Monday, January 17, 2000

Steven Ivy figured out how to add my bookmarks to his home page. Excellent! It's not that hard, just view the source code for www.scripting.com to see how we do it. It doesn't matter where you link to it from, it works anywhere on the web.

Simple To Do has "all the features you'd expect in a list manager -- you can prioritize items, sort them, mark them as Done, and it's even hierarchical so you can create sub-items to your main items."

Reminder. TransMeta's announcement is this Wednesday. That's the company that employs Linus of Linux.

Weblogs that contain "Transmeta".

I spent some time this morning writing an engineering document for a patent application for an invention that I believe is as deep and revolutionary as Amazon's 1-Click technique.

Kragen Sitaker offers several arguments for filing patents.

Array is doing something weird with JavaScript. I've never seen anything like it before. I wonder if it's patentable?

I got a call from Bill Gladstone, an agent who represents book authors. He's hot to trot on FatBrain and iUniverse. I suggested we work out an easy path for editors to publish to print directly from their Manila sites. He was very excited by this idea. We'll talk again tomorrow.

WSJ: "Bill Gates may have given up day-to-day operations of the world’s largest software company, but his new task is no less daunting: to dominate the Internet with Windows and Windows-based services." Sounds like SOAP.

Today we released an alpha of Frontier 6.2 that includes the code that enabled the performance boost for EditThisPage.Com on 1/8/00. Also, a new callback that allows Frontier's outliner to be used to browse network resources, and IP-address selection for NT servers. I wish I could point to the page where you can download it, but this release, as with all alphas and betas, is only available to customers. We've also started using the Manila bulletin feature to send development notes to the customers via email. Bit by bit we de-dilbertizing UserLand. You can't hurry love!

NY Times: "This is why Steve Case has really won the war at the end of the day," said John W. Sidgmore, vice chairman of MCI Worldcom, referring to America Online's 41-year-old chairman and chief executive. "Steve knew that most customers really want simple access, user friendliness and a tool that's very easy to use."

Already the flames are starting over the AskTog piece on the Mac OS X user interface. I wonder if the critics have actually read it. Bad news? Attack the messenger. Boring!

Tog points to Amazon. I grow more reluctant to direct flow to Amazon. A gentle hint.

Press release: "To secure eMatter documents, Fatbrain.com has developed new patent-pending secure digital rights technologies to protect the ownership rights of the document."

Oh well. Maybe I should just give it up and start filing my own patents. We generate truly unique and unobvious stuff every week. Maybe I'm being a fool.