Scripting News

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 03:03:14 GMT

Tim O'Reilly, via email, re this post: "Actually, Nutch has no ambitions to dethrone Google. It's just trying to provide an open source reference implementation of search to help keep Google and other search engines honest, by letting people compare the results of an engine whose algorithms and methodologies are transparent and accessible. It also aims to give a platform for people outside of the search heavyweights to research new search algorithms."

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 00:08:34 GMT

Geoff Heard has been marshalling MORE 3.1 docs. He has PDFs of the full manual. This is pretty incredible. Released in 1991, MORE works on today's Macs. You can download the software for free on outliners.com.

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 23:05:40 GMT

News.Com: "McDonald's said it plans to sell Internet access inside 100 locations in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas."

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 23:12:05 GMT

Charles Cooper: Here we go again.

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 22:21:57 GMT

DeanSpace: Why Use DeanSpace?

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 23:19:02 GMT

Thanks to Ole Eichorn for finding a bug in my RSS feed. The guid needed to be adjusted by three hours in order to be a permalink. It was a good guid (say that five times fast) but it was not pointing to anything on Scripting News. The bug was introduced when I moved from California to Boston in March. At first I thought Ole was being anal retentive, and told him so (not in those words of course) but he was right. It takes great courage to persist, and Ole clearly has great courage. Thank you. Now my permalinks should work. Praise Murphy!

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 23:41:36 GMT

Speaking of Ole, here's one of my favorite Ole and Lena jokes.

Howto: Generate an RSS 2.0 feed for Typepad.

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 19:35:32 GMT

EFF: "You could spend up to five years in prison, pay a $250,000 fine and lose your right to vote for trading a single copyrighted song if the Author, Consumer and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act is passed by Congress."

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 19:14:27 GMT

Greg Hanek explains why the XML-RPC site is getting so much traffic. \"Do a Google search on 'RPC' and see what is at the top of the list. The latest nasty worm (aka LoveSan, MSBlast) that affects Windows users takes advantage of the RPC hole that exists before applying one of the many WinOS patches. It is currently running amok, and causing many people a great deal of distress, and I suspect many folks are trying to use google to find out what RPC is.\"

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 11:53:47 GMT

News.Com: Is ZIP coming undone?

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 09:59:32 GMT

Sadly, this year I will not write about the Bees.

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 15:35:24 GMT

Google now has a built-in calculator. Coool. How about a built-in dishwasher?

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 11:58:39 GMT

The XML-RPC site is getting a lot more traffic lately. Nothing's changing, just lots more hits. And the referers don't reveal anything. Not sure what's happening there.

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 16:28:55 GMT

Google names eight enterprise customers of their search appliance: Pfizer, the US Army, the city of San Diego, Xerox, Hitachi Data Systems, Nextel Communications, Procter & Gamble and Discovery Communications.

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 14:40:52 GMT

BBC: "The earliest bloggers have been at it for two years now." Yet another idiotic piece about how much better the pros are than amateurs. A basic fact like this, so easy to check. The earliest bloggers have been "at it" since 1994, for almost nine years. No signs of it slowing down. Wishful thinking, perhaps?

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 11:43:22 GMT

Seth Finkelstein solved the puzzle on 20 Questions. A person who is both animal and vegetable. Read the comments to find out who it is.

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 10:55:14 GMT

Godin: "What is it about ubiquity that breeds contempt?"

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 10:07:58 GMT

Ted Leung writes about jury duty. It's like watching a courtroom drama on TV, but the camera is in a weird place. I wrote about my experience with jury duty in 1996.

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 10:16:09 GMT

Want to know what I'm subscribed to? Here's my subs file, in OPML. Here's the same list rendered in HTML. I'm going to do some more work on this tomorrow.

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 09:44:27 GMT

Great piece by Tim Bray that explains how designers should use XML. He describes the Worse Is Better school of XML format design. The names we use for elements are the worst-possible names, but they allow our software to interoperate. Namespaces create elements with names with colons in them. I bet Tim agrees that funky feeds, even if they're valid RSS, hurt interop. So much of this is obvious, yet we spend years arguing about it.