Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Chris Lydon's July 4 special on Emerson. 

Erik Lundegaard: "It wasn't until Superman came to television in the 1950s that the phrase became codified in the form most of us remember it: 'a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.'" 

It was great to see Paolo and Monica here in the US.  

I understand that the makers of the new Superman movie have changed his slogan to Truth, Justice, and all that stuff. Pretty lame, don't you think. Sounds like a song from the movie Chicago. Couldn't they have at least made the new ending rhyme with The American Way? Or made a new slogan for every culture, which leads me to the Jewish version which surely would have been, Truth, Justice and Oy Vey! Heh. Sorry. Anyway, with that in mind, happy birthday USA, you're still the country of mine, even if Superman is too politically lame to stay on board.  

I wonder if it's be possible for me to disagree with Randy Morin without getting flamed. I never said XML-RPC is better than SOAP or REST, or more perfect or pure, or better documented. I don't care if the others have better websites, or more advocates posting on mail lists. The reason I advise would-be platform developers to support XML-RPC is because at least for some developers (including me) it's so much faster to implement, so we spend less time creating glue and get to building applications sooner. I've learned that the sooner developers get to the fun part, the more likely they are to deploy. And if that's the goal, why not support it? BTW, I never said they shouldn't support SOAP or REST, in fact I often provide multiple interfaces to my would-be platforms, because I've learned that if you want uptake for new ideas, you shouldn't argue over small things like this, you should say yes whenever you can.  

Richard MacManus says BloggerCon IV tended to favor the most vocal people. I agree, and this is not the way it's supposed to be. I don't think the DLs took the guidelines seriously in this area, and unless they do, the unconference format suffers. They're supposed to seek out people, to interrupt repeating and droning. The guidelines don't say the DLs "may" interrupt, they say "must."  

At dinner last night a friend said the Wikipedia page about me is pretty horrible. As I've said before, I never read it, but I suspected as much. Every page I read that I know something about is controlled by a negative point of view that tends to promote certain things and be prejduiced against others. It's relatively consistent. And these are the technical subjects that Wikipedia is supposed to be accurate about. However, I think it will eventually take care of itself, as it expands to cover subjects and people more people know about, they'll see it for what it is, a place where the most persistent people with the most time to waste control what is said.