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New Radio pref: XML-RPC and SOAP. (Screen shot.) Metafilter has a friendly thread on Don's Amazing Puzzle. Bryan's working on a very beautiful new theme. It's like a Japanese garden.
Mark Woods is at the bleeding edge of SOAP interop. Read this article on Web Services interop. It's an eye-opener because they include sample code for a web service in .NET. Look at all the overhead. Did they really design an environment for web services? If so what are all those magic incantations about? I've seen Simon and Sam (and Christian) comment on this, their eyes can't see the overhead. But Sjoerd who's a scripting guy, sees it. Sometimes it pays to unlearn the things you take for granted. Make every bit of complexity justify itself, and if it can't, off to the bit bucket. Try Don's Amazing Puzzle for a demo of how hard it can be to see things you take for granted. My untrained eye sees six lines of overhead in the .NET hello world script. BTW, I hope Microsoft and others see this as a collegial form of competition. It may be something new to them. Unlike Marc Andreessen, who set as his public goal the marginalizing of Microsoft, I have no such goal. I just want to compete. I don't mind if I help them improve their product. In their press statements they say they compete fairly. By being open about it I hope to elevate the level of competition in our industry, by putting the focus on interop, performance, simplicity, user control of data, and freedom of choice. Guardian: A tale of one man and his blog. Congrats to Evan for winning the lifetime achievement award in the Bloggies. Mac Net Journal: The State of OS X Web Browsers. Leo Laporte has a Radio blog. Wow. Who do I thank for this? I read Leo's reports on getting another blogging tool installed and said to my team -- we gotta get Leo on board with Radio. I'm also hoping to get Jerry Pournelle using Radio. Ken Bereskin, an exec at Apple, is using his weblog to keep us informed on developments at his company. This is a very good use of the medium. My next Going Crazy tutorial is about do-it-yourself web services. It's only going to work among full peers. Sorry. But if you're behind a firewall there's good news. You can peer with other people who are behind the same firewall. Good news, the N2H2 censoring service is no longer blocking ManilaSites.Com.
Later the same day I got into a heated public debate with Jay Walker, patent abuser supreme.
Skipping Dot Net: Open Source Databases Linkfest. Weblogs.Com crossed the 500-site level today at 3:26PM. Just got an email from Lance Knobel inside the barricades at the WEF meeting in NY. He's going to start blogging it soon. Lance and Dan Gillmor are our eyes and ears this year. My project for this evening is called DIY Web Services. No fuss no muss. Leap in front of Microsoft, IBM and all their flacks. Make history. Write your own Web Service. Lose your mind. Actually become a Web Service. You'll see it'll make your mind go crazy. The music I've chosen for this programming work is Der Kommisar. "Dreh dich nicht um - oh, oh, oh Der Kommissar geht um - oh, oh, oh Er wird dich anschauen, und du weisst warum Die Lebenslust bringt dich um." David Davies updated his picture gallery script. Scott Loftesness: "Poor AOL!" Paul Boutin is the proud owner of Trustworthy Computing. HBS: Read All About It! Newspapers Lose Web War. News.Com: "What do you get when you cross a colonoscopy with a cockatiel? The same thing you get when you cross a cartographer with a hairball -- a Googlewhack." Branscum: "The remarkable thing about journalists is that we don’t have to be paid off in order to ignore, or miss, wrongdoing." We had an outage on one of our static servers for a couple of hours this morning. It cleared at about noon. Praise Murphy it looks like everything's okay.
PowerDNS is a "database backed name server with a nice XML-RPC API on top of it." Patrick Lioi: "I recently developed a line-locking source control application for an independent study project in Java and XML. After struggling with communication between the client and server, I found out about XML-RPC and fixed all my problems over a weekend." Ralph Hempel: "Unfortunately, the idea won't work for real software development."
Linus Torvalds: "In short, send patches to maintainers that you know I trust," he said. "If you cannot find a person to be a proponent of your patch, you should ask yourself if the patch might have some problem." A Python script that pings Weblogs.Com. Dan Gillmor: "The police presence is simply overwhelming." NY Times editorial: "Davos Men and Women should be able to convene in New York to plan their new world, while ordinary men and women freely and peacefully gather to protest the meeting." George Scriban: "It's interesting to watch the two different approaches being taken by Sun and Microsoft as they introduce their web services initiatives." On this day four years ago, Frontier 5 shipped. It was the first cross-platform Frontier, with versions for Windows and Mac. Around that time, Emmanuel Décarie put together the Frontier Newbie Toolbox, which could be a useful resource for today's Radio newbies. OS Opinion: Apple Doesn't Need Zealots. Saying goodbye can be a relief sometimes. Postscript: The nasty site crossed a new boundary today, and we cut the cord. It wasn't my decision solely, everyone at UserLand agreed. It's time to say goodbye. Enough is enough.
Screen shot: The Blogger API in Radio. Google displays their Scripting News award at the top of their awards page. Nice.
BTW, there are no ads on the Google page for Vinod Khosla. Soundbites from the Dot*Con Frontline show. Quicktime.
Scott Girard: "To Dreamweaver, the Radio macros look like ASP tags." Oy! A new macro for Manila, to prove Edd wrong about OPML. Doug is trying to figure out if there are any C-accessible APIs in Windows for displaying and/or manipulating GIFs, PNGs and JPEGs. Thanks to Josh Lucas for finding a mistake in the Radio 8 implementation of the Blogger API. Fixed. JY: "Accents are not turned into crap now. Goood!"
Eastside Journal: "Microsoft Corp's top executives were pale and somber as they filed into the company's in-house TV studios last November." Paul Boutin: "How much disk space would LMS need to handle all Radio logs through 2006?" David Davies: "I thought we could use a picture gallery." Steve Ivy has an XML Coffee Mug, in a Conversant site.
I admit to being jealous that Dan Gillmor is going to the World Economic Forum meeting in NY and I'm not. It's a BigCo, BigPub, BigGov thing. A couple of years ago my rabbi snuck me in. I had a white badge and the time of my life. I probably shouldn't have written about Klaus Schwab's agzend. Anyway we'll look forward to Dan and Lance's reports. Maybe I'll go to NY and write about it from the protestor's pov? Heh. Last night we released a series of changes that address most of the problems that non-English writers have been having using accented characters in their Radio websites. Manila now supports publish-and-subscribe for RSS feeds. Our theme website has a new look and lots of new themes. It's dual-purpose, with themes for both Manila and Radio. On this day in 1998: "I only knew my uncle Sam as a child. He was a distant man, very dark, but when I was a kid, we were friends. He showed me how to cook. He painted for me. I think he liked me."
WinPlanet reviews Radio 8. They say it might be the biggest thing since Pagemaker. "Radio 8 is a jaw-dropping jump forward in accessible online publishing." Yeah! New tool: Easy Images from the Desktop. Praise Murphy! Beta: fileSystem Upstream Driver. "It's perfect for people who have a static HTTP server nearby." Wired: "The architects of the Mono Project, an open-source version of Microsoft's .Net standard, have decided to alter the project's license to make it easier for corporations to contribute code to the initiative."
Seth: "I'm no yes man, but I have to agree with the 'Fascinating' crowd this time." Watch out world, Jacob Levy has a Radio blog. Jake: "áéíóú ÁÉÍÓÚ" Garret: "Had a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman stop by today. His product really sucked." Frontline ran an expose on the excesses of the dotcom boom. I saw it last week. Highly recommended. Brent: "They are without honor."
InfoWorld: "Intel and Hewlett-Packard said Monday they will lend support to an effort to create an open-source version of Microsoft's .Net initiative, called Mono." Jason Levine: "Where will my daily angst come from now?" Thanks to MacInTouch for the link to Radio and thanks to John Goodnough for the fantastic testimonial. I found our Windows, Mac OS X and Mac Classic products on Versiontracker. (Also we could use some positive user comments there to balance the not so positive ones.) On this day in 1998 I was emailing with Sun's Bill Joy on licensing issues for Java.
1995: "What is a platform?" Garth Kidd: "I've been having such fun hacking away on Radio, I just had to buy it. I look back on my early skepticism about UserTalk and cackle. All it took was a big enough dash of Killer App Sauce to make the platform compelling." One more thing before signing off for the day. Weblogs.Com will probably grow quite a bit next week because the Blogger Pro users are coming online. All kinds of new sites to explore. Incredible cooperation between two competitors. Every day I feel more and more like we're building a new layer on the Internet. Economist: Who's afraid of AOL Time Warner? 1995: "I want Undo in the Finder." Ken Bereskin: "Without much notice, the Undo command in the Finder's Edit menu now works allowing you to undo most operations that the Finder performs." I've been writing notes about the My Pictures tool on what will become the docs page. A mind bomb for next week. Kevin Altis has wired up PythonCard to the Blogger API and will release the code to show people how to do easy GUIs for Web Services. Lawrence Lee, who works at UserLand, installed Kevin's code and got it working. Here's a screen shot. I'm going to install the software myself next week and write a How To that shows you how to install all the necessary software and get Kevin's app to run on your machine. I'm hoping to see people use the XML-RPC and SOAP interfaces in Radio to connect to user interfaces running in PythonCard. Bryan Bell: "Where were you guys before Radio?" Bryan's been getting lots of feedback. I sent Bryan an email saying now he gets to be a leader, not just a hero. BTW, when I said the price was Under $100 we already had decided on $39.95. It's a competitive market, and we wanted our competitors to have a relaxing holiday season. Xerox PARC: "Sparrow Web makes writing to the web as easy as reading from the web!" Daily Probe: Rejected iMac Designs. Adam Curry: "I've crammed all kinds of cool functionality into my setup." On this day two years ago I did my first day Davos and blogged it. I was excited. It was exciting! I have three Radio 8 projects in the queue, in various stages of completion. 1. The Blogger API seems to be done. A few bug reports, addressed. If I don't hear anything further, it will be released shortly. 2. A filesystem upstream driver, the simplest so far, it just copies the files to another folder. This is ideal for a system where you have a static HTTP server on your LAN. 3. The My Pictures tool, which I started working on yesterday. Expect a beta-beta release of this later today. After this queue is cleared, the next thing I want to work on is making XML-RPC and SOAP handlers as easy to write as macros are. That will be the fourth Going Crazy tutorial, Murphy-willing of course. NY Times report Last week I had a great dinner with several people from the NY Times. Most of the conversation was off the record. I was surprised to hear that they watch this site. Of course I watch theirs too. We talked about the future of the Web, and the realities of running an electronic version of a newspaper with hundred-plus year traditions. I'm a lifelong user of their product. A lot of the ideas I got about writing came from reading their paper every day as a kid growing up in NY. Protecting some of those traditions is important. In my own small way I try to do that here on Scripting News. I gave them feedback about their website. My opinion -- they haven't fully embraced the Web (that's an understatement). The home page of the Times barely changes as the day goes by (they say this is not true, but as a reader, I don't see the changes). They used to systematically roll the site at 9PM Pacific every night, that's partially why I have a 10PM deadline here. I used to go there every night at 9PM with a sweaty mouse finger to check out their Technology, Business and the Editorial pages. Those are my big three at the Times, in that order. But then sometime during the dotcom bust they stopped being so systematic. Stories stayed on each of the pages for days. The reward for looking to see what's new at the Times is usually to find nothing new. Add to that the screaming ads which are ever more difficult to tune out, and the reader experience at their site is going in the wrong direction. The home page of the site is designed as the electronic equivalent of the front page of a daily newspaper. But the Web doesn't have a daily publication cycle. A Web reader can be enticed to come back many times during the day, I strongly feel that the editorial goal should be to give them a reward for doing that. I also want to know more about the reporters. I want to know what they read, what influences them, details of the reporting process that the print edition can't carry. I want the home page to be a weblog, a pushdown stack of what's new in the world, perhaps categorized by interest (several home pages). I understand that tradition is in the way of that -- so I'll accept it one hop off the home page (I know how to use bookmarks), or as a series of XML feeds that I can read hourly using my personal news aggregator. Anyway, as Doc says, the conversation will continue. I'll report here what I can report when I can. I don't often get the opportunity to influence the direction of such an important player and I want to be careful about it. Thanks for understanding. BTW, a surprise at the meeting. Dave Liddle, who I've known from the computer industry for 20+ years, is now a NY Times board member. Was I impressed? Yes!
Good afternoon sports fans. Steve Gillmor: "Not only does Radio shield you from the internal workings of the Web services architecture to dynamically generate highly customized Web logs, but it goes beyond authoring as an XML router with a subversive peer-to-peer engine." Subversive.
Phil Ackley: "I work with the devil." Excellent. Sheila: "It just started snowing in Seattle." Snowing. Craig Jordan is a lawyer and he wants you to steal his idea. Now that's the kind of lawyer I like! Dan Lyke is using the XML version of Weblogs.Com in an innovative way. Progress on the new Easy Images stuff. I just used the tool to upload a screen shot of itself. Heh it works. Nice. Still chuggin along. Ooops I see a mistake. Fixed. More progress. I've got it upstreaming, now I'm writing the code that posts it to your weblog. And for validation afficionados, yes the img's have alt attributes. New Radio 8 feature this morning. Now the Edit This Page button works correctly and opens the text of a story in a browser editing box. Kevin Altis: PythonCard 0.6.3. Note to self: Check out this Web app. And then Ralph's links. I just got the preliminary numbers for January. It's looking pretty good. A hearty thanks to everyone who bought our software this month. We couldn't do it without your support. The number one item on my list for this weekend is to get images working at a higher level in Radio 8. I want it to be easy and convenient and delightful. Congrats to Evan for getting Blogger Pro out. Amazingly someone is trying to monetize fear over Microsoft's Smart Tags. Monetize. Was that even a word before the dotcom schtick? A candidate for the best blog name of 2002. Last year on this day, an essay about responsibility, tipjars, and evolution of the Internet. Easy images Here's how the easy images stuff is going to work.
In the My Pictures folder is a sub-folder called My Web Pictures. We create this folder automatically when Radio starts up. When you save a picture into that folder, it is moved from that folder to the images sub-folder of your www folder, where it is upstreamed to your public folder. (It actually goes into a calendar folder structure in the images folder.) Now here's where it gets clever. After the upstream happens, a browser window opens with the text of an <img> tag in the edit box on your desktop website home page. Height and width are set. Border, align, hspace and vspace are given values you can change if you want. You can post it, or copy it to the clipboard, or ignore it. There's a prefs page that allows you some control over the <img> tag that's generated. I have a pretty good idea that this will work, because it's an enhancement of the picture management tool I've been using for my Web work for a couple of years. It takes what used to be a tedious multi-step operation that requires a lot of memorization, to a one-step process -- just save the picture where the OS wants you to save it, and we do the right thing with it. Now I have some technical questions.. Technical questions On my system, the My Pictures folder is at this location. If you use Windows, is that where your pictures folder is? If your name is Administrator, I guess so. But if you have a different name? What if you use Windows 98? Or XP? In other words, how do I write software that finds this directory? Next question. What about Mac OS X? And what about 7.5.5 and greater? Where do pictures go on those operating systems, and again, how would a program find these folders? If you have info, send me an email and I'll share what I learn. Simon Fell says that on Windows there's an API for this. Then on a whim I checked if we have an interface for this in Frontier, and we do! Screen shot. But we're not all the way home. That verb hasn't been updated in a while and there's no way that I can see to ask where the My Pictures folder is. We can't guess that it's called My Pictures because in Freedonia it's probably called Megza Pycterovich. It looks like the verb needs an update, but it seems Windows has a clean way for us to get the path. Now about the Mac. Thanks for all the great emails. I've gotten a couple of dozen in about fifteen minutes. Here's the deal. There never was a pictures folder on Mac Classic, so there we'll make up a place, as a default (on all platforms, actually, the user can tell us where to look for new pics). On Mac OS X, the pictures folder is apparently called ~/Pictures. Can I fileloop over that folder? Marcus Mauller volunteered to test file.getSpecialFolderPath on Mac OS X.
New Radio 8 feature. Now you can post to categories without posting to the home page. If you have categories enabled, there's a new checkbox, the first one, called Home Page (it effectively becomes a category). By default it's checked. Now you can easily publish multiple weblogs, going to lots of different locations, from one edit box. Screen shot. Yesterday I read on one of the blogs about a feature of Google. On a random basis it returns pages with redirects for links. Most of the time they don't do redirects, just once in a while, so they can add data to their ranking database. So as an experiment we programmed Weblogs.Com that way. Approx once an hour, at a random time, it generates a page of redirected links, and tallies up the click-throughs. I have no idea if it will generate useful data, if it does we'll publish it. Thanks to Masukomi for the tricky puzzle. One more time. How to tell if your ass is too small.
New Radio 8 feature. Now you can change the file extension for rendered files as they upstream.
Voting tallies for the Scripting News Awards for 2001. AP: "A former Enron Corp. executive who challenged the company's questionable financial practices and resigned last May was found shot to death in a car Friday, an apparent suicide, authorities said."
Sean Gallagher: "So, with this post, I officially resurrect the dot.communist, my original weblog." W3C: Current Patent Practice. Jake's in his 30's, I'm in my 40's. I think of Jake as a kid. Last night he told me that "the kids these days" have a saying -- TMI, dude. (Too Much Information.) The kids these days are smart.
Big news if you like coffee mugs.. Update to yesterday's mind bomb. Now Radio 8 supports blogger.getUserBlogs, a feature that tool developers need. Makes sense. Also fixed a bug in blogger.getRecentPosts when you requested more items than there are. Here's a feature that will make designers happy. You know the permalink icons that are all the same on all Radio sites? Well you can change them now. And yes, you can include them in themes. Another change went in a few minutes ago. The News Aggregator page is now much faster. How did we know how to make it so much faster? The profiler. Radio 8.0.2 is ready. When you get a new version, you only need to copy the new app into the Radio UserLand folder, replacing the old one. On 8.0.1 this wasn't clear, and lots of people did fresh installs, with not-great results. We're learning. Survey: "It's been almost a couple of weeks since the Scripting News Awards for 2001 were announced. Do you think I should release the vote tallies as some nominees have requested?"
Steve Zellers: "The poor shmuck reading this might actually want to know what's going to happen next " Eastside Journal: "After selling his own 7-year-old company, DevelopMentor Inc., Box joined Microsoft Jan. 7 as a software architect in the recently created .Net developer and platform evangelism group." Sam Ruby collates the opinions of Jon Udell, Simon Fell and James Snell on WSDL. We're starting to get somewhere. Sam et al, I ask that you read this writeup of ALIDL, a project I undertook in March of last year, and totally hit a dead end in Frontier. The same will be true, imho, of all dynamic environments (Python, Perl come to mind). The IDL is an exercise in frustration for those languages, for good reason. We like the dynamic features of our environment, and even if you could persuade us that we made a mistake (very doubtful) the train left the station a decade ago. Any network that these environments are part of will not yield to IDLs. Unless you see something I missed. Steve Ivy: "One way to get around this would be to implement a meta-data header for these environments similar to javadoc. I'll use Frontier as an example." Evan Williams: "So there you have it. A better description of this weblog I could not give you." Today's song: "Baby your mind is a radio." Ole and Lena were laying in bed one night when the phone rang, Ole answered it and Lena heard him yell, "Well, how the hell should I know, that's over 2000 miles away!" and he hung up. Lena says "Who was that Ole?" Ole says "The hell if I know, some weirdo wants to know if the coast is clear." Two years ago today I was getting ready for Davos. That reminds me, should we put WAP support in Radio 8? It's a tough economy. I just saw that Jim Roepcke was laid off the day before his son was born.
I just noticed that XML.Com updated. I wonder if they'll write up the XML Coffee Mug. Probably not. It is XML though. Skimming yesterday's Scripting News I see a comment from a law professor saying that AOL must have been quite unhappy with the Microsoft settlement. I wanted to say this. I was quite unhappy with it too. It leaves Web developers at the mercy of Microsoft. Not a great place to be. This medium is the new broadcast system. Imagine if there were one radio receiver manufacturer, not the company that invented radios, not one with any passion or philosophy about what radio is, or what it can be. Assume it's even worse -- radio was a diversion for them. They resent it. "Back to our regularly scheduled program" -- which isn't radio at all. If you were a radio lover would you be happy with a settlement that allowed them to continue to dismantle it? NY Times: "The sweeping lawsuit filed on Tuesday by AOL Time Warner on behalf of its Netscape subsidiary against Microsoft reflects AOL's fears that Microsoft, if left unchecked, will use its software to control how AOL's media assets are packaged and delivered over the Internet." The Fairvue award nominations are up. Vote for your faves. Feature request. Try disagreeing with someone without questioning their integrity. That will get your readers to respect you more because you're showing respect for them. Give them the facts, and your point of view, without making someone else bad. (Or hypocritical, disingenuous, unethical, weak, stupid, or whatever. Save those kinds of allegations for special occasions that warrant such escalation.)
Mind bomb: The Blogger API in Radio. We're almost there on the upstreaming problem for some Mac OS X users. It appears to happen only when we reuse streams. And it looks like an OS bug. Always the most unlikely thing. No sarcasm. NY Times article on the AOL-Microsoft lawsuit. "We now have a very clear indication of what AOL thinks of the settlement," said Andrew I. Gavil, a professor at the Howard University law school. "AOL must be incredibly upset with the settlement to file this suit." Conferenza reviews last week's InfoWorld Web Services conference. Beowolf is working on Radio themes. Asking for feedback. What is Googlewhacking? Joho: "A Googlewhack is a pair of common words that return only one hit when search for in Google." Sjoerd is #1 on Google for "Smart Weblogs". Evectors: "If you want to change your Radio weblog theme today, you need to know html and understand the basics of Radio macros. With remoteEdit you simply click on a button and edit your theme using Front Page (or any other wysiwyg editor), drag things around, change layout, styles and colors in the familiar visual way of these tools. You click one more button and your blog is updated." Paolo Valdemarin, the CEO of Evectors, was my gracious host when I visited Trieste and Venice in Y2K. Macrobyte updated the RadioConversant tool. Thanks guys! Dylan Tweney: "You can tell this is a weblog because of the calendar on the right." Paul Boutin recommends Raw Bandwidth as a service provider, if you're in SF. Doug Baron: "clock.set (tcp.getCurrentTime ())" Alan Reiter: "Boingo launched with more than 400 hot spots across the country." Jon Udell: "Is WSDL gum, or grease, or maybe a little of both?" Simon Fell: "For any non-trivial service, writing the entire WSDL by hand [even with a good xml editor] is painful and error prone." Planet Replay has an XML-RPC interface. Chris in Michigan: "RU8 is a platform that comes bundled with a killer app. Once I began thinking of it that way, it made a whole lot more sense to me." Matthew Trump is working on what he calls the Radio Paradigm. Another homecoming. Steve Michel wrote the scripting column in MacWEEK in the early 90s. I thought it was amazing that they even had a scripting column. Steve always had interesting scripts, and he loves neat toys, like all scripting people. Mark Paschal: "A large part of Radio's coolness is from its decentralizedness." Sean Gallagher: "If they just gave the money to a trust to fund Mozilla, that might make things interesting." Scoble's story on Blogger Pro is rising fast at Daypop. Phil Ackley asks: "Was it the lava, Dave?" Yes. The Flounder asserts: "I'm sure Dave doesn't really think I blame his software for my own foolishness." That's correct. I used the Flounder as a foil for an early morning bitch-fest, something I'm famous for. They often don't make it through mid-morning. That's why Europeans have an edge in Dave-watching. They get the good stuff. Thanks for being such a good foil and so good-natured about it. Well the new Dell machine arrived early. It was supposed to get here on February 1. So we get a few extra days to set it up. It's going to be the new community server for Radio 8 users. It's a real honking pile of steel. 1.8 gigahertz. 1 gig of ram. Over 100 gigs of disk. And what am I doing with all that power? Editing its weblog. Heh. Soon it will be doing more.
BTW, I like to check from time to time, it gives me a warm feeling to know that according to Google, I am still the authoritative source on John Doerr.
News.Com: Netscape Sues Microsoft. Profiling in Radio. "An incredible viewing port into the performance of the dynamic HTTP server." Scoble's notes from the Blogger Pro demo this evening. Survey: "In my third Going Crazy tutorial I showed you how to do a smart coffee cup, one that would make it really easy for a Radio 8 user to subscribe to your XML feed. Now we want to make it a standard feature, so we need to decide on a graphic." Sylvain Carle has already adopted the popular choice. Jerry Grote was one of the stars of the 1969 Miracle Mets. Want to blow his mind. Tell all your friends that he wants to be a major league manager. I'm on his mail list. He's a great guy. He'll make a fine manager. Tell him Dave sentya.
The Blogger API will be built-in in Frontier 8. Evectors is building a bridge to Radio. AP: Amazon.com Posts First-Ever Profit. Jeremiah: "I've been saying 'Oy!' a lot." Kvell. SXSW award finalists. Nicely designed sites. Jon Udell dug up the original home page for Radio from July 2000. I like the "Mainframes are Computers Too" story. It has a happy ending. "Somehow we survived." There was another philosophical piece. "Once the power is in the hands of the users, there can be no turning back." For some writing I want to do I need a definition of the term Full Peer. What do you think, does this explanation make sense to you? Salon: Relics of the lost bulletin-board tribes. Kevin Altis continues the Python-As-Good-As-C discussion. Tonight in Mtn View, the second meeting of the Weblogger Interest Group. Radio 8 users, if you can't update because you're behind a firewall or proxy server, we have a fix. It's a one-time thing to get back in the loop.
Mark Hershberger has Emacs working with Blogger. It's gratifying to see this comment from Seth. Radio and his Conversant software should be kissing cousins. Radio runs on the desktop, Conversant is a centralized CMS. Radio's claim is that the desktop is a powerful place to put Web software, more than just a browser. Centralized services are still totally essential to make the Internet work. Both products can and should win. (And yes I am thinking big. Why not? Let's have fun.) Evan Williams says Blogger Pro will roll out this week. He's going to demo it tonight. On one of the Radio weblogs someone wrote a complaint that if Radio were open source they'd get all their problems dealt with right away. Of course it's almost certainly not true, we're working as hard as we can, I don't know that if we had no hope of earning back our investment that we'd work any harder (this doesn't even make sense). But there's a bright spot. Two-three years ago a comment like that could have started a jihad. We just came through a period when commercial developers were vilified. I hope we never go back there. I believe I even know the lesson of all this michegas -- it's about users deciding what they want and proactively getting it. If you start a negotiation with "I won't pay you any money" -- you're certain to not get anything valuable in return.
A new Bryan Bell theme for Radio 8. "Adult Contemporary." New feature: Language support for main RSS feed. New feature: Weblogs.Com notification for categories. The hits keep on coming. We have a new RSS feed for all the updates to Radio.root. You can subscribe to it in the News Aggregator and know within the hour if your favorite bug has been fixed or pet feature has been added. This feed is online now and reflects the latest updates. Mark Paschal: Stapler 1.7.0 is a Radio 8 tool that "creates web syndication feeds from web sites. These feeds can be used with Radio UserLand's News Aggregator, or other XML syndication software. Flexible scripts for scraping with CSS-like selectors and regular expressions are included as well as several special purpose scrapers, but Stapler is expandable with your own scraping scripts written in Radio's UserTalk language." We're working on the next feature for Radio 8, a browser page you can go to do get the latest updates. Now I have to write the text on that page. "Click on Update Now, below, to get the latest features and fixes for Radio UserLand." Short and sweet. O'Reilly: How the Wayback Machine Works. Paul Boutin has Bill Gates's memo on security. Fairvue: "The posting of the Bloggie finalists has been delayed by a few days." Greg Smith is exploring FileMaker and Radio. Another IBM SOAP guy having fun with a Radio weblog. Note that we've made a lot of progress in the battle against complexity in Web Services. These days the advocates of WSDL say they are optional, no problem if they're not there, either way is OK, we're easy to please. A few short months ago they were saying "Our way or the highway," basically. Here's a very likely fact. WSDL is a delay tactic to keep the rest of us confused until Microsoft is ready to dominate the market. After reading the transcripts of the antitrust trial would you be surprised if this theory turned out to be correct? After all it is very confusing, even some of the IDL advocates seem to think so. The point I made earlier is that we didn't need them to bootstrap the Blogger API, and none of the developers using the API seem to miss them, so the assertion that they're part of the bootstrap doesn't make it with me. Do you care to know my philosophy? If so, read this piece. "I believe XML formats should be designed as end-user software is designed. Hack at the details, make every feature justify itself, reduce every three-step process to one if you can. Do it over and over, and then work on the top level. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Speaking of Google, I was kind of bored and wanted to see how my investment in 
A reader's guide to the above. Sometimes my evil twin gets a word in there. This time he's talking as Homer Simpson might talk about donuts. An alternate pronunciation could be as Mr. Burns might say "Excellent." If you don't know the Simpson's character set, please feel free to ignore this paragraph. 
On the desktop of Windows is a folder called My Documents. Inside that folder is a sub-folder called My Pictures. They've tweaked the OS so that graphics programs automatically seek to this folder when users save a picture. So this is the natural place to pick up pics that are destined for your Radio website. (I understand the Mac has a similar feature, and of course we're going to do it fully for both operating systems.)
