Sunday, February 28, 1999

If you're interested in XML-RPC stuff, today's been pretty active. We have support for the base64 data type in our server now, and we're working with Hannes Wallnöfer from Austria on teaching Mail to the Future to serve Java applets, of all things! It's futuristic, but maybe not all that futuristic... 

www.backup.com, at $99 per year per 100 MB, now has a free competitor, Atrieva, which gives you 10 MB for free. Forever? 

InfoWorld: Golden era of app development? The buzzwords are different but the religion is the same. Given enough time, more RAM, bigger disks, faster CPUs, faster networks, of course application development gets easier. 

Dan Gillmor: Linux in the spotlight. Hey Dan, I like the Bookmark section on your column. How about linking to Scripting News? ;-> 

Saturday, February 27, 1999

Mail to the Future now supports templates, allowing XML-RPC-savvy clients to push mail messages thru stationery.  

But Dave, Do you love Microsoft? An answer to a frequently asked question. 

Netscape: Communicator 4.5.1 Release Notes. Thanks to Lawrence Lee for the pointer. He says "It doesn't say anything about changes to how the keyword system works and the binary isn't available yet to test it. Should be out in a few days." 

NY Times: For Microsoft, humbled may not mean defeated. 

News.com: Layoffs threaten VRML's future. 

News.com: LinuxWorld draws Industry Leaders. "Microsoft is not exhibiting at the show, the company said." 

Microsoft: Creating a UNIX Application Using the Win32 API. 

Web Techniques on Netscape's new rendering engine, Gecko.  

NY Times: Even on the web, major political parties have the advantage. "...mainstream candidates embraced the Web while their third-party opponents largely neglected it." 

SF Chronicle: Planning your day online. 

The text file that CyberSitter uses to block access to sites it deems unacceptable for children. They also block sites that are critical of CyberSitter. 

Friday, February 26, 1999

Important: The following userland.com servers have been moved behind a new T1 line and may not be accessible for a few days. They are: search.userland.com, docserver.userland.com. 

Reuters: Taco Bell dog inspires movie. 

MacWEEK's Cameron Crotty has found a new love. 

Bernie De Koven, an expert in meeting and outlining, but a Frontier newbie, posted an essay on outlining and Frontier, and Phil Suh, an expert on websites and scripting, puts it all in context and outlines a roadmap for giving Bernie what he wants. I love the web! 

InternetWorld: Lawsuits challenge ad sales based on keywords. 

Netscape 4.5 sends domains you visit back to a Netscape-owned server and they don't tell users they're doing it. We covered this in depth last October, and received assurances from Netscape that users would be informed of their choice in 4.5.1. Until the promises are fulfilled, the software they're shipping is dangerous and it should not be recommended to people who aren't fully aware of the privacy issues. 

InternetWeek: Microsoft pulls MSIE beta from web.  

Dan Gillmor: Microsoft's Best Hope. "It now seems inconceivable that Microsoft could come out of the trial with a victory."  

NY Times: On the web, ad and editorial lines blur. 

Thursday, February 25, 1999

Greg Pierce asks When will we reach Nirvana?  

Updated: suites.slideshow. Makes it easy to do presentation-style websites using Frontier's outliner. 

Here's an example of a slideshow produced with the suite. 

Component-Net, publishers of DominoPower and PalmPower, are looking for a Frontier programmer to help with their publications, in or near Princeton NJ. 

HyperSpace uses "existing technology to deliver improved bandwidth from the web server to the clients browser without impacting the infrastructure of the web or the web server." 

CNN: Top 100 Stories of the 20th Century. 

CNN: New Nixon tape transcripts released on Web. 

From the Hell Hath No Fury Department.. Chris Nolan at the SJ Merc takes several shots, probably well-deserved, in the last section of her current column. Hi Chris! 

However, Chris raises a serious issue. There's a new site called www.davenetics.com, that's a clear ripoff of DaveNet. I've been writing and linking on the Net using the DaveNet name since 1994. Be original guys. This is very confusing, as Chris points out.  

However, I realllly like their template! Nice green color, fast loading, they have rounded corners on the tables. Excellent design! Which raises an interesting question. If it's OK for them to copy my name, is it OK for me to copy their design? I'd love to hear from someone at "Davenetics". 

News.com: Broadband ISP Road Runner searches for CEO. 

Dan Bricklin, one of the two authors of VisiCalc, has an excellent website on the history of the first personal computer spreadsheet. I was there! I remember my first demo of VisiCalc. "This is god!" I said to myself. Like a lot of people who had dreams of what PCs could become, that first glimpse changed the way I think forever. 

Dan has a scan of Ben Rosen's review of VisiCalc in his newsletter, which was the precursor to Esther Dyson's RELease 1.0. (REL stands for Rosen Electronics Letter.) 

Dan is speaking on March 3 at the San Jose Tech Museum. 

1/4/95: Demoing Software for Fun & Profit. 

Wednesday, February 24, 1999

DaveNet: When Microsoft Loses.  

Next Thursday at Seybold/Boston, Scripting for Production Automation. 

News.com: Olivetti renews bid for Telecom Italia. Trieste telco. 

Internet America, a recent IPO, has a great ticker symbol. 

California Highway Patrol, Traffic Incident Information Page. 

Apple Australia is syndicating a bunch of sites, including Scripting News! What an honor. Greetings to Apple Australia! How do you say it? G'day! 

I heard from Tony Stevenson, the husband of webmaster from Apple Australia. He uses a Perl script called Daily Update to grab the HTML from the Avantgo version of Scripting News. Thanks for the info, mate! 

I think this piece about an Apple employee being fired is a joke. 

Press release: Platinum to release source for VRML products. 

Wired: The dawn of the infomediary. Yo Fred! 

News.com: Intel demos 1000MhZ Pentium. 

Rick Segal, a former Microsoft exec, has a different point of view on the Microsoft v Blue Mountain Arts case. "..as competition drops off, the big guy gets sloppy, lazy, ultimately unresponsive and arrogant.." 

Tuesday, February 23, 1999

DaveNet: Blue Mountain Arts. 

The Seattle area has a really cool website that allows you to monitor traffic conditions. They also have webcams set up so you can see for yourself what's going on. This is very nice! 

You can almost spy on Microsoft thru one of the webcams.. 

Interesting! Blue Mountain Arts won an injunction against Microsoft in late January. 

At the same time, we're still curious why David Shinpaugh can't download a fresh copy of MSIE 5.0b2/Win. 

Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Boston have traffic cams too. 

Even sexier, you can use a Java applet to see where Seattle's buses are! 

News.com: Microsoft argues against OS tinkering. 

Is Mr. Wakeup Phone Call to the Future? 

Wired: Go.com doing well. "Higgins said that, unlike other Internet networks or hubs, the Go Network is a tightly integrated coalition of sites 

with a universal navigation, registration, and personalization scheme." 

Chuck Shotton and Dan Shafer debate the merits of server-side programming in Java. Dan says that the best thing about Java is "no memory leaks." I think that's funny because this morning I'm fighting a huge memory leak on my server! Let me add my two cents, there's nothing like memory leaks to spoil a sysop's day! And even more ironic, I think it's some code that's running every five minutes because Chuck's server in Virginia is calling it every five minutes, via XML-RPC! 

I get more and more respect for Murphy every friggin day!!! 

Tomalak notes a Yahoo stylistic change. 

A peek behind the scenes. Here's a log that shows me what sys.memAvail is once a minute. 

John Glassburner won a small victory in his fight to get the word "Aretha" added to the Microsoft Office dictionary.  

Aretha is not in WordNet either. 

BTW, it would be really cool to get an XML-RPC-based WordNet server up somewhere so I could call it. The dictionary and software are free for downloading from Princeton's server. 

Dan Gillmor: Push has a new application? I call these JIT-SEs, and they're invaluable for researchers, writers, columnists. 

News.com: Domain name disputes loom. 

Monday, February 22, 1999

DaveNet: What a Month! 

Missing in Action? The MSIE5 Beta. What do developers do when their hard disk crashes? Help, anyone from Microsoft. Shinpaugh needs your browser, how else are we going to do XML-RPC on the workstation?  

PC Mag's John Dvorak just posted a piece describing Windows 2001, a vision that's remarkably similar to the one expressed in today's DaveNet piece. I like my screen shot better! 

Here's John Dvorak's personal portal. 

Greg Rushton improved my suites.netDictionary. 

MacWEEK: New Browser Comes from Germany. And check out the editor's note on that page. They're having fun at MacWEEK. That warms my heart! 

Textfiles.com turns the web into an early 80s PC! It's character based, 8.3. 

News.com: AOL Homepage Service Bombarded. 

Scripting News 2 is a channel at my.netscape.com. 

Interactive Week: CNET repositions as a vertical portal. Smart! 

Control panel screen shot #4. Lots of new stuff. It connects to our todolist server via XML-RPC of course. There's a link manager that's smart (it uses a server pref to remember which pane is frontmost). Since I'm a word guy I put a real dictionary on my control panel. Right now you're thinking this is just like my.yahoo.com, well, it is and it isn't. Our application still is content management. Once more we're learning that everything you need to run a great portal is also needed to run a great CMS. 

BTW, one thing that may not be obvious from that screen shot, the application the browser is talking to is running on my desktop machine, not the server. This is the Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server vision, realized. Practical benefit? I can access stuff thru my control panel that is private, stuff I don't want to store on a server. 

USA Today: IBM working on a system-on-a-chip. "You could have enough memory to store voice-mail messages right on the cell phone." Of course the phone should be a web server too. 

Adobe: Golive 4. 

Builder.com: To Mac or not to Mac. They say that Macs can't be used for Enterprise Content Management (Vignette, Texis, etc). I'd like to see them back that up, even though they do say UserLand is working on it. I would say Macs have a distinct advantage here. Why not compare the content management on News.com (a Vignette site) with content management at MacWEEK (a UserLand site). Compare users to users. How do writers at News.com feel about StoryServer? How do the MacWEEK people feel about Frontier? Builder.com could help clear things up instead of adding to the confusion. 

Do you use a Mac server in a content management scenario? 

Michael Benevento, at Apple-Europe, manages "a site with 120 authors spread all over Europe maintaining around 60 websites simultaneously." Enterprise Content Management. 

Forbes: Mining for Gold. 

BTW, to people who send me mail asking when a Linux version of Frontier is coming, if you want a respectful answer, don't call the computers I use PeeCees. Only very immature people can dismiss hundreds of millions of users that way. Or maybe very stupid people. 

And if you send me a personal comment on this I will remember your name forever! People can be so intrusive. Simple message: MYOB. This is between me and the idiots who think they can win without working with Mac and Windows people. 

Sunday, February 21, 1999

Consider this screen shot. How do I disable Microsoft's friendly front-end so I can dig in and find out what went wrong? In less than forty minutes I had the answer. Excellent! 

Bernie De Koven describes an experiment he did with online technography. 

PJama is an "experimental persistent programming system for the Java programming language, that embodies the notion of orthogonal persistence: an approach to making application data persist between program executions with the minimum possible effort required from the application programs themselves." Frontier users have had one of these since 1992; all globals in Frontier persist, you have to do nothing to make them persist. That's pretty close to minimum! 

A wise person asked "If Nirvana was the code name for Frontier 6, what could possibly come after that? In other words, what would the codename for Frontier 7 be?" Hmmmm. 

Another wise person once asked, many years ago, how could there possibly be a WordPerfect 2.0? Maybe that was their downfall? 

Saturday, February 20, 1999

Reuters: Movie critic Gene Siskel dies.  

Upside asks: "Ever walk through a graveyard and wonder about the people behind the names on the tombstones?" 

Jeff Veen: Whatever happened to PNG?  

Is it just me or is everything happening today about dead things and people? 

I went thru the picture archive and came across some beautiful pictures that I wanted to share: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. 

Builder.com wants you to choose the most innovative web people.  

InfoWorld: LinuxWorld Announcements. March 1-4, San Jose CA. 

Upside: Vignette vs Broadvision. 

Red Herring: Vignette's IPO. 

Press Release: Web3D consortium launches X3D standardization initiative for web and broadcast 3D graphics. 

Standard: War at Wired. 

Friday, February 19, 1999

PC WEEK looks at Jigsaw. "Jigsaw's object-oriented design allows it to handle requests efficiently and maintain a database of all the server's resource information. That design also allows the server to filter requests and maintain object-based authentication and allows users to easily publish files directly to the Web server." 

If you're running Jigsaw, please tell us about it. How does it compare with Frontier 6? 

CNN: Internet IPOs Soar. "WebTrends shares rocket 177% at their debut; Vignette jumps 152%." Congrats to Vignette! 

NewsTracker query for Vignette; WordNet query. 

New release: mailToTheFuture.root. It's the definitive sample app for Frontier 6, uses membership and net storage. XML-RPC, XML and HTML interfaces. It's the modern version of BarChart. Frontier 5.1.6 users can review this app to see what development in Frontier 6 will be like. Comin soon! 

Web Review: Generating Flash on the Fly. 

A lot of personal downtime today due to an installation disaster with Netscape Communicator 4.5/WinNT. Everything's back to normal now, but it was scary for a while.  

ZDNet: Window spoofing bug hits Communicator. 

Cameron Crotty: "Up until now, the Internet as you know it has been a test run -- a prototype. Certainly we've seen some amazing demonstrations and some genuinely new businesses. But you ain't seen nothing yet." Yes yes yes! 

News.com: Adobe to show GoLive.  

Chuck Shotton: 'While waiting on downloads I've been making little, dorky paper cut-out turbines to spin on the head of a pin, driven by the heat rising from the computer monitors. I decided that while cute, they weren't high tech enough, so I went looking for info on Stirling Engines. I found a great site in Japan that shows how to build one out of a tin can, balsa wood, a balloon, some wire, and a candle. Allegedly, the thing runs at several hundred RPM off the heat of the candle!' 

InfoWorld: Microsoft Free to Clone Java? "Two weeks ago Microsoft asked if [the injunction] applied to independently built Java technologies -- so-called "clean room" products that do not contain any of Sun's Java code. Whyte clarified the injunction Thursday, saying it did not apply to independent Java technologies." 

Data Communications: Broadband means broad change. 

In May of last year I wanted to do automated backups and run a radio station over broadband. 

Melanie Warner: Which comes first, the product or the IPO? 

Wired: Compaq questioned Microsoft monopoly. 

SJ Merc: Purple Moon, a pioneering maker of software for girls, went out of business Thursday. 

Thursday, February 18, 1999

PC Week: Microsoft's Quiet Little Database. 

The Economist: Hackers Rule. Great picture! 

Ian Beatty: SuperCalendar macro. 

This site has the browser-based editor I want. Help! Save me from the POS that's in MSIE. 

David Carter-Tod posits about POS and posts M3K. 

Progress! Here's the latest screen shot of my news editor control panel as it looked at about 5:10AM. Lots of new features. It shows a preview of the home page, saving me a few steps and giving me more confidence that everything looks good over there. 

How does it get the preview? Via XML-RPC, of course! 

More progress! Now I have a dictionary in my control panel. It connects with WordNet, run by princeton.edu, parses the result and displays it for me. It's important that it's on the same page as all the other stuff. Allows me to play with words. There's more to the story. 

News.com: Vignette Raises IPO Price. 

Red Herring: Marimba Pushes to IPO. 

From HotWired's archives, a Brock Meeks column that identifies Henry Hyde as the "..water boy for Senator James Exon by carrying the Communications Decency Act over to the House side and wedging it into the telecom bill. Hyde is also responsible for adding the language to that bill that criminalizes putting abortion information on the Internet.." Thanks to Matthias Neeracher for this pointer. 

News.com: Coke Registers Dasani.com. They conclude that this is their new brand for bottled water. Now, Microsoft has registered baboon.com. What would that mean? 

In the GNOME world BABOON is an acronym for Baboon Allows Baboon Objects Over Networks. 

WordNet on Baboon. 

CNN: Microsoft Denies Sabotage. 

CNN: Clinton Returns to New Hampshire. "While Lockhart insisted Clinton has no plan to gloat in New Hampshire, even he admitted the president is unlikely to ignore the political significance of his visit." Clinton is the master of chutzpah, it's less than a week since the acquittal. I am very impressed! (No sarcasm.) 

InfoWorld: Lotus delays Notes 5 release. 

Wednesday, February 17, 1999

InfoWorld: MediaSurface stresses content management. Congrats to MediaSurface for closing the CNN website. 

A new Mail to the Future service. Now you can receive links from Tomalak's Realm every night at 12 midnight Pacific.  

Business Week: How vulnerable is Microsoft? 

ZDNet: ISP offers free PC. Requires three-year subscription. 

Wired: Intel Thinks Different Too. 

Proof that Tinky Winky is not gay. 

Please don't send pictures or movies or collections of icons via email. If you want me to look at something, put up a web page and send me a URL. In this day and age there's no reason to send big things around via email, esp unsolicited big things. 

Matt Dornquast is looking for info on cXML. 

People are buzzin about aint-it-cool-news.com. 

The project I'm working on generates a stream of feature requests for browser makers. Here's one. I'd like to, in an anchor tag, be able to specify a link that's traversed if the user holds down the Ctrl/Cmd key when clicking on the link. I'd use that to let the user edit the page instead of viewing the page. Yes I know about security, and it's fully addressed in my scenario. (The editing happens on my own computer only.) 

Script Meridian: Regex 2.0.1. 

Silly Putty on the web. 

Pictures of amazing things people have created with Silly Putty. Most of them are pretty silly! 

Will Trillich started a Frontier benchmarks site. 

InfoWorld: IBM to embrace Linux on server hardware. 

News.com: Time-Warner to use News Corp content on broadband systems. 

USA Today: Stock Fraud on the Net. 

When too much is not enough.. PoliticalJunkie.com. 

This message on the W3C's WebDAV mail list announces the opening of RFCland 1.0, the XMLization of the IETF RFCs. 

NY Times op-ed: Hillary Thinks, Rudy Waits, Pundits Yearn. "The idea of running Mrs. Clinton for the Senate while her husband is still in the White House was born of a mixture of great production values and political desperation." 

Tuesday, February 16, 1999

Eric Soroos's mail server for Frontier now supports APOP authentication. "This package connects incoming email into the Frontier workflow process. Incoming mail can trigger any script you care to write. The applications can range from personal email, to mailing list archives, to XML-RPC interaction. This is simply one more way to get information in and out of a Frontier ODB." 

I spent much of today developing a new control panel for editing the Scripting News home page. As it develops I'll show you the screen shots. I'm really excited about this, now that a pattern has developed the thing is practically designing itself.  

MacWorld: Media Management Tools. 

humansource.com looks a lot like Jakob Nielsen's useit.com. Cameron Barrett spotted the similarity, and Nielsen responded. 

News.com: Marimba files for IPO. 

I have a script that opens a web page in my browser, how can I force it to refresh the page from the server? It must work on Mac and Windows and in all popular web browsers. Answer. 

MacWEEK: Summer Expo in NY. 

Microsoft: Visual Basic Live. 

Wired: Microsoft litigators ponder penalty. 

AP: The First Net Blockbuster. "The Internet is a godsend," said Eugene Delgaudio, president of the Council of Volunteer Americans. "It was literally sent by God to give the mimeograph crowd a way to communicate." 

IdleTime, one more time. "We wrote it so that scripts could run when the system is idle, when there's no user there clicking on keys or pulling down menus and opening and closing windows." 

NY Times: Protestors seek Windows refund. 

I'm looking for a website that shows how various congressmen voted on the Communication Decency Act. Specifically, I'm interested in knowing how Henry Hyde voted on it. 

This is actually a very hard question to answer. The CDA was embedded in the Telecommunications Reform Act, which did a lot of other things. Hyde voted Aye to the TCR act. If we want to get to the bottom of this, we're going to have to dig a little deeper. Hyde may have made a mistake. He taught us how impeachment works. We may now be able to turn the gun on him, and the rest of Congress and the President. Who's going to blink first? The net is much more powerful now and it's only getting more powerful. 

Keith Dawson: The 265 most hypocritical US Representatives. 

Monday, February 15, 1999

InfoWorld: Product of the Year for 1998. 

News.com: Motorola ships 500,000 cable modems. 

Builder.com asks what do you love about your job? 

Jakob Nielsen: Fighting Link Rot. 

It's not too late to vote for Scripting News at the Webby Awards site. (Vote in the Search Engines and Portals category. The last day to vote is 2/28/99, but why not do it right now?) 

Andre Radke: libMD5 implements MD5, a message digest algorithm that can be used to condense an arbitrary length message down to a 16 byte (128 bit) hash.  

Tip: Calling a UserLand server via HTTP. 

Virtual domains hosted on 206.204.24.20. This is one of two real servers that's used to manage and serve the content for all our virtual sites. 

DocZilla is built on Netscape's open source browser. "DocZilla, the superbrowser 'eats' everything - SGML, XML, HTML and much more." 

ImageLock: Top 5 Graphics on the Net. 

AP: Internet Romance Thrives. 

Sunday, February 14, 1999

Saturday, February 13, 1999

Friday, February 12, 1999

Thursday, February 11, 1999

DaveNet: Syndication in XML. 

W3C: Scalable Vector Graphics. 

Preview of netscape.com channel for Scripting News. It'll go live early next week. There's the power of XML for syndication. It doesn't have to be complicated. 

AM Rosenthol: Define Deviancy Up. Yes. 

SJ Merc: Man leaves Illinois prison after 16 years on death row. 

Themes.org: How the unofficial Netscape channels started. 

Jorn Barger: The Myths of Structural Markup. 

John Foster, former product manager for QuickMail at CE Software: "MTTF brings back an important function in a more accessible way."  

NY Times: Clinton Vows Revenge on House Republicans. There goes the contrition. My advice to the Senate, both Republicans and Democrats, put the vote on hold for two weeks and let him sweat. He still hasn't gotten the message.  

2/9/99: "Exonerate. The spin doctors are going to have a lovely time with this word. The President is exonerated. The rest of the world wonders what the fuss was about." We're already there. 

The Times editorial page still wants censure. Hey guys and gals, it won't work. Clinton skates right by that. The United States is being humiliated, from within, by its top elected official.  

Bill Bradley: "But all of us need to remind ourselves why we're Democrats.. Is it because we simply want to win power or hold on to it, or is it because we have a vision for America? A political party must be more than a strategy or just a set of positions on issues." Even the Democrats offer choice, we don't have to lower ourselves to Clinton's level. 

Wednesday, February 10, 1999

DaveNet: Mail to the Future. 

Washington Post: "In the end, it's the crazy ad-hoc nature of Web technology that makes the Internet explosion so lovable. If the Web masters slowed down long enough to make sure everything worked, they'd lose momentum." 

MSNBC: Falwell Suspects Tinky Winky is Gay. "The fact that he carries a magic bag doesn't make him gay," Steve Rice said. "It's a children's show, folks." 

I get frequent requests to channel Scripting News content thru my.netscape.com. I don't have time to learn how it works. However, we have an always-current XML version of the last day of Scripting News, and would be happy to support Netscape and others in writing syndicators of that content flow. No royalty necessary. It would be easy to have a search engine feed off this flow of links and comments. There are starting to be a bunch of weblogs, wouldn't it be interesting if we could agree on an XML format between us? 

Netscape: Unofficial NetCenter Channels. 

Zero Knowledge: Freedom Network Architecture. 

Tonight in Mountain View: XML and Java. 

Mail To The Future is mature. Go ahead and point to it. Here's the tag-line: "Send mail to yourself or others at a specified date and time.. in the future!" (Note the italics. Take a deep breath. In the future!) 

Where we're going from here.. MTTF already has XML and XML-RPC interfaces, and we're adding new wires on a daily basis. This is potentially quite revolutionary. Cameron Barrett wants to use it to distribute a news letter to a list of readers. We need a Support-Associate to work with him (I'll guide). Marc Canter and his team are making excellent progress on a DHTML broadband interface for MTTF. And MTTF is not Mean Time To Failure as Anita Rowland thought. (So far so good!) 

How do WebDAV, the Discussion Group and DHTML design tools fit together? 

PandaWave: UUIDLib for Mac. WebDAV uses UUIDs. They're distributed source on this, so it should be possible to get this code, or equivalent, running in Frontier. 

MSNBC: 500,000 apply for free PC. I guess it already paid for itself! 

Wired IPO prospectus excerpts: Vignette, NetObjects, RazorFish. 

Jason Gerry found an interesting application for MTTF. 

Builder Buzz on Microsoft Visual Interdev 6.0. 

ConservativeNet: Write to Congress. 

Tuesday, February 09, 1999

DaveNet: Ask the Questions. 

I had a phone talk this morning with Simeon Simeonov at Allaire, and we worked out a proposal for merging WDDX and XML-RPC. He posted a report on the conversation on the discussion group. Comments from interested people are welcome. 

W3C: Personalized Information Description Language. 

David Carter-Tod: Frontier as an Instructional Management System. 

Cameron Barrett has a cool use for Mail to the Future, and this leads to an interesting use of XML-RPC to get a mail list from his workstation onto the server. Here's a sample script that adds a mail list to a MTTF server. The script could be written in Python, Perl or Java too. 

CNN reviews SimCity 3000. 

Bitstream’s PageFlex is an on-demand publishing server enabling the design and fully automatic production of customized print documents that are targeted at a narrow market segment or an individual reader.  

Red Herring: IdeaLab launches Free-PC.com. 

News.com: Amazon backs off promo plan. 

MacWEEK: Dissecting Sony's game. 

Questions you need to answer to get a free PC. 

Builder.com's discussion on best practices for site design. 

The Eggman's Concise Rules for a Successful Website. 

Wired: Lycos, Diller merge. 

Interface: A biochip in presidential candidate William Cozzano's brain hardwires him to a computerized polling system that channels the mood of the electorate directly into his brain 

Microsoft's Robert Hess: To Web, or Not. 

Monday, February 08, 1999

Paul Haeberli starts a discussion on his Flash C library. If this goes somewhere, we could have a Frontier suite that allows websites to be rendered in Flash. That would be very nice, if only for the anti-aliased text it would enable. 

Brent Simmons is working a on printer-friendly version of the getting started docs for Frontier. 

News.com: Firms sign on to e-commerce XML standard. 

Jakob Nielsen: Why People Shop on the Web. 

David Meggison: 19 Short Questions about Namespaces (with Answers). 

InfoWorld: Lotus's Web-based project software.  

Lotus: QuickPlace Highlights. 

Barry Campbell reviews SimCity 3000. 

Wired: The Grateful Dead and MP3. 

5/27/98: An Afterlife for The Dead? 

Wired: Marimba to file IPO today. "For the past year, Marimba has been distancing itself from push and pitching itself as a network-management software company." 

OpenIPO is a "new way to take companies public that gives everyone equal access to the IPO. A bid from an individual has the same standing as a bid from the largest institutional investor in the world." 

CNN: White House responds to Byrd comments. Now I wonder why CNN missed the scoop they got, as reported in DaveNet last week. 

NY Times: Amazon's recommendation for sale? "$10,000 is the price tag for a premium package for a newly released computer book -- consideration that includes the top slot on the computer home page, an author profile or interview and 'complete Amazon.com editorial review treatment.'"  

TechWeb: Mac may not be Y2K safe. Maybe Steve Jobs doesn't know about Murphy? 

NY Times: Microsoft is Starting Web Site Aimed at Women. 

Sunday, February 07, 1999

Seattle Times: Organizational shakeup at Microsoft? 

Is this a picture of technography? 

Very few sites give me website-envy, this one does, at least in its design. I very much like the idea of it having a set of queries that it's willing to run against its database. Now, why doesn't it recompute the list every time I click on a link? Is it really that useful if for some terms it just has stuff from a week ago? It's a good idea, but they didn't take it far enough? 

LinuxCare is a one-stop-shop for Linux tech support needs. 

CNN: Victoria's Secret knows ads, but not the Web. Duh-h-h! 

I'd bet that when Microsoft decided to bundle MSIE with Windows in 1995, their purpose was largely to kill Netscape, but eventually the focus changed and now they use the browser as we do, more and more as the surface of all work that happens on the desktop. If that were true, what would the logical legal remedy be? That is, the market shifted, the browser isn't what it used to be, Microsoft surely played a role in it becoming what it is, so now what? 

Arnold Lesikar: Tag Extraction Kit 2.1a5. 

Paul Haeberli's Flash Synthesizer. A C library for producing Flash documents. Haeberli adds, "I'm curious about ways of hacking with Director Shockwave stuff. Do you know someone in that area I could chat with?" 

John Cowan posted a critique of XML-RPC on the xml-dev list. 

Teresa Martin on Microsoft's style sheet patent. 

Tia O'Brien on Doug Engelbart. 

Saturday, February 06, 1999

InfoWorld: Welcome to the new Web order. I'm quoted extensively in this piece (thanks!). The interview with InfoWorld's Walsh was a turning point. I've done some more writing about where these ideas have lead us. Comments and questions are welcome. 

Heads-up: A Tcl implementation of XML-RPC is in the works. 

MainStay: JustEdit Plus. 

xmlproc is an XML parser written in Python. 

Newsvision owns http://www.tableofcontents.com/. Arrrgh! 

Microsoft's Alex Hopmann responds that David Shinpaugh's problem running cross-server XML-RPC requests from MSIE 5, reported yesterday, is a browser security issue, and it's not a deal-stopper. 

NY Times editorial: When Speech Becomes a Threat. 

Red Herring: Top 10 stocks for 1999. 

Friday, February 05, 1999

What is Mail to the Future? It's a demo app for Frontier 6 that's accessible thru HTML, XML and XML-RPC. 

David Shinpaugh has a problem using Microsoft's new IXML-HTTP Request object in IE Beta 5 build 1309.  

MacWEEK's Cameron Crotty finds his inner Andy Rooney. 

Webdav.org: Frequently Asked Questions. 

WebMonkey: MP3 Nuts and Bolts. 

Wired: DreamWorks tries MP3. 

MacWEEK: Adobe InDesign will be Scriptable. "Adobe is reportedly telling prospective clients that the software's scripting features will allow them to perform any customizations they desire." 

XML Spy is an XML editor for Windows. Screen shot. 

Dan Shafer: Macromedia tools get cooler. 

Dongyang Wang is a PhD at UW-Milwaukee who is interested in XML-RPC. 

Gates: We're no Coca Cola. Time for a new formula? 

CNN: Gates gives $3.3 billion to charities. 

PC WEEK: Be says Microsoft's claims are flattering but untrue. 

Web Review on Microsoft's stylesheet patent. 

News.com: ISP shuts down controversial site. 

CNN: China shuts down popular Internet forum. 

CNN: I was a pest. I sent a note to Ms. Currie and asked her to pass it along to the President, requesting that I meet with him. 

InfoWorld: Microsoft's video follies show browser removal is tough. 

MacWEEK: Connectix wins first round in Sony lawsuit. 

Thursday, February 04, 1999

DaveNet: Politics of Plumbing. 

Josh Lucas: XML-RPC Applet brings XML-RPC into the web browser scripting environment thru a scriptable Java applet. 

SimCity 3000! Early review -- it's just like SC2K, except the graphics are prettier. What a bummer! (I wish they had networked it, like GeoCities, but visual and with simulation.) 

Hannes Wallnöfer has a demo of a Java applet running in a web browser connected to JavaScript code, also running in the browser. This is key to getting XML-RPC to show up in JavaScript in Netscape and Microsoft's Mac browser. 

Eric Soroos is interested in starting a Seattle Frontier User's Group. 

Wired: Microsoft Wins Web Patent. Scary! 

CNN: Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) one of the architects of the plan said she was not willing to go forward unless the proposals get some support from Democrats. Bravo. 

Washington Post: 'Impeachment is a constitutional cul-de-sac from which there is no escape," Byrd said. "This effort to resolve this matter by an easy political vote is a will-o'-the wisp.' 

As far as I can tell, there is no mention of the Larry King/Robert Byrd interview on any other news site. 

CNN: Transcript of last night's Larry King Live. 

InfoWorld: Software AG to take wraps off XML server. 

eMediaWeekly ceases publication. 

Autonomy has "the only technology capable of providing you with a complete infrastructure for the automated handling of large volumes of information for Knowledge Management or New Media markets." Whatever that means. 

http://www.webdav.org/ ;

Jean-Louis Gassee on Microsoft's bedtime stories. 

SJ Merc: DSL service not yet up to speed. 

Andrew Duncan is looking for experienced Frontier developers in New Zealand or Australia. 

Wednesday, February 03, 1999

[Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "responderAttributes".]  

It works! Brent has MSIE sending an XML-RPC message to our server, getting back and displaying the result. Thanks to Alex Hopmann at Microsoft for helping us with this. 

News.com: Microsoft missing the portal boat? "Microsoft must perform a precarious balancing act between its Web properties and desktop applications. But many observers believe that in fearing the cannibalization of its desktop software, the company may have missed a huge opportunity on the Web to promote these same applications." Bingo! They can have their cake and eat it too. Support an XML-RPC interface for the desktop apps, so users can edit the data stored on the server and then save it back to the server for access thru the web. 

Press Release: The Motley Fool chooses Object Design for content management. 

TidBITs: Driving the 4.5 Web Browsers. 

MacInTouch: The continuing saga of a user trying to get ADSL service from Bell Atlantic for a Macintosh. 

MSNBC: MS exec admits demo tape is wrong. 

Tuesday, February 02, 1999

XML-RPC is now an official PythonWare offering. 

Bunnyhop: A girl's guide to geek guys. Go get em girls! 

If you've got an agent reading Scripting News in XML on your behalf, it just got easier. The most recent edition of SN is always in this file. The back issues are in the usual place. More info. 

XUL stands for "extensible user interface language". 

XP is a generic application-level protocol meant to serve as the foundation for specific protocols, in a manner analogous to the way the XML recommendation of the W3C serves as the foundation for specific markup languages. 

The XP spec is interesting, however there are good reasons to use HTTP as the enclosure for an XML-RPC message. However, if you control both ends of the conversation, there's no doubt it's simpler and more efficient just to move XML over TCP, and it would be an easy adaptation of XML-RPC to also support XP if it catches on. 

David Carter-Tod: Why XML? 

Here's one area where Microsoft could make an immediate contribution to the deployment of XML-RPC. 

Micah Alpern asks an excellent question re Microsoft and XML-RPC. I responded at length. Microsoft people are invited to comment, as are others, but no flames, please. 

HP: Instant Delivery. 

SJ Merc: Poor Little Rich Guys. For the record, as a company founded by a cashed-out entrepreneur, UserLand would welcome the participation of some of those poor little rich guys who are itching to get back into the flow. Plenty of opportunity here. See next item. 

Greeting cards sold over the net are a hot idea! Imagine the opportunities for customization. People with a knowledge of scripting DTP products like Quark or PageMaker, if they moved quickly, could make a mint here. 

Wired: COPA Unconstitutional. "Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection." US citizens, let's count our blessings. At least the courts still practice the Constitution. 

James Clark clarifies XML Namespaces. 

Monday, February 01, 1999

WSJ: Microsoft's Civil War. "Hasn’t anybody here ever heard of Windows?"  

News.com: McNealy says Microsoft is a Planned Economy. If so, there's a real good solution. Encourage Microsoft's continued involvement in an open distributed computing protocol, like XML-RPC. Even better, Sun could work with us too. Instead of cutting down Microsoft, let's build a new computing platform where monopoly power in operating systems is irrelevant. Some people at Microsoft get this. Are there any visionaries at Sun? 

Microsoft's Bob Atkinson on namespaces in XML-RPC. Here's a turn in direction by Microsoft. As XML-RPC makes inroads it undermines Microsoft's lock-in, and Sun's too. This is not a random engineer acting on his own, Microsoft really struggled with this. In the end, I don't know how they made their decision to let Atkinson join the public discussion here, but they deserve our congratulations for doing so. 

Fredrik Lundh: "XML-RPC is like HTTP/1.0, anyone can understand it, it can be used from all major scripting environments, and we're not even close to seeing the true limitations of the protocol." 

Software AG: Tamino, the Information Server for Electronic Business. 

News.com: Iona fortifies Java strategy. 

InfoWorld: Gates promises more integrated products. 

Microsoft: Office 2000 as a tool for project-based learning. 

Eric Folley: suites.skyTel. 

The Economist: Why Internet shares will fall. 

NY Times: Web censorship raises its ugly head again, under the usual guise of keeping kids from exploring their sexuality (impossible!), and this time under cover of the President's own sex scandal. When Clinton talks about "Doing the business of the American people," is this what he means? 

On Sunday I caught up on the political spin on today's Lewinsky deposition. What I didn't hear either side say is that in 20+ times she's testified none of it has been viewed by the public. That alone suggests that it's a good idea for her to testify, as fully as possible, and fully publicly.  

Washington Post: Online site organizes against impeachment. www.moveon.org? Hmmm. Let's start www.reapwhatyousow.org. How about www.whatgoesaroundcomesaround.org? Even better -- www.amnestyforresignation.org. 

MacWEEK: Connectix unfazed by Sony suit. Includes comments from UserLand board member, Jack Russo. 

Wired: Nintendo clone released, yanked. 

ZDNet: Angry Scenes at Apple UK. 

Michael Ventura: Wired to What?