Sunday, July 31, 2005

Whooopeee -- there's a Mac version of the OPML Editor! 

5:15PM: Arrived safely in Rochester, NY. I was thinking all the way about strategies to get out of the scaling bottleneck I thought we were in, but I sign on and everything looks hunky dory!  

Lisa Williams: "Here are my backlogged posts from yesterday's BlogHer conference." 

Jim Armstrong: "Much faster than any other way of doing it." 

Pics: New York State by car. 

Important: We fixed a bug in the Mac software, when changing the header graphic on your blog. To get the fix, choose Get Latest Code from the Community menu.  

Adam is still having trouble setting the header graphic. We'll figure it out, but in the meantime, you can set the header graphic without using the command. Just put a file in the "decorations" sub-folder of the the blog folder named headerGraphic.gif or headerGraphic.jpg. It'll get upstreamed, that's all that has to happen to set the header graphic.  

Watch the Mac users' first posts.  

At 1:15PM, checking in from Ithaca. Everything was looking great until I went to check changes.opml.org, and it had an error connecting to the static server. I restarted Apache and now it's working. I suspect it's the Instant Outliner, finally maxing out. Or maybe it's people downloading the Mac version of the OPML Editor. Hmmm. On further investigation, one of the log files had grown to 1/2 gigabyte. I shut down the server, archived the file, restarted the server, and it seems to be running much better. Then, looking inside the log file, most of the hits on the static server are checks of Instant Outlines. Seems we've already hit a scaling "situation." Something to think about on the rest of today's drive.  

At 10:15AM, it's time for me to go out for the day. I'll be sure to stay at an Internet-capable hotel tonight, and may find a Starbucks somewhere in my travels to check out what's going on. It's so cooool to see all the new Mac activity, and sorry it took so long to get you the software.  

Jay Rosen's notes from BlogHer 05. Interesting that I find it easier to read and point to a man's account of the conference. This idea came up at a session in Nashville, on international blogging, where Hoder said what they need is for American bloggers to point to them more. I thought about it a bit and said, that I don't think that would help very much, what would really make a difference would be to send me there, to take pictures, to view their world through my lens, and then report that back through my blog. That would help foster understanding, that would be a link that meant something. Pointing to a woman because she's a woman isn't a solution to a problem anyone really has. However creating understanding seems to be the solution to everything.  

Doc wants to bookmark a trip to Cooperstown in the fall. Actually this whole area is spectacularly beautiful, and not too crowded. I used to marvel at how nice and brown California hillsides are in the summer and then so lush and green in the spring. Well here we are at the height of summer, and the hillsides are like beautifully manicured lawns in heaven. Maybe it's so nice because its cooled off a bit, the highs are only in the low 80s now. And I know that later in this trip, probably tomorrow or the day after, I'm going to re-enter CongestionLand. But south-central NY state is very very nice in the summer. Okay, so our super-exclusive geek-exec-con in the winter is in Park City, and Fall 2006 in Cooperstown. 

Weird NY Times non-editorial-page editorial about Microsoft's patents. It's weird because the author is a historian, not a technologist; and it's also weird that they're taking Microsoft to task for what is an industry-wide problem. It's as if they were blaming Iran or Pakistan for the problems of nuclear proliferation. Microsoft was hardly the first or even the biggest abuser of software patents. Again, the Times shows a remarkable lack of timeliness (where were they when the mess was being created, not that they weren't warned), and why make it a Microsoft issue.