Friday, January 21, 2000

Mike Kuniavsky: "The Open Source movement has no feedback loop to end-users."

One simple way to include users in the loop is for developers to get the open source software from UserLand. The trick is to get tools in place that user interface designers like, not to turn programmers into UI designers.

5/7/97: "Programmers build castles out of theorums. Every program is proof that certain input will produce certain output. We build more complex castles, and look for synergies that allow the generality we like and still be approachable in non-mathematical ways. In movies they call this suspension of disbelief. In programming we call it the user interface."

Kate Adams is back. What a relief!

Reuters: Nixon Watergate Tapes Go on Sale. "For $18 each, the public can now buy two dozen 30-minute cassettes of President Richard Nixon's conversations during the Watergate scandal, which led to his resignation in 1974."

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has a Davos site too. They're also providing free Internet workstations. This could come in handy!

Michael Shrage: "As men age, they lose their brain cells at rates up to three times faster than women. Then again, men typically have more brain cells to lose." I didn't know that!

Today's technical project is a new verb, op.getSubOutline, a necessary component for pikeRenderer, which is a descendent of MORE's Rules feature, but for HTML. And instead of using a fancy dialog to specify rules, we use XML.

Andre Radke has a new Manila weblog called Spicy Noodles. Andre is a UserLander from Germany. Brent and I have been on his case to start a weblog. At last week's onsite meeting we had Chinese food at Jing Jing in Palo Alto. Our favorite dish was Dan Dan noodles, a Chinese noodle dish with a spicy peanut sauce. Everytime I ran into Andre in the hall I'd exclaim Spicy Noodles! Andre laughs. He's normally very quiet. So that's how this site came to be called Spicy Noodles.

For our users it's very good that Andre has a weblog. He does much of the Frontier kernel coding. Experience has shown that the better the kernel is connected to what users are doing the happier the users are (and presumably the kernel too).

I bet there are some spicy noodles in this picture.

More news from Germany. A group of new Frontier developers is working on a chat server. Out of this I hope we get a simple XML-RPC interface for chat. This will connect up with Pike, our web outliner that's in very active development now. Earlier this week we put in a feature that allows scripts to catch the Return key. This is a central feature for turning Pike into a chat client. With a good XML-RPC interface we should be able to make it work with any openly specified chat interface.

Cold Fusion 101 is a newbies site for Allaire's Cold Fusion.

MSNBC: "The Transmeta people were enthusiastic about all of their accomplishments, but were somewhat obnoxious when it came to questions from the press about all the secrecy over the past four years. They appeared to be very proud of the fact that they were able to manipulate reporters trying to gather facts for their readers by telling them lies to throw everyone off track."

Perhaps predictably, some people are taking my comment about Julie McCarthy personally. One writer thinks that I think (oops) that the only thing bad about yesterday's ETP crash is that a note from a celebrity was lost. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was an example to show anyone who's feeling pain that I share it in a personal way. My hope is to attract creative people who are pleased with a free service, and mature enough to know that it's just a computer at the other end of the line, with all the imperfections and frailties that computers have. It must be tempting to conclude that a flaw in the computer is a flaw in Dave. If you want to be friends, take care of that on your own. No need to share that vision with me. Thanks.