Monday, November 22, 2004

Greetings from New York City. Hey it's warm here. The flight was uneventful. Not much to report. 

There's free wifi in the new Terminal A at Seatac. It's very nice and shiny. Feels international like one of the myriad terminals at Heathrow. I'm in a Tully's Coffee drinking a Starbuck's ice coffee reading the NY Times. Got all my brands jus where I wan em. 

Draft: How to extend RSS 2.0. This is a new howto I wrote this morning while packing to fly to NYC. It's just a draft. Talking with Adam over the weekend, I said "Hey, if you can fly an airplane, you can learn to extend RSS." He laughed, probably wondering when I was going to call him on the dumb blonde act. Anyway, namespaces seem so difficult because there's almost nothing to it. Like the Web, they're loosely coupled. Most of the glue is there to help human beings, the software assumes you know what you're doing, and ignores stuff it doesn't understand. Even though the core is frozen, RSS itself is a liberal environment, you don't need anyone's permission to extend it. It's really simple, as the name suggests.  

Tim Jarrett: "I love what’s happened with enclosures and Podcasting. That’s the sort of innovation that XML syndication needs, user experience and business models; not 'innovation' in how the underlying content is expressed." 

BTW, yesterday David Brown announced that he has Python integrated with Frontier. One of the first bennies of releasing the Frontier kernel as open source. Andre Radke is improving the performance of the object database.  

There's now an API for Google Deskbar. 

Register: "Early on Saturday morning some banner advertising served for The Register by third party ad serving company Falk AG became infected with the Bofra/IFrame exploit. The Register suspended ad serving by this company on discovery of the problem." 

Wired: "Shared Media Licensing, based in Seattle, offers Weed, a software program that allows interested music fans to download a song and play it three times for free. They are prompted to pay for the 'Weed file' the fourth time. Songs cost about a dollar and can be burned to an unlimited number of CDs, passed around on file-sharing networks and posted to web pages." 

After god knows how many weeks I still can't get Windows XP on my cute Sony laptop to find these newfangled "web sites" on the Internet. So I offered a bribe to Microsoft evangelist, Robert Scoble. If he'd help my machine work on the Internet, I'd buy him a Pho dinner (they have wifi at my favorite Pho restaurant in Bellevue). Anyway, the night started out bad, the restaurant was closed, so we went elsewhere, and then found a wifi signal at a shopping center. He was able to get online in two minutes by erasing the queue of preferred hotspots. Then he farted around with my screen telling me I was doing it wrong, and only made it worse, much worse (he tells the story here) and ended up saying they're going to get this right in Longhorn. I was beginning to think I'd be a Mac user by then, anyway, so humor him, at least he got the Web working again. When I got home, of course it wasn't finding the sites, so I have a fancy $3000 DVD player. It's nice, but that wasn't the idea.