Thursday, November 17, 2005

OPML.Org: "I've been steadily getting inquiries about extension mechanisms for OPML. I think it's now a good time to start discussing this." 

New header graphic. Anita Wilhelm, illustrating the spirit of TagCamp in Palo Alto on October 29. Notable because it's the first graphic I produced on the Mac. Took about an hour, but I figured out how to use Graphic Converter Pro, which is pretty nice, but not quite as easy as ImageReady. The good news is now I should be able to do new little graphics in the margin. Ever since switching to the Mac, I've just been snarfing old ones from the archives.  

Dvorak: "Content theft is here to stay and the big media companies are going to have to get used to it." Maybe they should start by not calling it theft, or piracy, and understand that bits are not exactly like other kinds of "property." Maybe it's wrong to think of them as property at all, before we devalue all the other kinds. Think about it. The world has changed. Soon all the people who were born before Napster will be old and then we'll be dead. The kids of today don't see it the way we were raised to see it.  

More proof that Mike Arrington is at the center of the known universe (don't worry Mike, you'll be in the banner of Scripting News pretty soon now). The Riya launch party at his house in Atherton tomorrow night may well be where the announcement is made that Google has acquired them. Who knows, but it's the talk of the town, even though I'm in DC, and Mike himself is on a plane now heading this way. Funny Forest-Gump-like world we live in. 

An important fix to close a security hole in the OPML Community Server. If you have a server running, and if you haven't modified the code, at the top of the hour it should have updated, and you should have the fix already installed.  

Comments about security 

It's been three years since I worked on the release of a server project, the last one was Radio Community Server. Shortly after that I got really sick, and as a result left the company, so it's still out there, but amazingly it still works. I downloaded a copy this morning to see how we dealt with this same issue. I was kind of curious and (a little anxious) to think that this issue might have slipped through and not been noticed for three years. Not to worry, the hole had been closed there too.

Closing a security hole is like dodging a bullet. You could say it's bad news because the hole was there, but experience has shown that new server software always has security holes. It's a good thing when a hole is closed, not a bad thing.

Phillip Pearson reported this one. He did it perfectly, as he always does. Phillip is one of those guys who you want to work with when you get a chance to. I was very happy to see him get in the loop on this project.

So, we got by this one, and there will be others for sure. There will also be performance issues, and crashes, and bad design we have to live with because of Rule 1 and Rule 1b. You don't know what they are? Aha, just wait.

I miss Terry 

It's great when people get back in the loop, but of course some people never will. I miss Terry Teague. Now that I'm using the Mac more or less full time, it would have been great to have his help in dealing with Mac software issues. But Terry died earlier this year, proving once again that there's no time like now, don't put off to tomorrow what you think of today, because eventually there will be no tomorrow.