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George Harrison dead at 58. BBC, AP, MSNBC, NYT. Today's song: "All things must pass." Lots of Harrison links and pics on today's BookNotes. Drop the SOAP 1.0, "A bunch of simple AppleScripts for Mac OS X 10.1 and higher that use SOAP/XML-RPC web services." InfoWorld: Intel Hops in the Trunk. Maybe they want to hop into one of these too. Oh the power of weblogs. Entertainment Weekly ran a poll of most popular actors, and Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek (not to be confused with Wesley Felter), was a top vote-getter. Why? He's got a blog, of course. And if you haven't heard yet, so does Ru Paul. Who's next? AP: "A senior Republican senator and frequent Microsoft critic has asked the Justice Department detailed questions about the government's antitrust settlement with the software giant." Internet.Com: "A Judge for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California Friday sided with bondholders of Excite@Home, forcing the company to block service to some 4.1 million users worldwide." Bill Gates has done it all, now that he's been Scobelized. Harrumph: "Really clean people bathe." Evan Williams has had it with Exodus. It's a relief to find out that Dori does not have cancer. Kevin Altis: Videogame consoles are the PC of the future. The Yaysoft weblog directory is getting new features all the time. Nice work. Jihaddict: "A Skewed View of the War on Terrorism." Russell Letson: Taxonomies Put Content in Context. NY Times: Deal for Exodus Said to Be Near. I'm getting sick. Cough, runny nose, sneezing, aches and pains. I'm going to work anyway, but I would be surprised if my thinking is very clear today. Drinking coffee. Fixing bugs and testing Weblogs.Com. There was some breakage in the last few iterations. Serves me right for thinking it's "easy" to improve a deployed app. It never is. Would someone like to manage a directory of apps that are not open source and do not come from Microsoft? (Some have sent mail asking how to do it. Put up a web page and list all the products that are not open source and do not come from Microsoft. Categorize. Link to their sites so people can find out more. This is invisible software, to many. The list will be huge. Like this or this.)
Paul Snively makes C++ code look pretty in Manila. MacFixit cooperates with Apple. Now Apple's going to have to ask Slashdot to cooperate too. Congratulations to Joel Spolsky and Fog Creek Software on shipping CityDesk. Much luck and mazel tov. News.Com: "A Dutch court on Thursday ordered file-swapping software maker Kazaa to prevent people using its product from engaging in copyright infringement or face thousands of dollars in fines." On the verge of disappearing: Excite@Home. Lots of users wondering how they're going to connect. Even businesses are scrambling. Another company that's in deep ca-ca is Enron, which is slightly far afield of our usual area of courage, at first glance, but they were as much a product of the dotcom disaster as Excite@Home. Brent Simmons: "I’m a big fan of usability guru Jakob Nielsen—but I don’t go to his site very often because I find it hard to use." John Robb: K-Logs and Personal Branding. Kevin Werbach: "The rise of WiFi shows the power of open spectrum." NY Times: "Data to be released next week is expected to show that the number of people exchanging music simultaneously on the most popular free service, a network called Fast Track, which is based in Amsterdam, now exceeds the use of Napster at its peak." Wired: "Diane Sawyer, host of ABC's Good Morning America, announced that her show will soon reveal the secret invention -- rumored to be a super-efficient personal scooter -- that tech heavies like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos said could possibly change the world." One year ago today: "What if VCs were mensches?" Good morning sports fans. What a morning. Power outage last night. My desktop computer doesn't like it when it's shut down by power going off. Outlook Express refuses to read my inbox. The usual cure, restarting the computer until it works didn't work after 12 restarts. Is this any way to run an Internet? Meanwhile Microsoft promises everything will get better when they rewrite all the software and stuff me in a locked trunk. Why don't I believe that? MS must wonder why they get the blame for the Internet not working. Stop and think about that next time you wipe out the competition. That's the downside of competing so viciously. When no one is left standing you get the blame. Better to invest in competitive markets. Then you can always point the finger at the other guy. Anyway, I'm very glad to be back online. The power went out during Law & Order. Just when the juicy black actress admitted to killing the guy who copped an unwelcome feel. She says "Does that mean I'm going to jail?" Boom, out goes the power. Not even a flicker. One more TV comment. During a commercial (which I still let play sometimes even though I have a TiVO) in the kitchen I hear some lovely music from the TV in the other room. "What is that?" I think to myself and listen for a product name. No name. Go back and rewind, and listen again. Arrrgh. It's the music for Windows XP. You gotta give Microsoft this much, whoever does their ads really knows how to pick the tunes. Microsoft spokesperson: "Madonna, Ray of Light."
Testing 1-2-3. Finishing up work on some new features for Weblogs.Com. Wish me luck! The features are.. Ta-dahh. Weblogs.Com is becoming RSS-aware and Europe-aware. And it has an architecture that supports other kinds of awareness. Here it is.. Beta feature: Weblogs.Com Communities. "First, up-front, I want to be clear, this is a beta feature. It almost certainly doesn't work. But I think it does. So we will spend the next days and weeks proving that I'm wrong." Aaron Cope already supports the new features from Perl. That was fast! Matthew Bean is doing a blog portal based on the Weblogs.Com changes.xml feed. This is so cool, I can't tell you. It's exactly what I wished for. More creative repurposing of machine-generated XML data. Seth Dillingham, one of the best developers in the Frontier community, is looking for work. I wish we had the money to hire him, but if you're looking for someone who knows how to make the object database, CMS, and HTTP server really work, Seth would be a good guy to hire. It's tough out there right now. I want to get the lights back on. In this economy I bet some people would appreciate that. Jeff Walsh reports he's having trouble getting through to Amazon.Com this morning. I'm getting through OK. This may be noteworthy too -- I couldn't get through to News.Com earlier, now it's working again. Viewing the Internet from all our different points of view yields different results. Some people say okay, and I say OK. Wonder if I should switch. Let's give it a try. Okay. This page lists the Top 100 most-subscribed-to news feeds among the Radio 7.1 beta testers. It's also available in OPML. Dan Mitchell is using Radio 7.1 on Mac OS X. Of course now that we're moving, the critics section is getting revved up too. What can you do about it, except keep moving. It's rough out there. If they published software and supported users, they'd probably not be so quick to call us bad names. Whatever. Have a nice day. Kimbro Staken: "The problem I have with the current Hailstorm idea comes down to one thing, Microsoft." Now a report from the NY Times that Microsoft has made a move toward settling with the European antitrust commission. The MS spokesperson says they're commited to interop. That and fifty cents used to get you on the subway. Steve Jobs says it's not fair to punish Apple for MS's antitrust violations. Bewildered, Web developers are left out of the discussion entirely and wonder if the government decision-makers are incredibly naive; or if there are deals being made under the table. In astrophysics we know that black holes exist even if we can't see them. One-sided deals against the public interest are a lot like black holes. No, I don't think they're stupid, but they must think we are. Life in suburbia. No coffee. OK, write a few notes then go out and get some. Ooops. Car battery is dead. Left the car door open. Wait an hour and pay $60. Work without coffee? My brain says no.
Brrrrrrrr. Collllllld. Brrrrrr. Hey check this out. Interoperating Web Services. And no BigCo's. See, developers can work together. Hah. Glenn Fleishman's notes from the 802.11b conference. Press release: "Meet Steve Muench, Product Manager, Lead XML Evangelist And Oracle Guru." I discovered a new flame redardant. It goes like this. "Another person who's smarter than I. What a relief to not have to be the smartest guy anymore. Dave" Hey there's some kind of virus running loose. I've gotten a dozen emails with big attachments this morning. The DoJ's favorite software company has something to do with this. When are they going to close the damned holes. Hey I'm in quite a mood this morning. On our internal workgroup I just called Radio 7.1 "a bitch with an attitude." I wasn't paying it a compliment. That's part of the We Make Shitty Software meme. One way to fix bugs is to see your software for what it truly is. The cool thing about software is that if you don't like the way it's treating you, it is possible to fix it. If only the same were true of people! Summary: We Make Bitchy Software. With attitude! One more thing. We Make Bitchy Software. And so do you! Hey Frontier is getting less bitchy. Check this out. Outliner buttons. These will prove quite useful in workgroup software. BTW, all the Frontier kernel improvements in 7.1 will also be in Radio. Reuters: "IBM and Vignette have packaged the key components to deliver a complete e-business infrastructure for rapid deployment of Vignette solutions at a lower cost of ownership." WSJ: "IronPort’s initial investors include Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, the chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively, of the free e-mail service Hotmail Corp., which Microsoft Corp. bought in 1998." Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist, offers post-dotcom lessons for entrepreneurs, but it would be more interesting if he could tell us what VCs learned from the excesses of the dotcom gorging, which they led. The interesting thing about VCs is that they seem to think they are the fountain of all knowledge. Well, I suppose many of us suffer from that affliction too. "Seem to think" --> a sign of weak philosophy. Three years ago, AOL's market cap was $43 billion. Today, it's $165 billion. Yahoo was $21B, today it's $10B. Amazon was $11B, now it's $4B. Here's an interesting game to play while watching reports on TV about the war in Afghanistan. Count the number of times they say "on the ground." You might be amazed.
The rollup of Frontier 7.1 continues. Today, the changes in Manila for 7.1. Manila, as you may know, is our browser-based content management system. A new feature for Manila, released today, should make Bryan Bell happy. Susan Kitchens: Interview with Taliban Singles Online image creator. Tim O'Reilly: "Next week, on December 3 and 4, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is hosting a symposium to honor the ten year anniversary of the web in the US." The Weekly Standard: "Anyone with an average IQ and an Internet connection can perform the kind of legal research necessary to reach a minimally creditable judgment about the constitutional character of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism campaign. But a job like this takes more time and mental effort than most of us prefer to expend. So we have come to depend on professional journalists and politicians to do the bulk of it for us. Which is fine -- as long as they're actually doing it." NY Times: "Librarians' assertion of the principle of confidentiality may seem trivial to some people compared with similar stands by, say, doctors or priests. But librarians take it very seriously — so seriously that in most libraries nowadays, once a book is returned, the record of who checked it out is expunged. Forty-eight states have laws that protect the privacy of library patrons." John Robb: Decentralized Teams and K-Logs. Doug is doing a review of the docs for Tools. We've got to get it all to come together for the release of both 7.1's. NY Times: "The idea behind NetGuard is to create a national volunteer force, drawn initially from the nation's top high-technology concerns, that could mobilize quickly in the case of an emergency. Its role would be to repair downed communications systems, restore computer operations and create new systems to aid support and recovery efforts." News.Com: "With Google's new file-type search tool, a wide array of files formerly overlooked by basic search engine queries are now just a few clicks from the average surfer -- or the novice hacker." Demo. Alison: "You've always wanted to get into Alison's pants. Now you can do it from the convenience of your own room, through a novel web interface!" Screen shot. 802.11b coverage of the 802.11b conference, via 802.11b. Hey I thought of doing a press release announcing that XML-RPC and SOAP 1.1 work with 802.11b, but I guess everyone knows that, right? Does anyone do a press release when standards work as they're supposed to. I could write such a release. I'll give it a try. Here it is. It's funny! This morning I started a list of developers who create software that build on SOAP 1.1. If your company makes SOAP products, send me a pointer to your home page or (even better) a page that says what you're doing with SOAP. Thanks! Thanksgiving 2001 Welcome back. In case you missed it, I wrote a kickass Thanksgiving speech on Thursday morning. Let the spirit of thankfulness continue. Amy Wohl read my Thanksgiving speech. She says "And thank you, Dave, for sharing with us the gift of being able to so easily create weblogs and communicate our daily thoughts. A whole new experience and an increasingly addictive one." Some thanks that I overlooked in the piece. Thanks to Mike Donnelan for making me laugh. Every time I get the Windex to clean off the droplets of coffee on my monitor I think of Mike. Thanks to the readers of DaveNet and Scripting News for teaching me so much. Even though you're very modest, you are much smarter than I am. (Think about it. There's only one of me, and thousands of you. At best I am a stimulator and assimilator and integrator. I often take a contrarian view, but my grounding in this activity comes from the people who participate by reading and offering their own pov, respectfully of course.) One more thanks, and it wouldn't have fit into the piece because it was a Web Thanksgiving piece. Thanks to the universe for helping my dad survive cancer this year, and thanks to my family for the new closeness, friendliness and courage it has brought out in all of us. There's no time like now. Grouchy Are you grouchy this morning? I am. Judging from the number of flames that were waiting for me this morning I'd say a bunch of other people are too. Holidays can be rough. Coming back to work can be even rougher. Stallman's $830K The following is not a flame. Thanks for the nice note Richard, enjoy the money, have a nice Hanukkah. Gzai gzint. Richard Stallman: "$830K (actually a little less with current exchange rates) is the total sum. Since it is being shared by three people, I will get 1/3 of that -- after taxes, perhaps $170K. It's a nice sum of Hanukkah gelt, and will make a difference for me, but it wouldn't support an organization like Sourceforge for long."
Survey: "Are you smarter than me?" The early results are in, and it appears that, according to the readers, they are not smarter than me. Tim O'Reilly: "GPL is just as much an expression of power over users as any proprietary license." Hey Tim is partly right. In commercial software users run the show. I gotta sell some software to make payroll every damned month. In this stinking economy you can really feel that. That means the users have a lot of power. My company dies if they don't like what we do. It's probably a lot like selling books and conferences. Hey if people want to sort out where SOAP is going, check this out. The thing that's so cool about HTTP is that it added network programming to every programmer's toolkit. Right? Why didn't it happen before that? What is it about HTTP that made it work, when AppleTalk and various Microsoft-3COM-Novell-IBM, etc networking APIs didn't catch on? Here's the deal. HTTP had to be graspable by a single mind, because it was designed by a single mind. We all know that design-by-committee doesn't work, right? Did you ever read the Mythical Man-Month? If not, stop everything and read it right now. Why anyone expects committees to come up with something revolutionary is a total mystery to me. They only produce stuff that's incomprehensible. It's always the lone guy working in left field (actually under the bleachers) that creates the stuff that rocks the world, it's never a BigCo that does it, for good reasons -- they're total committees (and don't imagine that creating a committee of BigCo people solves any problems, it doesn't). You'd think people would have figured that out by now. BTW, there are people who want me to stop using the term BigCo. No way. It works. And it's catching on. I heard a guy at a BigCo complaining about how he worked at a BigCo. It's real. There really is a BigCo mentality. It even creeps into SmallCo's. Gotta love it, but be cursed if you live it. Not a good lifestyle if you want to do cool shit. Kevin Altis: "The cool thing about HTTP is that the protocol itself is printable ASCII so you can actually type it yourself with a telnet session and pretend to be a client or server and easily debug the contents of any headers without special tools." Amen. A personal note that only Frontier programmers will truly understand. I've been doing a lot of programming and writing in the last week, doing the Hypercard + MORE thing, and I'm liking it as much as I hoped I would. Now, when I get something nice working, or when the software does something nice that I wasn't expecting (it just happened) I exclaim something, it's uncontrollable, it just comes out of my mouth. The sound is this -- P'tahhhh (sounds like ta-dahhh, songlike). I didn't know where it came from, it just comes out of my mouth. Last night I figured it out while driving. Here's what it means. At the top of every script I write is this line. local (pta = html.getpagetableaddress ()) Mexican Slang 101: "Puta -- short for prostituta, this word means whore, but is more extensively used. This is what a Mexican would say if he hammered his finger." MSNBC has an article on the FBI's Magic Lantern project. In the middle of the night your computer checks with the FBI to find out if you're a terrorist, a web service, perhaps called fbi.amITerrorist (ipAddress). If it returns true then every keystroke you type on your computer is transmitted to the FBI including your encryption key. Voila. All of a sudden Carnivore works. John Robb thinks this capability will be pre-installed with Microsoft's OS. I think so too. How do I know? Well I don't know for sure, I don't have sources, but it must have been tempting for MS, too tempting. They get out of the antitrust conviction and in return they give the Feds the keys to all our computers. Not just in the US, of course, MS is a big seller in the international market. The workaround for terrorists (and independent developers) is to use an older or non-Microsoft OS, and get good antivirus software, not McAfee's -- to keep the Feds from going places they aren't supposed to be. It's so interesting. I get emails telling me to stop writing about this, stop writing about that, if I listened to all the emails I would have to just stop writing. Hey if you want me to stop writing, have a nice day and get a life. Yet another dotcom-is-dead article from the NY Times. This time it's really dead. I'm sure there will be another and another proclaiming that it's really really dead, and then for sure really really dead.
iBlog you blog we all blog for iBlog. George Ma, who I thanked in the Thanksgiving DaveNet, writes to say that he was frustrated in his evangelism on behalf of weblogs inside Apple. To George and all other natural-born technology evangelists, it's like being a Mets fan. You don't give up. You keep going. When someone says no, you just say OK, let me tell you again why you have to do this. No is an OK answer, it just means they want to hear the schpiel one more time before saying Yes. Now it's not like being a Red Sox fan. Mets fans know that some day we will win it all. Red Sox fans must know, by now, that it ain't gonna happen. Survey: "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?" Kevin Altis: "Regardless of what inroads Java may have made with backends and embedded into products like Oracle or a large variety of cross-platform non-GUI solutions, it still sucks for building GUI apps." Washington Post: "At least one antivirus software company, McAfee Corp., contacted the FBI on Wednesday to ensure its software wouldn't inadvertently detect the bureau's snooping software and alert a criminal suspect." Earlier this morning I rolled up a new version of the UserLand home page. It was a collaborative effort among many of the people at UserLand and now, perhaps for the first time, reflects how we really view ourselves. Is 13 years too long to wait for this? Apparently not. Steve GIllmor: "Java won." Steve's story is right on. Sun is clinging to an old view of the world, one where Java would become the Uber-Operating-System. If that vision had been realized, RMI would have been fine, because all code would be running in Java, a Java-to-Java wire would get you everywhere you want to go. Steve is right, Java did win, it's here to stay, lots of developers use and love it, but it didn't succeed at sucking all life in the developer world into its confines. Keeping the Java developers in the Sun box is not a good idea, because as some developers love Java, others love Perl, Python, etc. (The etc part is pretty big too.) Imho, Java will grow even more if developers can cross the bridges at will, without converting all their code. But this has always been the argument betw Sun and developers. Sun says "Convert all your code." Some developers did. Others didn't. That's the battleground that Sun and Microsoft have yet to conquer. In politics the Democrats and Republicans fight over the middle, in software politics, they ignore the power of the middle, for now. BBC: "Somalia's only internet company and a key telecoms business have been forced to close because the United States suspects them of terrorist links." We're having power-outage weather here. Wind is gusting, it's pouring rain. Nothing to do but wait for the lights to go out.
Good morning Workers of the Web -- Be patient! Charles Cooper: " It's not at all clear that SOAP is necessarily better than XML-RPC." Syndic8 has an XML-RPC interface. "Experimental," says Jeff. "Coool," says Dave. My seven-year old friend Patrick Scoble has a fine message of the day. "OOOOOOOH YAH!" Dave Polaschek has a Perl script that pings Weblogs.Com. Adam Kelsey's RSSBlog now pings Weblogs.Com. LA Times: "You could conclude that what the instant-messaging world really needs is a good, old-fashioned ruthless monopolist to impose a little order." Today is Friday, and you're using Internet Explorer. NY Times: "While bin Laden may have his finger on the trigger, his grandson might have his finger on the mouse."
Thank you for visiting Scripting News on Thanksgiving. Today's song: "So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth. And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth."
People of the Web: What are you thankful for? While we've been fussing over Radio 7.1 with our beta group, we've also been getting a new release of Frontier ready to go. It's also called 7.1. Here's a list of the new kernel features in Frontier 7.1. I think it's a really solid point-one release. Lots of new goodies, fixes, performance enhancements, for both Mac and Windows. BTW, all the new stuff from Love Manila Month is included in 7.1 as well. I don't have a list of those yet, but will have one shortly. Andrea: "I've passed my last exam. It went much, much better than math, so I'm happy now." $830K for Stallman Richard Stallman will have a Happy Thanksgiving this year. Do you work really hard to make good software? I do it every day. Does Stallman push the envelope? I haven't seen any evidence of that. Imho, the economy is still rewarding the wrong people. At one time if you pushed for excellence in software, you could build a nice business. I still believe that. But it's disheartening to see so much money go to support Stallman's theories. I believe this works against software breakthroughs, even software progress. Something to think about. Would the $830K have been better used to support SourceForge? Heh -- NTK, what? To Danny O'Brien, I see what you're doing. It's hard to argue with what I actually said, so you put words in my mouth and argue with that. Heh. Tricky. Anyway it's true that Stallman doesn't push the envelope. Maybe in the past he did, but now he's pushing something else. When I asked about Sourceforge, I was thinking about the users, the people who run free projects on Sourceforge. And if you think it's a profit-making enterprise, think again. Anyway it's hard to criticize one of the sacred cows of dotcom lunacy, but it used to be harder. Can open source compete? Yesterday I had a long phone talk with the leader of an open source project that's in a similar space to the work I've been calling Hypercard + MORE. Kevin Altis is the lead developer of the PythonCard project. We compared notes, I explained how I was using the outliner to design complete user interfaces, how that relates to OPML and explained how, if they want to, they can leverage our work. I liked talking with Kevin, he was part of the Very Early Web, formerly of Intel. He's an engineer and a straight shooter. What was most striking about the conversation was the reality of open source projects after the dust has settled, the hype has subsided, and the ESR theories debunked (fully). Open source projects are mail lists, not that different from W3C mail lists, or the Syndication or XML-RPC lists. They attract people who like to debate, few if any write code, and those who do are not appreciated or supported. We hit the same limits when we tried to do our development in the open. It wasn't until we focused on what we like to do (make cool software), and viewed users as feedback providers, not politicians or co-developers, that we were able to get back on track. Then I think of Stallman's $830K. Is anyone giving Altis money or other forms of appreciation for working his butt off? And that much money could fund a small software company like UserLand for two years. It's a lot of money. Perhaps this can be a theme for Thanksgiving 2001. Let's pay our respects to developers who work for not much love or money, to make the world work better through software. Bill Gates' Thanksgiving NY Times: "With this settlement, Microsoft gets off dirt-cheap," said Eugene Crew, a partner of Townsend & Townsend & Crew, a law firm in San Francisco, "and it helps Microsoft perpetuate its monopoly." I guess at Thanksgiving dinner, Bill Gates will be thankful that he was able to defeat the Web, bottle it and control it, stuff it in the trunk, lock it and throw away the key. Thanksgivings of the past
1995: "Please don't forget to thank yourself." 1996: "We have a positive heritage. A national sense of humor. We have a thumbs-up, can-do attitude. This holiday is the one where we choose to focus on our best. Everyone wins on Thanksgiving. We're grateful for what we have. We let go of our fear, we make love, and we look forward." 1997: "No one is less deserving on Thanksgiving. Rich people serve food to homeless people. We put aside our normal hierarchy and look for the person, not the bank account, house, car, education, spouses, children." 1998: "Properly done, Thanksgiving is also about giving people a break. Loosen the ties, cut some slack. No one's perfect, even on a major holiday. Of course. Especially not on a major holiday." 1999: "Newbies are people who are trying something new. So it seems pretty clear, if you have a choice, why not be a newbie?" 2000: "A reminder that the world, and the universe that contains it, while vast and mysterious, can also be a lot of fun."
Hypercard and the Web Following up on my Hypercard + MORE post, I didn't make the connection. This may take a few tries. What if you could design, create and edit a stack in a single outline? That's what I have working. Instead of the runtime being Hypercard, the runtime is the Web. The Web is a descendant of Hypercard but I've never seen a developer toolkit that made programming the Web as easy as it was to program in Hypercard. I am now there, after seven-plus years of work, I'm actually beyond it, imho the outliner and Hypercard should have been integrated in the 80s. We didn't have good interapplication communication, and while networking was ubiquitous on the early Mac (a major innovation), the programming APIs were horrendous. That's why Hypercard didn't become the Web.
(BTW, it's easy to forget that Macs of the mid-80s didn't have the memory, disk and CPU speed of today's honkers. Today I have lots of room to put a whole UI in a single outline, and the computer performs very well while I'm editing it. I doubt if this would have worked so well on a typical 80's computer.) Now of course Hypercard had something that the Web doesn't (and should). Lineto-moveto. I hate tables. If Microsoft ever wants to upgrade the Web instead of fighting it, let me know. Two big things to do: 1. Add vector graphics that are so simple that HTML coders can grok it in three screens. 2. Upgrade the text editor in the browser to at least be as good as WordPad. I would be happy to give Microsoft 1/4 of my time over the next year if they agreed to let me drive the development of these two things. No charge. Free as in it costs you nothing. More free advice Thoughts arising from the discussion re Jake's outliner story.. Some people take parenthood in stride, you can have a conversation with them without them insisting on being right about everything. These people make good friends, and I believe, good parents. If they can listen to and enjoy other adults, even people who are different from them, there's a chance that they'll treat their children with respect and take good care of them, and enjoy them for who they are. Another thought -- Jake is an adult now, 32 years old, and when you talk about him as a child without including the adult Jake in the conversation, you're showing disrespect. Does Jake-The-Man think Jake-The-Kid (and his Mom) did the right thing? That's for him to decide, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe the know-it-all parents (who don't know Jake) should defer to his judgment. This "I know what's right" school of parenting is pretty horrible to be around, even for people who aren't their kids. Miscellania Blogalia Yesterday's Special Vehicle was the Wienermobile. Today's is the Kissmobile. Julian Bond's Celebrity Blogmatch. I'm not sure how it works, but if I say something about weblogs here, I guess it shows up over there. Is it based on RSS? Julian says not yet, but maybe sooon. Can his server handle the flow? Will his page rise to the top of Daypop? What do the opinions of two bloggers matter in this crazy world we live in? And will the wienerboys show up? So many questions. BTW, the correct motto is "It's even worse than it appears." Wired's annual call for vaporware. Doug Kaye: "I hereby grant the new design the Doug Kaye Personal Publishing Preferences Administration User Interface Award for the week of November 19, 2001. Gold Ribbon and First Place in the competition." WSJ: "All over the high-tech industries, a looming recession and a collapse in stock prices have forced companies to cut spending, lay off workers and slow product development and sales efforts. For Microsoft Corp., that means it is time to wrest important new markets from its weakened rivals. At the top of its target list: software for hand-held computers, online services and servers." Seth Dillingham, a great Frontier developer, with lots of experience, is looking for work.
Last July I gave a talk at the Burton Catalyst Conference on Web Services. They just sent an MP3 of the talk. Haven't listened to it yet. Let me know what you think. Here's a DaveNet piece I wrote about the conference. Steve Gershik: "That's it. I've read enough of Dave's web site. I am now officially a disciple." Heh, look at the url. Hey, it's even worse than it appears. An interview I did with CMSWatch just went live.. CMSWatch: The Case for Personal Web Publishing. "A smart company wants to have an employee who's immersed in the rest of the world. The worst thing you can have from the point of view of the management of a company is people who are basically churning your dollars on their own political infighting or whatever's going on inside your culture -- they're not making you any money by doing that." SD Times: "Critics are claiming pieces of the spec remain unfit for deployment, and complain that a uniform, Java way of creating and consuming Web services still is not baked into the platform." John Robb sticks his neck out. "I hope I am wrong. If I am not, you heard it here first." Luke Tymowski sends a pointer to frogware's weblog, a site he started in 1997. It's great to hear about corporations that are using a weblog to keep themselves informed and to attract new customers through the Web. W3C: XML Protocol Usage Scenarios. Jason Levine: "Granted, web-based apps aren't right for everything, but they're perfect for a huge chunk of the things that people need to do on computers these days." Heard on NPR: "The only difference between a poor man and a rich man is that a rich man suffers comfortably and a poor man suffers uncomfortably." The Prince de Ligne: "Money may not buy happiness. But it's nicer to cry in the back seat of a Rolls Royce than a Volkswagen." On a lighter note, what ever became of idearrhea.com?
Bruce Epstein: "Earlier this year he was a middleware programmer integrating PCs and mainframes. Today, he was pumping gas to pay the rent." Hypercard + MORE == ???
What if you took Hypercard and MORE and merged them. That's where I am working right now. We had all the basic ingredients in 1986. It just took fifteen years to get them working in the same place. And we had to learn how HTML and HTTP work. It's conceivable all this could have come together a long time ago. But that's how software is sometimes. As usual if you stare at a screen shot you can learn a lot about where we're going. Calling all bloggers!
Jake Savin on Outlining. "I told her no; I would not make an outline, unless she told me why." Dori Smith takes a contrarian view of Jake's experience. Sylvain Carle translated What Are Weblogs to French. "Les communautés de publications web personnelles." Jean-Louis Gassee: Windows XP, essai transformé. From Aaron Swartz, news of an XML-like way of representing RDF that is not XML. For a long time I didn't know that RDF isn't a form of XML. The XMLization of RDF is just a way of transporting it between RDF-handling apps. RDF purists eschew the XML form. "That's not the cool stuff," they say. Aaron Cope sent a pointer to Perl tools for working with N3. Slashdot: With XML, is the Time Right for Hierarchical DBs? Oh yes. I've spent my whole career getting ready for the Slashdot folks to ask this question. Simon Kittle: "TextRouter is a generic weblogging and text 'routing' client. It's main use is for posting to Blogger and/or Manila maintained weblogs." Seems like Michael Fraase has a pretty good case against a spammer, with the usual I Am Not A Lawyer disclaimer. Glenn Fleishman: "Apple Computer last week released a major revision to its AirPort wireless network hardware and software that improves security, enables direct dial-up access to America Online and makes the system compatible with corporate and education networks." CNN: "There are the little 'eeee' ones, then there are the 'ooooh' ones -- those ones you have to stand up and follow with your head," said Susan Kitchens, a writer and artist at the Mount Wilson party. Helen Thomas: "The Bush administration is using the national trauma and state of emergency resulting from the Sept 11 terrorist attacks to trample the Bill of Rights." Scoble: "I gotta get a Tivo." Camworld: "I'm so excited." Deborah Brancum: "I try to be a calm gal." Jim Winstead: "I'm not much of a soup person." Doc Searls: "I'm a happy camper." On sticking your neck out Adam Curry: "I felt like an amazing dickhead." I love the way Adam writes. Many people would edit-out statements like that because a real dickhead somewhere is going to add that to his quotefile, saving it as "evidence" for some future insurrection. This may seem like a small thing, but when you write publicly and quickly, as both Adam and I do, when you make a self-deprecating statement like that, you're asking for trouble from a very vocal minority. Most readers, I think, prefer writers to show a little vulnerability. I know I do. I smile when I read a statement like that. I have a pretty good idea of how he said it because he's a friend of mine. Now I generally go through my fear and say what I think, and take the heat. To this day my detractors cite this DaveNet piece, written in 1995, as evidence of my flaws as a human being. The joke's on them of course. That essay is proof of strength, not weakness. Anyone who makes software who thinks their stuff doesn't suck is in for a rude awakening. "It's the truth. We make shitty software. And so do you!" Walking down the hall at Living Videotext I'd poke my head into a programmer's cube and say "We make shitty software." To which the programmer, if he was following the ritual, would retort: "With bugs!" Of course if you don't even try to make software that other people use, it can't be very shitty. The people who make the most noise are people who don't show us their software, they don't stick their necks out. That's why their opinion about how software is made isn't very interesting! Show us your software that doesn't suck and I will bow down and worship at your altar. Of course the critics are going to start scurrying to find out who's trashing Dave now. Heh. You won't find a pointer here. You may find one here. Lotsa luck! One of the best lines in all of rock and roll is Mick Jagger responding to a bunch of idiots in the audience at the end of Little Red Rooster on Love You Live. "Everything alright in the critics section?" Then the band launches into a fantastic rendition of Chuck Berry's Around and Around. "I said the joint was rocking.."
Continuing the What Are Weblogs thread -- weblogs are relational writing, that's why it is so close, if you're serious about it, to academic writing. Almost everything on this page relates one thing to one or several other things. Academic writing is supposed to be that way, but it was hard work before the Web. Bill Humphries tells a story of meeting a journal-writer at a party. "But those are just lists of links!" she said dismissively re weblogs. Bill's blog is just that, a list of links. I still go there when he updates, so something is happening there. Is weblog writing like any other kind of writing that came before? I think not. Linking has never meant so much. I speak from experience, having spent much my early life poring through card catalogs and library shelves, and rarely finding what I was looking for. I was doing then what DNS and HTTP do now (and Google). The Web is so much faster that it makes relational writing possible, much the same way that outlining software made outlining possible. (Before that many people faked the outlines, we were supposed to create them before writing the paper, but instead we wrote them after.) One more thought before going for a walk. On the K-Logs list, Phil Wolff says that it must be hard to do what I do, beyond the scope of a casual blogger. It's true. I pour huge amounts of time into this weblog, both writing and attaching software ornaments to it, it's like a Christmas tree, it grows up and new gadgets come online every year. (And then eventually you decide enough experimenting it's time to do this for real.) Anyway, of course no one but me is going to be willing to put so much time into it. But here's the key thing Phil, software always works that way. Someone has to do the iteration, and factoring and learning (and relearning when new people come on board) and waiting and sloshing through the details -- sometimes two or three times -- toward one end -- making it so easy to do that anyone can do it. This is the unfortunate fact of bootstrapping. Someone has to do it manually before you can figure out how to automate it. This is probably the last bootstrap I'm going to do, personally. In the future I'd like to just watch and critique other people doing them. I'm getting too old for all this digging!! BTW, it turns out that Scripting News is not listed in Yahoo's weblogs section because it is already listed under scripting. Is that anyway to manage the biggest directory on the Web? You gotta be kiddin. (That's like saying you can't get to this site by searching for Dave because you can also get there through scripting.) Bruce Epstein: Why Virtual Offices Suck. Amen!
Aaron Cope: "Apache::XBEL is an Apache mod_perl handler that uses XSLT to transform XML Bookmarks Exchange Language files into exciting and foofy dynamic HTML documents." Foofy? Is that a technical term? Megnut: "True paradigm-shifting, revolutionary thinking is rare and hard to come by." Amen!
Now, instead of worrying about us UserLanders having a little fun dreaming about the luscious and brilliant and outspoken Ms Amanpour, here's something worth writing home about.. NY Times: "The Bush administration is considering the creation of a secure new government communications network separate from the Internet that would be less vulnerable to attack and efforts to disrupt critical federal activities." Why do I worry about this? Because if the government has their own private network, they won't care if the one I use gets trashed by Uncle Osama and his evil-doing friends.
Apache XML-RPC is a "Java implementation of XML-RPC, a popular protocol that uses XML over HTTP to implement remote procedure calls." What are weblogs? "Personal Web Publishing Communities. Four very key words. Let's go through them one by one." This is really the big story of the day. Try searching for Christiana Amanpour on Google and see who gets the top link. Way to go. Maybe she'll let you buy her dinner next time she's in town? Newsbytes: "The Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice will hold hearings next month to examine whether a dramatic increase in patents awarded each year has upset the balance between intellectual property and antitrust laws." DoD: US Soldiers on Horseback in Afghanistan.
Survey: "In the next 90 days, will there be new legislation or an executive order that controls what can be published on the Internet in the US?" CNN: "Terminals at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport were being evacuated Friday after a man entered a secure area without being screened, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said." Scott Rosenberg: Inside Salon Premium. "We signed up 10,000 subscribers in our first 11 weeks, and brought some critically valuable revenue into our company's coffers." One of these days I'm going to be the first Dave on Google. Yahoo doesn't tell you who their category editors are. Here's a category on urban legends. They link to my story about Kaycee Nicole. I like the way the author characterized my article. But whose voice is it? And then there's the Weblogs category, which still doesn't link to Scripting News. So who's the editor and why don't I get a link? Perl.Com: Create RSS channels from HTML news sites. Link and Think is "an observance of World AIDS Day in the personal web publishing communities." NY Times editorial: A Travesty of Justice. John Dean: "No president can govern in a fishbowl, particularly in time of war. But as president-watchers have noticed, we clearly have an incumbent who savors secrecy. Not since Richard Nixon went to work in the Oval Office has there been so concentrated an effort to keep the real work of a president hidden, revealing to the public only a scripted leader." Dean says something that's echoed by the supporters of the new controls. "In time of war." Double-click on that. "At war" is a technical term, not a PR term. It's being used very loosely in Washington. There is no declared war. We are not "at war." Lance Knobel: "As far as I can tell, Americans have been largely immune from a debate that has raged outside its borders, between those supporting the military campaign in Afghanistan and those opposed." The SJ Merc has a story about a 68-page justification by the DoJ of its settlement with Microsoft. Dan Gillmor is not impressed. "The stench continues to emanate from James' deal with Microsoft. No phony defense will make this rancid onion into a rose."
OK, another note. In the debate over the executive order that turns over non-US-citizens to military justice, the proponents argue "If it's good enough for our soldiers, it's good enough for us." At first glance this seems reasonable, but wait a minute -- they want the power to execute people, kill them, in the name of justice, without due process and without the right of appeal. If you believe that kind of power won't be misused, hello, wake up, it will be misused. All the mottos apply. It's even worse than it appears. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. There's no time like now. BTW, more than a few people who read Scripting News are subject to this executive order. I tripped over another executive order that I missed, written about today by Richard Reeves in the Op-Ed section of the NY Times. Was it just one year ago that we thought it didn't matter who we elected President? We voted on how good their commercials were. We nominated two of the least excellent people in our midst. For a whole generation we voted, when we did, for the lesser of two evils. I started a new directory to track the erosion of liberty in the US. Let's hope this directory doesn't get any longer than it currently is. JD Lasica: A new Web ad model from the NY Times. Paul Westman: "To date, Yahoo! ranks as my single biggest investing mistake." Another in a continuing series of notes of caution re depending on Yahoo for community services, which we do. I have started 27 Yahoogroups, and am a member of 35. There's no way of knowing how long these services will remain online. Another thing to worry about, and I am already way overloaded with things to worry about! Evan Williams is trying something new. Congrats for having the courage to go first. Let's watch this carefully. If it works it could be a new way to pay for "free" services. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
