Wednesday, November 03, 1999

InfoWorld: Red Hat extends its reach. "Branching out into what it believes will be a lucrative market, Red Hat Software on Wednesday announced it will offer a number of consulting and support services for open-source products, including the Apache Web Server, operating under distributions of Linux other than its own." With their super-high market capitalization, they have to spread out into any business that relates to open source. Their market cap practically requires it of them.

BusinessWeek: Salon and Slate. "Actually, Slate and Salon don't even mention each other when you ask them to name their competitors. Slate publisher Scott S. Moore cites the Web sites of Wired or The New York Times and Washington Post, while O'Donnell has grand aspirations of Salon becoming a full-fledged news service akin to CNN."

Here's another difference. Salon is a My.UserLand channel.

BTW, as I was installing a new version of Frontier, I noticed that SalonHerringWiredFool.Com took over 17,000 hits today, even with all the ISP-related problems, and with just word of mouth carrying the message. That's pretty good!

Survey: Our ISP thinks that people connecting from the West Coast are experiencing the problems and people connecting from elsewhere are getting normal service.

Luke Tymowski reports at 4:30PM Pacific: "Whatever happened has made Scripting.com extremely quick. No more lurchy 60 second page loads. Just blasts up in one go." This is consistent with what we've seen for the past week. At about 5PM all of a sudden the problem clears up, only to reappear the following morning.

Len MacDonell sent a screen shot that echoes what everyone else is saying. The problem is inside Conxion. When they ask who the ISP is, does this indicate that they're not working on the actual problem? Have I got that right?? (I'm not an expert in the router area, and I'm trying to be kind because we like them so much!)

Like them or not, I am about to blow my top. I got an email from one of the customer relations people saying whether I understand why or not, they really want to know, geographically, where all you people are coming from. My response -- go down the hall to one of your competitors, dial into www.scripting.com. That's where you're geographically located. Near as I can tell, no one is getting a clean connection to this system. Why?

We started a Manila site for O'Reilly Associates, hosted by Dale Dougherty. It's starting pretty quickly!

Genehack: "If I was Dan Gillmor, I'd be starting a 'blog too, because that's got to be preferable to burger flipping." Cute, but when I get a pointer from the Merc, my hits go up by a lot.

MacCentral: AppleScript Primer Part II.

MetaFilter, the community 'blog, keeps on truckin. It's like a guestbook, with respect. I like it.

Not to be confused with MetaFilter, Gabby at MetaTalk says Weblogs are Evil. She comes highly recommended by several people I trust so I removed her "randomness". To me, being random is not a bad thing.

The SJ Merc is running an AP story about Chris Nolan's resignation. "The New York Post has offered to run the high-tech gossip column, Nolan said."

RefererLog: Rogers Cadenhead asked Jeeves if OJ Simpson killed his ex-wife Nicole. Ever the philosopher, Jeeves answered Rogers' question with more questions!

News.Com: Microsoft and RR Donnely in Pact. According to Microsoft exec Dick Brass, it's of "historic proportions."

BTW, I used to hang out with Dick Brass, many many years ago. He has a very distinctive way of talking, and I can actually imitate his way. (There are only two other people I can imitate, Dick's boss, Bill Gates, and dBASE guru Adam Green.) I introduced Adam to Dick in the late 80s, and they tried to take over Ashton-Tate. I could imitate both sides of their discussions. True story!

Inman News: XML Politics in Mortgage Industry. "Allowing independent groups developing ad-hoc, closed standards will eventually lead to standards anarchy," Lesher wrote. "Having multiple, competing standards is the same (as) having no standards at all."

Bruce Perens: Run LinuxOne out of town on a rail. "Seeing how well the Linux IPO market was doing, they copied Red Hat's S-1 form (the form you file with the SEC prior to doing an IPO) almost word-for-word, and now they've copied the Red Hat software and are beta-testing it as their own product without any apparent enhancement, and they are violating the GPL."

Have the connectivity problems eased? If not, please send me an email, again, saying who your ISP is. Our ISP seems to think it has something to do with who your ISP is, but looking at the traceroutes people have sent us, we think the problem is in their shop. We forward them diligently to the NOC at our ISP.