Thursday, August 05, 1999

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!