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I've been following the travails of Evan Williams in his dark basement office, and the story just keeps getting stranger and more interesting by the minute. Murphy is on his tail. On Thursday night he broke a friend's nose, by accident of course. If his website were a novel I'd be waiting with bated breath for the next chapter. Incredible story. Doc: "If it weren't for the love, we wouldn't be here." John Markoff: "While each company preaches commitment to so-called open computing standards, all the approaches have essentially proved to be calculated efforts to guide customers toward proprietary software development platforms that would give the company a competitive advantage." Right on. A new look for My Handsome Radio Blog. WebReference: RSS Viewer Applet. I tried it with my Grateful Dead channel, but it didn't work. It was looking for localhost. Why? How could that work. I have no idea. Back to work. Apache Toolbox has a lot of Apache bits integrated making it easier to get a full-featured Apache server running. Good idea! I just found out about GreyMatter. Interesting! Damn, as if we didn't have enough to worry about, now someone could hijack the whole damned planet. A great plot for a new Bond movie, eh? I wish I had thought to grab this domain. What is .NET?  Great stuff from the new dotnet discussion group.. Ted Shelton: "Microsoft needed a modern application architecture." Loren Lovhaug: "Like everyone else I know who is playing with this stuff I am both loving it and swearing at it all the time." Josh Allen: "Asking questions that don't have any right answer is a traditional part of the interview process at Microsoft." My opinion: SOAP celebrates diversity. CLR wants to be the universal scripting environment. CLR and its tools will define what it means to be a Microsoft developer. Sun has the same philosophy. Both want to capture, hold and define developers. The Internet offered us freedom. I'd rather be an Internet developer. Morality plays BTW, the open source community, to the extent that it exists and can speak for itself and have strategies, has a huge opportunity to embrace diversity. But the open source philosophy has been even less tolerant than Microsoft and Sun. Either you bathe in their bathtub with the plug in, or you're the devil. It's a highly moral thing. At least Sun and Microsoft have the modesty or good sense to not make it that religious, although at times Sun does go pretty overboard, hey Microsoft does too. Ask Eric Raymond if you don't believe me.  What is Apache? Thinking out loud here (always). I'd like to put SOAP interface under Apache. I spoke with Brian Behlendorf about this at a party in December in Menlo Park. Both Radio and Apache support SOAP. It should be possible to add onto both server environments without adopting either's extensibility technology. Just SOAP and XML-RPC should be all that's required. It seems that Eric Kidd's XML-RPC-in-C group could take a leadership position here. Define a CGI interface that just depends on XML-RPC. Wouldn't that be cool? We share plug-ins. Hah. I love it. This is a little-guy strategy. I love XML because everyone seems to agree on it and it forces open the doors. That makes it safe to be a little one. Which is how I like to be, I'd never fit in at a big company or in a big open source project. I do integrated user-interface-oriented software, not much room for compromise. I'm one of the last of a dying breed. I don't think there are too many at Microsoft, and the open source community doesn't attract too many. I work on the the kinds of stuff that Tog writes about. The Qube designers are my heroes. Just a handful of people do what I do, or so it seems. I'd like to revitalize this art, so what we learned in the 80s isn't forgotten forever. There *was* a time when independent developers were celebrated, but not today. Unless you've raised $50 million it's hard to get the press to believe. Final note in this thread. If you didn't read yesterday's DaveNet, please do. The bathtub-plug metaphor is really working. See SOAP for what it is, a technology that undermines all kinds of lock-in. I know I know Most open source developers are cool people. And if I want to avoid flames I should never even mention the term. It's funny, many reporters feel the same way. Don't write about me. Mac people too. I should make a list of all the things I'm not supposed to have an opinion about and put that up on my website. Then of course I would be writing about those things, so I'd get flamed for that too. The only way to write for the Web is to not take all this too seriously. In a few years we'll all be dead. The universe will go on. It's even worse. California is running out of energy. The rain forests are being destroyed. Patents are destroying intellectual freedom. Dubya is president of the United States. AIDS, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, earthquakes and hurricanes. What are you going to do about it? Do your part to make the world a better, happier more fun place, and I'll do the same. SoapWare.Org Let me know if you have a SOAP project that you'd like put into the soapware.org domain. I'd love it if it became something of an organizer for an independent SOAP development community. Hey for that matter, let me know if you'd like an xml-rpc.com domain. We could open up free hosting there too. The cool thing about these sites is that they have SOAP and XML-RPC interfaces. That's something even SourceForge doesn't have, yet. Blogging center Boston Globe: "Another 'blogging center is Userland.Com, a technology and publishing company 'focused on the Web as a writing environment and a medium of high-integrity journalism.' UserLand is similar in many respects to Blogger: It's a quirky collection of tools, advice, and experimentation. This visitor felt as if he stumbled into the back door to a slightly disorganized laboratory crammed with projects: ambitious, half-baked, and abstruse. Kind of like the weblogs themselves." It's true of course, our home page is terribly out of date. We focus on the experiments, and forget to pop up to the top level when they become commercial, before responding to the next opportunity or emergency. But what about the Boston Globe? It's quirky and sloppy too (look at the layout on that article). I got the link from Evan, but his link didn't work, so I used their search engine, which found it, but it's today's article, so why did the link go bad? In other words Weblogs and the Web are quirky. And as the unnamed author (another quirk!) says in his closer, may they always be so. Remember.. "It's even worse than it appears." 
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