Thursday, January 13, 2000

I've been interviewed about the change at Microsoft. "Do you think it has any real effect on the company?" Yes.

10/18/94: Bill Gates vs The Internet. Did Bill win?

7/3/97: Bill Gates's Money. "How big does Gates think?"

Today is Marc Canter's 43rd birthday. Happy!

Steve Zellers downloaded the MacBird source and "carbonized" it, and got it running on Mac OS X. He's going to check his changes into SourceForge so the community project can get going. Thanks Steve! Steve works at Apple, on AppleScript.

Brad Pettit got a link from MacinTouch today! Yeah. Excellent. Brad works at Microsoft on MSIE/Mac.

Now get this, both Brad and Steve used to work at Living Videotext and did various parts of MORE years and years and years ago. We're all still diggin, in The Year 2000. Ain't that amazing??

Voices from Fire in the Valley, a book about the early history of Silicon Valley, written by Mike Swaine and Paul Freiberger.

Washington Post: DOJ demands Microsoft breakup. "Which company would get Bill Gates? How would the programmers be split up? And what would prevent employees assigned to the non-Gates firms from quitting and joining Gates's company?"

DanDot: MSIE Design Mode Example. Excellent! See what happens when you get a designer involved in technology? It becomes understandable, and exciting.

A prediction. The designers are going to revolutionize our world. Finally web technology is getting easy enough so the designers can take over. They've been very patient. Now they're going to rule. Whew! (I hope.)

Final postscript to my post MSIE 5.5 woes. Everything's back to normal. After uninstalling 5.5 I was left with IE4 and didn't know it. It was like a time warp. Some of it was familiar. There were huge selection bugs in IE4 that were fixed in IE5. That's good, glad I wasn't imagining it. And I wasn't an Outlook Express user in the IE4 days (I used Eudora) so its weirdness was totally unfamiliar. When we noticed that I was using IE4 (it could be easier to find this out) I immediately upgraded and everything went back to normal, and the feeling of unease transitioned to a feeling of well-being. All is right with the world this morning. Welcome to The Year 2000.

Reviewing the pictures from the Davos site one thing became clear. I need to get a haircut and some new suits. Even the people in the press room are wearing white shirts and ties. No problem. As usual at UserLand this project has a codename. First it was My Fair Dave, but to make it more rhythmic, now we're calling it My Fair Davey. Harumph.

Robert Hess: The Bloodiest Mary. "I took along a collection of Bloody Mary mixes with expectations of doing taste testings in order to find out what people prefer."

Mike Cohen thinks Apple's new UI is a big mistake.

Robust Systems has a picture of Mesa Verde cliff-dwellings, one of my favorite places in the world!

I was going to send this link just to Doc Searls, a Mac and Manila user who is also an editor at Linux Journal (and a Cluetrain guy, and a cool human being).

Elliotte Harold: Quotes about XML in 1999. Fascinating reading, focuses on the politics of XML, overlooks the accomplishments. Typical focus of the XML-DEV list. No mention of RSS or XML-RPC, both of which blossomed in 1999.

In the meantime, the W3C has started a mail list for discussion of distributed computing protocols, and they even acknowledge XML-RPC! Yeah-ha.

Salon: Execution, Texas-style. "George W. Bush, the presidential candidate campaigning as a compassionate conservative, does not appear ready to stop the execution of a teenaged murderer."