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Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design. "The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users' expectations, the more they will feel insecure. Oops, maybe if I let go of this apple, it will turn into a tomato and jump a mile into the sky." PC Mag: Bitmap and Vector Graphics. Fredrik Lundh shows Edit-this-Page functionality for PythonWare.Com. VectorZone is a Flash site sponsored by Macromedia.
NY Times: Pop! Goes the Bubble. "There are many more E-sellers than there were before -- a change, almost imperceptible, that is weighing on many Internet stocks today."
Chuck Shotton: "What the Internet needs is a set of true peer-to-peer applications that run on the client side. Until that happens, the old client-server model will continue to be a barrier to any sort of meaningful distributed or decentralized computing on the Internet." Not sure if I agree, but it sounds good! US Subs: It started as a very simple idea. "The boat sits at the dock because I just can't seem to find the time to use it anymore." "Waterfront property is too expensive." "I don't have as much time as I'd like to go diving."
DaveNet: Weblogs. "Right now a very small percentage of web users have websites. That can and will change." "You're onto something powerful," says Dan Gillmor.
InfoWorld: Macromedia sneaks a peek at new web dev tools. Dave Polaschek says that weblogs are for Intranets too. True! US Patent and Trademark Office: Notice of Public Hearing and Request for Comments on Issues Related to the Identification of Prior Art During the Examination of a Patent Application. Privacy is a big topic on the Internet today. In September 1997, in DaveNet, Bill Gates said: "For some reason the public isn't hearing about this issue at all. I can't believe there isn't more of an outcry." Finally people are tuning in. They are recording everything you say. It can and will be used against you. "A new cyberdictator could ask his MIS department to do a query against the email database. Find me six million people to kill, and give me a reason to kill them."
Scott's article will probably be pointed to by lots of weblogs! ;-> Ever wonder what a sonic boom looks like on a humid day? Frank Beacham's Questioning Technology. Technote: The XML-RPC interface for Manila will look much like the XML-RPC interface for search.userland.com. 15seconds.Com uses the XML version of Scripting News to demonstrate server-side XML coding for ASPs. Hey, the ball is realllly rolling now. Pinch me! Drew Ivan: 'Back in 1945, Vannevar Bush's landmark essay "As We May Think" described a device called Memex that sounds a lot like today's Worldwide Web. He envisioned a class of people called Trailblazers who were adept at wading their way through hypertexts and leaving a trail of links for others to follow. Weblogs are to the WWW what Trailblazers were to Memex, except not hypothetical.' On Monday we registered a new domain, it's amazing what names aren't taken. Unfortunately weblog.com is taken. Wired: Microsoft got Mad, then Even, with IBM. News.com: Microsoft Defends Per-CPU OS License Fee.
A demo a day! Today I showed Manila to Fortune's Brent Schlender. He said: "Manila is the coolest piece of software I've seen since the web browser." Stewart Alsop contemplates eBay's funeral. BusinessWeek: eBay vs Amazon. Wired: Feasting on Failed Promise. "The consensus is we're about to hit a boom in the insolvency industry. The laws of gravity are taking hold." Jamis: "It was 10:00 on a moonless night as we rattled along in Magdie's ancient Peugeot at 70 mph. The glowing tip of a cigarette drifted by in the adjacent lane and I thought drowsily that the car along side of us on the freeway didn't have any headlights either." Can you find the hidden billionaires? Can you find the future billionaire?
Andreessen: "We have to make this stuff much more simple at every step of the chain." Agreed. Now more than ever I wish Microsoft would improve the text editor built into MSIE. I've tried to explain this to them so many different ways. Here's the straight poop. The editor sucks. If you want to see what I mean, get a HotMail account and use it write all your email for a couple of days. You'll hate it. Make it so you don't. Wired: "The government has turned Australia into the global village idiot", said Danny Yee, a spokesman for Electronic Frontiers Australia in a statement. Standard: Perlman Steps Down at WebTV. "Microsoft plans to replace the core WebTV operating software with the Windows CE system, a move that will make WebTV a key part of Microsoft's high-stakes entry into the interactive-TV space." InfoWorld: "XML.org will provide a registry and repository for the access and management of XML schemas, Document Type Definitions (DTD), and other XML-related information." News.com: Taking Sides in XML. "What XML proponents fear most is that the major software makers will use their financial clout to hijack the consensus-building process, leading to proprietary and incompatible versions of XML schemas that favor a particular vendor's software and architecture." I just got interviewed by Salon re Manila! Why is it called Manila? Sydney Morning Herald: Internet Censorship Passes Hurdle. "The federal government's crackdown on Internet pornography and violence passed the Senate today with key independent Senator Brian Harradine congratulating Communications Minister Richard Alston on a sterling job." NY Times: AOL Volunteers Sue for Pay. "AOL is a for-profit business. What community leaders did was very essential to the service in terms of what they were selling to the public. The minimum-wage laws require people get paid a minimum wage." Jude Wanniski: Let's Kill Some Civilians. "Senator Lieberman is such a sweet man, with such a sweet voice and demeanor. His colleagues all marvel at what a spiritual fellow he is.." Publish reviews PhotoScripter 1.0, which adds scripting to Adobe PhotoShop/Mac. "But my biggest beef with PhotoScripter is its pricing. A single-user license is $299, while a workstation license (which allows the plug-in to be placed on a server and accessed by up to ten people) is $999." Huh? $299 is a bargain! There's a huge need for this product, and Adobe has been unresponsive for eight years! What's the reviewer's reasoning? He doesn't say. That people's time is worthless? Scripting PhotoShop has been on the professional's wish list for eight years. Now an independent developer has delivered. They should have a parade for MainEvent instead of complaining about, of all things, the price! What do PhotoShop professionals earn? Frontier 6 developers, there's a new release of prefs.root today. The demo site for the new features is kind of funky and interesting in a technical sort of way.
Salon: Stalking the Wild Fry's Salesperson. 'In the unlikely event they were caught, they behaved like prisoners of war, meeting customer's interrogations with elaborate obfuscation, misdirection, hedging or outright lies. But by far the most common response was "Sorry, this is my first day."' Ken Sall: WWWhat happened at WWW8? Dan Gillmor: Slashdot Almost Addictive. eBay: "I want to open a scuba shop in the Keys. I'm selling my house, quitting my job, and may not own a computer again. I will, of course, be available for transition, info, and advice for a few months." Paul Everitt: Funding the Perfect Beast. News.com: Deep GeoCities cuts to follow Yahoo merger. Macromedia announces Free Flash Player Source. InfoWorld: Microsoft Pitches Visual Basic. "As developers move away from building traditional two-tier programs and begin focusing on distributed, n-tier Web applications, Microsoft wants to make sure that its popular Visual Basic development tool is not left behind."
DaveNet: Edit This Page. Amazon: Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, Tog on Software Design, The Inmates are Running the Asylum. I just ordered new copies of all three books. If you're from Borders or Barnesandnoble, instead of complaining, set up a site that displays info about the books and has three buttons: Buy from Amazon, Buy from Borders and Buy from Barnesandnoble. Make it easy for me to support you. John Dvorak: The All-Things Approach. "I suppose it's possible that the world's biggest bookstore can become the world's biggest CD store and the world's biggest toy store and the worlds biggest clothing store and.." Bruce Tognazzini: The Sorry State of Web Design. Steven Champeon: Building Dynamic HTML GUIS. Freedom Forum: Jon Katz on Weblogs. BucksWoodside.Com has been on the air for over 71 hours! Dave Polaschek's WWDC report. Good Morning Silicon Valley is a weblog. I met the editor of this site, Pat Sullivan, this morning. We had a lot in common! Question for people studying the IPO craze. Why has no brand emerged in the Internet Cafe business? Why hasn't one of the 'brick and mortar' brands seized this opportunity? Why hasn't one of the big ISPs? Laptops are great, but what if every Barnes and Noble had several easy to use web browsers? So there Jeff Bezos! ZDNet: InfoSpinner Claims Load Balancing Patent. Name withheld: 'I manage all of the non-MVS systems integrators at (a large bank), and I attended several technology briefings last week at HP. I feel that their efforts, in addition to being open, will have a greater long-term impact than BizTalk.' ZDNET: "BizTalk is more than just the next generation of Microsoft's DNA (Distributed interNet Applications) architecture. It is also the name of a new XML-based BackOffice server that Microsoft will release into beta test this summer and ship sometime shortly after Windows 2000." Paul Boutin: Why ask Why? Finally some sobriety! Hic. IBM's XENA is an XML editor. No Mac version? Screen shot of XENA running on the Mac. IBM should change their website to include Mac in the list of compatible systems? InfoWorld: "Macromedia is also releasing the source code for the Flash 4 player, enabling any platform or application developers to integrate Flash playback capabilities into their products." Wow! News.com: Macromedia Creates Shockwave Portal. Macrobyte, a Frontier developer, expands. Keep on truckin! Frontier 6 users, if you're using WebEdit to share access to an object database, it's time to take a look at WebEdit 2.0.
InfoWorld: Push Ain't Dead. It's called email. Doh! David Pogue: Attack of the Living Email. "One frightening morning I awoke to find that I was exactly 1,749 messages behind." New channels: Tour of Italy, POW/MIA Freedom Fighters. Version 0.7.0 of Carmen's Headline Viewer. WSJ: Linux Draws Flack from Microsoft Attack Team.
New channel: XML.COM. Perfect! XML.COM questions XSL. "How necessary is XSL? Is it just too complicated? Is it really an improvement over what we have today? Might XSL even be considered harmful to the Web?" Paul Howson: "XSL has been mooted as 'the way' to translate xml. However, XSL is a complex and as-yet-incomplete piece of work. If you’ve read the XSL spec, you may find yourself wondering whether things really need to be that complicated." At 7AM Pacific a BucksWoodside.Com went live. We did lots of work on the site, mostly behind the scenes, to make the content flow easily. This was an incredible educational process in user interface. Buck's opening day screenshot. It's always a good idea to do one of these. Over the months and probably years, the interface is likely to change, and probably will get more complex. I wish I had opening day shots for all the sites I've done. Live and learn! Never demo on a development server. "Learn what makes your software crash, and avoid doing those things! Run through the demonstration over and over, each time you get a new version from development. If the new version doesn't demo without crashing, use an older, more reliable version instead." 1991: Demoing Software for Fun & Profit. Win Mitchell is looking for a Frontier developer. Eric Kidd: Benchmarking & Linux Scalability. News.com: Microsoft Forms Linux Group. Like MacArthur, fresh from his victory over Japan, marching without opposition to the China-Korea border. There's no company to defeat here. No small set of minds to find weaknesses in. Oooops? This evening I wrote a poem in prose and pictures for Linus Torvalds. Be strong my brother! It had to happen! www.gluetrain.com. "Markets are conversations. Conversations are markets. Markets are he as you are we and we are all together." Red Herring: Venture Capitalists Feel the Heat. "As returns on investment into Internet startups continue to skyrocket, venture capitalists are no longer the only investors willing to take a bet on high-risk, out-there technology investments." Don Hopkins, a member of the SimCity development team, has accumulated a list of recent stories about the project. MacWEEK: Raven Zachary's report from Apple's WWDC. This morning I fixed two broken channels. Scripting News and SlashDot.Org.
I was chatting with Bernie this evening about the project I've been working on and saying that DeepFun.Com was an inspiration for me, and I started talking about admin interfaces. Bernie told me about the one that Matt Daw put together for him, and I asked for a screen shot. TQ White wrote a Letter to the Editor of the NY Times. They printed it! News.com: What does the future hold for NSI? Time: Vote for Person of the Century. Who is Murray N Rothbard? Dan Peters of the Dallas Morning News wants to know if Frontier runs on Wolfpack server clusters. I do too! News.com: How prime is portal real estate? Microsoft: Cluster Server. AKA Wolfpack. CNN: Scaling Problems at E-Trade. "Once we got down into the technology," Johnson said, "it was actually kind of scary." O'Reilly: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. The full text of the book is there. Congratulations! Good idea. MacWEEK: Motorola and IBM are Friends Again. Wired: Amazon Drops Controversial Book. ZDNet: Amazon Reverses Book Ban.
WebMonkey: PHP/MySQL Tutorial. Linux.Com goes live. Three songs by Dan Gillmor, columnist at the SJ Merc: #1, #2, #3. Thanks to Lawrence Lee for tuning into this! Requires MP3. NY Times: Stock Trading at Work. Infoworld: Oracle's NCI Abandons Name, just as Network Computing is starting to deliver on the promises. Tbtf.Com: Domain Name Competition? Not yet. Our most popular channel: The Motley Fool. NY Times: Internet Datacenters Power the Web. "Internet datacenters are sprouting up across the country in a sure sign of the trend toward once again housing information and computer power centrally -- a seeming reversal of the last two decades of computing." InfoWorld: Apple is Back, but Does IT Care? TechWeb: U.S. Uses Key Escrow To Steal Secrets. Wired: Deconstructing Austin Powers. Interactive Week: Q&A With Jim Phillips. The interesting part is in the Talkback section at the bottom of the page. Apparently this is what happens when a vendor is too agressive with patents. The users get angry. This is how the patent madness should shake out. The predators should fear for their existence at the hands of the users. Samuel Reynolds: What is a Table Renderer?
New channel: Web Graphics. Hot site! Jeffrey Zeldman: "Visually challenged? Not to worry. We got yer graphics – right here. And they're all free." This is the perfect companion site for Scripting News. A bonanza! Lawrence Lee reports that Microsoft Office 2000 has support for threaded discussion groups. Is the protocol connecting the workstation to the server open? Could we plug a new writing tool into their network? And can we replace their server with one running on Mac OS or Linux? Sydney Morning Herald: Talk Back to the Web. "We're not going to let Chrysler go on Ford's Web site and post a note," said Mr Tan, acknowledging enforcement may be difficult considering the potential for a vast and growing number of comments. CritSuite predates Third Voice. Andy Babiec tried Third Voice and was reminded why he doesn't like unmoderated discussions. Brief review of Third Voice. As the editor of a website, I don't like it. I hope people don't use it. It's a money-grab. Michael Lawley asks what it will take to get me back on Apple's side. Damn! LinuxNewbies.Com is taken. However we were able to snatch a juicy domain with Linux in it. Hah! Red Herring: Interwoven's Dance Card Fills Up. Forbes: Open Season in Silicon Valley. Bruce Hoult reports that the guts of Open Transport have been removed in Apple's OSX. Wired: Struggling to Be.
New channel: BMW Motorcycle Owners of America. Perfect! Lindon Parker runs an on-line only record company. He thinks MP3's days might be numbered. VQF.Com compares their format to MP3. Matt Hamer raises some tricky problems with the XML format used for Scripting News. If you're reading our XML file, please check this out, a change to the DTD and a tweak to the format may be coming. News.com: Linux.Com Goes Live Tomorrow. Red Herring: Third Voice Will Make Money. Emmanuel Décarie, a Mac scripting expert, new to Unix, asks how interapplication communication works on Unix. Dan Shafer is getting ready for the Builder.Com conference in New Orleans in December. I went to this conference two years ago, it was fan-tas-tic! InfoWorld compares RedHat and Caldera. NY Times: All About.Com.
SunWorld: Scripting Across Frontiers. "If you work with Web applications, you owe yourself the opportunity to see how Frontier can benefit you." XML For Preferences. A posting to the XML-DEV list summarizing our recent work on preferences authoring in XML. Please clone our XML-based preferences system, as widely as possible. It's just storage. NY Times: New Investors, Beguiled by the Web. Suck: "We've seen the future of music, and it looks a lot like a Gap commercial." SJ Merc: Valley Long on Ideas, Short on Management. Red Herring: Startups Aren't for Everybody. MSNBC: More Tech Firms Embrace Linux. Search for extraterrestrial intelligence at home.
Source release of Prefs.UserLand.Com. If you are running a Frontier 6 server with membership and user preferences, please download the new code and use it. You'll be happy you did. Here's a website I'm doing with my uncle Ken Kiesler, also known as The Great Va-Va-Voom. The song of the day, Irma Thomas' Hip Shakin Mama. RealAudio. O'Reilly: SourceExchange. "It's a dynamic, wide-open marketplace of software projects where buyers with highly specialized demands meet suppliers of highly skilled services." InfoWorld: Microsoft Embraces other Platforms? "After months of labeling its Windows platform 'the ultimate application server,' Microsoft is partnering with third-party vendors in hopes of giving customers a solution that better fits with their heterogeneous environments." Faisal Jawdat: "With all due respect to the fantastic accomplishment that Linux represents (both in terms of creating a new operating system 'from scratch' and in terms of creating something significant and usable in Open Source), it's not ready to be my client OS or my server OS for serious work, and the Linux community needs to realize that the leap required is more than a code fix."
New channel: Python.Org. Coool! News.com: MP3.Com Files for IPO. "We believe that large numbers of artists and consumers are drawn to MP3.com because they have historically been under-served by the traditional music industry." News.com: 550Mhz Pentium IIIs Coming. MacWEEK: Sherlock is one to Watch. Two Sherlock screenshots, thanks to David Handy: #1, #2. Wired asks "Would you want your child to grow up to be Steve Jobs or Bill Gates?" Kickoff message for our "other" new mail list. An invitation for open source development. A new plan for a distributed portal. Customized content aggregation. Personalization up the yin-yang. Private intranet channels. And dissemination of information thru search engines, pagers and email, printing and of course the Internet. Jim Byrne would like to get in on the Linux "feeding frenzy". He asks which is the best distribution for PowerPC hardware. Hint to Apple get "Darwin" off your roadmap and jump to Linux. LinuxPPC transforms your Macintosh into a powerful UNIX workstation A spiffy new interface for preferences for UserLand.Com. It's just a wizard. Makes it easy for preferences to grow. And it's a framework, we'll release source code when it's done so every Frontier 6 site can have a great preferences sub-site. The wizard interface is specified in XML, so non-technical people, tutorial writers, for example, can document the preferences system right in the spec for the system. This puts the power in the right place. Also it's scalable, the same spec could be rendered in Flash, DHTML or as a static web page. All from the same source. I still want to do some more work on this. Stay tuned for more new features. Frontier webmasters needed in Washington DC. Wired: When Industries Collide. Tech should hang tough. There's no way copy protection will work. MP3 is here to stay. MP3.Com had a mole in the London meeting. "Seems that all the suspicions of behind-the-scenes manipulation and not so hidden agendas are true. Despite public claims to an open industry conglomeration of cooperative forces set to solve the world's digital problems, an elite, secret group has been meeting to subvert the process." David Weekly: Why SDMI Will Fail. "When a computer program, say RealPlayer or WinAMP, wants to play some music for the user, they have to send that data in raw form to the sound card. It is a trivial manner to write a piece of software that pretends that it is a sound card!" News.com: Motley Fool Won't Rush to IPO. "Our time frame as a business is 60 years, not 60 days," Motley Fool chief operating officer Erik Rydholm told CNET News.com. "We consider an IPO to be a financing event and not an exit strategy, and we don't want financing to be confused with our business goals." Right on!
DaveNet: Linux Newbies. New channel: Free XML Tools. Perfect! Wired: US May Pull Belgrade Bandwidth. "People are exposed to bad propaganda on both sides," he said. "The Internet is the only place there's some kind of sanity. It's crucial. At this particular moment it's crucial." News.com: Amazon paid $250 million for Alexa. InfoWorld: Buy a product, get some stock. "Cyrus Intersoft plans to give developers who sign up to create applications using its forthcoming Java-based network operating system a lot more than a pat on the back and a free T-shirt -- they will get stock in the company." CNN: Sony Unveils Robot Dog. As one of the first universities on the Internet, Stanford University has long held Class A network 36 which holds approximately 16 million addresses. Because of IP address scarcity, Stanford is giving back the 36 net in the year 2000. Eric Kidd: Zope and Frontier Compared. This becomes more interesting as we move towards Unix. We want to deploy apps that scale up to millions of users. We will use Frontier as a content management and rapid development environment. Until we have Frontier running on Linux, we will deploy in some other environment. If we can build a bridge to Zope, and if its applications scale well on Intel hardware, we'll go with Zope. Key point: We made a decision last month that we should not wait for Frontier to get to Unix. We can't really, because we can't turn away users. Mail To The Future, for example, is growing, there's more press coming, following the Yahoo endorsement. And eventually I think My.UserLand.Com is going to develop into a major Internet portal. We won't hold the apps back waiting for Frontier to get to Linux. Some people may be surprised at this flexibility, but many of our customers need this kind of bridge too. The Web is growing at a feverish pace, you can't be in a position where you have to turn away growth. Bottom-line: This is why it's good that Zope is getting XML-RPC. Bernie DeKoven wants to know what you think. TechWeb: 25 Vendors in Hosted Apps Consortium. Interesting! There's room for another 25 vendors here. I like XML, Linux, NT, scripting and databases. ASPs is a cool idea. I like it. Today's music: A Certain Girl by Naomi Neville, as sung by Allen Toussaint, of course! What's her name? I can't tell you! Wired: What If Aliens Cloned My Hair? "The company that launched the remains of Timothy Leary wants to send a lock of your hair hurtling into space." So if 25,000 years from now an alien cloned my hair, would my consciousness be there? InfoWorld: Microsoft's Bosworth talks up XML. "What we learned from the Web is that easy and simple beats efficient and complex." InfoWorld: Dell Demos New Sales Website. Cool! But will they be able to fix a laptop with a broken keyboard? Heads-up, we updated Frontier on our CMS server last night, so there will be macro errors and other glitches, for sure. If you spot one, send an email to andre@userland.com.
TechWeb: Berners-Lee Says Patents Obstruct an Open Web. The latest update of LibGD focuses on image transformations, vertical and horizontal flips, rotation through 90 and 180 degrees, shears, and rotation through arbitrary angles. News.com: Starbuck's to enter Portal Fray? What is the problem at Starbucks Coffee? SJ Merc: The Dead on MP3. "Spokesmen for the Grateful Dead announced Tuesday that the band will let its fans legally swap online recordings of live performances." Garcia once said, "When we're done with it, you can have it." DeadRadio: "Due to licensing issues and restrictions this content is no longer available. Please visit www.broadcast.com for your favorite radio station." Hello? 5/27/98: An Afterlife for the Dead? Dave Luebbert, an old friend from Microsoft's Word team, posts suggestions for improving the interface on discuss.userland.com. Update on my attempt to get my Dell laptop repaired. As I expected, it arrived nonfunctional. We'll go around the loop at least one more time. Microsoft: NT Service Pack 5. News.com: Net number system at crossroads. "The legacy space doled out to those that had the foresight to ask for it is the source of jealousy for many latecomers. They point out that while Mercedes Benz holds nearly 17 million addresses, only 1.04 million have been allocated to the entire nation of China." 6/22/98, ZDNet: Big Entities Stash IP Addresses. "What was once nearly worthless in the mid-1980s is an increasingly valuable commodity in today's fast-growing Internet." The Class A licensees. Thanks to Fredrik Lundh. RFC 1335: The Problem of Address Space Exhaustion. RFC 1466: Guidelines for Management of IP Address Space. We need help with COM. Rather than broadcast this via email at all the microsoft.com addresses I have, I thought I'd try posting it here. Brent is working on a breakthru application of COM. We think it's going to help set a new standard for ease of use in website writing. But we need some guidance from Microsoft. Brent works in Seattle, so we could move quickly. Zope 1.11.0 pr1 includes preliminary support for XML-RPC. Yes! What is Zope? Its Zen is revealed here. Paul Everitt: Real world open source. Everitt is the creator of Zope. REBOL 2.0 was released yesterday. No XML-RPC, yet. It's still important to get XML-RPC support in all the major environments on all major OSes. We have Python, Perl, Java, and of course Frontier. It's a platform-vendorless cross-platform, lightweight, Internet-based distributed computing protocol. And it's fun!
I am now officially no longer a Linux virgin. I have Red Hat 6.0 running on 206.204.24.10. The installation wasn't that bad. Now to read more docs and figure out how to browse the file system and get some real web pages up. The Linux-Newbies list starts now. Stuart MacMillan hacked up a graphic to welcome me to Linux. Thanks! News.com: AOL Considering Linux STB? WoW! Radio.Yahoo.Com. I'm listening now. MacWorld launches MacBuy.Com. Macrobyte, a leading Frontier developer, is looking for a JavaScript DHTML programmer, for a short-term contract. Is there anything the American people, esp Internet users, can do to express our desire for peace with the people of China? Scenes from Beijing. Twelve days ago I posted a story about bad service from Dell on a simple repair for my laptop. They promised 72-hour turnaround at the beginning. It's now approx 417 hours later and we're no closer to having a working system. This is impacting my business. Dell had a stellar reputation with me for service, now it's falling apart. They can't make a simple repair, what can I count on them for? I paid a premium, as a business user with limited time, to protect against exactly this kind of foul-up. Bernie DeKoven is not the only person fed up with NSI. Mark Kennedy, a team member at The Motley Fool, wants to move his RSS file. A reasonable request. Now we have to come up with a mechanism to update the service list. In my proposal, which I brought to the XML-DEV list, I want to implement a new tag. Read the proposal and discussion here. Cameron Martin has an IE5-only browser for the RSS files on My.UserLand.Com. I tried it and it doesn't work here, but he says it's "Very Alpha" so that explains it as far as I'm concerned. Apple: AppleScript change notes for Mac OS 8.6. Stephan Somogyi: Apple's Open Source Niceness. Apple's OpenPlay sounds like a little part of Frontier, cross-platform TCP verbs. MacWEEK: Next Steps for Apple. Cute title! Red Herring: Intel chairman indicts Internet money model. "A Dow drop of just 5 to 10 percent for more than a month or two would be nuclear winter for Internet financing." Marimba's stock has been going down since its IPO. Now it's only worth $1.37 billion. Update.. Today it's up 2 points. I wonder if Scripting News readers are bargain hunting? News.com: Vignette acquires Diffusion. Here's what Diffusion does. NY Times: A picture is worth a thousand words. For ten points, who's Bill Clinton's hugging partner? Here's the rest of the story. The source code for the award-winning MailToTheFuture site is available from the Examples part of the Frontier site.
DaveNets: Dreams or Teams? and Thanks Yahoo! The source for My.UserLand.Com is ready to go. Doc Searls interviews Craig Burton on the prospects for Linux. MacInTouch special report on Apple WWDC. If any Scripting News readers are at WWDC, I hearby invite them to post reports, impressions, gossip, strange sitings, etc. The Standard: NBC Buys Xoom. "The new venture, to be called NBC Internet, combines the Snap.com venture of CNET and NBC with Xoom.com and NBC Interactive, which includes NBC.com." MSNBC: Lycos Deal Dead? "USA Networks Inc, stymied by stiff shareholder opposition to its agreement to buy Lycos Inc, is expected to abandon its three-month-long bid to acquire the Internet company, according to people familiar with the matter." InfoWorld: NAI is releasing Versions 6.5 of both PGP Enterprise Security and PGP Command Line, to allow encryption of information in common batch files and on several new platforms, including mainframes, FTP servers, and Web servers. The music site of the artist formerly known as Prince. NY Times profiles the CEO at eBay. "In a Valley of unexpected millionaires, Meg Whitman is the unlikeliest of billionaires." Eric Kidd coaches me on installing Red Hat Linux 6.0. The Office of the Registrar at York University is is hiring experienced Frontier programers to build on-line interactive services for students and faculty. BBC: Surviving on the Net. "They are locked in a secret central London youth hostel - their only contact with the outside world is via e-mails and online user groups. They will have to get everything they need - from underwear to food and drink - by ordering it on the Net." Wired previews Apple's WWDC which begins today. MacInTouch reports improvements to AppleScript in Mac OS 8.6, to be released today. It will have an external script scheduler app and the ability to do GETs and PUTs (it's not clear if it's HTTP or FTP or both). Frontier has had a built-in scheduler since 1992 and full net functionality since 1996. MacWEEK: Sears to sell iMacs.
A milestone in XML used for content syndication. Today we opened the channel list for My.UserLand.Com. At 5PM Pacific, I posted some early docs for myUserLand.root. Clark Cooper: Benchmarking XML Parsers. Sean Brown: XML Icon Contest. Are you using or developing for Windows CE? If so, what is it? Even if you think you don't care, you should. There are going to be millions of these boxes on the Internet. What kind of content do they handle? How interactive are they? Why aren't they using WebTV which we already know how to make content for? Or are they using WebTV?? What's the content developer story for Windows CE? Windows CE Power is a Frontier site. Coooool! Jaron Lanier: Making an Ally of Piracy. "The easier it is to copy music, the less of a threat piracy will become. When piracy gets easier, professional pirates have less to offer. The only pirates left will be fans. And there are lots of ways to make money from fans." Dan Gillmor: MP3 Sets New Tune. MSNBC reviews three Linux distributions. I got Red Hat 6.0. I'm making a trip to Fry's today to get a copy of Linux and Adobe ImageReady. I'm going to try the Sunnyvale store today, I hear it's better than the Palo Alto store. Wish me luck. (Of course Fry's doesn't have a website, so I'm still trying to figure out where the Sunnyvale store is.) An employment application for Fry's. Thanks to Lawrence Lee, Fry's Sunnyvale is on Arques Avenue.
Update on My.UserLand.Com. Source release on Monday, we're opening the URL list, and building on XML-RPC. New channels: The Be Site, clippings.cameronmartin.com. The Mac OS is falling behind Windows in an area that is important for content developers. Ryan Finley loves iCab. "It never crashes. An 850K download." On the lighter side, a Japanese toilet bowl manufacturer has caught onto the iMac "craze". Those nutty Japanese! Brent Simmons has a question about embedding HTML on Windows. Phil Hughes, the publisher of Linux Journal, likes BeOS and asks if it can do anything productive. Dylan Tweney: We Need 'Synchronets'. "My calendar now exists in four separate locations: on my Palm, on the laptop I use for work, on my home PC, and on Yahoo." Jacob Savin tells the story of his life as a recording artist. Midgard is an open source server based on PHP and MySQL. CNN: NATO bombs Chinese embassy in Belgrade. "NATO spokesman Jamie Shea called the attack 'a terrible accident,' and said NATO bombers 'struck the wrong building.'" CNN: Protestors attack US embassy in Beijing.
Dylan Tweney: Online David has Musical Goliaths Quaking. Mike Murry: Group Calendar App for Frontier 6. News.com: Coming soon -- Yahoo Radio. MacWEEK's Robert Morgan would buy Apple's stock, but can't say why. Rhino is an implementation of JavaScript written entirely in Java. InfoWorld: New security holes in Microsoft servers. View source on this page. I still don't like Al Gore, and won't vote for him, but it's an interesting message and a clever use of HTML comments. Slashdot's Jon Katz on virtual property. "Ultima Online players have begun going onto eBay spending real dollars, sometimes thousands of them, to acquire video-game assets that included characters, houses, castles, gold, armor and magical potions." Eric Kidd: "The Declaration of Independence is the philosophy of the United States government, and the Constitution is the actual implementation." More Eric Kidd: "Having known the Swiss, I'd hate to be on the wrong end of their righteous indignation. I know how they feel about litter, shoplifting and loud noises after 10PM, and an invasion would probably qualify as all three." People are raving about the new iCab browser for the Mac. Hey, does anyone know any of the developers of iCab? If so, I'd love to get this message to them. Microsoft supports an embeddable web browser control on Windows. The Mac needs this too. Microsoft said they aren't going to do it for the Mac. How about a DLL we can link to from Frontier? This morning I'm listening to the music of Aaron Copland. It's inspiring springtime music! Washington Post: Greenspan Credits Technology. "Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said yesterday that an unexpected leap in technology is primarily responsible for the nation's "phenomenal" economic performance and the current extraordinary combination of strong growth, low unemployment, low inflation, high corporate profits and soaring stock prices." MSNBC: AltaVista Opportunity Slipping Away? Wired: Sun Takes a Detour on Java. News.com: Rival Java Consortium Formed. What is the Schools Interoperability Framework? Tim Bray: "I moderated a presentation they did at XTech'99. It's Microsoft-driven, they're trying to build a protocol so that all the computer systems you need to run a school can talk to each other. When the kid signs in, he gets his library card auto-magically. It's all done with XML, loosely-coupled message interchange. Reason it might work is that it's not hard to cook up a vocabulary that describes everything you need to know about elementary school students. They claimed, loudly and repeatedly, that it was completely vendor-agnostic and not tied to Windows. Reasonable people will be suspicious, but the concept seemed sound." Heidi Roizen is this week's Big Thinker on ZDNet. She's going places, she hasn't started telling her next story yet. Stay tuned, don't touch that dial! Ooops! Red Herring has the story. She's going to Softbank Ventures, to be a VeeCee.
DaveNet: Money on the Table. News.com: Crypto export limits ruled unconstitutional. Yay! Jon Swartz: Encryption Author Seeks Probe Details. New channel: Manifest Station. PC World: Web Makes Nobel Laureate Grouchy. I know what he means! Wired: Be files for IPO. "Due to our financial position as of December 31, 1998, and absent the raising of additional funds, our independent accountants have expressed substantial doubt regarding our ability to continue as a going concern," reads the prospectus. Bobby is a web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities. Michael Gilbert tested 200 sites focused on disabilities. 65 percent fail the Bobby test. AP: Microsoft, AT&T Form Alliance. ABC: Chat with Linus. David Carter-Tod: Editable Online Outliner. Netscape only. Doc Searls: Netscape survives its own autopsy. NetStudio offers both a free automated Web graphics service and award-winning retail software to allow anyone to create compelling, custom Web graphics with ease. Wired sneaks a peek at the new Star Wars. (Not the trailer, the movie itself!) Red Herring: Kleiner funds Linux startup. The Polite Spider Suite 1.0b5. "The Spider crawls the Web. He is polite because he never goes where he is not supposed to. This version is even more polite than the original Spider." Chris Nolan: 'Silicon Boys' Won't Win Many Friends. Upside: Lifestyles of the Fully Vested. MacWEEK: Gone but not forgotten. "Unlike Painter, which managed to carve itself a niche as complement of Photoshop, Live Picture never had that luck. Every potential user seemed to mistake it for a Photoshop clone." Marc Canter's favorite San Francisco restaurants. Dr Dobbs Journal 1999 Excellence in Programming Award.
DaveNet: Swimming With the Music Industry. InfoWorld: Microsoft's Allchin on Windows 2000 Beta 3. This could be the moment the Internet stock bubble bursts. I had this idea myself, I thought about offering stock to Scripting News readers. It's the logical conclusion of the Internet stock mania. If each user has so much value, why not let the user benefit from that value. Eventually the contradiction must get resolved. This site is the most concise explanation of the bubble. News.com: Lucent Licenses Netcenter. Verrrry Interesting! Freedom Forum: New US Law requires websites to become 'handicapped accessible'. Philadelphia Daily News: Recording Artists Fight for Survival. "If I were starting out in today's environment, I don't know if I'd make it," said Sheryl Crow. NY Post interview with Sheryl Crow. News.com: AOL Exec says Browsers are a Dead Market. Wired: American Idiotics. "It didn't take Washington politicians very long to respond to reports that the Littleton, Colorado, killers had their own Web sites. Last week top Justice Department official Eric Holder said he'd like to see new regulations controlling how Americans use the Internet, and President Clinton warned of its dangers." Here's an item for cluetrain.com. The reason the political leaders push the 'net needs control' story is so that they can keep encryption from being universal. They love the fact that they can read every email you send or receive, and that they can monitor all your web activity. That's why Al Gore loves the Internet. It's the ultimate political control weapon, if he and his friends own it. Their 'regulations' will never pass the constitutionality test, and they know it. The real issue is encryption. One more time, let's see the site. We already know how to make fertilizer bombs. Hearty congratulations to members of discuss.userland.com. Yesterday we tackled a touchy subject and didn't flame out. I'm proud of you guys! MSNBC: It hurts to read this article. But read it anyway. USA Today: Charitable giving takes a cyber-turn. Red Herring: Lucent Bets on Net Conferencing. "Persystant will need to break through many barriers to get Internet data- and voice-conferencing accepted in corporate America, according to Ms. Hale. Bandwidth, security, and psychological issues have all slowed the adoption of the Internet-based conferencing systems." Red Herring: Goldman Sachs Dims Net IPOs. "Over the past month, any Internet IPO that hit the market was bound for the IPO Hall of Fame, with an opening-day gain of one hundred percent or better guaranteed. Not today." NY Times: Record Label Rushes to Get on Internet. "The demand is there, and demand is being filled now by independent labels and illegal content," Kenswil said. "It's crazy for us to not recognize demand and move." News.com: DOJ Probes NSI for Anti-trust. MacWEEK: Nieman Marcus Sells Macs. Fredrik Lundh presents a Swedish view of the Yugoslavian mess.
CNN: Poll says violence in media should be regulated. "Most Americans think the federal government should do more to regulate violence on TV, in movies, in music, on the Internet and in video games, although the greatest support comes for increased government regulation of the Internet." Americans are idiots. Benoit Cazenave, a Frenchman, thanks Americans for developing the Internet. Of course I believe there are some Americans who are not idiots, but as a group, measured by the polls, we are. Al Gore talks about the Wisdom of the American People. Pfui! I think the American people, collectively, are about as wise as a bored four year-old. Karl Fast: Canadians are Idiots Too. Dan Gillmor: Australians are Idiots Too. Wired: SEC Chairman To Investors -- Get a Clue. "To investors: Don't be idiots. To online brokers: Don't prey on the idiots. To regulators: Don't draft heavy-handed laws to protect the idiots from themselves." The idiots are everywhere today. John Dvorak: Bland PCs. InfoWorld reviews Mac OS X Server. MSNBC: Cuba Stomps Baltimore, 12-6. "The Orioles, whose AL-worst 7-17 record belies their payroll of more than $78 million, were completely outplayed by a team whose players make a total of about $2,250." Deep Fun: Png Ponnng. As you may know, Netscape bundles our Mac IdleTime INIT with Communicator. This has been a huge annoyance and distraction for us, as people send us emails blaming it for all kinds of system ills. However, today, Virginia Lindsey reports a real problem with the way Netscape is using IdleTime. This is a support issue for Netscape. InfoWorld: Lucent to debut collaboration software. "It's a persistent place on the Internet or a corporate intranet where people can go and get engaged in a variety of activities." The product Lucent will be releasing: BitRoom. It's an interesting piece of software. On the client it's an enhanced web browser. eBay: Now you can buy your own planet! NY Times: Companies derail the burnout track. Wired: MS cheated in DOS war. "What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS," Brad Silverberg, a Microsoft executive, allegedly wrote in a 1992 email cited by Caldera. News.com analyzes the rebuttal witness choices in the Microsoft anti-trust trial. InfoWorld: Foes tee off on Microsoft. "Solaris is the New York Yankees," Bernard said. "NT is the Taiwan little leaguers. Solaris is Niagra Falls; NT is a spring mist." Go get em Bill! Wired: MP3.COM signs Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette. "The report says Morissette will post songs on MP3.com that were recorded live on her tour, and that she may take a stake in the young company." This is how it will happen. Wired: Never Mind. "In March, Tom Petty released a song from his Echo album -- Free Girl Now -- on MP3.com. But the MP3 file was taken down after two days because Warner Brothers had not approved the promotion. The song was downloaded more than 150,000 times before it was removed, however."
New Media interviews literary agent John Brockman. "So describe for me your idea of a new site devoted to cutting-edge thinking. The person who understands this best is Dave Winer." Thanks! Bob Metcalfe: "I urge that ICANN abolish all but the geographical top-level domains, letting each country administer its own DNS servers under its own trademark laws." Tomalak: Tweaking Slate. Wall Street Journal: RealJukebox. News.com: Kleiner-Perkins invests in LinuxCare. Josh Lucas asks if we need to connect PHP to XML-RPC. No. Network Solutions: Customer Satisfaction Survey. Wired: Volunteers to Fight Patent? Rocky Mountain News: Simpler Domain Names? RMI.net's system adds the dot before the final three characters in a company's name. Holiday Inn's simplified domain -- holiday.inn -- would be all a surfer would need to type to find Holiday Inn's site. Here's a PHP manual with annotations. Santa Clara on Thursday: 8th Annual Silicon Valley Entrepreneur's Conference. "Discussions by venture capitalists, accountants, attorneys, commercial bankers, angel investors and investment bankers - all the information you need to guide you in buying, financing, selling or growing a business." Washington on Wednesday: DC Frontier Users Group. BusinessWeek: Can Backweb Soar? "Push, as we knew it two years ago, is dead. But the concept and the technology are alive, and maybe well, under a new guise." Cringely: Hate.Com. "There are more Eric Harris' in more places like Littleton. Their Web pages absorb emotional energy that might instead go into killing people. These cries for help can be easily found with a search engine and a peer counselor. In this sense, the Internet is part of the solution, not the problem. Why would we ever want to shut these pages down?" Lightyear Media has personal web server software for the Newton. This is an example of a Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server. People make fun of this idea, they're silly to do so, shows their ignorance, because HTTP is a powerful protocol, and it doesn't just have to be applied in the traditional client-server model. Christoph Pingel reports that they have the same security problem with domain name registration reported yesterday by Charlie Jackson, in Germany. MacWEEK: Live Picture on Ice. NY Times: Parents Fears about the Internet. What a crock. The web did its job in the Littleton case, giving Harris the outlet for his ideas. The parents and police didn't read the website, that was the failure. Wired: Lawsuits over Dirty Domain Names. Chris Nolan on Buy.Com, HotMail and NetObjects. News.com: Merchants pull out of Amazon Auctions. "Like eBay, Amazon allows auction participants to post comments about both buyers and sellers, although only feedback from those who complete transactions with an auctioneer can influence their 'star' rating. Nevertheless, knowing that anyone could post commentary about Cameraworld.com, regardless of whether they'd done business with the retailer, worried chief executive Alessandro Mina."
Thanks to all the people who sent birthday wishes! ABC: What's Up With Domain Name Database? "The registry information is our proprietary information," says NSI spokesman Chris Clough. "We’ve been providing it free to the community, but under the contract, all of the intellectual property gathered through the InterNIC process is our proprietary information." I've been emailing privately with several people exchanging ideas for working past the current NSI-centric domain name system. LibGD is a Frontier graphics extension (DLL) for creating and manipulating images in GIF format. Mac and Windows. Carmen's Headline Viewer reads RSS files. Every 30 minutes it grabs a list of news sources. Windows. Bruce Hoult is an app developer, and prefers Macintosh for a variety of interesting reasons. An edited version of an email I sent to a friend, a creative guy who wants to join an Internet startup, on how to go about it. Lessons learned over a long time, and freshened with new reality checks with Silicon Valley venture capitalists. InfoWorld: First WebDAV Products.
DaveNet: Who Owns .Com? Scoooop! News.com: Potential Domain Registrars Cry Foul. Arm-twisting 101. I'm trying to get Marc Canter to release the source code that allows MSIE5 to communicate via XML-RPC with UserLand's servers. I'm doing it gently, but being firm. News.com: Linux is Fun. Torvalds said civilization has developed to the point where survival is often taken is taken for granted. Consequently, "if you're not interested in doing something, you probably won't do it." Builder.com: Web Innovator Awards. Congrats to Mozilla.Org, The Web Standards Project, ICQ, PHP, ASP, Allaire and Macromedia. Excellent choices! I have an idea! Let's learn PHP. It seems quite popular, and philosophically compatible with what we do.
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