Tuesday, January 11, 2000

I'm still looking for a place to do a live session in Europe. Thursday February 4 looks like the ideal day. London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome? I'm pretty open.

BTW, I thought I'd share this here, I just saw a demo of a Manila site hosted on Linux! I find this quite exciting, as if I didn't already have enough stuff to be excited about.

Andre says: "I actually signed up and posted a test message. I even received the confirmation email. Very cool!"

Jon Katz in Never-Never Land™: "The significance of IBM's move was that the next generation of e-business will expect increasingly open standards for inter-operability across a wide variety of computer platforms." See the News.Com article below about IBM's patents.

MacWEEK: Macromedia's stealth bombshell. "We're no longer talking about linking the Web page to legacy documents (by far the most frequent use for PDF files on the Web) but about providing a complement to the online user experience -- one that's designed from the ground up with printing in mind."

Dan Gillmor's passion is evoked by the AOL-Time Warner merger. "AOL's huge market capitalization, spurred by a stock market that abandoned sanity long ago, left the world's most powerful traditional media company in the dust."

Dan, when do you think UserLand will buy Knight-Ridder? Will asking that question, in public, even in jest, make Knight-Ridder stock go up? (Or down?)

Brent Simmons is trying to figure out how to get WINE running on a system without Windows installed.

LinuxPlanet reviews Zope.

We're getting pretty heavily pounded on EditThisPage.Com this morning. Looking at the logs it's not clear if it's any single site getting most of the traffic. Still investigating.

Something to remember when we think of IBM as a possible partner, last year they filed an astonishing 2756 new patents, many of which relate to the Internet.

DavosNewbies: "As much as we try, many of the panelists in Davos ignore our injunction against preparing speeches. There are a few speeches at the Annual Meeting: this year, Blair, Clinton, Summers, Albright and the King of Jordan will have a chance to make a 'special message.'"

I'll be attending Davos as a Media Leader. I interpret this to mean that my primary role at Davos is to cover it, which I intend to do, fully. Of course I will be using Manila.

How an Anatomy and Physiology professor uses Manila.

John Thompson went to Bronx Science a couple of years after I did. Now he's doing an EditThisPage.Com site devoted to Macromedia's Lingo programming language.

I don't usually push the Top100 list on EditThisPage.Com, I want people to focus on quality not quantity, but it's worth noting that Array, Garret Vreeland's website, is now number one on the list, displacing the Builder Live site, which has always (till now!) held the top position. Garret is also working with us on the makeover of the DavosNewbies site.

BTW, EditThisPage.Com is now hosting 1685 sites!

I made the mistake of installing MSIE 5.5 on my desktop machine yesterday. I had to see what the fuss was about. According to some, any object can be edited in 5.5. Unfortunately, there is also major breakage in this version. The Copy command no longer works for pictures! Hellllp. This added another step to my routine for working on sites. As my doctor says when I gain weight (and shrug it off) "This is going in the wrong direction."

MSIE 5.5 has too many bugs to be used in everyday production. Forms don't work properly (the Submit button does nothing, not in all forms, but the important ones). The text editor goes deaf. The new version is too aggressive at caching pages.

How do I go back to the old version? The Microsoft site refuses to install 5.01 on top of 5.5. I need help here Microsoft, you have to do better at serving web developers. We're very busy people, overcommitted, and with no time to waste on this. Thanks.

Update. I uninstalled 5.5, and nothing is working right. Selection in the web browser is badly broken, so I delete text that I was planning on keeping. I am having a lot of trouble editing my sites. The browser scrolls vertically at random times. And even worse, Outlook Express has gone totally dysfunctional. When I reply to a message I get a really funky window that looks like it's trying to be HTML (I have HTML turned off) and the buttons are in the wrong place, and I'm pretty sure it's lost some important email. I'm not amused.

We're having an all-week on-site meeting at UserLand while we crunch on long-term projects. Updates will be more sporadic, but the benefit will be progress on projects that require a lot of coordination among team members. Still diggin!