Thursday, March 23, 2000

We made some changes to the Manila-RPC spec as we zero in on the first beta of Pike.

BTW, we will also release Frontier 6.2b1 on Saturday, Murphy and PacBell-willing. Your humble servant.

I have a wish list item for people who like to play with PhotoShop. Remember those THINK signs that IBM used to give to all its employees. I want one of those, but for the web. It was one of the things I liked best about IBM (I was an IBM kid, my dad worked in Armonk. Did I say that before?) Any company that sent that message to all their employees had something good going, Dave The Kid used to think. There's that word again!

One of my best products ever was called ThinkTank. Pike of course, is very much like ThinkTank, but it's for networked writing. We used to "hack culture" as Doc says Chris Locke does. I wanted an IBM-style sign back then too, but instead of saying "think" it would have said "tank".

My ad guy for ThinkTank was Dave Carlick, who went on to do Netscape's first website, and founded the now notorious DoubleClick. His slogan for ThinkTank was Cogitank Ergo Sum, loosely translated to "I ThinkTank therefore I am."

Eric Soroos is coming down from Seattle. This will be the gathering of the millennium. Can you believe I've already forgotten how to spell millennium??

Making up for lost time on the Pike beta release. Working on taglines. Four so far:

• Free for everyone.
• Works with Manila.
• Windows/Mac.
• The 1st Web outliner.

Here's how it all comes together (at least in my mind):

When was the last time you listened to a song that used to be a favorite 25 years ago? Meeting Across the River, from Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run album, just gave me the chills, like a time capsule. It used to define, in a way, what it meant for me to be a man, or more accurately, a developing man. Living at the edge of the law (if we blow this one they ain't gonn be lookin for just me this time) he has time to express his love for his brother (Change your shirt, cause tonight we got style).

"But Eddie, man, she don't understand, there's two grand practically sitting here in my pocket."

BrentNut: "Hey -- I'm editing this page in an outliner!" No doubt the first of many such exclamations.

Also note the weird URL on Brent's page. How did that happen??

We like to stay current on what Microsoft is doing in network systems, web user interfaces, XML, distributed computing, standards, OSes. For the last six months or so, we have been in the wrong PR flow, getting briefed on consumer stuff, MSN, Radio Shack, etc and not being briefed or included in important (to us) rollouts in XML, operating systems and browsers. Any Microsoft marketing/PR people tuned in? I have tried every other means to get this corrected. I'm sure it's just an administrative thing.

O'Reilly's Meerkat is an "open wire service". It's kind of hard to find the actual Meerkat page on O'Reilly. Comparable to My.UserLand, they wrote their own aggregator that reads (a subset of?) the same files My.UserLand reads.

Reuters: Cisco Briefly Tops Microsoft in Value.

7/9/96: Cisco Systems. "The two companies are like Amtraks on a collision course. Why? Simple. Cisco makes software for networking, and wants to make tools for content. Microsoft makes tools for content and wants to make software for networking."

New features in changes.xml on Weblogs.Com.

Peter Miller: Representing Tables in XML-RPC.

Two new weblogs: Digital Photography and AppleScript.

"Gee it's great to be back home!"

Susan Kitchens: "Glad the network is fixed!"

Garret Vreeland: "Hey, we're alive again!"

Jeff Cheney: "Wow! I didn't really know how much I love EditThisPage until I had to live without it for a day."

Three mini-outages this morning, 10, 20 and 30 minutes, during which there were no hits on the servers, and I couldn't get out. They're like aftershocks of earthquakes. I totally don't have my sea-legs now.

Linux1 and the Honkers: The California LAN gets bigger. Now there's a Linux machine in the cluster, and the new 700 Mhz Subhonker1 is added to the mix, along with a MacUser Eddy award for Frontier 2.0.

Outage Images: "While we were cooling our heels waiting for the Internet Gods at PacBell to give us juice, I played with pictures on my laptop, reviewing unpublished pics, and coming up with this random selection which I call Outage Images."

Press release: Cobalt to Acquire Chili!Soft. "Chili!Soft enables developers to use Microsoft tools to create dynamic Web pages."

According to Jean-Paul Smets, the European Patent Office has granted Amazon a patent for 1-Click.

One of our longest and most frustrating outages is over. Our link through Conxion went down, the outside world couldn't access any of the servers that are on our California LAN, including EditThisPage.Com and Weblogs.Com. The outage was in PacBell, and you gotta know this, Conxion came through in unbelievable form. At times I couldn't believe the resources that were applied to getting us back on the air. We're going to send flowers to Conxion today for performance above and beyond the call of duty, particularly Steve Martin, who outlasted all of us, he arrived at 5:30AM yesterday, and he was still here when Bierman and I left at about 10PM. Brent stayed up with Steve, and explains the resolution.

The outage also meant that we couldn't get out, and it couldn't have come at a worse time, because everyone was here for our onsite in preparation for the ManilaPalooza meeting on Saturday. Or maybe it was for the best. Instead of working at a breakneck pace, we had to slow down. Both Brent and Andre were able to get development done, although it was difficult to do without a net connection, it was possible.

As noted below, the hardware upgrade for EditThisPage.Com went smoothly, it took 38 minutes, and while the upgrade was happening Murphy tripped the wire at PacBell and knocked us off the air. We took the unusual outage as an opportunity to do software upgrades on most of our servers, and to add 256MB of RAM to Subhonker2, the machine that runs Weblogs.Com, so it should be faster now too. I'm looking for signs of problems related to all the upgrading that happened yesterday, and there may be a problem with static pictures on ETP, but otherwise all looks good. Still probing.

From the I Learned Something New Department. Yesterday Steve Martin was talking about Blue Screens of Death on Windows NT. I told him that in three years of running as many as five NT systems I had seen only one blue screen. He told me that that was quite good, he sees lots more of them. Bierman then explained that Microsoft's server software, Back Office, SQL Server, Active Server Pages, etc, tends to use undocumented system calls to get closer to the hardware, and that's why NT gets the rep for bluescreening. My servers don't do this because Frontier plays by the rules, and when there are problems it doesn't bring the OS down.

This makes the Cobalt acquisition of Chili!Soft that much more interesting. I assume that their ASP-compatible runtime doesn't do the BSOD thing. Is that true? Luke?