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Walter Cronkite: Speaking With the Enemy. This XML feed contains the top five minutes of changes from Weblog.Com. Updated every minute. Cuts down on bandwidth if your app polls frequently. New RSS power at Daypop from Dan Chan. Today we started getting pings from a community called persianblog.com. Change in perspective due to change in geography. Now when Doc writes about hotels in Silicon Valley with good WiFi my ears perk up.
Busy morning. Got a Cambridge PO box, then opened a local checking account, and got my Harvard ID. It says, in big letters, OFFICER. I asked what that means. They handed me a piece of paper that says "Officer is a nineteenth century term used for academics, administrators, and professionals. It is the highest status Harvard offers." Yow. It feels heavy. The list of perks is impressive. I can use all the Harvard libraries, athletic centers, and can dine at the Faculty Club. They even have a website for all the bennies. Today I feel very well-taken-care-of. Thanks Harvard!! New Manila theme, Swim Fan. PHPmySubscriptions is "a simple tool to read the news of your Radio aggregator on the Web, when you are away from your Radio." AP: "NBC fired journalist Peter Arnett on Monday, saying it was wrong for him to give an interview with state-run Iraqi TV saying that the American-led coalition's first war plan had failed because of Iraq's resistance. Arnett himself called the interview a 'misjudgment.'" The Guardian tunes into John Robb. "In an earlier life, he was a USAF Special Ops soldier. He's not an armchair pundit." That's right. John's weblog offers a unique point of view with intelligence. A must-read. How to delete a news item in a Manila weblog. News.Com: "Segway's Human Transporter, the high-tech scooter that captured the nation's imagination two years ago, is proving to be an easier device to drive than to sell."
Lance Knobel: "To my untutored eye, it seems the British army's long experience in Northern Ireland is proving extraordinarily relevant in Iraq." Ruzz: "The only thing I admit to doing wrong is buying all of the shares in Dave Winer's blogs so he couldn't buy anymore and what did it hurt? I drove the price for UserLand up to nearly $200 a share. Who suffers? Who!" Caleb Crain: "Who says aesthetics has nothing to do with politics?"
Tariq Mohammed is blogging from Kampala, Uganda, where he is a United Nations volunteer. Paolo has been sucked into the endlessly fascinating BlogShares virtual trading site. I started a branch of the directory on the Harvard site to list free source code. To celebrate, I released the source for the site-ranking page. Dan Lyke, editor of the venerable Flutterby weblog, has met his wiener boys, and wonders how to be rid of them. Here's how I did it. I shut down my discussion group and occasionally point to sites that have comments sections. If the wiener boys show up, no problem. Eventually the link scrolls off Scripting News. There's always a clever answer to the cowards, you just have to breathe deeply and let it come to you. I've been using my camera again. Here's a picture of Russian-born software entrepreneur Vadim Yasinovsky, from Clear Software. Statues on Brattle Street, and a few pics of food at Mary Chung's Chinese restaurant on Mass Ave near MIT. I still have to learn how to turn on the flash on my camera, so I guess I have to go back once again to get a pic of their spicy noodles. Life is tough. I hereby nominate Pete Seeger for a Berkman fellowship. And now that I've moved the truth can be told. I used to live across the creek in Woodside from Joan Baez, who is profiled in the same piece as Seeger. I met her once in the supermarket and talked on the phone once. She has a very nice house, with lots of cool people hanging out.
List of sites we're hosting at Berkman ranked by hits, either today or all-time. Comment here. Bill Moyers: "I put the flag in my lapel tonight." BBC: "The World Health Organisation expert who first identified the mystery pneumonia that has claimed dozens of lives has himself died of the disease, the UN agency has announced." AP: "A suicide bomber killed five Americans in an attack Saturday north of the city of Najaf." NYT and BBC reports. The Times reports on a Columbia University anthropology professor "who said at a campus antiwar teach-in Wednesday night that he hoped to see 'a million Mogadishus' -- referring to the city in Somalia where American soldiers were ambushed in a lethal firefight in 1993." Interesting that the Times reports this as a denunciation of the professor's remarks. Why not just report it as two stories. Why does the president of Columbia get the headline? An update to last night's doctrine. "It's time to stick the tail between the legs and get the fuck out of there folks. This doesn't smell good." BlogShares is a "fantasy stock market for weblogs." Scripting News is an attractive buy at $14.08 per share. Megnut gave a keynote in Illinois. Neat! Welcome to Wendy Seltzer and her new weblog. NY Times: "The most influential antiwar coalitions have shifted away from large-scale disruptive tactics and stepped up efforts to appeal to mainstream Americans."
Christopher Lydon reviews the "great writers who anticipated the contemporary crisis."
Our new weblog hosting service went live today. Anyone with a harvard.edu mail address can create a free weblog. Please wish us luck, spread the word, and praise Murphy!
A new doctrine tonight. Next Tuesday marks six years of Scripting News and fifteen years of Frontier. On this day in 1999, Slashdot supported RSS. A MFB. Jeremy Allaire reports on Esther Dyson's interview with Google's Sergey Brin. More work on Harvard weblogs today. More from our ex-special-ops guy, John Robb. "We need to be able to destroy all six divisions in place simultaneously."
At dinner last night with Adam Green, he said something disturbing. He said this will be Dubya's last war. I said that's right, because we're going to vote his ass out of office next year. Adam said the Democrats don't have anyone to run against him. I couldn't believe that. And then he started listing them, and damn if he's not right. Holy shit. Four more years of this bullshit? I never signed up for that. Christopher Allbritton, former AP and New York Daily News reporter asked readers of his weblog to pay to send him to Iraq, and they did. He's reporting from Turkey today, on his way into Iraq. Bravo. If the BBC reporters weblog had permalinks I'd point to some of the posts, especially the one about dolphins helping clear mines in Umm Qasr. I didn't see the NBC news piece on weblogs, but Doc did. "Last night's seconds-long NBC news feature on Weblogs verged on the meaningless." Last night's session was great. About 15 people. Lots of great discussion, lots of ideas where to go. We'll do it again next Thurs at 7PM. Matthew Langham wants an outliner for his Pocket PC.
"thinkusaalignright"Well, with a little help from Murphy, it looks like I made my 7PM deadline. Later tonight we will start serving up new weblogs for harvard.edu people. Lots of other stuff happened today. I had a nice talk with Wayne Rosing, VP-Engineering at Google. I got some insight into how the deal with Blogger happened, and how they're working internally. We reaffirmed the love affair the blogging world has been having with Google. Okay, so now they do blogs too. We can still work with them. Let's hope for the best. What did Macromedia do that was so bold? They broke out of the browser. Now Flash is a browser on its own. We don't need no stinkin HTML, DHTML or whatever. And they support XML-RPC and SOAP 1.1. Nice. A no-fud-zone? Keeping our fingers crossed. I also got interviewed by NPR, so if you're listening to the radio this evening and hear a mellow confident booming voice boasting about how weblogs are taking over the world, that's me -- or Scott Rosenberg, they interviewed him too. Also, I'm told this time we will definitely be on NBC News tonight, but in the meantime I have to launch some blogs, so I'm outta here, see you later. Love, Dave. Jon Udell on publishing a project weblog. Martin Schwimmer: "I am very happy to make an RSS feed of this web site available to aggregators who make non-commercial use of the feed." More work on Berkman weblogs today. The goal is to be open for business at tonight's meeting. In this context, open for business means automatically creating new weblogs for anyone with a harvard.edu address. Later today Macromedia will announce a new product, one I've been wanting for seven years. I'll wait until the press release runs before explaining why it is so important, why it will be controversial, and why the controversy won't matter. Postscript: Sorry for the delay. I hit a few bumps in various projects that are underway. My comments on this announcement will probably have to wait till tomorrow. Sorry. As a newbie to Boston, I'm glad to be here as they change all the rules about how the main arteries work. They held up completing The Big Dig until I got here. Good thinking. Now everyone is a newbie, not just me. How about that! Presidential candidate Howard Dean gave a talk at Harvard last night. He asked an interesting question. Next year, how will we feel when China invades Taiwan because they think they have weapons of mass destruction? Has the new Bush Doctrine, pre-emptive wars, unleashed a philosophy of world power that we may not be so comfortable with? Reminder, if you're in Boston tonight and want to learn how our new weblog service works, we're having a meeting tonight at 7PM at Berkman Center, 1587 Mass Ave. If you can't make it tonight, we'll do it again next Thursday and the one after that. If you have a harvard.edu mail address, we can create your weblog tonight, Murphy-willing, of course. If you tuned into NBC News last night you would not have seen or heard me, or a story about weblogs. They called last night to say that it got bumped, and has been rescheduled for tonight. Unfortunately I will not be able to watch it (see above) so if some kind soul would record the show (I am without TiVo) and upload the result, that would be super. 3/27/99: "If you have a news site, a weblog, I encourage you to put up an RSS version of the content so we can flow it thru our templates and out to readers' desktops." From the If-You-Ever-Doubted-There-Is-A-God Department. I just finished writing an email to a friend where I said: "I am glad I'm out of the real estate biz. I'm more comfortable in unreal estate." I then checked new mail. One message. Spam. Subject: "Be the next Real Estate Tycoon." Yes there is a god. And he or she is listening. And has a terrible sense of humor.
Warblogging.Com's new Index Of Evil is an application of Weblogs.Com. "EvilBot downloads every blog that's changed since it last downloaded the list and looks for words like Ashcroft, Hussein, Saddam or Osama." John Markoff's obituary of Adam Osborne. Don Park: "People like Sean [McGrath] are smart experienced experts whose criticisms should be carefully examined like rocks from a jade mine instead of focusing on flaws." Amen. The Webmonkey blog notes Harvard weblogs, with kind words, which is appreciated since my initial adjective for their weblog was not so kind.
Ed Cone: "If an Iraqi division was rolling up I-85 through Greensboro on its way to overthrow some hypothetical despot in Washington.." I was interviewed this morning by one of the US television networks about weblogs and the war. Pictures from the NBC News interview, by Wendy Koslow. Slashdot thread on H2O project at Berkman. Juliette Kayyem started an H2O rotisserie on the war in Iraq. Two new Technorati services: Hot Links and Breaking News. John Robb: "We don't want to go in. We can't go in." Paolo's weblog is one year old today. Hey is Doc hot, or not? Happy Birthday Brent! Brent says: "I want WebKit. I promise to use it for good and not for evil."
Another announcement. On April 8 I will give a presentation on weblogs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The sponsors of the presentation have asked that I invite readers of my weblog. 4PM-5:30PM at the Faculty Dining Room, IOP. I just started a mail list for developers working in the Manila content management system from UserLand. Paul Boutin: "The BBC misspells me five times as Paul Boultin today, but at least they got it right in the URL. Coupled with Reuters' Paul Bottin citation last week, it's got me wondering how accurate the rest of the news is." My old friend Randy Green has an interesting car. Kottke: "The ball and chain is out of town for few days so I did today what every red-blooded American male does in this situation: I went shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond for fluffy, white bath towels and a bath mat." Work continues on the hosting code for Harvard weblogs.
The guy blogging in Baghdad is creating quite a splash in print. Mickey Kaus said it well. Some people are "simply in a position to know things others have a hard time finding out." The Department of Media Sciences, Anna University, Chennai is hosting a national conference on blogging. One year ago today: "My bet with Martin Nisenholtz at the Times says that the tide has turned, and in five years, the publishing world will have changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want." Three years ago today: ManilaPalooza! Would you like to be the reporter embedded with this story?
News.Com: "Instant messaging company Jabber on Monday said it secured a $7.2 million investment from Intel Capital." NY Times: "Fears about a new respiratory disease deepened considerably today as all [Hong Kong] public hospitals reduced non-essential services, workers and students were told to stay home if they felt at all ill and one of the two top officials handling the outbreak was himself hospitalized." Donna Wentworth is blogging the ILAW conference in Rio. Michael Winser wants to hire a journalist.
Dan Bricklin's pics from Sunday at PC Forum. Lance Knobel: "Embedding reporters might be merely a recognition of the reality that much of the reporting media has already embedded the coalition's assumptions into its work." Interesting stuff on John Robb's weblog this morning. He says that Iraq could have taken Saudi Arabia in the last war, and their failure to do so led to their defeat. John also says that we don't have enough manpower in Iraq to control the country. Karlin Lillington tells the story of a UK reporter in Iraq who is not embedded, and therefore "can say what she wants and is not restricted by the military." "There are people dying in Iraq, said Peter O'Toole, backstage at the Oscars. "I'm an entertainer. My job is to cheer them up. If I can." One year ago today, a text editing cheat sheet for Radio.
Adam Curry has a link to the Al Jazeera videos.
Ian Evans is blogging the Oscars on-site, backstage at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. Paul Boutin: "San Francisco is still lying around the house in its bathrobe, bitching about its lost dot-com job and demanding rent control while neglecting to take out the garbage." Doc is blogging PC Forum. He says Tim Berners-Lee is a British Bob Frankston. "Speaking faster than most of the listeners can hear, yet at a fraction of the speed at which his mind works." John Dvorak thinks Apple is getting ready to switch to Intel. Great stuff on Microdoc News, aka Google Village. Nick Denton: "The inhabitants of Bucharest were so crushed by decades of harsh dictatorship, that they emerged suspicious of each other, credulous of rumor, disorientated by the truth, seething with recrimination, and bitter, bitter, bitter." Blogging at Harvard support. Every Thursday evening at 7PM we're going to have a live face-to-face session about blogging at Harvard. The sessions are open to anyone from the Harvard or Scripting News communities. The discussion is mainly how to do a weblog. Every week I'll try to present a feature or two, answer questions, etc. There will be a projected computer, making it easy to do demos. Sessions may or may not be blogged. At first we're going to do it in a large conference room at Berkman Center, Baker House, 1587 Massachusetts Ave. There's room there for no more than 20 people, and seating for only about 10. We can improvise. If more people come, we can get larger space. I'l post a reminder towards mid-week. Important note -- you do not need to be a geek to come to these sessions, in fact, we won't go deep on technology, because that can be so intimidating for non-technical people. I'm glued to the TV and when I'm not doing that I'm glued to NPR. It's not a nice day. Very soon we're all going to have to decide if it's ethical or moral to view TV pictures of American prisoners of war, or Americans who likely were executed by the Iraqis as prisoners of war. Up until today the war hasn't effected my body chemistry, despite the awful news, I've been feeling pretty good. Today it hit me. In 2001 Google acquired a company called Outride that implements something like the personalized search I describe below. I heard from two people who worked at the company. Working on Weblogs at Harvard
Good morning Internet! Here's an idea. Should Google take who's doing the search into account when doing its page rank work? For example, last night over at Bob Doyle's house, I said Let's go eat at that Chinese restaurant on Central Square that has spicy noodles. Bob said Okay, what's the name? I thought, How am I going to find the name? Aha! I put it on Scripting News for just this occasion. So we go to Google, click on Advanced Search, set the domain to this one, and search for MIT noodles. Two hits, the top one is the correct one. Then later (and here's the insight) I realized that Google could take note that I do that kind of search a few times a day. Clearly I think Scripting News is pretty authoritative, way more so than almost any other site. Can that be factored into the results they give me? I think perhaps I should patent this so no one else can.
20th Century House I live in a house without TiVo. I'm not happy about that. The people I rent from just have cable. Twentieth century style television.
Nick Denton is mapping the invasion of Iraq. NY Times: "More than 100,000 New Yorkers marched down Broadway today to voice their opposition to the ongoing war against Iraq." Tonight I went for Cambridge's equivalent of spicy noodles at Mary Chung's, down by MIT on Mass Ave, with Holly and Bob Doyle. We had a wonderful time. Even so, I much prefer the west coast noodles. I'll go back and get some pics of the eastern noodles. This afternoon I took a two-hour walk around Fresh Pond. I'll post pics of that tomorrow. A reader of my archive sent a question about this piece about baseball and men. It's a nice little story that may explain something about the role of war in our species. A silver lining to all this war misery. People are getting politically active. If you ever doubted that your vote matters, now all doubt should be gone. Remember that next time you get a chance to say who runs things. Best feeds for war coverage: AP War News (provided by GoUpstate), BBC World News, NY Times Front Page, International, National, Politics (provided by UserLand). Cyberjournalist: Weblogs and Diaries from Embedded Journalists. Joi Ito: "If I stop drinking, I will be able to blog at night and catch Dave Winer when he starts blogging in the morning on the East Coast." Cooool. Cambridge is cool One of the cool things about Cambridge is all the interesting people you meet. I'm renting a house from a professor for two months, and the current tenants don't need the house for the rest of March, so I'm taking over starting today. I went over there yesterday afternoon, not expecting anything in particular, but this being Cambridge, and these being interesting times, a fantastic discussion ensued about weblogs, war, law school, doctors, hearts, more weblogs, the medical school, Mitch Kapor, more weblogs and finally to the reason I think I have a fellowship at Harvard Law School (at least from god's point of view, or Murphy's). I wrote a follow-up email to my newest of Cambridge friends, a medical doctor. Here's what I said.
Programmers are no different, but unlike the other professions, we're having trouble even existing. Yet our society runs on computers more and more every day. So let's figure it out. We are weird just like doctors and lawyers. But that doesn't make us bad. That's why I was glad to see Mitch go back to writing software. He's one of those programmers, like me, who can complete a sentence and give a speech and find an idea that entertains. Later it occurred to me that our lives are in the hands of the government. No one likes that, I bet even the government people. BTW, they tell me I'm moving into Mitch's neighborhood. Hi Mitch! What a small world. I swear I didn't plan it this way. Ohhhh Microsoft Mary Jo Foley says that Microsoft is getting ready to woo ISVs. That's nice, but there are two problems.
Second, they're thinking about it the wrong way. The article says they want to incentivize developers to put new Microsoft technology into their apps. No no no. That tells me they (Microsoft) have a problem, but you don't create new markets that way. This is what Apple was doing while Microsoft was eating their lunch in the late 80s and early 90s. Incentivizing developers to include new toolkits that provide functionality that users don't want. Oh what an awful strategy that was.
Kevin Sites: "I've been asked to suspend my war blogging for awhile." Pictures of a warm sunny spring afternoon in Cambridge. BBC: "Shares on the world's stock markets have surged because of hopes of a swift end to the conflict in Iraq." Scott Rosenberg: "These are the images the whole nation is taking in as representations of this conflict." BBC: "At least two people -- including a policeman -- have been killed in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, at an anti-war march." Technorati's new current events page. Annotated. Updated every 15 minutes.
Today's programming project for weblog hosting at Harvard. BBC picture gallery of British soldiers in Iraq. Glenn Fleishman: "A plan to give away Real World Adobe GoLive 6 as a free PDF might cost me $5,000 to $15,000 in bandwidth charges because of, well, too much interest in the book." My new camera is slightly larger than a cell phone. My old camera was an order of magnitude larger. I tend to take the new camera with me. It fits into a pocket. Yesterday I got pics of the demonstration at Harvard because the camera was in my pocket when I came upon the demo. "thinkusaalignright"Scary interview on CNN by Paula Zahn with Tom Daschle, Senate Minority Leader. They played Daschle's speech prior to the war, where he said it was a failure of diplomacy that forced the war. Playing the speech now was unfair. As the NY Times editorial said, that was the time to ask how we got into this mess. Now that the war is on, Daschle has made a joint statement with Senate Majority leader Bill Frist supporting US and allied troops in Iraq. Then Zahn asked if Daschle could see how some would have seen his statement as unpatriotic. What an outrage. Zahn is a reporter, interviewing a distinguished member of the US Senate. She pressed him. If I were he, I would have gotten up and left the interview. Listen up. War is not an excuse to turn off your minds. We need our minds more than ever. Reporters don't lecture leaders. They report. Daschle voiced a concern that many Americans have, at an appopriate time. Once the war is under way, he and we are commited, like it or not. Werbach: "Listening to Tony Blair's address last night on the radio, my wife and I couldn't help but feel that the world would be a better place if his home were #1600 Pennsylvania rather than #10 Downing." Kevin Marks: "I find myself turning to media from England as well as weblogs, and thought I'd pass some links on." Raph Levien: "I attended the noon rally at UC Berkeley." George Tsiokos did a chart comparing versions of RSS. Being an early riser on the east coast isn't so bad. It means I get to share the flow with late nighters on the west coast.
BBC: Iraq invasion under way. AP: "The very missiles Saddam Hussein fired at US forces in Kuwait appear to have been the same weapons he either claimed not to possess or agreed to destroy." John Robb, ex Air Force special ops flyer, says "Excellent!" to US strategy in Iraq. "It looks like Bush stumbled into the right military strategy: decapitation strikes," he writes. Pictures from today's anti-war protest at Harvard. A place to comment on today's Scripting News. BBC reporters are working weblog-style. Excellent. Inside Ventura County has great war coverage. I was interviewed by a wire service, asked how today's events compare to 9/11/01, from the weblog point of view. After a bit of thought, there's no comparison. Today's news is far away from sources accessible to bloggers. There was plenty of time for the big networks and newspapers to get into position. 9-11 was a surprise, blogs can mobilize more quickly, and we have more people in NY and Washington. JD Lasica: "With advances in digital photo and video equipment, battlefield images will be available for online distribution almost immediately." Paul Boutin, who we trust, fact-checked the Iraqi blogger, and concludes that he probably is reporting from Baghdad. Andy Rhinehart has an RSS feed for AP war coverage. Excellent. Click here to subscribe in Radio's aggregator. Debka expects the surrender of two Iraqi divisions. "They are the forces charged with defending the oil fields of region and represent two-thirds of the Iraqi army in the south."
The Age: Saddam appears on Iraqi TV. Non-war news. Entertainment Weekly: "President Bush and French President Jacques Chirac may not be phone pals anymore, but that didn't stop Chirac from discussing Saddam Hussein, the war in Iraq, and other serious issues with another famous American: Jerry Lewis. Except it turns out that the man who had a five-minute phone conversation with Chirac last week wasn't Lewis, but rather a Los Angeles DJ impersonating the comedian." Via Instapundit. A weblog in Baghdad? David Appell has doubts NY Times: "Mr Bush sought to tamp down expectations of a quick victory with few casualties by warning that the battles in the days ahead 'could be longer and more difficult than some predict.'" BBC: "President Bush confirms the military campaign against Iraq is under way, after explosions rock Baghdad at dawn." Reuters: "The strike on Baghdad appeared limited and there was no sign yet of the awesome display of force predicted by military analysts to stun Iraqi troops and sap their will to fight." BBC: "Countries around the world have reacted swiftly to the start of conflict in Iraq." Tim Rutten: "Cable news came of age during the first Gulf War. Online commentary -- or blogging, as it is known -- may have found its moment in this second campaign against Saddam Hussein." Jake: "Two new server-level preferences were released today for Manila's News Aggregator feature." BBC: "Three billion Suns would fit into the most distant black hole yet known." Lessig: "One reply, from the representatives of the Kinks, demanded $10,000 for permission to reprint the line 'help me, help me, help, me sail away' from the song 'Sunny afternoon.'" News.Com: "About a year ago, the New York Times signed a deal with Radio Userland, a content management software developer that produces a news aggregator, which allowed that organization to distribute RSS feeds." Radio UserLand is the name of the product, not the company. The Times feeds are here. News.Com: "Networking giant Cisco Systems on Wednesday said it would buy Linksys, a manufacturer of networking gear for consumers, in a stock deal valued at $500 million." Dave Aiello compares Feedster and rssSearch. One year ago today, NY Times syndicated for Radio. Carl Garland writes: "Never emailed you before but I think I have the only site on the Web that not only lets you make March Madness picks for your own groups but will let you retrieve User Picks, Leaderboards over XML-RPC. My site is kinda a mixture between Yahoo Groups, Blogging, and Creating your own contests. Anyway I have a short blurb about it in my overly weak blog. I hope you will be hearing more XML-RPC stories from me in future and thanks for all your work." News.Com: ICANN names new CEO. Grub "provides a free for download, free to run, distributed crawling client, which is used to create an infrastructure (database + volunteers) that will eventually provide URL update status information for nearly every web page on the Internet. Grub's distributed crawler network will enable websites, content providers, and individuals to notify others that changes have occurred in their content, all in real time." Via Evhead. Chris Pirillo's pics of the Google-Blogger party.
Survey: Are you glad or sad we're going to war? News.Com: "Apple Computer on Wednesday named former Vice President Al Gore to its board of directors." Travel pics of cheesecake, the Taconic State Parkway, the Berkshires, Great Barrington and Butternut Basin. Scott Rosenberg follows up on the Eve of Destruction. Matt Haughey has an innovative use of technology. I've arrived at Harvard. I'm going to keep my to-do list out in the open at least at first. Rich Santalesa: "While no one wants a war, there are things worth fighting for, which apparently the French and some others can't fathom. Freedom is one. Safety is another." Morbus Iff reports that SourceForge is providing RSS 2.0 feeds for its projects. NY Times: "Ted Turner is still not ready for his exit from AOL Time Warner, at least not while there is still an audience eager for his personal views and antics." Ad Age: "Recent internal research by Procter & Gamble indicates that consumers who fast-forward through ads with digital personal video recorders such as TiVo still recall those ads at roughly the same rates as people who see them at normal speed in real time." More travel pics Pictures of a warm spring day in NYC. St Patrick's Day dinner at a diner in Queens. Driving up the Taconic State Parkway and through the Berkshires into Great Barrington on the way to Boston. When I was a kid we used to ski at Butternut Basin. Think! As you might imagine I got some strong responses to yesterday's DaveNet by Scott Rosenberg. There's nothing wrong with a strong response, but I am disgusted by thoughtlessness of many of the comments. "thinkUsaAlignRight"I made a point of listening to the shock-jock shows on AM radio as I drove across the country. So the "arguments" are familiar to me. What I'd say to them if they'd listen -- read some histories of war, not the histories of starts of war, when everyone is full of honor, courage and conviction. Learn about the trench warfare of World War I. Or how long it took for the US to extricate itself from Vietnam. I recently read a history of the Civil War in the US. What a fucking mess that was. Sure a lot of piss and vinegar at the start. But the people in the southern US are still bitter about that war, 140 years later. A lot of people died, nasty deaths; and a lot of what people cared about was destroyed. All of us are too young to remember, that's why we have to study this stuff, and think about it. Scott did change my mind, but I was almost there. You don't ever go into war thinking it's going to be easy. If it is, count your blessings, but assume it won't. Bush is not leading us well. We should have heard some thoughts about how hard war can be. It's like the disclaimers we get on cigarettes. Warning, these things can kill you. I hear so much concern for the people inside Iraq. Come on. You right wing guys don't really care about them, do you? If so, why only Iraq? Why not take on civil strife, starvation and disease where ever it happens. I don't believe you really care about the people of Iraq. Sorry. On the other hand, I don't agree with everything Scott said. He repeats an oft-repeated mantra of the left, that Bush wasn't elected, and this just weakens his argument. Bush was elected. No candidate is responsible for flaws in the system. Had the random outcome in Florida favored Gore, there's no doubt in my mind that he would have taken office without any hesitation. Net-net, if the people who read Scripting News and DaveNet aren't thinking, there isn't much hope for the world. And by the way I have no sympathy for people on the other side of this disagreement who say nasty shit about the US. This is my country, watch what you say about it. Thanks. War commentary Paolo Valdemarin: "After September 11 the US were leading the largest coalition of countries ever seen. Now, whatever the US administration is saying, they are going to a war alone." Actually the British are fighting with the US. Lance Knobel: "I'd like to have seen an alternative to war, but that would have meant an international commitment to intrusive inspections, backed by the threat of force. In the light of French and Russian vacillation, it's very unclear whether that could have worked." Megnut: "I'm uncomfortable with the idea of America unilaterally removing someone from power. And I am very disturbed by the approach the American government has taken to achieve its goals." Karlin Lillington: "The Bush administration has been utterly hopeless and inept in creating a coalition abroad, in showing leadership overseas, in working towards consensus."
DaveNet: Eve of destruction.
BBC: "Developers of file-sharing services have redesigned the applications to use random ports." Reverse Cowgirl: "What is it about brown hair that just says, I'm armed and ready to kill?" Four Guys From Rolla have a tutorial on RSS. Here's the latest trick in marketing conferences. They created a personalized "site" for me. Yeah they got me to click on the link. But I'm not going to the conference. Sorry. I have a confession to make. I never use regular expressions to parse XML. My programming environment has a very good XML compiler, very nicely integrated. It's much easier for me to use it than to hack together something with regexp. Ray Grieselhuber blogged a cross-country drive with pics. In Boston, when listening to NPR they say "WGBH in Boston." Of course, that's the public radio station in Boston. It's world famous. We hear about WGBH even in San Francisco. It's snuck up on me twice, making me giggle both times. I imagine after a while you get used to it. Not there yet. James Cham writes: "I'm a long-time reader, and I thought I'd mention that although WGBH is pretty popular, the public radio station that most people listen to is WBUR (90.9). It's more talk-y/news-y than WGBH's eclectic mix, that's the format that does well in these parts." Another weird thing. Governor Romney. My lawyer in Palo Alto wants to do a conference call at 7:30PM Pacific. That's a bit late for me. I'm already on Eastern time. I can tell I'm going to have a problem here. Being a morning person worked in California. It doesn't work as well in Eastern. Later: I've arrived in Cambridge. Rarin to go! Earlier: I'm on my way to Boston. I'm going to drive through the Berkshires, and approach from the west. When I was a kid we spent vacations there, there are a lot of memories for me on this route. Look for pictures tonight or tomorrow.
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