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This evening we reached a milestone. My.UserLand.Com is now a writing environment. Check out our new Weblog Editor. If you find great links, share them with us. It's never been easier to get your ideas on the web. UserLand.Com membership required. Here's the channel I've been working on to test this stuff out. Hey, I like this tool. I like it better than what I'm using to edit Scripting News. This is, by the way, mass market stuff. It's easy. What is desktop.com? EmailJournal.Com is a Frontier site. Tim O'Reilly answers a reader's question about component technologies for Linux. XML-RPC gets a mention. Wired: NetoMat, the Non-Linear Browser. A perfect match for the content flow that's building on My.UserLand.Com! News.com: Playing Domain Name Hide-And-Seek. News.com: Sweeping Net Restrictions in Australia. Here's a domain I wish I had thought of grabbing. No doubt someone will complain about this. New directions for My.UserLand.Com. We've de-emphasized, for now, the Choose Your News and Favorites pages on My.UserLand.Com. They're still there, you can still use them, and we will preserve the functionality as we go forward. Next, I think very few people are aware that we're doing static rendering of channels as they change. For example, here's the static rendering for Scripting News. So, if you want, you can write your own page, running on your own server, that selects the channels you like, and arrange them any way you want. You don't have to like the way we do it, you can create your own interface if you have a moderately powerful server scripting environment. (This is Scripting News, after all.) Next, we provide the full uptodate service list in XML. So, if you don't like the way we render channels, write your own channel renderer. Open it to the public. I think it would be fun to get aggregators running in every scripting environment. Now, looking at the service list, I can see room for improvement! Why is no one making suggestions there? NY Times: "How can the record establishment make money by selling music for digital download online? The challenge might not be so difficult if a healthy music trade were not already in place in the form of unprotected MP3 files, the digital audio compression format that can easily be copied and distributed illegally."
Big News: Slashdot Acquired by Andover.Net. "We had 2 options: get cash from some investors and hire a staff, or or find a company that we felt understood what we wanted to accomplish here, and use their money to hire help." Congrats! Coool! I just was offered a virus. (But I didn't fall for it.) Wired: CmdrTaco on SlashDot Sale. Salon reviews Microsoft's retail presence at SF's Metreon. MacWEEK sneaks a peek at PhotoShop 5.5. Bernie DeKoven: "WebEx is a platform for technography." What is WebEx.Com? I know two people at WebEx. Mark Altenberg and David Thompson. It's a small world! Soundbites on the state of XML for a piece on InfoWorld.Com. Microsoft: Windows Scripting Host 2.0. Thanks to Lindsay Marhall for doing a Tcl version of the XMLizer script, adding to the PHP, Cold Fusion, Perl, AppleScript, Java and Frontier versions. This may be the first script to be ported to all these environments, and provides an interesting contrast between all the popular scripting syntaxes. Wired: "Yahoo, which launched its Yahoo-GeoCities site Monday, says it owns all Web pages, articles, and images on member sites and has irrevocable rights to them for all time." Jim Roepcke started a new weblog. He says "I've wanted to take advantage of Frontier 6's CMS features, but until now the only interface that actually used 6's features was the discussion group." Either Jim's missing something or I am. We have been steadily deploying and releasing apps that build on mainResponder. MSNBC: AOL in talks to enter PC business. Red Herring tells the story of Critical Path's IPO. Industry Standard: The Selling of TheGlobe.Com.
ContentServer 2.0, with new support for guest databases and discussion groups. CS allows groups of writers, artists and designers to contribute to a Frontier-managed website using their favorite tools, thru email, FTP or file sharing. It's one of the earliest examples of web workflow in Frontier; CS 1.0 shipped in April 1997, the same month we started Scripting News. Thea's Galleria visits the Haddock Directory, a directory of 5000 URLs on more than 300 pages, managed by Frontier. Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Pricing. For a 25-client license, it's $1609. It's not clear if this means that the web server is limited to a certain number of threads. A page explaining the pricing for people wanting to use NT Server just as a web server would be helpful. William Crim says "NT pricing is worse than you fear." Crim's bottom line, for a reasonable server with Microsoft's SQL database, software cost: $9126. Jim Flanagan: "Deploying Linux in certain large-scale situations is a far cry from $free. Talented people must be employed making Linux do what you want. Linux is flexible. You can go where you want, provided you can understand the source, have the technical resources, and don't need to go there today." New Channel: The New Museum of Contemporary Art. NYC? SJ Merc: Valley is Overflowing with Men. "The region that gave the world the semiconductor and personal computer is one of the few major metropolitan areas in the country with a surplus of single men, according to marketing data derived from the U.S. Census." NY Times: Delay in Domain Registration. "The latest delay comes on the heels of a letter-writing campaign by Ralph Nader and tax watchdog groups and an inquiry from the chairman of the powerful House Commerce Committee, Rep. Thomas Bliley, R-Va., questioning the actions and the authority of the Commerce Department and ICANN." In c't's test lab, a comparison between NT/IIS and the freeware duo Linux/Apache focused on practice-oriented tasks. The Register quotes Larry Ellison. "Anyone can write a browser, and people will. That's not going to matter." Yes yes yes. Microsoft's Ben Slivka writes in response to yesterday's DaveNet that they have a benchmark dynamic site implemented in VB, ASP and SQL running on NT. He suggests that this site be ported to other environments to compare scalability, time to develop, runtime characteristics. This is a positive step in the right direction. He says "Not an answer to your $1500 or even $5000 question, perhaps, but the perf numbers look pretty good." To everyone else, think about it. Hey I tried to log into the site, but it didn't work. I guess they're still diggin! Upside: Limits of Linux Passion. "I bought my first Windows machine. Of course, I bought it to run Linux." Industry Standard: Talk Radio Moves to the Web.
Eric Raymond: "There is nothing like having your finger on the trigger of a gun to reveal who you really are. Life or death in one twitch -- ultimate decision, with the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices." Yeah, here's what I learned, the one time in my life that I fired a gun. It scared the bejesus out of me. I don't want that kind of power in my hand. I don't trust myself with it. Upcoming DaveNet topic. Now that we have a Cluetrain for vendors, where's the Cluetrain for users? What responsibilities do users have when they have access to management and development staff of companies whose products they use? What can today's users do to help more companies come out from behind the firewall?
DaveNet: Why Linux Will Win. Jakob Nielsen's latest AlertBox: "Vertical search engines like NewsSearch.UserLand.Com integrate multiple search result formats in a single listing, highlighting the differences in writing style and annotation detail between the constituent sites." How To Change the URL of Your Channel. For My.UserLand.Com channel providers. Chris Lansdown: Microsoft Advertising for Linux? SJ Merc: Has Silicon Valley Changed?
Eric Soroos has a new version of his Mail Server that runs inside Frontier. He's got the mail system fully integrated with Frontier's content management system. This is a very important project for all serious Frontier system developers. It's a first-of-its-kind mail server because of the CMS integration. Please support Eric's work. New My.UserLand.Com feature: It has a discussion group! And it's different from any other DG we host. Each "fat" news story starts a thread. And there's a new flat listing for comments. We're giving this format a try in this context to see how it works. New version of the DocServer website. It's been modernized to run in our newest editorial environment. Easier navigation. Same subscription procedure, so it just got better, no extra work for Frontier developers. Thinking about the PC WEEK benchmark comparing Linux and Windows NT as a web server. A few comments. If you wanted to do a fair comparison Linux would get to run on hardware that cost more than NT Server. What is the cost of NT Server? I just hunted around Microsoft.Com and couldn't find it. I got a Cobalt Qube, $1000, runs Linux, I don't think you could buy a reasonable NT Server for $1000? If so, I'd like to get my hands on one. Another consideration, the benchmark tested static pages. All the interesting high-traffic sites are dynamic. You could take static page serving out of the benchmark as far as I'm concerned. What matters to me is scripted web pages. Compare Perl to Perl. When we get Frontier on Linux we'll be able to do some meaningful A-B comparisons. Hey check this out. I can point to Wired articles in a very weird way. Look at this URL carefully. See the "scriptingNews" in there? You could change that to any string. I tuned into this by looking at a URL that SlashDot is using. I wonder what Wired does with this? Will they pay me money for that hit? Interesting! MacInTouch report by Raines Cohen on the MacHack "Apple Handshake" session. InfoWorld's Nicholas Petreley says Bob Metcalfe will eat his words about Linux v Microsoft. "Last week, Bob Metcalfe predicted that Linux would fizzle against Windows. His reasoning? Open-source ideology is balderdash and Linux is 30-year-old technology."
Salon: The Breakfast Spot of Champions. "The Woodside diner that's all the rage with VCs and journalists makes a perfect party locale for 'The Nudist on the Late Shift.'" WebMonkey: Why Designers Should Care About Mozilla. News.Com: NSI won't sign with ICANN. "NSI contends that ICANN is supposed to be unbiased and has overstepped its bounds with its fierce public criticism of the company. ICANN counters that its public feud with Network Solutions was triggered as a stall tactic by the registrar to delay erosion of its monopoly." Esther Dyson, via email: "Once the testbed period is over (now slated for July 17), only accredited registrars will be able to operate in .com, .net and .org." News.Com: AOL Beats Netizen in Domain Spat. "We don't play favorites with large corporations or small businesses," Graves said. "We treat everybody the same." Uh huh. 5/01/99: Who Owns .Com? PC WEEK: Will Microsoft 'Open Up'? "The most likely settlement concession points and/or remedies imposed by the judge will be those that are short term and limited in scope, such as the end to exclusive Internet contracts, internal policing by Microsoft of potential anticompetitive behaviors and the opening up of its Windows product to third-party browsers." PC WEEK compares NT and Linux as a web server. "After a tortuous five days of tests, audited by the best and the brightest from Mindcraft, Microsoft and Red Hat Software Inc., and despite significant tuning improvements made on the Linux side, Windows NT 4.0 still beat Linux using the Apache Web server and Samba in every performance category, although the margin of victory was smaller than in Mindcraft's tests." TechWeb: Allaire Kicks up E-commerce Tempest. What is it? Netrics: e-Site. "Web site publishing by email."
MacWEEK: MacHack Gets Rolling. "Five members of the 12-person contingent from Mountain View, Calif.-based Netscape offered an update on Mozilla, the forthcoming version of the Navigator 5.0 Web browser." Stewart Alsop: Have I told you lately that I hate Windows? "You know what? I really wish there were a computer out there that could give me basic PC applications that work fluidly with the World Wide Web and networking. I really wish that the computer industry wouldn't give up right now and leave us holding the Windows bag, just when we've got this new Internet economy opening up for us. I'm dreaming again about being freed from the experts." A clue for Stew, who's a VC now. Invest in software developers. Forbes: "Softbank's Masayoshi Son has created an Internet empire in a blaze of dealmaking. He's just getting started on what he calls a 300-year business plan." What is WAP Binary XML Content Format? (Answer.) Jamie Zawinsky: WebCollage creates collages out of random images found on the Web. Nicholas Petreley on PHP. PHP is a relatively low-level environment. Zope is more complete, and Frontier is even more so. We're all just getting to know each other. Petreley is a brilliant writer and technologist, I've been following his work for years. It's great to see him getting started in this area.
DaveNet: Syndication and Aggregation. News.Com: XML and HTTP. "It's like inventing a language without verbs. There has to be a standard way to deliver structured data. And if not CORBA, EJB, or even COM, then what?" Easy. New Stories on My.UserLand.Com continues to impress! Wired News appears to own the 4AM slot. William Crim on the Salon IPO: "If Furbies cost $300 no one would buy them. But if they cost $30 and every kid in America wants a Furby from a dwindling supply and people will pay $300 for one." What is MoreOver.Com? WebMonkey: CGI Scripting for Fun and Profit. Charlie Jackson: "Do you think Network Solutions should continue to have a government-granted monopoly when it can't keep up with the workload?" News.Com: Web storage sites next big thing? Wired: Torvalds lays an egg. (It's funny, as an aside, I would have said the same thing about Wired's party last night. Their speaker, Po Bronson, took cellphone calls during his speech! It was staged, but it wasn't funny.) The official Buck's report on last night's party. "I felt like I was living in NYC once again."
As part of the convergence of the digital world with the restaurant world, we whipped up a little web-kiosk so people can get a window into the world of Buck's on the Web, from the world of Buck's in Woodside. If people like it this could become a semi-permanent feature at the restaurant. Has anyone looked into IBM's Bean Scripting Framework? Dave Winer: The Hidden Failure of MSIE. "I don't think they love the web. What a bad situation for the web. Because so many people use the web and because there's no real sign of life at Netscape either. Marc Andreessen is givin a lot of speeches. But where's the software?" Jodi Mardesich: Out of Microsoft. "Rearden Steel is definitely about innovation," he goes on. The more he talks, the more it sounds like that kind of innovation was hard to do at Microsoft. 12/2/96: "We can all back up our own websites. Let's pick a time to do it. Copy your website to a floppy disk, and put the disk in a safe deposit box, clearly marked as being part of the backup-the-web project. Your heirs can pass it down thru the generations. Uncle Dave was a webmaster! Look kids, here's what he did. My disk could become an heirloom." Side-note: We've been archiving the My.UserLand.Com channels, so if historians want to trace the development of syndication on the web, we'll be able to give them a clue. Murphy-willing! NY Times: Salon IPO Falls Short. "Salon.com, an online magazine with meager revenue, went public with a whimper today, as investors continued to weigh not only the value of Internet issues themselves but also that of the institutions leading them to market." Jesse Berst: Four reasons you're gonna love XML. I guess it cures every ill. Will XML pay your taxes too?
New Channels: LinuxToday, BucksWoodside.Com, AppleSurf. David Carter-Tod adds Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) to the list of supported environments for XML-RPC. Motley Fool: Salon.Com Open for Business. "While Hambrecht charges as low as half the fee of mainstream underwriters, the companies taking this route to public life are paying an even dearer price." Jesse Berst: The Hidden Failure of Windows 2000. "Anyone who studies Darwin knows that a species is most successful when it adapts to a particular environment. Windows 2000 failed because it tried to succeed in every market. As a result, it's a jack of all trades but a master of none." MSNBC: Another PowerBook Headache? News.Com: Oracle XML components speak most languages. I would like to see Oracle adopt another language. I bet a lot of other developers would like this too! NewsWire "keeps you updated on the latest headlines on some of the top news sites. It polls sites every hour (with the time between each poll configurable) and if there is anything new it grabs the headline. If there are any stories you want to read you simply press a button and it brings it up in your browser." It's a Windows desktop app. Reads a text-file format from the back-end or snarfs links from HTML. Scroll to the end of the New Stories page on My.UserLand.Com. You'll see a list of pages, one for each hour of the day. Now you can see all the stories of the day, broken up into hourly listings. At dinner last night I said excitedly to my friend, "It's got lots more cool stuff than News.Com." It's true. Thanks to all the diligent webloggers who are contributing to this page. Hopefully it's a win-win. I really like what's happening here. The rest of the web seems boring in comparison. Yeah! SF Chron: Giving a Push to Push. Hey push was overhyped. Get over it. To think that there will *not* be new kinds of flow is ridiculous. As the grooves get worn there will be other ways to distribute info. Push as it is currently implemented by Marimba and others is centralized. When it's decentralized it will become quite powerful. But it's tricky, and tricky stuff takes time. Reuters: Salon IPO Priced at $10.50. "Salon is offering 2.5 million shares, or about 23 percent of its total stock." Quote.Yahoo.Com: SALN. Good luck to our friends at Salon!
DaveNet: Internet Cafes, Embrace and Get Over It. I changed the New Stories page on My.UserLand.Com. Now it only shows the stories that have appeared in the last hour. A List Apart: Netscape Bites the Bullet. "Netscape has made the tough decision to sacrifice backward compatibility with their proprietary version of the Document Object Model (DOM) in order to fully support W3C standards and release a faster, leaner Web browser unhampered by legacy code." As you can see from this CVS log, XML-RPC is now part of the official Zope distribution. Subatomic Humor: Funny Things Famous People Did. Follow-up: What became of ICE? Are there any public servers we can try dialing into? Bernie DeKoven: The Boundaries of Play. PC WEEK: "eBay is hardly the only high-profile transaction site to take a public beating over the past year; consumer sites such as Amazon.com and Victoria's Secret have also suffered embarrassing outages." John Dvorak reviews Pirates of Silicon Valley. Time: Yahoo on the Motherboard? Wired: "On Monday, search engine Excite@Home and start-up Lipstream launched Excite Voice Chat, a service that brings the human voice to Excite's chat service." News.com: Lycos, Lotus hook up thru Notes..
Sandy Reed, editor-in-chief at InfoWorld, says that they're going to fix the broken links in the transition to their new format. This is good news! Hadar Pedhazur, the venture capitalist behind Digital Creations, explains why they open-sourced Zope. "As you already saw with the XML-RPC collaboration, we are more than willing to help in any reasonable way, and we hope that this effort on your part will be rewarded by many more people joining the UserLand fold!" Excellent! The New Stories Page on My.UserLand.Com lists all the new stories contained on all the sites as the day goes by. Think of it as the Weblog of Weblogs. Now the new stuff comes one click closer to you. Less hunting around. More productive use of your time, and more exposure for the weblog editors who put the most effort into informing and entertaining. Viewed thru the New Stories page, it's clearly more fun if people support the "fat" ScriptingNews format for syndication. You get a chance to pitch people a little, and provide context. It's even better if you include a thumbnail image. They make the New Stories Page look so pretty. I'll try to illustrate this later today. In a different context, if you're doing a My.UserLand.Com channel, you are now a Contributing Editor of a super-weblog. This is going to be an interesting dynamic. Before we give users the power to exclude channels, let's see how this page evolves. It's got a lot of people contributing to it! Probably more than any other weblog. Probably more than a lot of bigtime newspapers. This is the web in action. This is why the closed systems like Yahoo, Amazon and the NY Times don't stand a chance. The web is powerful. See Automating Channel Syndication with Scripts for sample source code for scripts that automate production of fat-format channels using popular scripting languages such as Perl, AppleScript, Java, and of course Frontier. With a new feature introduced this morning, you can notify My.UserLand.Com that your channel has changed, and cause the system to reload it immediately instead of waiting for the top-of-the-hour scan. I'm tweaking this paragraph slightly to cause a new story to appear in the story list.
Lawrence Lee: "Amazing! Putting aside all the comments about the new layout and design at InfoWorld.Com, I can't believe that they decided to break all the inbound links to their stories." A quick check with the search engine reveals that our links into the archives of InfoWorld.Com are broken. Ouch! WSJ: "Poor Microsoft Corp. Even when things go sort of right in its antitrust battle against the federal government and 19 states, they quickly go wrong again."
PC WEEK referees a Linux-NT server faceoff. Microsoft is blundering here. There's still a major disconnect at Microsoft, they think they can "win" in competition with the Internet. We saw it in Office 2000. The web is actually bigger than Microsoft. We don't want a single-vendor world. Goodbye to the Monolithic Do-Everything Hand-Holding Platform Vendor. The more they try to treat Linux as just another OS, the more Linux will swamp them. Advice to Microsoft: View Linux as you viewed the Mac in 1983. It's a puzzle and a curveball. You don't own it. Find out what developers want to do with Linux, then provide tools that make that easy. Create bridges from Microsoft desktop apps to servers running on Linux. Invest in WINE so Windows developers have a clear path to Linux without creating new source code bases. I can hear Bill Gates now saying Never! But until he embraces the Internet, in its latest incarnation (Linux), without trying to own it, he'll keep losing. They keep looking for a company to compete with. The Internet is not a company.
A couple of weeks ago I installed a virgin copy of Frontier 6 on a Mac running an old version of System 7. I use this server to offload tasks from the NT server, things like batch-loading of the RSS files for My.UserLand.Com and sending Scripting News bulletins.
New channel: A boy and his basement. Todd Sternisha asks for feedback on his new weblog. Edd Dumbill has an XML-RPC client for PHP. Beta. Edd also does the Pharmalicensing channel. TidBITS: Putting URL Access Scripting to Work.
DaveNet: Linux.UserLand.Com. Philosophy, roadmap. New website: Linux.UserLand.Com. Our lab for Linux work. Our first step is to get a solid XML-RPC implementation on Linux. We've been working in the Zope environment with the Python scripting language. This morning I interviewed Digital Creations CEO Paul Everitt on the connection between Zope and Frontier thru XML-RPC. WhereIs WhoIs? We converted one of our membership-based sites to run in Linux. Here's an A-B comparison on Windows NT, and Linux. We're publishing source code and tutorials to show people how to use their Mac and Windows skills to deploy scalable applications on Linux. Our focus is on building systems that leverage the advantages of all platforms. We don't have an allegiance to any individual platform. We don't want to see Microsoft or Apple lose. We just want to make great servers and web writing environments and help others do the same. No fear! Thanks to PythonWare for an excellent XML-RPC foundation. And thanks to Digital Creations for their help and support. The XML-RPC additions will be integrated into the next release of Zope, which is open source, which we happily support. This morning we flipped the home page of BucksWoodside.Com. Three new stories, and a picture of Kim Polese. Fortune: "The 7:30 a.m. chatter at Buck's of Woodside--the Silicon Valley breakfast mecca for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs--is all about patents and game plans. Marty Walker, a founder of Frequency Technology, fits right in. He's explaining how his company will change the world. Or at least the world of microchip design." InfoWorld.Com has a new look. Very confusing! I used to be able to scroll down the home page till I hit a visited link and then hit the Back button. I wish they'd do a channel, I'm already getting used to browsing the web thru My.UserLand.Com. And getting ideas for new things we can do with the story-flow. How about a table that showed the stories in reverse-chronologic order with a link to the channel we got it from. It would be a super-aggregate channel. But I wandered a little off topic. Back to work! NY Times: MP3.COM in deal with ASCAP. MSNBC: Open Source Guru to Visit Microsoft. I didn't know this kind of stuff was news! Seth Dillingham has a tool to create an RSS file from plain text. Josh Lucas has a Java version of the textToXml script. Jamie Scheinblum did it for Perl. Bill Berry is looking for someone to help design a Frontier-hosted intranet in the SF Bay area. Wired: The Worker's Website.
New channel: Tomalak's Realm. Most excellent! More great news! XML.COM is now producing a fat XMLization, just like Tomalak and Scripting News. This is very good news indeed. The more support we get the more likely Netscape and others will let the content drive the process, not technology and industry politics. I'm looking for volunteers to write scripts in Tcl, Python, Perl, AppleScript, etc to turn straight text into a channel file for My.UserLand.Com. If there are volunteers I'll kick it off by releasing the source for a Frontier script that produces our XMLization. OK, we got volunteers for Java, Python, Perl and Cold Fusion. So in keeping with my offer, here's the source code for the script that produces a My.UserLand.Com channel that runs in Frontier 6. Steve Zellers posts an AppleScript version of textToXml. Thanks!! Adam Trachtenberg posts a PHP version. Coool! "Over 1,001,357 messages served." I'm not sure when we crossed the 1 million mark, but discuss.userland.com has been serving lots of messages lately! SF Chron: Jerry Sends His Regards. Jon Katz on flaming. "On the Net and the Web, openly expressed ideas are on the beginning of a discussion, not the end. A tech or not, the writer has to accept the fact that some, if not most, of his ideas will turn out to be incomplete, illogical, even wrong. This is the very different reality of the interactive writer: the willingness not only to receive criticism, but also to accept and study it." InfoWorld: Preaching to the Converted at Java One. "In a tone reminiscent of a rally on the campus of U.C. Berkeley, Sueltz shouted, 'refuse to conform to proprietary development models. Throw them out! Subvert the forces that would fragment Java! Continue to fight for open standards!'" MacWEEK: Five Keys to OSX Success. "Can Apple release an operating system so compelling that the majority of G3 owners upgrade and owners of older Macs buy a new computer to run the new operating system?" Wired: Salon's real swipe at the system. "If Salon's IPO goes smoothly, it could land a devastating blow to one of Wall Street's most lucrative franchises: taking companies public." NY Times: Banner ads on the move. "Web publishers and interactive advertising agencies have been under pressure to experiment with different types of campaigns -- and the results are increasingly visible on users' screens."
DaveNet: A Faceoff with Netscape. Frontier 6 Security Alert, affects systems running mainResponder, we highly recommend all users install this fix. Here's the next revision of our scriptingNews web syndication format, started in 1997. It's got one major advantage over RSS, the items can be paragraphs that link to one or more web pages, which more accurately reflects what's going on. We would have preferred to work with Netscape, but they have had so many departures and are so confused that they can't remember that they committed to working with us. We love competition! You can see the advantage of scriptingNews format in this simple A-B comparison. Here's the "skinny" RSS version of this site, and here's the fat version. We would be pleased to see these improvements in the next revision of RSS. That would be the happy ending for channel content developers. XML.COM: Why XML is Meant for Java. ZDNet: NT Security Hole. "Nearly every Windows NT-based Web server on the Internet is vulnerable to a newly discovered security hole that lets a malicious hacker take over the server -- and, in some cases, the network to which it is attached, says a network security company." NY Times: Booming in Silicon Valley. "And in meetings at power breakfast spots in Palo Alto like Il Fornaio or Bucks in Woodside, executives shake their heads over stories such as the one about the home in a comfortable Palo Alto neighborhood that sold in April for $1 million more than the $2.4 million asking price." Sidney Markowitz: "If I were to be kind to Gosling I would guess that he made a reasonable statement about Unix being more virus-resistant than Windows and the journalist did the usual garbling that one sees in news articles. The less kind interpretation is that Gosling stretched the truth to take an opportunity to flame Windows in public." EasyEverything.Com is a chain of Internet cafes in London. Wired: Palm V a big hit at Java One. Regular Expressions: PHP and JavaScript. Macromedia: Flash 4.
Wired News comes online as a non-synthetic totally compatible 100 percent standards compliant My.UserLand.Com channel.. Welcome! Seattle Times: Meet Ben Slivka, the burr in Microsoft's saddle. "Slivka also argued that Microsoft should put its resources and weight behind improving HTML, the browser standard for document formatting and layout. That threatened Microsoft Word overseer Peter Pathe, who along with other Microsoft Office partisans felt the way to go was to make Word the document standard on the Net." Never!! From an engineer at Netscape, hints on the next rev of RSS, which is locked down and in testing. That's not a nice way to play! We'll have version 2.0b1 of scriptingNews format ready for review tomorrow morning. InfoWorld: Gosling Says Unix Systems Immune to Viruses. Don't they have emailers on Solaris? Can you enclose an executable or a shell script? If so, their door is wide open. News.Com: IBM Pushes Hard Drive Envelope. Interactive Week: Inktomi's Directory Engine puts it into head-on competition with Yahoo. Red Herring: Linux's Threat to Microsoft. "Microsoft's challenge has been to reproduce the strange ecology of Windows on the Internet." Wired: MS Funds Kaffe-Maker Transvirtual. "Redmond has taken the unusual step of funding an open-source software company that is writing Java code similar to that which landed the company in court with Sun." New channel: New Jersey Jobs Resume Network, WebComics. Late in the day yesterday I reversed my decision to include synthetic channels in My.UserLand.Com. The whole thread is very interesting, lots of new people participating. My dream is to do my Scripting News work from the Cyber Up Internet Cafe on the beach in Negril, Jamaica. More hot links on the Marc.Canter.Com channel.
News.Com: Java Clone Tilts Towards Microsoft. Jeff Veen: The Web Isn't Free. "Ad targeting may be common today, but it's still in its infancy and certainly not being exploited. There's no excuse for untargeted advertising on the Web. There's no reason I should encounter a solicitation to check my horoscope from a banner on a site offering commentary on the future of computing." I took my eye off My.UserLand.Com for a few weeks and while I was dozing, Ian Davis of Internet Alchemy was doing some very innovative stuff with RSS. I'm still just figuring out what he's done, and where he wants to go. SJ Merc: Java's Dual Personality. "In terms of curing cancer, toppling empires, draining swamps, Java has consistently failed to live up to what Sun promised." Interactive Week: Java Gets Grounded. "Java's main selling point remains its promise of being able to write an application once and have it run anywhere, on any computer." Wired: EBay said a failure in software from Sun Microsystems caused its service to go down at 7:50 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday.
BusinessWeek: In the Land of Plenty, Plenty of Angst. "At Buck's, the quirky, Wild West-themed power eatery in Woodside, Calif., owner Jamis MacNiven put 28 notches on his door jamb last year." NY Times: Illness as a Metaphor for Networks. "I believe that we are indeed living in a computational ecosystem which is more and more globally cross-linked," he said. Or to put it more simply, "It's an amazing system, and it's very vulnerable." BTW, we cracked a barrier to web-hosting a few weeks ago. Lots more comments on this page. The question is how to deploy our new software. It's puzzling! It's not surprising that Marc Canter's channel has interesting stuff on it! I like this a lot. One of my best friends is playing around on the other side of the My.UserLand.Com interface. If you generate pages with scripts, you can include Marc's channel in your home page by reading this static file. Here's what you get when you set Marc loose with an outliner that renders to the web. I'm reading an early release of Paul Andrews' history of the Internet at Microsoft. The book is not out yet. It was immediately interesting to me because it includes excerpts of a DaveNet piece from 1994 and Bill Gates' response. That got me thinking about whether Gates is reliving Ken Olson's career (he's founder of DEC). Thought some more and I postulate that Office 97 is fairly analogous to the PS/2, which was a disaster of proprietariness for IBM. More on that later. News.Com: McNealy Critical of Microsoft Investments. "I have yet to see a customer who is disappointed when there's interoperability between two different pieces of technology," McNealy said. "I've yet to hear them say, 'Oh darn, I plugged it in and it worked. I hate that.'"
Now you can do syndication just like Alta Vista and ZDNet! IBM: DDbE automatically produces a DTD from a set of well formed XML documents. Welcome to the All-New User Interface for My.UserLand.Com. Comments, questions, suggestions.. New channels: Marc Canter, Psybersearch.
DaveNet: Friday Loop Closing.
MacWEEK: Vignette Drops Mac Support. "We are ending Mac and Solaris support for the StoryServer client tools with the release of the next version of those tools." Lawrence Lee on IBM's WBI. "And after much anguish, we hit on the name WBI by flipping the letters IBM over and having the audacity to pronounce it webby." MacWEEK: Stuck in the middle again. "Apple has done a terrific job of reducing prices and increasing value at both the low and high ends of its product line. How about some help for those of us stuck in the middle?" Hypothetically, suppose I had $15,000 burning a hole in my pocket. I want to buy new server hardware with this money. Should I buy fifteen $1K machines? Thirty $500 systems?
MSNBC: Net startups get advice from the big boys. "Any CEO that sleeps at night is probably smoking dope," said Andreessen. So, should the CEO sleep during the day? ;-> A new game from Bernie De Koven. New channel: The Tour Report.
Wired: Web publishing the Microsoft Way. "Dixon said that Microsoft would soon publish documentation outlining the Office XML tags so that other creation tools could create pages with Office-friendly formatting." Never! Email to Microsoft re Office 2000 and MSIE. Buck's: They Came for Flapjacks and Stayed for Each Other. This is community in a whole different way. Or the usual way! Jamis: "I write in Word and drop the text into a box and hit post and boom I-are-a-web-guy." It's true! News.Com: How Worm.ExplorerZip works. InfoWorld: New Worm.ExplorerZip virus spreads over Net. News.Com: Hard-drive stripping virus a doozy. MSNBC: Malicious worm hits PCs. NY Times: New Infection Is Killing Files Through E-Mail. Every day I see more articles on the web about women and their use of computers. That's cool, but it seems every article includes one or two sweeping negative statements about men. This article has two, maybe three. Can you spot them? There are so many ways to say this is wrong. The golden rule, two wrongs don't make a right, you reap what you sow. Here's what I have to say. I'm a man and I don't like it. Thanks for listening. Tcl-RPC implements XML-RPC in Tcl. Welcome! Current list of implementations: Python, Java, Perl, Tcl, Frontier. David Carter-Tod asks for assistance with XML-RPC for ASP. XML.COM: Building a Metasearch Engine. New channels: Finetuning.Com, Sounds and Pressure, Search Atlanta. Feed: "With Third Voice, the para-site community has attached itself directly to the host, but in a way that is only visible to Third Voice users. For Web publishers, that's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, your pages can spark discussion and debate, even if you don't have conferencing software installed. On the other hand, outside readers suddenly have the opportunity to scrawl in the margins of your text, whether you invite them in or not." Tog on QuickTime 4.0. "If you are that one-in-a-million designer who is so good that you can serve up totally cryptic stuff and people will still beat a path to your door, then your name is Kai Krause. The rest of us need to develop a little self-discipline." Tog has too many page reads for his ISP account. No need to send me email about this, I already know. Thanks. Cringely: On the Internet, Fame becomes Fortune.
DaveNet: Byte and the Merc. The next thing I have to do is to install Office 2000 on my laptop so I can read a spec that just arrived from Microsoft. It happened in real-time, as the DaveNet piece was going out. Can they read my mind?? Microsoft: Viewer for Word 97. It's freeware. Re yesterday's piece, from a Microsoft exec: "We worry about whether we are going to get crushed by the Internet every day." USA Today: Web creator displeased with his invention. "We used to say the Web would mimic the world," he says, "but, in fact, it ended up being the world." I'm rewriting the Recently Updated Channels process. After a few days running, it became clear how it could be simpler. So the updating is a little erratic now, but should settle down again shortly. PC World: RemarQable Discussions. David Carter-Tod has an XML-RPC connector for ASP pages. He says the performance is acceptable. This could change the way we do dynamic sites here. I've asked if he's released the code, and if so, I'll link to it here asap. CNN's Lou Dobbs resigns to start Space.Com. I wonder if they need a content management system? John Grohol points out that Mr. Dobbs needs some help with security. The database of email addresses they're collecting is in plain text and in plain view on their server. Paolo Valdemarin: How hot was it in Trieste last summer? So hot that Marc Canter passed out! Another heads-up. We have a project going to get one of our smaller membership-based sites running in Zope on Linux. It's up and running now and we'll link to it shortly, perhaps later today.
DaveNet: Office 2000 is Not Fun. "Office shows development muscle and a tremendous coordinated resolve to overcome challenges, and this it does very well. But its imagination is missing in action. It takes no risks." Jakob Nielsen comments on today's DaveNet. Dan Gillmor: Creating Web-based Documents. "Manila is easy to use, but its enormous potential stems at least as much from other built-in features: among them, a calendar, which lets readers click on previous days' postings; a search engine; and discussion-group software. I hope to use Manila to produce a so-called Web-log, an online exploration of how I see the world (or at least the Web portion of it), in the relatively near future." Thanks Dan! We've already designed the banner for Dan's Manila site. CNN: Amazon Toying with Music. News.Com: AOL Names NetCenter Manager. Press release: Homestead Builds on Castanet. Press release: Microsoft and Inprise Sittin in a Tree. $125 million. John Udell: Distributed HTTP. "Peer-to-peer Web computing is the future. Why not start exploring the possibilities now?" MacCentral: Apple's open source moves welcomed by BSD community.
Byte: Exploring XML-RPC. "Does distributed computing have to be any harder than this? I don't think so." Wow! DaveNet: The Boys of Woodside. This is the first time I can remember that a DaveNet piece didn't get top billing on SN. Buck's: Indian Princesses. "Every year over 200 girls come with their fathers to Huddart Park for a weekend of Indian wildness. We are lucky to get a few every year at Buck's." Frontier 6 Users: New version of the navBar macro that uses XML to specify the content of the navbar. It's faster than the non-XML version. ZDNet: W3C's Amaya browser simplifies web editing. "Unlike products such as Microsoft's Office 2000, which relies on proprietary server-side extensions to publish documents on the Web, all of the publishing capabilities in Amaya are based on HTTP 1.1." I don't think that statement is exactly true, Microsoft is using WebDAV, which is an IETF proposed standard, not proprietary. New channel: PythonWare.Com, DominoPower, PalmPower, Windows CE Power. An anonymous MacNN reader comments on ThirdVoice. Internet Alchemy: Open Content Syndication Format. It's a higher-level format, it gathers resources, whether they are in RSS or scriptingNews format, or some other syndication format. It also allows the sysop to provide a contact address (very important!) and specifies frequency of updating. It seems we could advance RSS to include this information, and also to include more of what scriptingNews format has that RSS doesn't. (scriptingNews predates RSS by more than a year.) IBM: XML is the next big thing. We already knew that! NY Times: Critics of Icann. "Among those leading the charge to put the brakes on Icann's policy making is Network Solutions..." News.Com: Pay per-use apps. Back in the old days we called these Service Bureaus. I think it's a no-brainer. Lots of software, including our own, requires technical expertise to set up. But not to use. There's the opportunity. NY Times: Software Ad Blockers. "An emerging category of Web software that blocks advertising is challenging the Web industry and rankling the nerves of some Internet executives." Maybe they could make the ads interesting so people wouldn't want to block them? Most banner ads and the pages they link to are lame.
My.UserLand.Com changes in the last 48 hours. This is important reading, especially if you're running one of the channels. Recently Updated Channels is the state of the art of human web trawling technology. Murphy willing!
Rebecca Eisenberg: Browser wars over? They should be. "Meanwhile, as I was switching from Netscape to Internet Explorer, at Moscone Center Andreessen was admonishing the crowd for not creating applications that are easy enough to use. Keep it simple, he was saying. Don't make users download and install things. If you make your software too hard too use, you will lose customers." SJ Merc: Silicon Valley's Spectacular Failure. "Ultimately, Go flopped because it misjudged its customers, the difficulty of its technology and the strength of its corporate partnerships." SJ Merc: Microsoft Office 2000 and the Web. "In any Office 2000 application, you can select Save to the Web from the File menu at the top of the screen. You can then open Web Folders and put the Office 2000 document directly onto the server, with Office 2000 automatically handling the chore of translating the Word document or Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation into HTML." I want it to be even easier! A new mail list is forming to do XML-RPC for Tcl. NY Times: Why Internet Investors Are Still Ravenous. "Stocks not ready for prime time were foisted on a welcoming public lusting for the big score, they now say. In Silicon Valley's effervescence the past few months, discretion lost out to greed." The first banner ad worth placing on Scripting News. I had a brief phone talk yesterday with Eric S. Raymond, the champion of Open Source. I thought it was worth mentioning. I was hoping we could talk about ways of working together, but he just said Open Source was the thing that mattered, so I said Nice to meet you! and left it at that. Over the weekend I started playing with a Cobalt Qube that my friend Doc Searls got for me. Thanks to Rick Eames I was able to figure out how to get in. I'm in!
Andrew Wooldridge asks about other sites like scripting.com. W3C: XHTML 1.0. BBC: Volkswagen fights online deals. Wow! Linux gets easier to install. And thanks to Jacob Levy for sending me all these great links. Gotta get him to run a channel. InfoWorld's Bob O'Donnell doesn't like ThirdVoice, he thinks they'll get into legal trouble. I don't like ThirdVoice either, but never mind lawsuits, think of the karmic issues. As a webmaster I hate the idea of ThirdVoice. I put a lot of time and effort into running an interesting site. If someone has something to say let them put up their own site. Let's make that easier. ThirdVoice is yucky. News.com: The future of broadband? "Where cable or telephone companies talk in terms of megabits per second, Media Fusion talks of the possibility of transmitting exobits--that's a 1 with eighteen zeros after it--per second though power lines." Web Review: "Several readers were appalled that I would suggest using single-pixel GIFs as a layout control tool." Dan Gillmor: Spin, Dishonesty and Outright Lies. "Technology companies will quit being deceptive only when their customers force them to quit, and all the journalistic exposes won't change this basic truth." Amen! MacWEEK: Somebody's Watching You. "Nearly everything that flows to and from my computer over the Internet is transmitted as unscrambled plain text or something very close to it." New channel: Adrenaline Labs. Doug Brewer's SndApp 1.0b2 is a set of scripts that makes SoundApp (a free sound utility) an MP3 jukebox. Mac only. This morning I'm listening to an old Patti Smith CD. Hey do you want to be a rock and roll star? Then get a guitar and learn how to play. "Three chord rock merged with the power of the word."
DaveNet: Thru the Magic of XML. New channels: MacWEEK, Dr Dobbs, ZDNet, The Register. This evening, after complaints from vocal DaveNet readers, I finally made it so that My.UserLand.Com does not require a cookie to display individual channels. Tomorrow I'm going to look at moving the channel reader script off the main server so we can do more frequent refreshes. These fixes were long overdue.
Microsoft is looking to hire a Linux product manager. c't: Script Bug Causes OSX Server to Panic. Zope.Org: Zope Portal Toolkit. InfoWorld: Jackson Laughs at Linux. MacWEEK profiles OSX developer Andrew Stone.
DaveNet: Concluding the Microsoft Trial. Here's a funky Grateful Dead Internet music station. SJ Merc: "This is a place where a true innovator hangs out a sign: Cafe Soleil: Tanning Salon, Coffee House, Web Computers." A strategic partnership with Buck's? Hmmm. Buck's: The Nudist on the Late Shift. Moira Gunn: Time for a Change? "Information is flowing everywhere, all the time, and your email might cross 20 state boundaries in a second and a half with just the click of your mouse." Wired: Industry Loves AOL Acquisitions. SJ Merc: Gates gives $5 billion to charity. AskTog: Interfaces that Kill. New channel: MobileStart Headlines.
InfoWorld: Browser seen as key to AOL-Netscape deal. I'm going to run a DaveNet piece soon saying that the browser belongs in the operating system. The positive solution is to arrive at a set of cross-platform APIs that allow non-Microsoft HTML renderers to plug in, in place of the Microsoft renderer. We need built-in system-level HTML rendering on Mac OS too. See how cool I am! I speak my convictions even though Microsoft funds our competitors (loosely speaking). It's a big world out there. Lots of cool stuff to do! Updated: SlashDot.UserLand.Com now displays only the 25 most recent SlashDot.Org stories. The page was getting huge, now it's more manageable. This review is part of the building of a new directory site for UserLand.Com. We have lots of little gems like this one scattered around our servers. We're working to bring them all together in one place, what we're calling Your Site of Sites. Your Show of Shows aired on NBC between 1950 and 1954. The program starred Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris, and was produced by Max Liebman. The show's writers included, among others, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, and Larry Gelbart. Interestingly, Eudora/Mac has a limited HTML display capability even though there's no HTML control available from Microsoft (or Apple?) on the Mac. Qualcomm must have their own HTML rendering code? The Age: Keeping the Apocalypse on Ice. "The Soviets and then the Russians have lied, cheated and deceived about their smallpox holdings and their intentions to use them as strategic weapons." ComputerWorld: Why Bother with Mac OS X Server? Ballyhooed by Apple as combining "the strength of Unix with the simplicity of the Macintosh," Mac OS X Server is a poorly designed, poorly integrated set of three operating systems: Apple's Macintosh, Next Inc.'s Next OS and the freeBSD Unix. Yesterday's MacWEEK piece showed how Apple has quietly adopted standards of Wintel world. The last step, which seems inevitable in a world where Apple markets the color of the machines and other non-technical features, is that the operating software becomes less important, and the cost of being non-standard becomes higher. To Apple, the benefit of competing in a larger sandbox must be irresistable.
New feature: Scripting News Bulletins via Email. Members only. Screenshots of the two bulletin formats, plain text and HTML. News.com: AOL Acquires Spinner.Com, Nullsoft. $400 million. MacWEEK: MacWorld Acquires MacCentral. Wired: Overheard at the Microsoft Trial. "I don't know if he's referring to pissing on JFC or pissing on JDK 1.2. Nor do I know is what he specifically means by 'pissing on'. I think it's a term of multiple meanings." Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister, Tony Tan, had breakfast at Buck's recently, along with several Silicon Valley industrial heavyweights. News.com: Japanese Snap Up Robot Dog. "The 11-inch-tall Aibo can go for walks, wag its tail and be programmed to do tricks, although it cannot answer to its name." MacWEEK: A Lesson Learned the Hard Way. "The issue here is Apple's increased adoption of non-proprietary technology. Since the late 1980s Macs have seen PCI boot out NuBus, PC Card replace various Apple-designed notebook connectivity technologies, and, more recently, USB replace the Mac's traditional serial and ADB ports. Internally, EIDE and ATAPI have replaced SCSI as the peripheral connection system. Many of those anonymous-looking chips on your Mac's motherboard can also be found on any number of Wintel motherboards." Christoph Pingel has been working on a Frontier-based website management system for broadcast stations. Beautiful! Your screenshots are welcome at ScreenShots.UserLand.Com. Wired: Ticker Shock Strikes Techies. "Most don't come from money, and many never expected to have much. Suddenly, they're faced with unexpected dilemmas: What would I do if money no longer mattered? What really does matter? Goldbart says that line of inquiry leads inevitably to the basic question: Who am I?" NY Times: Money Can't Buy Happiness, Or Can It? "Of course, people don't complain about the disappointments of prosperity unless they are prosperous.." MSNBC: Food.Com Goes Local. "They’re a herd of elephants, and if you get the herd marching down the same path, it becomes a tremendous force" said Rhoades. "But to get those elephants moving in the same direction takes a long time and a lot of work."
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Perhaps PC WEEK's motives are revealed in their choice of graphic for the benchmarks they ran comparing Linux and NT? 
