Thursday, September 30, 1999

[[Web/Technology]] 

[[UserLand/Frontier/Syndication]] 

The My.UserLand aggregator is back on the air. Sorry for the outage. There was a bug in xml.compile. An assertion failure that was silent. Fixed. It's churning and interfacing again. Murphy is good and kind! 

[[UserLand/Frontier/Samples]]New sample: Simple String Remover. "I needed this script because I wanted to markup the text on the Scripting News home page with categorization strings delimited by double square brackets." 

[[UserLand/Frontier/Samples]]Eric Soroos responds with his version of my script which uses Regex. Excellent! 

[[Computers/Clones/Dell]]ZDNN: Dell Livid at Analyst Report. "Dell Computer Corp. is livid with an influential computer analyst for issuing a critical report that faults the fast-growing computer maker for allegedly attempting to cover up a series of miscues." 

[[Computers/Apple/Macintosh]]Salon: A worm in the Apple? "Quicktime 4.0 is like nothing you've ever seen on a Mac. Has Apple broken its intuitive user interface?" 

[[Operating Systems/Linux]][[Operating Systems/Windows]]Linux.Com: Microsoft Fundamentalism vs Linux Spirituality. "Microsoft has been and continues to fight for its survival with FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). It also uses power and control to force compliance. It is a top-down organization, struggling to control and monopolize the avenues of information transfer. Its top down model and insistence maintaining itself as the one and only way, is easily compared to fundamentalism. And what do fundamentalists stoop to when challenged by superior knowledge, technique or insight? You guessed it, FUD." 

One man's "spirituality" is another man's FUD. By focusing the spotlight on MS, they blow off independent developers and also the Mac, and Solaris, and basically everything else. Proof that not only are there self-centered jerks in big companies, but also self-centered jerks in the open source community. 

[[Engineering/Philosophy/Murphy's Law]]Murphy's Law was born at Edwards Air Force Base, in 1949, as was Stapp's Ironical Paradox -- "The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle." Amen! 

[[Weblogs/Developers]] 

[[XML/News]] 

XmlHack.Com is "a web site covering essential news, issues, opinions and programming advice from the XML developer community". Welcome! 

It's also our newest channel. Schwinnnng! 

[[Engineering/Philosophy/Murphy's Law]]Dictionary.Com: "The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself!" Excellent! 

[[Operating Systems/Solaris]] 

[[Operating Systems/Linux]] 

OS Opinion: What if Solaris were free? Would Linux survive? 

[[Web/Culture/Free Speech Issues]] 

Matt Dornquast reduces the Third Voice debate to its essence. 

[[Web/E-Commerce]] 

MSNBC: Amazon Repositions. "Starting Thursday, Amazon.com refashions itself into a Web superstore with more than 500,000 new items. Vacation packages, handpainted miniature football stadiums and, yes, even local bookshops will be available on Amazon.com through its new zSHOPS program." 

[[Web/Culture/Art]]NY Times: Aesthetics of Plain Old Text. "Using Ascii 'is a flag indicating an attitude that image-making with computers is not merely the technical pursuit of creating the perfect simulation.'"  

[[UserLand/Frontier/Customer Support]]We'll extend the "grace period" Frontier pricing for another ten days. This allows us to catch up with questions and work with the credit card service bureau on problems (their service is relatively new and not without glitches) and gives us a bit of breathing room on the Support Associate program. 

Wednesday, September 29, 1999

CamWorld: Content Management Systems. Thanks for including Frontier. BTW, our top price changed, it's now $899. Vignette's top price is more like $2 million, not $100K. Also, we do not have Tcl/Tk specially embedded but on Windows we can connect thru Active Scripting. Further, Frontier is special because it has great text editing tools the others don't have. And we support the Mac, where lots of web content originates. We also run behind IIS and all major Mac web servers, as well as having our own integrated HTTP server. Everyone help Cam get the full story. This is great! 

Progress report on My.UserLand. 

"Now there is an aggregator and an affiliate. The interface is implemented in XML-RPC, and it's going to be open and documented, so that affiliates can be written in any programming environment that can make XML-RPC calls and field them. You need to be both an XML-RPC client and server to implement an affiliate." 

Murphy taught me much today! I shouldn't have boasted that He is my partner. No no! I am His humble servant. An insignificant sinner. I am repentant. Tomorrow is another day! With the help of Our Lord, My.UserLand will be churning and interfacing once again. Still diggin! 

4/24/95: The Baseball God. "Anna Chavez, the anchor on KGO-TV said: 'Isn't it great Pete! No matter who wins, *we* win!' Imagine her putting both of her index fingers to her cheeks, twisting them slightly and swaying her head from side to side. I groaned when I heard her say it. 'This is not good.'" 

Question: Murphy. Man? Or Woman? 

The Register: Transmeta patent reveals plan. "The company's processor is intended to be faster than anything built using current technology, and to be able to run any of the operating software for any existing processors - faster than the original." Great news for scripting! 

Red Herring: "For Scott Kurnit, life on Internet time means constant movement, like a shark in motion, always pushing forward. Resting means sinking to the bottom, disintegrating into the sands of time." 

Chris Nolan on Patrick Naughton, July 1998: "Patrick is the kind of guy, you go, 'Patrick, you're a genius.' He says, 'Yeah.'" 

MSNBC: eBay wants to stand alone. "We have a business to run here," said Rock. "Part of our business is to make sure that the user experience on eBay and the sites out there are accurate. The costs of allowing the aggregators doesn't outweigh the benefits." 

Boston.Com reviews Tim Berners-Lee's new book: "If your requirement is to make a large amount of money, then your options in life are rather small," he said in a recent interview. 

ComputerWorld: Will Third Voice turn your Web site into a voodoo doll? "If your company has a controversial product, your own Web site could become a protest rallying point." 

Third Voice might start responding to web developer concerns if the reputations of their lead investor, and the companies they have invested in, were linked to the company. The company has a much brighter future, imho, if it finds ways to collaborate. 

Tuesday, September 28, 1999

Reuters: US, NSI work out Domain Name Deal. "As part of Tuesday's agreement, Network Solutions will recognize the authority of ICANN, which it had resisted until now." 

Director-Online: XML and You. "You can't swing an expired IDE drive at your local magazine rack without hitting a glossy publication extolling the virtues of XML." 

News.Com: Corel, others legitimize IM software. "Corel will add the instant messaging client in a partnership with Webb Interactive Services, which has taken a keen interest in Jabber's project to produce an instant messaging client based on XML." 

Salon: Do Penguins Eat Apples? "Do you want to sell colored plastic all your life or do you want to change the world?"  

What if SOAP or XML-RPC connected Linux and Mac? You'd get PhotoShop connected to Zope. Dreamweaver and PHP. Quark and MySql. AppleScript and Apache. Don't forget Director, Illustrator, BBEdit and WebSTAR. Think different. 

There's a new registration page for My.UserLand channels. This is part of the process of separating the server into two parts, aggregator and affiliate. It's realllly difficult work. If you registered a channel in the last 24 hours, please re-register using the new form. And if there are problems, please report them on the DG, and include all information you possibly can. If there are errors from the server, what did it say? What's the URL of your XML file? What's your channel ID? 

New Frontier Sample: Close All Windows Safely. "After a day's work I end up with a couple of dozen windows open in Frontier. To clean up my work environment I have to step thru them one at a time, deciding if it's a guest database (which I want to hide) or a window contained in a database (which I want to close)." 

Cameron Barrett: "I recently implemented a pretty cool little feature on my web site that allows my readers to choose whatever color scheme they want." 

Java Report: XML as a Distributed Application Protocol. "Even the OMG has had to support XML, with some obvious reservations. But with the OMG, that is probably more of an effort to appear open to new technologies and directions than any belief that it may be a good replacement for the core CORBA technology. Better to say 'XML has its uses, and here's how it can fit with CORBA,' than to put your hands over your ears and chant 'I can't hear you.'" 

News.Com: Sun Posts Java Beta. "In development for the past year, the Java 2 Enterprise Edition competes with Microsoft's programming model called Windows Distributed Internet Applications. The two companies are at odds because Sun wants programmers to use Java so the software they build can be used in all computers. Microsoft primarily wants developers to create software that operates with its Windows operating system." I don't think the last part is true. 

Monday, September 27, 1999

DaveNet: Take Microsoft's Invitation Seriously. 

PC WEEK: Lather over SOAP. "Why was Microsoft flying SOAP under the radar? It looked much like a pre-emptive strike against the established distributed object interaction standards of CORBA—a vendor-neutral option currently favored 2-to-1 over Microsoft's COM, according to Forrester Research." 

Why was PC WEEK blind-sided? They wouldn't have been if they read InfoWorld or DaveNet. 

I love the web, but Third Voice scares me. 

Brian Carnell: "A few months ago I banned a user from posting in the discussion forums area of all my web sites after he kept trolling from one to the other posting these long diatribes defending sexual contact between adults and minors." 

Last week on the XML-DEV list, a complaint from people who want less email. They wanted summaries of the important postings. So I suggested that what the XML-DEV list needs is a weblog. "It would be great if someone could point to all the major postings on this list from the web on a daily basis," I said. 

This morning I notice that there's a My.UserLand channel that accepted the challenge. I love the web! 

Dan Bricklin's story of his trip to the Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, CO. 

I got excited about this festival too in 1997. 

Heads-up: On Sept 30, the special "grace period" pricing for Frontier expires.  

Sunday, September 26, 1999

Dan Gillmor: The Digital Age is changing all the rules. 

New Channel: Smog Alert. 

WinLinux 2000 is "the only Linux system that installs as easily as any Windows application automatically detecting and configuring most of your hardware devices." 

2:30PM: Switched to the new backend for My.UserLand. The switch should be transparent, you should see no difference in the story flow. The first full run of the new system will happen at 3PM. It worked beautifully without a hitch! 

Some stuff still needs to be re-wired. For example the viewChannel page isn't linked into the new flow yet. That's next on the list. There also seems to be some breakage in the UserLand-hosted weblogs.  

Saturday, September 25, 1999

Matt Neuburg: First Steps with MainResponder. 

My history of SOAP. "Before folklore becomes reality, XML-RPC was originally, privately, called SOAP, when Don Box and I were working with Bob Atkinson and Mohsen Al-Ghosein at Microsoft." 

Jim Roepcke: Callback to fix end of line characters. 

News.Com: Net plumbing IPOs still hot. 

Don Box on the mystery of CDL. "We need CDL (or something like it) to communicate to humans and machines what our SOAP servers are capable of doing. In that respect, they are very much like DTDs." 

Wired: "Always expect a train." Murphy's Law. 

Friday, September 24, 1999

DaveNet: Windows apps on Linux? "I'd love to see Microsoft make an investment in making Windows apps run smoothly on Linux." 

New channels: Zope.Org, Director Online. Welcome! 

We finally got Red Herring! What a long trip, but it has a happy ending. Thanks! 

Unfortunately today's the day we did major surgery on the back-end of My.UserLand.Com. Lots of old stuff that it thinks is new. I guess that's the price of progress! With any luck things will settle down in the next hour. Thanks for your patience. 

Here's a list of today's back-end changes for My.UserLand.Com. 

Docs for serviceList2.xml. More information about each channel. 

TheStreet.Com: Top 10 Internet Myths. 

CNN/LinuxWorld: SendMail for NT not open source. 

The Register: Linux for Windows? "Linux users who're at all bothered about Windows would prefer it the other way round - the ability to run Windows apps on Linux." 

Don Box answers Fredrik Lundh's query, with the first public SOAP server, that we're aware of. 

Developmentor: Experiment with CDL and SOAP Marshaling. Not sure what this is, but it's written in Perl and has something to do with SOAP. 

More Mystery CDL Stuff. I wonder if this is what my experiments look like to Scripting News readers? I'll figure out what these CDL things are, for sure, and then I'll explain them! 

XMLTP.Org is "an online community effort to standardize the transport mechanism for XML data. By taking cues from the Linux and Apache community, XMLTP.org is in the process of developing a standard way to send, receive, and execute upon XML data." Thanks to Wes Felter for that link. 

Wes found another reinvented wheel on SlashDot. "Imagine 100 Unix desktop systems, all controlling their configuration via XML and a centralized database. This is some of the things that we will be looking at within the next year or so." Wow!  

According to Network Solutions, Virginia is the capital of the Internet. I didn't know that! 

Thursday, September 23, 1999

New Channel: Salon.Com. Schwinnng! 

Jon Phillips from Desktop.Com responds to our questions. "We're working on getting our API together and putting it out as quickly as possible." 

UserLand.Com's global glossary now has people in it. 

Here's a sample script that reads the global glossary into your object database. It's just seven lines of code! Source. 

LinuxWorld: Introduction to AOLServer. 

JavaWorld: Scripting Java Apps. 

ComputerWorld: Microsoft's Net Stragegy. 

Motley Fool on Apple Computer: "Unlike other PC manufacturers, Apple is also a major software company. Macs use its unique operating system, which offers the most viable mainstream alternative to Microsoft's Windows." 

Wired: Visio's Changing Vision. "Visio will stay in its downtown Seattle office, far from Microsoft's Redmond campus, and Jaech and his management team will still run what will now be known as Microsoft's Visio division." 

Cringely: "For the sake of Microsoft, the new model says that the corporate culture of the company being bought has to die." 

Fredrik Lundh: Does anyone have a public SOAP server? 

I get lots of email from people who want to know what XML-RPC is. I send them a pointer to this DaveNet piece from July 1998. For some people this flips the switch. 

Wednesday, September 22, 1999

Press Release: Rogue Wave Supports SOAP. "The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in Microsoft's Windows DNA 2000 provides developers with an advanced technology for building Web services and linking heterogeneous components over the Internet. SOAP provides an open, extensible way for applications to communicate using XML-based messages over the Web, regardless of the operating system, object model or language used by particular applications. Nouveau's support for SOAP allows developers to easily access CORBA applications via XML." 

It's time for a fun feature! 

Don Box's SOAP FAQ. 

Desktop.Com has an outliner. Screen shot. 

Dave Rogers on "smart" outliners. 

Eric Soroos on next-generation email. He talks about using XML-RPC as a pipe for flowing email. This isn't the first time I've heard this idea. It's intriguing, because sometimes I think it should work the other way, that XML-RPC could use SMTP or POP as its transport. No reason you can't send an XML body for a mail message. But if it flows thru XML-RPC I can access email thru my object database and outliner. I think this is where email belongs. 

Hannes Wallnofer, the lead developer for XML-RPC for Java, proposes an approach to the "attributes question". 

Jeff Veen introduces XHTML. "Rather than the usual rushing to 'improve' the spec with a few ill-conceived add-ons, the W3C has decided to slow down and fix the broken stuff." 

The Seattle Frontier User's Group meets on 9/28. 

Salon on Slashdot: "What's really remarkable is how little cash got this ball rolling. According to figures provided in the prospectus, from August to December 1998, Slashdot itself had net revenues of only $18,000."  

We had our first big crash on Nirvana. It was going to happen sooner or later. Now was as good as time as any.  

For Frontier users I wrote a narrative of the recovery process, and included a set of three scripts that automate a lot, but not all, of the work. As usual, full source is included. 

My.UserLand.Com, also running on Nirvana, seems to be fine. It missed a few hours, but it caught up. 

Tuesday, September 21, 1999

Jon Udell: Becoming an RSS Channel. 

The Global Glossary is a lookup table that filters all content on all UserLand.Com servers.  

I did a quick Glossary Browser so you can see what's there. 

And there's an XML version you can download to suck into your content management system. It's updated whenever we change our global glossary. Open is better! 

According to Google.Com, MailToTheFuture.Com is related to Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Excellent! 

News.Com on Desktop Websites. They all have APIs. I want to know more about this now! Let's get a look at those APIs. Help me help me.  

News.Com: Microsoft Hatching Online Plans for Office. "Microsoft finds itself in the same position Netscape encountered a few years ago as it attempts to sell software that others are giving away." 

Red Herring: Guy Kawasaki, Venture Matchmaker. "Garage.com had just secured a $12 million round of financing, adding some heavyweight partners as part of the deal." 

Still no word from Red Herring on the location of their RSS file. 

Desktop.Com has a developer program. Interesting. Would someone like to sign up and report on what they're doing?? 

Tucker Goodrich: "Bill Gates is rumored to be using this as a demonstration of why Scott McNealy is out of his mind." 

MSNBC: IBM Gets OS Religion. "The phenomenon of the Internet has made the world safe for multiple OSes," says IBM Software Group GM Steve Mills. "Customers feel comfortable buying systems running more than one OS because of advances in the Internet, open standards and cross-platform middleware." 

9/12/99: An End to the Uber-Operating System. "The purpose of XML-RPC is to erase the lines that separate applications, to allow developers to bring the power of the Internet to the desktop and in the connections between back-end applications, no matter what operating system they run on." 

If you ever doubted that Don Box loves SOAP, here's proof.  

Internet Publisher: The Works of Mark Twain. A Java applet that implements a book-style interface in a web browser.  

Jakob Nielsen: User-Supportive Internet Architecture. "One interesting unification is the Edit This Page feature in the Web authoring platform from UserLand Software. There is simply no distinction between the website and the writing interface: authors navigate the live website just like other users, and when they want to change the text on a page, they click a special Edit This Page button (that is not visible to regular visitors without authoring privileges)." Thanks! 

5/24/99: Edit This Page. "A few years from now we'll talk about FTP the same way our ancestors talk about punch cards. "Remember the old days when we had to FTP our files up to the server?" Oh we had it tough! Just like the people who used spreadsheets and word processors that didn't have Undo." 

Jakob also talks about how the original architecture of the Internet, by design, gives equal voice to all. It's been interesting to see how the Open Source communities deal with this. Some are hierarchies, in fact, I think all the successful ones are, it's reputation flow, as Jakob talks about it, but with less formality than you see on Eopinion, for example. 

Monday, September 20, 1999

DaveNet: Next Steps in XML-RPC. "And I'll not forget Microsoft, our friend, and a diverse multi-national company with lots of users." 

Tim Lundeen raises a question about attributes in XML-RPC and I write a small essay with my thinking on the subject. 

Nicholas Petreley: "Microsoft can easily use XML as a standard way to pack its documents full of proprietary data objects." 

PC WEEK on SOAP: "Visual Basic 7.0, demonstrated at the announcement of Windows DNA 2000, will apparently integrate SOAP to a high degree. The difference between multivendor and Microsoft-only systems may turn out to be analogous to that between raw SQL database access and access to server-side stored procedures." 

NY Times interviews Roger McNamee on Microsoft. "At the end of the day, I expect you will be able to count dozens and dozens of companies that are Microsoft's competitors. I don't expect them to be able to step into the Web infrastructure world and just take over, the way they did PC software. But I would not count them out, either." 

WSJ: Ford, Microsoft in Online Partnership. "The joint venture will operate independently, but will still be under the umbrella of Microsoft, much like MSNBC.com, Microsoft's joint venture with General Electric's NBC unit." 

Scoop Nisker: "If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own." 

5/6/98: "There once was a lady from Niger who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They returned from the ride with the lady inside and the smile on the face of the tiger." 

News Byproducts: 17 Year Old Announces His Room Off Limits. "Though the other Prices believe that Kenny is overreacting, Kenny's announcement was followed by an immediately appeal to the United Nations." 

Steven Ivy looks at customer service at CompUsa. 

Sunday, September 19, 1999

A new open spec for preferences flow thru XML-RPC explains how to build a distributed website, with some or all of the machines serving dynamic pages with per-user customization, and provide a single place for the user to set preferences and have the changes percolate to the other servers on the network. 

We want to see a common way to build networks out of mixed content systems, such as PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, Zope. The reason we're taking a leadership role is that we want Frontier to be an important part of those environments. As we move forward, every link in our chain is openly specified. Today we have publicly explained how another of our links works. Competition is welcome. If there's a reason this spec won't work in an environment you use or have created, please get involved.  

Don Box on SOAP: "Both XML-RPC and SOAP allow you to get a server and client up and running in less than an hour. Both also require more than an hour to become completely generic and compliant." Amen! 

Developmentor's SOAP page. 

Read this InfoWorld article and then think about how Microsoft launched SOAP, in the middle of a confusing array of buzzwords and market-jibberish. This in an incredible screw-up, the analysts are proclaiming DNA as a Windows-only thing, when SOAP, if it were at the core of Microsoft's plans (is it?), makes it completely non-Windows-centered. So much confusion! 

If I were Microsoft's marketing god, playing with the hand they have right now, as I understand it, here's what I would have told the press.  

New channel: Linux Planet. 

Saturday, September 18, 1999

Prefs.root is a Frontier 6 application that allows a group of web servers to share per-user prefs, and provides an easy method for authoring UIs, based on XML and outlining.  

Paul Tchistopolskii: W3C and Small Vendors. 

Welcome to Nick Arnett, the VP Marketing of Invisible Worlds. I've known Nick since the early days of the Mac. This is excellent. 

Naval Ravikant of epinions responds to questions raised in my tour of their site last weekend. "We can use our system to build a dynamic weblog, in which anyone on the net can submit a link and commentary on any given day. Then, when you come to the site, your trusted weblog is automatically built according to your trusted weblog-maintainer list. Such a dynamic weblog is custom-tailored for each individual and doesn't require each weblog author to write every day." 

Mr. Ravikant was an early contributor to Scripting News. His comments top the Mail Page for 8/6/97. This counts for a lot here! He's a great writer, has a strong opinion, and doesn't mind sharing it. Thanks man. 

The XML-RPC mail list is having a minor identity crisis. Should it be broad or focused? I voted in favor of making it broad. SOAP *is* a form of XML-RPC. I want to stay in touch with the people who are working on this stuff, and don't want to subscribe to a different mail list for each protocol.  

Friday, September 17, 1999

SlashDot: Andover.Net files IPO. Break a leg! 

Tim Bray: "I am building this big hairy complicated app in which a web server traverses an extremely complex database, extracts some dense information structures, sends them to a client, and the client does some nifty rendition tricks." 

Mark Gardner has Frontier/Win calling Perl, and Perl calls back. Nice! 

Here's evidence of *lots* of working together. Scott Sweeney has an XSL renderer for Scripting News, based on our XMLization. It does the rendering in the web browser, IE5. It makes me dizzy. It also makes me laugh! 

What is EdgarSpace? I have no idea. 

Tucker Goodrich: "EDGAR Documents are the filings made to the Security and Exchange Commission by publicly-owned companies. Annual reports, quarterly reports, that sort of thing. I live in these things all day long." 

Danny Goodman, who is well-known in the scripting world, built an application that explores the Invisible Worlds database from JavaScript in the browser. 

This is so frustrating! They talk and talk about their XML, but where is it?? Remember Dr. Strangelove. What did he say. What's the point of having the Doomsday Device if you don't tell people about it. What's the point of being XML if you don't share it? Hello. 

OK, they have DTDs for EDGAR and RFCs. Where are the actual files? URLs? 

BTW, the Doomsday Device in Dr. Strangelove was not a joke, or it was a very good one, depending on how you look at it. 

WebReview: PhotoShop 5.5's Save for the Web. 

PC WEEK: The scoop on web content management. "Web content management products will still have something to offer, especially in workflow, where many document management tools and other products come up short. But businesses looking at Web content management should take a long, hard look down the road before opening their wallets for a product available today." 

I've been spending more time with the Profiles site. From time to time I'm going to point to ones I find interesting. For example, surprisingly, Kilgore Trout, a recurring character in Kurt Vonnegut novels, is a UserLand.Com member, as is Don Hopkins. 

Red Herring: Is Motley Fool a Wise Investment? 

PS: Yesterday I finally got in touch with the webmaster at Red Herring and they're going to send me the URL of their RSS file in a couple of days. They want to do a special one just for us. This is fairly frustrating. Whatever. 

The Motley Fool has contributed content to My.UserLand.Com since Day One without conditions. They are our friends. 

Thursday, September 16, 1999

Call for Support Associates: "Every year UserLand chooses a group of between 10 and 20 Frontier experts to work with the Frontier community and the UserLand staff." 

Dori Smith: "This is a common complaint of women geeks. They ask complex questions, but only get back 2+2=4 type answers." 

Jesse Berst: "The Web demands a new approach. An approach based not on the mindset of engineers, but on simplicity. Perhaps the best model right now is the Palm OS, which does a few jobs but does them well. But I'm not convinced Microsoft will ever get simplicity." 

5/24/99: "Writing for the web is too damned hard. It turns you into a bookkeeper. I've got files all over my hard disk and their counterparts on the server. I can't keep track of them! When I'm reading a web page that I wrote, if I spot a mistake, I have to execute 23 complicated error-prone steps to make the change." 

Carl Malamud: The Importance of Being EDGAR. "We foresee an Internet that is much smarter about organizing itself. As powerful as the Internet is today, tomorrow it will be far more valuable as invisible worlds of information become visible." 

ZDNet: "LinuxChix isn't gender biased, though. Men are welcome at meetings and, by Richardson's count, about 20 percent of the 200 members of the LinuxChix list are male." Excellent. Finally a women's group that Gets It. 

I got a fair amount of (respectful) email from women who use Linux, in response to this quote: "I pitch the Linux community, my brothers, to work with us", from this DaveNet piece. There's nothing exclusive in that quote. We can work with women too, as LinuxChix accepts men. When we accept the power of men to work with other men, we take an important step forward. 

BTW, I've raised this issue with two longtime friends who run women-in-technology groups, Sylvia Paull and Christine Comaford. They didn't change their policy, unlike LinuxChix, they still exclude men from their groups. Too bad! 

News.Com: Motley Fool closes $26.5 million venture round. "'We are not a company that has 23 employees and was founded five months ago and plans on going public within a year, no matter what the business looks like,' he added in a less-than-flattering reference to the crop of Internet IPOs this year." 

Macrobyte has openings for two full-time Frontier developers.  

10 points to the first person who finds Red Herring's RSS file. 

Wednesday, September 15, 1999

MSNBC: Microsoft to buy Visio for $1.3 Billion. Stunning! 

Motley Fool on the Visio deal. "Why spend a fraction of your $3 billion research and development budget designing niche software when you have a collaborative relationship with a competitor right up the street?" 

InternetWorld: Take My Content Please! 

WebReference.Com: Using RSS News Feeds in Perl. 

Sam DeVore is using XML-RPC to connect his students, via HyperCard, to a Frontier discussion group. Excellent! 

Frontier Developers you can hire. (If you're very lucky!) To be listed on this page, visit the prefs site, review your information, and click on the radio button to allow us to publicly list your info. The public developers page is refreshed every night around 1AM Pacific. 

Last summer the IETF ran this critique of XML-RPC. I think they missed that XML-RPC is merely a formalization for the body of POSTs to allow diverse scripting environments to connect over the Internet. There are lots of one-off solutions that only work for a single environment. The purpose of XML-RPC is to unify the one-offs, so we can do some building. 

It's been a few months since Third Voice showed up on the web. What contribution have they made? Here's an example, Scripting News viewed thru a Third Voice lens. Viral web app? No, a mindless cesspool. I wonder what kind of comments accumulate on the Third Voice home page? 

Further, their technology is pretty weird. They install a web server on the user's machine! Why? Jeremy Bowers has been looking into this. Thanks! 

Tuesday, September 14, 1999

IETF Draft: Simple Object Access Protocol. 

My.UserLand.Com: Call for related sites. "If you have a service that builds off one or more of our backend features, we want to tell people about that, to help us all understand what's been accomplished with XMLization of news flows." 

Jeremy Bowers: "Third Voice, rather then being a hip new design to take us into the new millennium, is a throwback to mainframe-style centralization. They control the servers, they control the content, they control the service, they have sole possession of all information about the users gathered, only their clients can access their servers. In return for being granted the privilege to use the service, you turn over every right to your content you possess, while (of course!) keeping all the responsibility." 

Vintage Computer Festival, October 2-3, Santa Clara, CA. 

News.Com: Dell chasing Apple in wireless laptops. Excellent! 

Matt Jadud has a Frontier voting booth. It's nice. I answered his questions. Why not? (Here are some of Matt's Frontier projects.) 

Jacob Levy, as he often does, asks the right question. This time he asks for a list of things SOAP does that XML-RPC doesn't. We clearly need a whitepaper-quality document that addresses this. 

In the meantime, an interesting thread has developed in the XML-RPC DG, leading to Hannes Wallnofer's message, with the beginnings of a development plan for SOAP support in various scripting languages and environments. 

Dan Gillmor: "Not for lack of trying, Microsoft has been discovering lately that it can't take over the Internet. Monday's announcements were slanted toward Windows, as you might expect, but they were also a recognition that the Net, not Windows, is the emerging platform." 

NY Times: Microsoft Starts Recruiting For Its Next War. "Sure, it may be more difficult for Microsoft to seize the Internet standards," Tarter added, "but they have 15 or 20 years of experience of gaining control of standards in computing. They're good at it." That's spin. This time, for better or worse, Microsoft created the standards. 

Frontier developers looking for gigs: There's a developer's panel on our preferences sub-site. If you click on the radio button to make your information public, we will list it in a page we're developing so organizations with jobs to fill can find people with skills to fill them. We need more developers. There's no reason not to be fully employed if you know Frontier and like to work on new applications. 

Welcome to Matt Ocko, the first Silicon Valley VC to post on our DG. Thanks Matt, for breaking the ice. We want to start lots of companies here! There's no time like now. 

Monday, September 13, 1999

DaveNet: An end to the Uber-Operating System. 

XML-RPC.COM: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). 

A personal apology to UserLand customers who received a confusing renewal notice yesterday. 

The US Army is indeed running WebSTAR/Mac, as is www.scripting.com. 

A plug for My.UserLand.Com. The new version that allows channel exclusion makes it a billion percent more valuable. Now I really feel like I have my own personal news agent. It could still be improved, I have some ideas, but this version works pretty well! Highly recommended for news junkies like me. 

Microsoft: "SOAP provides an open, extensible way for applications to communicate using XML-based messages over the Web, regardless of what operating system, object model or language particular applications may use. SOAP facilitates universal communication by defining a simple, extensible message format in standard XML and thereby providing a way to send that XML message over HTTP. Microsoft is soliciting industry feedback on version 0.9 of the SOAP specification." 

Microsoft SOAP white paper, in Word format. 

SOAP also is an acronym for The Society For Obstetric Anesthesia & Perinatology. 

Martin Haeberli: "You may remember that SOAP stood for (in the late 1950's) 'Symbolic 

Optimizing Assembler Program' - for the IBM 650 (whose main memory was a spinning drum!)." 

Mozilla.Org: The Gecko Bugathon. "Help save Gecko engineers from imminent doom!" 

Eric Soroos' theory on why it's so quiet on the DG. 

Jon Udell on Linux databases. "Don't let ideology get in the way of business. Open source makes sense when it makes business sense, otherwise not." 

WSJ: Microsoft to unveil software that moves away from the PC. 

News.Com: Microsoft eyes e-Commerce tools. 

Tim Lundeen requests a NULL data type for XML-RPC. 

Jeff Cheney: "Mac Publishing LLC, publisher of MacWEEK, Macworld, MacCentral and MacBuy, is looking for an energetic Frontier developer to help us build and maintain our fast-growing content management system." This is a highly visible job. We need a great Frontier developer at Mac Publishing to work with us on their content system. 

News.Com: What's next for Andreessen? 

Sunday, September 12, 1999

Heads up. The object access protocol spec we did with Microsoft will be released on www.xmlrpc.com on Monday morning. 

The web as a Turing Machine. "Many of today's everyday objects fit the Turing model. A digital cellphone is a Turing Machine -- its input tape is the keypad, and the output tape is its memory. If your refrigerator, car, bicycle, or stereo has a computer in it, it can be modeled as a Turing Machine." 

2/27/98: RPC over HTTP via XML. "The Internet is a platform. A platform is made up of tools and runtimes. Internet tools run on all kinds of operating systems, as do the runtimes. The beauty of the net is its simplicity, its ubiquity and its lack of a controlling vendor." 

2/4/99: The Politics of Plumbing. "Yesterday in a conference call with Microsoft people I said the biggest win was for them to support the XML-RPC spec without changes." 

1/29/99: Microsoft and XML-RPC. "Think of it this way. If I develop a search engine running on NT, it can be replaced by a search engine running on Solaris or Linux with a simple emulation of an open protocol. XML-RPC is far simpler than COM, CORBA or Apple Events. Time to deployment, from scratch, is measured in days, not years. We can move very quickly. And customers get choice." 

Linux Journal: Will Linux Conquer the Desktop? "When the script kiddies came calling, they found my front door wide open." Oops! 

Dan Gillmor: "Sun Microsystems and IBM recently jumped back into a largely moribund 'network computer' market with a new generation of terminals whose sole purpose is to give users a window into the network. Will they succeed any better than their predecessors? I'm betting they will, complementing the ongoing success of the Palm handhelds and soon-to-be rage for smart cell phones and other devices." 

Developer Nation: An RSS Parser in Shockwave. What will they think of next! 

Jonathan Eisenzopf takes the RSS categorization discussion in a different direction. 

Linux.Com: I Love Man Pages. 

NY Times: New Year's of a Lifetime, at the Office. "Jurczyk, director of information services for Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, a law firm in Chicago, will be in the office with 20 co-workers, watching for Year 2000 computer problems while snacking on peanuts, sesame sticks and M&M's and toasting the millennium with bottled water and soda before dozing off on a rented cot." 

Here's a truly bizarre screen shot showing MORE 3.1 running on Windows NT, thanks to Tobias Hofman. I encouraged him to post a DG message explaining how he did it. 

Saturday, September 11, 1999

Steven Livingstone: XML-RPC client for COM. 

David Mundie: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DDC. 

RSS moves forward. LinuxToday now supports the new fat format. Thank you very much! Let's keep rollin. 

Frontier moves forward too. In version 6.1, coming soon, the scheduler will launch and supervise threads. This makes better-performing server apps easy. An early release is ready for review, including full source. 

More on Marc Andreessen. "I think it's important to separate the person from the myth. Andreessen, like you or me, is a person. I think you can write reviews for software products, you can love or hate a company for its competence or generosity. But you can't review a *person* that way." 

5/6/98: "Hey, one thing's for sure, people think more about rich people, but don't confuse that with listening. Are any of those thoughts grounded in reality? When we talk about Gates are we talking about a man or a huge bank account? I have no idea. Probably neither." 

I went on a tour of epinions.com, which went live last Wednesday, signed up as a member, almost wrote a review, and made a few hopefully helpful suggestions. 

NPR's Fresh Air had a show on Tuvan Throat-Singing. This is how I first heard of it. 

Friday, September 10, 1999

I asked Tim O'Reilly for help introducing XML-RPC to the Linux world. He sent an endorsement to the CEOs of VA Research, Red Hat and to Eric Raymond. Excellent! 

SlashDot interviews Tim O'Reilly.  

InfoWorld: Marc Andreessen Leaves AOL.  

Marc Andreesen is a brilliant technical leader who was at the center of 

influence our industry for a long time to come. 

Macrobyte: Queue Suite for Frontier. 

Scientific American: Throat Singers of Tuva. "Testing the limits of vocal ingenuity, throat-singers can create sounds unlike anything in ordinary speech and song--carrying two musical lines simultaneously, say, or harmonizing with a waterfall." Throat singing *is* amazing. Check it out. 

You can experience throat-singing right now, Scientific American has a page with links to QuickTime scans. Remember when you're listening, you're hearing a single human voice. 

Tom Clifton's cat, Shasta, does not like Tuvan throat-singing. 

ComputerWorld: The Moral Majesty of the W3C. "Nevertheless, even those who don't fancy the W3C's operating philosophy acknowledge that its agility is rare in a standards group and that its specifications bear a 'moral majesty.'" I hate moral majesty! 

From the You Heard it Here First Department. The new word for the new web millennium, post Y2K, is churn. That's what we're all doing! Now you know. 

Today's 'lite' question: Is Don Hopkins the Gilligan of the Internet? 

Help request. The NY Times ran an article on weblogs a couple of months back. I'm looking for a pointer.  

Wow! Jakob Nielsen found it, sort of, and lived to tell the story! 

Lawrence Lee, the master of the search engines, found the Times story using a trick that most web readers wouldn't think of.  

Speaking of search engines, here's a clue why the DaveNet piece, More Dancing Hamsters, has been read so often. It's the number one hit when you search for Dancing Hamsters on Alta Vista.  

When I saw this link I thought Edie Brickell was sick! What a relief. Best wishes to Mrs. Simon for a quick recovery. 

A picture of Edie Brickell with one of her fans. Isn't the web great? You can find anything! 

Thursday, September 09, 1999

News.Com: Cobalt poised to be 2nd Linux IPO. I have one and I like it. They burst the price bubble. Cobalt is a big problem for NT. A consumer product all the way. Heap-o power. Two thumbs up. 

WSJ: Citrix Systems helps lead drive to rent software via Internet. 

Chicago Tribune: She has seen the future and it is Weblogs. "A Weblog is a Web site that maintains a constantly updated list of links to other sites; those links can deal with any subject or focus on a particular one. Webloggers typically offer pithy, sarcastic commentary about the links." Excellent! 

Jon Udell and I devised a categorization system for RSS this morning. Here's his report on the conversation. 

InfoWorld: Microsoft's ASP Strategy. "The creation of the Certified Commercial Network Services Provider (CCNSP) program by Microsoft this week comes only a few days before the Sept. 13 announcement of Microsoft's development tools and hosting strategy around Windows 2000, which is due to ship to the mainstream early next year." 

Rewrite of the Channel Chooser page. Now we list channels only if they have been updated in the last seven days. The checkboxes reflect whether or not you've excluded the channel. This provides the missing UI for re-enabling excluded channels. I have other ideas for improvement but wanted to rest here for a bit and let this new functionality sink in. 

The Story of Atrieva: "I talk with the CEO or VC or other exec at a company. We don't connect. Later on I find out that there's one of 'our people' inside. I wish there was some way to make the connection while an idea is active!" 

Design Challenge: "I want to open a site for feature requests." 

Updated: My.UserLand.Com FAQ. 

Heads up. I have taken the Favorites page out of the navlinks for My.UserLand.Com. The purpose is to focus the functionality on the home page. Since our backend storyflow is totally open, anyone else can provide this service if people want it. 

Wired: Dolby says it's Payback Time. "The music industry is now going to have to own up the fact that the flocking of people to the Web as a venue for music is really an expression of the fact that the Web is a much better venue for that activity than a large chain store in a shopping mall." Yeah! 

MSNBC: BlueOval Outruns Ford. "A federal judge has denied Ford Motor Co.’s request to stop a Mustang enthusiast from putting some of the company’s internal documents on his Internet site, saying such an order would violate the First Amendment." Requires Windows Media Player. 

Wednesday, September 08, 1999

Carmen's Headline Viewer 0.8.9. "Over 500 News Channels." 

Now you can exclude channels on My.UserLand.Com. 

Coming sooon. We have to update NewsSearch so it indexes more channels. It predates the registration process, RSS, and My.UserLand.Com. 

I added links to Frontier News and NewsSearch to the left-navigation links on the Scripting News home page. 

I changed the Top 25 list on the DG to the Top 50, and 25 popular messages were revealed. Surprise! 

We're having a very unusual late summer thunder/lightning storm here in Silicon Valley tonight. 9-9-99. 

Jakob Nielsen: "A reputation manager is an independent service that keeps track of the rated quality, credibility, or some other desirable metric for each element in a set. The things being rated will typically be websites, companies, products, or people, but in theory anything can have a reputation that users may want to look up before taking action or doing business." 

Radio Shack bit by Y2K? And they're in denial? 

Red Herring: How Amazon Kept Alexa Founder. "Aside from satisfying investors and rewarding key employees, Mr. Kahle had another big idea: he saw ways in which Alexa's knowledge of the Internet and user behavior could significantly improve electronic commerce." 

Yesterday's question seems even more timely now. 

Detroit Free Press: "What can corporations such as Ford Motor Co. do to take control of rogue Internet sites that publish confidential information?" 

You heard it here first! It's 9AM on 9-9-99 in New Zealand and all is well. Whew! 

The Evangelist is In: "Let's move the heavy machinery, the stuff that's hard to set up and maintain, off the user's desktops and put it on the servers." 

Wired: Sun Introduces Sun Ray. "It follows the vision of co-founder and visionary Bill Joy, who says 'complexity should be absorbed in the network, not thrust on the user.'" 

Jeff Alami on Linux.Com: Why the Battle is so Important. "Linux is primarily fueled by the work of thousands of developers worldwide who are coding away with no interest in money or conflict. The goal is to create good-quality, useful software and to share it with other users. But without knowing (or caring), they are essentially becoming the arms providers for the the Linux and Open Source side of the operating system wars. For the people who fight these wars, the battle is oh so very important." 

To Jeff and others, don't feed the war! It'll backfire. Linux itself is quite good at working on Windows and Macs networks. The community, however, has a long way to go. Let's wire Linux up to Windows and Mac over the Internet and erase the barriers to the adoption of Linux. 

11/4/98: How a Windows Developer Thinks. "To the Unix folks, please stop focusing all your attention on Microsoft and look to possible friendships with people who work inside Windows, but who don't work for Microsoft. We can help each other because our interests are aligned." 

Fredrik Lundh compares CORBA to XML-RPC. "From a scripting perspective, CORBA is stone-age technology." 

Eric Kidd compares XML-RPC to CORBA. "XML-RPC shouldn't turn into CORBA. The best thing about XML-RPC is its simplicity. CORBA has some good attributes, but simplicity is not one of them." 

Meanwhile Apple is making news in a struggle with some vocal users. Couldn't they find something more interesting to put on page one? 

Tuesday, September 07, 1999

The advantage of wiring up a discussion server is that thru common interfaces, people are able to connect up scriptable text editors to the web, working around limitations of textareas in web browsers. Once you have the ability to use a modern editor to write for the web you won't want to go back. 

Why did Amazon buy Alexa? Can you still get riled up about this? I'm having trouble. 

David Mundie: Why I Love Gema. "I have been searching for the perfect language for text manipulation ever since I became interested in computers." 

InfoWorld on NetDocuments. "The service includes a synchronization feature, which allows users to upload documents to the Web, make changes in their native application, and have those changes automatically synchronized within the same document." Faq. 

MacInTouch rolls out a new site design. I find it unsettling. I had my MacInTouch routine pretty solid. Now I have to learn a new way of reading. I prefer more gradual change. 

News.Com: Free Labor on the Internet. "A growing number of Net companies, including Netscape, Lycos, and Deja.com, are using volunteers instead of salaried staff to build their content directories." Jacob Savin wonders how this relates to Open Source. 

WSJ: CBS to merge with Viacom. "The combination would create a media powerhouse owning the CBS network, several major cable networks — including MTV, Nickelodeon, Country Music Television and the Nashville Network — and storied film studio Paramount Pictures." 

Wired: "Thursday, 9 September may be represented as 9999 on many computer software programs. In theory, this string of nines might disrupt systems and provide a preview of the millennium bug." Two days! 

New channel: Diary of a New Homemaker. 

Monday, September 06, 1999

I need a script that runs on Windows, for Eudora or Outlook Express, that loops over all my mailboxes, and writes each message that's over seven days old to a file (XML please) and deletes it from the mailbox.  

Paul Howson needs this script too. "It amazes me that the people who create these programs have not forseen this problem." Amen! 

9/7/96: "People with an extra computer can have their own search engines. All their written work is filtered, cross-indexed and sorted. If you can make it flow thru email, it can be more useful to you. The other machine, your mail organizing database, is busy categorizing and sorting things while you're writing and reading. This is not beyond the leading edge. We can set up these kinds of servers now, in 1996." 

The Frontier News page is once again being updated regularly. Look for more frequent updates as we approach 6.1. 

Welcome Tim Lundeen, the latest technologist to join the discussion at XML-RPC.COM. 

Bruce Perens: Sun's StarOffice Release. "The StarOffice release is definitely good for Linux, but its non-Open-Source nature also raises some concern. Could Sun be building ammunition for its next war? StarOffice may also be an attempt to gain long-term control over the Linux desktop market." 

Moving forward. Now you can attach enclosures to messages thru the XML-RPC interface. 

SF Examiner: The eOne PC has Apple steaming. "Twenty years after Steve Jobs ripped off Xerox PARC's graphical user interface technology, Apple Computer's ever-interim CEO can't believe someone would have the nerve to knock off his iMac." 

Ronald Bourret: XML and Databases. 

Sunday, September 05, 1999

Frontier as a DG Message Editor. "Editing is easier than it's ever been, and (key point) users of this tool will only need to understand how the DG works, they don't have to understand the website framework." 

Full source release. Let's have fun! 

And finally a somewhat out-of-date screen shot.  

I've been using the new editor for a few weeks, and believe me, it makes a difference. 

Bonus! I whipped up an RPC handler that allows an "affiliate" to read our story flow thru XML-RPC. It works with Frontier and Python, but there's a problem with ECMAscript. 

Saturday, September 04, 1999

Major major digging going on tonight on the static home page. We need a holiday weekend for these kinds of changes! 

A new version of www.userland.com went online this morning. It may take a couple of days for it to percolate thru DNS, so here's a temporary URL that's guaranteed to get you to the new site. 

Feedback on the new UserLand home page?  

SpaceViews on the Cassini flyby. It worked! 

Very beautiful pictures taken as Cassini flew by Earth's moon. 

SpaceViews is a My.UserLand.Com channel. 

Here's what Earth looks like during a solar eclipse. 

New feature on the Frontier website. A page that lists all the root changes since the last full release. This will soon be available as an RSS file. 

Andre Radke, our German Engineering Department, is in the US. 

Mappa Mundi explains how TraceRoute works. 

Working on the new UserLand.Com home page, I did a search for "diggin" in DaveNet, and it came back with a lot of matches! 

Even before Zope had an official logo, it had an official song! 

CNN: Businessman Linked to Prostitute thru Hotmail Hole. "I just wanted to know if they really were prostitutes," he said.  

Fast Company: The Customer Experience. "Dell doesn't claim to have discovered all of the elements that create a definitive customer experience. Indeed, 16 months ago, the company formed the Customer Experience Council, a group that is scrutinizing every aspect of how Dell interacts with customers."  

I want a computer vendor that specializes in serving people whose time is valuable and to whom outages of 30 days are not acceptable. This is a customer experience issue. Dell doesn't do this. Who does? 

Wired: Think Different about Upgrading. "Apple's recent line of Power Mac G3s can't be upgraded to Motorola's new G4 chip, and according to hardware manufacturers, the engineering was intentional." 

MacInTouch has a page dedicated to the upgrade issues. 

Friday, September 03, 1999

DaveNet: The Dark Side of Syndication. 

Important Note: This is an Editorial Environment. "If you bought an ad on the op-ed page of the NY Times, there's nothing to stop the Times from running an editorial that is critical of your company, or even against the interests of your company, and they could run it on the same page as your ad." 

News.Com: eBay shuts down search engines. "Leading online auctioneer eBay is clamping down on outside companies that use search engines to find items for sale on its site, arguing that the technology affects site performance." 

We started a Top 50 page for XML-RPC.COM. 

Wired: MS Denies Spy Key. "The issue centers around two keys that ship with all copies of Windows. The keys grant an outside party the access it needs to install security components without user authorization. The first key is used by Microsoft to sign its own security service modules. Until late Thursday, the identity and holder of the second key had remained a mystery." 

Michael Swaine: Why Rebol Matters. "Rebol's built-in datatypes include types for currency, times, dates, numbers, strings, words, tags, logic, lists, hashes, data types, and objects (although Rebol is not really an object-oriented language). Built-in networking protocols include HTTP, FTP, POP, SMTP, NNTP, Finger, and Daytime." 

David Carter-Tod: Including Channels in Pages. 

And Bill Humphries is using David's service (who uses our service which reads Bill's RSS file that now appears back on his home page). The web as pretzel! 

New channels: Wytheville Community College, IdioSynch.Net. 

E&P: MarketWatch sells headlines on iSyndicate. "iSyndicate will distribute CBS MarketWatch.com headlines which will link back to stories on the financial news site."  

iSyndicate flows value in the reverse direction, flowing dollars from sites that repurpose stories to the sources of stories. The fact that MarketWatch is selling their collection of headlines indicates that at least one content provider sees value in the collection, contrary to the arguments of the scraper engines. 

iSyndicate is sponsoring Internet Content 99, with a stellar lineup of speakers, all from the big-money sites. But.. where are their competitors? Shades of Vignette. 

Here's their session on syndication. Yes yes, it's the iSyndicate CEO and some customers. Oy! 

Press release, 6/15/99: Vignette investment in iSyndicate. 

3/19/99: ICEing RSS. "RSS looks great to me, with just a little more icing on it, simple stuff based on XML-RPC, it will be able to do everything ICE can do, without requiring a $50K tariff to Vignette." 

The ICE Summit, in Redondo Beach CA, 9/23/99. 

The Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook. A site dedicated to the inventor of the Turing Machine. 

Thursday, September 02, 1999

Announce: Simplified Frontier pricing, UserLand Store. "Our goal remains to make Frontier users the most powerful developers and communicators on the Internet." 

New channel: FreshMeat.Net. Yaha! 

HoneyLocust: "Static web pages work fine with older browsers, and allow one to insulate oneself from the falling bombs and shells of the browser wars." 

I reorganized the home page of the Frontier site, pulling up the summaries from the Tour pages, and linking to screen shots. For some reason I get inspired when I know a lot of people are looking at one of my sites! 

42 new pages on the Frontier site, and the night is still young. That must be some kind of record, and proof that the Frontier site is no longer read-only.  

2:22PM: Not to tempt anyone, but here we are many hours after rolling out the new pricing program, and no flames. Thanks! 

A message I posted on the XML-DEV list announcing the XML-RPC interface for discussion groups. "For UserLand, this is the back-end for our editorial groupware system, and a new web writer's tool we have in development. But the interface can be used for all kinds of workflow and groupware. The more the merrier!" 

Steven Livingstone is leading a group who is wiring up MS-Word thru COM to be an editor for DG postings. 

Jeremy Bowers: "Scraping may produce the same information as a hypothetical RSS file, it cannot produce the same permission." 

Dave Winer: "From what I know about webmasters at big publishing companies (we're working with a few of them) -- their management will not understand the issue when it pops up to their level. When they learn about scraping, I believe their first response is going to be to sue, and it may be tough to talk them out of it." 

MSNBC: "As a matter of course, we don’t knowingly sell a company’s name to competitors," says Diane Hunt, a Yahoo spokeswoman, but she notes that some cases fall through the cracks." 

Wired: "Two days after rival Sun Microsystems unveiled a plan to publish word processing and spreadsheet applications for free over the Web, Microsoft executives said they're considering a similar strategy." 

I got an email in response to this post, saying that HTML doesn't count because it is not a Turing Machine. Of course that's true, I'm not sure its Turing-ness matters, but then I had a thought this morning that the purpose of XML-RPC is to turn the Internet into a Turing Machine. I liked that description because it is so concise, assuming you know what a Turing Machine is. 

6/3/96: Of Mice and Menus. 

Wednesday, September 01, 1999

DaveNet: Automated Deep Linking. "There's something new going on, and it touches on some sensitive issues like who owns your home page -- you or the web?" 

ZDNN: "Microsoft blamed an evil genius for its Hotmail security goof, but the company’s spin may be the only crime." 

Zope 2.0 shipped today, includes XML-RPC support. 

Matt Daw has the GetStateName demo app working in Zope. 

Late Night Software: XML Tools for AppleScript. 

Also from Late Night: WatchNews, a FaceSpan app that reads our XMLized news and displays it in a window. Nice! 

Cal Law: Congress Does a Database Dance. "The fight over a database copyright bill began in 1996 when the European Union adopted a directive that prohibits a second-generation publisher from extracting a substantial part of a first-generation database." 

News.Com: Will Web publishers get lost in space? "How are mainstream consumers going to find material they like in a churning sea of free expression?" 

RegEx: Xanadu from the Wilderness. "Xanadu will receive a lot of attention over the next few months. It promises to be an excellent demonstration of how Python fares in a high-performance, large-scale, complex role that many programmers believe is reserved for C++ and Java." 

IETF: MSN Messenger Protocol 1.0. "This document describes the syntax and semantics of the MSN Messenger Protocol, the communication protocol running between MSN Messenger Service 1.0 clients and servers." 

8/4/99: Why Should AOL Open Up? "This time around Microsoft wants to force AOL to open up their Instant Messaging service -- they want to take their share of Instant Messaging without bursting any bubbles! Amazing chutzpah. By complaining in a confusing way they hope to force AOL to burst their *own* bubble. It's as if, playing chess, you run a press release saying your opponent should give up their queen, and somehow you expect this to happen?" 

MacWorld: Seybold Photo Gallery. 

Interesting diversion. We've put Top-50 pages on several of our sites. The main DG, DaveNet, Frontier, and DocServer. When reading these lists you can see the presence of search engines. They move articles about Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and Jean-Louis Gassee up to the top. And docs about base64 encoding. And the Dancing Hamsters! 

LinuxCare: Advanced Data Recovery Techniques. 

MacCentral: AppleScript over IP. What is it about? My theory.. Apple has done a tunneling protocol that allows AppleTalk to move over TCP-IP. The AppleScript connection comes for free, because the Apple Event Manager works over AppleTalk. It's just a theory. 

Since 1992, the University of Melbourne ARNS packages have been providing the ability to connect remote clients to AppleTalk services by creating personal AppleTalk tunnels over the IP Internet.  

Ask Tog: Avoiding Frequent Flier Syndrome. "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.." 

Michael Tutty: "I've been working for a while on an XML over HTTP remote objects system. After checking things out here, it seems very similar to what I'm doing."