Tuesday, August 31, 1999

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?