Scripting News

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 22:56:18 GMT

News.Com: "America Online has quietly secured a patent that could shake up the competitive landscape for instant messaging software."

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 22:20:31 GMT

JY Stervinou read on Joi Ito's blog that I asked Google's Sergey Brin if he would read the changes.xml file from weblogs.com to make Google's index even more just-in-time. I asked in public after asking privately several times. Brin seemed genuinely interested. The people at Supernova definitely wanted it. I hope it happens. ";->"

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 20:10:19 GMT

News.Com: Elcomsoft Not Guilty.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 18:52:46 GMT

IETF: Using XML-RPC in BEEP. Interesting.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 19:27:52 GMT

Matthew Langham: Last-minute business RSS.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 19:14:47 GMT

Tim Knip has Groove talking to Radio. Apparently it was quite a bit of work. I'm surprised because Radio has a BDG-compliant SOAP implementation, and that's a very big target and it's totally frozen. I guess it's no secret that I feel that as new implementations come online they should be tested with the ones that came before and they should interop.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 18:32:07 GMT

Several changes for the non-RDF module for copyright licenses. The changes allow the example file to pass through the validator, and allow authors to use licenses not from Creative Commons. This is the last call for comments, later today, if there are no problems, I plan to remove the caveat from the status section.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 18:12:39 GMT

Mary Jo Foley: "Could Microsoft be working behind the scenes on another new programming language?"

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 17:39:36 GMT

Daniel Berlinger: Proposed changes for RSD v0.7.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 16:10:57 GMT

BlogTalk is a European weblog conference set for May 2003, in Vienna, Austria.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 15:40:46 GMT

The Boston Globe surveys (some of) Boston's weblogs.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 15:30:02 GMT

Wired: "She was told her butt would be out of harm's way in 24 hours."

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 10:40:30 GMT

Before I go back to sleep (it's 2:40AM) I'll leave you with a pointer to an essay I published on this day in 1999, before the milennium rollover. It's a really nice one, and even though we're not rolling over on such a big level this time, much of what's there still applies. This is a tough time of year for everyone. Cut everyone some slack, including yourself. And when possible, use your programmer mind in a positive way. Look for ways to make it easier for our less technical friends, and look for shortcuts, and don't fight Murphy. "A deep breath and a smile and keep on truckin!"

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 10:27:09 GMT

Matthew Thomas suggests that the license element in the creativeCommons RSS module have an href attribute that points to the license instead of the value of the element doing the pointing. His reasoning is that the URL isn't meant to be read by humans and therefore should be an attribute. I had never heard that before, and at first dismissed it, but then thought, hmm, that's an interesting idea. If you feel strongly one way or the other please post a message.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 10:17:28 GMT

Another person who works in the middle of the California night is Italy's Paolo Valdemarin. Today he has an essay that explains the work they're doing on "topic maps" which is exactly what I was calling "timeless weblogs." It's the intersection of OPML and RSS and it's cool. I've not implemented it, they have. I look forward to trying it.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 09:33:02 GMT

I love working in the middle of the night (it's 1:30AM) because my time coincides with people like Phillip Pearson, who is a very generous programmer in New Zealand, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, and that's fcuking far away. Tonight Phillip asks if we'd like a search engine for weblogs, written in Python, as part of his community server, and the answer is absolutely, please, it's a much requested feature, especially if it performs well and stays up without too much fuss and/or muss.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 09:20:52 GMT

I didn't make it SF last night for the Creative Commons party. Lots of accidents on the road, chalk it up to a weather outage. I hope the launch was great. Sorry I wasn't there!

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 09:14:57 GMT

Thanks to Adam Curry once again for being the most excellent guinea pig. Or viewed another way, canary in a coalmine. He's trying out my new weblog outliner, and noticing that his copy of Rado is doing a lot of work at the top of every minute. Other people are likely to notice this too, especially if you've got a lot of Tools installed. On a modern OS like Windows 2000, XP or Mac OS X, you won't notice it in other apps, but you will notice it in the Radio app. When you're using the outliner, you're typing in the Radio app, quite possibly for the first time. In Adam's case, I guess it's been a while since he worked in the Radio environment. The solution is to uninstall Tools one by one until you figure out which one is using all the cycles. Or get a second computer for the myrid of background tasks running on your behalf. I'm about to do that myself. ";->"

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 09:24:42 GMT

Canary in a Coalmine: "First to fall over when the atmosphere is less than perfect"