Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Time Magazine has RSS. We have Bing! 

Aaron Swartz: "Gmail now indicates that users have a full terabyte of disk space!" My Gmail account is saying the same thing. 

After listening to John McCain on NPR's The Connection this morning, and then listening to a repeat this evening, the obvious thing for the Republicans is to privately ask Bush not to run for re-election and quickly get a McCain candidacy together. This is the best remedy for the United States, if not for the Republican Party. 

Two years ago: Ideas for standards work. 

A window into W3C politics, as they discuss RSS & Atom. Not a word about: 1. users, 2. publishers, 3. bloggers, 4. developers. Mostly they're worried about: 1. Tim Berners-Lee, 2. BigCo's. 3. IETF, 4. Patents.  

Tim Jarrett: "RSS isn’t owned by a big company. To the extent that it has owners, they are all the content authors, aggregator developers, and readers who have invested time and energy in making it work for them." 

The RSS advisory board has "a very conservative mission, to answer questions about RSS, to help people use it, to promote its use." 

UPI: "The scandal continues to metastasize." 

The Atlantic: "If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken."  

Citizen Action of New York: "In only 17 key 'battleground' states, voters will decide who wins the Presidency. What can the rest of us do?" 

Frank Zappa: "Yes indeed. Here we are." 

Vincent Flanders: "If I'm paying $700 for a software package, it better install like Photoshop and be as easy to use as Radio Userland or it has to kiss me where I can't. And send me flowers the next day." Hehee. 

One year ago: "The Times can't be a factor in Google searches for the simple reason that the Times archive is not accessible to Google." 

We're starting to get some pings in the audio weblogs commons. Not enough yet to do an HTML rendering. If you implement an audio weblog service, you can help bootstrap a community. Here's the howto. 

Every silver lining's got a touch of grey 

David Brown: "Imagine a language where persistence is assumed, and if you want something to be transient, you have to do something different."

I find it amazing that so many people with Frontier experience are still on the Web, and then boom, yesterday's announcement, and they're chattin it up wonderng what it means. Me too.

It's good to see all the old faces, and it's good to see that the years haven't dampened their enthusiasm. Yeah, we're a little worse for the wear, it's cool that the code ages more gracefully than we do.

David Gewirtz says he can't wait to see how some of the features he's been using for years were implemented. That's the spirit I love. David I think you'll like it. There's an architecture in there.

I've found that a good script writer can become a good kernel developer, it takes a few months, maybe more; with Brent and Andre being the two great examples. And Tim Paustian too. I don't think any of them had experience with C-level programming, but at some level working on the kernel is like working in the environment it defines. It's a little more difficult, but the code runs a lot faster. In the age of multi-gigahertz CPUs and gigabyte memories, the possibilities are awesome.

BTW, people who say that it's too late can't know that. And the expectations are low. All I want it to see the technology preserved. If one young programmer in Podunk learns something from it, the way I learned from reading the Unix kernel in the late 70s, then I'm happy. If it exists on a hard drive somewhere in the year 2040, that'll exceed my expectations wildly. If a bug gets fixed or a new technique is learned from reading the code, that would be fantastic. We're not finished giving, yet.