Wednesday, October 31, 2001

XML.Com: Building XML-RPC Clients in C. 

John Robb: "Is the US Post Office worth saving?"  

News.Com: AOL adds file sharing to ICQ. 

Weblogs.Com changes are now available in RSS 0.92. 

Graham Dumpleton: "It looks like the web based XML-RPC debugger I was providing on the OSE web site on SourceForge is no more." 

NY Times: "The nation's longest period of economic growth, spanning 99 months, came to an official close in the third quarter, the government reported today." 

Jerry Pournelle rolled his truck in Death Valley in 1998 and had to walk out. 

Interesting article about Sun's James Gosling and SOAP. I'd like to meet with him now that I know that he's interested in SOAP. He must be a neighbor. I see him in the grocery store from time to time. Next time I'll introduce myself. 

Apparently the Gosling article requires some kind of cookie that I have. Clicker beware. You may be asked for a password. Some people think this is the end of the world and indicates moral corruption on my part. You are hereby acknowledged in this point of view.  

Of course there are more serious things to worry about. 

Postscript to yesterday's examination of reader-friendly timezone strings -- it's a hopeless cause. Instead we're going to have a pref where the user can enter a geographic location for his or her weblog. Like San Francisco, CA or Singapore or George Matesky's Basement. I will enter Pacific, and when my weblog updates it will say Last Updated: 12:37PM Pacific. That's the best we can do until the world gives names to each of the timezones. It might be a useful exercise for the world to do this, we need to work with the UN or some other geopolitical organization. Maybe it would be like naming hurricanes. It could be a symbolic change with large economic impact, and could loosen the world up a little bit, perhaps with some humor. The Russians and Pakistanis have to share a timezone. Russia and China share a few. Perhaps we could name the zones after Nobel Peace Prize winners? It would give people an alternative, peaceful path to immortality. 

Register: "WWW creator Tim Berners Lee has given his strongest hint yet that the W3C organization he created ought to shun the idea of accepting royalty-bearing patents as web standards. He also acknowledges that the move could lead to the fragmentation of the Web." 

Another release of HierMenus. Now might be a good time to ask why the leading browser vendors don't just implement a reliable and easy way for Web developers to add menus to Web apps. As far as I remember, and my memory may not be perfect (heh) the browser guys never did features that Web developers wanted. Too focused on destroying each other to be bothered to listen to developers. That Microsoft now wants independent developers to invest in their platform is amazing. It'll never happen.  

Tuesday, October 30, 2001

Jim Roepcke: "I rolled a car when I was 19." 

Derek Powazek: "Tonight I ordered dinner for me and my sweetie at burritodelivery.com, where business is booming. And the burritos were top-notch, too." 

Robert Occhialini says that other portable MP3 playback devices have flaws that Apple has addressed with the iPod. 

Netscape 6.2 is released. 

AP: "President Bush will throw out the first pitch in Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium Tuesday night, aiming to project an air of normalcy even as the government warned of possible new terror attacks." 

Doc Searls notes that MORE, a fourteen-year-old program (roughly) runs quite a bit faster on today's hardware. That of course is a demo of Moore's Law, our friend, as is the other big law that drives all computer and software development (it also begins with a M.) 

MORE has one of the more flexible product names. It's not an acronym, although you would be forgiven for guessing that it is. It was chosen because we didn't know which of a myriad of features we threw into the product in 1986 would gain traction. It turned out to be Bullet Charts. It was quite popular in France where its name is a homonym of the word for death, mort. And it of course is also a homonym for the law that makes it run so fast in 2001. 

Good morning to the special envoy to Afghanistan and the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and their Vietnam-era helicopters. 

BTW, in case you forgot, we first heard about the Taliban in March when they blew up 2000 years of Buddhist history. Now, the Buddhists, being who they are, did not retaliate by bombing Afghanistan. That would not be Buddhist-like.  

Stupid question. Do timezones have names? In the US they do (Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern). I know that some parts of Europe do. What about the rest of the world? If all timezones have names, where can I find a canonical list of them? 

Here's the question framed in the context of a new verb I'm putting together. 

Another context. I want to avoid hard-coding the string circled in red in this picture. I want to "get it right" without having to ask the user to enter a string. 

Boy this issue is hard to grasp for some people. Look at the screen shot if you're confused or think you know it all. 

PostgreSQL has dealt with this problem. More good names on this page. Another good list. 

Thanks to Steven Vore for a pointer to the World Time Server, which is kind of a messy site, but may help in this little hole-dig. 

Hey I actually know someone who partied with Prince. 

Faisal Jawdat asks a deeply philosophical question. Is Scripting News a Journal or a Weblog? The Weblogger User Group mail list debates what Scoble wanted to accomplish when he started the group. Luckily Scoble is still alive so we can ask him. If he had died yesterday in the car crash I would have said this (after a suitable mourning period). "He sure didn't start the group so it could debate whether it was a user group for webloggers or journalers." But since he's alive (as far as I know) I can't say that. 

Last year on this day I ran a survey for consenting webloggers. Maybe in this question is a philosophy that can guide the users group? 

Hey while that debate is broiling, welcome to the rain. We're having the first bona fide storm of the California rainy season. Nice! 

Happiness is discovering an old demo app that still works. 

Monday, October 29, 2001

Exclusive! "A seatbelt saved my life," says Scoble in a phone interview. His car is totaled, but he's OK. "I wasn't riding my bike," says former car owner. 

Craig Burton: "One of my biggest complaints about Groove has been its closed archtiecture." 

JD Lasica has a fantastic set of links to stories about weblogs. 

Archive.Org has a better copy of the 24 Hours site than I do. Nice. 

Adam Curry's MTV Chronicles site is #1 on Daypop. 

Doc: "So I guess it's good to be back." Yes! 

John Robb: "This is another great example of technology being used to improve the quality of airline safety without infringing much on personal privacy." 

News.Com: Patent holder eyes Web services players. 

French webloggers are having a dinner in Paris on Nov 22. 

Jean-Louis Gassee writes about L'iPod. 

ResearchBuzz covers the Weblogs.Com corner-turn, with a quote from Dan Chan, the developer of Daypop. 

Erin Clerico: "I don't think businesses and organizations need to filter their messages on the web through web designers to be effective. Web designers should play a role, as should scripters and server managers." 

To Kevin Gossett, we love designers. But designers shouldn't have to be copy editors. Nor should writers have to wait for them to make changes to their stories.  

Mike Krus is doing interesting stuff with changes.xml, and is producing a file that's compatible with it for his scraped RSS feeds. 

Essay: The 1986 Mets. 

Why should anyone care? 

Picking up where we left off last night -- you can probably count on one hand the number of people who use Opera to read MSN (not so true of SN though). Key point that the Times didn't get, to balance the piece --> MSN is not a monopoly. If they want to block people using Opera or Mozilla or whatever, why should anyone care?

It would have been much more serious if MSIE couldn't read Yahoo or Google, or this site. Or if they were modifying the content of all the sites their browser reads. Why? Because MSIE is a monopoly.

We admire and thank Opera, Mozilla, iCab et al for perseverence, and someday when MSIE doesn't have the Web by the throat we'll appreciate them even more.

Sunday, October 28, 2001

I imagine that most people at MSN are pretty happy with the headline of this NY Times story. Who the hell cares about MSN. Heh. Sneaky. Somehow they got the Times to care. 

I imagine that most people are pretty happy with the result of tonight's World Series game.  

Wow, Adam gets something very interesting started. "If the MTV brass didn't hate me by then (I'd been on air for 3 years already) then they certainly saw I could be the largest pain in the ass."  

I'm trying to figure out, just using the Web, what time today's World Series game begins and what channel it's broadcast on on DirecTv. As with most Web searches, I came across something interesting along the way, a rebroadcast of the final game of the 1986 World Series, NY vs Boston. Still looking for today's broadcast. OK, it starts at 4:30PM. There it is, it's on Fox. Nice. 

NY Post: "The Yankees melted in the desert last night in Game 1 of the World Series. They were putrid on the mound, rotten in the field and impotent at the plate." Cool! 

Last year on this day: "If only every faceoff and misunderstanding in families, business, life in general, could be resolved by having a parade where everyone is included, honored and celebrated." 

Adam's blogrolling macro is very nice. "Knowing which weblogs on a Blog Rolling list have changed, simplifies keeping track of the flow of these conversations. This is done by hi-lighting any recently updated link in bold." 

Essay: Power in the Muslim World. 

Salon: "I would have loved to have voted for it," says the two-term liberal Democrat. "But my view of my job is to do what I think is right, not to be cowed by the name of the bill." 

It's good to see that American bluster is still alive and well. 

Saturday, October 27, 2001

Wes Felter: "There's been plenty of talk about the possible impact on the open source community if SourceForge shut down, but I haven't seen much creative thinking about what to do about it." 

Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems has a weblog. 

How to clear a pyloric valve outage 

When your pyloric valve slams shut here's what you do:

1. Go for a vigorous walk.

2. Drink a bottle of cold Calistoga.

3. Speak your mind.

Amazing what a good constitutional does for the old pyloric valve.

Afternoon, pyloric valve outage 

I was trying to think of how to explain how all that Spicy Noodles made me feel this afternoon, and then I figured out that what I was trying to say came straight from the mouth of Walker Percy as he introduced Ignatius Reilly. "His pyloric valve periodically closes in response to the lack of a 'proper geometry and theology' in the modern world."

Exactly. My pyloric valve has slammed shut.

Now, with that in mind..

Lawrence Lee is researching User-Agents.

Jason Levine likes XP.

Evan Williams likes outliners.

What else?

We'll see soon enough!

Morning notes 

Good morning sports fans. Updates will come later. I'm having brunch with Susan Kitchens and Scoble at Spicy Noodles. A weblog event for sure. See you later today.

BTW, a well-intentioned blogger brought my house of cards down this morning. Had to figure out how to prevent recursive pinging. Done, before coffee. Yowsa.

Friday, October 26, 2001

David Singer got home early on his trip from Atlanta to San Jose. I link to this story because it is so simple and easy, and it's nice sometimes to have things be that way. Shabbat shalom indeed! 

Mark Pilgrim has the full scoop on the NY Times electronic edition. Oy such a bad idea. Requires a special player. No Mac version. Expensive. Content "expires" after seven days. I can see why they like it, but their users won't. 

Dan Gillmor interviews Tim Berners-Lee. 

Wired: "The Dec. 2005 expiration date embedded in the USA Act -- which the Senate approved 98 to 1 on Thursday -- applies only to a tiny part of the mammoth bill." 

Lawrence may have discovered the reason I'll move to XP. 

12/23/97: "My eyes have never had to work so hard just to see." That was almost four years ago. It's time for New New Glasses. Even reading the computer screen is a strain now. Oy. Anything that helps is worth it. 

Ha'aretz: "Foreign Minister Shimon Peres returned yesterday from a trip to the United States with many impressions. 'The Americans have moved from one era to another,' concluded Peres. 'We haven't even begun to understand what happened there. They aren't thinking about how to defend Israel, but how to defend themselves in a crazy war.'" 

Lance Knobel: "It's extraordinary that in the 21st century, a major economy, Italy, can be largely cut off from commerce because of its reliance on a handful of tunnels through the mountains." 

Daniel Chan: "Daypop is now taking changes.xml into account when scheduling the crawling of weblogs." Excellent. 

changes.xml tells you which weblogs have ping'd in the last three hours. Also, userAgents.xml tracks the sources of pings. Perl and PHP are rising fast. Nice. 

John Robb: "I am fairly certain that nobody at Forrester has ever built a major Website." 

I got caught up somewhat on the news in Anthrax-Land, otherwise known as the USA. Are the terrorists are running a beta test? Broader deployment coming soon? The American people want reassurance, say the reporters to the politicians, doctors and generals. No one wants to offer reassurance. No bedtime stories now folks.  

"Can't bomb Afghanistan during Ramadan," say the Muslim leaders. Ahhh. Well, you can't bomb the US in September say the Americans. How quickly they revert to their nasty habits. All the bombers were Muslim, and most of them were from Saudi Arabia. How about we bomb Mecca, and call it even? Icon for icon. Maybe you'd better show us that you're helping to get rid of the terrorists. Seems like the Saudis are supporting them, if you can believe that bullshit. (BTW, Mecca is in Saudi Arabia.)  

Thomas Friedman: "I guess the Arab world can launch wars on Ramadan, but not receive them." 

London Times: "Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network have acquired nuclear materials for possible use in their terrorism war against the West, intelligence sources have disclosed." 

Thursday, October 25, 2001

Thanks to Bruce Campbell for sending this picture which is sure to make the rounds. Suggestion to Microsoft PR. Next time Billg goes on TV, make sure they take the "War On Terror" banner off the screen. 

MSN backpedals. "The last thing we're going to do is turn people away." Of course. 

John Robb: " XP is much faster than ME or 98." 

Walt Mossberg: "Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn't your fault." 

Walt's got a problem that's for sure. He only talks about products from big companies. He gets schlock. Support your friendly independent developer. You're more likely to get what you want. 

Flangy: "VBScript is, to put it mildy, not my favorite language." 

Brett Glass: "Opera rendered the site perfectly -- and more quickly than MSIE." 

Thanks to Wes Felter for sending a pointer to this page on MSDN that has a SOAP request for Hailstorm. 

Lots of pushback coming from people who think Microsoft is anti-interop. Now, wearing my SOAP-developer hat, I have to push back to them. It's my job to make sure that SOAP is a standard for independent developers. If one of those developers is poisoning the soup, well, it's my job to highlight that. Microsoft has said repeatedly on and off the record that their purpose in using SOAP is to attain interop. If that's provably false, that's news. Now if I take off my SOAP hat, I have to say if MS achieves interop in SOAP, it would be a milestone, and unusual behavior for them, and newsworthy. 

Paul Simon: "Negotiations and love songs are often mistaken for one and the same." 

AP: "Webloggers aren't constrained by objectivity or fact-checking." Hmm. 

News.Com: MSN shuts out non-Microsoft browsers. Ooops. 

JD Lasica is looking for excellent weblog writing. 

An O'Reilly article about .NET services from Microsoft. Is anyone checking out Microsoft's stuff to see if it interops with Frontier and Radio? This is important. At the same time we're asking Microsoft to support the Manila SOAP interface in their development work. It works better if independent developers work at the intersection between different environments. 

I just got an email from a friend at Microsoft who says we can use COM to communicate with .NET. He surely means well, but there's still a major disconnect. We are not interested in connecting with Microsoft through COM. That's legacy. We invested three years in SOAP. Manila has a full SOAP interface. That's the protocol we want to use to connect.  

BTW, Wired is almost as frustrating. It's over a week since they honored me with their top award, and still there is no official mention of it on Wired's website. How long does it take to put up a page that says "Wired Announces the Winners," and explain who they are, and what the process was, and why Wired admires them so. Then I could send a pointer to people at Microsoft saying "Look, they checked it out, and we are actually doing cool shit with SOAP. You should support it and let people know it's there."  

Dr Strangelove asked Soviet Ambassador De Sadesky: "But the doomsday machine only does its job if people know about it. So why didn't you announce it?" 

I was thinking Microsoft could have run a press release when Wired announced the award. "Look, SOAP was honored." I could say wonderful things about how innovative Microsoft's work was, and explain the promise for independent developers. I actually think, had this not happened during the XP rollout, that the press release would have happened. The PR people at MS are paying attention, if not the technologists. 

Fast Company: Microcontent and Microcommunity. 

Derek Powazek: User to User Support. 

Blocking spam-pingers: "One of the people developing an app that builds on changes.xml pointed out a site that was showing up every hour even though the content on the site had not changed in any meaningful way." 

BigBlogTool supports Weblogs.Com. Thanks! 

WebReference published a list of sites using HierMenus. 

Thanks to Adam for this important news. He says: "Clearly this calls for a nationwide investigation!" 

Steve Burgess: "At this dark moment when we stand shoulder to shoulder with all the residents of Gotham, can we pause a moment to curse the Bronx Bombers and all their works? Hell yes. I hate those Bronx bastards." Amen. 

10/23/00: "Clemens, who cleanly fielded the bat head, turned toward Piazza, whipped his right arm back and threw the wood toward his newfound nemesis." 

JD Lasica: "The Internet Archive contains more than 10 billion Web pages dating back to 1996. Three years ago they'd already scooped up 12 terabytes of content, or 12 trillion bytes." 

Heard on NPR this morning -- there are more Muslims in the US than Presbyterians or Methodists. 

Congrats to Microsoft on shipping Windows XP. 

But: "A new technology meant to prevent illegal copying of Microsoft's latest operating system is stopping many people from buying it, according to an informal survey of CNET News.com readers." 

Patent-busting for fun and profit 

Greg Brown, a software designer at the now-defunct Netobjects, helped piece together the patent mess between Adobe and Macromedia.

Apparently Macromedia bought 11 patents from Netobjects earlier this month, including the patent they're hammering Adobe with. And, although Brown was unaware that Clay Basket was developed in 1995, he confirms that my work in this area predates theirs by about a year.

I wasn't hiding it. I wrote a DaveNet in 7/95 about Clay and there was a public mail list and lots of users. I eventually came to believe that the Web is a groupware environment, and that the central app couldn't be a wizzy productivity tool. Netobjects probably eventually realized that too, but they had already promised their users something they couldn't deliver. Outliners play an important role, but the HTML web is not an outline.

BTW, I visited the production area of Smolan's 24 Hours project in 1996, and saw the Netobjects tools in use, and thought "Oh yeah I did that last year, it doesn't work."

BTW, I started working on outliners in the mid-70s. I have a feeling there were a lot of patents filed in the 90s on art that was published in the 70s and 80s.

The Wayback Machine could be useful for patent-busting. But the server is having problems, and it would be great if Google could index it. (Maybe they already are.)

Wednesday, October 24, 2001

AP: "Thousands of spectators, mostly women, filled the Tehran University stadium for the ceremony, singing and waving flags as five young Iranian athletes dressed in white-and-pink robes and black Islamic head scarves took a lap around the grounds in horse-drawn chariots." 

I wish Zeldman would learn Manila. He rules out content management for designers because it's too expensive or difficult to use. Oy. We've been working on the inbetween sweet spot for years. At this point there's no excuse for an expert like Zeldman to not present Manila as an option for his readers. 

This is so cool. Archive.Org has a version of this page from 1996 and most of the links are archived too. Thank you. What a trip down memory lane. Here's Scripting News from July 1997. What a funky header graphic. Here's what DaveNet looked like in 1996. 

My name is Dave and I'm a Microsoft addict. Help me. 

CmdrTaco: "Now flame me if you feel it necessary." 

Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Afghanistan. I'm so tired of Afghanistan.  

What is News Industry Text Format? 

Flangy: "Unemployment: great, but not the wave of the future." 

Sue me if you want, but I find Lawrence's Notebook more interesting than his other weblog.  

News.Com: Developers -- What .Net will cost you. 

I've gotten a bunch of email pointing to that article, people seem to assume I'd be outraged that Microsoft is charging for services to developers. Well, as Gomer Pyle said, surprise surprise, I know how much money it costs to provide "free" services. We're still unwinding from the lunacy of the dotcom period. There's not much of a business model in giving away things that cost money. Now, sometimes platform vendors give away services to developers to build a market. The more Microsoft charges for theirs the better, as far as I'm concerned. Makes it easier to compete, profitably. Nice. 

Abraham Lincoln: "It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all the time." 

Dan Gillmor: "The government wants to be able to track pretty much everything that moves digitally. It may find allies in the entertainment industry, which would be delighted to have the same capability for songs and movies." 

John Van Dyk: "Is anyone else noticing the parallel between the slowdown of snail mail and the slowdown of email?" 

Craig Burton: "iFolder is a personal Internet storage system." 

Last year on this day I was in NY, getting ready to go to the World Series, and attending the launch of Groove. This year the Mets aren't in it. Of course that doesn't mean they aren't the philosophical World Champions.  

Proof that NYers indulge in wishful thinking. 

Weblogs.Com corner-turn continues 

Evan Williams: "For those who have wondered, Blogger will support the new Weblogs.Com." Right on.

Dan Lyke: "Okay, I kludged in a hack to make the Flutterby CMS notify the new Weblogs.com when the front page has changed."

Rafe Colburn: "I've updated my weblogging application so that it notifies weblogs.com whenever I add or update an item."

Adam Curry is working on a blogrolling macro.

I broke the home page at 9AM for about an hour. It stopped updating. Silly mistake. It's back up now.

Matt Bean has a PHP interface to Weblogs.Com.

There are just four implementations. We need one for Slashcode, AppleScript, Tcl, Rebol, Java, you name it.

Moveable Type is supporting the Weblogs.Com XML-RPC interface.

Trained Monkey shows just how simply it can be done.

It's being discussed in Greymatter-land.

People are complaining about the Weblogs.Com corner-turn on MetaTalk. "No good deed goes unpunished."

BTW, one of the benefits of the corner-turn is that a bunch of UserLand-hosted Manila sites are now much faster. They will get even faster on Nov 3 when we turn off the scanner.

Tuesday, October 23, 2001

Today's song: "Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding." 

We flipped the switch on the Weblogs.Com transition. Now it's up to DNS to start sending people to the new home page. 

FAQ: "Whoa! Where did all the features go?" 

Docs for changes.xml. 

I did a live interview with Rob Black on 240 radio stations around the US at 8:10AM Pacific. It was fun. MP3. 

Karlin Lillington: "In the midst of the global terrorist crisis, some good news and positive movement is coming from this little island. It is a historic moment and may provide hope for other corners of the world." 

Bush: "I don't have anthrax." 

Scoble: "Don Norman is wrong when he compares pens to software." 

Apple iPod. 1000 songs in your pocket. Specs. Only works with a Mac.  

Steve Jobs: "When we get a little spare time, we will look at taking it to Windows. We know the experience won't be as good, but we will probably look at that down the road." 

Archos Jukebox Studio 20 MP3 Player. "With a whopping storage capacity of 20 GB you can carry the equivalent of over 500 CDs! In addition, the Jukebox Studio 20 is a fully functioning USB Hard Drive. With its hot swappable, plug-and-play, USB connection, you can conveniently store and take along personal files, along with all your favorite music selections." 

Jim Roepcke finds a bug in the design of the iPod. "It doesn't have a Mic." 

Powazek: "How can you spot the one MP3 player made just for the Mac? Answer: Look for the most expensive one." 

Dori Smith on the iPod: "Okay, I've seen the iPod and I've watched the commercial. And all I can say is, 'Snore.'" 

Cydney Gillis: "'We're not sitting on our hands drinking latte up here between the time a security vulnerability is reported to us and the time we issue a (patch),' Lipner said." 

Syndic8.Com is kickin butt. It's great to see a hard-working, productive community developing around RSS. 

MacWorld UK on the patent dispute betw Adobe and Macromedia. "Hierarchical structure editor for Web sites" caught my eye. I'm pretty sure I had one of those before either company. 

Well the Mariners didn't win, and all that stands between the Yankees and another World Championship is a team from Arizona called the Diamondbacks. That can't be a real team. Arizona? It's too hot there to play baseball. Didn't they used to be the St Louis Cardinals?  

Mark Pilgrim: "Welcome to my weblog. I hope you enjoy it. I just got hired for it." 

Faisal Jawdat: "The US hasn't been safe from terrorism. Consider abortion clinics. Not only do they get blown up, not only do people try to murder abortion providers, but Planned Parenthood has been receiving anthrax mail threats for years." 

Monday, October 22, 2001

Economist: "Windows XP is the first consumer version of the 15-year-old program in which crashing does not seem to come as a standard feature." 

NY Times: "Microsoft's pitch to developers is greatly weakened because of [the antitrust conviction]," said Dave Winer, co-author of SOAP and chief executive of UserLand, a developer of Web tools. "Microsoft's only vision is lock-in." 

For people coming from the Slashdot link, here's a Google query that locates some of my comments re open source. BTW, US is great, rah-rah.  

Many apologies to people who don't like it when I write about terrorism. Here I go again. I was thinking, why has the US been immune to terrorism until Sept 11? What kept them from blowing up our buildings and people? Why was the US a safe haven for money? (Maybe it still is.) How did we pull it off? The only answer I came up with was this: terror. We have all these nukes. And we probably have great bio-warfare stuff too. The other guys were scared of us? Now does that make the US a terrorist organization? Something to think about. 

Then I heard a report about the IRA and Sinn Fein. I thought to myself "Poor Irish terrorists, they're not getting their fair share of the attention." Then I had a terrible thought. Maybe in the future the terrorists will compete to destroy pieces of the US to get CNN to tell their story and put their leaders on TV. Maybe Ireland wants to start a competitor to Al-Jazeera. What better way than to export some of your terror to the good ole US of A? 

Slim: "I almost killed Heather's Cat." 

News.Com: Microsoft's music pitch a little off-key. 

Washington Post: 2 Postal Workers Die. 

Tomorrow at 8:10AM Pacific, I'm going to be interviewed by Rob Black on BusinessTalkRadio. The show is The Bottom Line, and will be webcast. 

Now here's why I, as a software developer, don't like memes. 

Lawrence Lee is keeping a Radio weblog. 

Julian Bond: "One of the mailing lists I moderate on Yahoogroups is getting hit by spam to a ridiculous extent." 

Ars Technica reviews Mac OS 10.1. 

Today's word is dollop. What a funny word. I was just pouring myself a cup of coffee, and got out the half-and-half, and with a certain ceremony I hurled a dollop of the creamy stuff into my coffee. A dollop. Where did that word come from? 

It's hard to figure out how to say this without sounding unappreciative, so I'll go ahead and say it anyway. I wish Wired had a page on the Web where they listed the winners of the Rave Awards, so I could point to it as a permanent fixture on Scripting News and my bio page. Back in the old days of Wired, the page would have flipped in real-time while the awards were being announced in SF. Lal lala. 

Sunday, October 21, 2001

Glenn Fleishman reviews Mac OS 10.1 in the Seattle Times. 

Doc Searls echoes what I've said here before. The most valuable feature in Windows XP is one Microsoft won't market (but should). Kiss the Blue Screen of Death goodbye, forever. Unlike earlier versions of Windows, XP uses technology that's been available in the CPU since the late 80s, that protects the memory of the OS from errant apps. So if an app crashes, it can't bring the OS down.  

But Allchin has no excuse -- he's supposed to understand how the OS works. (Maybe he doesn't.) When he blames other people's apps, he's so full of it. Only Microsoft's apps can cause BSOD's -- because only Microsoft's apps have license to circumvent the protection of the OS. Other apps play by the rules. 

Once I installed Microsoft's Back Office on a server just for fun, and found out why people say W2K is a crashy OS. If you don't install any Microsoft apps, it's actually a rock-solid OS. Go figure. 

Wes Felter: "My interpretation of Allchin's message is that he's blaming stability problems on device drivers, which can easily cause crashes since they run in the kernel." 

John Robb: How we will fight an Asymmetric War. 

Remember that super-detailed picture of the WTC disaster site? It's back. 

Amy Cortese: Venture Capital, Withering and Dying. 

Washington Post: "FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and some are beginning to that say that traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans." 

Former NY Mets catcher Jerry Grote has a schmaltzy noisy website with a powerful message. He wants to be a major league coach or manager. "My knowledge of the game, the ability to see everything happening on the field, my desire to win (and being on five championship teams), and the ability to correct mistakes being made, will make me an excellent manager."  

Chris Pirillo: 50 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Windows XP. 

Newsbytes: US on Verge of 'Electronic Martial Law'. 

Derek Powazek interviews Slashdot-creator Rob Malda. 

Tuesday is the big day for the Weblogs.Com corner-turn. I've written some notes about what to expect. "I'm sure it's confusing -- it's confusing here too. The new weblogs.com will be different from the old one. How much different it will be will depend on what the weblog community does with it." 

Baseball talk 

Way to go Mariners. First they have a tear-jerking Yankee Stadium ceremony with the National Guard, honoring the dead of Sept 11. Everyone cries. Doesn't it suck? Play ball. Yankees score and gloat in the dugout.

Then "Seattle scored seven runs in the sixth, and the Mariners crushed the Yankees, 14-3, setting a league championship series record for runs in a game."

That's how you do it. You don't win in the post season by being a nice guy. Next time don't fall for National Guard stuff. This is baseball, Seattle. Get a grip and kick their butts. Show no mercy.

10/21/00: "OK, he's a Yankees fan. Now I know why I don't like him."

Saturday, October 20, 2001

Steve Gillmor: Groove's Rubber Soul.  

Scoble: "Only at a tech conference can you trade cards with four people at once with Palm devices." 

Mike Donnelan is running a caption contest. 

AP: "Macromedia Inc. is claiming it owns the patent to Adobe Systems Inc.'s popular Photoshop program, according to a suit filed in federal court Friday." 

Adam also found Wired's article on Apple's new music device confusing, and specs out his dream device.  

This cartoon perfectly illustrates why the Mariners can't beat the Yankees. "I love NY but I don't love the Yankees." Oy yoy yoy. 

I warned about angering The Baseball God in 1995. "'Isn't it great Pete! No matter who wins, *we* win!' Imagine her putting both of her index fingers to her cheeks, twisting them slightly and swaying her head from side to side. I groaned when I heard her say it. 'This is not good.'" 

This is why east coast teams have a geographic advantage over west coast teams. On the east coast they don't give a fuck about the other guy's skyscrapers. On the west coast we try to let "everyone" win. Now in software that's admirable, in baseball, it's a prescription for earthquakes, or worse. 

Lispmeralda is "a client-side implementation of the XML-RPC protocol using ELisp for Emacs" 

Aaron Cope has a bunch of tools for Weblogs.Com including an XSL stylesheet, a bookmarklet for pings, and a Mozilla sidebar. Reminder, the next step in the corner-turn happens on Tuesday. 

Oh my god, it's Don Norman and Marc Canter, on stage, at the same time. I guess this proves once and for all that they're not the same person.  

O'Reilly's Dave Sims reviews the USA Act which has now passed both houses of Congress. 

News.Com: "The U.S. Department of Justice is growing suspicious of the labels' increasing power, and antitrust investigators are beginning to invite start-ups to closed-door discussions in Washington, D.C., to determine whether the labels are violating antitrust laws." 

NY Times: "One of the signal pleasures of living in a democracy is the privilege of point of view. You can love New York — and feel compassion for all the suffering that has happened here — and still deplore those smug Yankees."  

One year ago today I made a list of my mission-critical software. Not much has changed there. 

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Friday, October 19, 2001

Wired: "Apple on Tuesday will unveil a new portable electronic device that allows people to listen to digital music files away from the computer.. The device -- called the iPod -- can be synched with the computer using a high-speed cable connection that allows consumers to download their music into a portable system, which can then be accessed by either a car or home stereo system." 

AP: "German authorities have issued an international arrest warrant for a Moroccan on charges that he helped plan and prepare the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, prosecutors said Friday." 

Scoble is blogging the PopTech conference. 

Amy Wohl on the value of endorsements. 

Kevin Werbach asks, on the Decentralization list, if his theory that SOAP is for big corporations and XML-RPC for independent developers, is true.  

Kevin is one of my inspirations for wanting to get corporations on the record about their use of XML-RPC. My impression is quite different from Kevin's. Corporations do development with people who are much like you and me (in fact lots of corporate developers read Scripting News). I hear from people inside corporations all the time who use appropriate technology based its merits, not on whether a BigCo is pushing it (aside from that MS is not pushing SOAP, they're pushing a soup of confusing and ill-specified stuff).  

As a co-developer of both XML-RPC and SOAP, I have no stake in either protocol winning. I like them both. My software supports both. But I do not want to see this world divided between the respected and the disrespected. I give developers at MS and IBM no more credit for doing useful stuff than I do a random developer at a company I've never heard of. Actually, based on my experience, it's more likely that a lone developer will do better work than his counterpart at a BigCo. You can be closer to users when you're at a small company, and you respect customers more because you depend on them, in a real way, to keep your business going. 

One more thing -- SOAP and XML-RPC are almost 100 percent politics. The technology is very thin, and by design, easy to implement. These are Emancipation Proclamations for free-thinking developers everywhere. No one cares if you work for a BigCo or not. Roll up your sleeves, build some distributed systems, exercise your right to use any development or runtime environment you want, and force the vendors to compete on the merits of their products. If BigMoney makes better software, they deserve to win. If the past is any guide, they don't stand a chance. 

I commented on this in a recent DaveNet, but no one picked it up as far as I can tell. "The economics of software favor small independent developers." Double-click on that, and look at the ways the Big's try to undermine the Little's, but it's mostly bullshit. Where are the standards the Big's were cooking up in the early 90s. They're dead, swept away by SMTP, POP, HTTP, HTML. The tech renegades at MS fully understood this, but the industry hasn't caught onto this yet, and most of Microsoft hasn't either. 

W3JMailServer has an XML-RPC interface. 

Adam Curry rants eloquently about email.  

BTW, we have the problem licked. We're using a new system at UserLand, it replaces our largely email-based internal communication system. It's a combination of instant messaging and outlining. I'm sure it's not for everyone. But for workgroups whose product is thought (like my company), making an investment in human-to-human communication is a pure money-maker. It's interesting that Adam exploded on this at this time. He's not NDA'd (yet) on the new product. 

BTW, this new communication platform will be open. The connections are all implemented in SOAP 1.1 and XML-RPC (your choice). The documents are passed between computers in OPML. So if you do a text tool or outliner, just be sure you support OPML and encourage the people who work on the OSes and scripting environments to bake in XML-RPC and SOAP 1.1. That's it.  

Specs: XML-RPC, SOAP 1.1, OPML. 

On this day last year I wrote my favorite DaveNet of all time. 

Frank Zappa sang La la la la la la la -- Nice lady! Don't ask me why this is running through my head. It just is. (I know I know, it was actually Flo and Eddie who sang that, the vocalists who joined The Mothers after disbanding The Turtles.) "Watch out where the Huskies go and don't you eat that yellow snow!" 

Sometimes Donnelan just cracks me up. 

Thursday, October 18, 2001

DaveNet: Wired's Tech Renegade for 2001. 

Kanan Makiya: "Arabs and Muslims need today to face up to the fact that their resentment at America has long since become unmoored from any rational underpinnings it might once have had." 

Paul Boutin: "The notable blogger-clustering was funny to watch last night." 

I was interviewed on KGO at 4:38PM. It was fun! 

Amy Wohl: Could Blogging Assist KM? 

BBC: "BBC Arabic Online has been named as the best Arab language website for the second year running." 

Brad Templeton explains, with a prototype, why Larry Ellison's identity card idea might not be very good. 

CNN: "Attention Taliban! You are condemned." 

XML.Com: "SOAP 1.1 has become a de facto standard, with broad industry support from many vendors, large and small." 

What is Photoshop Tennis? "One player emails a Photoshop document to the other containing a single layer. Each player progressively adds a layer until the match is over, either by time, withdrawal or mutual consent. A guest adds comments in real time and the people watching vote for a winner."  

Just got an email from Scoble. He has arrived in Maine, of all places. Looks like a nice spot. 

BBC: "The Government in Kenya says it has confirmed a case of anthrax exposure from a contaminated letter - the first such case outside the United States in the 11 September terror attacks." 

Jay Allen has "photos from the first Bay Area Weblogger User Group (or whatever it shall be named) meeting on October 16th, 2001 in Mountain View." 

I sent a message to Microsoft PR that we could make hay with the award SOAP won last night. Alas, no surprise, they're in PR Hell right now with the Windows XP rollout. I want Microsoft to market developer freedom. They have a new developer czar, btw, Eric Rudder. I know Eric. We butted heads over Java in 1997. He was on Bill Gates' staff at the time, researching privacy technology. We talked then about what they're doing now with Passport and Hailstorm. A long time in planning. He's a smart guy, I could work with him, but we're going to have the same argument now that we had in 1997. Relax about Sun, trust developers more, be a little bit more vulnerable, and the rewards for Microsoft will be huge. 

News.Com: "Some writers ask me, 'So, what is .Net?' And I say, 'Hey, you're talking to the wrong guy."  

MSNBC launches a site in Arabic. Smart. 

Wired press release on the awards. 

A very cool web app from Tobi Schaefer. 

Christian Riege: "I'm constantly on the lookout for seeing real benefits of SOAP over XML-RPC."