Sunday, February 13, 2000

This News.Com report offers an interesting theory why CNN looks good in Netscape but looks so poor in MSIE5. Here's the key quote: "CNN, for example, can create a CNN starter icon and a browser that is customized to work very well with CNN content." CNN and Netscape are the same company now.

Pet peeve re common misunderstanding of how UserLand works. From Montana News: "Maybe Brent can figure out how to make Manila sites SVG smart?" Arrrghh. Well, Brent does a lot of good work, but we're a team here at UserLand.

Reuters: Peanuts cartoonist Charles Shulz dies at 77. Sad!

I spent about an hour this morning creating my first SVG file using Mayura Draw 3.6. It was pretty painless, it worked as advertised. Yahoo!

A roadmap for community SVG exploration. Build the equivalent of the Macintosh Dialog Manager in JavaScript by walking a hinted SVG structure thru DOM, with MacBird as the design tool. MacBird must be modified to spit out SVG documents with the necessary JavaScript code to run the dialogs. Of course MacBird is open source, and SVG is an open spec.

Here's a simple way to get started down this road. Use Mayura Draw to create an SVG document that looks like this.

Digital Applications: SVG2PDF. Guess what it does?

The curmudgeon who teaches statistics remembers the 1969 NY Mets from a Cubs' perspective. That is, losing.

Now let's engage in a brief conversation about this. Cubs fans were pretty cool. Unlike Shea Stadium, Wrigley Field had outfield bleachers. That meant that most home runs were caught by fans, at Shea very few were (only a few seats are in fair territory). When the opposing team hit a home run, the tradition at Wrigley Field was to the throw ball back, as if rejecting the home run, saying it's not worthy of the respect of Chicago fans. I believe if we had more fair seats at Shea we would have come up with as creative a response.

What got this baseball thing going? Spring training starts today for the Cubs. There are two leagues, the cactus league and the grapefruit league. One plays in Arizona and the other in Florida.

Interesting bit of synchronicity. The San Francisco Giants train in Scottsdale, which is also the location of PC Forum. There are three games scheduled in Scottsdale during the conference. The Giants play Arizona, Oakland and Anaheim on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, all games are at 1:05PM.

When the Internet is really humming, someone in Scottsdale will head over to the stadium with a digital camera and upload five or six photos onto their Manila site and send me a pointer.

Changes to the Manila-RPC interface support custody and saving the state of editing windows.

WWW9: Frank Leahy proposes to talk about Wired's use of XML in distributed applications of their HotBot search engine.

WWW9: Jim Flanagan proposes to talk about authenticated XML-RPC.

Qube Quorner: Week in Review.

Carpe Dieum: -13 degrees F in North Dakota. Brrr.

Happy 30th birthday to Noah Glass!

Last night at Noah's birthday party I heard that there was discussion about Davos on ETP sites, I was so busy at Davos that I couldn't tune in. Curious, I decided to go look for it, starting in Garret's discussion group. Pointers appreciated. I understand that Davos happened on the Web too. I missed this, I want to catch up.