Sunday, October 31, 1999

Let's have fun! Send me links to horrible things. Especially *dead* horrible things.

Thanks to David Lawrence. This story perfectly fits the above description.

It is considered very bad manners indeed to shrink another person's head, so don't try this at home.

Ron Kleinman, the Chief Technical Evangelist for Sun Developer Relations, makes the case for XML-RPC and SOAP. "We have demonstrated how defining an industry XML standard around a platform-neutral wire (XML/HTTP) allows for any two compliant subsystems to interconnect despite the OS and messaging middleware they use." Reading this article makes me think Sun is getting ready to support one or both, or announce their own XML-over-HTTP protocol. (Thanks to John Brewer for this pointer.)

NY Times: "Clearly, Amazon's numbers don't paint a pretty picture. Customer growth has slowed from 60 percent in the fourth quarter of 1997 to 22 percent in the most recent quarter. Revenues per customer have declined from $40.32 in the third quarter of 1997 to $27.16."

Another Star Trek story: "I have always thought that Captain Picard would have been better off with a design that informed him right away when somebody stole one of his shuttles, without waiting to be asked first."

A milestone in the bootstrapping of subhonker1 (a new server). It's now an affiliate, sporting a different interface for the My.UserLand story flow. Some people might prefer this interface, but don't bookmark this page, because it's sure to go away soooon.

Dan Gillmor: Client-servers teeming with innovation. "Client-server computing is moving away from its roots. It's morphing to be part of the environment that sucks in everything in its vicinity: the Internet. And we're only beginning to gauge the impact." Exactly!

Edd Dumbill notes a discussion on the Python mail list about the lack of activity in XML development. Edd's been busy! He released a new version of his SiteSummary product for Zope.

Der Spiegel: Ziemlich hilfreich. "Warum sollte man etwas umsonst tun oder sagen, wenn man damit auch Geld verdienen kann? Mit dieser Frage konfrontiert uns das neue Internet-Angebot Epinions.com. Natürlich entspricht das nicht der Selbstdarstellung des Unternehmens. Nein, Epinions.com nennt sich den 'ultimativen Online-Shopping-Guide'."

Peter Merholz, who is featured in the Der Spiegel piece, has an English translation on his website. I found it difficult to read Peter's translation, so I wrote a script on our CMS to add paragraph breaks.

SJ Merc: Surviving the Dot-Com Booom. "For the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, the pressures are greater than ever. Can anyone really run on valleytime forever?" No. Next question.

LinuxWorld: A REBOL Incursion. "Don't be fooled by people who say that Carl Sassenrath's new project is 'just a scripting language.' In reality, the chief architect of the AmigaOS is after nothing less than your cell phone, your Java-enabled toaster, and your Linux box in his quest to make your operating system irrelevant in the new world of instant messaging."