Monday, July 19, 1999

Press release: PHP 4.0 Beta 1. "PHP 4.0 offers drastic improvements in every aspect - performance and scalability, features, platform support and extendibility."

News.Com: Red Hat to start Linux news site. "Judging by the Linux seller's job openings and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company intends to set up a news site based in San Francisco, complete with an editor-in-chief and a staff of journalists writing news, features, tutorials, and other original content. The portal effort would compete with other prominent Linux-related Web sites such as Slashdot and VA Linux Systems's Linux.com site."

XmlTree.Com adopts the Dewey Decimal System to classify XML content on the net. This is an interesting idea.

Lawrence Lee links to background info on the Dewey Decimal System, which was invented around the turn of the century (the last century).

News.Com: Coalition supports Microsoft metadata proposal.

Wired: Microsoft Quarterly Earnings. "Microsoft said on Monday that its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings jumped an eye-popping 60 percent -- a much bigger growth rate than in recent quarters -- on continuing strong sales of its Windows and Office software."

"A man pulled up in front of Buck's last weekend with a load of strange creatures. At first I thought they were llamas, but closer inspection revealed them to be alpacas. Alpacas have a shy, engaging look about them and they resemble a sheep crossed with a camel. They have a soft bleat which, in chorus, is plaintive and haunting."

Economist: Caught in the Web. "Without classified advertising, most newspapers would find it hard to survive; and classified is the bit of the bundle that is most vulnerable to the Internet. The newspapers’ problem is not just that techies like surfing the web; it is that classified works far better on the Internet than it does on paper."

Wired: Slaves of the Net. "We're all slaves to the idea that we think we're going to get rich in this medium," Lessard said. He estimates there are hundreds of thousands of wage slaves toiling at jobs in the bottom ranks of the digital economy, but says their plight has been obscured by the media fixation on multi-millionaires in their 20s."

Press Release: Barksdale and Silverberg Invest in Net Startup. "Tellme was founded by Mike McCue, former vice president of technology at Netscape, and Angus Davis, former product manager of Netscape's Communicator Internet software. In April, Hadi Partovi, lead program manager for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, made headlines when he joined the company co-founded by his former arch-enemies at Netscape. All three are under 30, and Angus is 21 years old."

Hardware update: SuperHonker is back up now, after having its motherboard, two CPUs, and heat sensor replaced. But it's cold today, so I'm staying realistic until the next heat wave comes. And I'm using the laptop again to write and it has a Shift key that's intermittent. Dell asks if I've tried an external keyboard for the laptop. Oh geez. I wish I had never bought a Dell.

It could be worse! At DesignFrame in NY, the ceiling fell on their web server. It still works, amazingly.