Friday, August 06, 2004

More Bainbridge Ferry pictures, and Microsoft visitor badges. 

The first picture in the sequence is sure to get top billing on Scripting News at some point. The Seattle skyline was looking pretty good yesterday. The water of Puget Sound will make a good backdrop for the name of the site. 

Northern Voice is a blogging unconference in Feb 2005 in Vancouver. 

Julian Bond recommends ZoneAlarm for tracking all outbound traffic and Scott Frazer recommends TCP Spy, Jack Huisinga recommends Winternals TCP View Pro. I've tried ZoneAlarm, got lost setting it up. I'm more motivated now. I spent an hour and a half bending the ear of a Microsoft guy who's responsible for this stuff today. I said it's time to get on the side of the users. It's amazing the press isn't beating this drum more loudly, but it's just a matter of time. I paint a pretty good doomsday scenario for Microsoft people. Imagine a major bank requires its customers to get a Mac in order to do online banking. With the spyware situation on Windows, it's not such a far-fetched idea. These machines are leaky sieves. Who knows what info they're sending back to Spyware Corporate Headquarters. Passwords? Account numbers? Hmmm. 

There's something missing from the search engines. I'd like to give it a name of a thing or a person and have it show me, in reverse chronologic order, what's been said about that thing or person. That would allow me to effectively create a custom weblog about a person or thing, even if there was no weblog about the person or thing. 

There's something missing from Windows. An application that hooks into the outbound Internet message flow, and shows me where messages are going. This would allow me to figure out what spyware is running on my system even if the various utilities can't get rid of them. Then the next step would be to allow me to block traffic to certain servers. That would disable the spyware. It seems that I should have control of my machine at that level.  

Jeff Sandquist says that Windows XP SP2 has this feature. Cool! 

News.Com: "Microsoft on Friday wrapped up development on a long-awaited security update to Windows XP." 

Mary Jo Foley says Microsoft will release a local disk search before the end of the year.  

On this west coast trip I'm talking with people about the next BloggerCon, an academic, non-commercial un-conference. No speakers, no panels, no audience. Long 1.25 hour sessions, multiple tracks. A welcome session where we sing the national anthem, and a closing session where we say tearful goodbyes and plan to meet again. The first BloggerCon in October of last year was an inaugural. In April we did the mid-term. Should the next one be in October, or after the election? Are there enough true believers on the west coast to make it a clean sweep, setting the stage for a European Con in Spring 2005? We'll discuss this at the BBQ at Scoble's on Saturday, at the convention bloggers meeting at Stanford on Monday, and between bites of noodles and chicken at Jing Jing later Monday night.  

Steve Gillmor's Ode to iPod.  

Today, more meetings at Microsoft. Already I've learned that the interest in blogging and RSS in Microsoft is deep, broad and long into the future.  

President Bush: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."  

Washington Post: English, a Battleground State. 

NY Times: "Silicon Valley's digerati, traditionally the biggest proponents of initial public offerings of technology stocks, are overwhelmingly bearish on Google's anticipated offering."