Scripting News

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 00:33:18 GMT

Only Scripting News asks "What will you do while Dubya gives his speech tonight?"

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 22:17:55 GMT

Jing Jing, home of Spicy Noodles, has a website.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 22:26:39 GMT

I've booked my next trip east. I'll be in NY betw Feb 5-7, then Boston betw Feb 8-11, and back in NY betw Feb 12-16. The beginning and ending dates are fixed, but the time betw Boston and NY is flexible. I'm looking into getting a classroom for an evening session open to all Boston-area bloggers to talk about whatever we want to talk about. Here's an idea of how these meetings work. BTW, the round trip air fare betw SFO and JFK was $340; that's non-stop on a major airline.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 21:58:59 GMT

Michael Winser is one of the developers of Microsoft's Web browser. He was a frequent contributor here during the browser wars of the 90s. What he says about performance of HTML tables is authoritative. "There's only one solution: change the problem," he says.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 19:29:48 GMT

One of the more interesting ideas in Cosmos is that we might live inside a black hole. It's one way to grapple with the finiteness of the universe. "Where does the universe end?" asks the student. "Is there a wall, and if so, what's on the other side?" Well, if you lived inside a black hole you might ask the same questions. Exactly the same questions.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 22:02:04 GMT

Reuters: "Kazaa said Tuesday that it had countersued film and music companies seeking to shut it down, alleging antitrust violations and overzealous copyright protection."

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 16:55:37 GMT

News.Com: "Opera Software says the future of its Mac browser is clouded now that Apple is producing its own."

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 14:32:52 GMT

Douglas Bowman's markover for Weblogs.Com. Very nice!

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 14:56:26 GMT

Simon Willison cracks the nut as well.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 16:35:41 GMT

8:30AM Pacific: I applied Bowman's design to Weblogs.Com. The text is a little small, but otherwise it's great. It's much faster at refreshing than the table-based design.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 14:33:00 GMT

Wired: "Anyone can contribute an article to the Wikipedia."

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 14:46:52 GMT

Count the errors in this BBC article, starting with the title which does not describe what the article contains.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 11:16:47 GMT

NY Times: Worm Hits Microsoft, Which Ignored Own Advice.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 12:24:11 GMT

Adam explains how his weblog became part of his TV show.

Lunch in Switzerland

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 11:51:49 GMT

Lance Knobel: "As I write this, my friends in Davos will be making their way up the mountain for the annual highlight of the meeting: the Schatzalp lunch. The lunch is on the 'snow terrace' of the Schatzalp Hotel, which has the faded grandeur you'd expect of the former sanitorium and setting of Mann's Magic Mountain. Sadly, it looks like today there won't be much of a view."

This gives me goosebumps. The venue of the Schatzalp lunch is a slice of heaven on earth. Photo.

In 2000, the year I attended, the dotcom bubble was still very much inflated, probably at its peak. I was one of a handful of people from the Land Of Dotcom, so the investment bankers wanted to hear what I thought about this or that or the something else. For me that peaked at the Schatzalp. Neither will probably ever happen again. But what a grand day that was! Oh man.

RSS enclosures

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 11:31:25 GMT

My next tutorial for RSS developers is going to be about enclosures. These are do-it-yourself things, with the goal of helping developers of weblog tools, aggregators and news readers support the feature. So far I've done tutorials for comments and guids. The next is enclosures.

Enclosures are easy to support, but we need an example to work with to bootstrap it. It should update at least once a day, with a new enclosure that we can download in the middle of the night. So I asked Adam Curry to help out here, and he agreed. So here's his RSS feed, subscribable, for testing enclosures:

Adam Curry: Welcome to the Payload Channel.

I'm going to use this opportunity to write a new browser-based enclosure function for Radio that notifies you in a module in the Status Center when new enclosures have arrived.

CSS, a black hole

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 11:30:13 GMT

Reading through the first batch of email this morning. People responding to the query about a CSS version of Weblogs.Com are asking why I want to nuke the table. Performance. I explained it. If it's not possible to get that kind of layout with CSS, just say so. But this is not a religious thing. Believe me. I explained that too. Makes me wonder if people bothered to read my request before writing (long) responses.

Bravo. Gary Taylor understood what I was asking for. It's probably not cross-browser though.

I think I give up on CSS. It's a black hole. Andreas Helstrom suggested splitting it up into multiple pages. That's probably the most workable solution that works in every browser without support headaches into the next millennium. Onward!

Wait a minute. It looks like Dave Polaschek nailed it.