Scripting News -- October 1998
Saturday, October 31, 1998
Jakob Nielsen: Why Yahoo is Good. WebReview: Building a Synonymous Search Index.
A Halloween story about Terrible Tony and his mother and The People's Court.
Friday, October 30, 1998
DaveNet: Safe Computing and Communicator 4.5.Interhack's take on the What's Related.
Apple exec Avie Tevanian's written deposition in the Microsoft anti-trust case, released earlier today. Reports from News.com, MSNBC, SJ Mercury-News.
BusinessWeek: Small companies moving to MSIE.
Python.org: The XML Bookmark Exchange Language. Neat-o!
Browserwatch discussion about What's Related?
Chuck Shotton's KirbyCam is still operating! But where's Kirby? And where's Chuck?
ICE got me thinking that it may be time to try out a new business model in the Frontier developer community.
CRN: Authoring group launches ICE.
WebReview: A Perl script to get hockey scores.
News.com: CA buys into 3D. "An easy-to-use, video game-style visual interface will be the way IT managers will want to interact with their applications going forward."
SJ Merc: Something to think about next time you want to send someone a flame.
NY Times: Mac OS is better than ever.
Thursday, October 29, 1998
Safe computing issue: Netscape 4.5 and URLs.Jeremy Quinn wants a scriptable digital camera. Steve Fuchs made the Nikon digital camera scriptable, as a skunkworks project. Nikon management might be surprised by how many of these they sell now that it's known to be scriptable.
Newsbytes: Easier surfing over breakfast.
IBM: WebSphere Studio. Sounds like Nirvana!
MSNBC: Netscape, Microsoft and AOL. Politics at the summit of the software industry.
ZDNet: Selling across borders.
Digita is an operating environment for digital cameras and imaging peripherals.
Steve Fuch's BirdBath. The birds do favors for you!
Updated: Nirvana Server feature list.
Here's a slice of the Nirvana development process.
From an email I posted this morning: "OK, every once in a while it crashes. But what's more amazing, when you know what it's doing, is that there are times when it doesn't."
Want to come back to a flamer? Try this: "Interesting points. You must be a very smart person! Thanks for sharing your vast intelligence with a person such as myself who can learn so much from a person of your depth and wisdom, not to mention broad experience. How can I possibly repay you for all that you have given me?"
Wednesday, October 28, 1998
Reuters: Apple felt threatened, went with Microsoft.News.com: When.com plans calendar launch.
St Laurent: Building XML Applications in Java. It's a book, the early chapters are there.
Wired: Andy Grove says doctors need PCs.
Notes and questions from my first look at the ICE spec.
Interhack: Privacy problems with What's Related?
Tuesday, October 27, 1998
DaveNet: Think!Steve Wozniak: "It's clear that Netscape succeeded at replacing Windows. More of my computer usage nowdays involves network directives than OS directives. This is probably the general concept that Netscape wanted to follow to its golden end. It's just that IE came along to block it, not better versions of Windows."
W3C: ICE format and protocol.
Wired: Syndicating the web.
InternetWorld: Using channels to manage data.
Wired: Netscape retools for standards.
InfoWorld: IBM retools for the Internet Age.
Red Herring: VCs hold court in Boston. Wow. They're very arrogant!
InfoWorld: Windows NT is history. "This is a product that can usher you into the next millennium," said Brad Chase, vice president of Windows marketing at Microsoft.
Robert X. Cringely: Microsoft is Already Crippled.
Another way to do What's Related? Nah.
News.com: Yahoo eyes business deals.
SJ Merc: Unix Gaining in NT Rivalry.
The alternate home page takes a lickin keeps on tickin.
Monday, October 26, 1998
Thea's Galleria goes to Brockhaus, Germany, to a site that combines Frontier workflow automation with DHTML templates designed in Macromedia Dreamweaver.InfoWorld: IBM buys Build-it, builds on WebDAV.
Lots of blue-chip visitors today as pointers to the What's Related app get passed around the net. Famous R&D organizations, universities and big-time magazines. Conclusion: The combination of Netscape and XML is good pull.
Fill out a form to attend tomorrow's ICE Summit.
What is http://when.com/?
Due to a system glitch, this article was offline for the weekend. Still diggin!
More new samples for Frontier 5.1.4 users.
MacInTouch is reporting serious compatibility issues with Mac OS 8.5.
Isn't this graphic scary? Happy Halloween! (Don't stare at it too long. I did!) 
Sunday, October 25, 1998
NY Times: Microsoft is on top of the world, for now. "I'm sorry, but Mr. Gates is busy teaching a competitor about Windows."News.com: New server for e-commerce. Interesting combination of features.
Don't forget, clocks go back one hour this morning. Spring forward, fall back.
Saturday, October 24, 1998
DaveNet: Netscape's XML App.Tom Fuerstner wants to hook Frontier into Tango on NT. Can you help?
Our interface to Netscape's What's Related? server.
I just released the source code for whatsRelated.root, the Frontier application behind the interface.
More info from Guha at Netscape.
Microsoft: Security advisory for IE4 users.
In eMediaWeekly, Henry Norr reviews Mac OS 8.5. "Although this release does offer some nifty new features, it mostly reflects a focused, disciplined effort to clear bottlenecks and eliminate misfeatures customers have complained about for years. On the whole, it does a very good job."
Friday, October 23, 1998
What's Related? More than meets the eye..I did a little bit of digging and found out that Netscape's What's Related server is an XML application! Yee-hi. Can I parse it? You betcha! I'll have a demo app up first thing tomorrow morning. Y'all come back sooon!
W3C: HTML Components.
There's a new beta Perl Development Kit for Windows that's supposed to allow much easier embedding of Perl.
Here are the release notes from the PDK download.
I just spent 1/2 hour browsing around the sample scripts folder that comes with the Perl release. It's all about COM and connecting with other scripting languages on Windows.
DomainSurfer can find the scripting domains.
Tim Bray writes: "Being a textually-oriented kinda guy, I went looking for 'text' domains." Tim's favorite site was batExterminators.com.
The alternate home page is hummin right along, staying in synch with www.scripting.com.
Doc Searls' dating theory. It's actually Joyce's.
This year's Agenda focused on Washington.
New domain: http://docserver.userland.com/. Multi-homing works on our new server! Neat-O.
Thursday, October 22, 1998
Apple in Fortune: Then and now.The United Nations opened a new worldwide election support website. A 3000-page site, frequently updated, with a companion CD-ROM, managed by Frontier.
New sample script, produces nested object database table displays, useful for debugging.
Paul Howson's XMLTR suite translates XML documents to HTML or to a tool-specific markup language for print publication. Thanks!
Howson also took a look at XSL.
SJ Merc: Microsoft scores. Netscape's Clark wanted to do a deal. But on the other side, the dark side..
SJ Merc: More Java emails. "Subversion has always been our best tactic," John Ludwig, the Microsoft vice president in charge of Java development, told his colleagues in a memo describing his company's efforts to take on Sun's Java. "It leaves the competition confused, and they don't know what to shoot at anymore."
ZDNN: Running Java Fast.
Wednesday, October 21, 1998
TechWeb: ICE makes a Splash.Mother Jones on the Microsoft trial.
David Coursey: Is Microsoft so Wrong?
I just rebuilt the archive page for October. Sorry for the delay!
Following up on yesterday's talk about Perl and XML, it would be helpful if there was a vision statement from Larry Wall and perhaps Tim Bray, explaining where Perl and XML meet. This would give other people working in XML in other environments, including ours, an idea of what parts of XML applications make sense in Perl.
And to Frontier users, stop apologizing! Be proud. We're doing great. What we're doing is certainly comparable to what the Unix folks are doing. And in some cases, we do a lot more.
Performance Computing: Unix as Literature.
Tuesday, October 20, 1998
CNN: Microsoft Trial, Day Two.InfoWorld reports on Barksdale's testimony. "I have never been in a meeting in my 33-year business career in which a competitor had so blatantly implied that we should either stop competing with it or the competitor would kill us."
Mail Starting 10/20/98. Whew! Finally the Mail pages are working on the new server. It's been almost a month. One important note, like all other URLs on nirvana.userland.com, the one above will change.
Platform Issue: We're planning on integrating Microsoft's HTML display control in Frontier 6 on Windows. This is the right time to mention that this capability does not exist on Mac OS. To Apple, it's an important Windows feature that that Mac OS does not have.
Larry Wall wants Perl to be the best scripting language for XML work. This always bothered me. How do I respond? It's a good idea for Perl to invest in XML. I support that. Then I figured it out. Frontier 5 already is, by far, the best scripting environment for XML work.
O'Reilly press release: "Leading Perl and XML developers collaborating. Goal: To make Perl the top scripting language for XML."
Background: Frontier 5 and XML. And we're not the only ones working on XML in Frontier.
Technology Solutions has adapted James Clark's expat parser to run, elegantly, in the Frontier environment, cross-platform and native. It's the same parser Netscape and Perl are using. We've got this one covered!
XMLU is producing a new event called <TAG>'98.
Olav Martin Kvern: Fonts for Coding.
Monday, October 19, 1998
Jon Postel, 1943-1998.DocServer for the Future. Frontier 5.1.4 users can subscribe to a database of Frontier documentation. Nirvana!
Advanced Frontier users: WebEdit for Guest Databases.
Those tricky Netscape guys! The webmaster of whitehouse.com got redirected too.
Jakob Nielsen: Failure of Corporate Websites.
Press Release: Computer Associates supports Linux.
NEC: SocksCap.
NY Times: Microsoft goes to court.
SJ Merc: Virtual Courtroom.
CNN: More Clinton documents released.
W3C: Change history for HTTP.
Sunday, October 18, 1998
With any luck, tomorrow we will take a big step in the movement towards safe sandboxes and scripted firewalls. It's sort of like push technology, but with a purpose. Ever the promoter, I'm sure to make a big deal about it. One way or the other.Saturday, October 17, 1998
MacInTouch: Henry Norr looks at Sherlock.RCFoC: A business-card size CD-ROM.
This morning I was thinking about how glossaries will work on nirvana.userland.com.
I was also playing with pagetables and paramtables.
Friday, October 16, 1998
Frontier Users: New sample scripts illustrate how to combine guest databases with XML-RPC and how to use a postFilter scipt to do global redirection on web servers,An interesting connection between the needs of hand-held users and XML.
eMediaweekly: Vendors cheer Apple results. Yay!
Veo Systems' vision for XML in Internet Commerce.
InfoWorld: Symantec acquires Quarterdeck.
CNN: Greenspan cuts interest rates, stocks soar. Maybe we'll avoid a recession in the US?
Thursday, October 15, 1998
What do you know? About scripting and Mac System 8.5? We hear that interapplication messaging is faster, and there's a lot of new functionality that's scriptable, specifically Control Panel settings.Wired: Y2K and Prisons.
This is what a happy server looks like.
Kurt Egger has a Sherlock plug-in that connects System 8.5's search engine up to our search engines. That was quick!
I just found out about Info-ZIP.
WinZip has a command-line interface.
Upside: A Big Yawn for Linux. I disagree. Linux is a great server OS and it's attracting developer investment, real stuff, not like Java.
News.com: IBM Backs Apache.
Forbes: Vignette is the Story.
NY Times: Apple's profitable year. "Now let us gloat." Great quote!
Wednesday, October 14, 1998
Yesterday, Brent Simmons visited Microsoft to learn about VML, the vector graphics format that will be supported in MSIE 5.Tim Bray: XML support in MSIE 5 Beta 2.
MacWEEK: $106 million profit for Apple. New consumer laptop announcement expected.
Red Herring: Sendmail pits angel investors against VCs.
Yesterday, Jimmi Johnson visited me to get a behind-the-scenes demo of Nirvana, and I learned a lot and got a bunch of ideas.
Tuesday, October 13, 1998
InfoWorld: Microsoft gives XML a big bear hug.USA Today: WebTV is watching you.
Salon on Perl and Larry Wall.
The alternate home page now has a Find function. Try this search, and I'll get an endorsement.
Loes Pieper's Annotate by Haiku Server.
Industry Standard: Bringing Online Stars Offline.
Web Review: Making your Website PalmPilot-friendly.
Following yesterday's discussion, I'm going to do a Palm-friendly interface for Scripting News, but it'll probably take a couple of weeks. I want it to fit in with Frontier's existing scalable content facilities.
Infoworld reviews Pictorius, a team-based web development environment.
Wired: Taking the Web's Political Pulse.
Monday, October 12, 1998
InfoWorld: DMTF backs XML standard.Builder.com: Getting started with Apache.
ZDNet's DevHead site, a competitor for Builder.com?
Next question! Brent has one for ISAPI experts.
News.com: Apple's first yearly profit since 1995?
In-Progress's Interaction can send XML-RPC messages to Frontier.
Do you use a Palm Pilot? Every page served on Nirvana is dynamic. What should Scripting News look like on a tiny screen?
For people who asked what kind of load Nirvana is taking, it's pretty light. 12820 hits in the last 26 hours. You can increase the load a little by viewing this page, it will refresh every 30 seconds.
RFC: #renderTableWith.
Here's an interesting Frontier verb, html.buildGlossary, that I hadn't paid much attention to. I'm now paying a lot more attention to glossaries, they're the key to integrating all the different worlds that co-exist on our new server.
Gianni Rubagotti: XML in Italian.
Brent Simmons wants his .ASPs working with IIS.
SJ Merc: High tech moves to Maui.
Also in today's Merc, Chris Nolan talks about the "exclusive" Agenda conference. Yes I got invited, but I chose not to go.
It was at this conference two years ago that I had my famous exchange with Larry Ellison. It got me quite a reputation with that crowd, but I'd like to speak, not just be an audience shill.
InfoWorld's Bob Metcalfe, also the host of Agenda, on SandPiper's Footprint.
Sunday, October 11, 1998
The Scripting News Archive page is being maintained in parallel with the main Scripting News page.How do I do it? XML-RPC, of course. You already knew that!
Dave Gudeman: A dissenting opinion on Java.
Don't be bashful, leave your questions, comments and suggestions on the discussion board.
IBM's Rexx home page.
Red Herring: Plumbers' Helpers.
Macrobyte: Tile Windows 1.0.
Jon Bosak: Religion.200 is a group of four religious works marked up for electronic publication from publicly available sources including The Old Testament, The New Testament, The Quran, and The Book of Mormon.
I unzipped Bosak's FTP download and placed the files, unmodified, on our server.
Dan Gillmor in the SJ Merc interviews 12 industry notables on the Microsoft-DOJ lawsuit.
Saturday, October 10, 1998
The next site is ready for review: Scripting News Stories.BTW, the primary access interface for this site and the Archives site will be a search engine. I've given up doing outline listings of sites containing 800 articles.
Joy 2.0 unifies JavaScript, C, Objective-C and Tcl into a single scripting language for OpenStep/Mach, Rhapsody DR2, OpenStep Enterprise and WebObjects.
What the new format looks like in a text-only browser.
I got this weird email from Amazon.com today. I haven't been there in at least a week.
SJ Merc: Internet industry confident.
Friday, October 09, 1998
Preview: What Scripting News might look like in the future. Please, no complaints about broken links or undefined glossary entries. I know, and I know.XML.COM explains WDDX, with examples.
NY Times: What's on your hard drive?
MacWorld's Jason Snell on regular expressions.
Web Review's Dale Dougherty on regular expressions.
News.com: Warnock demos new stuff.
A new feature for the discussion group. You can now read messages without having the cookie and without logging on.
Frontier users, if you want to sneak a peak at the source code for the discussion group, start here.
Click here if you have some braincells to burn. What a trip!
A neat idea for a web gadget, a COM or Apple Event-aware app that takes two parameters, the address of another app, and a window title. It returns a GIF representation of the bits being displayed in that window. For live websites, we could show people what's in a specific window on the server. It would make a *big* difference in the usability of our site and our software. It's got to be easy to program and as fast as possible. I'd pay US $195.
Preston Holmes did something like this with clip2gif in August 1996.
ScreenView is not exactly what I want, but it's cool! I'm going to check it out.
Andreas Hellstrom reports caching problems with MSIE 4.01/Mac.
Another problem with MSIE for CGI writers?
A proposal from 12/96 for a way to make content developers much more powerful.
Thursday, October 08, 1998
Dave Kuhlman's excellent survey of current distributed computing technologies, including XML-RPC.A postscript to yesterday's struggle with cookies and MSIE 4.01/Mac. I set up a test for the Microsoft people. It returns a cookie and does the redirect, and (get this!) MSIE 4.01/Mac handles it just fine. I had found another problem *after* (apparently) incorrectly concluding that the redirect was the problem, MSIE 4.01/Mac doesn't handle cookies with spaces in the name. That was easily fixed by not putting any spaces in the cookie name. So as Emily Litella used to say... Never Mind! (And my apologies.)
We reached a big milestone today. By our measurements, Frontier 5.1.5b4 running on our 450Mhz NT4 machine could now serve the flow of www.scripting.com, with every hit being being a dynamically rendered page.
Web Site Journal interview with Dan Shafer.
Red Herring: Scriptics makes Tcl respectable.
I hear that Microsoft is adding vector graphics to the next beta of MSIE 5/Win.
ScriptMeridian:Matt Neuburg's lecture on WSFs.
Wednesday, October 07, 1998
Press release: Microsoft outlines support for WebDAV.Debugging: Cookies, Redirects and MSIE 4.01/Mac.
Richard Blumberg reviews REBOL.
Discussion Group: Why we did a BBS. Short answer, groupware and content management may look like the same thing, but they're not.
Time: The 50 Cyber-Elites. They dig money!
Builder.com reviews Lotus Domino as a web development environment.
SJ Merc: Symantec sales, profits down. "Some guy was working in a panel and blew it up,'' Eubanks said. "It's embarrassing but true.''
Gary White is looking for a copy of Multimate.
Tuesday, October 06, 1998
DaveNet: A Brief Note.A bunch of features and fixes for the discussion group.
Smart Reseller: IBM is taking the offensive, again.
The IBM strategic document behind the SR story.
Press release: Lycos acquires Wired Digital. Very interesting. I wonder whose look and feel will survive?
Brent Simmons has a question about Microsoft's Personal Web Server.
Windows NT Magazine: Win32 Scripting Journal.
TetraSix: The French XML Site.
Monday, October 05, 1998
The first test app for our new membership-cookie-mail loop code on Nirvana. It's a very simple application, a discussion board. Read some mindless messages. Leave one of your own. But please don't ask for features in the discussion board, it's just a test app. Thanks!InternetWorld can't find the beef in XML.
HRML is Human Resource Markup Language.
Doug Brewer: ODBC over XML-RPC. Hot damn!
Wired: Macromedia's comeback.
Mark Bernstein compares hypertext and baseball.
Got JavaScript and DHTML? It gets you going and then you realize it can never work.
Updated: The XML FAQ.
NY Times: Big trouble in Japan's banking system.
Wired: REBOL.
Tish is back. Thank god!
Wednesday is the fourth anniversary of DaveNet.
Sunday, October 04, 1998
InfoWorld: Politics in the XML World. It's fun!Over the weekend three scripting.com sites were converted to run dynamically on Nirvana: DocServer, 24 Hours of Democracy, and my personal site.
Jakob Nielsen: Personalization is Over-Rated.
ICOM Datenverarbeitungs: XML Parser for Delphi.
Where did the expression "Well shiver me timbers!" come from? What about "Datenverarbeitungs"?
Saturday, October 03, 1998
James Robertson: It's Time For Practical XML!PC WEEK reviews Trellix 2.0.
Web Developer: REBOL, New Language for the Net? What do you all think?
Web Developer: DOM Level 1 Becomes a W3C Recommendation.
Industry Standard: How to Make Love to Developers.
More signs of progress on the
page.
Friday, October 02, 1998
Nov 15-18, Chicago: XML '98.We could really use something like this page, explaining how to keep NT servers up and running and happy.
Simon Garland recommends www.sysinternals.com and www.pureperformance.com.
Lawrence Lee recommends Workstation NT.
We improved Nirvana's log browser to show us which requests are taking too long. For the most part it's performing well enough, but sometimes it takes 5 seconds for a 1K file to be served. There are definitely some threading issues in there. We're on it.
A new backgrounder on what we're doing on Nirvana.
Thursday, October 01, 1998
Why do my NT systems go 100-Percent CPU-wise for no apparent reason?SF Examiner: Clinton in Silicon Valley.
Web Review: The seven stages of type appreciation.
Red Herring on Vignette.
Motorola: VoxML.
THINK is a Linux outliner.
PC WEEK: Will Oracle 8i kill Windows? Weird question.
Clean up your web pages with HTML TIDY.
XML.COM: Microsoft and XML. Somehow we missed this in July, but it's still very interesting.
I wonder what they mean by a structured editor...
Is it an outliner?
Nirvana's first sexy feature: A calendar UI.
A screen shot of the database table that the calendar is browsing.
Back issues...
Check out Scripting News -- September 1998.
|
This page was last built on 11/2/98; 4:52:13 AM by Dave Winer. dave@userland.com |