Scripting News

Were you invited?

Wed, 02 May 2007 00:18:37 GMT

Another exclusive, invite-only tech conference, $3000.

Here's the list of invitees, username "enter" password "thelobby".

Can't believe they didn't invite Scoble. What's up with that?

However, the format seems really interesting. "No panels, no keynotes," which is 2/3 of the disclaimers for BloggerCon (we also featured no audience).

It's a good idea. I'd throw in a few of the Hypercamp ideas as well, but (of course) I wasn't invited (nor would I go to such an exclusive event).

Frankly, I doubt if they needed to make it invite-only with the steep price and long distance (Big Island of Hawaii). The exclusiveness and publishing the invite list is more of a marketing thing, and more than a little unfair to use people's names without their permission, if in fact they didn't have their permission.

Of course you have to look to see if you were invited. Or to see who's cool enough to be invited. Any surprise omissions? Post a comment.

I'm off to Gordon Biersch for dinner with a bunch of nerds who invited themselves. Heh.

Jay Rosen on Frontline's News War

Tue, 01 May 2007 23:02:54 GMT

Jay Rosen: "The way the film was edited to bring out one story: heroic press fighting against ownership and its budget cuts, a government that would like to silence it, and untrained bloggers and amateurs buzzing around, stinging like knats. This is the story Lowell wanted to tell. He's been a part of it in his career and feels very passionate about it. He's newsroom Joe himself, and he's got newsroom Joe's mindset. You let that perspective carry the day. You're entitled to make that decision, which is an editorial decision, and I'm entitled to be angry about it. Because it's inadequate. You had the materials to challenge it more, you just didn't want to."

Today's links

Tue, 01 May 2007 07:00:00 GMT

Jeremie Miller, the designer of Jabber, is joining Wikia.

Today's song: Oh Nine Eff Nine.

Travel day

Tue, 01 May 2007 14:09:06 GMT

Heading back to Berkeley this morning, going through Oakland, and I'll avoid the Maze by taking city streets through Oakland and Berkeley.

Tonight there's a dinner at Gordon Biersch in SF for British blogger Hugh MacLeod. I'll be there if BART travel isn't prohibitive.

Today's links

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:31:40 GMT

Slingbox supports AppleTV.

Adam Curry has a gripe with SplashCast.

The #87th most influential person in IT.

How to design a podcast player

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:11:18 GMT

Notes from today's *excellent* discussion.

It's listed as a panel, but I'm the only official panelist.

Our topic of dicussion is, officially, How to design a podcast player.

I wrote a piece about this, with three points, in February.

1. Self-contained, untethered synchronization, much the same way a Blackberry gets email.

2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production.

3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.

After we discuss that, we'll talk about whatever people want to talk about.

Some more ideas...

1. Checkbox News.

2. Twitter as coral reef.

3. Spreadsheet calls over the Internet.

WebFS

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:44:44 GMT

WebFS is a "web services protocol used to exchange files and associated metadata between web applications and services. It's primary intentions are to allow the free-flow of files and data between web services and applications."

I'm sitting next to Nick Cubrilovic of Omnidrive, who is developing this protocol as an interface to his service, and is working on an open source implementation as well.

Other developers are working on it, but he doesn't have clearance to reveal their names.

He has a private mail list that's he opening up.

Bay Area Outage, Day 2

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 07:00:00 GMT

Raines has an outage update. Like Raines, I made my way from Berkeley to the Oakland Airport yesterday, without incident or traffic. I also took city streets and avoided the Maze, my route would have taken me through the section of freeway that's missing!

Bradley Horowitz, who lives in Berkeley and works at Yahoo has a daily two-way traffic nightmare to look forward to. Maybe enlightened high-tech employers will take this opportunity to distribute their workplace.

Governor Schwartzenegger has declared BART free for all today. What a trip that's going to be. It'll be hard to get a seat on the Richmond line.

My Twitter Friends, Day 2

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:25:54 GMT

Yesterday I documented the new My Twitter Friends feature in the OPML Editor.

At the time I hadn't tested OPML inclusion in a Twitter post, but today I had a chance (while watching the Microsoft keynotes) and it worked.

Here's a screen shot with an outline expanded.

And here's the Twitter post that created the link.

Blogzone video

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:27:49 GMT

I'm hanging out with Scoble at the Blogzone at the Venetian. We're going to watch the keynote here. There's a guy in an Elvis outfit here. Really embarassed for the guy.

This happens to me too

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:14:42 GMT

Ross Mayfield: "I was reading the NY Times and glanced at the top right of the page looking for the time."

Wikipedia editing

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:58:11 GMT

Yesterday I did something I had never done before, I edited an article on Wikipedia. And then I edited another.

The first one was about the MacArthur Maze. It had already been updated to include the outage, I just fixed some typos, and rearranged the words so they flowed better. Then I decided to link to my page of links about the news, expecting that would be reverted in a few days at most as the full story was documented, but it was reverted within minutes, as were all my other edits.

Then I decided to look at the RSS page to see if it linked to the RSS 2.0 spec. It didn't, so I added a link. I haven't been back to see if that has been reverted. BTW, most of that page is worthless, things that never happened, Rove-like spin from god knows who. That's the thing about Wikipedia, it's a free-for-all slamfest, and you don't have a right to confront your accusers. Feh.

Movies from the Blogzone

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 04:04:55 GMT

Joshua Allen on leaking tomorrow's announcements.

Jeff Sandquist on Pahrump, NV.

Miguel de Icaza on the name Miguel and how it feels to be at a Microsoft event.

The scene at the Blogzone.

Today's links

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:11:57 GMT

BART tips on commuting in the New Bay Area.

Scoble is hosting a geek dinner for Hugh MacLeod in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Dinner tonight, 6:30PM, Grand Lux Cafe

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:07:39 GMT

Bloggers dinner tonight at the Grand Lux Cafe at the Venetian at 6:30PM.

Sign up, comments, on the wiki.

Seeya there!!

PS: My flight gets in at 3:30PM.

PPS: Get ready for weather shock. High of 94 today. Hot!

PPPS: I've got my Sprint Ambassador phone with me. 415-871-7163.

Major Bay Area highway outage

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:00:00 GMT

This morning there's a report on local news that a critical piece of Bay Area roadway is out, and may be out for weeks or months.

The biggest traffic bottleneck in a traffic-challenged metropolitan area is known as the MacArthur Maze. Four major freeways, 880, 580, 24 and 80 all come together from the East Bay, and from the other side -- the Bay Bridge connects all that with San Francisco.

Early this morning a gasoline tanker truck caught fire on a ramp connecting 580 westbound with 880, causing 250 yards of freeway to collapse.

Google map of the maze.

Reports from SF Chron, KGO, Mercury News, Contra Costa Times.

New Twitter support in OPML Editor

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 15:12:24 GMT

Yesterday I released new code that allows you to browse the posts from all the people you're following on Twitter.

How to: 1. Choose Update opml.root from the File menu. 2. Click on OK. 3. Quit and relaunch the OPML Editor app.

There's a new Twitter sub-menu of the Community menu, with two commands: 1. The Preferences command allows you to set your Twitter username and password, and 2. My Twitter Friends opens an outline window with a list of your friends.

In the window, when you double-click on a friend's name, after a short delay, we display the last 20 status messages posted by that person. If the the message contained a URL, the outline node is a link, if you double-click it, the link opens in your web browser (screen shot). Although I haven't tried it yet, if the URL ends with .opml, it should open in-place, since that's a hack the OPML Editor uses to trigger an OPML inclusion.

As usual, report any problems here, or on one of the mail lists.

PS: Amyloo got it before I even wrote it up.

Spreadsheet calls over the Internet?

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:38:24 GMT

I like having a spreadsheet around, but until Google came out with their browser-based spreadsheet, I hadn't used one in many years. I find Office too much software, and all the other spreadsheets I had learned either didn't run on my machine or weren't being actively maintained. Without thinking much I had stopped using them.

But now I use it for all kinds of little tasks that require an array of values, or a bit of calculation. Now I'd like to start building more of my life around a spreadsheet, to use it to monitor various processes on my servers, but to do this, there will have to be a protocol for plugging web apps into the spreadsheet.

Here's the syntax I imagine using:

[server].getPortfolioValue (username, password)

It would work just like a built-in spreadsheet function except the call would go out over the net, run the procedure on the indicated server, and display the value it returns, formatted according to how the spreadsheet author says it should be formatted.

The server url would include a protocol, server name, port and path. I would recommend doing XML-RPC first, it's the simplest, most uniformly implemented RPC out there. You'd have to do some form of SOAP, and extend REST with standards for serializing and de-serializing parameter lists and returned values (or you could adopt the serialization format from one of the other protocols).

Example: xmlrpc:\//rpc.fidelity.com:7092/

Interestingly, this is one of the demos Microsoft did for Multiplan for the IBM-PC in the early 80s when it was competing with Visicalc. Then, it was a good vision, but impractical. Today it's practical and would be very useful and would lead to many interesting apps, perhaps even businesses.

Today's links

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 23:18:58 GMT

"So what?" is exactly right. Imagine saying that the number of telephone calls had stalled at 15.6 million. Or the number of Word docs. Blogs aren't businesses, they're documents, or at best collections of documents. Counting them is an meaningless exercise. Look for individuals who are changing things using blogs, that's what's important.

Phil Wolff: "Skype lawyer Seema Sharma emailed blogger Jan Geirnaert Friday afternoon. She told him his popular skype-watch.com and skype-gadgets.com blogs put him in legal jeopardy."

42 people have signed the Mix 07 wiki page so far.

Twitter as coral reef

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 07:00:00 GMT

Calling a technology a coral reef is the highest compliment I can pay.

Here's how the story goes. Scattered throughout tropical seas are coral reefs that started when a ship sank and sea creatures made it their home. Then the predators of those creatures started hanging out, and their predators, all the way up the food chain. Eventually, if the ocean climate was right, a coral reef would appear, much larger than the wrecked ship that started it all.

These days they deliberately sink ships where they want a coral reef.

It's a little sad for the ship, to be devoured this way. I know how it feels, Radio 8 is hardly used anymore, although I think it's a great piece of software, it got consumed in the flames of people who didn't like RSS, but despite their protests, the coral reef did show up, and now RSS has become a thriving ecosystem.

When I develop something new these days, I automatically think of using Twitter as a back-end to connect users of my software. If other developers aren't doing this, I imagine they will soon. And Twitter will beget competitors, and they will have to have APIs if they want to be competitive (Twitter has one) and by now I think they'll have to be compatible with Twitter's to be taken seriously.

The role that Twitter is playing is a vital one -- it's a notification system, always-up, and keeping it up is someone else's problem. As a system designer, I'd like to believe that Twitter or something like it will always be there. I'm not sure of that yet, but it seems we're close.

I know Microsoft is rolling out the red carpet for them in Las Vegas next week. Not sure I like that, or if I would like it if I were Twitter's owners, I'm suspicious of Microsoft's embrace, after lots of experience. But for me, there's really not much risk, even if MS were to try to eat their lunch, as I said, they'd have to be compatible, right?? We'll have to ask Ray about that.

In any case, Twitter is becoming, for me, a coral reef. That's cool.