Tuesday, February 08, 2000

This is just a test. Please pay no attention to this, as I am demonstrating Manila to the people of Boston.

Umberto Eco from Davos: Visions of the Future. "Fraternity will, of course, survive as a metaphor, but it will be difficult to explain to a child what it means to love someone like a sister or a brother."

According to Peter Dyson, an editor of the Seybold Report, Macs have CPU serial numbers. "I am a beta user for Adobe PDF Merchant, they encrypt the file and the decryption key requires your disk serial number or CPU serial number." There was a big flap when Intel announced that they were adding serial numbers to Pentiums. "Bogus," says Dyson.

Nick Beadman: "I am pretty sure that there is no serial number in the PowerPC. What I think Adobe are using is the Ethernet Hardware Address which every PowerMac has thanks to built in Ethernet networking."

John Dvorak: The Cross-Site Scripting Scam.

A new editor at MacWEEK. Welcome!

NetDyslexia: How to Make a Popular Weblog.

Susan Kitchens is putting out fires.

A discussion on utok.com on Hack-The-Planet.

They're still working out glitches in their publishing system at Infoworld.Com. Yes, there was a denial of service attack against Yahoo, but one report is enough.

Jakob Nielsen: Novice vs. Expert Users.

Dan Bricklin: "This morning, Trellix Corporation, the company I founded and for which I am CTO, will announce that we will be offering a browser-based web site publishing tool and a private label hosting service. There will be a smooth integration path for moving sites made with the browser-based tool, called Trellix Web Express, to our client-based Trellix Web. I'm demoing an early version of Trellix Web Express at the Demo 2000 conference this morning." Rock and roll!

This is good news for Manila users, and not terrible news for UserLand. Competition will help define a market. The magazines need products to compare. However, the arrival of competition from a fine company like Trellix underscores the need for file-format compatibility, in the age of the web, this is expressed in terms of an XML-RPC interface. We have already specified an interface that allows you to move content in and out of Manila sites. Before you use Trellix's service, be sure they provide a similar interface, even better, one that's compatible with Manila. This would be a good question to ask if it isn't addressed in Dan's demo at Demo.

NewsTracker query for product announcements from Demo.

TrellixWeb Express press release.

I got an email this morning from Amazon. My response is at the end.

"Ask not what the Internet can do for you. Ask what you can do for the Internet."