Wednesday, March 01, 2000

I had an interesting day today at XTech in San Jose. Went to a BOF meeting held by W3C to talk about distributed computing protocols. It looks like Microsoft wants to turn SOAP over to W3C, and it also appears that W3C wants to re-work the whole thing! Wow. Here we go again. Tomorrow I'm giving the morning keynote. I think I'm going to ask for support for XML-RPC and ask that whatever W3C et al come up with be backward-compatible. I have some thinking to do tonight.

I also had lunch with Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at Il Fornaio in San Jose. While we were having lunch Tim got a phone call from Jeff Bezos! They had a long talk. Afterwards Tim said he now understands why Amazon is doing what they're doing. I said I'm looking forward to reading his report.

BTW, I got a picture of Tim O'Reilly talking with Jeff Bezos.

I met Edd Dumbill, who works at XML.COM, does the xmlhack weblog.

Here's the full set of pics from XTech, including three pictures of Don Box, the Microsoft SOAP guys and Eric Prud'hommeaux of W3C.

Web Techniques: Blowing XML Bubbles.

News.Com: Microsoft takes aim at Linux with reworked system. "Intel today said it will use Microsoft's reworked operating system--now called Windows for Express Networks--in a server appliance aimed at helping small businesses network their computers."

News.Com: Palm division hit with patent suit.

Paul Barton-Davis: "As one of the founding programmers at Amazon.com, I was very dismayed to learn of the company's legal attempts to enforce its 1-Click patent."

Danny Goodman: "I want to make very clear that I am not an affiliate with Amazon or any other bookseller. In the book info areas on my Web site, there are links to the pages of several booksellers directly to my titles. None of those links include those 'buried' affiliate codes in the URL."

Interesting! It's possible to use a member profile page on Amazon to state your position on Web patents. I took a screen shot of the page in case Amazon changes its mind.

Jeff Bezos has a member page and a wish list. Let's buy him something nice when he swears off patent abuse.

Even more interesting.. There are lots of comments about patent abuse on the Amazon discussion board. The Web Speaks!

On March 25 we'll have a meeting of people who use Manila, or who develop with Frontier, and their friends, and other people who participate in UserLand.Com.

Manila Newbies: The Manila Tip Sheet.

Last night we installed two optimizations on the server that's running EditThisPage.Com.

Linux Newbies: Understanding the RPM.

Luca Bolognese: XML as a bridge between client and server.

IBM: XML and Scripting in Perl.

Weblogs.Com: "I'm looking for ideas for taglines."

Jodi Mardesich: Why I'm Joining a Startup.