Monday, July 26, 1999

John Dvorak: The iBook Disaster. "When you see some guy pulling an iBook out of his backpack a few months from now, tell him his little computer looks delectable and see what he says."

John VanDyk, Frontier developer, squash hunter.

Wired: Government to NSI -- Give it Up. "In an escalating war of words, the Commerce Department has warned Network Solutions to share its valuable listing of more than five million Internet addresses and their owners."

CNNfn: Open Instant Messaging Inevitable. "We want interoperable systems and that's going to happen," said AOL spokeswoman Ann Brackbill. "The issue is how we will work together. Without the right coordination, privacy will be at risk in our view."

The State: Computer News going Electronic. "Windows Magazine, one of the most respected computer publications in the industry, announced in its August edition it would no longer offer a print version."

PC WEEK: The Way of Linux. "Could the fragmented history of Unix be repeating itself with Linux? There are signs: Variations in ideology as well as cash--lots of it--are pushing Linux to the brink of fragmentation as the threads of the open-source model--its only stabilizing force--are weakening." Wishful thinking?

Eric Kidd: Zope XML-RPC Todo List.

Next problem. I'm looking for an easy way to do filesystem-based redirection in Microsoft's IIS.

Robert Palmer finds himself searching for a live XML-based stock feed, which would truly be a killer app for XML. "Hey, I'm a newbie to XML, so maybe I'm just completely off the mark and/or lost."

I3 Solutions has an XML stock ticker, but where's the XML?

Josh Lucas found the XML. I've tested it here, and it works. However, on the I3 Solutions page they say "we are extracting stock information from a popular stock quote portal site and converting that data into XML," so I'm not really comfortable building an application off this XML flow.

Jonathan Eisenzopf: A Perl module that "provides a basic framework for creating and maintaining RDF Site Summary (RSS) files. This distribution also contains several examples that allow you to generate HTML from an RSS file. This might be helpful if you want to include news feeds on your Web site from sources like Slashdot and Freshmeat."

6/20/99: A collection of scripts, in Frontier, Java, AppleScript, Perl, Cold Fusion, PHP and Tcl, that produce a ScriptingNews 2.0b1 format syndication file from a plain text format that's easy to work with.

SJ Merc: Woodstock Webcast a Digital Debacle. "This weekend's Woodstock.com Webcast of the 30th anniversary festival -- when you could access it, when your computer wasn't crashing, when the so-called streaming video did as much and stopped with the herky-jerky Max Headroom nonsense -- was a painful display of the sophomoric misuse of technology."

Wired: Geezer Geeks. "Older techies are finding it difficult to sustain the upward spirals of their early careers in an industry that favors younger, cheaper labor."

Forbes: 2 Amigos, 1 Amiga. "You can do stuff with a ten-year-old Amiga running on a 14-megahertz processor that you can't do on new PCs," says Collas, who left his job as Gateway's senior vice president of new products in 1999 to head Amiga.