Wednesday, March 31, 1999

MP3.COM: The Dancing Hamsters Remix. Yeah! 

Mark Gardner posted a screenshot of a Perl app running in Frontier. Neat-o! 

Now a BMW can bring foreign climes to you. 

On Monday we did an experiment in online technography. Thanks to Bernie for writing it up. 

Eric Raymond isn't retiring after all. I know what it's like! 

Here's what I'm cooking for tomorrow's Seder. Vegetarians avert your eyes. 

News.com: Yahoo to acquire Broadcast.com. 

My.UserLand.Com gets a link from the Open Directory Project, right next to My.Netscape.Com. Thanks! 

New channel: pharmalicensing.com.  

IBM: XML Enabler is a servlet that formats data using XSL, generating HTML that can be viewed in any browser.  

Neal Stephenson: In the Beginning was the Command Line. 

CNET recommends Y2K diagnostic programs for Windows. "Mac owners: Your machines are, and always have been, free of the Y2K bug." A common misperception perpetuated by Apple advertising, not a service to Mac owners. In fact Macs can and will have Y2K problems. A word to the wise! 

Apple's Y2K website. "The Mac OS and most Mac applications can handle internally generated dates correctly all the way to the year 29,940." A more reasonable statement. 

Hey I just got an email from Ford Prefect, pointing to a DG hosted by TDV which is Douglas Adams's production company. 

Here's one of the things that's been bothering me about the NATO fighting in Yugoslavia. 

Guys, be careful what you ask for.. 

Tuesday, March 30, 1999

DaveNet: MS Stock Glitch? 

Welcome to Vanderbilt Medical Center Reporter and Sophie B Hawkins Underground, the newest My.UserLand.Com channels! 

More channels! Lava Magazine, NZ Jazz Online, USA Weekend Box Office. 

MacWEEK: Anatomy of an Executive PB. 

My friend Marc Canter has found his affinity group. Happy Pesach, Praise Jah! 

And Happy Passover to all Scripting News readers! 

Draft: Frontier 6 for Frontier 5 Users. 

Cocoon is a XML/XSL publishing framework. 

InfoWorld: Sun, AOL Execs Head for Moron's Hall of Fame? They said it not me. 

MacWEEK: Getting Serious about Games. 

A screen shot showing Frontier 6 being used to write today's DaveNet piece.  

Your pictures are welcome on ScreenShots.UserLand.Com. 

Lawrence Lee reports that the mysteriously missing News.com story about MSIE5 customization features has reappeared! 

The Sample Code and Utilities thread continues. 

Second thoughts about the 4GB glitch and MSFT stock. This morning Quote.Com has an incorrect P/E ratio for MSFT. 

CD Index, the Internet music CD database, is developing an XML interface.  

SprocketWorks was done by my friend Marney Morris. 

NY Times: Following the trail of the Melissa author. Coding style and an Ethernet ID are the key clues. 

Monday, March 29, 1999

A little bird whispered in my ear.. On Friday Microsoft stock split, two for one. As a result there are more than 32-bits of MSFT stock out there. This has caused computers to fail a la Y2K.  

Screen shot of www.nasdaq.com showing incorrect market capitalization and number of outstanding shares for MSFT. 

Another concern, MSFT is part of the S&P 500, so its valuation may be off too. All this is happening on the day the Dow closed at over 10,000 for the first time in history, and people were predicting computer glitches, but this one seems to have passed unnoticed. 

On further investigation, the only site that was wrong was NASDAQ's. In all likelihood, according to a couple of people I spoke with who would know, they haven't updated their database. Their website *is* wrong, but probably not because of the overflow situation, it's probably due to incorrect info about the number of outstanding shares and correct info about the MSFT stock price. The trading databases generally store the number of thousands of shares, not the number of shares. This appears to be a false alarm. 

Eric S Raymond: Take My Job, Please! "You'll find you have to fight to find any time to really think or reflect about the things that put you on that road in the first place. And you barely have the energy to actually hack code any more. You listen to yourself spinning words to strangers in suits instead, and feel like a plant being pulled slowly out of the ground -- roots not tearing, yet, but feeling the strain, feeling the strain." I know what he means! 

WebZine 99 Discussion List. 

A thought puzzle for members of the Frontier community. 

WebInformant: Beware of Microsoft's XML. 

New My.UserLand.Com channels: More Like This, Liason Francophone, Beo and osOpinion. Channels are refreshed every hour on the hour. 

Also available: SlashDot.Org, The Motley Fool and Mozilla.Org. 

Ygenerator 1.0 generates Flash content on servers, as does Swift Generator 

InfoWorld: XML Buoys Object Databases. We're there too, have been for almost seven years. Content management all the way. Relational? Great for bookkeeping apps. 

News.com: Amazon to offer online auctions. 

Wired: Russians Attack Whitehouse.gov. 

Sunday, March 28, 1999

Seattle Times: States to auction Windows source code? 

A big milestone! Here I am, registering the RSS version of slashdot.org with my.userland.com. It was a long trail that led to this place, but every step was done with open low-tech stuff that's being maintained by content management systems, one in Perl on Linux and the other in Frontier on NT.  

Want to know how it came to be? Read this DG message. I love this story, it's so Internet-like. It's at times like this that I totally dig this medium. 

Another reason I like this Rube Goldberg-like contraption is that it sticks it to Netscape for requiring that nutty free-speech-limiting agreement. As they say, the net routes around outages. 

Belgium's On-line With Rock is the newest my.userland.com channel. 

A question about My.UserLand.Com from a news site producer: "Will you accept French-written news concerning information technology and mainly Africa?" Yes! Absolutely. Think big and broad. We want all kinds of news. If there are people doing French stuff about Africa, we want it. RSS all the way. 

Netscape's RSS spec. 

Trend Micro: Security advisory on the Microsoft email virus known as Melissa. 

SJ Merc: What's bugging Microsoft? They're not talking about viruses. 

Dan Gillmor: Online threat to print journalism. Dan's one of the good guys. My advice, in their coverage of the Internet industry, expose more lies told by advertisers. This is where I suspect the Washington Post, NY Times and the SJ Merc alike. Coming out of the Apple press conference a few weeks back, I was apalled how the major outlets covered it. The lies were right there on the surface. They all carried the party line. This makes me doubt their credibility when they cover subjects that I am not familiar with. 

Saturday, March 27, 1999

DaveNet: Submission. 

WUGNET: Gates on Linux. "Linux doesn't have the graphics interface. It doesn't have the rich set of device drivers. So certainly we think of it as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market. But I really don't think in the commercial market, we'll see it [compete with Windows] in any significant way." Oh boy, Bill doesn't get it. Linux is grabbing the high ground in the server market. I think Microsoft would do well to come up with a faceless version of NT with just a command-line interface and work tirelessly on performance in this configuration. 

"If you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get. We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp." Deal with it.  

MediaMetrix ranks the top-traffic websites. 

Rick Levine: Your Customer isn't an Idiot. 

Brian Livingson: Will freeware and personalization bring new life to browsers?  

Web browsers are document readers. We still don't have one that works. 

Tweak for My.UserLand.Com, let the sysop opt-out.  

The Chicago Ham Radio Resource has signed up as a My.UserLand.Com channel. 

If you're looking for ideas for new RSS-based channels, check out Yahoo's personalization system. You probably need to get their cookie to even see the page, but it's worth a look if you're interested in this stuff. 

Friday, March 26, 1999

InfoWorld: Massive Email Virus. "At risk are Microsoft Exchange Servers running Microsoft Outlook. With an ever-changing subject heading of "Important Message From [end-user name], the attachment to the e-mail is a document entitled "list.doc" with a body of text reading "Here is that document you asked for ... don't show anyone else ;-)." Upon opening the attachment, Microsoft Word 97 will ask if you want to disable the macros, to which you should reply yes, or the e-mail will automatically be sent to the first fifty names on each company mailing list." 

Much progress on My.UserLand.Com. You can now choose your news. Some interesting channels there. More are on the way? RSS is a good start at a syndication format. Grass roots and blades popping thru the earth. The good stuff. UserLand.Com membership required. 

Oooops! The RSS registration page was broken, but it should work now. Sorry for the inconvenience. 

SlashDot.UserLand.Com keeps right on rolllling along. One of the next items on my to-do list is to get it integrated with My.UserLand.Com. Do you see how the dots connect? Pun intended! 

One more dot. All this stuff is fodder for our Just-In-Time Search Engine. Can you spell portal? Can you smell one? 

Frontier Users: Brent posted the new Getting Started guide for review. Comments and suggestions requested. Thanks! 

Bernie DeKoven: Bottom-up Technography. "When we finished, we had a strategic plan that reflected and responded to everyone's thinking. We printed out the entire document, the strategies on the first level in bold, the tactical suggestions on the second level and the initial input on the third. We added three blank pages on the end, bound them, and had a signing and champaign party for the entire staff." 

Arnold Lesikar: The Boolean search extension extends the capability of the Userland search engine. In a search you can now specify words to be excluded as well as words to be required on a page. Other keywords can be optional. In short this extension makes the Userland search engine function more like one of the major Web search engines.  

A number of people have commented on a News.com article that appeared yesterday, about MSIE5 users who are unhappy with the new web accessory feature. Now the article is gone. This is unusual for News.com. Lawrence Lee found the article, syndicated on ABCNEWS.COM. Ooops? 

Wired: Yugoslav Net on the Brink. "As a result of recent NATO attacks on Yugoslavia, Eunet Yugoslavia is unable to provide its customers with payment services and customer support," says a notice on the site. "We hope that we will return to normal operation soon." 

AutoDesk: WHIP is the "Free viewer for drawings on any network." 

MacWEEK: Love for Newton Lingers. "This is a Newton," the recent Stanford graduate whispers, raising the machine as if he's offering it up to a higher power. "We are rabid fans." 

Thursday, March 25, 1999

Frontier users: Send us your screen shots! Be creative.. 

I've collected some great examples from the screen shots site. 

Charles Babcock: Open source, closed minds. 

Flutterby: Why XML Adoption will be Slow. 

The beat goes on. One more time! 

Today's song: "Give me the Keys" by Huey Lewis and the News. "I can see you got your motor running. But don't you think you're moving kind of slow? If you feel the way I feel, let me get behind the wheel! Give me the keys, and I'll drive you crazy. Give me the keys and I'll drive you out of your mind!" I know it's corny, but I like it. 

Happy Birthday to Aretha Franklin. We love you! 

Scott Richards at Macromedia released a DLL for Dreamweaver that does an HTTP GET. This could be a key piece for connecting Frontier apps and DW, especially interesting for my.userland.com, coming sooon. 

InfoWorld: W3C Chief Urges Agent-readable Sites. "Berners-Lee strongly urged I-commerce developers to start migrating toward the RDF, which, according to the W3C's Web site, 'integrates a variety of Web-based meta-data activities including site maps, content ratings, stream channel definitions, search engine data collection (Web crawling), digital library collections, and distributed authoring, using XML as an interchange syntax.'" 

Today I'm thinking about an alien living in some other galaxy, browsing the web, seeing a link to Earth, clicking on it, and finding something interesting.  

News.com: Users Fume over Customized IE5. 

CNN: Government asks Internic to Explain. 

David Fiedler: What was Network Solutions Thinking? 

Red Herring: Sun, surf, $50 million. 

Seth Dillingham: The Queue Suite, a system for processing items one at a time in the order they were received. A key component for workflow apps. Runs in all versions of Frontier. Thanks Seth! 

Ian Beatty: A new outline renderer for Frontier 6. Yay!! 

Screen shot of Ian's renderer. Synergy! 

Christoph Pingel is working on an editorial system for a broadcast radio station's website. 

I don't think this site will win a Webby Award.. 

I'm looking for something like WebSTAR for Windows NT. 

Christian Rappo writes "Hi Dave, I wake up this morning and you know what? They tell us that there is a war not so far from Switzerland, my place. A war in a warland! Bad days." I agree. I feel that World War III may be starting. I don't like what my country is doing. 

Wednesday, March 24, 1999

An invitation to sneak a peek at the design for the new Frontier 6 site. Feedback is welcome, but remember to.. Be kind! 

NewsSearch.UserLand.Com is starting to get interesting. Here's a query for Apple. Look at all the interesting places it takes you. 

Builder.com: Vote for the Web Innovators. We made the list! 

Wired: Hot Mining Company IPO. 

Nicholas Petreley: Microsoft should be more concerned with its own OS design problems than with Linux. 

CNN: Emails from Kosovo. 

News.com: Industry group urges Microsoft breakup. 

PC World: IE5 Branded for Life? Fascinating article. I guess this was a response to the open-sourcing of Netscape and the way Netscape has tied Communicator to NetCenter? 

Microsoft: Browser Extensions Overview.  

Netscape's answer: XUL. 

Steve Ivy is glad this feature isn't in the Mac version of MSIE. 

Dan Shafer reviews MSIE5 from a web developer's point of view. 

Tuesday, March 23, 1999

Thea did a new Galleria! "Were it not for Frontier, I wouldn't be able to do this site because it would take far too much time away from my family--not to mention my other clients." If you have an interesting Frontier-managed site that you'd like to be appreciated for, please let Thea know. 

Late Night Software: OSA for DreamWeaver 2.0. 

Web Developers Journal interviewed Marc Canter in 1995. Great soundbites. Like this: "Where I'm shooting at is where they will end up at in 5 years. So I'd like to say that the set top box, which is the supposed platform that will be out there for the info-highway, would have 16MB RAM, and 100 MIPS processor, and DSP and MIDI built in, with real time streaming video. That is something we could target well to the end of this century. That is something that will be a decent platform to start from." 16MB? 

News.com: Apple to offer digital appliances, Ellison says. 

Wired: Buzz from the Desert. "Before a stunned group of potential investors -- and a friend of a member of his company's board -- the intoxicated CEO climbed atop a table and began screaming random obscenities at the stunned power crowd. Oops." Sounds like they're having fun this year at Esther's! 

InfoWorld: Vendors Itching to Ship 8-CPU Intel Servers. 

InfoWorld: Linux Alley is Crowded but Lacks Apps. 

MacWEEK: Untangling the Web. "Think of reading a 10-page interview with your favorite musician or a lengthy excerpt form Joyce's Ulysses on a Web site. Doesn't really fly, does it?" 

More swingin animals! Now the cows are dancing. Uff-dah! 

Bernie DeKoven: Dynamic Templates. "Keeping the agenda items as the top level in an outline allows participants to expand (add subheadings to) any item, and then collapse the outline to an agenda-level view. This way, no matter how deep and detailed a discussion becomes, we can instantly refocus.." 

Richard Stallman comments on Apple's open source license. "...only part of MacOS is being released under the APSL--and it is the lowest level part. The only practical use for this code is to run the non-free part of MacOS." It's understandable that he would find this confusing. It is not the underpinnings of the MacOS that Apple released. It's the underpinnings of another OS, one with far fewer users and developers.  

Snap for people with speedy net connections. 

Red Herring: Snap sells speed. 

A fellow named Aaron is using Frontier and the IdleTime INIT to combat RSI. 

News.com: IBM Launches Business PCs starting at $859. 

Robert Morgan: "I expect the gathering of key Apple investors to be quite a lovefest, considering the company's triumphs since last year's meeting.." 

MacWEEK: Rhapsody hits a sour note.  

Salon's Scott Rosenberg continues the outliner thread. "I learned that many of you are as irate as I am about the paucity of choices the commercial marketplace provides in the field of PIMs; that many of you still use old, outdated programs to organize your lives, as I do, because you love them even though their publishers don't.." 

Monday, March 22, 1999

Brent is quoted in InfoWorld! "I was a little [annoyed]," said Brent Simmons, a developer at UserLand Software, in Seattle. "[The consolidated Web site] may be easier, but I already knew how to use [the Internic.net] site, as did thousands, if not millions, of other people." Brent's original news-making DG post. 

InfoWorld: Yet Another Caching Scheme. Big Zzzzz. 

Industry Standard: InterNic Hijacked? 

Jakob Nielsen: URL as UI. 

InfoWorld: Printers get Web Addresses. 

Matt Wrigley's Communist Christmas Joke. A few months early. 

News.com: CyberMeals becomes Food.com. National strategy goes local. Competes with Dine-11 and Waiters-on-Wheels. 

LinuxWorld: There is more to XML than roll-your-own HTML. 

InfoWorld: GNOME builds an Open Interface. 

Puget Sound Business Journal: Net frenzy strikes Rivalnet. 

MacWorld: Focus on Website Design. 

Hamster Blast is a parody of the Hamster Dance. Shockwave. 

Steve Jobs introduces Mac OS X Server. QuickTime. 

Marc Canter, heard on a random mail list: "Have we forgot Bacchus, Baudelaire, Hemingway, John Belushi? Where's the fun in life - we're all getting old and we need to party more! And remember we don't need drugs or drink or even Yoga - partying is just a state of mind." Thanks for the reminder! 

MSNBC: Love Trumps War at the Oscars. "How do you say, it's the hailstorm of kindness of gratitude for you," raved the blissed-out Benigni. "I want to dive into this audience, you know. Your generosity is too much." 

NT Times: Slideshow for the Oscars. Neat-O! 

Jon Katz: A different kind of enlightenment.  

Wired: Here's a glitch for Microsoft to fix. 

RFC 2229: A Dictionary Server Protocol. 

The DICT Development Group. 

Sunday, March 21, 1999

Dr Dobbs: Ousterhout on Open Source and its relationship to commercial software. This is more of an evangelistic piece than a thorough analysis. Open source is the Trend of the Year, as Java was, or object oriented programming a few years back. When it comes down to it, people will compare products to other products. For development environments some portion of the source will be given away and others will be kept private. Our cone is inverted the other way. We developed a kernel and editors that are private, but we keep piling on free source code to show people how to apply it. There is no purity possible as long as Intel and Motorola don't publish the source for their chips. We'll eventually completely figure this one out, but by the time we do there will be something else for people (ie reporters) to be hysterical about. 

Frontier 6 users, there's a new release of whois.root. 

Bernie DeKoven: Technography and Outlines. 

New easy-to-remember address for our SlashDot Story List page. 

MSNBC: Triumphant Balloonists Land in Egypt.  

SJ Merc: Stalking the Drunken College Student. "I don't think," says Dave Berman, an IBM spokesman from San Jose, "we're going to be giving away free beer." Why not? 

NY Times: Product Promos in Math Textbooks. "The best-selling packaged cookie in the world is the Oreo cookie," it begins. "The diameter of an Oreo cookie is 1.75 inches. Express the diameter of an Oreo cookie as a fraction in simplest form." 7/4. 

MacWEEK: Mac OS X Server Apps Multiply. But can they express the diameter of an Oreo cookie? 

MacWEEK survey on PDF delivery of news. 

Saturday, March 20, 1999

NewsHub integrates and reports headlines from the world's premiere news sources every 15 minutes. The sysops of this site have gotten in touch, we're going to look at adding their scarfings to our RSS flow. I love new buzzwords! 

News.com: Netscape job cuts likely next week. 

Friday, March 19, 1999

From yesterday's piece: "I hereby offer to work with people on Microsoft's browser team to get better text editing into the browser environment for 5.1, 5.2, etc, and make the same offer to Netscape or any other browser vendor who sees the browser as a two-way environment, for reading and for writing." 

No surprise, Microsoft swarmed. That's what I wanted. They want to know where I want to go. My first response was to fix the bugs in textareas, and I would get my thoughts together for the next step. So here's a message that's headed in that direction. I sent it via email to Julian Jiggins, a program manager on the MSIE team and Michael Winser, a MSIE programmer, and a frequent contributor on our DG. 

WebEdit for Frontier 6 is available. We're going to let people who are serious WebEdit users have it now, and we'll release it thru the updates process after the remainder of Frontier 6 ships. People may need time to plan for this part of the upgrade, because it involves upgrading groups of team members. 

InfoWorld: IBM Will 'Wait and See' on Desktop Linux. "No one runs large, million-hits-per-day Web sites on Linux," Occleshaw said.  

Stanley Wong at Yahoo says: FreeBSD is good enough to handle one of the largest sites on the Net. We still run FreeBSD on a overwhelming majority of our servers/services. 

Jason Domina has a Regedit hack that allows you to hook any text editor into MSIE5's Edit With command. I bet it would work with Frontier? 

InfoWorld: XML to play bigger role in development. 

News.com: Does MSIE5 Undermine Microsoft's Case? Is it part of the OS or a separate app? 

Tim Bray: XML in XML. Requires MSIE5 

HTML version of Bray's story, readable in any browser. 

Charlie Wood at Vignette says RSS is too low-tech, we should syndicate with their ICE protocol. Instead, let's go with something truly low-tech and open. RSS is a good beginning.  

NY Times: John Markoff looks at Sony's Playstation II. 

InfoWorld: Tcl community drafts extensions standard.  

Scriptics: TEA Summit. 

Wired: MacWEEK returns to Print, Kinda. 

2/9/99: Paul Howson on rendering to PDF from Frontier. 

HTMLDOC generates PostScript and PDF from HTML. 

iSyndicate's RAPID technology provides a "highly scalable means to aggregate, package, integrate and deliver volumes of varied and relevant Internet content to sites of all sizes. This content includes headlines, full-text articles, and images/photos." 

Dan Shafer: The multiple-page web content dilemma. 

The neatest new feature in MSIE5 is the radio bar. I've not been able to listen to the radio while I work because my computers interfere with reception. Last night I was able to listen to Larry King interviewing Monica Lewinsky's father and stepmother while I read the fascinating email that came in response to yesterday's piece. It helps to be at the end of a T1 line. 

My least favorite MSIE5 bug. The Back button goes dim at inopportune random times. It forgets how you got here. It's happened five times today. Thankfully the Home button works. 

Interesting side-effect of the MSIE5 shipment. It's been hard to get thru to our California servers because our ISP is Conxion. 999 days out of a 1000 this is a good deal, our pipe is extra-wide because we share that pipe with Microsoft's US download site, which is also hosted by Conxion. But when a new version of MSIE is released our sites get slow. 

CNN: Mattel buys Purple Moon. 

MacWEEK: iMac wows game developers. 

Thursday, March 18, 1999

DaveNet: Everyone's Equally Nasty. 

Microsoft's program manager for MSIE responds to privacy concerns raised in today's DaveNet piece. 

Alexa's Brewster Kahle on What's Related. 

Dan Lyke created a Perl script that automatically builds an RSS file. Excellent! 

News.com: Where Will Explorer Go Today? 

Wired: IE5 Nixes Push, Adds Integration. 

Main discussion group thread on the RSS Tester App. 

MacWEEK's Jason O'Grady looks at Sony's Vaio sub-notebook. 

Wednesday, March 17, 1999

Preview: Workgroup To-Do Lists in Frontier 6. 

The RSS File Tester provides a simple way to check the validity of Netscape-compatible RSS files. People have been reporting problems. I wanted to see if the problems are with the files or with Netscape's server, and also (obviously) to accumulate a list of RSS files. If there are enough of them we might be able to do something interesting here. 

WhoIs.UserLand.Com: New features, fixes. Each history item now has a checkbox that allows you to delete the item. Correctly handles spaces in the request, spiffy new graphic. 

Hannes Wallnofer has a new version of XML-RPC for Java. 

News.com sneaks a peek at MSIE5. 

Several leaders of the Open Source community published their concerns with Apple's Public Source License. 

Frontier Users: We got bit by the Comment Bit Bug. It's a nasty little booger. In order to be able to update Frontier.root, manual installation of a fix may be necessary. The problem will be with us forever, when exporting an object from Frontier 6, if you intend it to be used by people with Frontier 5 or earlier, be sure none of your script lines are longer than 255 characters. We have provided a script that verifies that for any script object. If you were already using the Frontier 6 app when you installed the last root update, or if you're a week or so behind, everything is fine, no changes are needed. 

Financial Times: Gates Interview. "Every piece of e-mail I have sent over the past decade has been read by 50 government lawyers. So there is nothing new. I live the examined life." Registration required. 

Brent Simmons notes that The Dancing Hamsters are now included in NewsSearch.UserLand.Com. 

Oh no! Another one. The Boogie Blocks. 

Are you an idiot? If so, this site is for you. 

Tuesday, March 16, 1999

DaveNet: More Dancing Hamsters. 

Jonathan Hendry sets me straight. Apple *is* open sourcing a bunch of new stuff, HFS, AppleTalk, and Netinfo. 

MacInTouch, LinuxWorld, and InfoWorld report on today's Apple press conference. 

Preview: News Sites in Frontier 6. More links. 

One more time! Let's do the Hamster Dance. Crank it up! 

According to Brad Marsh, PHP now supports XML-RPC. 

PythonWare: Cutting and Pasting. 

wump.com: XML for More Like This. 

Jim Hurley: Anchor Text Should be Meaningful in Isolation. 

MSNBC: Dow tops 10,000. 

Last night I wrote an essay explaining why Netscape's agreement for my.netscape.com information providers is unacceptable. I also got a phone call from Eckart Walther at Netscape. We're going to try to work something out. This is good. I'm sure they'll read this at Netscape. I'd like to show them a tiny portion of a screen shot I took of the netscape.com home page during the web blackout in 1996. Let's not forget our idealism, I don't want attorneys editing this page, yours or mine. 

I still display the blue ribbon on every DaveNet piece as a reminder that we could lose our free speech any day. 

Steve Forbes announces, on the Internet. Dan Gillmor isn't impressed, with Forbes or with Gore, for his claim that he created the Internet, although Gillmor credits him with having an early vision of the importance of the Internet. But please don't forget that Gore is part of the Clinton Administration, which signed and pushed to enforce the Communications Decency Act. 

NY Times: 19 States to Seek Overhaul of Microsoft. 

Monday, March 15, 1999

DaveNet: NewsSearch.UserLand.Com. 

News.com speculates on tomorrow's Apple announcement. "The company will go part way toward embracing the 'open source' programming philosophy when interim chief executive Steve Jobs tomorrow introduces a new program encouraging developers to optimize the operating system for Apple hardware, sources said. If the program is successful, the result will be both a higher-performance operating system and more developers on board." 

WebMonkey looks at CVS. 

Eric Kidd compares Frontier and Zope. Thank you! 

Then Eric issued a challenge, which I accepted, and now, probably for the first time, Frontier and Zope are connected. 

Internet News: Netscape launches new publishing program "The network is built on the RDF Site Summary format. RSS is a new, open-file format that facilitates the exchange of content summaries and e-commerce data between Web sites. RSS enables program participants to create their own channel on the My Netscape service and frequently deliver content automatically to their readers." 

Our announcement: Scripting News is the first site to support RSS. Here's a link to the RSS version of Scripting News.  

Compare RSS with scriptingNews format, which is richer, it includes enough information to do an elegant syndication-based search engine (coming later today). Netscape's and Slashdot's formats are basically equivalent, neither is as rich as our format. 

Netscape's legal agreement was too one-sided and restrictive for us. Unless their agreement changes, you won't see our RSS file displayed on my.netscape.com. Be sure to read the agreement carefully before registering. You're giving Netscape's attorneys a lot of power over what you say on your website. Be sure there's something in it for you. 

Netscape: MNN Futures. "In this release of MNN, Netscape has intentionally limited the complexity of the RSS format. However, in the future, Netscape plans to work with other organizations to enhance the RSS format to support additional tags, while making it more compliant with existing W3C standards for XML and RDF." 

Slashdot.org is now customizable. 

Roxen Challenger is an open source web server. 

MainStay: JustMail is a Java email client.  

PC Mag: Software Returns to its Source. 

MetaSpy is an interesting behind-the-scenes look at a search engine. 

My friend Bobby Orbach says that this product already covers the vertical search engine category. They don't. Bobby, our center is content management, not smart crawlers. We use human brains and judgement to decide what goes into our search engine, not algorithms. We're more like Yahoo or The Mining Company, with a deeper CMS and Windows/Mac workstation software.  

freedrive.com offers a free 

password protected virtual 20MB hard drive accessible thru the web. 

On the Script Meridian community list, a reminder, posted via Mail to the Future, that Frontier 4.2.3 is about to cross a big milestone. It's been 1,000,000 minutes since it shipped. We've accomplished so much in those million minutes! 

I get lots of emails pointing me to iCab, a new web browser for the Macintosh. People are very enthusiastic about this software. That's great! Now, someone please help them get a site with some screen shots on it. It would make it easier to spread the word. 

Josh Brauer did some screen shots of iCab. It's nice! 

Sunday, March 14, 1999

Milestone: Frontier reads Slashdot.org. 

Heads-up: We're working on a new service that indexes news sites like Tomalak's Realm and Slashdot.org and Hack the Planet and others that have syndication hooks and excellent links and staying power.  

The result? A new search engine that uses the brains and judgement of people doing weblogs to decide what gets indexed. We're going to start with a search engine that focuses on the web developer world because that's what we know. But the software will be easily adapted to create search engines for any area of specialization. With any luck tomorrow I'll have a pointer to the search engine for you to try it out. 

slashdot.org's ultramode file. It's the equivalent of the XML version of Scripting News. Hack-the-Planet has an XML view that's compatible with ours. We're working with Lawrence Lee on an XMLization for Tomalak. 

Jorn Barger thinks the weblog JIT-SE will be nice. Then the discussion rolled around to how to get his weblog in the loop.  

Wired: MacSpotting is a New Obsession. They list Seymour Cray as a Mac user, but unfortunately Mr. Cray is dead. 

Bliner 98 is a "bracket outliner" for Windows. It looks coool! A very nice combination between a spreadsheet and an outliner. Numbers roll up the hierarchy. I know this idea works because we did it in MORE 1.0. Looks like they've taken it quite a bit further than we did. 

News.com: Forbes to announce candidacy on the Internet. 

MSNBC: A medium that was invented by Al Gore? 

Want to get rich fast? Register this domain name. Funny! It's like the emailer with a spell-checker that doesn't have the word emailer in its dictionary. Ryan Szekeres tried to register it. "I get a template error saying the domain is registered. That sucks." Oh well. It was a good idea anyway! 

Saturday, March 13, 1999

David Theige, MD, has a news site running in Frontier 6. The format will look familiar. The content, unless you are a medical doctor, will not. Another blade of grass popping thru the dirt. 

Some go ga-ga over a web server with this kind of interface..  

David Pogue's Computer Industry Song Spoofs. 

Computer Currents: XML in Excelsis. 

TechWeb: Yahoo Suits Could Chill Free Speech. "Last week, Raytheon sued 21 anonymous posters on Yahoo message boards for making negative comments about the company. On Monday, Wade Cook Financial, an educational company, filed suit against 10 such posters, generally known as "John Does" or "Anonymous Cowards." Neither suit names Yahoo, but both demand that the Web portal turn over the names of the users." 

Microsoft sent two letters this morning to its customers regarding privacy and the Office apps. 

Chuck Shotton's snarfer is grabbin our new XMLization, the one that works with the big portal company. Blades of grass poppin up thru the earth. The next thing is the weblog search engine. We're going to do a JIT-SE.  

What's a JIT-SE? Use the search engine. Recursion! 

Andrew Duncan has a personal portal. Keep going guys. You're on the track. It's so great to see this vision being realized! 

Bottom line: Web servers are not just for servers anymore. 

Friday, March 12, 1999

An email received this evening from an Apple PR person: "You are cordially invited to a press conference hosted by Steve Jobs on Tuesday March 16, at 11AM... regarding Apple's operating system strategy, with news that should be of interest to anyone watching recent industry trends in software development." 

It's going to be a busy week. On Monday we're making a syndication announcement with a major portal. This funky website is going some interesting places! And on Thursday Microsoft will ship MSIE5. Glad I got my SuperHonker! 

The guys at portaldeveloper.com are looking for some gigs. They do excellent work! 

Esther's has a great Flash intro this year. Get ready to be impressed! 

LinuxWorld: Apple's position on Linux -- No. 

Steve Ivy has his own personal portal. This is so excellent, I love to see this kind of stuff happening! This is the Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server application. It's here now and right on. More. 

James Spahr edits his to-do list in the browser. 

The SuperHonker is here. Very strange feeling, all this power, but I have to run a different browser, and my old monitor didn't work with this machine. Everything feeeeeels weird! As always. 

Now I'm off to Fry's to get a replacement for my fried monitor. Ain't life funny that way? I hate Fry's! 

A random link, I was researching something else and came across this MacWEEK editorial from 1995. Gorgeously written. I wrote a piece around that time about the return of King Jean-Louis. 

For review: Asynchronous XML-RPC for Frontier. 

Scriptics: TCL and Java integration. 

ZDNet: Silverberg unlikely to return to Microsoft. 

WebMonkey: Bring out the GIMP. 

SF Chronicle: Netscapees Spawning Startups. 

ZDNet: Is Microsoft porting Office to Linux? 

Dan Gillmor on XML. "A genuine worry in the XML community is whether major technology companies will cooperate on creating open file formats for everyone. XML was created in part to help do this, but it won't dissuade a company that wants a proprietary advantage." 

InfoWorld: Microsoft reorg expected next week. 

We've heard rumors that Frontier 6 will be sold at a lower price than Frontier 5. In fact, we have no plans to change pricing. 

Thursday, March 11, 1999

ZDNN: Ellison to run for California Governor? 

Salon: Microsoft's Scorched-Earth PR Strategy. 

Bruce Tognazzini: Maximixing Human Performance. 

Another interesting Tog piece.. How I Made a Small Fortune at Apple Computer (out of a much, much larger one). 

MacWEEK: Why MacOS X Server? The question had crossed my mind too. Playing Monday Morning Quarterback, Apple would have done well to invest in WebSTAR. Sorry! 

In May l998, US President Bill Clinton stayed at the home of a Silicon Valley mogul, Steve Jobs. Chelsea Clinton, the President's daughter, three friends and an entourage of Secret Service agents had dinner at Buck's. 

Fortune: A Cautionary Tale of Silicon Valley. A grossly unfair story. Marimba was quiet for a long period after the initial hype. They're now selling software at an impressive rate. I was as critical as anyone of Marimba during their massive hype period, but this story doesn't give Marimba credit for adjusting to the realities of their market, which they did. 

Salon: Beauty and the Geeks. "The most egregious aspect of the Fortune feature wasn't the article's text but its accompanying art. While the author criticized Polese for posing for 'glamorous close-up [photos] with her face softly lit and airbrushed, eyes beaming up at the camera,' Fortune decorated the article with a series of its own glamorous close-up photos of Polese, dolled-up and beaming at the camera. Apparently, Fortune wanted to criticize a woman for using her sex appeal and capitalize on that sex appeal at the same time -- to have its cheesecake and knock it, too." 

Wednesday, March 10, 1999

DaveNet: Whois.userland.com? 

Woodside Almanac: $4,400 Breakfast at Buck's.  

Philippe Martin: ODBExtractor 1.1. 

Other WhosIs's: SmartWhoIs, CompanySleuth, NameStake. 

Footprint Software makes an outliner for Windows CE. 

From the It Had to Happen Department: domainauction.com. 

MacWEEK: PowerBooks are too heavy. 

When.com: Upcoming IPOs. 

Charlie Wood explains Vignette's URL format. 

Here's a picture of Jamis MacNiven (the owner of Buck's), Jimmi Johnson, Marc Canter and myself brainstorming about the website and eating free food, a couple of weeks ago during VC rush-hour at Buck's (Thursday morning). Then Daniel Berlinger had some fun with that picture. The original photo was taken by Flash Stutsman. 

Hello! My name is Dave. Welcome to our little planning ommision. I am the commisar. We are planning to overthrow the proletariat. And whistle while we work. How will you contribute to the downfall of plurality? 

Wired: Building a Self-Actualized Web. "If XML becomes the universal format for structuring data, as its backers anticipate, everything from classified ads to news articles to recipes to search engines will be more orderly, and applications like browsers can manipulate and display these documents in more useful ways, according to XML advocates." 

Grateful Dead: Playing in the Band. This could be the theme song for the web, at its best. 

Moses DeJong: TCL Java 1.2. 

Chris Sutton is running Linux on his desktop. He's the system manager in a predominantly Mac workgroup, but he feels the pull of Microsoft every day. 

Reuters: Microsoft aims new OS at China's masses. 

Chris Nolan: Will Bristol Drop the Ball? 

Tuesday, March 09, 1999

The new version of Buck's Woodside is on the air. Now we have to put some new content on there! What a trip this is going to be. 

whois.userland.com got some new friendly features this morning. 

Frontier users can download whois.root. It's a website in a guest database. It requires mainResponder to run. If you don't know what that is, stay tuned. 

David Detlefsen wants to do XML-RPC from the Unix shell. 

At 7:46PM Pacific, the Seattle Times home page is broken. It says "Forbidden. Your client is not allowed to access the requested object." Major real-time link-rot! 

Jorn Barger: The Best and Worst of Web Design. 

I got the link above from a thread about link-rot, and an informal list of practices that make me raise my fists in furious indignation. 

Should you see a goat cheese tart on the dessert list, do not fail to order it. Like most everything about this place, it soars. 

NY Times op-ed: Paul Simon on the passing of Joe DiMaggio. "A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.." 

Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee.  

Simeon's Cave of Magic. How does this work!? Never mind. I figured it out. I posted the solution on the DG. 

On MacInTouch, Henry Norr compares the performance of the Pentium III vs the Mac G3 in doing PhotoShop ops. 

Dan Gillmor: Last-minute deal what you'd expect from Intel. 

Wired: From the Alley to the Valley. East coast entrepreneurs meet California VCs. "The days of creating new brands online are over now that major media companies have entered the fray.." The VCs are always saying that and they're always wrong. 

Builder.com: Working in a Web Group. 

InfoWorld: Microsoft invests in Internet copy protection. 

MacWEEK: Apps for Mac OS X Server. Hmmm. No familiar names there. 

Monday, March 08, 1999

Lawrence Lee takes the lead in identifying a common source of link-rot, which I talked obliquely about in regard to the Fortune article, below. We're going to work to identify this issue for the industry and flush this bad practice from the popular news sites. 

In 1996 Marc Canter asked Who Will Buy Apple? Requires Shockwave, of course. 

A new URL for our WhoIs server. I'm going to write a DaveNet piece about this tomorrow morning. I want to add a couple more features. It feels electric here today. Lovin it! 

Jeff Stuit's badmusic.org. 

InfoWorld: Is your site really working? 

Ian Beatty discovers a revolutionary yet unpublicized feature of Frontier 6. You can edit discussion group messages with Frontier's wrapping headlines outliner. It's all done with smoke and mirrors. As far as I know we're the first developer to so deeply integrate a workstation editing tool with a browser-based interface. This is just the beginning, and a large part of the reason it's so important that we're on both Mac and Windows. (Willie Sutton robbed banks because that's where the money is. People who write for the web are on Mac and Windows. That's a clue.) 

Slashdot has a back-end view, that's logically equivalent to the XML view of Scripting News. I smell convergence! 

Menwith Hill is the largest electronic monitoring station in the world. It is run by the US National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors the world's communication for US intelligence. Menwith Hill employs 1,200 US civilians and servicemen to work around the clock inside "hardened" buildings intercepting and analysing communications mainly from Europe, Russia and the Middle East.  

From the Cryptic Clue Department. 'Agents? That's the old stuff. Angels? In with the new!' 

ZineZone lets you build your own Zine. Interesting. It's not what I thought it was. I thought it was competition for what we're building, but it's not. Whew! 

KDE: Screenshots Page. 

Fortune: Non White-boy Venture Capital. "Bucks Restaurant is still far and away the best place to see and be seen in the Valley; to survive here you must have at the very least a cell phone and a Palm Pilot; and venture capitalists, as a general rule, are white men between the ages of 35 and 50."  

Bucks is my favorite restaurant too. And we're doing their new website! It's going to be coooool. 

One more thing, the Fortune link will be broken tomorrow. One of my pet peeves. A big site like Fortune should have a permanent home for the piece on the day the piece runs. The NY Times does this too. They screw the whole thing up, I only point to them when it's really worth it, I hate putting broken links in my archives. Further, they use a real CMS at Fortune, so they have to be able to do this right. Maybe Jakob Nielsen could add this to his list ways to avoid link-rot. It's certainly high on my list. 

Jakob Nielsen: Communicating Trust in Web Design. 

www.womanonfire.com. 

MacWEEK: Sony goes for the gold. 

InfoWorld: Announcements for XTech. 

NY Times: Joe DiMaggio dead at 84. The Yankee Clipper was married to Marilyn Monroe. 

MacWorld: Golive 4.0's Biggest New Feature. 

Sunday, March 07, 1999

NY Times: Stanley Kubrick dead at 70. Directed Dr. Strangelove, 2001, Clockwork Orange.  

InfoWorld reports on last week's Open Source Summit. 

Netscape: Communicator 4.51 released. 

New version of betty.rpc.client that supports asynch XML-RPC. 

DomainSurfer works like our whois page, but it doesn't do history. 

Mozilla.org: XP Toolkit Architecture. 

NY Times: Privacy Concerns about Microsoft Products. 

SF Chronicle: Microsoft Tentacles Reaching Out Again. 

James Clark: Expat FAQ. 

Saturday, March 06, 1999

Kurt Granroth suggests a codename for Frontier 7. 

I've wanted this forever, a simple fast Who Is page for Frontier 6.  

I just added a cute little feature that actually will be very helpful to people deploying Frontier 6. The Who Is script now remembers the last string you entered in the text box. It was two lines of code, one to get the remembered value, and one to set it. It works for every person who is a logged-on member of the DG. This is why F6 is so powerful. The website framework can now hook you into persistent memory for every user. Hahaahaa! 

And then I made it more complicated. Now it keeps a history of all the domain names you've checked, indicating whether they are taken or not. A feature I didn't know I needed until I had the site up and running. 

Using my new tool, I found the perfect domain name for it, but (arrrgh!) it's taken. 

Next step is to integrate it with my control panel. 

Friday, March 05, 1999

If I were Microsoft I'd be even more bold.. 

It'll be a lot of years before Linux is user-friendly, and by then Bernie and I will be old men smoking cigars and ogling the girls on the boardwalk at Miami Beach.. 

CNN: Hackers Target Pentagon Computers.  

News.com: The race to create XML e-Commerce servers. Zzz. 

Richard Brandt: Webwide Applications. 

Feminista: Letter to NOW.  

Salon's Scott Rosenberg laments the lack of PIM software. More.. 

From the Keep it Simple Department.. A 32-bit real-time OS, GUI, HTML 3.2-compatible browser, web server, and networking stack all on a single 1.44MB floppy. 

MacCentral: Sony unveils next generation PlayStation. Too bad it doesn't have TCP. 

PC Mag first look at the HP Jornada. 

David Coursey: Gagging on @Home. 

PC WEEK: Microsoft exec dissects Linux. 

Thursday, March 04, 1999

DaveNet: Dancing Hamsters. 

Early this morning we reached a milestone in our collaboration with Marc Canter and his team at Broadband Mechanics.  

Their high fidelity DHTML interface for our Mail to the Future server is now online, with two important limits. 1. It requires MSIE 5.0b2/Windows, and 2. You must change your security settings to allow communication with a remote server. This enables the XML-RPC connection with the server. Details are here. 

Now, when you're ready, dive into the wild and hairy (and gorgeous) world of broadband applications. 

Other news 

The technography thread continues. Today we're talking about the technographer's net connection. 

If you don't have Windows or MSIE5.0b2, or don't want to change your security settings, here's a new slide show of the functionality. 

News.com exposes issues around the lack of a standard GUI on Linux. They got it right. Mac and Windows each have a standard way of drawing windows and menus and handling mouse and keyboard interactions. Linux leaves that up to the user, which makes it hard to develop interactive software that runs on all flavors of Linux. This is the weak-spot in the Linux strategy, and the reason why, at this time, it can only challenge Microsoft on the server side, not on the desktop. More.. 

OTOH, as reported in the NY Times and elsewhere, the Linux industry is gravitating to GNOME over the other GUIs. When and if a standard coalesces around one of the contenders, it could be a serious challenge to Microsoft's dominance on the desktop. 

According to WordNet, a gnome is a "legendary creature resembling a tiny old man who lives in the depths of the earth and guards buried treasure." 

According to rumors flying around on email, Microsoft offered $5 million for the linux.com domain. If true, one has to wonder what they would have done with it. IMHO, the money would be better spent creating bridges to Linux so networked apps running on NT can scale up to running on Linux. As an NT developer I would really like to see this happen.  

Apple: Mac OS X Server screen shots. NextStep with a Mac-like UI? 

Red Herring: Adobe Fights Quark in Print. 

Here's the teaser site we put up for people who wandered into www.mailtothefuture.com, while it was in development. 

Newsweek.com: Header-ache. 

Yahoo: Real-Time Delivery of Orders to your Secure Web Server. 

Wednesday, March 03, 1999

Wired: A Linux Car Stereo! Wow. 

Fredrik Lundh reports that the user interface of the Linux Car Stereo is scriptable, it's written in Python. 

A2B Music: AT&T's new music site. 

Welcome aboard Garret P. Vreeland! 

One more time.. Let's do the Hamster Dance! 

When I go like this.. it means I get it ;-> 

We're a knowledge management company! 

MacWEEK: Quark Answers Adobe Challenge. 

Press Release: DataChannel's XML Framework. 

Trinity Globecaster is a do-it-yourself Internet TV station. (Wes wants someone to lend him one!) 

Red Herring: Microsoft-bashing at LinuxWorld keynotes. 

InternetWeek: XML can unlock access to legacy data. 

According to News.com, Hewlett-Packard will offer customers storage and computing on a rental basis. 

Tuesday, March 02, 1999

DaveNet: Comparing Broadband and HTML. 

John Dvorak has another screenshot of a confidential Microsoft product, Windows 2001. 

AbiSource: Pictures from LinuxExpo. 

News.com: The bidding war for Linux.com. Was Microsoft really bidding, and why? 

InfoWorld: HP Splits in Two, CEO Platt Splits Too. InfoWorld wins the Best Headline of 1999 Award. 

Press Release: Computer Associates and Red Hat sittin in a tree. Bringing Linux to the desktop of one million PC. 

CNN: Senate report on Y2K. 

Ouch! My face is red. Bryan Green points to three DaveNet pieces where I *did* claim to be a journalist. 1, 2, 3. So I retract the statement I made today about never claiming to be a journalist and apologize to my readers for not having done a thorough search of DaveNet back-issues before making the statement. 

MSNBC: Internet Deals at Snowbird. 

Ygenerator is a dynamic Flash generator that works in the same way as Macromedia's Flash Generator. 

Dru Jay has two interesting ideas that are well-illustrated in two web pages. 1, 2. Both look like they could be done in Frontier.  

Wired: Microsoft to Drop Spam Filtering. "Just because we're complying doesn't mean we're giving up," [Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla] said. "We want to defend our right to add technologies that aid users."  

Avantgo: Mobile Application Link is a communication standard and software that enables handhelds to exchange data and applications directly with centralized application servers in the same way that HotSync or ActiveSync technologies enable a handheld to exchange data with a workstation. 

Now you too can do The Hamster Dance.  

But wait, there's more! 

www.airsicknessbags.com. 

David Brown has a cable modem and wouldn't give it back. 

IBM has an interactive XML syntax checker, as does UserLand. 

Wired: Counties and Internet Taxation. As malls shrink, as the Internet grows, counties are losing their revenue base.  

Fairfax IT: Pentium III-only Sites Coming Soon. Oooops! 

Upside: Brenda Laurel vs Barbie. Barbie won. 

Adobe's InDesign is their challenge to Quark, to be launched today in Boston at Seybold. 

MacWEEK: InDesign makes Seybold debut. 

MacWorld: Adobe Answers XPress. 

News.com: Adobe Rolling Out Quark Killer. 

NY Times: Internet Sellers Appease Retailers. "...if you don't practice cannibalism, the competition will eat you for lunch." 

Developer's Day at WWW8 includes a panel on web scripting, and Frontier gets a mention. That's nice! 

Monday, March 01, 1999

Marc Canter and his team at Broadband Mechanics have been working on a high fidelity user interface for Mail to the Future. Here are some thumbnails that illustrate the differences between a plain Netscape 2.0-compatible HTML interface and a high-bandwidth DHTML interface: