|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
That's it for this year! See y'all in 2-2. Blog-Con: "Vegas was chosen not for proximity but for the possibility of getting 50 million bloggers in one place at once. We already have more than 3 million signed up, but we need more." Survey: Is it 2002 where you are? Another survey: Will you/did you get drunk to celebrate the New Year? WSJ: Computer in Kabul holds chilling memos. "Last May, someone sat down at an IBM desktop here and typed out a polite letter to a bitter foe of al-Qaida, the anti-Taliban leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. The writer tapped at the computer for 97 minutes, according to its internal record, then printed out the fruit of his labor: a request for an interview with Massoud." Essaylet: When to give away the technology. I think that should be my year-ending DaveNet piece. What do you think? Or maybe it should be my first DaveNet of the new year? Hmmm. Phillip Harrington chose Weblogs.Com as one of his Best of 2001's. Thanks! In a way it's nice to be thought of as being so thoughtful as to have planned to get so embroiled in debate. Now of course we don't mind the traffic, our servers get lonely if no one uses them. But we're not the king of the hill as Julian suggests. Blogger was just named one of the seven wonders of the Web. Microsoft has $30+ billion in cash (we have $0 billion). We're just a little company always trying to figure out how we fit in in this crazy ever-changing world we live in. John Robb summarizes the discussion about open source. Two-Two
Another thing that will happen in 2002 -- the On This Day In feature will get another year. I could put it in right now but that would just get another pointer to the text you're reading right now. That would be Two recursive for my poor coffee-deprived brain.
I've been watching Burning Bird flail about open source, and finally she says something worth pointing to. "You get what you pay for" is over the top. I don't support that and I'll argue with John about that assessment. It's a cheap shot. I know what it feels like to have someone say that about my software, stuff I worked hard on, and didn't charge money for. I don't put any less effort into making it usable when I am giving it away. To this day people say that about Manila because we give them free hosting on machines that are carrying a heavy load. And while it can be painful to hear, there's a deeper truth that the open source advocates can't hide from. They're really saying "I can't complain because I didn't pay for it." So to use a Doc-ism, there's no market conversation about open source. The developers don't listen to the users (they're famous for that) but even if they did, the users would be loathe to complain because they're not customers and they know it. Now it's interesting to note that, as far as I know, no one has ever said "You get what you pay for" about XML-RPC. This says to me that, intuitively, people know that formats and protocols should be free of cost and totally open. Maybe "should" is too weak a word -- maybe it's "must." I believe this in my heart, it's something I take for granted. If there's a toll on the road, developers will wait until something without a toll comes along. And this may be the line where open source makes sense, maybe finally we can put the debate to rest -- open source can stop snarling, and accept its place as the province of would-be standard-setters. Commercial vs open source is like a hot and cold water valve on a faucet. Where you want competition, give away the technology. Where you want to be competitive, keep it to yourself. The Skipping Dot Net guy is also trying to parse this. He says that UserLand is the most open commercial company he knows. This is because we tweak the valves to get the right temperature to come out the faucet. I figured this out in a new way after watching VA and CollabNet tweak their offerings to include some hot water in their mixes. I also had a long talk with James Barry in Colorado in August, he's an ex-IBMer who was at CollabNet then (and now is CTO at Jabber). He opened my eyes about business and open source from the pov of a company that had bet its future on open source, and only open source. BTW, I promise you, OPML is going to be as big or bigger as anything we've done at UserLand, including SOAP, XML-RPC and RSS. It's a source of cold water and it's killer. We have the hot water to balance it, I hope, if not, Omni might be a good bet, or JOE. See how it works? Users who have choice move. Users who are locked in wait. I don't care how big you are, you're still in the same ecosystem. Now the ad hominems are being flung at poor l'il me. Heh. Choose to believe I'm a flawed human being, that's your right, but you'll never learn anything that way. My philosophy -- we're all barking farting chihuahuas, and none of us get out of this alive. My shit does stink, and so does yours. Have a nice day, I am not a lawyer, and it's even worse than it appears. BoingBoing continues to impress. KD: "What kind of girl spends her Sunday afternoon up to her elbows in PHP & MySQL?" Internet.Com: "The Federal Communications Commission Thursday approved Boeing's Connexion service, putting high-speed Internet at the fingertips of flying passengers one step closer to realization." Doc Searls weighs in on the open-source-as-flop debate, and says something agreeable. "My vote for Flop of the Year is the whole investment bubble. Every company has two markets: one for its goods and services and one for itself. In the dot-com bubble, interest in the latter completely overcame the former. Rather than selling their goods and services, companies sold themselves, over ane over, in round after round, to investors. Markets for many kinds of goods and services, were seriously hurt. Software especially."
Good morning and thanks for all the fish. Susan Kitchens takes us behind the scenes at the preparations for the Rose Bowl Parade. Susan is a nominee for Blogger of the Year, and this is why. The joy of sharing experiences, they don't have to be earth shaking to be interesting and colorful. The news didn't always used to be bad, and in the future, it won't be either. Doc Searls, another top blogger, says that Real changes its user interface as often as Rob Glaser changes his underwear. Now I'm not sure I want to go there. Checking. I don't. He also says "Earth to Real: I am not a pin in your bowling alley." Interesting. I never thought of Doc as a pin in a bowling alley. Now you know why he gets the big bux. Meanwhile the virtual thought police buzzards of the blogging world are circling John Robb, trying to push him into the LCD abyss, taking the edge off his writing, and the bluster out of his prognostications. I hope it never happens. That's what I like about Jrobb. He's blissfully unaware of how politically incorrect he is. And may he always stay that way. Because the emotional age of the norm in the blogging world is way down in the single digits. I think the wienerboys have given up on me by now, let's hope they don't get John. Postscript on the busted pipe. I called the gardener and he installed a new valve. The pipe was good. We did a little digging together, but I let him do the hard work. I called him instead of a plumber because I trust him, and because it was in his part of my domain. Yes I'm sure it has something to do with the Internet. I wonder if the Shea scoreboard consumes any water? A puzzle. When you go to the airport these days there are people all over the place waiting for flights because they tell you to come three hours early, and you know you gotta do it because the lines are so long. Now I understand why the line for security is so long, they're doing more work, it takes more time. Take your laptop out. Take your shoes off. It's a much bigger deal. More people are looking at each traveler. But tell me this, why are the lines at the ticket counters so much longer than they used to be? Another end of the year exercise. By now maybe you have an idea of what kind of 90s you had, personally. Was it good, bad, don't know yet? I'm going to find a way to ask this question today, Murphy-willing. How many times did you fall in love in the 90s? Did you make megabucks and then lose them? What are your regrets? You're ten years older, what did you learn? And what do you look forward to in the 2000s? JD Lasica: The FBI pays my mom a visit. Andre Durand: Chocolate is Out - Make-Up is In. Tommy Agee died this year, and then this report in the NY Times says the Mets might be headed for real trouble. A new stadium, with a retractable roof? Let's hope NY's new mayor sees the folly in this. Giuliani is a Yankees fan. Don't fall for his tricks. Of course the Yankees need a new stadium. Almost anything could help them. Why not try it. But the Mets, no way, leave Shea right where it is, funky scoreboard and all its deep philosophy. OTOH if they end up tearing down Shea, I wonder if I could buy the old scoreboard? Wow that would be cool. After the Gulf War I wanted to buy an old Scud missile for my front lawn (that was before I had a weblog or you would have heard about it). Unfortunately I never got the missile. But just imagine the power of having the Mets scoreboard on my front lawn. I bet you could see it from outer space. On the other hand, maybe they should build a new Shea, and if they did that, I'd abandon my quest for the old scoreboard if they move Shea from Flushing to Ground Zero. That would send a message to the terrorists. When you blow up a building that has very little philosophy (admit it, the WTC was sterile and uninteresting) we'll just replace it with the deepest philosophical icon we have. Then next time they blow up something we could move Shea Stadium there. What do you think? Hogwash! Mark Pilgrim theorizes that if we were writing Frontier today we'd do it as an Apache module. Now, we like Apache, we use it here, but we've been there and ran out of growing room. Here's the story. We started on the Web in 1995 as an app running behind Webstar, when Frontier was seven years old. Webstar was not open source, but still played the role Mark talks about. Platforms are platforms, whether it's open source or not matters not one bit. The API Webstar defined was as open as Apache's and was emulated by all other Web servers on the Mac platform. (Another non-open source platform, probably as big as Apache, if not bigger in terms of software and developer hours invested.) Eventually we outgrew the limited API of Webstar (or more realistically the inertia that comes from a broadly supported standard). Frontier is so much more than Apache ever will be, getting content and control to flow over HTTP is a small (but significant) part of what Frontier does, and it does it much more completely than Apache. Our stack goes all the way up to Manila. I still can't believe that Apache left all that territory open. My theory about this is that they were fat and happy and blissfully unaware of what the competition was up to. If the world is right, having a browser-based way to edit content will be as basic a feature for a Web server as Undo became for word processors. Think about it. Go dig into the Qube and see where Apache stopped evolving and think about the role its opensourceness played in its complacence.
If someone says something you don't understand or agree with you could conclude that they're not as knowledgeable as you and dismiss what's said. I see this happening as people exchange opinions about John Robb, who I think I know better than they do. "He's a suit," some say, and therefore doesn't understand deep technological issues, as they do, presumably. I don't make any such assumptions about John. If he's a suit, he's my suit, which is fine, I definitely need one, but believe me, when I want to work out a tough software problem, very often I talk with John about it. Perhaps some people think software can exist without users. That's where the open source thing is lost in space. Instead of dismissing, if you're a serious developer, dive in and learn. John is definitely a user, but he's also a technological visionary. A pretty unique person in that regard. Mr. Barrett points out that USA Today did not include British sci-fi cult novelist Douglas Adams in their list of notable Gone But Not Forgottens for 2001. Michael Fraase: "While open source software has an incredible amount of potential, it has—with very few exceptions—failed to live up to that potential let alone its hype. This is most likely because all of us like to get paid for our work. And the idea that there is somehow something wrong with that is preposterous." Wes is in New Orleans. He says "Mm, there's nothing like a hot jalapeno smoked sausage po-boy." Oh am I envious. The only thing that's better is an oyster po-boy with my-nez. Eric Sink bet several hundred thousand dollars on an open source word processor. "The cost of software construction is still very high. Open source is the lowest-margin way to run a software business, and low-margin businesses are very hard." Maybe it's possible to go back to my invitation to Brian Behlendorf from April of last year (seems longer-ago than that) and agree that "we can work with various different copyright and trademark systems, that each approach has its place, and that our common bond is love for computers and people who use them. And love for our own creativity, and wishes to see it thrive and be built upon by others." If I could re-draft that statement I'd take out the michegas about ESR and O'Reilly. These are no longer issues. That shows you how far the loop has unwound. What counts is clearing the path for progress, and working together to make things work better. If I want to charge for some of my software that shouldn't be a problem for anyone except my competitors who are free to charge less, but let's leave the holy wars for Uncle Osama and his pals (look where it got him, he looks terrible!). I had a feeling John would get flamed for saying open source was a flop. It's almost a mathematical statement. It's as if the Mets said they were going to win the World Series and so humiliate and demoralize every other team that they would just give up baseball. Well, OK, they could say it, but then at the end of the season, if they didn't win, and the other teams were still playing, you could reasonably say it was a flop. The problem of course is that they set the expectations too high. Any good coach or political consultant will tell you not to do that. Set the expectations so it's likely you'll exceed them, but not by too much. As Mets fans know so well, you may have to wait till next year. I got a few requests for citations on the bluster. Now first let me say that I like Brian Behlendorf. I'm not saying he's not a nice person. Nor am I threatening his business, or livelihood, he's a rich man (I think). But he went on the record on how open source would effect commercial software (I hate the term closed-source, it's so pejorative) and here's what he said. "Everyone in the Internet industry at one point or another has to compete against someone who provides the same service for free - everyone, that is, with a business model not based purely on time and materials." Well, what John is saying, and I'm supporting is a simple idea. It didn't work out that way. NY Times: The Year in Internet Law. One year ago today Mary Jo Foley went looking for Web Services and didn't find much to talk about. That story was rewritten many times in 2001. Did the BigCo's have a clue? Well, they sure knew how to spin the press to ignore everything else. In that way 2001 was much like 2000, or 1999, or whatever. Even so, somehow this article appeared on IBM's site. It would be interesting to see one of the BigPubs pick up this angle on Web Services. In the end it matters less how Big the Co is, adoption of new formats and protocols is probably inversely related to the size of its proponents. The BigPlans of the BigCo's usually get flushed down the toilet by apps coming out of left field from people who have no right to create them. Perhaps that should be another element on Metz's qualifications for what gives a protocol or format juice. And why exactly is it inversely related? For that you have to look into the cultures at BigCo's where permission to innovate is so jealously guarded. Most people inside the firewall don't have it, esp the people who are likely to have a good idea once in a while. They're usually highly irritating people, who seem self-centered and arrogant. (Who does he think he is?) The good ideas do actually sometimes get implemented, but often in a hidden corner of some marginal product where it makes no difference. The people who do the standards work at the BigCo's can be great engineers, some of them are very smart and experienced people, but as you can see in specs like UDDI and WSDL, they also have to work with low-road idiots who carve out political power in their companies by polluting simple ideas with incomprehensible compromises. No one fights for simplicity, and if they do they are ground into submission by the compromisers. You don't need a degree in rocket science to figure out what's going to fly. If you can't make sense of the spec in 10 minutes no one is going to use it so you can safely ignore it. Lots of email this morning. Sri Lanka has a terrorism problem. Might be worth learning more about. Of course some people from Pennsylvania take exception to my sweeping bash of the entire state. I will never run for President of the US, because Pennsylvania is pivotal, but then so is Michigan, which proves my point. If you want to be President you have to watch a lot of bad baseball. Michigan has one major league team. American League. Also hardly worth mentioning. This is the beginning of a review of US baseball. In the end the only teams that matter are the Cubs, Red Sox and of course the Mets. Why those three teams? Well, because the Mets need someone to play in the regular season and in the post season. Pat Berry is running for President of the US in 2008.
Frontier News: The aggregator from My.UserLand and Radio UserLand will be part of the Frontier 7.1 release. The following post is neither informational or normative. Robert Sprynn admits that he might hate Pennsylvania. I know what he means. It's a dirty overcast state, without much to say for itself, wedged between New York and Ohio (another dim place) -- they have two baseball teams in Pennsylvania, both National League, undistinguished and kind of overcast and dirty, hardly worth mentioning. The only place I can think of that's less distinguished than Pensylvania is Maryland. I just noticed that the Consulate General of Sri Lanka has a Manila site. It's a weblog. I bet we could have a good Scripting News dinner in Sri Lanka. Do they have good beaches? Do they have good food? CIA Factbook page for Sri Lanka. "Slightly larger than West Virginia." That's an approachable size. Acclaimed science fiction author Arthur C Clarke has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956. "It's India without the hassle." Why can't work always be as easy as it is this week? I find it very relaxing. I can take a break or a walk and still get a huge amount of work done in each session. It's not that the phone doesn't ring. I spent at least two hours gabbin today. What is it about this week that makes work so easy and satisfying? Grand Central has some developer kits. A new idea. A virus aimed at geeks. Cute. John Robb's picks for top trends of 2001. Jake wants to know what x = [0] * (2 * 2) means, in Python. Brent Simmons: "Email is no longer reliable." What were the big trends of 2001? Clarification and progress report on yesterday's call to Unix gearheads. We want the functionality of crypt in UserTalk so we can write Apache password files from Frontier. UserTalk is Frontier's built-in scripting language. It's an Algol-like language, much like Python, JavaScript and Java, but it came a few years before. Jake is working on converting the Python version of crypt to run in our environment. 5/9/95: "I had originally wanted to call the language Juicy, because it is C-like, and because both Doug Baron, and I are Jewish. But decorum prevailed and we went with the more predictable (and boring!) UserTalk name."
NY Times: In Rewritten Internet Fables, the Late Bird Gets the Worm. Walt Mossberg: Microsoft had a good year, at expense of customers. Christopher Hanson was born two years ago today. Bootstraps and corner-turns This year we spent a lot of time on corner-turns after lots of bootstraps last year. The two concepts are quite related. I'm going to go take a walk and formulate the relationship and then write about it later today or tomorrow.
I was going to use Blue Mountain Arts to send a birthday card, but it's no longer free. Yahoo still does it for free. Then I found I have a busted pipe. Not a Unix pipe -- a water pipe. In front of the house. It's been out for at least a couple of days. I have no idea where the valve for this broken pipe is, but I can see the money flowing down the driveway. No chance of getting a plumber out here until tomorrow. In California you have to fix these things quickly. $500 water bills happen. This month. No doubt. Calling Unix gearheads. We need a UserTalk script that generates encrypted passwords as if they were produced by Unix's crypt function. The docs are very scary. But the hash function must not be horribly difficult to code. I'd rather not have to call a Perl XML-RPC handler to get the hash, but that's what people are telling me to do. I can't believe it. Michal Wallace has meandered through this territory in Python. JY Stervinou found Java code that does what crypt does. Leonard Rosenthol did a Crypt UCMD for Frontier. That's the closest yet. He includes source. (But the server is not accessible.) CNN: Nude robbers succeed with barely a struggle. ImageMagick is a "robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write, and manipulate an image in many image formats." The period between now and early-mid January is often the most productive part of the year. Four years ago in this period we started syndicating Scripting News in XML. What new stuff will we create between now and January 11 when the lights come back on? Only time will tell. What is Serence? A List Apart: Mac Browser Roundup. Orf is running a piece on weblogs, in German. Thomas Friedman: "If everybody flew naked, not only would you never have to worry about the passenger next to you carrying box cutters or exploding shoes, but no religious fundamentalists of any stripe would ever be caught dead flying nude, or in the presence of nude women, and that alone would keep many potential hijackers out of the skies." BTW, I had to take off my shoes going through security for the flight down to San Diego. Luckily I was wearing clean socks. This was my first plane trip since Sept 11. The security at SJO was awesome. The line streteched down to baggage claim. People kept their sense of humor. It moved fast. The best security perhaps was that everyone got to know each other. On the flight home last night I had a fantasy of a Saudi fanatic hiding in the Santa Cruz Mountains with a Stinger missile. We landed safely anyway. O'Reilly editors pick the best of 2001. I like this piece by Cory Doctorow, looking forward to a 2002 without carpetbaggers.
NY Times: "In the last three months, spam has spiked." Time named Rudy Giuliani POTY for 2001, as 32 percent of SN readers who voted thought they would. Scoble: "Clearly Osama Bin Laden has had the biggest impact on all our lives this year." BTW, I've been brainwashing Scoble's son Patrick. I just read on Geeksworld that they want to do their own awards. I sent an email: "I would be happy to help, I already have a server that does what you want, and I could arrange for it to email you results every night. I'm winding down for the holiday -- but if you want to point your form at my server, after I get back, I can set it up. Happy to do so." Daniel Berlinger: "Today, I decomissioned my BeBox." NY Times: Alaska Helps Its Elderly Residents Tell Their Stories. "Why, as soon as the tide goes out, your table is set," Mr. Gordon explained. "Clams and cockles and mussels, and all kinds of fish." 802.11b: "I'm currently accessing the Internet by sticking my Apple iBook in the window of the hotel."
DaveNet: A Weblog Manifesto. Oh no O'Reilly has yet another new book out. Geez those guys have been busy! Shane McChesney is SkippingDot.Net. I watched Merchants of Cool, narrated by Douglas Rushkoff, who I got to know in Copenhagen. Interesting show. Of course I wondered how weblogs are going to play into the commercial domination of teen culture. Maybe it already has for all I know. But Viacom hasn't bought Blogger yet. Will we see that day? Yeah, I think we will. What do you think Evan? (He met Rushkoff too.) I can just see Ev on the World Wrestling Federation. No I can't. Greg Ritter pushes back on my rant about Lessig's fantasy about software and source. There's a lot of truth to what Greg says, a lot more than there is in Lessig's dream. The glitch in Ritter's rant is the assumption that people would respect the copyright on the source. I doubt they would. Competition is good, but let's have some barriers to entry. Otherwise why work so hard. It'd be more fun to take up pottery. BTW, there's something very Atlas Shrugged about Lessig's pitch. Lawyers. Oy. Lawyers use software too. I wonder what software Lessig uses. He should have a talk with the people who wrote the software, and explain what features he wants and what bugs he wants fixed, and then tell them after they do all that work, that they have to give their source to their competitors. I have a feeling he'll leave the meeting without getting what he wants. Looking for a good link on Atlas Shrugged, and it's all BS. Let me try to synopsize. It's a story of creative people who work hard who get pissed off at all the niggling little idiots who try to tell them what to do, so they create a haven to hide in while the world outside falls apart. Then they come back, and everyone says how much they missed them. It's not a great book, for adults -- it appeals to the adolescent pov, basically They'll Miss Me When I'm Gone. (The sad truth of adulthood is that they won't. Sorry I didn't make the rules.) But it's not a worthless book. It's just that people try to attach so much meaning to the story that just plain isn't realistic, it isn't how the world actually works. No one is so pure as the heroes of Atlas Shrugged. And the whole "objectivist" rant is arrogant. Oh I see, if I were objective I would see it your way. Feh. That gets in the way of the fun of the story. 802.11b: Why Software Matters. "Boingo is not a software platform locking users in. In fact, it's a standards-based tool that relies on only standard protocols to ease the process for its users. Other companies will be able to come along, using different or identical protocols and still transit TCP/IP data on the Internet. They'll have to negotiate their own contracts with wireless infrastructure providers, but that will be the case in any vision of the future of Wi-Fi." Steve Silberman: The Geek Syndrome. Brent Simmons: "I'm 200, You're 200." 12/22/98: "It's a good time to be hibernating. Music on the box, more sad James Taylor tunes. He misses everyone, even before they're gone!"
DaveNet: How to help peace. Hey is today the shortest day of the year? Or is it tomorrow? Jeremiah: "I'm only 16, so I still have (estimate here) 70-75 years ideally left until I'm outta commission. Think of how much more knowledge I can gain in that time." Right! Meryl Evans: "Oh the weather outside is frightful. But the monitor is so delightful. And since we've no place to jog. Let Us Blog! Let Us Blog! Let Us Blog!" Jeff Polaski: The Twelve Bugs of Christmas. Year-End Google Zeitgeist. Scott Hathaway needs help with Python and SOAP. Python 2.2 is released. IEEE Spectrum: "To succeed in a world of micromarkets, Locke contends, a company's marketing needs to embrace today's welter of on-line forums, in such a way that participants in those forums are willing to describe and endorse a company's products without appearing to be empty shills." New motto for SN? "Greasing the skids since 1997." Deborah Branscum: "Girls rule!" Totally. Library News Daily is going to be a daily read for me. Annova: "Grammy bosses blacklist performers who are to perform on rival show the American Music Awards, an awards organiser claims." Yes Jason, I am listening. And congrats on being chosen Yahoo's weblog of the year. I am jealous! Mike Sanders knows how to manufacture flow. Blogger of the Century? Well I guess the century is still pretty young. Robert Barksdale wants to know if this is O'Reilly's next big hit. I have to admit that I've dreamed about that too. It's got all the elements that make an O'Reilly hit, imho. Start with this page for an idea of chapter one or a foreword. Chris Chapman has an idea for a prerequesite book, one that would come before a Radio book. He's right about that. You have to get immersed in the culture first. At least knee-deep. New motto for SN? "Leaving skidmarks since 1997." News.Com takes Segway for a test drive. Emmanuel Décarie: "Salut univers!" Killer app. Balderdash! Lessig: "When the system protects Hemingway, we at least get to see how Hemingway writes. We get to learn about his style and the tricks he uses to make his work succeed. We can see this because it is the nature of creative writing that the writing is public. There is no such thing as language that conveys meaning while not simultaneously transmitting its words. Software is different: Software gets compiled, and the compiled code is essentially unreadable; but in order to copyright software, the author need not reveal the source code. Thus, while the English department gets to analyze Virginia Woolf's novels to train its students in better writing, the computer science department doesn't get to examine Apple's operating system to train its students in better coding." Lessig's analogy doesn't work. You can not see how Hemingway wrote, you can only see the words he published, the publication does not reveal the process. Similarly with software, students are free to study the published work, and use that as prior art (patents notwithstanding). Lessig's analogy is wrong. Further, I can sing a song I heard on the radio, but with published source, anyone would be able to sing the song as well as the person who created it. There's a reason why open source software hasn't produced very many memorable melodies. Programmers have to make a buck to keep programming. It's pretty simple. He says programmers give the public nothing in return for copyrights. How insulting. We give our time and our ideas, just like lawyers and college professors. There's no equivalent of source code in his two professions. If there were, I could just invoke the Lessig Defense in court and get the exact same result, every time, and even better not have to bother with a lengthy trial. Or take Lessig's course from 1989 and get just as well educated. Software is unique among creative and thoughful work, in this way. The source gives you an exact replica of the original. And software needs to be upgraded. It costs money to do that. That's why we don't publish the source code, so we can keep working on it. He's got some good points about orphaned software. Evan Williams picks up the ball. In fact Frontier is over 13 years old. And btw, my education cost money too. I wasn't just born knowing how to write software. It takes a long time to get proficient enough to write usable software. I can't believe we have to justify ourselves at this level to a learned man such as Lessig. But it seems we do.
Scot Hacker reviews Mac OS X. Hey there's a Christmas tree over there! ==> Jon Udell: Can IM Graduate to Business. Network World Fusion's Do-It-Yourself RSS Feed. PC World asks "Does anybody really know what time it is?" Burning Bird: "The really great thing about weblogging is you can set your own rules." There's so much good news these days. Here's an article on Perl.Com that explains how to program Microsoft's Active Directory through XML-RPC, and avoid the locked trunks and have fun and support interop. Wow. Things are really sorting themselves out nicely. Thanks! Alan Reiter has an analysis of the Earthlink wireless announcement covered so excellently yesterday by Glenn Fleishman. Two years ago today, Jason Levine: "I moved my EditThisPage site off of Userland's server, and onto my own. All in all, it was a phenomenally easy thing to do; that being said, there are a lot of things that I had to think about and do beforehand in order to make it that much easier." AaronLand is updating. Bravo! I added him to the rotation for my WeblogsComHelper app so his updates will show up on the weblogs.com home page. If you love scripting hacks in Perl, XML and JavaScript, Aaron is your man. Next year I want to do a Rookie of the Year category. If there was one this year, Amy Wohl would be on the list. A natural born blogger. Watch her explode in 2002. It's going to be something to behold. Can people be killer apps? You betcha. BTW, speaking of killer blogs, thanks to O'Reilly for pointing me to BoingBoing. It's also on Weblogs.Com. I read it every time it updates. Prior art Last year Medley caught hell for doing awards. She did a nice job, also in 1999, inspired by the gorgeously named Bad Hair Days, who did awards in 1999. Look at all those sites I've never heard of (and some I have of course). Thanks to both for being pioneers, from an awards newbie. More awards, not none Mike Sanders has a clue. BTW, I did not get into a blog fight with Cam. No way. It's true he cut me a new asshole, but that's OK, I needed one. Mike points to Jeneane Sessum who nails it. Let's have more awards, not none. Hey if people were watching when I started Scripting News they would have complained about that too. But no one was watching. Now again, let's do something new. My little project will have been a huge success if there are a thousand awards sites next year. And get this, it's not too late for this year. I have a lightweight awards-tracking server, and I'm willing to help other people get their awards pages going. Heh. You know like I helped people start some blogs a couple of years ago. One more thing. I'm also going to ask that we get our act together and create a network of XML documents so we can write crawlers and aggregators that walk the network of friendship and gather interesting information about it. We're going to hit a scaling wall on Weblogs.Com at some point, probably at a human level before we hit it at a software or bandwidth level. When the list gets up to 1000 changes per hour no human being is going to have the time to scan through all those without some assistance from software. But aggregation and prefs will come to the rescue. We already know how to do it at a technical level. It's a bootstrap. By now people should get that about these science projects. Anyway, per Mike's suggestion, here's who I voted for. Phil Harrington voted for Evan Williams. What is DRM? This is going to become a FAQ. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. It's going to become as famous a concept as Y2K was. You may not have heard much of it yet, but you will. I don't know the beginnings of the term, but it came on my radar as a response to Napster, which was a totally anti-DRM system. It was so loose that there wasn't even the implication of trust of the user. The culture of Napster was use it and you don't have to pay for it. That was bad, imho. But the brutal DRM response is to try to make it technically very difficult if not impossible to use something without paying for it. That's not how software works, and the users know that, trying to stuff this genie back in the bottle, however attractive an option that may seem, is simply not going to work, it's only going to get the users to hate you, if you adopt the DRM philosophy. DRM is a term that only a skilled PR person, or patent lawyer, or venture capitalist or accountant could love. It's complete spin. Technically it's the same thing as the much-reviled copy protection that pervaded the software industry in the 1980s, led by Lotus, and followed by practically everyone else. The users went on a holy jihad and won. It was this that inspired me to name my company "UserLand" when it was founded in 1988. Never again would I so align my interests against the interest of the users. Choosing this name forced me to remember the lesson I learned from copy protection. Killer apps and blockbuster OSes I was reading yesterday on Jrobb's blog that Windows XP isn't selling very well relative to other blockbusters like Windows 95 and earlier releases. What a shame, because as a software developer who creates products for Windows, I want the users to move up to XP because it is a much better operating system than the old DOS-derived assembly language non-modern OSes that MS used to sell. Then I caught myself. "Dave you don't run XP yourself, so how can you recommend it to your users?" I can't, not with a clear conscience. Maybe therein lies the problem for Microsoft. They don't really have anyone's support. And further, there are no killer apps floating around for XP. Now with all possible humility I think I have one in the pipe. Can't we work something out Microsoft? A win-win. I'd like to recommend XP. Can you take out the phone-home features, and just ship a no-nonsense OS that isn't all about DRM and doesn't crash and supports modern Internet apps. I support your wish to be paid for your software. I have the same wish. But you got us in a tough corner. How about easing up a bit? Moral of the story -- blockbuster OSes are created by killer apps. Windows 95 was blockbuster because of MSIE and Outlook Express -- ie, the Internet. Going back earlier, Mac OS was a raging success because of MacWrite and MacPaint, and then Pagemaker and Excel. Windows 3.0 was a blockbuster because graphics apps are so much more powerful and easy to use than character-based apps. XP's beauty is invisible until some app comes along and makes it clear why a normal user should care about its beefy reliability. DRM is a negative sell, it's a reason not to upgrade, the opposite of a killer app, it's a douser app. I think the users sniffed this one out.
Stop the presses! Thanks to Daily Python-URL for digging up this article about XML-RPC on IBM DeveloperWorks. What a great story. He starts off saying in every way imaginable what a piece of expletive XML-RPC is. Then proceeds to say that this is the highest praise possible. Right on. It's true. We make shitty software. With bugs. So maybe, just maybe, IBM wants to support XML-RPC in their systems? (Ducking.) Mike Krus dropped a mind bomb on the Syndic8 list today, in response to a query from Tara Calishain about his changes.xml file. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to use this feed, but I'm sure I will. Once again Mike Krus, who's a nominee for Best Weblog Utility/Distraction, blows my mind. Then it gets even better. Dan Chan at Daypop is using Mike's feed for his headline search feature. Then Tara asks why Google doesn't tune in. They will when Daypop shows up on their radar. How I edited the awards outline. "First, I opened up the outliner and created a file called awards.opml." 802.11b News: "Check back late on Wednesday night for the release of a major Wi-Fi-related story. The world of Wi-Fi service changes tomorow. Story tonight after newspapers hit the online stands." Survey: Who will be Time's POTY for 2001? I didn't know that the Xbox was a skunkworks project at MS. Doc: "Ken's emails are so expletive huge that my Eudora literally crashes trying to open them." A new file-writing bottleneck verb is coming later today for Frontier and Radio. For once all the platform-specifics are encapsulated in one verb. So over time we'll transition to the new verb, and eventually all our code will have all the options. Ken Dow: "Scoble Scoble he's our man! If he can't write it, nobody can!" WickedIntellect.Com has a Flash interface for Blogger. Remember when I said I'd kick myself for not nominating certain sites ? Well, I found one. Aaron Cope does fantastic work. I'm not sure if he actually updates his weblog, but he does so many neat scripting things that he shares on the Web. I just tripped over a browser-based OPML viewer that he did last year, and it's so nice! And it's just one of many things he does with XML, Perl, Javascript, etc. Opera for Macintosh: "The legendary speed of the Opera Web browser is now available on the Macintosh in two flavors: PPC and Carbon. Opera for Mac is not only fast, but flexible and easy to use, with a bright clean interface implemented according to the Apple Design Guidelines." A List Apart: How to Read W3C Specs. Microsoft: Windows Desktop Product Lifecycle Guidelines. Amy Wohl: "I first took a bite out of the Apple in the late 1970’s, wending my way through the Hilton Anaheim’s parking garage, where the National Computer Conference had exiled those unruly, juvenile PC’s." Amy writes a great remembrance. I was in that parking garage in Anaheim, showing off my wares, I bet the strange-smelling smoke came from my pipe. Heh. Amy is cool, she was one of the mainframers who made the trek to see the future. Most were too cloistered to see that their world was unravelling. Lance Knobel asks if anyone is listening. I am. Last night on NPR I heard a very eloquent Middle East scholar explain the Gulf War and why it got so many Muslims riled up. I was expecting to be angry about this -- no good deed goes unpunished eh, but he explained it so well that it got through my thick American skull. The story goes like this. They liked that we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait and protected Saudi Arabia from invasion by Iraq. What they don't like is understandable. We left him in power in Iraq, with helicopters and weapons, and encouraged the people of Iraq to revolt, and some of them did. He slaughtered them and we did nothing to help. In my own small way I can relate. This is how I feel about the US settlement with Microsoft. Now the slaughter will begin. The US attitude about the non-western world is indeed that they are uncivilized and that all we care about is if they have tyrants who are friendly to our government. Saddam's crime wasn't that he was a despot, it was that his despotism threatened the US. What I'm hearing is familiar, it's the voice of people who want respect. In the rush of emotion after Sept 11, I decided to do something different -- I gave $100 to the Palestinian Red Crescent. It occurred to me that with the end-of-year gift-giving season in full swing, it might be a nice way for the people the US to do something nice for the people of the Middle East. I don't think the money flows to terrorists. It's just like the Red Cross in the west, they take care of people who need help. The first step to respect is to realize that these are real people, with hearts and brains, and like all people, it's hard for them to hate people who care for them. So I highly recommend doing this. I feel really good about it. I got my mom to give them $100 too. Now we joke about how the Bush Administration is going to round us up. I told her I thought it would be an honor to be rounded up for giving a small amount of money to help people who need help. Jeff Barr has a story about backs, and advice for dealing with them when they get sick. Microsoft's next moves Steve Ballmer's comments about the Xbox have largely gone unnoticed, but there's a new platform brewing, and it's not just for games. An untapped vein in computer software is going to be explored in the next few years, I wrote about it in a DaveNet piece in 1995, Taking Candy Seriously. The surfaces that we use to express ourselves and communicate are long overdue for an overhaul. We've been digging the same hole for 20 years. What if productivity software were overlaid on something other than a spreadsheet or database-like grid? Microsoft is inching up to doing just that. And this time, they're not just in the software business, they're doing the hardware too. By starting with games, Microsoft gets around the inconvenient traditions of the desktop software world, which is much more open than the gaming world, where the right to ship software is jealously guarded by the platform vendors. It's the perfect workaround for future antitrust problems. Just let the PC die and replace it with something that they fully control. Does Microsoft have the power to make the PC die? I don't know. They'll deny it's their intention, but the tea leaves say something different.
Kimbro Staken: "Mac OS X is the death of Linux on the desktop." XML Cooktop: "While the commercial XML editors race to expand their ever-growing set of features, users suffer under the load of bloated applications that take too long to download, too long to start, and too long to comprehend. The developers of XML Cooktop struggle to keep features out of Cooktop so that it downloads in seconds, starts up fast every time, looks clean, and gets the job done." Ad Critic: "We became so popular so fast that we couldn't stay afloat!" John Doerr himself sent me a pointer to Dan Bricklin's article about Segway. Powazek: Successful companies encourage community. The awards are #1 on Blogdex today, still #1 on Daypop. Both sites are nominated for Best Weblog Utility/Distraction. Hey thanks to O'Reilly for the link to the awards. There you go. That's just plain nice. Thanks guys. And they even got a plug in for one of their faves. That's how you do it. Right on right on. Christian Riege is counting down to the Euro going live with a pic of a different country's Euro every day. This is why I read CamWorld. He's an irascible fellow, for sure, and seems to have a "thing" for me, but when it comes to these kinds of subjects, he goes deep, and tells you what he knows. That's the blogging impulse, and definitely BOTY material, imho, fwiw, ianal, etc etc. Rageboy: "If you don't want to play, Cam, well just piss off." One of the nicest things about doing the awards is making a new friend. BTW, for the record, John Robb is President and COO of UserLand, and works for me (I am the CEO). The opinions he expresses on his weblog are his own. I point to them for the same reason I point to anything else, because I think an informed person would want to consider his point of view. This philosophy is explained on the What Is Scripting News page. Aging bodies, young minds OK, an update on my back. It's still out, but it's manageable. I have one of those herbal bags of whatever that you stick in the microwave for 10 minutes, and then put it around your neck, or in my case, under the butt at the small of the back. It delivers heat for an hour before you need to zing it again. It makes a back problem less of a problem. I also take huge doses of Vitamin C, and a little bit of Advil. I thought I should give you an update after reading this on Brent's site: "Sometimes I wish that everyone on the net was at least 40 years old—or 60, better yet—so they were past that age of earnest self-righteousness. It’s boring and unattractive."
Richard Landry: "My back has been out for the last two weeks. I’m slowly recovering, doing very gentle yoga postures to keep the rest of me from stiffening up while my back heals, and avoiding anything that could re-injure it. Good luck. It’s no picnic." Amen!
Good morning ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's time for the annual Scripting News Awards for 2001. These are the best weblogs this year in my humble opinion. Who will win? That's up to you! Hewlett-Packard: "A new species of the personal Web page has emerged recently with dedicated hordes of devotees. This new beast is a blog, short for weblog. Blogs are essentially minimalist Web pages heavy on personal opinion, as well as a collection of links mirroring the blogger's recent Web travels." Now you know it's getting mainstream. Brent Ashley: "I've been saying for ages that Linux will never be ready for prime time until I can take a bare machine, pop the disk in, and have it up and configured pretty well automatically, without partitioning, farting with X parameters, finding drivers, all that." Dan Lyke says he may do his own award nominations, and I think that's a great idea. The process of thinking through what sites you value and why and then saying so publicly is a good one to go through. I learned a lot doing this. BTW, the awards are #1 in the Daypop Top 40. First time I ever got a #1. Thanks! BTW, today's Google search for "awards". You gotta know I'm going to be checking that again in a few days. While the rest of the development team has been focused on Radio 7.1 and beyond, Brent has been kicking butt on Frontier and Manila. Lots of new features. For example, today Frontier got the ability to send a configuration email. This will be an invaluable tool for getting quick answers to server configuration problems. Red Hat is using XML-RPC in a strategic way. That's cool. Andre has a pic of a Euro. Michael Fraase: Is spam killing email? BTW, we found another brilliant kid, Jeremiah Rogers. This one groks outliners. When I got an email from him last week I thought what a smart person. I bet he's young. Then I see his pic on his blog and am blown away by how young he is. There have been lots of great acceptance speeches today, but none more enthusiastic than the effusive Susan Kitchens. I found myself rooting for her, just reading her gush. A natural-born blogger if ever there was one. Cam is pissed off that I nominated him for BOTY. Bummer. To Brent, re Inessential, that is a corollary of Murphy's Law. It's close kin to the one that says that broken computers can often be repaired by taking them for a drive in the car. Two years ago we were contemplating a new millennium. "It's like a graduation, but on a global scale. There's never been anything like it. It's never happened before, and in our lives it will never happen again. If you screw it up you won't get another chance. So play it safe and assume everyone means well, and let it go at that." Wired: Madcap Maneuvers Halt MS Hearing. Dan Mitchell reviews Apple's iPod. Notes on the choices I feel terrible about not nominating sites I love. An example, Daniel Berlinger's Archipelago. Daniel is such a sweet guy. I thought about it, but it's not one of my mainstays. Like he says, maybe next year. Same with Bump. Then, there was the Best-Named-Blog category. I only had two entries there, and I didn't know either site well. Then Dori Smith posted a reminder, after I had finished, saying that I had once complimented her for having such a great name for her blog. Ouch. Backup Brain has become a regular read for me, and the name itself fades into the background. It's a two-personality blog, Dori writes it with her husband Tom Negrino. If there had been a best named blog category this year, no doubt BB should have been in it. There are people who run weblogs, like Eric Soroos, who are expert scripters, but their sites don't cover scripting, or update too infrequently, to make it into the scripting weblogs category. Part of the criteria for choosing a site is frequency of updating, and the expectation of continued updates. It's entirely subjective. And so far no flames, thank you, my fragile condition may be getting me some sympathy, if so, that's cool. And I'm sure that lurking in the shadows are some sites I'm going to kick myself for not honoring. I'll use Scripting News, my bully pulpit, to make up for that. Fragile Today is a special day not just because of the opening of the awards site but also because My Back Is Out. This happens every few years. I'm like a cripple. Walking is very slow and painful. Bending down to pick something up an impossibility. Yet here I am contemplating a day of work, hoping I don't start coughing (I have a lingering cold) or laughing too hard. Oh the fragile human condition. And the spam flood continues in force. 180 messages this morning, almost all of it offering things I have no interest in. Sympathy is appreciated, solutions not. BTW, to Cam, who is one of the nominees for Blogger Of The Year, we think of email in different ways. I want my readers to be able to send me email. Hiding my email address would make that impossible. I'll put up with the spam. There is no alternative other than to stop using email altogether.
We're up to 15 nominees for Blogger Of The Year. The site is ready, it'll go live first thing tomorrow. Wes wins the award for being the first to spot the award site. His site, Hack The Planet, is nominated for Best Technology Weblog of 2001, along with 802.11b Networking News, AppleSurf, Bluetooth, ICANN, Living Without Microsoft and Segway News. I wrote a new distributed app to do the awards yesterday, and put a bunch of time into nominations, and tweaked the categories. I decided to stay positive and eliminated the Demon of the Year category even though it was my favorite. Here are the final categories. Best Technology Weblog, EditThisPage.Com Pioneers, Gone But Not Forgotten, Best Scripting Weblog, Best Weblog Utility/Distraction, and Blogger Of The Year. The largest category is the last, with 15 nominees. They are all blogs that I consider interesting and worth recommending, esp the BOTY category. I wish I could nominate sites done by UserLand people, if so I would have nominated Brent's Mac Scripting blog in the scripting category, and I would have started a Rookie of the Year category with John Robb and Scoble as nominees. Without a doubt Tomalak would have been nominated for Best Technology Weblog. Let this paragraph express my appreciation to my teammates at UserLand who are pioneering new forms of blogging. The voting system is pretty good but not totally spamproof. I'm not going to reveal the algorithm, but it's not dependent on cookies, or UserLand.Com membership. It will be a simple page, rendered in the Scripting News template. Murphy-willing, voting will start | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
