Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Apple: "Rendezvous is now available on Windows 2000 and XP." 

Wes Felter: "I'd like to remind everyone that Rendezvous libraries for Linux, Windows, and Java have existed for months." 

Daring Fireball dismisses the idea that Apple ripped off Konfabulator. There actually is some validity to the developer complaint, and there's a lot to be said for licking your wounds quietly esp when you produce software of great utility but limited depth. What's good is that developers are starting to care about other developers. That's important. Create strategies together that build on each others' strengths. There's no power in complaining about Apple, of course they can add features to their OS, esp ones that link back to the Macintosh of 1984. But if you all viewed the Mac OS as a collaborative development platform, you could market your stuff independent of Apple. Now that would be much more revolutionary than a pretty collection of useful widgets. (Which has been done before over and over ad nauseum.) 

1997: "My pitch to programmers, which is far more revolutionary than any programming language or operating system can be, is to look for understanding where you find it, work with people you want to work with, and don't waste time with people who won't listen and aren't grounded in the truth." 

A few days ago Rogers asked what stories were lurking in the 3000-plus websites that used to be hosted on weblogs.com. Well I had trouble sleeping, so I started poking around, and came across this site with pictures of a hippie wedding in Oregon. Interesting. One of the guys looks just like Jake Savin. Oh wow, that's Jake's brother. He's getting married. There's Jake! Wow. Lots of pictures, and people wrote their stories about the wedding on the blog, including Jake's mom, who gave us some really good advice when my dad was sick (she's a doctor). There you go Rogers, a story. Real people.  

BBC: "The US Federal Reserve has raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point, in a widely-anticipated move." 

Now some of the mail has been very gratifying, coming from Republicans, who also dislike Moore, and now seem a little more interested in what I think about the war and related issues. That's how Moore can do some good, we can find the common ground that connects us, as Americans. Basic fact -- we have to live with each other. Moore doesn't offer us a way to do that. By extrapolation, Republicans with minds should openly distance themselves from the right-wing anti-intellectuals (some of whom run this country, btw). It's time to think, how are we going to avoid a debacle like the election of 2000? Seriously, we're headed for a replay.  

RSS Birds-of-a-Feather at the WWDC tonight in SF. 

Steve Gillmor interviews Sun president Jonathan Schwartz. 

Alex Halavais: Really Sexy Sindication. 

Some asshole talking on his cellphone got creamed. 

Haacked: Dave Winer Misses The Point With Fahrenheit 9/11. 

Who was it who said that "I disagree with everything he says but I'll fight to the death for his right to say it." 

Thanks to Brian Hampson: "The phrase 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' is widely attributed to Voltaire, but cannot be found in his writings. With good reason. The phrase was invented by a later author as an epitome of his attitude. " 

A little bird whispered in my ear that I'm on the list of bloggers who will get credentials for the Democratic National Convention in Boston, July 26-29. 

I'm getting a lot of interesting mail about the piece about Michael Moore below. This stuff should be on blogs somewhere so other people can read it. I can't put up a comment thread because there are also some really abusive opinions in the mix. If you didn't call me a four-letter word, it's not abusive. And you can be a former reader, no problemmo, I already have a lot of readers, I can afford to lose some.  

Steve Rubel: "RSS today feels like the Web 1994." 

Mozilla Foundation press release on a new plug-in architecture, also supported by Macromedia, Apple, Sun, Opera, "...to extend the Netscape Plugin Application Program Interface in a manner that allows greater interactivity with plugins such as Flash, Shockwave, QuickTime and Java, resulting in a richer, more interactive web." 

Engadget: "A new bit of software called Place Lab uses triangulation of signal strength from the three nearest hotspots to determine location." 

Bill Seitz recommends taking the ferry to see the minor league Staten Island Yankees. 

EFF: The Patent Busting Project. 

Microsoft opened up their bug reporting system for Visual Studio. You can report a bug, which isn't exactly a new feature, but you can review their bug database, which is quite unusual. They also came out with a development environment for beginning programmers called Visual Studio Express, and sample apps, including an RSS 2.0 screen saver in C#.  

6/30/01: "KnowNow used to know what they don't seem to now know. " 

Moore's tactics 

Nicholas Kristof: "Insults and rage impede understanding." Amen.

About the Michael Moore movie, Farenheit 9/11. I haven't seen it and I don't plan to. I'm an American before I'm a member of any political party, and I have more invested in the intelligence of our decision-making process than in any one decision. I'd rather re-elect Bush than elect a president based on Moore's politics.

Yesterday on NPR they played an excerpt where he confronts members of Congress and asks if they would send their children to fight in Iraq. What a ridiculous question. No parent will say yes to that question. You could have asked that question on the Capitol steps during World War II and they still wouldn't say yes. See how this cheapens the question of whether we should be in Iraq? In a smart world, we wouldn't be there, but it isn't because Congress people won't say yes when confronted by a camera crew.

Moore is the worst of American politics, an opportunist, an anti-intellectual.

Vote no on Moore.

Another name on the list 

Steve Kirks: "Kleenex has become interchangeable with tissue and now RSS has done the same with syndicated content. Now, we can move on to the next step: doing something great with the tools available."

I had a similar thought this morning as I checked the new posts on the Atom-Syntax list, and reading the Scripting News archive from one year ago, when the flamefest that launched Atom was still raging. I was reminded of the student strikes we'd do in the late 60s and early 70s. First have an organizing meeting with the steering committee, print up the leaflets, hand them out, march somewhere, sit-in the lobby of the school, maybe get on TV, whatever, and then what? They were great affairs while we were expressing our outrage, but in the end, we had to go back to school, get good grades, get accepted at good colleges, etc etc. We possibly helped end the war sooner, in some way (although the right-wingers said we did the opposite). It certainly was a lot more fun than sitting in a classroom, getting good grades, etc. We used to joke that we didn't do too many strikes in the winter, mostly they were in April and May when the weather was too good to be caught up inside a classroom.

Anyway, seeing the list of formats that Apple supports, RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, I sighed on behalf of Atom and poor not-respected-by-geeks RSS. Reminds me of what my doctor said when I showed up for an annual checkup five pounds heavier than the year before. I shrugged it off, not too bad I said. She said "But you're going in the wrong direction." Sure, people say that it doesn't matter how many formats there are, but it actually does matter, even for users, as I've said repeatedly, every new format is another brick in the wall of Barrier To Entry, and that means less choice, but it also might make it harder for efforts that build on RSS to get started. I'll give you an example.

Yesterday, I got a note about a great BitTorrent-with-RSS application. I saw the URL to the feed, and groaned. It's RDF. Now, all the BT+RSS apps have been built around RSS 2.0 because it has the enclosure element, and we'd never, as far as I know, anticipated that the RSS confusion would creep into this space. I looked at the file to see how they did it, and whoa, it's a 2.0 file, even though on the outside it says it's RDF. Once you combine RSS with other things, which definitely should be happening more, you add another dimension with the two other flavors. Instead of having to do something once, you have to do it three times. And that's more than three times the trouble, which makes it less than one-third as likely to happen. Imagine going to the BitTorrent people with that problem. "Call us back when you make your mind up," they might reasonably say.

Anyway, when it's all said and done, there will be another flavor of RSS, another name on the list, more work to do, not too bad. If my doctor were here she'd say "But you're going in the wrong direction."