Tuesday, August 31, 1999

Frontier 6.1b1 is now running on Nirvana. 

Arnold Lesikar: LibGD 1.0b3 uses RLE compression only and does not infringe the Unisys patent. 

Nick Denton: 130 RSS News Feeds. "Moreover.com is an Internet service which scrapes headline links from about 1,500 sources on the web, and across more than 150 categories of news." This raises an interesting issue, the next one after deep linking. Can others scrape your site for links to stories and repurpose them as XML? 

Newsweek: Europe's Got Net Fever. "Nick Denton didn't plan to leave his perfectly good job as technology correspondent for the Financial Times when he moved to California." 

Ian Davis of Internet Alchemy adds his thoughts to the XML-scraping thread. "Dave said he would be unhappy if someone scraped his site. I'm not sure why. Dave gains nothing in monetary terms for driving customers to Scripting News but gains a whole lot in mindshare and exposure for Frontier, Userland and whatever he's working on at that point in time." A disturbing comment. I'm right here, I wish he would ask instead of telling me why I have the wrong opinion, about *my* content. Thanks for listening. 

CNN is running Dylan Tweney's InfoWorld column, with a survey that asks how you feel about Deep Linking. 

MacWEEK: Apple introduces new desktops, flat-panel display. 

This morning's Scripting News Challenge™. 

My bet: Open Source AppleScript. 

Jeremy Bowers wins a minor Honorable Mention for predicting the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field™, but no one bet on a G4 (and I doubt if we would have given the prize anyway, it wasn't a very exciting announcement, unless you think varying the colors is a major deal). 

SlashDot.Org: Unisys not suing all webmasters. 

Simon St. Laurent: A Civilian's Guide to W3C.  

Sun's newly acquired StarOffice is available for download. It's not clear from the marketing page whether StarOffice is written in Java. This used to matter to Sun, does it not matter now? 

Monday, August 30, 1999

This is the DG interface that Simone Bettini and Paolo Valdemarin are working on. They're using the XML-RPC DG interface released last week. Hint to Paolo and Macromedia, it would be great if the editor produced Flash text. 

New channel: Jon Udell. 

New tours: Website framework, Workgroup web server, Case studies. 

Buried treasure: How to Write an XML-RPC Handler. 

More buried treasure: Matt Neuburg explains XML-RPC. 

Here's a neat application of the XML-RPC to DG interface. Eric Kidd, who works at UserLand, has connected his CVS to his DG, so we can watch the changes as he checks them in. Zzzzip! 

Wired: A startup for startups. 

I got five emails in three minutes about a backdoor in Microsoft's HotMail server that allows anyone to read anyone else's mail without a password.  

CNN on the HotMail security hole. "Millions of free Internet e-mail accounts provided by Microsoft's Hotmail service were susceptible to a major security breach that allowed access Monday to users' accounts." 

Tim Bray on the HotMail Hole: "The thing that's really startling is that the HotMail system was left on the air for a substantial number of hours after the one line of HTML necessary to open the door had been posted on dozens of public web sites." 

Progress report: "I saw how the Frontier site could be like Scripting News, but better. That I could have fun with it, and that it could become a discussion group like this one, *and* that it could have a functional hierarchy." 

InfoWorld: Sun to mount desktop attack. 

Jon Udell: Exploring Zope. "Zope is a 100 percent scripted long-running HTTP daemon, which maps HTTP requests directly into scripted method calls." 

Jacob Levy: Programming ideas and time to mature. "Dave's recent ruminations on Algol-60 and its relation to UserTalk reminded me of an urban legend about software: some pundits believe that it takes about 20-30 years for novel approaches in programming languages to become mainstream." 

And sometimes, when the timing is just right, adoption happens very quickly. Examples include spreadsheets and HTML. 

Press release: Macromedia Flash-enables Illustrator. 

David Carter-Tod wishes to revise his wishes for achieving the M10K threshold. "I wish for a good job with stock options so I can retire in 10 years time." Seems do-able. 

The next M10K challenge. Be the first to have a DG message that you posted achieve more than 10,000 reads. (Honorable mentions achieve more than 5,000 reads.) 

Evolt.Org: Don't Panic About GIFs. OK. 

Wired: Apple, Adobe show at Seybold. "The hottest buzz surrounds Apple, which is widely rumored to be unveiling a new professional machine featuring a new, hotly anticipated PowerPC chip from Motorola that dramatically speeds multimedia performance." 

Sunday, August 29, 1999

Digging up background for the tours for the Frontier site, I came across this specification, written in 1960, that describes what was then a new programming language called Algol 60. It's the basic design for many current programming languages, including C, Pascal, Java, JavaScript, and UserTalk, the language built into Frontier. I was five years old when this spec came out. 

Except for the GOTO statement and keywords appearing in 'single quotes', the design of Algol-60 is the way all block structured languages work today. Was it the first language to be specified by a BNF grammar? I'm not sure. Lisp may have been first with a formal definition. Most earlier languages were designed in an ad hoc way, and could not be formally specified. 

James Spahr has DreamWeaver/Mac integrated with our CMS using the AppleScript XML-RPC connector. Bravo! 

I believe we nailed the problem in the XML-RPC DG interface, thanks to patience and intelligence from Ben Griffiths. 

According to LinuxToday, mySql is now open source. Coool! 

Eric Kidd: "The Cathedral and the Bazaar wasn't written to compare proprietary software with open source software. Instead, it was written to compare two ways of building open source software." I didn't know that. 

On the XML-DEV list, Tim Bray takes issue with multiple namespaces in the XHTML spec. It's over my head, but if Tim says it won't work, I believe him. 

I'm working on the Frontier website this morning, building a series of tours to link into the pages hanging off the home page. Finally it's all making sense to me, the What is Frontier? stuff, which everyone likes, is the table of contents for the site. I'm just hotting up the bold items and linking them to pages that take you on a tour of the features. 

Along the way I'm discovering some gems. For example, this story explains outlining in Frontier. With the recent renewed interest in outliners this has become an interesting page in a new way. Note that we describe outlining in Frontier in the context of script editing. In Frontier 6 the outliner became more generally useful for writing, and the docs don't reflect that yet. 

If you are an expert Frontier user you can help out and write a tour or two. It's quite easy, and I even wrote a spec that explains how to do it. 

New tours: Scripting in Frontier, Frontier's object database. 

Saturday, August 28, 1999

XML-RPC DG Status: We've had some reports of problems, but messages have been posted thru Perl and AppleScript, so we know the interface is working at least from those two languages. Stay tuned.  

InfoWorld's Dylan Tweney on Deep Linking. "InfoWorld until recently had a restrictive linking policy, although it was essentially toothless. According to this policy, people who wanted to link to stories within InfoWorld's Web site were supposed to request permission first. The policy was widely ignored, as search engines and a host of other Web sites regularly linked to InfoWorld articles." 

c't: Multiskript-Hypertexter. "Wem die händische Erstellung seiner wachsenden Webpräsenz über den Kopf wächst, sucht früher oder später nach einer automatisierten Lösung seiner Probleme. Unter MacOS und Windows findet die objektorientierte Datenbank Frontier daher immer mehr Freunde. In der Version 6 lässt sich das skriptgesteuerte Programm sogar durch Browser-Aufrufe steuern." 

Don Hopkins: "In my big book of karma, Bill Joy has a lot of penance to pay, to make up for the psychic and aesthetic discordances he inflicted on the world by writing VI and CSH. He can have all the credit for those he wants." 

Oliver Wrede: "I think Generator is far to expensive. They demand a licence at $3000 bucks for each processor on the webserver and $500 per developer using the developers suite." 

Dave Winer: "Personally, here's what I'd like to see. A cheap Flash-based word processor with very basic formatting commands. That way I could write some text, see what it spits out, and learn how the Flash format works." 

Cringely: "..a bad experience in the company's very first acquisition, when it bought Powerpoint. Even though this late-80s purchase was of a company with fewer than 50 employees, both Bill Gates and then-CEO Jon Shirley told me the experience was horrific for Microsoft. It was a problem of trying to merge corporate cultures that were very different. And the lesson learned was not to even try for such a merger. For the sake of Microsoft, the new model says that the corporate culture of the company being bought has to die." 

From the It Could Have Been Me Department. Before Bill Gates and Jon Shirley decided to acquire PowerPoint, they had a Letter of Intent to acquire my company, Living Videotext. We lost the deal in a meeting with Shirley over exactly this issue. Shirley said that they'd offer everyone at LVT jobs, but that we'd become a product team and nothing more. "Oh the waste!" I thought. We had put so much effort into integrating the support and management functions of the company. Everyone was a MORE user, and on a career path to be part of the product team. I objected. They bought Forethought instead, the company that made PowerPoint. Don't worry, it was still hell trying to integrate LVT with Symantec. 

Friday, August 27, 1999

New spec: How to access UserLand's DGs thru XML-RPC. If this gains traction it will become an important standard for including user-written text in a content management system, directly connecting to user-oriented desktop text editing tools. This is how we factor the limited text editors in web browsers, by making the editors we love more intimate with HTTP (thru XML-RPC of course). Support is welcome from HTML editors (eg Word, Golive, Dreamweaver) and user-oriented databases (eg FileMaker, Access) as well as programmer editors such as BBEdit and Emacs. It's an open protocol, we also welcome competition on the server side, and in fact we plan to provide an excellent outliner to hook in on the workstation side. If you're interested in the future of writing for the web at a plumbing level, please check this out. Thanks! 

Eric Folley: suites.autoWebEdit. "This suite is designed to make using WebEdit easier: when you open a webpage, this suite automatically checks it out for you; close the page, it's automatically checked in." Good idea! 

InfoWorld: "The long-sought ability to run applications on different servers in far-flung places over the Internet without an army of high-end developers came a step closer this week as the Object Management Group (OMG) adopted the CORBA Component Model." Why wait? XML-RPC is doing this right now, not in the next millenium! 

Once again I get good links from ntk.net. "If we had Xanadu you'd realise how out of context all these quotes are." Hey they follow the DG here. Thanks! 

News.Com: Web breathes new life into Macromedia. 

Hey Macromedia has two new products! Here are some pictures and screen shots. 1, 2, 3, 4. Here's the scoop on the two products. One is an improved version of their Generator server-side engine, and the other is an add-on that allows Adobe Illustrator users to generate Flash-compatible content. Not earth-shaking, evolutionary. That's always a good idea. (I'm looking for the press releases now. If you find them send me a pointer.) 

InfoWorld: Microsoft and HP spec Over-the-Internet Printing. "IPP allows print jobs to be sent to any printer connected to the Internet." 

On this page I outline my vision for RSS and invite everyone who has an opinion to express it. Thanks! 

Granite Canyon provides a free public DNS. 

I got emails this morning from vice-presidents of Microsoft and Compaq in response to yesterday's piece. 

MSNBC: Teachers take the Web to Class. "Thousands of teachers nationwide are returning to their classrooms this year with a few new technological tools under their belts." 

Nick Lowe defends Word-as-Outliner. 

Jason Levine had a happy Dell experience. 

Yesterday was a stunning day on Discuss.UserLand.Com. We're really zooooming. What a community. What good spirits. No flames and we're tackling tough issues. Excellent! 

Yesterday was M10K Day. David Carter-Tod, the lucky creator of message 10K, gets a wish! Use it wisely. 

Reuters/ZDNet: A good geek is hard to find. "The men here are every mother's dream. They're stable and well-educated, and they are wealthy. Some of them have millions and millions of dollars and no one to spend it on."  

Thursday, August 26, 1999

DaveNet: Compaq DOA, Microsoft NT setup cruel and unusual punishment. A long title today! 

The Compaq Saga continues. I resign as a customer. They continue to play hard-ass. I flip it around. In case anyone from Compaq is tuning in, I included my customer number. Dell asks if there's any way they can win me back. I have terms. 

While I was on the phone with Compaq we crossed a milestone on Discuss.UserLand.Com. David Carter-Tod posted the 10,000th message. David has been a frequent contributor to the Frontier community and to Scripting News. I couldn't think of anyone I'd like to honor more. Excellent! 

News.Com: More Compaq Layoffs Expected. 

TJ Rooney, a Pennsylvania legislator, proposes a computer lemon law. "Rooney was joined by two Pennsylvania consumers who purchased defective computers and are battling the manufacturers over ineffective repairs covered under warranty." 

Richard Blumberg recommends Debco Electronics, a clone maker in Cincinnati. Phil Suh recommends Virtual Micro in Milpitas, CA. (That's closer!) Ron McCoy recommends Telenet Systems, and says they make the servers for Yahoo and About.Com. 

SJ Merc: George W. Bush says Give Creationism a Chance. I think he needs a whack over the head with a computer disk. This is so embarassing for the US! 

MSNBC: Bands of Angels Get Organized. "Angel investors — wealthy individuals — now inject an estimated $50 billion into young companies every year." 

InfoWorld on virtual meetings. "Collaborative real-time conferencing solutions, a subset of the ever-expanding Web-based collaboration market, is bringing employees, customers, and corporate partners together via the Web, minimizing the effort and time required by all." 

Richard Hoefer: "When I asked top-flight web design firms in San Francisco what they used for web flowcharting, some mentioned Visio -- while most used no form of intelligent flowcharting at all." 

David Sherman explains how cloning makes lawyers more powerful. 

Doc Searls: "Phil's beliefs are ones that Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times and most of the publishing world agrees with." 

Dave Winer: "As you know, I am not an open source zealot, but I am a zealot when I think I'm being lied to." 

Reuven Lerner, a columnist at Linux Journal, says they have a liberal policy, allowing authors to publish articles elsewhere, upon publication, as long as they include the phrase "Reprinted from Linux Journal." 

Jacob Levy with today's Quote of the Day: "No! You're supposed to love FAT32. What! You don't love it? Let me whack you over the head with this computer disk.. Wham! There, now you feel better, surely!" 

Wednesday, August 25, 1999

The Compaq Saga that started last week continues, with the arrival of the machine, DOA. And I finally wrote down, so I won't forget, why NT setup is such a uniquely humbling experience. 

Today's song, Galileo by the Indigo Girls. 

An email from Dennis Ritchie to Dan Bricklin explaining how he got permission to release the early version of the original C compiler. 

Dori Smith on the difference between coding and writing. 

Wired: Programmer Reaches his Xanadu. 

A question to start the day. If open source is so good for software, why isn't it equally good for books and magazines? 

Tim O'Reilly: "I feel that it's immoral to try to compel someone else to give you something they've created without compensating them in some way. That is, when software is freed, it is a gift, not the result of an obligation." Excellent! 

Jice "enables companies to easily construct syndicated publishing networks, Web superstores, and online reseller channels by establishing Web-site-to-Web-site information networks." 

InternetNews.Com: The Worst Security Hole? "IE5 users can protect themselves by going into security tab of the browser's Internet Options menu, and disabling ActiveX controls or plug-ins." 

Apparently the Udanax site has exceeded its transfer limit. Luckily there's a mirror site here. 

Tuesday, August 24, 1999

DaveNet: Ted Nelson Returns. "Now, twenty years later, and ten years after all work on the system had ceased, Nelson and his band of believers have released the source code to the Xanadu system." 

Jon Udell: "Last night, at the O'Reilly Open Source conference in Monterey, Ted 

Nelson and his team demonstrated and shipped Xanadu, the fabled hypertext system that inspired the World Wide Web. It was a remarkable 

and strange moment." 

Xanadu Secrets Become Open-Source. "In celebration of the success and vast human benefit of the Open Source movement, we are proud at last to be able to present to the world the technical ideas and methods on which we worked so hard for so long." 

I downloaded the "Green" release of Xanadu and put it into a folder on my server so I can read it thru the web. You can too! 

Gary Wolf: "Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form."  

Ted Nelson's home page. 

Lots of Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart links in the archive from 1/24/98. 

Is Xanadu a software antique? I think so! 

Prosthetic Monkey: Red Hat Wealth Monitor. 

Matt Neuburg: Long Day's Journey into Night of the Living Dead Software. Excellent! 

Upside: Percolating Java. 

Here's what happens when an outliner discovers cloning. 

Nicholas Petreley: "If you're going to bet your company on Windows 2000, I've assembled 10 responses you should memorize to be fully prepared for the consequences." 

The guestbook on Microsoft's Windows 2000 test site is interesting. Lots of Linux people there. Why are they so interested in Windows 2000? 

Another Jon Udell piece: From Virtual Memory to Object Storage.  

Monday, August 23, 1999

Jakob Nielsen: Do user interface standards stifle creativity? "Despite the strong consistency in all Mac software do you think Excel looks like MacWrite? Or that there was no design creativity involved in making MORE (a popular outliner)? It's clearly not the case that all GUI software is the same even though most software has pretty strong compliance with the platform design standards these days." I absolutely agree. The Mac UI guidelines of the day covered a small part of the functionality of any app. Yet developers resist standardization, I did too. 

Blogger is an automated weblog publishing tool. Excellent! 

News.Com: Sun Decapitates Java OS. Oooops! 

Heads-up -- Scripting News will not be updated frequently until Wednesday morning. I'm in Monterey at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. I'm on a panel at 2PM (tomorrow!) with Paul Everitt, Guido Van Rossum and Eric S. Raymond. There was a scheduling screwup so I'm relaxing and learning a little about Perl and Python. I just watched the Perl Bowl. It was funny. Also it's funny that I can update the home page from the computer room. Even though there are 50 people in the room, it's silent. All you can hear is clicking of keys. Lots of clicking of lots of keys. Hey I could get used to this. 

On second thought I miss my laptop, even though its keyboard doesn't work well. This system is running Netscape on Linux. The clipboard doesn't work right. It refreshes pages when I go back and forward, wiping out what I typed. And it looks cheezy! I miss Windows! I'm going to say that on stage tomorrow. (Probably not.) 

PS: I figured out how to use the clipboard. 

Sunday, August 22, 1999

DaveNet: Who Reads DaveNet? Thanks to Jakob Nielsen, Dan Gillmor, Craig Cline, Brent Schlender, Pam Edstrom, Bill Gates, Jim Gable, Rick LeFaivre, Jesse Berst, Douglas Adams, Kevin Fong, Andrew Anker, Dan Shafer, Adam Curry and John Perry Barlow for participating. 

Frontier 6.1d16 is now running. This should increase performance on MailToTheFuture and the main DG, as examples. We're also hot on the trail of a crashing bug. Excellent! 

TechWeek's David Needle on me. "User interface design has become a lost art. In the early day of PCs, prior to the Mac, every program had its own UI. The Web is now in that position, where every site has a different UI. The next big thing is going to be a standard UI for the Web, so we have to decide what the basic features are a site needs. If we do it right, it will be better for users." 

There's a lot of confusion in the Needle piece. Some important things were dropped in the editing process, I guess. Here's my response. After reading Needle's piece and responding to it, I read the Microsoft pages on the review sites for 1997 and 1998. I think I've been pretty consistent, preaching peace and love, and trying to understand Microsoft, playing dumb and taking them at face value, and then pointing out where the contradictions are. This is all in the hope of pointing the way, getting them back on course, so they don't try to hold back progress, in fact, I want Microsoft to *help* the new software world shape itself around the Internet. I've always believed since the Bill Gates vs The Internet piece in 1994, that Microsoft had to adapt to a world where they didn't set the standards. I believe that even more today. 

Dan Gillmor: "My ability to get nearly instant responses to my e-mail query from so many smart people feels close to miraculous. It's just a hint of what's to come." 

NY Times: "The conventional wisdom of the new economy says newspapers ought to be on their last legs. In this view, it will not be long before the Internet eats the newspapers' lunch by siphoning off readers and advertising to Web sites." 

Dave Barry: "Nowadays all of the hip modern newspapers spend millions of dollars operating Web sites where we give away the entire newspaper for free. Sometimes we run advertisements in the regular newspaper urging our remaining paying customers to go to our Web sites instead. Stop giving us money! is the shrewd marketing thrust of these ads." 

CNN: "The late astronomer and author Carl Sagan was a secret but avid marijuana smoker, crediting it with inspiring essays and scientific insight, according to Sagan's biographer." 

Saturday, August 21, 1999

Milestone: This morning I wrote a discuss.userland.com message using a new Frontier suite that allows me to write in a standard outliner window. When I save the window, it goes directly into the server's database. It's the fastest way yet to write for a server that's far away. I can always edit text in the web browser, but for more demanding writing jobs, there's nothing like having a smooth desktop writing app. 

Here's a screen shot of the Frontier suite in action, with its menu pulled down. This still is quite rough, we're planning changes to the Frontier kernel to support this new usage. It's a work in progress. We encourage other writing tool vendors to compete with us. The more compatible writing tools there are, the more fun we'll have on the server. 

Next week we'll release the spec for the XML-RPC calls that connect the workstation with the server. The interface is cross-platform, and will be easily supported on all major operating systems. 

Online Journalism Review: The Mythical Press Box. "Billy Payne, the executive chairman of the Atlantic Olympic Committee, after explaining that there just weren't enough credentials to go around to include the masses of online reporters among the 10,000 or so other journalists, added ominously in 1996, 'We have our own Web site.'" 

Suck: "The fat guy down in MIS may love remote administration, but he'll end up suffering with Windows 2000 until StarOffice has that talking paper clip his users like so much." 

Nick Lowe turned the MORE 3.1 refcard into a web page. 

Friday, August 20, 1999

Another incredible day and week at Scripting News. It's hard to believe how much we get done here. And it's a total community thing. Thanks! 

The next step for XML-RPC. We're going to specify a set of calls for hooking a desktop text editor into UserLand-hosted discussion groups. Of course the interfaces will be open so any collaborative content system can support them. 

Evolt.Org was created when Wired claimed copyright ownership of the WebMonkey mail list. It's a fascinating site, and was the source for yesterday's ultimate antique browser listing. 

WebMonkey has a different point of view on Evolt.Org, and Taylor expresses it here on Discuss.UserLand.Com. 

Jakob Nielsen is a strong proponent of meta tags. 

Mike Murry started a discussion group for Palm users. Excellent! 

Microsoft's new Developer Division will hold a press briefing with Microsoft President Steve Ballmer and Group Vice President Paul Maritz on Monday, Sept. 13.  

According to News.Com, Sun is buying application vendor Star Division.  

Brad Pettit improved the MORE to XML converter app. 

Outliners.Com: MORE 3.1 and 3.0. 

Wired: Chris Nolan Speaks for Herself. "This has been a particularly difficult month for me. In the course of my more than 15 years as a reporter, I have landed more than my share of punches. And I can take a few. But these last few blows feel like rabbit punches; the hits are from behind and below." 

Bring on the next clonemaker, Compaq. They should pay me for helping them debug their customer service.  

In 1996 I said I wanted an ISP that was as reliable and service-oriented as Compaq was in the 1980s. "We standardized on Compaq. All new machines purchased by the company had to be Compaqs. When we made this choice, the service got even better." 

From an anonymous source, the secret for getting good service from Compaq, in 1999. 

BTW we found a great ISP. Conxion has been rock-solid, responsive and professional for two-plus years, thru lots of growth on both sides. I recommend them without reservation. Bravo!  

New channels: Hacker News Network, Adobe Gallery. 

The next controversy? Meta tag theft. I don't get it. 

AltaVista on Meta tags. 

Thursday, August 19, 1999

Dan Shafer: The most elegant scripting language you'll probably never use. "Python adopts the sensible idea that white space should matter. It makes code more readable, and by incorporating the notion into Python's semantic structure, the language's inventor, Guido van Rossum, imposed a kind of order on programming that only Dave Winer's UserTalk scripting language and development environment succeeded in doing on a large scale in the recent past." 

Here's the ultimate collection of antique web browsers.  

Builder.Com: An Expert's View of XHTML. 

I got an email from Meera Srinivas at InfoWorld.Com saying that their linking policy has changed. It's true, their linking policy page has changed. For background, see this DaveNet piece and the discussion that grew around the deep linking issue. This change at InfoWorld happened in one week. 

MacWEEK: Free WordPerfect Due. 

JeraWorks is doing a cross-platform outliner.  

Kevin Kelleher on What is Scripting News? 

Steven Livingstone is working on an XML-RPC server COM DLL, for Windows (of course). 

For Frontier 6.1, I am proposing a change to the way it starts up, to fix a problem that shows up when you startup the first time. 

Question: What port does Microsoft's IM client run on? 

IETF Draft, 2/13/99: Instant Messaging Requirements. 

Press release: Motorola to acquire Metrowerks. 

Why do some content management systems produce such ugly URLs? Do the architects care about web users? Confusing stuff! 

Paul Snively: "Yeah, it really is, especially if the ugly URL is intended to be someplace that people can remember to come back to, to tell their friends about, etc." 

Red Herring's Tony Perkins loves Sun. It's interesting how he buys into the White Boy Welfare rap that Bill Joy invented Java. In fact Joy had nothing to do with the invention of Java. The press loves him because they can't understand what he says. Go figure. As I understand it, James Gosling was the lead developer on Java. A small team with a handful core developers and marketers. This is probably why I'll never be a darling of the VC crowd. I can't stand credit-takers. I guess Gosling doesn't care? Whatever. Onward! 

Wednesday, August 18, 1999

Dave Winer: What is Scripting News? "I didn't just want a site that reported on what's happening in the web development world, I wanted to create a place where web development happened." 

James Spahr has an XML-RPC client for AppleScript. 

More antique web browsers, for Macs of the late 80s, like the Mac SE. I wonder if Frontier 1.0 runs on these machines. MORE 1.1c surely did. 

Chris Nolan: How I Got a Chance at .Com Wealth. 

MSNBC: ICANN close to financial ruin. "In the process of trying to secure funds, it may have violated federal law." 

Scott Rosenberg: More on Deep Links. "While most Web sites crave links and depend on them to get the word out and garner new traffic, these companies have instead sicced their lawyers on the linkers." 

According to News.Com, Microsoft will release a specification describing how their Instant Messaging server works. I can't wait to see it. I immediately want to have a server, running in Frontier, so we can flow chat conversations out to to the web. I think the IM clients would make an interesting weblog authoring tool. 

On 8/5/99, Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi, the marketing director for MSN, said: "We will deliver an SDK for developers and we will have it out in the first quarter of next year. We're shooting to have it out before end of year." My response: "I didn't request an SDK. If you had an open and documented communication protocol no SDK would be necessary." Moral of the story: Microsoft, unlike all the other 800-pound gorillas, listens, and sometimes they respond. 

Tim Bray on SDKs. "I grew up with networked minicomputers and (mostly) Unix, and maybe that's why, in the final analysis, I always want to see the bits on the wire." 

MacCentral: AppleScript Primer. 

Peterme: Why Broadvision Sucks. "For the past 3 years, I've had various clients that used Broadvision for their application server. And, in each case, Broadvision was a nightmare to deal with. The people who sell Broadvision know this, so what they do is head straight to the people with money but no tech savvy on the client side, and mesmerize them with tales of One To One Marketing and the people with money fork it over without bothering to learn that the system is bloated, slow, and pathetic." 

USGS: Information on yesterday's California earthquake. The quake was centered in Bolinas, a hippie community on the ocean in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. 

A slice of life on the Internet. Inktomi's robot is crawling the virgin root file that we keep on Nirvana. It's been doing it slowly for the last couple of days. Basically all the source we ship with Frontier will be accessible thru their search engine. It should be funny! 

More life on the Internet. Now we're starting to get Y2K queries about IdleTime. Does anyone know if it is Y2K compliant? I have no idea, and I don't care! 

Heads up! My old account, dwiner@well.com, has gone inactive. I wasn't checking the account regularly. So, if that's the address you have for me, please change it to dave@userland.com. Thanks! 

Tuesday, August 17, 1999

MSNBC: Internet is Y2K ready.. maybe. Think about it. How many iterations did it take to shake out all the month rollover glitches in your site? How many problems were there *last* Jan 1? Were they horrible? Probably not. But the Internet will definitely have problems on Jan 1. Remember Murphy! (As if I have to tell *you*.) 

We're running new software on our main server. By clicking on this link, you are helping us test it. Give my regards to Murphy! 

This afternoon I felt the earth shake. I wasn't dreaming. I put on my shoes and bolted outdoors. It's been a while. I hate earthquakes! 

Jason Kottke collects antique web browsers. Excellent!  

Netscape has an archive site. 

Sten Linarsson believes he has found Tim Berners-Lee's original WWW application for NeXT. (1993) 

According to Red Herring my friend Christine Comaford is a Big Fish. Yeah I knew that! 

Yesterday I took screen shots of Frontier 6/Win, focusing on the built-in outliner. Since re-releasing the Mac outliners, there's been a stream of questions from people wanting to know if there are any similar outliners on Windows. Yes there are. We have one.  

Seattle FUG Meeting, 8/24. 

Macrobyte releases Tonto 1.0b7. 

InfoWorld lists four versions of Windows 2000, all to ship later this year or early next. No prices. 

MSNBC: We have You have Mail. "AT&T’s use of the phrase 'you have mail' dates back to the earliest days of the Unix programming language, which the company's research arm, Bell Labs, developed." 

Thanks to Ric Ford for pointing to Frontier 1.0 from his Mac Antiques page. One minor nit, Frontier 1.0 comes from UserLand, not Dave Winer. You might think they're the same thing, but they're not. ;-> 

Hart Scientific on Y2K. "If any banks are still operating after January 3, 2000, we want to be able to deposit our checks in them." 

Monday, August 16, 1999

DaveNet: Antiques in London and Washington. "As far as I know VisiCalc didn't create any patents, even though they surely could have. And we didn't register any patents for our early outliners at Living Videotext, the company that Symantec acquired." 

Washington Post on antique software. "How can anything be an 'antique' in a world that's only about 20 years old?" 

News.Com reports that Wal-Mart and K-Mart may be selling $299 PCs this Christmas running GEOS, not Windows. GEOS is an antique, for sure, that's apparently still ticking. Yeah! 

Jim Whitehead on ShareMation, "the first DAV-capable Internet storage site. In under 5 minutes, you can be up and running with 20 Meg of storage." 

Just for fun I added screen shots to the Frontier 1.0 page. 

Heads up! Just 23 days before 9/9/99, the dry run for Y2K. (In the old days, 'sentinel' records in data files were often given the value 99. Some people believe systems may fail, in a Y2K way, on September 9 this year.) 

CNN: Nuclear-powered NASA craft to swing by Earth. "Cassini will probably execute a flawless mission around the Earth if it can make the last hurdle through 8,000 pieces of 'space junk' surrounding the Earth." Dear Murphy! 

WebReference.Com: DOM-based Snakes. (Hint: Try the game first.) 

InternetWeek: XML Comes of Age. 

Michael McCarthy: "None of the PIMs have to-do list/project managers as good as a good outliner." I agree! 

News.Com: Iona doesn't want to be a footnote. I'm co-chairing the distributed computing track at WWW9 in Amsterdam next year with Iona's CTO. I'm going to send him a pointer to XML-RPC. It's even simpler than EJB. 

Denise Caruso on infinite loops. "Remember artificial intelligence? Pen computing? Both were the Next Big Thing -- hot investment targets that became big losers -- in the 1980s." 

12/24/95: White Boy Welfare. "I've known Denise Caruso, the media columnist for the New York Times, since we were both rookies in the software business back in the mid 80s. I've always admired her spirit and intelligence. She's irreverent and experienced. There's a spike in Caruso's curve, a sharp edge, a clean anger. She's a powerful person." 

AppleInsider reviews MSIE 5.0/Mac. "Mac Internet Explorer 5.0 is in the mid-beta stages, and requires a PowerPC-based Macintosh and system 7.6.1 or greater. The release is expected sometime this Fall." 

Sunday, August 15, 1999

London Times: VisiCalc is how programs ought to be. "Back in the early days, programs tended to speak their own language and nothing else. To insert a spreadsheet into a word-processing document or presentation was no small feat. And e-mail, if it existed at all, was just a few words of text shared between people who happened to have compatible mail systems." 

BTW, the London Times article points to outliners.com. Thanks! 

So, where are we going with antique software? 

Linux Journal: Can Linux Survive Patents? "The PTO has handed out thousands of patents for trivial software techniques that any developer working independently would discover. Little attempt is made to determine prior art. Increasingly, the agency is granting patents for obvious techniques that wouldn't surprise a 'Net-savvy sixth grader, let alone an expert." 

LinuxWorld interviews Richard Stallman. 

Saturday, August 14, 1999

Feature Request: Favorites Menu in Windows Explorer. When I posted this I wasn't aware that this feature is in Windows 98. I run NT4 Workstation SP4. I'm so confused. I thought I was using the OS MS wants me to? 

Even so, this begat another feature request for Windows Explorer. That's how it always seems to work, one new feature idea begets twelve others. 

News.Com: Resistance is Futile. "Borland was under siege, even as the company moved into a controversial $70 million headquarters in Scotts Valley, California, a sprawling high-tech campus that would later be described by visitors as a ghost town."  

Wired reviews Silicon Boys. "For all his swashbuckling stature in the Valley, Larry Ellison's Ferrari-burning, skirt-chasing, jet-piloting antics are really just B-team rock star stuff. He may be the baddest boy in the Valley, but once you step outside of the pocket-protector set, he's really not that bad at all." 

Red Herring: August Capital opens its doors. "Some cynics might say Sand Hill Road is simply not given to this kind of self-promotion." 

Friday, August 13, 1999

Antique: Frontier 1.0. (January 1992) 

New feature: Top 25 Most-read DG Messages. Rankings are compiled every night shortly after midnight, Pacific. 

Even newer: Top 50 Most-read DaveNet Pieces. We started tracking per-piece reads on the DaveNet site ten days ago. Already I have a better idea of how DaveNet pieces age.  

The most-read "old" piece is about HTML. 

Jacob's Angst is back after a bout with the flu. 

News.Com: What AOL Stands to Lose in Browser War. "A Microsoft browser monopoly could spell disaster for the leading online service and other Microsoft competitors on the Web, as content and commerce ventures could be forced to deal with Microsoft for access to any consumer getting on the Web from a PC." 

SF Chronicle: TV Firms Threaten to Sue TiVo, Replay. 

I received word that InfoWorld is changing their linking policy and will have an official statement shortly. I have read a synopsis of the new policy and support it wholeheartedly. 

Civic.Com's linking policy: "We invite you to link to any/all of our web pages. We do not view this as duplication." Civic.Com, like InfoWorld and ComputerWorld, is an IDG publication. 

WebMonkey (1996): Who's Linking to You? 

WebMonkey: Choosing a Publishing System. 

A middle-of-the-night thought. If open source projects are various kinds of dictatorships, what happened to the bazaar? Was that just marketing hype? Sounds pretty cathedral-like to me.  

Thursday, August 12, 1999

DaveNet: InfoWorld and Deep Linking. "Bottom-line, could the web get by without InfoWorld? Yes. Could InfoWorld exist without support from the web? I think not." 

TechWeb: Open Source Dictatorships. "My workload is lower because I don't have to see the crazy ideas," Torvalds said. "I see the end point of work done for a few months or even a year by other people."  

Atlantic Monthly: "Heads turned in June when Linus Torvalds's Linux operating system was awarded first prize by the judges of an international art festival. How far, one wonders, can the open source model go?" 

Scott Rosenberg: Don't Link or I'll Sue. "Objectors to deep linking, like Ticketmaster and Universal, want to have their Web businesses both ways: They put their services and content out on the public Web to attract users, but they also expect to be able to control every facet of how those users access their services and content." 

Phil Wolff likes XML-RPC for Preferences, but wants to know about privacy. 

Wired: Firefly Snuffed. "By mid-1997, the company had become a standard-bearer for 'Open Profiling,' and was working with Microsoft and Netscape, among others, to establish rules and regulations for how sites handled information about their users." 

Linking policies: NASDAQ, LaSalle Banks.  

Here's a site that doesn't mind being linked to. They claim to have the longest domain name on the net! 

A funny joke linked to from an awkward thread on Outliners.Com. 

Daniel Bushman, a Frontier user, witnessed yesterday's freak tornado in Salt Lake City. 

Wednesday, August 11, 1999

XML.COM: Implementing XML-RPC in PHP. "As some web sites become more like online applications, the advantages of offering a programmable API into their services are obvious." Excellent! 

XML-RPC for Preferences. User preferences can be shared among servers running in different environments on different operating systems anywhere in the world. 

News.Com: Microsoft's New APIs. "To stem the flow of developers away from the fold, the company needs a development tool that does for Web development what its Visual Basic tool did to revolutionize Windows development back in 1991." Interesting! 

BTW, I heard from someone in the know at InfoWorld, and their linking policy is for real. They really expect people to ask for permission to link to their stories. This is a big problem! 

Matt Neuburg (1993): MORE, MORE Dinosaur. 

The Economist: Bill Joy, the Brains behind Sun. "But whereas Bill Gates long ago said goodbye to geekdom (whatever Microsoft’s PR machine might say to the contrary), Mr Joy remains resolutely nerdy—a tall, rather shambling figure with a shock of ungovernable hair and a penchant for denim shirts worn with a slightly shiny suede waistcoat. True to form, Mr Joy can also be pretty hard to understand." Don't feel bad, I'm a geek and I find him hard to understand too. 

Simple ToDo: "Simple To Do has all the features you'd expect in a list manager -- you can prioritize items, sort them, mark them as Done, and it's even hierarchical so you can create sub-items to your main items." It's an outliner! 

Another excellent classic Mac outliner: Acta. 

Dan Bricklin: Reactions to the posting of VisiCalc and Other History Sites. 

New Channel: Frontier News. Excellent! 

Jim Flanagan shows how a simple CGI can prevent deep linking. The lawsuits can end now. All they have to do is upgrade their servers. 

A script that reads text from a MORE file into a Frontier outline. 

Red Hat IPO a stunner. Congrats! 

News.Com: "It's not your ordinary high-tech IPO." 

Motley Fool: SGI Bids Farewell to NT. 

MSNBC: Deadly Tornado Hits Salt Lake. "A sudden tornado touched down without warning Wednesday in the downtown area of Salt Lake City, damaging buildings, killing four and causing dozens of injuries." 

Upside: The Man Behind Linux. "I hope that in five years you'll see Linux being a desktop choice. Maybe not displacing Microsoft, but at least being a real choice so [that] when people go into computer stores and buy their computers in 2004, they'll have to [stop and ask themselves whether they] want Linux installed, or Apple, or Microsoft." 

ZDNet: Microsoft Aims at Linux. "At Microsoft we spend about $3 billion on development, so our operating system is tested in all environments. My concern is that if there are so many people developing Linux, customers will not have confidence that it will work so well."  

Thanks to Wes Felter for a pointer to an Apple mail list about HTML Rendering. 

Sadly, Jamis MacNiven, the owner of Buck's has remapped www.buckswoodside.com to a Best.Com server. We ran some great stories at and about Buck's. We wish Jamis and his team the very best. 

Tuesday, August 10, 1999

DaveNet: Scripting News Bulletins. 

NY Times: Ticketmaster sues over deep links. "Ticketmaster Online said that the Tickets.com site featured links that went deep into its own site, bypassing introductory pages and advertising. It also said Tickets.com has repeatedly plagiarized editorial material from Ticketmaster Online and misled consumers about ticket availability at venues affiliated with Ticketmaster." 

InfoWorld: Microsoft takes wraps off Embedded NT. "According to a study by the Gartner Group, Microsoft has taken great pains to ensure that NT Embedded does not 'cannibalize' its other operating system products." InfoWorld doesn't mention the price for the embedded versions. 

We have been linking to InfoWorld.Com since the inception of Scripting News, we're going to keep doing it until we hear otherwise from InfoWorld. I assume their linking policy is an old not-updated page explaining an old not-enforced policy. However, if they object, we will stop linking to them in the future. 

InfoWorld: General Motors 'dot-coms' Itself. "An automobile is just a Java browser with tires," quipped McNealy. 

Bruce O'Neel: OOPSLA 99 and XML. "A lot of these folks have used CORBA and one does get the feeling that a lot of them aren't completely happy about it." 

Outliners.Com: Kevin Shay used Acta. 

Tico Times: Mac Meets Mac in Cyber-Combo. "MiMac joins McDonald's and Apple Computer — which is lending 10 new iMac computers to the project — in a strategic alliance. Radiográfica Costarricense (RACSA), Costa Rica's Internet provider, will supply Internet access." 

Monday, August 09, 1999

DaveNet: Deep Linking. 

May I link to an article on InfoWorld.Com? Hmmmm. 

Outliners.Com: MORE 3.1. This was the final version of MORE, released in December 1991. From here we'll go back in time and fill in the missing pieces.  

MORE 3.1 box: Front, Back; more MORE 3.1 scans. 

Dan Bricklin: "Here I was visiting old castles and at the same time people from all over the world were trying out old software!" 

Jakob Nielsen: Video and Streaming Media. "Most sites would improve if they replaced streaming video with an alternative format such as a comic strip-like sequence of photos with captions." 

Despair.Com: "Suzan Woods, a spokesman for Marimba, was quick to contest witnesses' characterizations, saying, 'Kim did not push anyone. She utilized an open-standard technique, developed at Marimba, called the Distributed Unilateral Momentum Protocol, or DUMP. If anyone prints that she pushed, we’ll sue.'"   

Apologies for the outages over the weekend. See the Dig We Must message from Friday. It was very prescient. There was corruption in our membership database. Now it's clean, so if that was the problem, it is no more. As they say, Still diggin! 

Sunday, August 08, 1999

Outliners.Com: Clay Basket 1.0b8f Never Expires. 

Outliners.Com: Brad Pettit posts a MORE to XML converter. 

Jonathan Robie: The Design of XQL. 

News.Com: Why open standards are a myth. "Let's not pretend that when we worship at the altar of open standards millions of average consumers are lined up behind us."  

Jodi Mardesich: Behind FreeMac.Com. 

Saturday, August 07, 1999

Outliners.Com: MORE 3.1 Early Download. 

Jacob Levy wonders if it's time to short AOL? 

$180 million? The tiniest of drops in the bucket. 

Thanks to Brad Pettit, here are the MORE 3.0 docs, in PageMaker 3.x format. 

Howard Hansen discusses using XML to store outlines. It's logical! 

Friday, August 06, 1999

Dig we must! Over the weekend a new preferences server will come online. There may be glitches. UserLand.Com will run faster and will get new preferences-based features as a result of this change. No pain no gain! 

StatMarket reports that Microsoft now accounts for approximately 75% of all browsers used on the Internet. 

Introducing Discuss.Outliners.Com. 

An atlas of cyberspaces. "The cybermaps, like maps of the real-world, help us navigate the new information landscapes, as well being objects of aesthetic interest. They have been created by 'cyber-explorers' of many different disciplines, and from all corners of the world." 

The original weblog, NCSA's What's New page. 

Dave Kopper approaches Tree Charts in HTML. 

MsgTo.Com: Spam-free email? 

Another angle: SpamWorld.Com™  

News.Com: Is Gates pulling the Net's strings? "For the first time, a complete product that is completely Microsoft-free is now within reach." Mac? 

More antique software news on MacInTouch. 

Eric Kidd: Cobalt Qube needs more RAM. "As best I can tell, Dave's Qube has only 16MB of RAM. This was enough for the rerelease of ThinkTank, but not enough for the rerelease of MORE 3.0." 

Wired: Unix or Eunuchs? "The long hours required to succeed in a booming industry mean few hours left over for dating and relationships, leaving many with raging careers and utterly flaccid personal lives."  

12/2/96: "Here's a sure-fire way to create some new moves. Go for a walk. Come back. They're there. You just can't see them." 

Thursday, August 05, 1999

AOL (1998): Instant Messaging Protocol. 

Michael Mantel answers questions re the above protocol. 

Microsoft's response to yesterday's DaveNet piece. "We will deliver an SDK for developers and we will have it out in the first quarter of next year." Hmmm. 

Jakob Nielsen on SDKs: "The 'S' in SDK would impose too large a burden on domain experts who are not programmers but simply want to add some functionality to their website." 

John Robb president of Gomez chimes in. "AOL would be stupid to actually cooperate with Microsoft et al on the IETF proposal. Why? They are about to get jammed by the bandwidth monopolists in cable." 

Dave Winer: "I didn't request an SDK." 

Buck's: "Oxygen is no less than an entire redesign of today's hardware and software and the intention is that it be as pervasive as, well, air." 

More cool antique software: The Talking Moose. This was the killer app of the early days of the Mac. I have very fond memories of the moose. If you have a Mac, go get it now! 

Antique software is the top item on MacInTouch today. More comments, updated today, including a pointer to a site cataloging Mac OS open source software. The Mac is coming alive again. Cooool!  

Scripting challenge: Tree Charts in Frontier? 

Beta of the next Scripting News server. It's a dynamic page, you'll be able to set preferences for how many days you want, and you'll be able to configure RSS channels running down the right edge. You can bookmark this page, it's hooked into our news flow now, and should lag behind the static news by at most one minute. 

To prove that it's dynamic, edit your bookmarks. (UserLand.Com membership required.) Then go to the Beta News page. Do you see the change? Our goal is to have your bookmarks on the home page of every sub-site on UserLand.Com. And then build features out from there that run on all of our servers. 

BTW, this is a heterogenous network of three NT4 machines, two Linux boxes, and one Mac. The servers are distributed geographically, some in Seattle and some in Silicon Valley. And it's cross-content-management-system too. The beta page is a Zope/Python app, and everything else is Frontier. The Mac is playing a non-trivial role. It's the "offload server," doing email and the hourly RSS scans. It's busy about 5 percent of the time so there's lots of room for growth. It's an old old machine, but it serves a very good purpose. Long live the Mac OS! 

Oh yes, this is all possible thru the magic of an open documented protocol, called XML-RPC.  

Could your servers hook into this flow? Soon! Comment on the Linux.UserLand.Com DG. 

MSNBC: Microsoft-AOL Battle Heats Up. "We intend to be aggressive with access," said Brad Chase, vice president of Microsoft's new consumer and commerce Group and the point man for Microsoft’s new strategy. "AOL might think about it as a profit center. That’s not how we think about it." Coool! 

Wednesday, August 04, 1999

DaveNet: Why Should AOL Open Up? 

Outliners.Com: ThinkTank 2.41NP. (IBM PC, 1987) "There's a routine that clicks the speaker, every time the software checks for the Escape key. Originally I put this in as a way to be sure that it was checking often enough during lengthy operations. I left the sounds in, people thought ThinkTank had a motor!" 

Outliners.Com: MORE 3.0. (Mac, 1990) "All the other outliners were love affairs that were over quickly. On to the next thing. A new platform, a new way to sneak into memory with other apps, try out a graphic platform, try again, then again." MORE 3.0 was different. 

TechWeb: Classic Software is Reborn on the Web. "A handful of the pioneering developers of groundbreaking applications, such as VisiCalc, Turbo Pascal and C, ThinkTank, Ready! and MORE, are posting original versions that can be downloaded for free." 

Brad Pettit's MORE2Text translator. Brad was on the MORE team, versions 2 and 3.  

MacUser (1986): Product of the Year. 

Scott Lawton: MORE: As Revolutionary as Lotus 1-2-3. 

MORE 1.1c retail box: front, back. 

Our T1 line is getting swamped again! MORE 3.0 is a big download, 1755K. I'm glad so many people are downloading it. And Ric Ford is calling antique software a hot topic. Cooool! The Mac has an interesting history to explore and until now there hasn't been much of that. 

Tuesday, August 03, 1999

Outliners.Com: MORE 1.1c. "Later products added major features, such as virtual storage, rules-based formatting, more complete presentation features, and multi-line headlines. But what was added in richness was traded against some of the simplicity of 1.1c, which many people remember as being more complete than it actually was (I certainly am guilty of that!)." 1987, Mac. 

Release 1.0: The Web Goes Into Syndication. (Excerpt, the full report is available only to subscribers.) 

Screen shot of ThinkTank 2.41NP for the IBM-PC, 1987. This will be one of tomorrow's re-releases. The download also includes the OS/2 app. ThinkTank was one of the first apps for OS/2.  

More Antique Software: Lotus Agenda 2.0. (1988) 

News.Com: Mattel is launching a computer line for children based on its most popular toys. "Starting in September, Barbie- and Hot Wheels-branded computers from Patriot will be available for $14.98 per month, or $599. These systems, while not offering the hottest technology or the lowest price available, will still probably find a market in parents looking for an entry-level second computer, analysts say." 

Ric Ford posted an email I sent him yesterday. Excellent! 

Dan Gillmor: Software pioneers post early works on Web. 

DaveNet: MORE 1.1c (1987). "And now with the web as an inexpensive distribution system, the old software can speak for itself, and once again teach lessons, now with the benefit of hindsight." 

Jim Stegman reports that MORE 1.1c runs on his new G3, System 8.6.  

Wired: Baratz resigns from Sun. 

SF Chron: Nolan Exiled to Redwood City. 

PC WEEK: Instant Messaging Gurus. "The 38-year-old Saraswat, a senior researcher at AT&T Shannon Laboratories at Florham Park, N.J., and the 37-year-old Marvit, an Internet strategy consultant for Fujitsu Labs America in Santa Clara, Calif., contend 

that real-time chat and 'buddy lists' represent only a rudimentary implementation of the basic technology." 

Jesse Estevez is looking for a Frontier guru. "We currently render static pages to Apache. But oh, the sweet temptation of Edit This Page." 

Tog continues his usability rant on WebWord.  

Here's my next response to the venting of Tog. 

We are getting slammed! The MacDot Effect? Anyway. Sorry if you're having trouble getting thru, glad MORE 1.1c is only 233K! For the next release we're going to have to move outliners.com upstream. 

BTW, the Cobalt Qube that's running outliners.com is holding up great. I can still get great performance even though it's taking huge hits. Apache is good stuff! Thanks Cobalt! 

Monday, August 02, 1999

Microsoft response to yesterday's DaveNet piece. 

NY Times discovers Scripting News! "Rosenberg relies on about a dozen digests of links to technology coverage. These sites include Scripting News, which is published by Dave Winer, a software developer who has written for Hotwired." Nice! 

We got permission from Symantec to release early versions of ThinkTank, Ready! and MORE. We're working on the release site now, expect it to come on-line tomorrow. We're going to start with MORE 1.1c for the Macintosh, released exactly twelve years ago today on 8/2/87. Thanks Symantec! 

Dan Bricklin: How I Got Permission to Post VisiCalc. 

Dave Winer: How I Got Permission to Post the Outliners. 

AskTog: How Programmers Stole the Web. A throwback to the hype that surrounded HyperCard. Tog is perhaps a bit more charitable to programmers than they were back in 1987, but notice how, even after all these years, you still have to be a programmer to write programs. It will always be that way. It's tautological. 

The Genius Behind HyperCard (1987): "First, he gave all of us the power to create sophisticated graphics on a computer. Now, he's given us the power to become software developers without having to know a single word of programming code." Sounds like Moses. 

Tom Christiansen: Far More Than Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know about Prototypes in Perl. "The major issue with 'prototypes' in Perl is that the experienced programmer comes to Perl bearing a pre-conceived but nevertheless completely rational notion of what a 'prototype' is and how it works, yet this notion has shockingly little in common with what they really do in Perl." Maybe Tog was right after all?? 

PythonWare: Python Imaging Library. 

InfoWorld reviews Scriptics Tcl Pro. 

My.UserLand.Com now has preliminary support for RSS 0.91. The first new channel it can read is Chaos Network. Note that with item descriptions, RSS is approaching the expressiveness of ScriptingNews format. Which is still supported. 

Ooops! The Chaos Network seems to be down. (Too chaotic?) So the runner-up, Internet Alchemy, wins the prize for first with a running RSS 0.91 My.UserLand.Com channel. 10 points for Ian Davis! 

10 points for the Pigdog Journal, another RSS 0.91 site. (BTW, the easiest way to upgrade is to start writing 0.91 format text in your already-registered channel file. My.UserLand.Com will pick up the format change automatically in the next hourly scan.) 

MozillaZine is coming online any minute now. 

Netscape now has a RSS channel validator app. The page says it's looking for RDF text, even though RSS 0.91 is not RDF. 

Amy Wohl on Instant Messaging. "We could get away from the idea (which has nearly destroyed television) that everything on the Internet is about making money." 

NY Times: Showdown on Messaging. "America Online did nothing to prevent someone from mimicking its software, as Microsoft has. Microsoft's own message program, by contrast, encrypts messages, so that no one can create backdoor links to its system, as it has done to America Online's." 

Attention: Fat Corporate Bastards! 

MSNBC: Build Your Brand with E-mail. "E-mail newsletters provide an even playing field for online marketing. With virtually no production expenses, except for existing costs like Internet access and the writer’s time, all companies can use e-mail newsletters to bolster their brand, experts say." 

Sunday, August 01, 1999

DaveNet: Instant Messaging. "In the struggle for Instant Messaging, the winner, if there is one, will control real-time access to Internet users." 

Bob Frankston and David Reed on DNS. 

Eric Raymond issues a challenge. "The day I wrote this, Freshmeat carried twenty-two release announcements, of which three appear they might push state of the art in some respect, This was a slow day for Freshmeat, but I will be astonished if any reader reports as many as three likely innovations a month ion any closed-source channel."  

Steve Blinn: Instant Messaging is Dead. 

Odigo: "Find like minds. Pick up passengers. Give directions. Leave a mark." Warning! I installed Odigo, and I lost my desktop. I immediately uninstalled it and was glad to see my desktop again. Of course your mileage may vary. 

Phil Wolff: Attention Constraints are the Driving Force. 

Steven Levy on Dvorak: "That Dvorak is a cagey guy who knows recycling. After the original Mac 

came out he gave virtually the same gender-based criticism to it, dismissing not only the industrial design but the idea of using a mouse and pictures as girly stuff. (I wrote about this in Insanely Great.) His preference was the IBM AT computer, which he called 'a man's computer designed by men for men.' Both times he knew that the over-the-top sexism would be controversal and attention-getting. But it's interesting that his take in the original column was so wrong it can stand beside remarks like 'an individual has no use for a computer.' I wonder how this recent one will stand up." 

What is your biggest regret in life? Or, put another way: What would you do differently if you had another chance? 

Hey! I just started a new weblog on GrokSoup. Not bad. It only too five minutes. They still need to do some more work, I hit a bunch of errors, not like we don't have a few here too. ;->