Monday, February 14, 2000

The PC Forum web applications panel is shaping up nicely. Confirmed presenters, so far: Evan Williams of Pyra, Peter Miller of 1010data.com, Dan Bricklin of Trellix, Steve Guttman of HalfBrain, Ken Rhie of ThinkFree.

Reminder, tomorrow is the last day for submitting proposals for talks at the WWW9 Distributed Computing Track on Developer Day.

Jon Udell on Zope and XML.

In a truly civilized world, everyone would be issued one of these at birth too.

It wouldn't surprise me if emoonshine mcmanmon gets 18,000 responses to this posting.

Jason Levine: IIS 5.0 and Frontier. "IIS 5.0 has a new feature named socket pooling which it uses on machines which have multiple IP addresses. Essentially, when socket pooling is turned on, IIS will grab every IP address on the machine, even if it is explicitly configured to not use one or more of those addresses."

I can't tell you how much I wish I was going to SXSW. Look at the schedule. Damn! There are so many people we work with there, I'd love to be able to show them Pike and Manila working together. Unfortunately I can't be in two places at once. I *have* to be at Esther's on Tuesday.

Survey: Are you going to SXSW?

Steve Burkett is looking for an XML-RPC client-server in C++ using Winsock.

From the I'll-Show-You-Mine Department. Here are four UserLand servers, from left to right, Superhonker (main membership machine, xml-rpc.com, www.userland.com), Subhonker1 (editthispage.com, weblogs.userland.com), Subhonker2 (weblogs.com, my.userland.com, mail services) and Subhonker3 (mostly unused).

A second picture shows Nirvana (discuss.userland.com, mailtothefuture.com, lots of random stuff) and the Qube (static.userland.com).

DavosNewbies: "The Berne Declaration is an NGO group that, among other activities, has chosen to monitor the World Economic Forum."

Dave Galbraith of Moreover.Com has a proposal for WWW9.

Moving day for My.UserLand. It'll automatically redirect to a temporary URL until the migration is complete. Don't bookmark the test URL, it'll eventually break. Anyway, My.UserLand is now running on the same machine as Weblogs.Com (Subhonker2) and using the low-tech affiliate2.root. It also seems quite a bit faster. We're pulling apps off the ancient and creaky Nirvana, the old home of My.UserLand, which has served us well, but is no longer running the latest and greatest system software. Onward!

BTW, this change seems to have made discuss.userland.com faster and more reliable too.

Mike Jamieson has Illustrator working with SVG.

Following up on CoSource.Com, launched in December. A list of completed projects. Total money raised: $59,179.00.

CoSource.Com is a My.UserLand channel.

Today's creek pictures. The creek is up, but it's not at it's high point, I'd say it's been four or five feet higher in the last 24 hours. A little bit of sunshine is improving the light, so there may be more interesting pictures to take.

SlashDot calls Jack Valenti an "aging baby-boomer", but sheeez, I'm an aging baby-boomer, Valenti is 78 years old, which makes him seven years older than my father.

The Flounder: "I can't find a program that has even the capabilities of something like AppleWorks."

NY Times: "Computers used to be fun."

Another whacky idea for a multimedia startup. "Armed only with edible food, the winning team gets six shots (one per member) at various bonus prizes."

Look at how cute Sheila Simmons is. (Brent is in the background in this pic.) Check out them eyebrows! Right on.

CNNfn on IPO quality: "Buy.com last week performed well, but Pets.com drew little investor interest." I feel vindicated! At a Christmas party in San Francisco last year, I happened across one of the founders of Pets.Com, gloating about how much money he was going to make from their IPO. I hate this attitude. What happened to Big Ideas? The whole party was a gloat-fest, I left early. Glad to see the market has a mechanism for detecting this kind of crap.

Jeff Cheney: "OK, enough mocking Jason Snell. It's no fun because it's too easy."

Jason Snell: "Dave, you misunderstand my point."

While WR Hambrecht has no pending OpenIPOs, they have done a large number of private investments, and presumably have shared stock with accredited investors. Are they priming the pump? Will some or all of these companies go public through the OpenIPO process?

Is it just me or is everything about Real.Com broken? A few weeks ago my RealPlayer stopped working. Missing codec. Go to the site and get a new player. Where's the free one? After four visits I finally found it. Nice new look. But it doesn't work! Silence every time I play something. On screen everything happens, buffering, playing, blah blah, but no sound comes out of the sound system.

Michael Delehanty, a long-ago Apple IIe ThinkTank user, found outliners.com and needs some help.

BTW, in retrospect, the Apple IIe was the ultimate Apple II. I have fond memories of that machine. It fixed all the major problems with the original 40-column Apple II, without introducing a lot of extra stuff as the Apple III and the IIc did. Those were confusing products that didn't go anywhere the developers wanted to go. (The Apple III was a troubled platform from Day One, with hardware problems and a largely incompatible OS, I'm sure Dan Bricklin could tell you stories about VisiCalc on the III.)

The IIc and the GS came after the Mac, which most developers switched to, including me. When the IIe came out Apple was still the leader in the PC world, and they correctly appraised their market and gave them what they wanted. They had too many OSes in those days, a problem that Apple seems to be re-creating now. (BTW, reading some of the sites, there's a common misunderstanding. ProDOS and the IIe were separate things. And everyone forgets the UCSD P-System, which was the only rational Apple II OS, imho.)

So if Apple had too many OSes, how many is the right number? My first answer was one, but then I realized that companies like Red Hat, Cobalt and VA, which ultimately may be competitors of Apple's, have zero. I like the feel of that.

Market caps: Apple, $17.6B; Red Hat, $12.6B.

Megnut beat me on this one. She says: "Luckily we have a new tee vee here at the office so I didn't miss the Simpsons. But right as Maude's funeral started, there was an emergency broadcast interruption and for about two minutes (well it seemed that long at least) they babbled on and on about flooding near Guerneville. Bummer because it seemed like it was a pretty funny episode."

Right on Meg. The Simpsons "camera" was reviewing the characters who had died on previous episodes, Grandpa's girlfriend, the hapless guy who did everything right, Grimey. People who die on The Simpsons do it in a funny way! Reverend Lovejoy was just about to do Maude's eulogy when the bulletin came on.

But not that many people die on The Simpsons. Is it weird or what that Charles Shulz died on the day The Simpsons deal with death? (In case you haven't figured out the connection, The Simpsons are cartooons.)

Later today I'll have new pictures of the creek. It's way way up. I would have a picture of Dan-Dan noodles, but I forgot to bring my memory stick to Jing-Jing. Next time!

Red Herring's Tony Perkins was at Davos, and offers a clue why so many Europeans are fed up with the US. "Our strategy for Europe is: attack!" Oy!

Just when you thought it was safe to go outside.

One more time! How to tell if your ass is too small.