press conference, but please come back here and read the rest of Scripting News. It relates to everything Dan writes about. Lessig and Andrews So much stuff on the home page yesterday, and there will be more today, for sure. I got a call at around 10PM from Paul Andrews of the Seattle Times for a piece he's doing on Sunday. He pointed me to a piece he ran on Tuesday, quoting Lawrence Lessig and myself, about Microsoft and the courts. A very key idea, one that's been oft-repeated, but just as often not-heard at Microsoft. The issue is trust. Microsoft could probably get off with a behavior-based consent decree, with no "structural remedy" if the court trusted Microsoft management. Andrews also gave air to my proposed remedy, but got the second half wrong. I wasn't saying that Microsoft should port the Office apps to Unix. That's their choice. What I was asking for was an Emancipation Proclamation for developers who code to the Win32 APIs. A not-subtle difference. Also interesting in the Andrews piece, Lessig is moving to Stanford in July, which is just down the street. This is good, I totally enjoyed talking with him at Esther's and we're on the same side of almost every issue, esp the tough ones. Excited about buzzwords Yesterday I said: "The Microsoft people talk like Jeff Bezos, highly animated in a disturbing way. They talk in bursts. Loud exclamations. Hands wave. They explain how excited they are but the things they're excited about are buzzwords! I wish I remembered some of them. I wonder if this is the way they always are or if this is something they're doing just for the press people." A source at Microsoft says: "The MS people speak like that because the speaking trainer tries to make them speak like Steve Ballmer. I know, because I went through the same training. After a few really sucky speeches, I went back to my own style." Thank you! Microsoft-centricity An ex-Microsofter says: "When you work outside of Redmond you get more in touch with your customers. Yes, the execs travel to visit customers. When you visit a user group or trade organization you hear what people are thinking. A customer visiting Redmond, or one with Bill Gates in their conference room will use much nicer language to describe a problem than one in a user group environment where he can express his true issues." I think this is very true! It's so weird that I didn't feel comfortable asking or answering questions yesterday at the press conference, but at the same time, had no problem typing honestly into my outliner for the world to read on Scripting News. The Web does compress everything, there are new opportunities to communicate and understand. Quite a few people at Microsoft were reloading Scripting News while the press conference was going on. I found this out later when a bunch of MS people quoted me at the lunch following the press conference. That's compression! Zope, Frontier & Vignette David Brown finished his training on Vignette StoryServer, and has more comments on the differences between Zope and Frontier. Paul notes that Vignette's big selling point is caching and wonders how or when Frontier will get that feature. Vignette is pretty safe with their caching stuff because of a patent. Is it non-obvious? Of course not. But not wanting to give them a way of shutting us down with lawyers, we have decided not to chase them here. We're winning where we want to win, and can do it with static rendering instead of caching, so leave them alone, I say. Dilberts and PHBs love Vignette because it helps them feel like they "get" the Internet. I don't want those people as customers. High overhead. When and if they're ready they'll find out that powerful Web content management is not expensive or difficult or mysterious. In the meantime, sensible and creative people are choosing our product. Those are the people we want. More mail from Microsoft I love Microsoft! If only for their persistence. They're so pessimistic! That's the striking thing. Until Ballmer came on stage, I don't think a single Microsoft person even cracked a smile. Off-stage, they constantly profess a belief that they could disappear at any time. There's no reason to believe this is true. Big companies do not disappear, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how hard they try to self-destruct. Look at Apple and IBM. Bet the other way. I did that in 1983, based on the advice of a board member who said that big companies like Apple don't disappear overnight. So true. Back then Apple didn't even have a billion dollars in annual sales. But they lived to get it right. By 1986 Apple was booming, and a couple of years later they were back in loser mode. Seventeen years later, Apple is still here, and doing quite well. I also love Microsoft for what they were, and possibly someday could be again. The curiosity that was the hallmark of Microsoft in the 80s appears to be gone. No one at MS has asked me to back up my claims that we're there now, that we have their vision delivered in a form that the journalists in the audience would have had orgasms over, yesterday, not in 2005. We've got the development environment, the browser-based interface, and the GUI writing tool that shows very clearly why the browser-based interface is the innovation of the last decade. The old Microsoft would never have let me make such a claim without demanding a demo. They're lucky to have Steve Ballmer. I would recommend that Gates go on vacation. Take a massage class. Go deeper into what's bumming him out, and let it go. Find people in the company who think the outside world is friendly and fair, and give them the keys to run the show. There are a lot of smart, young and ambitious people at Microsoft, who want to add something great to the world. PS: There's no way to recapture the dominance of the early 90s. So few of them have even heard of BOGU. I'm sure Ballmer remembers. Teach them Steve. Thanks, but two mis-spelings Here's a transcript of Steve Ballmer's remarks yesterday. If you search the document, you'll find my name, but you have to spell it the way they did. Search for Dave instead. They also mis-spelled Don Box's name. It happens. I bet they fix it quickly. Lawrence Lee, the scribe of our Web, says it's fixed. Feature request Yesterday I got a lot of good pics of Steve Ballmer. I wish a great graphics person would honor Ballmer as Partykeller iconified Jakob Nielsen.
Brian Kelly did one!
Today's song If we had the Music Web of the Future, today's song would be Uncle Albert by Paul McCartney. "We're so sorry Uncle Albert. We're sorry if we caused you any pain. We're so sorry. Uncle Albert. But there's no one left at home and I believe I'm going to rain." Love, Dave
Dear Jakob Nielsen Reader I love Jakob, but he picked the wrong page to point to. The comments on this page are raw, directly entered while I was at the press conference in Redmond. They're interesting perhaps, because they are in process. A couple of days later, with my thoughts more composed, I wrote a whitepaper on this stuff. This is where it is. DaveNet: Dot-What? Observations I heard that Microsoft tried to get Marc Andreessen to be on stage for an endorsement. He couldn't make it. Thank god. What were they thinking at Microsoft? How maudlin would that be. On the bus to the airport I was interviewed by a reporter from Salon, Katharine Mieszkowski. We had a long time to talk, the traffic was awful on 520. She asked why I did all this work to get SOAP going. I had a moment to reflect. I remembered back to early 1998, when I was saying that I had done everything I wanted to do except create a standard. She asked what will you do now? I guess I accomplished what I set out to do. Cause for a pause. Pretty cool. The other day I wrote about scriptability of vector graphics programs for the Mac. I remembered Canvas, who did a lip-service job of supporting Apple's protocols in the early 90s. The CEO of Deneba, the developer of Canvas, got to speak at the WWDC rollout of System 7, even though I had a great meaningful demo of System 7, I sat in the audience. Even Gates got to speak, and I thought he did a better job of explaining why System 7 is cool than anyone from Apple. Deja vu. Today, I could have explained better than Gates why SOAP is so important. And my demo would have turned on the lights for everyone in the room. We're not talking about vaporware, our stuff really works. I'm using it right now to write this piece. Any writer would understand it in an instant. Key point: there were 250 influential writers in the room today. Missed opportunity. Why didn't Microsoft let me explain it? Why did they want Andreessen on stage and not me? I can only guess. When you want to take leadership of developers, you don't want the developers leading the developers. I forgave Apple, and therefore forgive Microsoft, if this is what's happening. I told Yusuf Mehdi that I will keep coming to visit, they're much more disciplined at Microsoft, and they listen. We've gotten through. SOAP is real now. There's still more work to do. In the Q&A a reporter asked what about Netscape and the Mac? Well, this isn't really about browsers, a point which Microsoft didn't make very clearly. I wanted to answer the question for Gates. Don't worry about the Mac, Frontier works on the Mac, and it supports SOAP. So the Mac is a first-class SOAP client and server. Right up there with Java and Windows. There's the power of partnerships. Gates mentioned Napster and Gnutella many times as proof of net applications that aren't HTML based. I like that. Good job Bill. Lurking in the back of my mind is the idea that we could do a SOAP interface for Napster, and spread out support for the protocol it defines. Any good technologist will tell you that the architecture of Napster and its brethren have applications far beyond routing around corruption in the music business (although that's an excellent application). Net-net, I am very glad I went. My mid-morning essay was the result of being bored and humiliated watching demos of me too stuff. I felt like I was watching an advertisement for something completely irrelevant. The MSN website creation stuff is far behind the leading edge. And it has nothing to do with what we're doing in SOAP-land, or if it does, the explanation was totally inadequate. Ballmer left Apple out of the list of competitors. Had they included Apple it would have raised doubts about the uniqueness of their ability to do new user interfaces. I'd argue that today's Apple has limited resources in this area. Regardless, there's more UI smarts outside of Microsoft than inside. But can all the smart independent designers work together to advance the art in Web apps before Microsoft gets there? I don't know. I took a load of pictures today. Notes from Microsoft's rollout Press conference started at 8:30AM. Gates is speaking. It's a great digital world, media, business, knowledge workers. Bifurcated. Powerpoint presentations spreadsheets, paperwork, meetings that are purely analog. Can't copy and paste from a meeting, says Bill G. Beyond browsing -- personalized, multiple sites, any device. Reading, writing, annotating. Natural interface, no barriers between users, devices. XML is the base protocol for the new era of software. It's called .NET, pronounced "dot-net". "As big a transition as from DOS to Windows." Storage is out in the cloud. The cloud understands, it's richer, it indexes things, it's based on database technology, it's the XML store. Think about the Windows clipboard. And OLE, that's when Windows really started to become object oriented. You no longer leave the browser, that's the Universal Canvas. .NET building blocks, Identity, notification, messaging, personalization, XML storage, calendar, directory and search, software delivery. These are their toolkits. How many search commands do you have in your PC? Now we're getting a demo of the "natural interface elements." Smart tags. Your emailer recognized company and people names. Click on a smart link and get a popup menu that gets you to their website and other places. The Universal Canvas is full screen and looks nothing like Windows. It has a natural langage command line where the URL box is. Voice is part of it. "You could say this is a bet the company strategy." I took some notes during the break. After the break, we're getting demos of really stupid ordinary bullshit. I just said out loud to the people around me "This is infuriating!" Why did we travel all this way to get a demo of MSN's me-tools? Luckily I can check my email. Tim O'Reilly sent me a pointer to this Jon Katz piece on Open Journalism. I want to be sure to read this when I get back to California. I wish I had a nickel for every time they used the word "rich". Paul Maritz gave a great speech about the role of SOAP in all that they're talking about. Much appreciated. Steve Ballmer is a fantastic speaker! "What is .NET? A programming infrastructre that supports the next generation of the Internet as as platform. It is also, a user environment a set of fundamental user servers that live in the client or on the cloud. It runs on servers behind firewalls and on the public Internet, and a set of services that Microsoft will operate and developers can use." I want to know why Microsoft is so Microsoft-centered. The revolution really hasn't occurred to them, imho. How about Microsoft using other people's services? Why should we sign on to Microsoft's vision? Hmmm. Hey it wasn't really Microsoft's vision, it was *our* vision. I think they've not really figured it out. Steve says he must work with partners, some advice --> drop the "third party" term. It's arrogant. It's a bug. BTW, people from MS are reading this real-time and sending me comments via email. Keep them coming. Microsoft is trying to make the calendar go back to 1992. It won't work. I'm trying to decide if it's appropriate to say this during the Q&A period. Geez they want to go back to Design Previews. What about W3C? Wow I got a plug from Ballmer. He thanked me and Don Box for working with them on SOAP. Wow. Geez. OK, there's nothing wrong with design previews, I totally enjoyed the process, except MS will be disappointed to find out it's not the early 90s and the world doesn't revolve around them at this time. Emphatically. Microsoft's core priorities: PC excitement, e-server business, MSN, migrating to the .NET platform. My net connection is flaky, and this is a work in progress. Don't consider these comments as anything more than off the top of my head as the day proceeds. Who's the competition -- Sun, IBM, Oracle, Linux, AOL? Ballmer finished, now Q&A. They feel impermeable to competition in .NET as a platform. They think the companies (and Linux) don't get it, or aren't in the right business; but they chose to slice things up that way. They argue that their installed base of developers is a huge advantage. This is sure to provoke a competitive response from some or all of the names they listed as competition. With that I'm signing off. I've got a 4PM flight back home. See you this evening, Murphy-willing. And thanks to Microsoft for a stimulating event. Lots to think about, and more questions to ask. Other Microsoft reports ZDNet, News.Com, MSNBC, NY Times, AP. Other news Texas executes Gary Graham despite his pleas of innocence. A majority of Texans believe innocent people have been executed.
More SOAP! Fredrik Lundh: SOAP for Python. "This version is somewhat experimental, and has a couple of known shortcomings that we plan to fix asap. It has been tested against Userland's SOAP implementation, and it's likely that it will work with IBM's Java library." Very nice! Fredrik put XML-RPC on the map, being the first to support it after UserLand in 1998. Continuing the long tradition of partnership between Frontier and Python. More disruption! On XML.COM, Simon St. Laurent has written an article on the disruptive nature of XML, esp in combination with HTTP, as in XML-RPC and SOAP. I wish I had more time to write, but I agree, it is disruptive, even more than he gives it credit for. And disruption is good, esp when things are stagnating and going nowhere. More Microsoft!
Expect a big blast of publicity for Microsoft starting now. Tomorrow, in Redmond, they will announce their next-generation Internet strategy, formerly called NGWS, which has XML and SOAP at its core. (And of course respects the legacy, COM, ODBC, WebDAV.) Imagine a word processor integrated into the Web browser (MSIE of course) and a toolbar that makes it easy to switch to your presentation program, spreadsheet, schedule, contact list, mail app, draw program, etc. All with a consistent user interface, and deep integration with Web services, that the client talks to through SOAP. And while the code for these apps resides on your local hard disk, they are updated automatically, presumably with user confirmation. You pay Microsoft for this software, but it's a subscription fee, not a traditional software license. (Just like Frontier!) Some of your stuff is publicly readable, some is not. All your information is stored on the server. So when you go on a trip, with a cellphone or a laptop, or are at a offsite, or a sales call, you can tap into the data, view it, edit it. It's like Yahoo with higher-level software running on the client. (This is what Gates talked about at Davos in January, the PC is not irrelevant, he said, it's essential.) Their strategy is a compromise with the Network Computing vision that was the anti-Microsoft rage a few years ago, and will lock into Windows, but do it through documented interfaces, expressed in SOAP. So Microsoft will claim that it is open, and this will be fair, assuming that other developers support the idea not just with words but with software. The software we will see tomorrow is demo-ware. The project started in a rush, early this year, when Gates stepped out of the CEO slot and become Microsoft's chief software architect. What we see tomorrow is pure Gates, circa 2000. And it's a new job for him, Microsoft has never had an overarching vision before, and perhaps they still don't. Of course lurking in the background is the possibility that Microsoft has filed patent applications on these ideas, which are somewhat unique (perhaps, esp in the areas where functionality is integrated with MSIE). The jury won't be out on that for a few years, because patent applications are confidential until they are issued by the USPTO. It would be helpful if Microsoft addressed this issue tomorrow, without waiting for a question from the audience. What is it called?
Or they might call it Wee Win, to say that it's much smaller than the current Windows/Office combo. Or Wheeee Win, which is the feeling of jumping out of the plane with no parachute while using Windows. Survey for Microsoft people Survey: If you work at Microsoft and know what the "We Win" strategy actually is, how close did I come to describing it? (This survey is on the honor system, please.) Surfing in the air News.Com: "In-Flight Network today said it will join satellite telecommunications provider Globalstar Telecommunications and digital wireless technology developer Qualcomm to offer Internet and email service on airline flights." Yahoo! Illustrator 9 is scriptable Ira Cary Blanco reports "Adobe Illustrator 9 appears to be fully scriptable." This is very cool, and as far as I know is the first Mac vector graphics program that's fully scriptable. (Canvas was an early adopter of Mac scripting, but their support was for PR purposes, and was functionally useless.) BTW, see the section below and Lessig's rebuttal to Warnock on patent and copyright protection. Believe it or not, Adobe's burying of the scripting plug-in for Illustrator is probably related to these issues. They have in the past killed scriptability projects for their software, fearing it would hurt sales if people could automate their mainstay app, PhotoShop. Organizations would buy one copy of PhotoShop, they feared, put it on a server, and batch-process their graphics off-line. Now of course we're pleased and impressed that Adobe has decided to open Illustrator for automation, but not happy that they're burying the feature, and wonder where the automation features are for PhotoShop. More ridiculous patents Mirror Worlds, 1/24/00: "Mirror Worlds announced today that it has been awarded patent number 6,006,227 from the USPTO for its innovative Lifestreams technology, which is emerging as both an office workgroup product and as an embedded feature in a new generation of Internet devices." Mirror Worlds is the company of Yale professor David Gelertner, whose non-unique visions have been filling weblog-space for the last few days. And Napster isn't patent-free. At the end of the interview yesterday I asked Kessler if they had filed any patents, and he said they had filed one, for a dynamic search engine that's seeded in real time, and was considering filing one for the method they used to give the universities what they wanted. Kessler said he would never work for a company that used patents offensively, but this is little reassurance, since Kessler could quit or be fired. Fortune: The hot idea of the year. Lawrence Lessig: The limits of copyright. The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handles. More Napster Jim Hebert: "For Napster to have a business model that anyone can comprehend they need to be at the center of it in some way -- the distributed backend which would be resistant to music industry attack has been designed, twice now, and the problem is Napster would write itself right out of the picture if it adopted it. That's their bug." I took this idea on a walk with me, and came to a different conclusion, after having met with the Napster people and crawled around the conundrum from their pov. If I were in their shoes, I'd want to see thousands of developers implement Napster-compatible servers and clients. Give the RIAA a much bigger target to shoot at. They'll have to sue every developer, and at some point, they'll realize how hopeless it is (every lawsuit will generate more bad PR for them, and who knows what other musicians are waiting in the wings to pull a Courtney). And it's not just hopeless for economic reasons, let's say Joe Developer who has a tin ear, or even better, is deaf, implements a Napster clone. What law did he break? What's unfair about what he did? I don't get it. Everything people do with Napster could be done with off the shelf authorless software, like HTTP or FTP. All Napster did was make it a little more convenient. Poor Napster (sarcasm) they end up with the biggest brand-name in online music, and the gratitude of music fans everywhere for breaking the logjam. If there are any products to be sold here, the Napster brand will work well with them. I think I could write a fair settlement now, but I don't think the music industry would buy it, but a year from now they will. It goes like this. All money goes directly to the artists. They can in turn hire music distributors, in a competitive environment, and reverse the royalty system. The artists have a bigger cash pot to play with, and can redefine how music production works, and how it relates to live performances and merchandising. The creative people would own the medium, as Courtney says they should, and I of course agree. We'll get art instead of flatness. We'll get a chance to evolve through one of our most creative artforms, and one that the Internet is ready to serve now. And we'll get a template for revolutionizing other artforms. Further we will have linked up software to music, and made music really easy to use. Where will that take us? Somewhere very cooool. Qbullet question I got an anonymous email warning me about modifying a qbullet for use here on Scripting News (the left-pointing blue arrow on each top level item). I don't like anonymous email, why does someone need to hide their identity for raising an interesting question? Seems silly. Anyway, I sent an email to the creator of qbullets asking if it's OK to use this graphic. Edd Dumbill asks Edd Dumbill: Are Weblogs getting dull? Answer: Only if you read dull Weblogs, Edd.
It's SOAP! Andre Radke: Introducing SOAP for Frontier. Whew! It's there. Now you can use Frontier to send and receive SOAP messages, exactly as you would with XML-RPC. This is the secret way to add new protocols. Make the differences invisible to the developer. A simple change, betty becomes soap. Easy easy easy. Frontier users, a tutorial with screen shots, full source and download are here. BTW, SOAP will run in Pike too, when we do a new release of it. History is made today! The first public demo of interoperable SOAP 1.1 implementations. Andre posted a notice of our test app, and Fredrik Lundh was able to call it from the Python SOAP library. Excellent! Doc Searls: "Parenting doesn't get better than this." Photos from Napster I had a 2-hour meeting in San Mateo this afternoon with Napster founder Shawn Fanning and VP-Engineering Eddie Kessler. 10 million people use Napster each day. Their office is connected to the Internet via DSL. Shawn moved from Boston to California in September 1999. There's no silver bullet, they're still figuring out what their business is. They host at AboveNet.
Eddie Kessler is Napster's VP-Engineering.
Napster's employee picture board. Napster's server engineering room, with a server engineer who's name I didn't catch. Patent insanity Financial Times: BT Owns Key Web Patent. "Patents were sought in 1976 and have already expired in countries out-side the US. But the US patent was not granted until 1986, and still has six years to run." Lance Knobel: "It would seem unthinkable, given the centrality of hyperlinks to the Web, that BT could have any recourse on this so-called invention." News.Com: Big-name companies lobby against patent proposal. "Companies say they need the USPTO to use all the money from patent fees to clear up an applications backlog that can leave companies waiting nearly two years for patent approvals." Au contraire. Let's cut the USPTO budget by 100 percent and rescind all patents issued in the last ten years. Just like the music companies, they're screwing the artists and the fans. When will the rest of us get a clue. It's an election year in the US. One more time. BobDylan.Com I gotta tip my hat, this is an excellent site. Look at all the songs. And it looks like Bob doesn't mind if you listen to his music. All the lyrics are there. My RealAudio isn't working so I can't tell if the songs are complete. Are they? If so, this is an exemplary site. All that's missing is the tip jar. Brent Simmons: "I remember sitting alone in my room at night, listening to Dylan through the headphones, thinking -- everything sucks, the system sucks, adults suck, school sucks, but Dylan understands." Rick Winfield says Dylan ain't so hip. Money money money Want to know how music makes money? Here it is. Do I mind paying more so college students can listen to music for free? Of course not! I want the kids to be happy. July 5 dinner in NYC If you're in NYC on July 5, mark your calendar, because that's when we're going to have the grand Scripting News in Gotham dinner and mini gustatory tour. Location TBD. 8PM eastern. It will not be webcast. I will bring my camera. We will eat Jewish food and drink egg cremes and belch loudly. We will discuss east coast things whatever they may be. Survey: Will you be there? Hey this worked in the past. I have five days free in NY and a rental car July 1 through 5. I want to go body surfing. I hate crowds. Am I fucked? Or better, how fucked am I? (I'm already starting to talk like a NYer, again.) Update, from Joel Spolsky: "Come on out to my beach house in East Hampton. The beaches here are better than any in California, body surfing is great, and it's easy to find a beach without a soul around, even on July 4th." I'll be there!
I found everything I wanted DaveNet: Where do I send the money? I just got an email saying that I could have dinner with George W. Bush tonight for $25K. I decided to pass. I'm saving my money for a dinner with musical artists. Then I listened to Sisters, by Annie Lenox and Aretha Franklin. The last line of the song: "Thank you, I'll get it myself." That summarizes what I have to say to the music industry. Subterranean Homesick Blues Today's Scripting News is sung to the tune of Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan. It's available in Real Audio on Bob Dylan's site. I'd like to put the MP3 on my server. Debating. With myself. Johnny's in the basement mixing up some medicine. Pumps not working British Telecom: "We patented the principle of the hyperlink in the mid-70s when people were still wearing kipper ties and flares." The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handles. An undercurrent of guilt I was feeling guilty, a twinge of it, a little bit of blues, about listening to all this great music. Then I realized something. I had paid for all of it. I haven't downloaded anything that I didn't purchase at one time or another. I'm listening to Bob Dylan now, a song I remember listening to in the basement of my parents' house when I was 15. Hey I love this shit. Did I buy the record? You bet I did. I hate the record companies. What a bunch of jerks. Most of the music I have on CD I bought twice. Once on vinyl. Once on CD. Oh yeah, remember cassettes? I bought those too. Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters. I must be thinking good thoughts I just got an email from the VP-Engineering at Napster. He invited me over. I'm going! (Tomorrow afternoon.) Bungie FAQ Question: "Would you like to listen to a rambling tirade that condemns this decision and includes words like 'traitors,' 'sellouts,' 'whores' and a great deal of profanity?" Answer: "No. Please keep it to yourself. If your mind is made up to hate this decision and by extension the people who made it, there is little we can do to make you feel better." Bob Dylan FAQ Question: "You know many Swedes?" Answer: "I know plenty, I happen to be a Swede myself." Tech pointers David Brown compares Frontier to Vignette StoryServer. Scott Hanson posted a specification of the protocol used by the Napster client. Juicy! O'Reilly adds a feature to Meerkat called Mobs. I signed up, but I'm not sure what they're for. Can other people read my Mobs? Are they accessible through their API? Hmmm. Synchronicity! As I was posting this link to Meerkat I got an email forwarded from an O'Reilly support person saying they did not plan to update their Frontier book. Ouch. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift. Farewell old friend News.Com: Farallon sells for $14 million. One of the original Mac companies, they revolutionized networking with PhoneNet, which allowed you to network Macs over ordinary telephone wire. Another site ranking According to webmostlinked.com, Scripting News is ranked 520 out of 617688 domains. Woz on music Steve Wozniak: "I felt as you do upon reading Courtney's impassioned documentation of how the industry works." You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows. New York dinner Survey: My east coast trip spans the July 4 holiday weekend, a very long one. I want to do a Scripting News dinner in NY. Two choices, June 30 or July 5. Which would you prefer? BTW, I'm thinking of doing one in Boston on July 6. If so, the June 30 date in NY works better for me. Emailing with Alex My friend Alex Cohen, who I wrote about on Saturday, sent me an email thanking me for doing so. He's so cool. There are lots of people who don't like being written about, even in glowing terms. Alex is a Web guy, he has nothing to hide. Apparently his Fanco vision has been bought into by his new employers, Pop.Com, a partnership of Dreamworks and Imagine, funded by Paul Allen. They bought countingdown.com, a phenomenal site built around a model quite similar to the one described by Courtney Love. Alex read the Love speech and was excited. This is what I like about Alex, he gets excited over big ideas and doesn't look for reasons not to do them, as so many people in Silicon Valley do. I of course share the enthusiasm. Yesterday I asked Alex if his backers are the good guys, or are they the people who are being routed around by Napster? They're the biggest names in Hollywood. Read their launch press release. Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, Paul Allen. I think we're looking at the biggest hole yet in the Internet business. Yes, I'm glad we're involved in the business Web (see notes below) but this is big-time ConsumerLand. SOAP tomorrow If everything goes as planned, tomorrow we will release the third implementation of SOAP 1.1, after IBM and Microsoft. Frontier's SOAP should interoperate with IBM's, however we don't believe it will interoperate with Microsoft's, at least not in the first rev. (IBM shipped first, we used their implementation to guide ours.) We also have support for We will provide a SOAP 1.1 validator Web app, as we have for XML-RPC, and encourage others to test against this app. The bulliest of pulpits NY Times: Critic sees flaws in Microsoft Strategy. This piece reviews David Gelertner's vision of the future, where gravity brings data back to desktops, a trend that UserLand has bet heavy on. According to Gelertner, Microsoft has not, instead moving data to servers. A great quote. "They have the bulliest pulpit in the world," Mr. Gelernter said of Microsoft, "but what have they done with it?" Microsoft rebuts. Yes, the desktop is important, but it'll take a while before that unwinds. Microsoft makes products for the mass of users, now the leading edge is exploring new ways to use the power of desktops in conjunction with the network. Imho, that's as it should be. Give Microsoft credit. Leading the way is unusual for them. Hey, it's unusual for any gorilla. I saw why as we did the SOAP project with them. Microsoft, inside, is a whole industry, a few standards bodies, lots of differing opinions, most of whom are sure that they're right. People who think Microsoft is brutal in their interface to the rest of the industry might be shocked to see how they deal with each other. Out of all that came a spec that can be implemented, and the docs don't fill a bookshelf. It's not as simple as the spec that came out of our four-person collaboration on XML-RPC, and it's got some vagueness, that we're working out now, as we implement the spec. It'll all come out well. No lock-in, a competitive environment, I hope. Will you be there? On Thursday I'll be at Microsoft covering the rollout of NGWS, which is getting a new name. Survey: Will you be there? A week from tomorrow I will at the Rising Tide Summit in Tarrytown, NY. Survey: Will you be there?
Steve Albini Steve Albini explains how the music business works. Google search for Steve Albini. Father's Day Cat Stevens: Father and Son. "I know I have to go." Where do I send the money? Wow, I just did a Napster search for a song I have been looking for in record stores, online and real-world, for years. I was willing to pay $20 for the song, but the music industry couldn't get it to me. The song is Them Changes by Buddy Miles. Listening to it right now. For the third time. Just try not to dance while this one is playing. Woooohheeeeee! She had me running. She had me hiding. She had me running. Hiding. Running. Hiding. Running Hiding. What I said. It's all right. Napster and Pike don't work well together. When Napster is running I can't edit in Pike. I'll get to the bottom of this. I bet they're running on port 81. BTW, Napster could be a lot smaller. The searches could be done from a Web site. All it really needs to have on the local machine is a daemon with a prefs panel, which if you were clever, could just be a Web page. With a Back button that works as you expect it to. The UI of Napster is pretty | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
