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DaveNet: Never underestimate Steve Case. Business Week: "The next round of globalization is sending upscale jobs offshore. They include basic research, chip design, engineering -- even financial analysis." Russell Beattie: Qwerty Phone Keypad. Interesting idea. Wired: "Ex-Apple programmer Jim Speth is about to release new open-source software that lets a select group of users share files over the Internet." Scott Knaster sends word that the Space Shuttle will be visible in the Bay Area as it's landing tomorrow. 1/31/00 was a sunny day, in Davos. David Heller: HTML's Time is Over. Let's Move On. Mark Pilgrim: "I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself." Scoble asks an important question. "Patient A has a troupe of 20 people with her, and at least five stay around the clock to pray for her. Patient B only has two people with her, and they don't stay around the clock. If something goes wrong with both patients at the same time, and there's only one surgeon available, which one gets the surgery done first?" There's no doubt that Patient A gets the help. Having spent a lot of time in hospitals in the last year, this is well-known among families. It's why I spent so much time in the hospital with my father. If the nurses and doctors get to know you, your friend or relative gets better care. No doubt about it. Adam's family
Interesting that they speak both Dutch and English at Adam's house. January 31 How time flies. Tomorrow is the beginning of the second month of the year. My hippie uncle, the guy who lives in Jamaica, is ten years older than me. He says it keeps getting worse. I know. Oy.
An image of an old geezer sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch appears, and I understand what he's saying. "Rush, rush, rush, that's all young people do," says the old geezer (in an Abe Simpson-like voice). But there's wisdom in the rants of a silly old man. First the old guy's body doesn't rush so well anymore. All the aches and pains. They quiet down if he just sits and watches. Young people don't have those pains. He doesn't remember. But time is rushing by fast enough. Old folk may know how to stop and savor a moment, just hold it, and appreciate it for what it is, without thinking of the future (which old people don't have) or the past (there's more of that all the time). I'm not really old yet, but I'm not young anymore. I'm one of those inbetweeners. Not just starting, but not finished. January 31. What a weird thought.
DaveNet: Meet The Peking Duck. New RSS Howto: How to support enclosures in aggregators. Don Park: "In Korea, secret PIN is often used to protect credit cards, cash cards, and bank accounts. Unfortunately, most people don't treat PIN as a personal secret and not only share it with others but routinely asks for it." Just got an email from a reporter saying we underhype RSS. I seriously had not considered that possibility. No sarcasm. NY Times: "All of AOL Time Warner's high-flying initiatives of the last two years have amounted to a $100 billion mistake." The Economist profiles the FCC's Michael Powell. I signed up for the Stanford spectrum policy conference, March 1-2. Cory Doctorow: "The city of San Diego recently dropped $23,000 on a Googlebox." Timothy Appnel: The Next Generation of TrackBack. Welcome to the first annual Nude Blog Awards. Juice is an "alternate browser with built-in support for Google's search API." Blogistan: "I'm no fan of the National Review, but this Jonah Goldberg image cracked me up." 2/3/95: "SuperBowl beer commercials are aimed at people who are drunk." Davos: "This year's hot ticket was apparently an invitation-only Super Bowl party, hosted by Bill and Chelsea Clinton."
BBC: "A total of 27 new sites will be opened at Welcome Break service stations, while 36 Hilton hotels will offer hotspots in their lobbies. Business travellers will also be able to log on at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Aberdeen airports." 0xDECAFBAD: "If I've heard of you, can I list you as a friend? If I've emailed you once or twice?" Jake Savin: "Now for a little code clean-up, some docs and a beta release."
Peking Duck: "I've been trying to access The New York Times and the Washington Post all morning, only to get the Cannot Find Server message for both sites." Tripod now has weblogs. Great stuff tonight on the Salon blogs. News.Com is supporting guids in their RSS feeds. Yes. We've got forward motion. Bing bing bing. Here's a clue why Steve Case stepped down when he did. $99 billion lost in 2002. Oy oy oy. Sjoerd Visscher: "I now include the referrers using XInclude." I've always wanted an Jake Savin: "I'm working on a new backup/restore feature for Radio UserLand, and have hit a bit of a snag." For sale: ZDNet Tech Update staff. Joi Ito: "If you need to get inebriated to 'bond' you've got a psychological problem."
Some people think that not going to war is a prescription for nuclear war. Sorry for not representing that pov in the above. It is a possibility I suppose. Another possibility is using the goodwill we've gotten with Hussein's neighbors to solve some other problem that saves lives instead of killing people. Wouldn't that blow people's minds? But don't pay attention to me, when it comes to war I'm usually the one arguing against it. I guess I was wrong about Kosovo, for example. I thought it was another Vietnam, for sure. It wasn't. Ever wonder how viruses get their names? It looks pretty random. The reporters need a handle for each virus. So why don't we use a system like the one they use for hurricanes and typhoons? First a woman's name, then a man's name, starting with A, then B, round and round we go. It's good because we don't let the virus writer add a name to the common vocabulary. Why should they get rewarded for being jerks, or worse. What do you think? Lawrence Lee: "Most virus companies seem to follow the CARO virus naming convention developed in 1991 by Fridrik Skulason, Alan Solomon and Vesselin Bontchev." To Tom Matrullo who wonders what good RSS is if it just shovels the same old crap he reads in newspapers. Tom, t's better than that. Much. RSS creates a level playing field that's open to all. Amateurs and pros, young and old, rich and poor, the homeless, the uninsured and people with AIDS, you name it -- they all can slug it out for readers in the same venue. If you subscribe to Scripting News, today you've already heard about a new peer-to-peer network, you've learned a little math, and read an amusing Glenn Fleishman piece about skiing in Montana (if you clicked) and heard that Dubya is borrowing a few lies (oops lines) from Teddy Roosevelt. And it's not even 7AM. Sure the NY Times, BBC, News.Com, etc are all worth reading. But now you're getting more variety, and they're getting competition, which are good things, imho. Another way to look at it. A old style journalist interviews a couple dozen people for a week, and then produces an article that you can read in five minutes. He includes a few quotes. That's one way to do it. Another way is DIY or Do It Yourself. A news event. I think to myself "Who would know what this means?" I go to their weblog. See what they think. Link to them from my weblog. Then I think of another person. I go to their weblog. Etc etc. This is good because it routes around the soundbite-creating and dumbing-it-down processes. Who cares if the expert said it in a clever way (actually I do care). But what I really want is to know what they really think, not what the editors of the pub want me to hear. The Open Content Network is a "collaborative effort to help deliver large, freely-downloadable content using peer-to-peer technology." Jason DeFillippo: "I am blogholio!" Scott Rosenberg illustrates the difference between mean and median in Bush's hype about tax cuts. "This average is a convenient fiction; it's a statistic that exists only because the enormous benefits accruing to the dividend-owning super-rich skew the 'average' -- and camouflage the fact that the cuts most middle class taxpayers will receive under Bush's proposal are piddling." If you've written an article about RSS recently, please suggest a link in the section of the RSS directory. I included JD Lasica's article because, imho, RSS is not just for geeks anymore. But it is still for geeks too. I'm working this morning on the developer evangelism I promised yesterday. RSS Feeds for the Fusebox.Org Forums. Glenn Fleishman: "Yeah, well, none of us have jobs!"
Jon Udell: "A lot of this stuff is much worse than it needs to be."
Only Scripting News asks "What will you do while Dubya gives his speech tonight?" Jing Jing, home of Spicy Noodles, has a website. I've booked my next trip east. I'll be in NY betw Feb 5-7, then Boston betw Feb 8-11, and back in NY betw Feb 12-16. The beginning and ending dates are fixed, but the time betw Boston and NY is flexible. I'm looking into getting a classroom for an evening session open to all Boston-area bloggers to talk about whatever we want to talk about. Here's an idea of how these meetings work. BTW, the round trip air fare betw SFO and JFK was $340; that's non-stop on a major airline. Michael Winser is one of the developers of Microsoft's Web browser. He was a frequent contributor here during the browser wars of the 90s. What he says about performance of HTML tables is authoritative. "There's only one solution: change the problem," he says. One of the more interesting ideas in Cosmos is that we might live inside a black hole. It's one way to grapple with the finiteness of the universe. "Where does the universe end?" asks the student. "Is there a wall, and if so, what's on the other side?" Well, if you lived inside a black hole you might ask the same questions. Exactly the same questions. Reuters: "Kazaa said Tuesday that it had countersued film and music companies seeking to shut it down, alleging antitrust violations and overzealous copyright protection." News.Com: "Opera Software says the future of its Mac browser is clouded now that Apple is producing its own." Douglas Bowman's markover for Weblogs.Com. Very nice! Simon Willison cracks the nut as well. 8:30AM Pacific: I applied Bowman's design to Weblogs.Com. The text is a little small, but otherwise it's great. It's much faster at refreshing than the table-based design. Wired: "Anyone can contribute an article to the Wikipedia." Count the errors in this BBC article, starting with the title which does not describe what the article contains. NY Times: Worm Hits Microsoft, Which Ignored Own Advice. Adam explains how his weblog became part of his TV show. Lunch in Switzerland Lance Knobel: "As I write this, my friends in Davos will be making their way up the mountain for the annual highlight of the meeting: the Schatzalp lunch. The lunch is on the 'snow terrace' of the Schatzalp Hotel, which has the faded grandeur you'd expect of the former sanitorium and setting of Mann's Magic Mountain. Sadly, it looks like today there won't be much of a view." This gives me goosebumps. The venue of the Schatzalp lunch is a slice of heaven on earth. Photo. In 2000, the year I attended, the dotcom bubble was still very much inflated, probably at its peak. I was one of a handful of people from the Land Of Dotcom, so the investment bankers wanted to hear what I thought about this or that or the something else. For me that peaked at the Schatzalp. Neither will probably ever happen again. But what a grand day that was! Oh man. RSS enclosures My next tutorial for RSS developers is going to be about enclosures. These are do-it-yourself things, with the goal of helping developers of weblog tools, aggregators and news readers support the feature. So far I've done tutorials for comments and guids. The next is enclosures.
Adam Curry: Welcome to the Payload Channel. I'm going to use this opportunity to write a new browser-based enclosure function for Radio that notifies you in a module in the Status Center when new enclosures have arrived. CSS, a black hole Reading through the first batch of email this morning. People responding to the query about a CSS version of Weblogs.Com are asking why I want to nuke the table. Performance. I explained it. If it's not possible to get that kind of layout with CSS, just say so. But this is not a religious thing. Believe me. I explained that too. Makes me wonder if people bothered to read my request before writing (long) responses. Bravo. Gary Taylor understood what I was asking for. It's probably not cross-browser though. I think I give up on CSS. It's a black hole. Andreas Helstrom suggested splitting it up into multiple pages. That's probably the most workable solution that works in every browser without support headaches into the next millennium. Onward! Wait a minute. It looks like Dave Polaschek nailed it.
Matt Croydon: "If a redesign happens and everyone is reading via RSS, did a redesign happen?" Jeneane Sessum: "How to quit smoking? It's time."
Cory Doctorow: "iCommune, the iTunes sharing/streaming plugin that Apple nastygrammed out of existence a couple weeks ago is back, though it's not clear if the author is doing this in defiance of Apple or not." Adam Curry: "I see the combination of RSS enclosures being used to hand off a url to a BitTorrent file, that automatically joins that file's network, downloads all relevant bits into the right places and notifies the subscriber of the new goodies." News.Com: "AOL is testing a new instant-chat robot that answers questions from AIM users about weather and stocks." A question for CSS design gurus. What's the best you can do with a table that has three columns like the one on Weblogs.Com. Let's see an example. I'd like the page to look good and load fast. Postscript: No one seems to understand -- I want to do weblogs.com without a table. Column 1 is the number, column 2 is the name of the weblog. Column 3 is the time it last updated. Look at the page. People say "But it's a table, that's what tables are for." I understand and usually agree -- but in this case -- the table is so long that some other way of displaying it might be much more usable. It's something of a scaling issue, not a religious or philosophical one.
Business 2.0: "Get ready for moblogging." MacWhispers: "Apple is near a beta release of their long-rumored professional word processing application." It really annoyed me that the list behind Weblogs.Com was imperfectly sorted. I thought this was because pings were coming in while the table was being sorted, but when I fixed it so this couldn't happen, it didn't get any better. That was a few months ago. Today I took another look and understood the problem more clearly. The code that produces the list doesn't even try to sort the list. It just happens to be close-to-sorted because another thread needed it sorted and did the work. But an indeterminate amount of time can pass between the two threads being called. So I changed the code in Radio Community Server to cache the table, and to lock a semaphore during the sort. The net result is that there's a little more lag between a ping and appearance on the page, but it's now perfectly sorted (unless it's not). Praise Murphy! Be careful what you promise. Wired: "A voracious worm that spread over the weekend appears to be under control. Meanwhile, conspiracy fans are having a field day trying to guess who released it and why." NY Times: Crime Is Soaring in Cyberspace. SF Chronicle: "Hundreds of police with riot gear, squad cars and helicopters were no match for larger numbers of troublemakers in scattered locations along International Boulevard who set fires, smashed windows and destroyed property, including a McDonald's restaurant that was ransacked and partially burned." Gnome-Girl: "Survived the Oakland raids and stampedes last night. Fires everywhere, outraged fans go ballistic but I lived to tell about it." Three years ago today I arrived in Davos. I attended a session on the size of the universe. "It was in this session that jetlag caught up with me. I was trying to figure out what time it was back home, and fell asleep doing that simple task. I woke myself up by reminding myself how exciting this place is." I remember when Old people are cursed by memories. So much bullshit begins with "I remember when." We can't help it, so forgive us. We do think there are common themes of life that we all go through. Think about it this way. We don't all have the same experience in puberty, but then again, we do. At the end, you're ready to have sex and make babies. There's lots of stuff ahead of you like that. Really. IM and weblogs Lots of great stuff in the thread on Instant Messaging and weblogs. Russ Lipton, as usual kicks big ass. Don Park too. Russ says each item on a weblog could form a chatroom for a few hours or days after it's posted. Keep a transcript. Allow the blogger the usual controls to keep spam, abusive posts and off-topic stuff off. Don says blogging is IM Slow.
What's the connection between IM and weblogs?
Dino Morelli hit a deal-stopper working on a schema for RSS 2.0. The problem is that each NY Times: "Newspapers are engaged in technological one-upmanship over 'AstroTurf' letters to the editor that look like authentic grass-roots responses from readers but are not."
Economist: "The best way to foster creativity in the digital age is to overhaul current copyright laws." John Rhodes: "Why not use RSS feeds to keep customers aware of new products and services?" NY Times: Scooters for Technophiles. Google Weblog: "In SearchKing v Google the judge has denied SearchKing's request for preliminary injuction. In other words, SearchKing asked for their PageRank to be put back to where it was while the trial was being held, and the judge said no." Smokers only
I remember a conversation I had on the "smoking deck" of a resort I go to. Smoking is prohibited everywhere but there. I was talking with a man in his early 20s. We were talking about nothing at all, just one of the heaviest subjects between young and old (I was in my early 40s at the time). The question was, why do you, Dave, think you're smarter than me? Or put it another way -- hey old dude -- you don't know shit. Which, of course, is mostly what young people have to say to old people. (Or so it seems.) So is it true, am I smarter than the young guy? Now, of course, I don't know the answer. I couldn't unless there was some objective measure of smartness. So all I can do is have an opinion. But that doesn't mean I can't use the scientific method to form the opinion. So I asked my young friend some questions. How old are you now? 22. Do you know more than when you were 18. Oh sure! No comparison, I was really stupid then. How about at 15? I was just a kid, I didn't know anything. (I move in for the kill.) Do you think learning stops at 22? Answer: Of course it doesn't. You learn things in your late 20s that you can't imagine in your early 20s. And the early 30s have their lessons, as do the mid 30s and the late 30s (oh boy!) and then the early 40s. And some of the learning is pegged to other people's experiences. Like when one of your parents dies. Or a child goes to college. Or things out of your control (bypass surgery). Ask a really old person about this. One of the sweetest things about life is that you can always learn, right up to the moment you die. And that's part of what's most enjoyable about being human. For some reason, if we can find the pure learning, it's a joyful thing, whether or not we ever get to use what we learn. BTW, my young companion basically said that learning does stop at 22. I wish I had his phone number or email address, he's probably about 27 now. I'd like to ask the obvious follow-up question.
Google Village: "Who are you optimizing your site for?" East Broadway Ron notices that spam sometimes tells a story in the subjects, when viewed in sequence. I've noticed this too! Would a meta-blog formed from the top sites of the day be interesting? SQL virus reports
Reports: CNN, BBC, Slashdot, Beta News, Google, AP, Reuters. Lawrence Lee: "Here's a chart from the Internet Traffic Report with global packet loss for the past 24 hours." Freedom.Org: "Quick fix is to firewall port 1434/UDP traffic, and reboot the affected SQL servers." Slashdot: "If you run Microsoft SQL Server, make sure the public Internet can't access it." Beta News: "The attack used a buffer overflow to execute code on a vulnerable SQL Server, causing that system to randomly seek out other computers to infect and in the process consume massive amounts of bandwidth." Jason Levine: "The worm generated an average of 2,815 packets a second, or roughly 170,000 packets a minute." My bet with Martin Observation. In 2003, when we want to, we can beat the NY Times, on a technical subject. Their report just appeared in their RSS feed, for the home page (so they thought it was an important story), but -- they don't have their own report, it's from AP. Presumably they will have a full Times-authored story in the Sunday edition. In contrast, when I checked at 6:30AM Pacific, Slashdot had the whole thing, cause and cure, and while I asked for and got lots more links from Scripting News readers, Slashdot already had the story from the main angle. One wonders why the AP report couldn't also include the cure, it's one sentence, sure it wouldn't mean anything to most people, but to the people who need the information, it could make a huge difference. The Internet is a set of interdependencies. We all depend on each other, never can you see that more clearly than when a virus attack is underway. Anyway, good job, World Wide Web, and hats off to Slashdot. Now, if I'm going to win the bet with Martin in 2007 (which I plan to), we're going to need to be that good not just in technology, but in everything. Earlier links Anne Bradstreet: "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." Doc: "I ride the Asymptote to Oblivion." An excellent Jamie Zawinski rant on Linux usability. Wired: "For a fee of $10 to $13, the service, called Live Phish, features specially designed cover art and provides soundboard-quality downloadable recordings of Phish concerts less than 48 hours after a performance." Rahul Dave: "With comments you don't care about identity, just that the person is a real person, not a spam bot." UserLand's mail server is down. No mail. Interesting feeling. It must be in the water (or air). My friend Cory Doctorow is having mail problems too. Carl Sagan I got new glasses. Interesting experience. The prescription is better at short distances, like for reading books and computer screens, but not as good at long distance as my old glasses. I figure the glitches will fix themselves. We'll see.
Without stars there would be no silicon (the stuff our planet is made from), or carbon (the stuff we're made from). Sagan's writing is so great. He has a way of making all my problems seem so unimportant. The last time I read his book he was still alive. He died at a young age of cancer. What a sweet man he was, so smart, so generous. America's medical system Doctor to a young man, just 27 years old. "I have bad news, good news, and bad news." First the bad news. You have a terminal disease. Without treatment, you will die. Now the good news. There's a drug that will hold back the disease. Unless there's a cure, you will have to take it for the rest of your life. Now the bad news. The drug costs $700 per month. Your insurance will cover it. But if you get fired or laid off, eventually you will have to pay for it out of your own pocket, or die. This is a real story.
Evangelism: "Guids are not just for geeks anymore." Here's a page that ranks RSS feeds by the amount of new bits they deliver to Radio users, both today and over time. I haven't looked at that page in a long time. Surprised more people aren't getting news from the NY Times and BBC. Perhaps that's because they deliver their news in spurts at the end of the day. Each spurt per user only counts for one. You score higher if you deliver news steadily. Phillip Torrone got a phone call today from Woz. Elwyn Jenkins: "Have you got your Google Word?" Peter Van Dijck: Introduction to XFML. Today is the first birthday of the XML coffee mug! News.Com: Font maker plans open-source typeface. Sounds like Uncle Ito's session at Davos went well. Popdex "offers the ability to host TrackBack threads." Berklee: "I'm curious about identity theft as well."
Evangelism: "RSS 2.0 has a neat feature that allows an item to link to comments about that item. Content tools and aggregators can support this feature, allowing people to comment directly from the aggregator." Fredrik Lundh's Python RSS reader supports the comments feature described above. Excellent. NY Times: "The Senate voted today to bar deployment of a Pentagon project to search for terrorists by scanning information in Internet mail and in the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies here and abroad."
News.Com: "The market for XML-based content-lifecycle products -- software and services that allow content to be easily reused in a number of formats -- will grow tenfold to $11.6 billion in annual revenue by 2008, according to a report released Thursday." JD Lasica: "Instead of the hunt and peck of Web surfing, you can download or buy a small program that turns your computer into a voracious media hub, letting you snag headlines and news updates as if you were commanding the anchor desk at CNN." JD does something extremely cool, on his weblog he provides full transcripts of the interviews he did for the piece. Much more interesting. Very nice. Someday all reporters will do this. Hey maybe they'll skip writing the polished piece, esp when the article isn't appearing in print. Let's have a weblog that covers identity theft from the point of view of an honest person wanting to be as safe as possible. I read an article somewhere that common criminals are turning from violent mugging to identity theft. Less messy, less work, less risk, higher yields. We also need a weblog about how to get good health care in the US. The weblog should be a collaboration between users and medical professionals. I got excellent responses to yesterday's rant. I hope we can get some of this energy to flow through the public Web.
Mary Jo: "Microsoft may find itself on the wrong side of the sneaker-wearing partner in Boies, Schiller & Flexner."
I find it striking that the meeting of Middle East foreign ministers, to avoid war in Iraq, is being held in Turkey, not in Davos. What a difference a few years makes. When I was there in 2000 you'd stumble across hallway meetings between high-level US, Israeli and Palestinian reps, and the show closed with beautiful ceremony with Yassir Arafat and Shimon Peres. "Peace is hard work," Peres said. Lance's report, not from Davos 2003. NY Times: "Until the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge eclipsed ferry traffic in the 30's, the building was the crossroads of San Francisco." Seth Dillingham: "If I was a spammer, I'd think this was a gift!"
Had a really interesting meeting this afternoon with famous investment banker and venture capitalist Bill Hambrecht. I'm interested in meeting more people who were part of the early Silicon Valley, before the dotcom boom. Hambrecht was the initial investor in Adobe, in 1982. He tells lots of Adobe stories. Fascinating stuff. PC Mag reviews Apple's new Web browser. Mark Pilgrim: Parsing RSS At All Costs. Interesting discussion about validating RSS; happy ending. Paolo: "In Italy nobody pays prescription drugs."
Scott Rosenberg: "For Salon, or any other standalone independent that needs to pay not only for content but for bandwidth and software and health plans for employees and so forth, some variation on the subscription plan is the only way to go." Wired: "There are a lot more voters downloading music than there are music company executives," Hayes warned. "If the RIAA was my client, I'd advise them to think this one through again." On this day in 1998, Netscape threw all their balls in the air. Roe v Wade On this day 30 years ago, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v Wade, forever changing US law, culture, society, lifestyles, and setting in motion a philosophical debate that continues to this day. Whether you're pro-life or pro-choice, or somewhere inbetween, this may be a moment to pause and perhaps listen, to understand that there are points of view other than your own, and hard questions that do not have simple answers. There appears to be no mention of Roe v Wade on the Supreme Court's website. I thought this was notable. $400 a month Prescription drugs cost a lot. Yesterday I refilled just one of my must-have prescriptions, the kind of stuff I have to take for the rest of my life or else I die. I have health insurance, for now, but the co-pay is pretty high. I asked what it would cost if I didn't have insurance. $400 per month. And that's just one drug. How do people pay for this? How does the government justify going to war in Iraq. Where are the priorities. If Bush had to pay $400 per month for one drug, out of his own pocket, I can't imagine he'd have too much bandwidth left for Saddam Hussein. Okay, five minutes later I've already gotten a flame. No, I didn't know they were so expensive. Sue me. Part of the philosophy of weblogs is that we don't mind sharing epiphanies, even if it makes us look stupid, to some. So, why was I so clueless? Because I've had good health insurance and good health, no reason to learn, or be concerned. It's easy to look the other way when it's someone else's problem. I'm just human, no claims of sainthood here.
News.Com: "A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Verizon Communications to disclose the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate in a legal decision that could make it easier for the music industry to crack down on file swapping." Daypop weblog: "There are 3000 more weblogs in the index which brings the total number of sites spidered to 10,500." Lance redesigns Davos Newbies, but keeps the name. I think he's right to do it, the old design, a Garrett Vreeland beauty, was showing its age. And as Lance says, he's no longer a Davos insider. But the spirit of Davos is something to attach to, and just as Scripting News isn't just about scripting -- but rather a philosophy that started with scripting -- Davos Newbies makes sense as the name for Lance's weblog. It's been a three-year run, and remains a must-read for me. Every time he updates I'm there, with a sweaty mouse finger, anxious to see what Lance has to say.
Now, on the other hand, it would be worth $40 per year, to me, to be able to offload the news aggregator to a centralized server. I expect I'll do a lot of traveling this year, with all kinds of net connections, some not very good. But is it a good business for UserLand to go into? I would advise against it. Keep selling desktop news aggregators. It's proven that people will pay for software that runs on their own machine. They expect to get centralized services for free. That's the problem Blogger has. Lots of users. Lots of free users. Evan responds. Of course if there had been any money in NewsBlogger you could have hired someone to add the bandwidth to grow the idea. And My.UserLand did get commercialized -- it's the aggregator in Radio. Same software. Peking Duck: "Nice guys always finish last in Beijing." Bryan did a kickass Harvard theme for Radio. Wildgrape NewsDesk is a "simple and fast RSS reader for Microsoft .Net." Minor update to the RSS 2.0 spec. Two years ago today: "I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am. Been hidin' out in a rock and roll band." Jon Udell: "It's cool to see that JavaScript can be as Perlishly terse as this." Seth Dillingham: Thread-based Global Variables in UserTalk. The callbacks for the Radio RSS-generator are released. Gnome-Girl: "I can be a complicated communicator." News.Com: "When Yahoo began selling premium services, the move was ridiculed by analysts." Jeff Kandt added a RSS feed for comments on each post. Tim Bray on RSS Tim Bray wrote a think piece about RSS. My comments follow. There's a misunderstanding in Tim's piece about UserLand's aggregator. Radio runs on the desktop, just like NNW -- its user interface is HTTP/HTML, so you read it in a browser, but you're talking to a server on 127.0.0.1. Therefore the scaling issues for both products are identical, but imho, manageable. Tim said in his lead paragraph to expect breakage, but I'm going to be a stinker. No breakage. Period.
Trial balloon: "A simple addition to discussion group software makes it easy for a user to go to one place to monitor all conversations he or she is part of." Simon Willison asks what to do when soneone hijacks an identity in weblog comments. I just improved Sunday's RSS-generator-for-Radio so that callbacks can now generate attributes on elements. As they say, still diggin. Bryan Bell is working on a theme for Harvard weblogs. I'm trying it out. I want it to be more dramatic. Harvard is the crimson school. I'm going to look for a really definitive Harvard website. If you find one send me some email. Check this out. My.Harvard.Edu. Wow. I bet they'll like RSS. Paul Boutin found the Republican astroturf generator. Lance: "Will I suffer withdrawal pangs from not going to Davos this week?" SourceID is "an open project site for Digital Identity ideas, protocols & software." This is an interesting site. Slashdot: "Kevin Mitnick is getting back online and can start taking email tomorrow, January 21." Jenny: "I will never buy SimCity 4 because I can tell how addictive it is just from the web site."
John Burkhardt shares his angst about SUVs. Tucker Goodrich: "This innocuous little fly just invites being peed upon." Wired: "The fact that movie and consumer electronics industry groups are not in on the new alliance is notable." Start me up Good morning. A few notes on starting up my weblog. It's 4:40AM Pacific, which is 1:40PM in Paris. In a few minutes I'm going to be interviewed by a German newspaper in London. The first W in WWW stands for World. No kidding. I go to my Manila site and Flip Home Page. Then I click on the Edit With Radio button. I bring the Radio app to the front. There's the outline. I choose SN Rules from the Boilerplate sub-menu of the Bookmarks menu in Radio. It adds the rules you see in the screen shot. (Or you will see when I link it in after taking it.) But I get ahead of myself. Then I add a new headline. Start me up. It's the first line of a Rolling Stones song. One that they sang in their HBO concert in NYC on Saturday night, which I watched on Sunday, thanks to my TiVO. No commercials to skip, by the way, so no BigCo exec to piss off. Paid for, out of my $70 per month fee to Hollywood and GM. Why do I always mention this? Becuase I pay them every damned month so they can get on TV and call me a pirate. Huh? Oy. Anyway. Then I have a blank outline. Unlike some writers, I love a blank slate and never have trouble filling it. My psyche generates lots of stuff. I try to filter out the angst. I've learned that's not popular. It's still there of course, just filtered. A day has begun. Ahhh. More Stones lyrics: "My eyes dilate, my lips go green. My hands are greasy. She's a mean, mean machine."
For review: How to extend Radio's RSS generator. NY Times: "The evidence is now overwhelming that Linux, once a symbol of software's counterculture, has become a mainstream technology."
Digital Hit is blogging the Golden Globe awards. Zawodny: My stuff is where? Exactly. Peking Duck, a weblog from Beijing, is totally right on. Every time I post a comment on a weblog I have to remember to go back and see if anyone followed up. We have to figure a way to automate this. Agree or disagree?
For some reason I thought of Brent when I saw this. David Weinberger: Open Spectrum FAQ. "Imagine rather than having to worry about how much 'bandwidth' is enough, everyone had unlimited access to bits so that the size of what you communicate simply didn't matter." According to dweb.blogspot.com, Pyra changed the IP address for blogspot, so people in China can now access all the sites hosted there. Of course the Chinese censors are certain to figure out what's going on. Postscript: Several readers have pointed out that China controls its own DNS, so it has blocked the Dweb site at that level. Tri-Valley Herald: "Protesters marched up Market Street to the Civic Center, where celebrity speakers including actor Martin Sheen and singers Bonnie Raitt and Joan Baez addressed the crowd." An actor who plays the President, gives a speech at a real demonstration. That crosses a line. Three years ago today Hedy Lamarr died.
Reuters: "A top music industry representative says Internet service providers will be asked to pay up for giving their customers access to free song-swapping sites." Key phrase: Substantial non-infringing use. NY Times: "A New York court has ruled that Network Associates, a maker of popular antivirus and computer security software, may not require people who buy the software to get permission from the company before publishing reviews of its products." Lessig proposes a small tax on fifty-year-old copyrights. Jack Balkin: "The Supremes have made new law that puts the DMCA into question." BBC: "Demonstrations in Japan were followed by protests in Pakistan, the Middle East and Russia. Others are taking place in Europe and the United States." A feature request for anyone doing an RSS aggregator. Watch for enclosures. When you spot one, make note. If you're running at 2AM (a configurable time) download all the enclosures you've found, and put them in a folder on the local hard disk. Present them to the user when he or she arrives in the morning. This way large media objects, songs and movies, can be transmitted overnight using the network defined by RSS. This idea came from Adam Curry. Scoble enters the great Alpha Male debate with tips for girls on how to get one.
Elizabeth Spiers: "My VC rolodex is just one big graveyard." Impressive. The NY Times has a Lessig op-ed on the Eldred decision. We had his thoughts within minutes. I heard a brief report on NPR, then tuned in Radio Lessig. Bing. Salon: "The Eldred decision, in the words of University of Buffalo law professor Shubha Gosh, 'deconstitutionalizes' copyright, pushing it father into the realm of policy and power battles and away from the principles that have anchored the system for two centuries. That means public interest advocates and activists must take their battles to the public sphere and the halls of Congress." Computerworld: Spam's getting more sophisticated. Paul Boutin: "A few alert Googlers have noticed that dozens of local newspapers from Boston to Honolulu have run the same letter under different names nationwide." Some people dis the Bay Area, but they should check out what spring is like here. It's heaven on earth. And it's still just mid-January. Fruit trees are already in bloom. The smells are to die for. Better than cheesecake. And not fattening. Hey I'm going for three hikes this weekend. How about that NY? Brian Buck: "Dave's fruit tree blossoms sound nice!" Open source advocate Bruce Perens is a guest on NPR Science Friday, in the Bay Area on KQED. News.Com has a new page describing their RSS feeds. Thanks to Xeni Jardin for this inspiring demo of recursion. Webcast of today's anti-spam conference at MIT. Bill Moyers covers copyright on PBS tonight. Brian Buck: "There are several hundred people protesting at the UN right outside my window." Jesse Shanks: Using OmniGraffle as an RSS News Reader with Applescript. Rogers Cadenhead: "Without notifying users, AOL adds http://free.aol.com to the browser's trusted sites zone, enabling executable code from that domain to be run without permission." Jeremy Zawodny: "It seems that api.google.com has been having troubles for much of the night." News.Com: "Apple Computer has forced a developer to stop distributing a plug-in that turned its iTunes music player into peer-to-peer music-sharing software." I went to lunch yesterday with Sandy Wilbourn, a friend since college in the early-mid 70s. Sandy used to be at Harvard, or his wife taught there, or something like that. I'm not sure. Anyway at lunch he said something about me that resonated. We were talking about using the facilities, libraries, gyms, etc on the campus, and Sandy said that I should just go there and act like I belonged. He and I both agreed that's one of my secrets of success. Now it's not such a secret! Martin Schwimmer digs back through the archives and finds a glitch in the NY Times' memory bank.
Register: "I suggested that they should put out files with legitimate titles and put inside them silence or random noise and saturate the file sharing networks with those files. That did start the poisoning." Wired: "To link directly to some newspapers' content, Danish search firm Newsbooster now must use the sort of decentralized subterfuge utilized by companies that distribute file-sharing applications." NY Times profile of renaissance blogger, Glenn Reynolds.
Tara Sue: "Politicians are more likely to defend the Web and its users once they utilize the Web."
Jon Udell reviews Apple's Safari browser. A new Bryan Bell theme? News.Com reports that Microsoft will issue it's first-ever stock dividend, and that Richard Parsons will replace Steve Case as AOL's chairman. Tim Jarrett reports that the high water mark on Weblogs.Com grows, on average, by 2.8 weblogs per day. Syndirella is an RSS aggregator for .Net. Glenn Reynolds is now a blogger-in-residence at MSBC. English 515 at Purdue University focuses on weblogs. One of the assignments is to read this weblog. James Speth: "I just received a Notice of Breach and Termination of License letter from Apple, stating that I violated my license to the Device Plug-in API which iCommune uses." New Scientist: "The entire site may have been blocked to prevent Chinese internet users reaching one blog in particular: dweb.blogspot.com. This site is has published lists of proxy servers that can be used to gain access to restricted web sites from within China." It's like a thing of nature, watch a natural-born blogger find his voice. The Supreme Court will have to stand by you and me someday. The executive branch of the US government will eventually do what China does. A few more loops and we'll be there. All roads lead to that. We will be within our rights, in every way. The First Amendment will protect what we do. The Sonny Bono law will seem like a small thing. Then, we will be very glad to have a highly principled constitutional scholar who hasn't sold out on our side -- and that's you Professor Lessig, in case you haven't figured that out yet. A thread on Cadenhead's weblog about authors and copyrights. I asked Aaron Swartz why his opinion on Rogers' work matters. "Isn't that between him and his publisher and his readers? I've asked Lessig the same question and I don't get a satisfactory answer. If you think he's screwing up, compete with him. Isn't that the American way?" Karlin Lillington gets Barrapunto'd. Don't worry it's PG-13. NY Times: "The Supreme Court today upheld the 20-year extension that Congress granted to all existing copyrights in 1998, declaring that while the extension might have been bad policy, it fell clearly within Congress's constitutional authority." NY Times: "In a new program to encourage graduate students to enter public service, Harvard University plans to give $14 million in 'presidential scholarships' over the next three years to 200 to 300 graduate students interested in public service or research careers." News.Com: "Venture funds, which tend to have a life of 10 to 12 years, have seen the return on their limited partners' investments fallen of late." NY Times: "Mr. Young estimates that Apple's cash position is the equivalent of $12 a share. The company's shares closed at $14.43 yesterday, down 18 cents for the day. In after-hours trading, Apple shares fell further, to $14.10."
David Galbraith: "Let's face it NY is much better than Irwindale." Two new installments in Halley's alpha male series. Dan Gillmor: "Swipe a CD from a record store and you'll get arrested. But when Congress authorizes the entertainment industry to steal from you -- well, that's the American way." Computerworld: "On flight LH 418 from Frankfurt to Washington, Lufthansa AG today began a three-month trial of a new onboard wireless broadband service that allows travelers to connect to the Internet some 30,000 feet in the sky." Rogers Cadenhead: "Breaking even or doubling my cost wouldn't be nearly enough incentive to yoke myself to a keyboard for months at a time as the Earth goes about its normal day-to-day business in my absence."
John Palfrey: "No one could have done a better job than Larry Lessig did." Donna Wentworth is gathering links on the Eldred decision. AP: "A huge victory for Disney and other companies." Forbes: "Somewhere in Burbank a mouse called Mickey is smiling." Lessig: "It has often been said that movements gain by losing in the Supreme Court." Joi Ito: "The default path is that we are stripped of our rights." Halley: "..transfixed by the picture of Professor Lessig on his blog." Mitch Wagner at InternetWeek interviewed me. Pretty good. There are a couple of things that I'd clarify (esp the use of the word innovation), but for the most part, it reflects what I believe. One of the Radio weblogs, by Roland Piquepaille, is being Slashdotted as we speak. Mazel tov Roland. Jamie Zawinski on Apple's decision not to use Mozilla in Safari. "I'm not bitter." BBC: "The US technology and music industries reach a deal to help protect copyright and stop piracy but not everyone supports the plan." Customers. Karlin Lillington: "The new standard for cutting-edge adventure tourism is going to be a flight into space and a stay at a space hotel." Five years ago today XML-RPC was zoooooooming.
Halley: "A dog ran right in front of my car and I tried ot miss him, but I hit him with a big terrible thunk noise." There is something ridiculously pathetic about people who trash SF to help them feel justified in living in NY. McCusker: "Wes's comments remind me of my intention to start using a hand puppet sometimes when I go out to play in the evenings." Wired: Partying Like 1999. A couple of ridiculously easy innovations from Phillip Pearson. Jeffrey Zeldman, a leading proponent of Web standards, shares Mark Pilgrim's disbelief at the discontinuity in the W3C roadmap. "By design, the present XHTML 2.0 draft is not backward compatible with HTML 4 or XHTML 1." Sebastian Delmont (via email): "Francisco Toro used to work for the NY Times, but his coverage of the situation in Venezuela on his blog got him in a conflict of interests. So he quit!" I almost forgot. Seven months since my last cigarette. Jenny reminds me not to forget the librarians, and I totally agree; and I'm hoping that when the time comes, she and other librarians-with-weblogs will help me find the right librarian to talk with at Harvard. My goal is to do as little work as possible. Glenn Reynolds nailed it when he said I was basically a blogger-in-residence at Harvard. Exactly right, if it works as I hope it does. A pied piper. And by the way I hope to invite visiting bloggers, people who come to give a presentation about what blogging means to them, in each of the disciplines that are taught at Harvard. The beauty of a university is that it has so many interfaces to the rest of the world. Each of them can be a source and recipient of evangelism. BBC: "On 15 January Lufthansa will start offering travellers the ability to surf the net and send and receive e-mails in real time as they fly." On this day in 1998, XML-RPC, as an idea, was born.
Pet peeve about Silicon Valley. Nothing is open at 3AM. No Starbucks. Hey there aren't even any good restaurants open at 3AM. Denny's? Hmm. When I asked Jamis about this a few years ago he said zoning wouldn't permit it (I wanted him to keep Bucks open 24 hours a day so programmers would have somewhere to go to hang out with people). But Safeway supermarkets are open 24 hours a day. So it can't be totally illegal.
Sebastien Paquet: Personal knowledge publishing.
Tonight we're up in San Francisco at the Rave Awards, rootin for Tara Sue all the way. Jon Udell: Services and Links. Mark Pilgrim: "After keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I’m still stuck in a dead end." PC Mag: "One of the big stories to come out of this year's CES is the approaching availability of 802.11g, which promises 54-Mbps wireless connectivity." Press release: "Jupitermedia Corporation today announced that its Jupiter Research division will be the first research advisory firm to offer dedicated research analyst Weblogs."
Doc Searls: "AOL is toast." David Galbraith: "What is amazing is that AOL ever became big in the first place when ten years ago they were already an anachronism." John Palfrey is co-director of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, where I'm a fellow. I guess in some sense John is my boss. I haven't had one of those in a long time. Weird feeling. BTW, that's one of my heroes, Maynard G Krebs, to the right. He's appeared on Scripting News for the last three January 13ths. Not sure why, but why not? According to News.Com, Web Services start-up Flamenco "has secured $14.5 million in two rounds of funding." Sam Ruby is organizing a blogger's dinner in Seattle two weeks from now. RFC: RSS 2.0 and the MetaWeblog API Karlin Lillington reports on the 16-year-old Irish boy whose super-fast Web browser may win him a chance to study computer engineering in the US.
Adam Medros: "I'm a grad student at Harvard Business School and I think the only blogger on campus."
LawMeme: "Google claims that PageRank is commercial speech, protected by the First Amendment."
Riveting MP3 interview with Nesson. NY Times: "Anyone who has ever tried to pry a girl offline knows that girls like computers. They just don't understand how they work." Paolo and JY comment on Dan Bricklin's SMBmeta. Several people at last night's dinner said they found the idea interesting. A directory of HipLogs. They're just getting started. Photos of people doing dorky things. What else is there?
And lest I forget, Simon Fell has black hair! AP: "Maurice Gibb, a member of the famed disco band the Bee Gees, died Sunday at a Miami Beach hospital, his family said. He was 53." Samizdata: "People say stupid things when you're trying to quit smoking."
Happy Birthday to Radio 8. One year old today. Don't forget the hamburger blogger dinner tonite in SF. Simon Fell will be there. Cooooooooooool. Joi Ito: "I'm glad I got to say 'blog' on national TV." Susan Kitchens: What real women do with duct tape.
John Palfrey: "Dave Winer's work in developing open standards for software, promoting the growth of widespread and broadly accessible Web publishing tools and content, and leading the blogging movement is outstanding." Hiptop explains how to do a weblog. "Send mail from your hiptop to hiplog@hiplog.com. That's it! You're blogging!" InfoWorld: Blogs in the Enterprise. CNN: Illinois Gov Ryan expected to empty death row. AP: "My favorite product that I got for Christmas is TiVo," FCC chairman Michael Powell said during a question and answer session at the International Consumer Electronics Show. "TiVo is God's machine." Wired: "An award-winning science fiction writer and digital rights activist has persuaded the publisher of his first novel to make the book available free online for anyone to read, print or even republish on paper." Blogspace shutdown in China
Peking Duck: "Yes, it appears the Chinese government has imposed a permanent nationwide ban on all blogspot.com sites." Open Flows: "After talking to other blogspot users all over China it seems that the ban is present throughout the entire country." BWG: "Bloggers from inside China are upset about that." Russell Beattie: "Cisco made a shitload of money selling their firewalls to China." Shelley Powers: "The use of proxies is a known workaround for censorship."
NY Times: "Some 10,000 people took the streets in the eastern city of Hefei this week in what appears to have been the largest student demonstration since the Tiananmen Square human rights protests of 1989. But the students had a much narrower agenda: traffic safety."
DaveNet: Chapter 5 in which Dave goes to Harvard. Ooops. Reading Jim Roepcke's weblog, I just realized that Apple crushed a couple of small developers by shipping their own Web browser. I fell into the same trap so many other people do -- thinking only of Microsoft. Users may not worry, but they should. It's in their interest to have small innovative developers trying out new ideas. No matter how they spin it, it's bad news for a developer when Apple bundles a competitor to your product. David Weinberger: The Problem with Metadata. Kevin Werbach: "With the announcement this week of Microsoft's SPOT devices and Apples 802.11g/Bluetooth laptop, the battle is joined. But where is the technical community?" A new mail list for the MetaWeblog API I removed the caveat from metaWeblog.newMediaObject, freezing the entry-point, and permitting deployment. I still owe you an RFC for using namespaces in structs in the MetaWeblog API. Dan Bricklin: SMBmeta Introduction. News.Com: FM gets strong reception at CES.
Jon Udell: "Ultimately, it's not about RSS any more than it was about NNTP. It's about the evolution of our species toward shared consciousness." Hamburger Blogger Dinner in SF on Saturday nite. Scoble, Pirillo and me. And Tara Sue? Could be. Last year on this day: "If you knew you were going to be stranded on a deserted island and could only take one website with you, which would it be?" Three years ago: "That's AOL Folks!" Halley: "Dave, the Boston bloggers will miss you today at lunch, but we now reserve an honorary chair for you at all Boston blogging events." Nice! People are really excited about the Harvard thing. That is so cool. Me too. I woke up in the middle of the night, my head buzzing with ideas. Can we do this? How about that? Etc etc. I need to start a website. And a directory.
I don't usually get scooped on stories about me.
1/1/03: "Believe it or not I'm applying for a job in academia." Jon Udell is getting record flow on his weblog. The librarians are figuring out what he's doing. Nice. Aaron Swartz: "ICANN is soliciting comments on two important whois issues." InfoSynch: "Sony's latest handheld is state-of-the-art; features include a 200 MHz processor, Palm OS 5, integrated Bluetooth, a WiFi expansion slot and a 2 megapixel digital camera."
Rogers Cadenhead: "Wishing death upon a political antagonist is truly loathsome." Ernie the Attorney: "When I get home I watch the news broadcast that has been captured by my TiVo. It's nice to skip through the commercials. But I usually skip through the stories too." MacInTouch reader comments on Safari. Clay Shirky: "The business Fred Smith imagined being in -- build a network that's cheap to run but charge customers as it if were expensive -- is the business the telephone companies are in today."
Halley: "A nice young woman wrote me by email saying she doesn't want to keep reading about how to become an Alpha Male, rather would like to know how to get one." Cristian Vidmar: How about pie-based browsing? Safari Enhancer is an "application for enabling several hidden features of the Safari webbrowser beta."
Two years ago: "A boat that leaks lacks integrity. If the leaking gets bad enough it stops being a boat and becomes a sunken boat. If someone is living on the boat, it becomes a houseboat. If its nature changes, so does the name." Last year on this day, Mark Pilgrim won the Best Scripting Weblog award. Last year there were barely enough scripting weblogs to have a category. I think Mark would still win today. In the last year he has done some incredibly good work, and now there are dozens if not hundreds of scripting weblogs. Phillip Pearson: RSS timezone issue when importing. McCusker's weblog gets more interesting every week.
DaveNet: First essay of the year. Daniel Berlinger: "We almost had convergence recently, but Pyra went another way. It's a real shame. I wish they hadn't. It's not too late." Interesting bit about me by James Hong. And one by Donna Wentworth. My comments are below. Seth Russell: "Google is great, but it's not very good if you want to know what's being said right now." Agreed. LiveJournal has an XML-RPC interface. Holy guacamole. JRobb says he's getting a Mac? Yikes. Bruce Perens: "We believe that there should be a fair, competitive market for computer software, both proprietary and Open Source." If I had a billion dollars I'd pay each of you $10,000 to read this page carefully, think about it, and then get started building a directory for each of three subjects you're passionate about and knowledgable of. All the technology is there. The format is open and brain-dead simple. And the philosophy is right too, imho. It's just waiting for people to decide to make it happen. Someday it will. I'd rather not wait any longer. Thanks for listening.
Paul Boutin posted an example file for Apple's Keynote. Dave Hyatt, a member of the Safari team at Apple (that's their new Web browser) has a weblog, and there he responds to the issues raised by Mark Pilgrim. This is fantastic. This is how the Web is supposed to work. Bravo.
Matthew Rothenberg: "Don't tell my wife, but I have a crush on Steve Jobs." OK. Halley: "It's sexy and frothy." Register: Start-up marries blogs and camera phones. The right way to do this, imho, is to connect the phone-to-weblog software through the MetaWeblog API, that way existing weblog users could participate, and new users would have choice of backend software. Any cellphone service provider that buys into this proposal will have to scrap it in a few months when the general solutions come out. Maybe less than a few months. Mobile blogging, or moblogging is very hot. So is choice for users. Spoke with Tara Sue yesterday. She's coming to Calif for the Wired awards in SF next Monday. She's nominated for one of the awards. She's an entrepreneur now, CEO of Policlicks, they're going to make some kind of announcement next week. She'll be here Friday through Wednesday. Maybe we should have a spicy noodles dinner for Tara Sue? Here's an RFC for an entry-point in the MetaWeblog API that uploads a new media object to the user's weblog. Last year on this day: "Like cholesterol, there's good sarcasm and bad sarcasm." Lauren Weinstein: Tiny Cell Phone or Big Brother? Paolo: "Introducing a new browser after 5 years is a pretty bold move from Apple." Comments James says people hate me because I change my mind. Where I grew up it was considered a sign of weakness if you changed your mind. My father, the guy who's so sick now, used to give me a hard time when it even appeared that I had changed my mind. I never let him win that. To this day I insist that I have the right, even the responsibility, to change my mind if circumstances warrant it. Suppose you get some new information. Or, on reflection, draw a different conclusion. How arrogant would it be to hold on to your old belief. What does it cost to change your mind? Why do people consider it a sign of weakness if you change your mind? I don't. Emphatically. Now, to Donna's comments. I remember when Lessig and I had our first public exchange on the weblogs. That was nothing compared to what we said privately. Very strong opinions, both ways. But I never didn't admire Lessig as a human being. From the first time I saw him speak I knew he was someone I would get to know, and hoped we would become friends. There's nothing wrong with an opinion stated with strength and conviction. Even if it's wrong. No one has a patent on the truth. And power can be a source of safety, not just danger. Lessig has a powerful mind. I find that interesting. Where does that go? Who knows. BTW, I like John Hiler too -- he writes for Corante as Donna does. A couple of times I said I didn't like some of the things he said. That doesn't mean I don't like the person. I'd like to buy John and Donna and AKMA a drink some day. Here's a toast to a strong opinion well-stated. I wrote an email to Donna today. "If this is going to be an interesting medium, there are going to be differences of opinion. That's not Low Road. That's First Amendment, and that's (I think) what we all agree is sacred."
Cadillac: "With a 345-horsepower engine, Escalade is the world's most powerful SUV and it has the muscle to back up its bold, distinctive style." JD Lasica: "I'd forgotten what a blast I'd had at past Macworlds." Reviews of Apple's new browser: Mena Trott, Mark Pilgrim. Matthew Langham and Daniel Berlinger blogged Steve Jobs. News.Com on Apple announcements. BBC: Teenager wins DVD court battle. "The court acquitted Jon Johansen on all charges and said he did not break the law when he created a system that could remove copy protection on DVDs." AP: "A Norwegian teenager was acquitted in a key test case Tuesday of violating computer break-in laws with his program that circumvents security codes on Hollywood's DVD movies." Brent Simmons: "An extension to the various weblog APIs that I'd love to see would be easy image uploading." Chris Morley: "A new C++ implementation of XML-RPC client and server for easy integration in C++ apps based on py-xmlrpc.". 1/11/01: Payloads for RSS. "When I started talking with Adam Curry late last year, he wanted me to think about high quality video on the Internet, and I totally didn't want to hear about it. Like a lot of people, I had tried it, and found it unsatisfying and frankly, exhausting." Ziff-Davis has two more RSS 2.0 feeds. One for PC Mag reviews, and the other for tech news from eWeek. Hey it looks like someone got the religion. Excellent stuff. Russell Beattie: "I forget what a freak I am sometimes."
Charles Cook updated XML-RPC for .Net. Sumod and Dejan Jelovic have RSS aggregators for .Net. Mary Jo Foley on Microsoft's CES announcements. Even better news. Mary Jo's column is now available as an RSS 2.0 feed, so you never have to miss it. Thanks! First DaveNet of the Year? I still owe you all an essay to kick off the new year. Basically, I was (and will) say that we've reached a plateau in our journey of technology. We've got all the basic ingredients for the Two-Way-Web in place. The back-end systems are maturing, with lots of choice. The XML-RPC interfaces are also maturing and (more important) standardizing. We went a lot further with the ManilaRPC interface, and the Edit This Page button in Manila, which is a great idea, still hasn't appeared in other mass market CMSes -- but I have no doubts the interfaces will deepen, and the convenience for users will increase, and the content systems will do more of the work. Another innovation waiting in the wings -- directories. It's the next step after blogrolls. The wizzy editing tools are coming from all corners, all platforms, mobile and desktop, you name it, someone is working on wiring it up to the content network defined by the MetaWeblog API. Further, we have settled the outage in RSS, again with choice. People who like RDF are able to use that, at a cost in confusion, but that's factored in already. We got the features and extensibility we wanted in RSS 2.0. If there's any more work to do there it's just clarification or cleanup. So the XML-RPC interfaces will deepen, the tools will keep coming, the back-ends will support the tools. Aggregators will be able to depend on more data in the RSS feeds. The next challenge is spreading the gospel. There we have just begun. Anyway, that seems like a good outline for a piece. Hey maybe that's all I need to say. Another section Before I forget, there's a major section that I've left out. In the past I tried to rally, then I begged the investment community of Silicon Valley to drop a little change in the tipjar for new technology. They had gotten so far off their mission, they weren't investing in technology through the dot-com mess, they were investing in marketing, retailers, publishers, and then finally just hype. There was no substance. The result is a completely wrecked leading edge here in the land of the leading edge, Silicon Valley. This year I'm done begging. It's over. I give up. The VCs can have this place. Good luck. I can't afford to wait for you. We have to find another way to finance the leading edge.
The Wired Rave Award nominees for 2003 are in. AP: NFL Says Giants' Game Ended with Referee Error. Andre Torrez: "This application allows you to map out a new XML-RPC message with a tree control and then submit that request to any XML-RPC server. The response is then viewable in a separate window." Chris Hanson: "The BDXmlRpcForWO framework provides an XML-RPC request handler for WebObjects 5.1 and 5.2." Brian Buck: "I was able to walk with my walker to the garage where our car is parked, which is 4.5 blocks there, and 4.5 blocks back. That's the furthest I've been able to walk by a long margin. And let me tell you, it wore me out completely, and I'm definitely in a lot more pain today, but it was a big milestone in my recovery." Only a rumor: Microsoft will announce, in the next few days, a software distribution system that works over radio. The announcement will come at Bill Gates' keynote at CES. This is not a rumor: Microsoft Instant Messenger is down, has been down for six hours. Paolo reviews Virtual PC 6.0 for Mac OS X. He can run several different versions of Windows on the same machine at the same time. NY Times: "The city of Long Beach, Calif., plans to announce on Friday that it will make free wireless Internet access available in its downtown area as part of an effort to attract visitors and companies to the business district." Branscum: "Down in Silicon Valley, Valley so Low, or so down, anyway, thanks to the shitty economy." Werblog: "New economy companies pay little in dividends because they believe they can make better use of the cash than their shareholders." Paul Haahr: "Continue taxing dividends, yet let companies expense them as they do with all other cash outflows." Bruce Bartlett: "One of the things I like most about blogs is that they provide links to articles, information and commentary that would not otherwise come to my attention." John Robb: "Going to kick some serious ass this year." Joshua Allen speaks up, eloquently, for The Semantic Web. Halley: "Alpha Males get pussy." I was emailing with Halley last night and asked why she didn't have comments, given that her site is named Halley's Comment. She gave the right answer (see Nick Denton's comment below). Halley lets it hang out, and that's really cool. She's an Alpha Female, if there is such a thing. There are a few other women bloggers who can handle a strong opinion from a man without screaming abuse (there are others who play the A-card too quickly). Anyway, Sam Ruby of all people, picked up on Halley's comment about Alpha Males getting pussy, and he has a comment section, so have a look, and if you have a comment, do. Nick Denton: "This is the way to deal with flamers: let them post on their own damn sites." Exactly. NY Times: "Phone calls over the Internet may finally be catching on." James Hong of HotOrNot is speaking in Silicon Valley on Thursday. Here's my curriculum vitae. It's basically a summary of my education, work experience, publications, honors and awards. It's much like a resume, for a person who hopes to find work as an educator. Halley expands on the Emotional Spa meme. Allan Karl: "Where are the mind gyms?"
Back in California, to a soaked living room (leaky roof, arrrgh), and just in time for the NY Giants vs the SF 49ers. HOLY SHIT HOW ABOUT THOSE NINERS! Great great game. In the end the Giants blew it. The final field goal from the 21 yard line (an easy distance for most teams) that should have won the game for NY was broken by a bad snap. But it was just third down. The holder could have fallen on the ball and they could have tried again. Instead -- panic, the clock ran out, game over. Does Jeff Garcia, the 49ers QB, remind us of Joe Montana or Steve Young? In every way. Andrew Orlowski has a story about Microsoft's cellphone. I am so wiped. Tired to the bone, and emotionally drawn. I know what I need. A spa. But not the usual kind of spa, I want more than a body massage and a hot tub. I want to go to an Emotional Spa™. A place where they massage not just your muscles, but your ego. When you arrive you get a standing ovation. Lots of special rooms for different kinds of support and appreciation -- all for you! (Actually for me.) You don't have to lift a finger. Not a care in the world. Sign me up now. On this day four years ago, a Telnet server for Frontier. It's still there. Does it work?
Steve Gillmor: "Opinionated, volatile, blunt, and disruptive, Dave Winer is an American original." Halley: "So here's Lesson Two -- if you really want to be an Alpha Male, you've got to give." Steve Zellers, a longtime friend who works at Apple, tells his MacBird story. Ernie the Attorney: "I think in the next year we are going to see a bevy of specialty law blogs." Charles Cooper: "Did you know you can use AIM on your cellphone?" Also: Shape Services, Nokia, PDApps. Apparently AOL has not been asleep at the wheel, just quiet about what they're developing in wireless instant messaging.
Rob McKnight: "One thing to take note of is the growing number of these devices with built in or add-on cameras." Adam reports on his Bit Torrent experiment. On this day two years ago I wrote about desktop websites. Just a random comment to say how much I'm enjoying reading two weblogs from Japan, one from Joi Ito, and the other from Professor Lessig. It's great to watch two minds blossom in a new space. Excellent. NY Times: "Disaster recovery sites like this one operate as high-tech lifeboats for other companies that need a safe haven for their employees, or for electronic records in fires, floods or terrorist attacks." Next gen cellphone Got a lot of email on this, the consensus appears to be Treo. Lots of people sing its praises. It's a cellphone and a great PDA. Ole Eichorn's comment was pretty concise. Ole Eichorn: "I have a Treo 300, which is on the Sprint network. It is a Palm-based PDA, a decent phone, and has a real web browser built in (not one of those crummy WAP things). Plus you can get and send email via your desktop (same accounts, etc.) And for you, a qwerty keyboard. It is bigger than your current phone, but I traded in a Motorola Star-Tac for mine and I don’t mind the larger size considering now I don’t have to carry a PDA." Bernie Goldbach: "If you want a qwerty keyboard for moblogging and don't mind if it comes attached to a 244g sharp-looking mobile phone, you want the Nokia Communicator." Question -- do any of these devices connect up to AIM or Jabber? Radio and Frontier have support for both. Where is AOL in all the maneuvering about cellphones that connect up to computer networks? (The answer seems to be asleep at the wheel?) Answer: see above.
Rogers Cadenhead says he's been puttering around with the MacBird source. Glad to hear it. Let me know if you have any questions. I might still be able to answer them. Paul Boutin notes that James Ledbetter's confession hosted by the once august NY Times "ends with a mention of his upcoming book." I'm still appalled. The NY Times plays too loose. It's ridiculous that they let Ledbetter take a bath using their good name. It says they don't understand journalistic integrity. If it were medicine or law or Trent Lott he was covering, or Enron or WorldCom, I suspect they'd get it. Computers matter, our economy runs on computers. When a mass deception has the press colluding, en masse, that calls for a house-cleaning, not a shrugged shoulder. As Dan Gillmor might say, we should all agree that what Ledbetter and his ilk did was and still is pathetic and disgusting, period, end of discussion, no excuses, and no books about it either, certainly not books written by the perpetrators of the fraud, presumably masquerading as journalists. Lessig: "If the Sonny Bono Act is unconstitutional, then Happy Birthday will be free!" Ed Cone: "John Edwards is a video-ready candidate, pretty to look at and smooth of tongue." Alan Reiter: "Well Dave, you can get a real qwerty keyboard on a cellular phone, but you'll need a new phone and new cellular provider and you'll have to put up with a larger device." Ernie the Attorney: "In two years almost everyone who uses email in any fashion (students, professionals, teenagers, maybe even grandparents) will have one of these devices. The question is whether you will have one that is separate from your phone." MacBird Open Source Release: "There are other UI runtimes, some are even open source. MacBird is different because it's built for the designer. You create and edit MacBird 'cards' using a draw program with grouping and alignment." Originally released three years ago today.
Brent Simmons who is now famous for NetNewsWire, an RSS reader for Mac OS X, wrote docs about MacBird back in 1996. They're still there on his site on Ranchero. Ian Beatty sends a pointer to AquaMinds NoteTaker 2003, an outliner for Mac OS X. Russell Beattie: "I am ruler of my blog roll." Megnut: "It's no wonder we're seeing an increase in unemployment, people seem to have no idea how to apply for a job these days." Susannah Breslin is looking for a weird weblog person (WWP) to speak at a conf in LA in Feb.
Gary Turner: "I feel sure that if 15 years ago I was able to play my pre-illness dad a video of his later life he would have thanked me and then driven his car into a wall at high speed the day before he contracted meningitis." Adam Curry is offering the first episode of his Dutch TV show via Gnutella. Robert Occhialini: "At the risk of embarassing myself quite badly, I thought I would go ahead and post my New Year's Resolutions here." Nick Denton: "I'm looking for a writer for a new blog media title, covering online porn and erotica." Evan Williams on AOL's weblogs: "We have firsthand knowledge that AOL has been looking at the space, with some interest, for a few months at least." Halley Suitt, a woman, offers tips on becoming an alpha male.
CBS Marketwatch: AOL said ready to boost blogging. Simon Fell did a pingback client tool for Radio. An update on my father's health, below. William Brody: "If we allow insurers to use genetic data, many more individuals will be left without coverage because they will be deemed too high-risk to warrant insurance at affordable prices." Read this op-ed by former Industry Standard editor James Ledbetter to be reminded how the business press excused themselves and still do now, for the abuse of trust of their readers during the dot-com boom. This guy is almost contrite, almost apologizes for his failure of ethics. We're offered every excuse, we're told he was angry with himself, and somehow that's enough, it's okay, he can go on being an editor at Time Europe, he can sell his book about the Industry Standard. This guy was certainly not a journalist when he was at the Standard, that's clear. Does he claim to be a journalist now? He wrote this piece now, and it ran in the NY Times. He says it would be wrong to blame business media alone, but that sidesteps the question. Would it be wrong to blame James Ledbetter. Imho, no it would not be wrong. BTW, it's disgusting that the Times let him use their space to try to clean his reputation. After all if it's okay with the Times, it must be okay? This calls for a disclaimer from the Times saying they don't sanction the antics Ledbetter describes, and it's not enough to later admit to them, something more is required. Journalism is not such a casual thing. A lawyer who admitted such an ethical vaccuum would be disbarred. To me journalism is just as high a calling. Perhaps not for the Times? Disappointed. NY Times: Professors Vie With Web for Class's Attention. Ross Mayfield: Blog Tribe Social Network Mapping. Karlin says there are far more than two Irish bloggers. Don Park: "Sash is also slow, bloated, and bewildering." Mitch Kapor update on the status of Chandler. Danny O'Brien: "I often wondered what adventure Felsenstein was up to these days." Wired's Vaporware list for 2002 is out. Hey the DMOZ directory keeps forgetting about RSS 2.0. Maybe they should get a new hard disk or something. (It's not quite as bad as it seems. Google's version of the directory isn't updating from the source. It's been months since the directory updated. Further, the DMOZ version says formats like 0.90, 0.91, 0.92 are deprecated. Who decided that? What an ugly word. Hey they're good formats, I'm happy when we get support for any one of the older formats. I think the directory should list them in reverse-chronological order, and leave it at that.) Dad update I try to keep the public reports not too frequent, no need for you all to be on the roller coaster. Last time I reported, Dad was on the steep slope down the mountain, and picking up speed. It didn't look good. But somehow he rallied, found strength no one could believe he had, and he's back in the pink, talking, off the respirator, out of the hospital, in rehab, feeding himself, at times feisty, and most of his conversation makes sense. Now of course I'm exhausted and so is my mom, maybe there's a rehab for family members who have been on the roller coaster, but I suspect not. It's so great to see him get better, and the rehab place seems great. Within an hour of his arrival they had him doing exercises, very modest ones, we know that this is the key to keeping his gains. Work the muscles, breathe deeply, eat a lot of nutritious food, and get a lot of support from people who love you. He's lost a lot of weight, but his spirit is strong. That's why he's here in 2003. At one point the doctor said my daddy would be lucky to see the new year. Well he made it. Right now I'm very optimistic. I'm going to stay in NY for a couple of extra days, it seems these days are very important, and nothing is going to happen in Calif until Monday anyway.
It's January 1, time for new beginnings. Believe it or not I'm applying for a job in academia, so it's time to put together my curriculum vitae. It's a fancy name for a resume. Basically, the job I want to do is the one I have been doing, with some extras (like teaching), but not in the context of a commercial software company. UserLand has been getting along fine without me since early summer. And of course I remain the major shareholder in the company, so I'm very interested, and I help out whenever I can. But if it goes as I hope it will, you'll see a gradual separation. All the stuff that I write on the Web, Scripting News, DaveNet, the specs and discussion groups will stay independent, but the software -- Radio, Manila, Frontier, etc -- that's UserLand. As I've been talking with people about this, it's been hard for them to separate me from UserLand, but that's what I want to do. I'm going to get a new job with a new title, and it's going to be quite different from being the CEO of a commercial software company. It's time to set my life in a new direction. My health, quitting smoking, my father's illness, all have given me the chance to make a big change in lifestyle. Wish me luck! And as I do this corner-turn, in the spirit of weblogs, I will document as much as I possibly can, publicly. Jerry Garcia: "When I was in the hospital, if I’d been able to choose my death, this is the one I would have chosen, the one that has an adventure attached to it." Business 2.0: "After creating a program that makes Linux as easy to use as Windows, Miguel de Icaza is trying to make it just as simple to produce open-source versions of thousands of new Windows applications. So why isn't Microsoft worried?" Jenny and her friends are bound to like this story. Penn State University is doing something with RSS. Halley is feeling empowered today by a new concept, The Job Angel. Check it out I think she's onto something. I just realized that we now have two Irish tech bloggers, Sean McGrath and Karlin Lillington. Happy Birthday to Megnut, who is 31 today. Five years ago today I wrote one of the most challenging DaveNets ever. It got lots of people talking, and to this day it gets me lots of mail.
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