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George Harrison dead at 58. BBC, AP, MSNBC, NYT. Today's song: "All things must pass." Lots of Harrison links and pics on today's BookNotes. Drop the SOAP 1.0, "A bunch of simple AppleScripts for Mac OS X 10.1 and higher that use SOAP/XML-RPC web services." InfoWorld: Intel Hops in the Trunk. Maybe they want to hop into one of these too. Oh the power of weblogs. Entertainment Weekly ran a poll of most popular actors, and Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek (not to be confused with Wesley Felter), was a top vote-getter. Why? He's got a blog, of course. And if you haven't heard yet, so does Ru Paul. Who's next? AP: "A senior Republican senator and frequent Microsoft critic has asked the Justice Department detailed questions about the government's antitrust settlement with the software giant." Internet.Com: "A Judge for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California Friday sided with bondholders of Excite@Home, forcing the company to block service to some 4.1 million users worldwide." Bill Gates has done it all, now that he's been Scobelized. Harrumph: "Really clean people bathe." Evan Williams has had it with Exodus. It's a relief to find out that Dori does not have cancer. Kevin Altis: Videogame consoles are the PC of the future. The Yaysoft weblog directory is getting new features all the time. Nice work. Jihaddict: "A Skewed View of the War on Terrorism." Russell Letson: Taxonomies Put Content in Context. NY Times: Deal for Exodus Said to Be Near. I'm getting sick. Cough, runny nose, sneezing, aches and pains. I'm going to work anyway, but I would be surprised if my thinking is very clear today. Drinking coffee. Fixing bugs and testing Weblogs.Com. There was some breakage in the last few iterations. Serves me right for thinking it's "easy" to improve a deployed app. It never is. Would someone like to manage a directory of apps that are not open source and do not come from Microsoft? (Some have sent mail asking how to do it. Put up a web page and list all the products that are not open source and do not come from Microsoft. Categorize. Link to their sites so people can find out more. This is invisible software, to many. The list will be huge. Like this or this.)
Paul Snively makes C++ code look pretty in Manila. MacFixit cooperates with Apple. Now Apple's going to have to ask Slashdot to cooperate too. Congratulations to Joel Spolsky and Fog Creek Software on shipping CityDesk. Much luck and mazel tov. News.Com: "A Dutch court on Thursday ordered file-swapping software maker Kazaa to prevent people using its product from engaging in copyright infringement or face thousands of dollars in fines." On the verge of disappearing: Excite@Home. Lots of users wondering how they're going to connect. Even businesses are scrambling. Another company that's in deep ca-ca is Enron, which is slightly far afield of our usual area of courage, at first glance, but they were as much a product of the dotcom disaster as Excite@Home. Brent Simmons: "I’m a big fan of usability guru Jakob Nielsen—but I don’t go to his site very often because I find it hard to use." John Robb: K-Logs and Personal Branding. Kevin Werbach: "The rise of WiFi shows the power of open spectrum." NY Times: "Data to be released next week is expected to show that the number of people exchanging music simultaneously on the most popular free service, a network called Fast Track, which is based in Amsterdam, now exceeds the use of Napster at its peak." Wired: "Diane Sawyer, host of ABC's Good Morning America, announced that her show will soon reveal the secret invention -- rumored to be a super-efficient personal scooter -- that tech heavies like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos said could possibly change the world." One year ago today: "What if VCs were mensches?" Good morning sports fans. What a morning. Power outage last night. My desktop computer doesn't like it when it's shut down by power going off. Outlook Express refuses to read my inbox. The usual cure, restarting the computer until it works didn't work after 12 restarts. Is this any way to run an Internet? Meanwhile Microsoft promises everything will get better when they rewrite all the software and stuff me in a locked trunk. Why don't I believe that? MS must wonder why they get the blame for the Internet not working. Stop and think about that next time you wipe out the competition. That's the downside of competing so viciously. When no one is left standing you get the blame. Better to invest in competitive markets. Then you can always point the finger at the other guy. Anyway, I'm very glad to be back online. The power went out during Law & Order. Just when the juicy black actress admitted to killing the guy who copped an unwelcome feel. She says "Does that mean I'm going to jail?" Boom, out goes the power. Not even a flicker. One more TV comment. During a commercial (which I still let play sometimes even though I have a TiVO) in the kitchen I hear some lovely music from the TV in the other room. "What is that?" I think to myself and listen for a product name. No name. Go back and rewind, and listen again. Arrrgh. It's the music for Windows XP. You gotta give Microsoft this much, whoever does their ads really knows how to pick the tunes. Microsoft spokesperson: "Madonna, Ray of Light."
Testing 1-2-3. Finishing up work on some new features for Weblogs.Com. Wish me luck! The features are.. Ta-dahh. Weblogs.Com is becoming RSS-aware and Europe-aware. And it has an architecture that supports other kinds of awareness. Here it is.. Beta feature: Weblogs.Com Communities. "First, up-front, I want to be clear, this is a beta feature. It almost certainly doesn't work. But I think it does. So we will spend the next days and weeks proving that I'm wrong." Aaron Cope already supports the new features from Perl. That was fast! Matthew Bean is doing a blog portal based on the Weblogs.Com changes.xml feed. This is so cool, I can't tell you. It's exactly what I wished for. More creative repurposing of machine-generated XML data. Seth Dillingham, one of the best developers in the Frontier community, is looking for work. I wish we had the money to hire him, but if you're looking for someone who knows how to make the object database, CMS, and HTTP server really work, Seth would be a good guy to hire. It's tough out there right now. I want to get the lights back on. In this economy I bet some people would appreciate that. Jeff Walsh reports he's having trouble getting through to Amazon.Com this morning. I'm getting through OK. This may be noteworthy too -- I couldn't get through to News.Com earlier, now it's working again. Viewing the Internet from all our different points of view yields different results. Some people say okay, and I say OK. Wonder if I should switch. Let's give it a try. Okay. This page lists the Top 100 most-subscribed-to news feeds among the Radio 7.1 beta testers. It's also available in OPML. Dan Mitchell is using Radio 7.1 on Mac OS X. Of course now that we're moving, the critics section is getting revved up too. What can you do about it, except keep moving. It's rough out there. If they published software and supported users, they'd probably not be so quick to call us bad names. Whatever. Have a nice day. Kimbro Staken: "The problem I have with the current Hailstorm idea comes down to one thing, Microsoft." Now a report from the NY Times that Microsoft has made a move toward settling with the European antitrust commission. The MS spokesperson says they're commited to interop. That and fifty cents used to get you on the subway. Steve Jobs says it's not fair to punish Apple for MS's antitrust violations. Bewildered, Web developers are left out of the discussion entirely and wonder if the government decision-makers are incredibly naive; or if there are deals being made under the table. In astrophysics we know that black holes exist even if we can't see them. One-sided deals against the public interest are a lot like black holes. No, I don't think they're stupid, but they must think we are. Life in suburbia. No coffee. OK, write a few notes then go out and get some. Ooops. Car battery is dead. Left the car door open. Wait an hour and pay $60. Work without coffee? My brain says no.
Brrrrrrrr. Collllllld. Brrrrrr. Hey check this out. Interoperating Web Services. And no BigCo's. See, developers can work together. Hah. Glenn Fleishman's notes from the 802.11b conference. Press release: "Meet Steve Muench, Product Manager, Lead XML Evangelist And Oracle Guru." I discovered a new flame redardant. It goes like this. "Another person who's smarter than I. What a relief to not have to be the smartest guy anymore. Dave" Hey there's some kind of virus running loose. I've gotten a dozen emails with big attachments this morning. The DoJ's favorite software company has something to do with this. When are they going to close the damned holes. Hey I'm in quite a mood this morning. On our internal workgroup I just called Radio 7.1 "a bitch with an attitude." I wasn't paying it a compliment. That's part of the We Make Shitty Software meme. One way to fix bugs is to see your software for what it truly is. The cool thing about software is that if you don't like the way it's treating you, it is possible to fix it. If only the same were true of people! Summary: We Make Bitchy Software. With attitude! One more thing. We Make Bitchy Software. And so do you! Hey Frontier is getting less bitchy. Check this out. Outliner buttons. These will prove quite useful in workgroup software. BTW, all the Frontier kernel improvements in 7.1 will also be in Radio. Reuters: "IBM and Vignette have packaged the key components to deliver a complete e-business infrastructure for rapid deployment of Vignette solutions at a lower cost of ownership." WSJ: "IronPort’s initial investors include Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, the chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively, of the free e-mail service Hotmail Corp., which Microsoft Corp. bought in 1998." Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist, offers post-dotcom lessons for entrepreneurs, but it would be more interesting if he could tell us what VCs learned from the excesses of the dotcom gorging, which they led. The interesting thing about VCs is that they seem to think they are the fountain of all knowledge. Well, I suppose many of us suffer from that affliction too. "Seem to think" --> a sign of weak philosophy. Three years ago, AOL's market cap was $43 billion. Today, it's $165 billion. Yahoo was $21B, today it's $10B. Amazon was $11B, now it's $4B. Here's an interesting game to play while watching reports on TV about the war in Afghanistan. Count the number of times they say "on the ground." You might be amazed.
The rollup of Frontier 7.1 continues. Today, the changes in Manila for 7.1. Manila, as you may know, is our browser-based content management system. A new feature for Manila, released today, should make Bryan Bell happy. Susan Kitchens: Interview with Taliban Singles Online image creator. Tim O'Reilly: "Next week, on December 3 and 4, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is hosting a symposium to honor the ten year anniversary of the web in the US." The Weekly Standard: "Anyone with an average IQ and an Internet connection can perform the kind of legal research necessary to reach a minimally creditable judgment about the constitutional character of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism campaign. But a job like this takes more time and mental effort than most of us prefer to expend. So we have come to depend on professional journalists and politicians to do the bulk of it for us. Which is fine -- as long as they're actually doing it." NY Times: "Librarians' assertion of the principle of confidentiality may seem trivial to some people compared with similar stands by, say, doctors or priests. But librarians take it very seriously — so seriously that in most libraries nowadays, once a book is returned, the record of who checked it out is expunged. Forty-eight states have laws that protect the privacy of library patrons." John Robb: Decentralized Teams and K-Logs. Doug is doing a review of the docs for Tools. We've got to get it all to come together for the release of both 7.1's. NY Times: "The idea behind NetGuard is to create a national volunteer force, drawn initially from the nation's top high-technology concerns, that could mobilize quickly in the case of an emergency. Its role would be to repair downed communications systems, restore computer operations and create new systems to aid support and recovery efforts." News.Com: "With Google's new file-type search tool, a wide array of files formerly overlooked by basic search engine queries are now just a few clicks from the average surfer -- or the novice hacker." Demo. Alison: "You've always wanted to get into Alison's pants. Now you can do it from the convenience of your own room, through a novel web interface!" Screen shot. 802.11b coverage of the 802.11b conference, via 802.11b. Hey I thought of doing a press release announcing that XML-RPC and SOAP 1.1 work with 802.11b, but I guess everyone knows that, right? Does anyone do a press release when standards work as they're supposed to. I could write such a release. I'll give it a try. Here it is. It's funny! This morning I started a list of developers who create software that build on SOAP 1.1. If your company makes SOAP products, send me a pointer to your home page or (even better) a page that says what you're doing with SOAP. Thanks! Thanksgiving 2001 Welcome back. In case you missed it, I wrote a kickass Thanksgiving speech on Thursday morning. Let the spirit of thankfulness continue. Amy Wohl read my Thanksgiving speech. She says "And thank you, Dave, for sharing with us the gift of being able to so easily create weblogs and communicate our daily thoughts. A whole new experience and an increasingly addictive one." Some thanks that I overlooked in the piece. Thanks to Mike Donnelan for making me laugh. Every time I get the Windex to clean off the droplets of coffee on my monitor I think of Mike. Thanks to the readers of DaveNet and Scripting News for teaching me so much. Even though you're very modest, you are much smarter than I am. (Think about it. There's only one of me, and thousands of you. At best I am a stimulator and assimilator and integrator. I often take a contrarian view, but my grounding in this activity comes from the people who participate by reading and offering their own pov, respectfully of course.) One more thanks, and it wouldn't have fit into the piece because it was a Web Thanksgiving piece. Thanks to the universe for helping my dad survive cancer this year, and thanks to my family for the new closeness, friendliness and courage it has brought out in all of us. There's no time like now. Grouchy Are you grouchy this morning? I am. Judging from the number of flames that were waiting for me this morning I'd say a bunch of other people are too. Holidays can be rough. Coming back to work can be even rougher. Stallman's $830K The following is not a flame. Thanks for the nice note Richard, enjoy the money, have a nice Hanukkah. Gzai gzint. Richard Stallman: "$830K (actually a little less with current exchange rates) is the total sum. Since it is being shared by three people, I will get 1/3 of that -- after taxes, perhaps $170K. It's a nice sum of Hanukkah gelt, and will make a difference for me, but it wouldn't support an organization like Sourceforge for long."
Survey: "Are you smarter than me?" The early results are in, and it appears that, according to the readers, they are not smarter than me. Tim O'Reilly: "GPL is just as much an expression of power over users as any proprietary license." Hey Tim is partly right. In commercial software users run the show. I gotta sell some software to make payroll every damned month. In this stinking economy you can really feel that. That means the users have a lot of power. My company dies if they don't like what we do. It's probably a lot like selling books and conferences. Hey if people want to sort out where SOAP is going, check this out. The thing that's so cool about HTTP is that it added network programming to every programmer's toolkit. Right? Why didn't it happen before that? What is it about HTTP that made it work, when AppleTalk and various Microsoft-3COM-Novell-IBM, etc networking APIs didn't catch on? Here's the deal. HTTP had to be graspable by a single mind, because it was designed by a single mind. We all know that design-by-committee doesn't work, right? Did you ever read the Mythical Man-Month? If not, stop everything and read it right now. Why anyone expects committees to come up with something revolutionary is a total mystery to me. They only produce stuff that's incomprehensible. It's always the lone guy working in left field (actually under the bleachers) that creates the stuff that rocks the world, it's never a BigCo that does it, for good reasons -- they're total committees (and don't imagine that creating a committee of BigCo people solves any problems, it doesn't). You'd think people would have figured that out by now. BTW, there are people who want me to stop using the term BigCo. No way. It works. And it's catching on. I heard a guy at a BigCo complaining about how he worked at a BigCo. It's real. There really is a BigCo mentality. It even creeps into SmallCo's. Gotta love it, but be cursed if you live it. Not a good lifestyle if you want to do cool shit. Kevin Altis: "The cool thing about HTTP is that the protocol itself is printable ASCII so you can actually type it yourself with a telnet session and pretend to be a client or server and easily debug the contents of any headers without special tools." Amen. A personal note that only Frontier programmers will truly understand. I've been doing a lot of programming and writing in the last week, doing the Hypercard + MORE thing, and I'm liking it as much as I hoped I would. Now, when I get something nice working, or when the software does something nice that I wasn't expecting (it just happened) I exclaim something, it's uncontrollable, it just comes out of my mouth. The sound is this -- P'tahhhh (sounds like ta-dahhh, songlike). I didn't know where it came from, it just comes out of my mouth. Last night I figured it out while driving. Here's what it means. At the top of every script I write is this line. local (pta = html.getpagetableaddress ()) Mexican Slang 101: "Puta -- short for prostituta, this word means whore, but is more extensively used. This is what a Mexican would say if he hammered his finger." MSNBC has an article on the FBI's Magic Lantern project. In the middle of the night your computer checks with the FBI to find out if you're a terrorist, a web service, perhaps called fbi.amITerrorist (ipAddress). If it returns true then every keystroke you type on your computer is transmitted to the FBI including your encryption key. Voila. All of a sudden Carnivore works. John Robb thinks this capability will be pre-installed with Microsoft's OS. I think so too. How do I know? Well I don't know for sure, I don't have sources, but it must have been tempting for MS, too tempting. They get out of the antitrust conviction and in return they give the Feds the keys to all our computers. Not just in the US, of course, MS is a big seller in the international market. The workaround for terrorists (and independent developers) is to use an older or non-Microsoft OS, and get good antivirus software, not McAfee's -- to keep the Feds from going places they aren't supposed to be. It's so interesting. I get emails telling me to stop writing about this, stop writing about that, if I listened to all the emails I would have to just stop writing. Hey if you want me to stop writing, have a nice day and get a life. Yet another dotcom-is-dead article from the NY Times. This time it's really dead. I'm sure there will be another and another proclaiming that it's really really dead, and then for sure really really dead.
iBlog you blog we all blog for iBlog. George Ma, who I thanked in the Thanksgiving DaveNet, writes to say that he was frustrated in his evangelism on behalf of weblogs inside Apple. To George and all other natural-born technology evangelists, it's like being a Mets fan. You don't give up. You keep going. When someone says no, you just say OK, let me tell you again why you have to do this. No is an OK answer, it just means they want to hear the schpiel one more time before saying Yes. Now it's not like being a Red Sox fan. Mets fans know that some day we will win it all. Red Sox fans must know, by now, that it ain't gonna happen. Survey: "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?" Kevin Altis: "Regardless of what inroads Java may have made with backends and embedded into products like Oracle or a large variety of cross-platform non-GUI solutions, it still sucks for building GUI apps." Washington Post: "At least one antivirus software company, McAfee Corp., contacted the FBI on Wednesday to ensure its software wouldn't inadvertently detect the bureau's snooping software and alert a criminal suspect." Earlier this morning I rolled up a new version of the UserLand home page. It was a collaborative effort among many of the people at UserLand and now, perhaps for the first time, reflects how we really view ourselves. Is 13 years too long to wait for this? Apparently not. Steve GIllmor: "Java won." Steve's story is right on. Sun is clinging to an old view of the world, one where Java would become the Uber-Operating-System. If that vision had been realized, RMI would have been fine, because all code would be running in Java, a Java-to-Java wire would get you everywhere you want to go. Steve is right, Java did win, it's here to stay, lots of developers use and love it, but it didn't succeed at sucking all life in the developer world into its confines. Keeping the Java developers in the Sun box is not a good idea, because as some developers love Java, others love Perl, Python, etc. (The etc part is pretty big too.) Imho, Java will grow even more if developers can cross the bridges at will, without converting all their code. But this has always been the argument betw Sun and developers. Sun says "Convert all your code." Some developers did. Others didn't. That's the battleground that Sun and Microsoft have yet to conquer. In politics the Democrats and Republicans fight over the middle, in software politics, they ignore the power of the middle, for now. BBC: "Somalia's only internet company and a key telecoms business have been forced to close because the United States suspects them of terrorist links." We're having power-outage weather here. Wind is gusting, it's pouring rain. Nothing to do but wait for the lights to go out.
Good morning Workers of the Web -- Be patient! Charles Cooper: " It's not at all clear that SOAP is necessarily better than XML-RPC." Syndic8 has an XML-RPC interface. "Experimental," says Jeff. "Coool," says Dave. My seven-year old friend Patrick Scoble has a fine message of the day. "OOOOOOOH YAH!" Dave Polaschek has a Perl script that pings Weblogs.Com. Adam Kelsey's RSSBlog now pings Weblogs.Com. LA Times: "You could conclude that what the instant-messaging world really needs is a good, old-fashioned ruthless monopolist to impose a little order." Today is Friday, and you're using Internet Explorer. NY Times: "While bin Laden may have his finger on the trigger, his grandson might have his finger on the mouse."
Thank you for visiting Scripting News on Thanksgiving. Today's song: "So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth. And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth."
People of the Web: What are you thankful for? While we've been fussing over Radio 7.1 with our beta group, we've also been getting a new release of Frontier ready to go. It's also called 7.1. Here's a list of the new kernel features in Frontier 7.1. I think it's a really solid point-one release. Lots of new goodies, fixes, performance enhancements, for both Mac and Windows. BTW, all the new stuff from Love Manila Month is included in 7.1 as well. I don't have a list of those yet, but will have one shortly. Andrea: "I've passed my last exam. It went much, much better than math, so I'm happy now." $830K for Stallman Richard Stallman will have a Happy Thanksgiving this year. Do you work really hard to make good software? I do it every day. Does Stallman push the envelope? I haven't seen any evidence of that. Imho, the economy is still rewarding the wrong people. At one time if you pushed for excellence in software, you could build a nice business. I still believe that. But it's disheartening to see so much money go to support Stallman's theories. I believe this works against software breakthroughs, even software progress. Something to think about. Would the $830K have been better used to support SourceForge? Heh -- NTK, what? To Danny O'Brien, I see what you're doing. It's hard to argue with what I actually said, so you put words in my mouth and argue with that. Heh. Tricky. Anyway it's true that Stallman doesn't push the envelope. Maybe in the past he did, but now he's pushing something else. When I asked about Sourceforge, I was thinking about the users, the people who run free projects on Sourceforge. And if you think it's a profit-making enterprise, think again. Anyway it's hard to criticize one of the sacred cows of dotcom lunacy, but it used to be harder. Can open source compete? Yesterday I had a long phone talk with the leader of an open source project that's in a similar space to the work I've been calling Hypercard + MORE. Kevin Altis is the lead developer of the PythonCard project. We compared notes, I explained how I was using the outliner to design complete user interfaces, how that relates to OPML and explained how, if they want to, they can leverage our work. I liked talking with Kevin, he was part of the Very Early Web, formerly of Intel. He's an engineer and a straight shooter. What was most striking about the conversation was the reality of open source projects after the dust has settled, the hype has subsided, and the ESR theories debunked (fully). Open source projects are mail lists, not that different from W3C mail lists, or the Syndication or XML-RPC lists. They attract people who like to debate, few if any write code, and those who do are not appreciated or supported. We hit the same limits when we tried to do our development in the open. It wasn't until we focused on what we like to do (make cool software), and viewed users as feedback providers, not politicians or co-developers, that we were able to get back on track. Then I think of Stallman's $830K. Is anyone giving Altis money or other forms of appreciation for working his butt off? And that much money could fund a small software company like UserLand for two years. It's a lot of money. Perhaps this can be a theme for Thanksgiving 2001. Let's pay our respects to developers who work for not much love or money, to make the world work better through software. Bill Gates' Thanksgiving NY Times: "With this settlement, Microsoft gets off dirt-cheap," said Eugene Crew, a partner of Townsend & Townsend & Crew, a law firm in San Francisco, "and it helps Microsoft perpetuate its monopoly." I guess at Thanksgiving dinner, Bill Gates will be thankful that he was able to defeat the Web, bottle it and control it, stuff it in the trunk, lock it and throw away the key. Thanksgivings of the past
1995: "Please don't forget to thank yourself." 1996: "We have a positive heritage. A national sense of humor. We have a thumbs-up, can-do attitude. This holiday is the one where we choose to focus on our best. Everyone wins on Thanksgiving. We're grateful for what we have. We let go of our fear, we make love, and we look forward." 1997: "No one is less deserving on Thanksgiving. Rich people serve food to homeless people. We put aside our normal hierarchy and look for the person, not the bank account, house, car, education, spouses, children." 1998: "Properly done, Thanksgiving is also about giving people a break. Loosen the ties, cut some slack. No one's perfect, even on a major holiday. Of course. Especially not on a major holiday." 1999: "Newbies are people who are trying something new. So it seems pretty clear, if you have a choice, why not be a newbie?" 2000: "A reminder that the world, and the universe that contains it, while vast and mysterious, can also be a lot of fun."
Hypercard and the Web Following up on my Hypercard + MORE post, I didn't make the connection. This may take a few tries. What if you could design, create and edit a stack in a single outline? That's what I have working. Instead of the runtime being Hypercard, the runtime is the Web. The Web is a descendant of Hypercard but I've never seen a developer toolkit that made programming the Web as easy as it was to program in Hypercard. I am now there, after seven-plus years of work, I'm actually beyond it, imho the outliner and Hypercard should have been integrated in the 80s. We didn't have good interapplication communication, and while networking was ubiquitous on the early Mac (a major innovation), the programming APIs were horrendous. That's why Hypercard didn't become the Web.
(BTW, it's easy to forget that Macs of the mid-80s didn't have the memory, disk and CPU speed of today's honkers. Today I have lots of room to put a whole UI in a single outline, and the computer performs very well while I'm editing it. I doubt if this would have worked so well on a typical 80's computer.) Now of course Hypercard had something that the Web doesn't (and should). Lineto-moveto. I hate tables. If Microsoft ever wants to upgrade the Web instead of fighting it, let me know. Two big things to do: 1. Add vector graphics that are so simple that HTML coders can grok it in three screens. 2. Upgrade the text editor in the browser to at least be as good as WordPad. I would be happy to give Microsoft 1/4 of my time over the next year if they agreed to let me drive the development of these two things. No charge. Free as in it costs you nothing. More free advice Thoughts arising from the discussion re Jake's outliner story.. Some people take parenthood in stride, you can have a conversation with them without them insisting on being right about everything. These people make good friends, and I believe, good parents. If they can listen to and enjoy other adults, even people who are different from them, there's a chance that they'll treat their children with respect and take good care of them, and enjoy them for who they are. Another thought -- Jake is an adult now, 32 years old, and when you talk about him as a child without including the adult Jake in the conversation, you're showing disrespect. Does Jake-The-Man think Jake-The-Kid (and his Mom) did the right thing? That's for him to decide, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe the know-it-all parents (who don't know Jake) should defer to his judgment. This "I know what's right" school of parenting is pretty horrible to be around, even for people who aren't their kids. Miscellania Blogalia Yesterday's Special Vehicle was the Wienermobile. Today's is the Kissmobile. Julian Bond's Celebrity Blogmatch. I'm not sure how it works, but if I say something about weblogs here, I guess it shows up over there. Is it based on RSS? Julian says not yet, but maybe sooon. Can his server handle the flow? Will his page rise to the top of Daypop? What do the opinions of two bloggers matter in this crazy world we live in? And will the wienerboys show up? So many questions. BTW, the correct motto is "It's even worse than it appears." Wired's annual call for vaporware. Doug Kaye: "I hereby grant the new design the Doug Kaye Personal Publishing Preferences Administration User Interface Award for the week of November 19, 2001. Gold Ribbon and First Place in the competition." WSJ: "All over the high-tech industries, a looming recession and a collapse in stock prices have forced companies to cut spending, lay off workers and slow product development and sales efforts. For Microsoft Corp., that means it is time to wrest important new markets from its weakened rivals. At the top of its target list: software for hand-held computers, online services and servers." Seth Dillingham, a great Frontier developer, with lots of experience, is looking for work.
Last July I gave a talk at the Burton Catalyst Conference on Web Services. They just sent an MP3 of the talk. Haven't listened to it yet. Let me know what you think. Here's a DaveNet piece I wrote about the conference. Steve Gershik: "That's it. I've read enough of Dave's web site. I am now officially a disciple." Heh, look at the url. Hey, it's even worse than it appears. An interview I did with CMSWatch just went live.. CMSWatch: The Case for Personal Web Publishing. "A smart company wants to have an employee who's immersed in the rest of the world. The worst thing you can have from the point of view of the management of a company is people who are basically churning your dollars on their own political infighting or whatever's going on inside your culture -- they're not making you any money by doing that." SD Times: "Critics are claiming pieces of the spec remain unfit for deployment, and complain that a uniform, Java way of creating and consuming Web services still is not baked into the platform." John Robb sticks his neck out. "I hope I am wrong. If I am not, you heard it here first." Luke Tymowski sends a pointer to frogware's weblog, a site he started in 1997. It's great to hear about corporations that are using a weblog to keep themselves informed and to attract new customers through the Web. W3C: XML Protocol Usage Scenarios. Jason Levine: "Granted, web-based apps aren't right for everything, but they're perfect for a huge chunk of the things that people need to do on computers these days." Heard on NPR: "The only difference between a poor man and a rich man is that a rich man suffers comfortably and a poor man suffers uncomfortably." The Prince de Ligne: "Money may not buy happiness. But it's nicer to cry in the back seat of a Rolls Royce than a Volkswagen." On a lighter note, what ever became of idearrhea.com?
Bruce Epstein: "Earlier this year he was a middleware programmer integrating PCs and mainframes. Today, he was pumping gas to pay the rent." Hypercard + MORE == ???
What if you took Hypercard and MORE and merged them. That's where I am working right now. We had all the basic ingredients in 1986. It just took fifteen years to get them working in the same place. And we had to learn how HTML and HTTP work. It's conceivable all this could have come together a long time ago. But that's how software is sometimes. As usual if you stare at a screen shot you can learn a lot about where we're going. Calling all bloggers!
Jake Savin on Outlining. "I told her no; I would not make an outline, unless she told me why." Dori Smith takes a contrarian view of Jake's experience. Sylvain Carle translated What Are Weblogs to French. "Les communautés de publications web personnelles." Jean-Louis Gassee: Windows XP, essai transformé. From Aaron Swartz, news of an XML-like way of representing RDF that is not XML. For a long time I didn't know that RDF isn't a form of XML. The XMLization of RDF is just a way of transporting it between RDF-handling apps. RDF purists eschew the XML form. "That's not the cool stuff," they say. Aaron Cope sent a pointer to Perl tools for working with N3. Slashdot: With XML, is the Time Right for Hierarchical DBs? Oh yes. I've spent my whole career getting ready for the Slashdot folks to ask this question. Simon Kittle: "TextRouter is a generic weblogging and text 'routing' client. It's main use is for posting to Blogger and/or Manila maintained weblogs." Seems like Michael Fraase has a pretty good case against a spammer, with the usual I Am Not A Lawyer disclaimer. Glenn Fleishman: "Apple Computer last week released a major revision to its AirPort wireless network hardware and software that improves security, enables direct dial-up access to America Online and makes the system compatible with corporate and education networks." CNN: "There are the little 'eeee' ones, then there are the 'ooooh' ones -- those ones you have to stand up and follow with your head," said Susan Kitchens, a writer and artist at the Mount Wilson party. Helen Thomas: "The Bush administration is using the national trauma and state of emergency resulting from the Sept 11 terrorist attacks to trample the Bill of Rights." Scoble: "I gotta get a Tivo." Camworld: "I'm so excited." Deborah Brancum: "I try to be a calm gal." Jim Winstead: "I'm not much of a soup person." Doc Searls: "I'm a happy camper." On sticking your neck out Adam Curry: "I felt like an amazing dickhead." I love the way Adam writes. Many people would edit-out statements like that because a real dickhead somewhere is going to add that to his quotefile, saving it as "evidence" for some future insurrection. This may seem like a small thing, but when you write publicly and quickly, as both Adam and I do, when you make a self-deprecating statement like that, you're asking for trouble from a very vocal minority. Most readers, I think, prefer writers to show a little vulnerability. I know I do. I smile when I read a statement like that. I have a pretty good idea of how he said it because he's a friend of mine. Now I generally go through my fear and say what I think, and take the heat. To this day my detractors cite this DaveNet piece, written in 1995, as evidence of my flaws as a human being. The joke's on them of course. That essay is proof of strength, not weakness. Anyone who makes software who thinks their stuff doesn't suck is in for a rude awakening. "It's the truth. We make shitty software. And so do you!" Walking down the hall at Living Videotext I'd poke my head into a programmer's cube and say "We make shitty software." To which the programmer, if he was following the ritual, would retort: "With bugs!" Of course if you don't even try to make software that other people use, it can't be very shitty. The people who make the most noise are people who don't show us their software, they don't stick their necks out. That's why their opinion about how software is made isn't very interesting! Show us your software that doesn't suck and I will bow down and worship at your altar. Of course the critics are going to start scurrying to find out who's trashing Dave now. Heh. You won't find a pointer here. You may find one here. Lotsa luck! One of the best lines in all of rock and roll is Mick Jagger responding to a bunch of idiots in the audience at the end of Little Red Rooster on Love You Live. "Everything alright in the critics section?" Then the band launches into a fantastic rendition of Chuck Berry's Around and Around. "I said the joint was rocking.."
Continuing the What Are Weblogs thread -- weblogs are relational writing, that's why it is so close, if you're serious about it, to academic writing. Almost everything on this page relates one thing to one or several other things. Academic writing is supposed to be that way, but it was hard work before the Web. Bill Humphries tells a story of meeting a journal-writer at a party. "But those are just lists of links!" she said dismissively re weblogs. Bill's blog is just that, a list of links. I still go there when he updates, so something is happening there. Is weblog writing like any other kind of writing that came before? I think not. Linking has never meant so much. I speak from experience, having spent much my early life poring through card catalogs and library shelves, and rarely finding what I was looking for. I was doing then what DNS and HTTP do now (and Google). The Web is so much faster that it makes relational writing possible, much the same way that outlining software made outlining possible. (Before that many people faked the outlines, we were supposed to create them before writing the paper, but instead we wrote them after.) One more thought before going for a walk. On the K-Logs list, Phil Wolff says that it must be hard to do what I do, beyond the scope of a casual blogger. It's true. I pour huge amounts of time into this weblog, both writing and attaching software ornaments to it, it's like a Christmas tree, it grows up and new gadgets come online every year. (And then eventually you decide enough experimenting it's time to do this for real.) Anyway, of course no one but me is going to be willing to put so much time into it. But here's the key thing Phil, software always works that way. Someone has to do the iteration, and factoring and learning (and relearning when new people come on board) and waiting and sloshing through the details -- sometimes two or three times -- toward one end -- making it so easy to do that anyone can do it. This is the unfortunate fact of bootstrapping. Someone has to do it manually before you can figure out how to automate it. This is probably the last bootstrap I'm going to do, personally. In the future I'd like to just watch and critique other people doing them. I'm getting too old for all this digging!! BTW, it turns out that Scripting News is not listed in Yahoo's weblogs section because it is already listed under scripting. Is that anyway to manage the biggest directory on the Web? You gotta be kiddin. (That's like saying you can't get to this site by searching for Dave because you can also get there through scripting.) Bruce Epstein: Why Virtual Offices Suck. Amen!
Aaron Cope: "Apache::XBEL is an Apache mod_perl handler that uses XSLT to transform XML Bookmarks Exchange Language files into exciting and foofy dynamic HTML documents." Foofy? Is that a technical term? Megnut: "True paradigm-shifting, revolutionary thinking is rare and hard to come by." Amen!
Now, instead of worrying about us UserLanders having a little fun dreaming about the luscious and brilliant and outspoken Ms Amanpour, here's something worth writing home about.. NY Times: "The Bush administration is considering the creation of a secure new government communications network separate from the Internet that would be less vulnerable to attack and efforts to disrupt critical federal activities." Why do I worry about this? Because if the government has their own private network, they won't care if the one I use gets trashed by Uncle Osama and his evil-doing friends.
Apache XML-RPC is a "Java implementation of XML-RPC, a popular protocol that uses XML over HTTP to implement remote procedure calls." What are weblogs? "Personal Web Publishing Communities. Four very key words. Let's go through them one by one." This is really the big story of the day. Try searching for Christiana Amanpour on Google and see who gets the top link. Way to go. Maybe she'll let you buy her dinner next time she's in town? Newsbytes: "The Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice will hold hearings next month to examine whether a dramatic increase in patents awarded each year has upset the balance between intellectual property and antitrust laws." DoD: US Soldiers on Horseback in Afghanistan.
Survey: "In the next 90 days, will there be new legislation or an executive order that controls what can be published on the Internet in the US?" CNN: "Terminals at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport were being evacuated Friday after a man entered a secure area without being screened, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said." Scott Rosenberg: Inside Salon Premium. "We signed up 10,000 subscribers in our first 11 weeks, and brought some critically valuable revenue into our company's coffers." One of these days I'm going to be the first Dave on Google. Yahoo doesn't tell you who their category editors are. Here's a category on urban legends. They link to my story about Kaycee Nicole. I like the way the author characterized my article. But whose voice is it? And then there's the Weblogs category, which still doesn't link to Scripting News. So who's the editor and why don't I get a link? Perl.Com: Create RSS channels from HTML news sites. Link and Think is "an observance of World AIDS Day in the personal web publishing communities." NY Times editorial: A Travesty of Justice. John Dean: "No president can govern in a fishbowl, particularly in time of war. But as president-watchers have noticed, we clearly have an incumbent who savors secrecy. Not since Richard Nixon went to work in the Oval Office has there been so concentrated an effort to keep the real work of a president hidden, revealing to the public only a scripted leader." Dean says something that's echoed by the supporters of the new controls. "In time of war." Double-click on that. "At war" is a technical term, not a PR term. It's being used very loosely in Washington. There is no declared war. We are not "at war." Lance Knobel: "As far as I can tell, Americans have been largely immune from a debate that has raged outside its borders, between those supporting the military campaign in Afghanistan and those opposed." The SJ Merc has a story about a 68-page justification by the DoJ of its settlement with Microsoft. Dan Gillmor is not impressed. "The stench continues to emanate from James' deal with Microsoft. No phony defense will make this rancid onion into a rose."
OK, another note. In the debate over the executive order that turns over non-US-citizens to military justice, the proponents argue "If it's good enough for our soldiers, it's good enough for us." At first glance this seems reasonable, but wait a minute -- they want the power to execute people, kill them, in the name of justice, without due process and without the right of appeal. If you believe that kind of power won't be misused, hello, wake up, it will be misused. All the mottos apply. It's even worse than it appears. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. There's no time like now. BTW, more than a few people who read Scripting News are subject to this executive order. I tripped over another executive order that I missed, written about today by Richard Reeves in the Op-Ed section of the NY Times. Was it just one year ago that we thought it didn't matter who we elected President? We voted on how good their commercials were. We nominated two of the least excellent people in our midst. For a whole generation we voted, when we did, for the lesser of two evils. I started a new directory to track the erosion of liberty in the US. Let's hope this directory doesn't get any longer than it currently is. JD Lasica: A new Web ad model from the NY Times. Paul Westman: "To date, Yahoo! ranks as my single biggest investing mistake." Another in a continuing series of notes of caution re depending on Yahoo for community services, which we do. I have started 27 Yahoogroups, and am a member of 35. There's no way of knowing how long these services will remain online. Another thing to worry about, and I am already way overloaded with things to worry about! Evan Williams is trying something new. Congrats for having the courage to go first. Let's watch this carefully. If it works it could be a new way to pay for "free" services. XML-RPC: Follow-up on Kate Rhodes' Comparison.
Tim Jarrett: "There's a new script on my scripts page. I used it to write this news item. It posts the current text from TextEdit as a News Item. It's called TextEdit2ManilaNews." What is XmlDataSource.Com? Reuters: "Yahoo! Inc. will cut 400 jobs, or 13 percent of its work force." Dan Gillmor notes that his Windows 2000 installation has gotten less stable. The same thing is happening here. Maybe our OSes are calling home in the middle of the night asking if it's time to upgrade. No I'm not switching to Linux or Mac OS X. But I don't want to switch to Windows XP either. kXML-RPC is "a J2ME implementation of the XML-RPC protocol built on top of the kxml parser." Scott Loftesness sends a pointer to Visionics. "Visionics makes the facial recognition systems that have been getting a lot of coverage of late." He thought I would find the link interesting because they promote their use of XML-RPC, right up front under Hardware Requirements. Nice. It's hardware for the 21st Century. On this day last year: "After watching a week of escalating lies on TV, I wonder if it wouldn't be fun to lie myself?" Even William Safire, a Republican, says that Bush has gone too far. "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens." This really sucks the big one. This is the kind of stuff my grandfather, who survived the Nazis, warned me about. "Stand up when it starts," he said. We thought he was a crazy old man. "It can't happen here," everyone said. It's happening here, and what do you do about it. Pastor Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.."
Kate Rhodes: XML-RPC vs SOAP. This is an excellent review, and hopefully will start a thorough, independent and objective evaluation of the two protocols that form the basis of Web Services technology. Amy Wohl: "This is my first attempt at blogging. Craig Burton is acting as my mentor. It's easier than I expected." I was sad to hear that Paul Boutin was laid off at Wired. Zeldman: "Like their colleagues at Opera and Microsoft, the engineers at Netscape have been sweating to produce a browser free of the sins of the past. It’s tragic to see their hard work undercut by suits who seem remarkably unaware of, well, frankly, everything" Lisa Rein has a transcript of Hillary Rosen's speech at the P2P Conf in DC last week. Survey: "We're thinking of doing a new version of Weblogs.Com for RSS feeds. News sources would ping the centralized server when they've updated. The server verifies the change by reading the source, and then adds it to a public list of changed sources, in XML of course. Now the question. If we created such a service, would you use it?" Klaus Schwab: "I look forward to seeing Dan, Abdulla and Jack at our Annual Meeting. I hope to see you there as well."
Tim O'Reilly: "I'm really glad I've been reaching out to Microsoft, and that they're reaching out to the developer communities O'Reilly represents." Brandon Wiley, re Tim's article, writes: "It says some things about how I'm cooperating with MS to write Hailstorm for Linux. I have a counter-blog on my own site, where I talk about why I am not in fact writing Hailstorm for Linux." John Robb: "Don't get scared and shut down your brain." Megnut: "My name isn't Megan." Postscript on the cross-blog memewar with Rageboy. It was a demo. I didn't want Locke to write another stupid BigPub piece about blogs. Second. How can a guy who calls himself Rageboy and writes a book about clues complain if I respond with vigor and clues. Right -- he likes it. So happy belated birthday you crufty old bastard, it's good for the flow, so say thanks and shut the expletive up.
Taliban leave Kabul Reuters: "US warplanes pursued fleeing Taliban forces, and their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, urged his scattered troops not to behave like slaughtered chickens but to regroup, fight on and obey their commanders." Washington Post: "Hours after Northern Alliance fighters ignored American appeals to refrain from marching on Kabul, Assistant Secretary of State Christina B. Rocca called on the opposition force this morning to 'exercise maximum respect for human rights and not repeat the mistakes of the past.'" Nelson Mandela: "One of the reasons for coming here is to be able to express my support for the President for his action in Afghanistan." AP: "'Thank you!'' children shouted, running after Americans visiting the dusty camp." NY Times: "Capping their stunning victories in the north, Afghan opposition fighters rolled into Kabul on Tuesday after Taliban troops slipped away under cover of darkness, abandoning the capital without a fight." Was the crash an accident? NTSB: "To have pieces in the bay and the two engines not located with the fuselage indicates something went seriously wrong very quickly in the flight.'' Mike Donnelan: "Yeah... it was a 'catastrophic engine event' all right. That's like finding a black man hanging from a tree in Mississippi and the local law enforcement saying 'Well, he musta hung hisself [spit] 'cuz ain't nobody seen no burning cross or nothin [spit].'" Mike lives in Mississippi. Another terrorist vector Name withheld: "Another vector I think we should all be worried about is money, legal-tender currency. Saturate several bills with a chem or bio agent, and then deposit this via an ATM or deposit box. At best, this would infect those bank workers who process the cash. At worst, the bills would re-enter the supply, thus infecting several people with absolutely no way to trace." Our industry today DaveNet: Getting in synch with Moore's Law. Jim Allchin is PC Mag's Person of the Year. Jon Udell: "I had seen all this before, almost a decade ago, in Windows for Workgroups." Kimbro Staken: "The Tablet PC is the latest hardware initiative being hawked by Microsoft." Press Release: Tablet PC support from Groove. 802.11b News: Apple: a Year Late, $100 Too Much. USA Today: Cisco chief: Future may lie in virtual networks. JD Lasica has an archive of articles he's written for the Industry Standard, Salon and other pubs. The Standard has already shut down, their content gone, so what JD has done is futuristic and historic. Andre Durand: "Any identity management system or protocol should first allow me to create and host my own identity. Other peers or web services would then have an ability to discover my identity by first querying my node, and secondarily querying my trusted identity host." Microsoft: "To obtain a site ID and .NET Passport, which will allow you to start taking advantage of .NET Passport services, we require all participating sites to sign a .NET Passport Service Agreement." News.Com: "Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison is gunning for Microsoft once again, this time with a new strategy aimed at the giant's commanding lead in e-mail software." Patrick Berry: "Larry, you just don't get it, do you?" Register: Four in five corporate emails are junk. Opera 6.0 is released. WebReference: Using RSS news feeds with Perl. Interesting article written by one of the RDF people, before they invented RSS 1.0. Look at the history section. Heh. They hadn't tried to write UserLand out of the story yet. It's funny how accomplishments get undone, when the cause is religious. The RSS 1.0 Working Group: Rael Dornfest, Gabe Beged-Dov, Dan Brickley, Ian Davis, Leigh Dodds, Jonathan Eisenzopf, David Galbraith, R.V. Guha, Ken MacLeod, Eric Miller, Aaron Swartz, Eric van der Vlist. For the archives, I took a screen shot of the first page of Eisenzopf's article.
Survey: "Was the crash in NY today an act of terrorism?" Survey: Do you think we'll have an airline industry in the US in a few months? Name withheld: "Another scary terrorist vector to think about: I was driving back to LA from SF on the 5 and noticed that the CA aqueduct flows right underneath the highway at least 3 times. What happens if someone dumps radioactive waste into this thing? Or the Colorado river? Two or three well planned dumps could potentially decimate the entire CA water supply. There should be armed guards patrolling these water systems esp when they are exposed to major throughways. I can tell you from my last two drive-bys that there is no one out there protecting us." Simon Fell: PocketSOAP 1.1. Are flight recorders obsolete? Why not have an HTTP connection from the plane to a static server somewhere very far away. Stream the flight recorder data to the server on the ground. Then when a plane crashes, no need to hunt. Something like a weblog for each plane in our skies. As an bonus they could offer net connections to 802.11b laptop-using passengers. From NTSB via NPR, they've recovered the flight recorder. John Robb: "A bomb put into a wing fuel tank would accomplish pretty much what happened." 10/29/01: "Wireless-technology company Qualcomm is working on a satellite-based system that would be able to broadcast real-time jetliner cockpit conversations, flight data and video of passengers to controllers on the ground." Doc uses his mind: "If you're sitting in a swamp on Rockaway Bay behind a duck blind wth a Stinger shoulder-held anti-aircraft missle launcher, an Airbus is a mighty big duck. You don't even have to aim very well. Your Stinger is a heat-seeking missle. It goes for an engine." Mapquest photo of the Rockaway neighborhood. Annova: "At this point, there's no indication of a terrorist attack, but it certainly can't be ruled out in the current environment."
The plane crashed into Beach 130th Street in Rockaway. I know the area. My grandparents lived on Beach 146th. That's the neighborhood my mother grew up in. I was just there with my mother and uncle in August. "All circuits are busy now. Please try your call later. 090T." Chuck Newman: "I can see the smoke from my office." Here's a map of the crash area. Reports: AP, CNN, BBC. "The Dow index dropped 200 points on hearing the news." WSJ: "How bad is the mood going into the Comdex computer trade show this year? So bad that one of the show’s organizers actually called drug company Eli Lilly & Co., maker of the antidepressant Prozac, to see if the Indianapolis company wanted to sponsor the event." Dan Gillmor is in Malaysia. Watch out when Dan leaves the country. He was in Africa on Sept 11. Heh. Tobi Schaefer asks a big question about Blogger.
This picture is probably only of interest to me and Evan Williams and a handful of other people. Back in August I was able to connect the outliner in Radio with Blogger using its XML-RPC interface. It's futuristic. Someday, imho, most people will edit their weblogs in outliners. Last night I did probably the last step in the Weblogs.Com corner-turn. I got the favorites-based desktop version of Weblogs.Com working in the beta of Radio 7.1 (not released yet). It was a pretty smooth transition. I expect that other people will do similar interfaces in Python, Java, Perl, etc. The key to performance is distributing the prefs-based stuff, and store and render-through-favorites on the local computer where there's plenty of unused CPU bandwidth. And a note to designers who are starting to love XML, check it out, a very simple XML feed is behind this useful interface. Now's a good time to pitch the Tuesday Lunch With A Programmer concept. (Or meme, as Chris is sure to remind me.) Designers, find a programmer and go to lunch tomorrow. You pay. Ask the programmer to explain how Weblogs.Com works. Since you're paying you can ask for more info, until it makes sense. It's a bootstrap. Once we get great interfaces accessing Weblogs.Com in all environments we can add more services. This is how we build a user base. Now, is there money in it? Only if the Web starts attracting investment again. But that, slowly but surely is a bootstrap as well. One step at a time. The Cluetrain mail list is filled with talk of blogging. Mark Pilgrim: "Jakob is off his mobile-phones-are-gonna-be-the-wave-of-the-future-any-day-now kick, as well as his micropayments-are-gonna-be-the-wave-of-the-future-any-day-now kick, and back to his bread and butter: kicking websites when they're down." AP: A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential election indicates George W. Bush would have narrowly prevailed in the partial recounts sought by Al Gore, but Gore might have reversed the outcome - by the barest of margins - had he pursued and gained a complete statewide recount. Macscripter.Net: XML-RPC support for osaxen.com. Let's hope Uncle Osama likes Windows XP.
BBC: "I've got the world's longest tongue!" OK, if you like tongues, here's an even bigger one. Heard on NPR. "Oy my son went to a psychiatrist and it's not so good," said one Jewish mother to another. "He has an Oedipus Complex." "Oedipus Shmedipus," said the other woman. "As long as he loves his mother!" This joke was told by the daughter of the author of The Joys Of Yiddish, Leo Rosten. It makes a great Christmas present! Dan Gillmor: "John Robb, who served in the U.S. Air Force special operations unit and is now president and chief operating officer at Silicon Valley-based UserLand Software, has been thinking about asymmetry and its consequences. I asked him how we could use the power at the edges of networks and society to counteract the bad guys." John Robb: "Dan Gillmor is onto the right approach to improve our society's immunological defense against terrorism. I have an idea on how to get our nation's governmental organizations to work together to improve their responsiveness to acts of terrorism. K-Log knowledge networks. This is how Silicon Valley can contribute to this war without stomping on personal privacy." Gretchen Morgenson: "The last of the Internet imposters — overheated stocks posing as growth companies — has at last been unmasked." Weblogs.Com changes are now available in OPML.
We've cleared an outage in our SOAP interop test server. It was down starting Oct 12, it's back up now. Many apologies. We've also got back in the loop on the Soapbuilders list and our server uses the recommended SOAPAction header, and the old one, so our implementation should interop at the BDG level with all the Soapbuilders servers. Thanks to Sam Ruby, Rich Salz and Simon Fell for helping us debug this. Further thanks to Simon for doing the WSDL file for the Manila RPC interface. It's still a very rich source of SOAP services, and is a real app that people can test against. Every Manila site is also a SOAP application (and XML-RPC of course). Adam Kalsey: "RSSBlog creates an RSS newsfeed from the HTML file of your blog. I created this so that I could generate an RSS feed for my Blogger powered blog." Jason Harlan: "Are there alternatives to the MS soapserializer and soapreader that could be used in an MS and ASP development environment?" Register: "He was, in other words, a suicidally-wrong choice for Palm, the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time." John Brockman eulogizes Ken Kesey, using his own words. "Can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault." It makes my heart warm to see a designer working with a geek. This is exactly what I hope to see more of. We need great designers to make our geekish systems beautiful to the eye. On the other hand, sometimes the designers go too far and create things that are totally unusable. AP: "Ken Kesey, whose LSD-fueled bus ride became a symbol of the psychedelic 1960s after he won fame as a novelist with 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' died Saturday morning. He was 66." Chris Locke pushes back on our anti-meme pushback. OK. But I still hate memes. They're used by people like Locke to take control of things we care about, to create hoops designed for other people to jump through, and in the end they blame us for the fucked-up software anyway. All we want to do is make tools for guys like Locke, and get feedback based on actual use of those products. We also want to be paid for this work, and get a vacation once in a while, and a pat on the back for a job well done. Not asking a lot imho. An excellent case study of this mess is on the O'Reilly weblog. Why should Yossi Vardi have to bend Tim O'Reilly's ear to get credit for being a pioneer of P2P, if not the pioneer of P2P. I'll tell you why. Hard-working programmers are too busy keeping the system running to try to get on the meme-maker's ladder. Anyway, I predict the business model of being a meme-level gatekeeper is totally bust, and in a couple of years, if we're still here, we'll all get together and have a good laugh about how crazy things got back then (i.e. now). Now when Tim got publicly excited, he did something honest, that most meme-makers don't do. He attempted to find the software that already existed that fit into his meme. Most of the time it doesn't work that way. The meme-maker, a Forrester or a whatever says "Here's something new! I figured it out! Let's get excited!" Now it doesn't serve the "here's something new" cause if it isn't new. So any vendors who are already providing technology for that purpose, almost by definition have to be left out of the meme. This seems stupid and unfair. The newcomers to the market are getting an unfair boost. Can't use ICQ for P2P say everyone, it's not cool, it's not with the meme. Anyway if you've been around this loop a few times as I have you know that the memes wash out, and what's left after is a market, which is all that was ever there, which is a conversation, and has products. Why is software particularly vulnerable to this? Ahhh, I even know the answer to that. It's because it's so new, and the BigPubs like to run stories that say we're full of shit, so when the shit-purveyors show up they're all over it, just so in a few months they can prove we're full of shit in Silicon Valley. Basically the meme cycle is caused by the fear the BigPubs have about technology. Of course they're right to be fearful because eventually technology will change their industry, and they'll have to learn how to do new things, and they're mostly pretty old people, and old people don't enjoy change very much. I know this because I'm getting pretty old myself. Anyway, the typical meme-maker doesn't trust or understand the programmer, because to get the code running you actually have to know something. That's why the conferences are largely filled with meme-makers talking with meme-makers about (you guessed it) memes. (The O'Reilly conferences are an exception, I went to their P2P conf earlier this year and had a great time.) Anyway it got so bad I had to stop going to tech industry parties. No one ever talked about software anymore. It was all air-talk and of course money talk, because memes made a lot of money in the 90s. So dear Chris, in Programmer-Land we've been badly burned by the memes. That's why we hate them so much. Let's say goodbye to people who neither write or use code. Let's have a quiet period where we simply use and create software for fun, evolution, collaboration, learning, hey even getting laid once in a while. Let's make it simple and human. 5/7/97: "A programmer is a rigorous scientist determined to coax the truth out of the ones and zeros."
Hey I did some after post-post-time late-night (for me) blogging over on my Handsome Radio Blog. It's reverse-chronologic, so you have to read from bottom-to-top. It may not make much sense. Whatever. I'll probably rewrite most of it on SN in the next few days. Good night one and all.
Survey: Do you hate memes? Brent: "Memes and truth are mutually exclusive." Cringely: "Imagine a murderer who shot his victims being enjoined for five years from using a gun, but still being allowed to carry a knife." Sam Ruby answered my questions by saying now's the time, in his mind the current version of SOAP is fully baked and ready to go. I then had a follow-up to his response. Cliff Baseman: "Named parameters is one of my biggest gripes about the SOAP spec." The Great Groove Debate continues on Mark Pilgrim's blog. John Robb: K-Logs and Continuous Education. Sam Ruby: "I am employed by IBM, but these opinions are mine." Sam, thanks for the comments. Now a few questions. Doug Baron: "I'm part of the UserLand team now." Welcome back Doug! To Doc and Chris, markets are more than conversations. There are also products in markets. This is my pushback for Chris for the day. (But the day is still young.) This morning ZDNet picked up that DaveNet piece. Nice. Different picture, different (but still dorky) headline. There's a place you can post your comments, so if you've been wanting to say something to me in public, here's your chance. (Postscript -- I just noticed that ZDNet removed the links from the article. Oy. How will people know I was talking about the Bill of Rights when I was talking about the 18th century decision we made in the US.) Joe Mahoney writes to say that Kmeleon is "the Netscape 6 rendering engine in a very IE like shell. It loads pretty quickly, and renders all the sites I've seen really well. And it doesn't have all that annoying AOL shit or dumbass Mozilla defaults. Most importantly it hasn't crashed, unlike Netscape or Mozilla." I didn't know that. Good idea! Hey you might want to go to this event in SF on the 13th and ask IBM if they plan to get with the people and support XML-RPC, and while you're at it ask them to explain why WSDL is important, and say what patents they have in Web Services. IBM is a BigBigCo. Are they our friends? Let's find out. Doc: "Here in Bløglånd."
Dougal Campbell: "What's the difference between XML-RPC and SOAP?" In response to Campbell's question, I wrote a comparison of XML-RPC and SOAP. Graham Dumpleton takes exception to my comparison, and he's absolutely 100 percent correct that SOAP has a serious flaw relative to XML-RPC. We hit the wall he describes in the implementation of xmlStorageSystem getMyDirectory verb. The workaround was fairly wasteful. The problem is that struct names are encoded as XML elements. This was a bad idea. Andreas Bolka implements XML-RPC for Rebol. Dan Gillmor is picking up on the flip-side of the Microsoft-DoJ deal, as I did in the News.Com piece earlier today. Heh. Gotta love Microsoft, it's so much fun to be paranoid about them, and so productive! Mark Pilgrim is accumulating bad news about Groove. Let me add a three items to Mark's list. 1. No Mac version. 2. Closed box. 3. $51 million from Microsoft. A bonus item! 4. Ray gives lots of speeches about XML. See item 2. I agree with Evan that Lindows is a boring idea. As long as today is a Crabby Thursday, a message for Chris Locke. Use the expletive software. Roll up your sleeves and dig in. No one cares about memes anymore. All that expletive was swept away when the dotcoms went bust Brent Sleeper is hosting a panel on Web Services at the Commonwealth Club in SF on Nov 13. I didn't know that the Daypop Top-40 is available in RSS. Jay Allen has an interesting theory about perpetual motion in the Daytop Top-40. I think the universe would collapse on itself if we followed his formula. What do you think? News.Com picked up my latest DaveNet essay. It was easy. Charles Cooper said he liked it. I asked if he wanted to run it. He said yes. They did a light edit, took out an expletive and one of the sub-heads (the most powerful one imho), and added a few words that I don't normally use (e.g. deftly). But the piece still says what it said so I'm happy. Also today on News.Com, a long piece on Web Services. I just skimmed it, saw no mention of XML-RPC or UserLand. I guess we aren't shooting the right memes. Written out of the story we wrote. No good deed goes unpunished. Frank X Shaw recommends sourdough pancakes. I love NY, but I still hate the Yankees.
Chris Ashley: Weblogging, another kind of website. Hillary Rosen: "I get it! I get it!" Dori Smith: "Not just yes, but hell yes." Craig Burton has a new gig. Mazel tov! Adam Curry: "Quincy Jones is the epitome of the American Dream."
Glenn Fleishman has connected Greymatter (a Perl app) to Weblogs.Com through HTTP. John Robb: How to Build a Knowledge Network. John is UserLand's COO -- and describes software that we're building at UserLand. Here's a bit of magic. Late last night Mike Dill posted a message asking for help integrating Perl and Visual Basic using XML-RPC. I had never met him but it sounded like he knows what he's doing so I linked to his question. Overnight he got three solid responses from other people who know what they're doing. People wonder how we get this stuff working. This is how. Developers are generous people and like to help each other. This may be a foreign concept to analysts and reporters and execs at BigCo's, but in fact this is how we build systems -- by pitching in and helping each other.
Happy blog birthday to Brent and Sheila. Both are two years old today. Next time I'm driving through Iowa I gotta remember to check out the Grove Cafe. Look at the size of that pancake. Looks tasty. I love a good pancake.
I gotta admit, in the 60s and 70s when all kinds of black people starting using words like motherfucker, it scared me. I was just a kid then so what did I know. This morning I heard an interview with Quincy Jones, a famous musician who (I didn't know this) grew up with Ray Charles and has done all kinds of great music, much of it very famous and commercial. Music for movies and Michael Jackson, I bet Adam Curry has met him. He's black, and talked about problems he had with white producers. Now I get something I didn't get then. It's OK to use a "bad" word, even a lot like Pryor does. It's not scary, it's funny. Pryor calls his washing machine a motherfucker. It's just a funny word, like fart or whatever. Not a big deal. He makes fun of white people. Hey that's OK. We're pretty funny when you look at it from his pov. Lance Knobel: "The isolated village in the mountains is an intrinsic part of Davos's character and success. I wouldn't have kvetched if it had been some other mountain fastness, but Manhattan is about as far from that as it would be possible to get on Earth." I agree with Lance. Davos takes you very far out of the normal daily thing. Conferences in big cities like NY are much more diluted. I love NY, but it ain't no Davos. However if they invite me (doubtful) I will go, no matter where it is. JD Lasica was interviewed by the Sacramento Bee about Weblogs. Last year this day was the beginning of the crazy post-election period in the US.
News.Com: "In an effort to improve security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the organizers of next week's Comdex trade show have banned the most ubiquitous of technology tools: laptop computers." Shelley Powers: "After the Chronicle broke the story on the huge vulnerability of the Bay Bridge -- about 30 feet from my apartment -- news crews are all over the place. So are helicopters. So are police." Reuters: "The Massachusetts attorney general said he and attorneys general from 'a core group of states' will not support the federal government's antitrust settlement with Microsoft." Survey: "Do you support the settlement between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice?" My WSDL rant spawned a useful thread on the Soap-Newbies mail list. Jrobb always finds an interesting angle. "Here comes the money grab. Each state will cut its own deal with Microsoft for billions of $$ in penalties. This is going to be as lucrative for states as suing the tobacco companies." Wes Felter is blogging the O'Reilly P2P conference in DC. Scott Kirsner: "Microsoft's investment makes it nearly impossible for another company to come along and purchase Beverly-based Groove, and keeping Gates & Co. happy could become a full-time job." WinInfo: "Describing Microsoft’s proposed settlement with the US government and 18 states as 'ineffectual,' Massachusetts attorney general Thomas F. Reilly said this weekend that his state would not approve the deal." NY Times editorial: Settling the Microsoft Case. There's a discussion among the leadership of the W3C on the future of WSDL, which is an acronym for Web Services Description Language. Here are some comments I posted over the weekend. NY Times: "The software that IBM is putting into Eclipse and into the public domain include programming tools for debugging, user interface work, editing and project management. The tools employ Java and XML technology, and the intent of Eclipse is to provide a choice of mix-and-match tools." Of course it's too much to expect that Yankees fans would learn humility from defeat. On the other hand it's nice to see some things remain constant, in our ever-changing world. I love NY, always will. I hate the Yankees, and all they stand for. Nothing can ever change that. If you don't like it, there's always next year. I won't be rootin for the Diamondbacks, but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for them, for being the team that knocked those arrogant MFs off their pedestal. Adam Curry: "Being dead sucks." On this day last year I asked a question of my male readers that ended up being part of Wired's profile of me, that perhaps led to my being chosen Geek of the Year for 2001. What's wrong with men wanting to know if other men are wired the same way? Hey I'm a sensitive guy. That doesn't mean that I don't have tons of testosterone flowing through my blood. Hey I like that stuff. A good drug.
NY Times: "As they neared a deadline to accept or reject the proposed antitrust agreement between Microsoft and the Bush administration, a group of state prosecutors spent the weekend fielding growing complaints about the deal from scores of industry executives, technology experts and consumer groups."
Maybe I do have a speech. A short one. When the Big Guy says "I'll win because I'm big," don't believe it. Congratulations to the Diamondbacks and a toast to all the individuals who choose to take a stand against the arrogance of bigness. I would be cheering the Diamondbacks even if they lost the series. What spirit they showed. They didn't blink. And the Yankees played great baseball, don't overlook that. Hey I said a kind word about the Yankees. What is that about? BTW, one more thing. At the end of the game the camera found Mayor Giuliani, in Phoenix, wearing a Yankees cap with NYPD and FDNY logos to the left and right. If the Yankees had won he would have given a speech. Glad they didn't. Enough Giuliani. BTW, I know it must hurt to be a Yankees fan right now. Get used to it. Mark Pilgrim: "The iTunes 2.0.0 installer can wipe out everything on your secondary partition." John Robb explains why, if the court goes along with the settlement, Microsoft will sieze control of everything on the Web in short order. It won't matter how much yelling and screaming there is. Frank McPherson makes an interesting point, worth considering, for a moment. He argues that antitrust case should have been a civil case between Netscape's successor, AOL, and Microsoft. The courts didn't agree. Microsoft was convicted and the conviction was upheld, their Supreme Court appeal denied. I think the courts were right, and let's hope they tell the DoJ to try again.
Arizona Republic: "Our little town blues are melting away."
Did Brett Glass find the "killer clause"? Gwénaël Le Dréan has translated our DocServer site to French. Voila! If this story is true, the US government has some explaining to do. "I was targeted because the Green Party USA opposes the bombing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan." If this story is true, AOL has some explaining to do. "Why on earth I would want to give anything at AOL trusted status, I don't know." LiveJournal is adding RSS support. Bravo! Derek Powazek's Design For Community site also has an RSS feed. Nice. The SXSW Iron Webmaster Showdown "invites teams of new media developers to quickly add significant personality and pizzazz to a pre-formatted URL while working in front of a lively audience of their peers. All teams will start with the same raw text and graphics and have access to the same hardware and software tools; using these materials, their task is to revise, reconstruct, re-mix, re-purpose and reformat the content and design into a more exciting whole in the space of 90 minutes." Why the same tools? That takes all the fun out of it. I'd like to participate, with Manila and Bryan Bell, just the three of us. We'd cream the ones doing hand-coded sites. John Robb takes this idea to its logical conclusion. Adam, let's get it on TV. Let's get down. Now that we've completed the corner-turn in Weblogs.Com, I miss the old blogs that aren't pinging us yet. So I did a little work this morning to turn the lights back on. In the process I published some data that my desktop machine has been accumulating through 2001. I'm linking to all that stuff from a one-day-blog using new notetaking techniques. Lots of new stuff coming online now. I like it. Interesting discussions going on behind the scenes in WebServicesLand. There's great motion now. Much of it NDA'd. I'm pushing the BDG once again. Keep it simple and let a thousand flowers bloom. Don't ask what the Internet can do for you. Etc. Wired: "The Beltway's chattering classes took a break Friday from anthrax scares and Afghanistan bombing to focus on the Microsoft antitrust suit once more." Seattle Times: "While elected officials and Microsoft reacted favorably to the tentative settlement announced yesterday, the Redmond software company's competitors called it a bad deal for them and for consumers."
DaveNet: The Microsoft settlement. Andrew Orlowski: "Not even in their wildest dreams could the business elites have imagined that in 2001, the AntiTrust department itself would be offering a convicted monopolist state protection." A comment on Andrew's piece. A short time before Sept 11, thinking about the Bush Administration, I came to the conclusion that they operate just like the management of a company like Microsoft. They'll do anything to stay in power. I don't understand why. I've always found that way very puzzling. Bill Gates has all the money in the world. He'll do everything he can to stay in control too, even if it reeks, even if it means publicly humiliating himself (ref the Breaking Windows chapter that ran in DaveNet). He appears to have no conscience, in his mind there must be no room for anyone else to be creative or successful. It can't be about money, but somehow that's exactly what it's about. Then came the attack, and everything seemed to have changed. But it didn't change. The government has no integrity but then, at the same time I'm behind them, as my wartime government. On the other hand, they'd like me to think of the terrorists as "evil-doers." Heh. Nothing is simple today. The fox guarding the henhouse, to pick up on Dan Gillmor's apt metaphor doesn't only apply to Gates and Company, it also applies to Bush and Company. At this point, although it's almost treason to say it, I wonder anyway if I'm backing the wrong side in the war against evil. BTW, there are several reasons I didn't like the use of the term evil, and said so on 10/13. I had to let it settle in before I figured it out. First, it's insulting to a mature and experienced and intelligent person who knows there are two sides to every argument. If you say your opponent is evil, you're telling me you don't want me to consider what they're saying. Sorry I can't do that, I'm not built that way. I will conclude, on my own, if they're evil or not. I find that I do have an evil receptor inside my value system. But it can't be invoked by a guy like George W. Bush. Second, when you call someone evil, it calls your character into question, and takes the stakes to a whole new level. It's hubris to call someone evil. How the hell does a mortal like Bush know if someone he's never even met is evil or not. Now, I still don't get Gates. He used to be much more alive, more feisty, more intellectual, much more interesting. What the fuck does he want now. As he is fond of saying, I don't get it. BTW, looking for the quote off SN about evil, I didn't find it, but found that it's appeared quite a few times, not in re Osama bin Laden. I forgot there was this whole thread lasting a few years about Dave's Evil Twin. Hehe. A note on today's outage. For some period of time my April Fool's page was what you saw when you came to Scripting News. It's a long story on a day when there's serious news. Many apologies for the confusion. It was actually quite a bit worse than it appeared. I hope y'all had a good chuckle, now back to work. Wired: "By cobbling together a handful of browser-based bugs with flaws in Passport's authentication system, Slemko developed a technique to steal a person's Microsoft Passport, credit card numbers -- and all, simply by getting the victim to open a Hotmail message." US Dept of Justice: Proposed Final Judgment. NY Times: "But the agreement was not endorsed by state prosecutors." Reuters: "The U.S. Justice Department on Friday said it had reached a settlement with Microsoft Corp. of the three-year-old antitrust case that would impose a 'broad range of restrictions' on the software giant." MSNBC: "Judge gives state attorneys general until Tuesday to join settlement." News.Com: "The deal would impose mild restrictions on the software maker compared with earlier rulings in the 3-year-old case, focusing largely on tweaking Microsoft's competitive behavior." Happy third birthday to Tomalak's Realm. John Van Dyk: "I think I'll write a plugin." This article on Advogato supports my long-held belief that software is speech, and protected by the First Amendment in the US. This is the way to bust all patents relating to software in one swoop. Lawyers please take note. I got an email from the CTO at Opera asking for configuration info. A good sign. Various theories abound. Key piece of data -- Opera had been running a long time (I had it set as my default browser). Every time I clicked on a link in an email it would display in Opera. Lots of sub-windows open. I also got an intro to James Gosling at Sun. Now I have his email address. I want to talk with him about Sun getting behind SOAP and XML-RPC. Ever the evangelist. And today is Decomission Day for the old Weblogs.Com, Subhonker or Weblog Monitor, whatever you want to call it. Last night I tried to talk myself out of it. Now I guess I know how Seattle felt when they decomissioned the Kingdome. But its time has come and a tear comes to my eye. I'll do the deed after drinking some more coffee. I did the deed. The old Weblogs.Com scanner has been put to sleep, forever. Thank you old friend. You pointed me to some great blogs. You were a lighting rod for controversy. You were host to some innovative shit. We learned a lot together, but it's time to move on. You are gone but not forgotten. Judith Burton: "During a time of crisis, when it all seems so terrible and uncertain, my grandson put it best. 'You just have to be brave.'" Adam Curry: "None of the really cool stuff ever makes it onto the air!" BTW, the Yankees won again last night. If I were a Yankees fan I'd be happy. But I hate the Yankees. I'm not unhappy, over all, I'm just unhappy about that.
Heads-up on corner-turns and maintenence. Tomorrow is the day for the second part of the Weblogs.Com corner-turn. The new Weblogs.Com is holding up quite well, it's got plenty of room for growth. Then on Saturday we're going to shut down most of our servers for a long overdue upgrade. I don't have an exact time right now. After the upgrade is complete I'll explain what we did. Still diggin! AP: Calif Says Bridges May Be Targets. News.Com: "Microsoft's blockage of competing Web browsers from MSN.com has been good news for some plucky rivals: They are experiencing record traffic and downloads, and a leading Internet authority is heaping scorn on the software giant." Doc Searls: "After the third free Bloody Mary, it doesn't matter what the hell Richard Stallman says. Well, actually it does." AP: "The three major television networks on Wednesday sued the maker of the first Internet-ready personal digital video recorder, saying the ReplayTV 4000 allows people to make and distribute illegal copies of television programs." Gregory Blake: "Adam Curry set up a macro that displays updated blogs. Since I don't use the same software he does, I decided to see if I could replicate it using the tools I use: Perl, PHP, and mySQL." Cydney Gillis: "It's a PlaySkool-type interface that makes Windows XP look and act like a Web browser, both online and off." Mahesh Shantaram is an Indian blogger looking for others. This is the most important pointer on Scripting News in the last month. We've been looking for people who are running weblogs in Central Asia. That Mahesh wants to organize them is a sign that he's the real thing. Let's go! Computerworld: "Bowing to customer demand for centralized systems, Groove Networks Inc. is modifying the peer-to-peer approach the company took when it launched its collaboration software a year ago."
Here's the performance monitor screen after removing Opera from the mix. BTW, my laptop is a 700Mhz machine (maybe 733, my memory isn't so good). My desktop machine is 1Ghz. The difference is that the laptop isn't running Opera, just MSIE. On the other hand, Radio could be taking fewer of my machine's cycles. We've got some more work to do ourselves. NY Times: "The Justice Department and the Microsoft Corporation have reached a tentative agreement to settle the long-running antitrust suit against the company, people involved in the talks said today." MSNBC: "The agreement would reportedly force the software company to end restrictive deals with computer makers, release some of the software code for Internet Explorer, and offer versions of Windows with and without added features such as MSN Messenger." Washington Post: "Some Microsoft rivals said yesterday if the settlement does not require the unbundling of the browser from the operating system, it could be at odds with the most recent federal appeals court decision in the case, which said that 'we conclude that such co-mingling has an anti-competitive effect.'" Comments. Although the agreement hasn't been announced, based on the reports above, Microsoft got away with it. There's no reason for them not to continue tying to transfer its monopoly in Web browsers and desktop operating systems to other areas. Bad news for the software industry, bad news for Microsoft too, long-term. Dan Gillmor: "What a shameful process, leaving a lawbreaker free to do practically anything it wishes. What a signal to the business community." Adam Curry: "Let me repeat that: A local beauty contest at a hardware store in Secaucus New Jersey. Adam Curry and Boy George as judges. Showbizz can be so cruel." Two years ago today Infoworld ran an article about weblogs. Screen shot of the page where Wired lists the award-winners for 2001. I can point directly to the page but their site redirects to the home page of the site. Plus I'm so sick of the dorky music they play in the background. Reminds me of a cheap reality TV game show. Anyway there's the proof. I wish they would have put up something nice and simple, no music please, with a little writing that explains what the awards are about and why they chose the people and products they chose. Could the flow possibly hurt them? I don't get it. Net-net today's Wired is only half-wired.
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