Scripting News -- December 1998
Thursday, December 31, 1998
DaveNet 1998 in Review.DaveNet: Goodbye 1998!
eMediaWeekly: UserLand opens new Frontier. "My favorite new feature is the content-based search engine," said Jim Roepcke. Philip Suh said he believes "the success of Version 6 will ride on how well the interface is developed for nontechnical users." "The new responder for developing Internet applications is really powerful," said Seth Dillingham. Thanks guys!
http://www.scriptmeridian.org/ is back on the air.
Tim Bray: Stretching the Concept of the Document.
Excite has a neat new photos website.
How to Design a Scripting Language.
CNN: Europe welcomes 1999 and the Euro.
CNN: Russia bids farewell to a troubled 1998.
Wired: Fear and Loathing in Cupertino.
Shoutcast is a streaming audio system for Windows/Unix
News.com on Shoutcast.
Seattle Times: Theologians, ethicists rip Clintons's 'manipulation of religion'.
NY Times: Nintendo uses teens for support.
CNN: Australia enters 1999 with a huge bang.
Remembrances from 1998: Barry Goldwater, Frank Sinatra, Karla Faye Tucker. Funniest character: The Taco Bell Dog.
Story of the year. In computer terms the headline would read "New power discovered in standard interface."
Wednesday, December 30, 1998
Linux Games interviews Dave Taylor: "I've been thinking for quite some time that this whole idea of header files and C files is stupid. You should write all your code as functions and data, and store them all in a database."Charles Summerhill asks if there are any for-pay XML servers that can return live stock quotes.
Chris Nolan had a memorable weekend with United Airlines.
Wired: Crackers go to war with Iraq. Could they help Chris?
Another site tries for intelligent web-based discussions.
Looking thru back issues this evening and I came across these nostalgic pictures from Alan German. Those were the good old days!
NY Times Op-Ed: "Any male supervisor who has consensual sex with another employee in any American workplace could be sued and deposed in the way Mr. Clinton was." I believe that's true.
www.100hot.com measures hotness counting hits using logs generated by proxy servers. Interesting! More mail..
Hey, you can vote for your favorite website! Remember us to MacWorld. Thanks!
Tuesday, December 29, 1998
Frontier 5.1.5 was released today.Frontier 5.1.5 trial version. Expires 6/1/99.
The trial version is great for working thru the website tutorial to see if Frontier is right for your site.
Jon Katz: Luring the lurkers. Katz makes an important point. If we want to have a business that works on the net, we have to be careful to serve all the people, not just the most vocal ones.
Wired: Microsoft wins Vaporware of the Year.
Hybris is a structured document editor written in Perl.
Wired: School dazed by court ruling. Free speech of high school students affirmed.
Washington Post: Is Gates Rattled? "He must think of himself as an industry leader responsible for helping the industry grow, rather than as head of a company fighting to stay in business."
DaveNet 5/19/98: "Microsoft's best option is a vision that truly excites users and developers, with Microsoft playing a limited role. I urge Microsoft to undermine the government's case, appeal to developers at a level of huge empowerment, so much power that trust isn't an issue."
Dan Gillmor: Don't be a fool on Internet stocks. "Witness the way industry after entrenched industry -- including much of the newspaper business -- has reacted to the Internet like a deer frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car."
Eric Sink discovers the purpose of www.scripting.com on the current mail page. Lots more good stuff this morning.
People who believe honor and government have nothing to do with computers should read this piece, 3/1/98.
Computer Shopper: Too many standards lead to frustrated site builders.
Red Herring: Ten trends for the post-PC world.
Mud-slinging on the NY Times op-ed page. "Why mention that two-year-old investigation now? Because it shows how petty, nasty and partisan Henry Hyde was in a situation where no wrong had been done." And it shows how petty, nasty and partisan the NY Times can be. I expect better from them. Often disappointed. Who cares about Henry Hyde's past? What difference could it possibly make? It's up to the voters of Illinois to take care of him.
Another coool picture. I don't know why I like this one so much. Who's more stoned? Nixon or Elvis? Hippy New Year!
Monday, December 28, 1998
DaveNet: People with Honor.NewMedia: Getting content on ICE.
Chris Gulker: Snow in Silicon Valley. 12/20/98
MacWEEK: New Apple systems due next week.
AdWeek reveals the 'secret' of JIT-SEs. If they read DaveNet they would have known about them in 1997.
My favorite JIT-SE is still nt.excite.com.
MacWorld: Projectors for PowerBooks. Projectors are important for technography.
What features are missing in web browsers?
Nicholas Petreley: New Year's resolutions are so much more fun when you make them for others.
Dictionary.com: honor.
Arabic News: Egyptian Consultation Council denounces strikes against Iraq.
NY Times: The Government and the Internet.
Seth Dillingham: Tonto 1.0b2.
Jakob Nielsen: Predictions for the Web in 1999.
Network Computing: Building a cyber-facade with dynamic content tools.
Sunday, December 27, 1998
Richard Ford: Our moments have all been seized. "When I pointed out that no one actually knew what the President had or hadn't done, and that the issue was a matter of fact and that therefore their opinions were, strictly speaking, worthless, and then wondered aloud why it was even interesting to have such an opinion, most of the students said they felt it was their 'right,' indeed it was their need and obligation to hold an opinion, and that it was wishy-washy and weak-minded to say you didn't know. Even if you really didn't know."Lawrence Lee: Apple's store closed for the holidays?
Saturday, December 26, 1998
Even a midnight server crash can teach me something!Washington Post: Cohen boogies with troops. "For four nights last week, the crew of this American aircraft carrier rained a torrent of bombs and missiles on Iraq. But Wednesday, standing amid idle warplanes, several thousand of them gathered on the sunny deck and crooned, 'You make me feel like a natural woman.'"
I wonder if servers tend to break during holiday season. One example, all the links off the home page on Red Herring are broken. Hey it's a slow news day! Does Murphy get busy when people go on holiday?
Hey the links on the Herring home page came back proving that someone is watching the site? Read the articles, they're good! A profile of Mitch Kapor and of John Doerr.
CNN: Professional complainer shares secrets.
Thursday, December 24, 1998
Twas the night before Christmas, and all thru the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse!The connection between Frontier and Microsoft's IIS web server is complete!
search.userland.com is a Frontier app running behind IIS.
Main Event: PhotoScripter 1.0, automates PhotoShop.
A New York Times discussion group on crime.
Silver bells. Silver bells. It's Christmas time in the city. Ring a ling. Hear them ring. Soooon it will be Christmas Day!
Wednesday, December 23, 1998
Active Scripting for Frontier (alpha). Call VBScript, JScript, and PerlScript scripts from Frontier/Win, so you can connect to other apps via COM. Yahoo!InfoWorld: "With higher-bandwidth Internet access becoming a reality for more and more users, 1999 will see many Web sites respond by offering different visitor experiences based on bandwidth." This is called scalable content.
The Discussion Group, off the air much of today, will probably be back tomorrow. Still diggin!
Seattle Times: It's Christmas Time in the City.
Lawrence Lee: Linking 1-2-3.
PC World: The Year in Quotes.
PC Mag: 100 Influential Companies.
Fortune: 100 Best Companies to Work For.
Wired: A zillion games in one.
eMediaWeekly reviews BBEdit 5.0.
NY Times: Greeting card industry is booming.
Tuesday, December 22, 1998
DaveNet: People with Minds.Well, today's experiment didn't work. Maybe tomorrow we'll get more responses to today's piece. After all, it takes some time to formulate new ideas. New ideas is what I want, in case it's not clear.
SJ Merc: Startups make pitch on TV.
In this piece from last summer I asked if we should make trust an issue in government.
Monday, December 21, 1998
MacWEEK.com is managed with Frontier! Thea's Galleria on www.macweek.com.
A screen shot from Brent's computer showing a Frontier script that calls a VB script to get information from the Windows shell. EE Times: Clash over digital wiretap bill escalates.
Wired: Baby you can drive my car.
XML.COM wraps up 1998.
InfoWorld wraps up 1998.
Standard: Ten Stories that Shook the Net.
NY Times reconstructs events that lead to impeachment. ZDNet: IBM paints Linux blue.
IBM: LotusXSL for Java.
DataChannel: XML parser for Java.
US Military Academy honor code. Very interesting reading.
News.com: Firmage's faith in aliens.
The cardboard cutout thread continues. Interesting!
Sunday, December 20, 1998
Phil Wolff on the Discussion Group: "You're doing a fine job of setting the tone for Discuss as a place where fellows of good will and a technical bent can discourse with minimum noise, focus on the ideas vs their expression, and reveal a bit of their personality through contribution."Tim Bray puzzles over Microsoft's support of XML in MSIE.
Oracle: PLSXML Utilities and Demos.
NBC post-impeachment poll. Clinton approval soars, only 34 percent want him to resign.
Time Men of the Year: Clinton and Starr; includes a gallery of 14 Clinton/Lewinsky covers in 1998.
Vincent Morris on gas masks and a network server problem in the House press gallery.
As the sun rose over the old Philadelphia Navy Yard, the senior citizens, parents, children and union members settled into the seats of bus No. 106 and prayed aloud for the strength to reach their destination.
The eye-catching black-and-yellow banner cost him $150, and Lewis Schrager, of Bethesda, hoisted it with pride on the east lawn of the Capitol: "Maryland Stands Against Impeachment.''
Ooops! Here's a site that lifted some of our artwork. Better get the lawyers busy.
Saturday, December 19, 1998
My first thoughts after watching today's events on TV.We could use a man like Herbert Hoover again! WAV.
CNN: House Impeaches Clinton.
CNN: Livingston Quits. Calls on Clinton to resign.
A.M. Rosenthol: What Clinton Can Do.
NY Times: Republican Approval Erodes in Polls.
Jeff Veen's browser wish-list for 1999.
Interactive Week: Tcl Pro for Linux, Irix.
MacWEEK's Cameron Crotty on AppleScript.
Friday, December 18, 1998
CNN: House debate on impeachment begins.Phil Suh wants to gather info about national dial-up ISPs.
The alternate home page has an Xmas tree too!
Frontier users: We're working on the scheduler and COM scripting today.
Dale Dougherty: Closing out the Web Year.
In 1993, we released a free Mac system extension called IdleTime, so scripts could tell how long it had been since there was user interaction, either a keystroke, mouse click or disk insert. This made it possible to write script applications that behaved like screen savers.
In 1997, AOL asked if they could bundle IdleTime with their Mac client, and then earlier this year Netscape asked if they could bundle it with Navigator. Both times we said yes, with no payment, because we felt that this feature should be as ubiquitous as possible.
We get a lot of questions about IdleTime, as you might imagine. Anyway, there were some problems reported with Mac OS 8.5, and Dave Ely, who worked on IdleTime for a while, has picked up the ball. Thanks Dave!
NY Times: World governments expand restrictions on the Internet. "The world's newest form of mass communication is under attack around the globe from laws, policies and police actions seeking to restrict content."
Thursday, December 17, 1998
News.com reports that Microsoft, RealNetworks, Inktomi and Sun and have submitted an IETF draft that claims to modernize proxy server configuration at the client.1998 Builder.com awards. They're all worth reading, but I found the ones on ATG Dynamo and Vignette StoryServer to be the most interesting!
MacWEEK: Sherlock is an e-commerce app.
MacWEEK: Adobe goes for Quark market with K2. Lots of scripting support, according to the article.
A communist Christmas joke. It's a clean joke!
Reuters: Reed Elsevier mum on renewed Microsoft talk.
IntranetWorld on XML.
News.com: Linux market share grows by 212%.
Wednesday, December 16, 1998
MSNBC: US, UK bomb Iraq. "Moments before the attack began, Trent Lott, R-Miss, the Senate majority leader, said, 'Both the timing and the policy are subject to question,' adding that he could not support military action 'at this time.'" Russia and France condemn the attack.Jesse Berst: Desktop applications will disappear.
News.com: Will Microsoft buy Reed Elsevier?
Herald-Tribune: Push didn't get the shove.
I bet you'll see this GIF about 80,000 times over the next few days. A little humor couldn't hurt?
News.com: Amazon up 46 points. Analyst says it will hit 400 in 12 months. "It's momentum on momentum."
NY Times: No on impeachment.
SJ Merc: Network Solutions and Yahoo in deal for domain name registration.
NY Times: Recording industry embraces the net. "The genie is out of the bottle," said Rob Glaser, the chairman and chief executive of Real Networks Inc., a leader in delivering music and video over the Internet. "As MP3 demonstrates, when the industry doesn't come together and create a solution, things happen anyway."
If you have experience in Frontier's web-server runtime environment, please check this out. We're beginning to roll some of the new features from our dynamic server into the standard Frontier release. We'll start releasing test code soon. You can follow the discussion, or participate, by clicking on the cow skull. Let's have fun!
Tuesday, December 15, 1998
DaveNet: Criminal Sexuality.MSNBC: Republican moderates embrace impeachment.
MainStay: JustEdit 1.0. This looks very hot!
SJ Merc: Campbell to vote to impeach.
Wired: The Globe's IPO. "Sometime this summer we'll move into our first new, bigger office. We're looking forward to that."
Michael Hoffman: Rapid navigation in your web.
Monday, December 14, 1998
DaveNet: Bill's Christmas List.NY Times: Dole's workaround for the Clinton quagmire.
The insidious performance problems on the dynamic server appear to be gone.. Did Christmas come early this year?
Sample: Find all outlines in Frontier.root.
Screen shot of the server performing smoothly.
Sports Illustrated: Sportsmen of the Year. Go Sammy go!
Wired: NT gets fat pipes. Invests $200 million in Qwest.
Wired: IBM publishes source code for secure emailer.
Stop Everything! We made Jakob Nielsen's Christmas shopping list for Bill Gates's new Internet Desktop. This is the highest praise I've ever gotten for a piece of software. Right on! Thank you thank you thank you. Maybe we should retitle the slide show from last week? The Internet Desktop. How the web becomes a multi-user authoring environment.
Chinese XML Now! Test files.
News.com: Oracle and Sun to sell preconfigured database servers.
NY Times: Clinton denines perjury, says he won't quit.
NY Times: If Microsoft loses, remedies are thorny.
SJ Merc: Technology changes the way evidence is presented in court. "Most of the government's documents are stored on a single CD-ROM. Between 20 and 30 hours of video is on three 18 GB hard drives, which are unhooked and carried back to the Department of Justice each night."
Sunday, December 13, 1998
The next question for Microsoft. We'd like to run Frontier behind IIS without making Frontier's UI invisible. There doesn't seem to be a way to do this.
Saturday, December 12, 1998
Can MSIE talk COM? Macromedia: Extending DreamWeaver 2.
Seth Dillingham: Tonto is a helper app for Frontier/Mac that manages a small floating window containing buttons for scripts that are available in all apps.
Xerox has a WebDAV server in Python.
Frontier-related announcements and the Discussion Group.
Wall Street Journal on MSNBC: Microsoft Courts the VCs. They hope to spawn a series of Microsoft-friendly startups. The VCs aren't very interested.
Web Review explores IE 5.
Thursday, December 10, 1998
I'm in meetings all day Friday. Scripting News will next be updated on Saturday.Washington Post: Republicans Draft Impeachment. Like it or not, it's happening. Analysts believe the House will impeach Clinton next week, followed by a Senate trial early next year.
UserLand's explanation for the slow performance of our dynamic server.
I'm doing my first Nirvana slide show tomorrow, and of course I wanted you all to be able to sneak a peek.
I had a few minutes to kill this evening so I added a new feature to our dynamic server. For each member, we now list the messages he or she has posted in the discussion group. Here's an example.
Everyone says Linux is strong on the server, it sure is, but now, why give up on the workstation? Linux seems a better fit than Java OS was for the "thin client" everyone used to talk about. It's still a good idea. Give me a few clean and simple editors that run fast on a 1995-era laptop and I'm happy! It's got to have great TCP, and hardly ever needs to write to its own disk. This leads to the inevitable, why doesn't someone who knows menus and windows and mice get over to Linux quickly and lead the desktop developers? Of course I'm thinking about Jean-Louis Gassee and company. As if they need to do another port.
NY Times on Hypertext fiction.
A MacInTouch reader report on Mac OS X.
InfoWorld: Sun rebuffed Microsoft's Java offers.
MSNBC: Sun will supply Linux for servers and workstations.
News.com: NSI and Centraal make a deal. The net will get more confusing
SJ Merc: Compaq paid $3.5 million for www.altavista.com.
IETF BOF on Friday: Human-friendly names.
NY Times: Etiquette in Email.
MSNBC/AP: The Mouse Turns 30.
Press release: Macromedia ships Director 7. It does XML!
Press release: Allaire announces WDDX.
Web Review: Yahoo is Dead. Long live Yahoo!
I still don't understand what XMI is. IBM on XMI.
Wired explains WebDAV.
Wednesday, December 09, 1998
New sample: suites.bannerAds.InfoWorld: Adobe to roll out new DTP product in April.
David Carter-Tod: Connecting Frontier and Visual Basic on Windows.
Tuesday, December 08, 1998
The Frontier 6 outliner will have wrapping headlines, as MORE does. This, in combination with HTTP and XML support, and the discussion group, search engine and net-based preferences, have us living in a new electronic world.CNN: Netscape browser is one fast puppy.
Wired: San Francisco blackout a precursor of Y2K?
New domain: www.xml-rpc.com. No big deal!
2/27/98: RPC over HTTP via XML.
MacWEEK: Why Unix is cool.
Monday, December 07, 1998
CRN: WebDAV gets IETF Blessing.InfoWorld: IBM --> Sun: Java --> standards body!
New search engine feature: An XML-RPC interface. Any website that has information that would be of interest to Scripting News readers and is managed by an XML-RPC content management system, is welcome to wire into our search engine.
New discussion group feature: Edit this Page.
Dan Gillmor interviews John D Rockefeller. In his mind!
InfoWorld Soap Box: Strange Scripts. They want to know the weirdest thing you've ever done with a script. Could get pretty strrrrange!
Infoteria: XML on BeOS. Bravo!
Python/XML v0.5 released. Bravo!
An interesting thread over the weekend, comparing Zope to Frontier, yielded this positioning statement for Frontier in relation to Zope and other dynamic serving environments, such as Allaire and ASP.
News.com: NASDAQ chose Windows NT for its new stock monitoring system, an application that has to handle huge daily transaction volumes.
Press release: Microsoft Joins Meta Data Coalition. Also explains Microsoft Repository.
Fredric Paul: The Dream is Over. "Putting Netscape under the tutelage of AOL ends Web builders' utopian dream of a free, noncommercial Internet that plugs high-minded intellectuals into some pristine electronic community." Hmmm. What about Kleiner's tutelage? See below..
Chris Nolan's trivia column explores the Kleiner keiretsu.
Sunday, December 06, 1998
About a year ago I decided to go into XML, for a lot of reasons, I thought it was an important direction. Now I want to do it again, into an area called technography. Bernie De Koven's Connected Executives is a step-by-step plan to help connected executives do for meeting rooms what they have learned to do for their offices - to redefine the very nature of the workspace (the meeting room) and the work (the meeting itself).
Here's Bernie's definition of technography.
TeamWave Workplace provides an Internet forum where teams coordinate, collaborate and share information.
Hey, I just noticed that there's a new user interface for www.useit.com. How did I miss this?
Dan Gillmor: Small portals prove that size matters. Dan and I have been talking!
Toward the end of the piece Dan talks about JIT-SEs. I said the first search engine company that supported something like siteChanges.xml would jump into the lead. I believe that enough webmasters who would support the idea if one of the search engine companies did. Why? Because we want more hits from the search engines.
The rep from Excite, quoted in Dan's piece says her company would love to do something like this, but can't even persuade most Webmasters to put meta tags on their pages. If Excite supported siteChanges.xml, would you support it in your website? I've started a discussion group thread, as usual, click on the cow skull. NY Times: Judging by the recent spate of announcements by high-profile Internet companies, the latest buzzword -- on the heels of "push," "personalized" and "portal" -- is "community."
Cringely: Patents patents patents.
News.com: Apple cuts PowerBook prices.
The SJ Merc ran this piece where repeatedly they said Sun is the only company that makes a computer that is not a Windows clone. What a crock! In San Jose of all place, you'd think they would know about Apple and the Mac. Do they think we're stupid?
Saturday, December 05, 1998
We did another brain transplant on the Discussion Group software this morning.Microstate's Hamilton is a cross-platform, database-driven, open-source application server.
Sun: Java Development Kit 1.2.
News.com: Dell business desktop down to $850. 333-MHz processor and a 4.3GB hard drive. No monitor.
Zope is a free, open source web application platform used for building high-performance, dynamic web sites.
Friday, December 04, 1998
One of the nicest features of the new search engine is that each item from every back issue of Scripting News is a separate item. So if something has appeared here, and you couldn't find it, now you can. I think this is a first, a content-structure-aware search engine, an effect that's achieved thru integration with a CMS. I find it works better than the summaries you get with less intimate search engines. For examples of searches, click on the cow skull. InfoWorld: IETF to approve WebDAV.
Lawrence Lee: Anal-Retentive (with a hyphen).
Brent is getting his sea legs on Linux.
News.com: Lotus FastSite 2.0. What standards does it support? FTP? HTTP-PUT? XML-RPC? WebDAV?
XMLNet is an API for streaming XML.
Builder.com on Personalization.
Red Herring: Vignette on the IPO Trail.
Thursday, December 03, 1998
BoardWatch: Web applications the logical next step. Yes!Late Night Software: XML for AppleScript. Bravo!
Andre Radke: libGD for Frontier 5.
Is there a Linux for Dummies?
The XML-Groupware project goes forward. Now you can get an XML map of the top level of the discussion group. This is equivalent to the HTML version, but naturally the XML version is easier to render in other XML-aware environments.
The source listing for a script that loads a discussion group thread into the Frontier workstation environment. If you're interested in the connection between groupware and content management, this is a good place (and time) to start.
Microsoft: XML as a production solution.
SJ Merc: Microsoft probes Gosling on WORA.
InfoWorld: Sun Used Java as a weapon against Microsoft.
Popular Science: The best of what's new for 1998.
Ric Ford: Mac OS 8.5 Troubles.
Washington Post: Eric Raymond crusades for Open Source.
Wired: The European Union is quietly getting ready to approve legislation that will allow the police to eavesdrop both on Internet conversations and Iridium satellite telephone calls without obtaining court authorization.
Wednesday, December 02, 1998
SJ Merc: Gates testifies, courtroom laughs.Oooops. This one almost slipped by. AOL also inherited Netscape's quiet power grab, which becomes more of a quagmire now that it's AOL doing the grabbing. Will "scripting" get you to a site on one of AOL's servers?
A funny thing happens when you sell out..
If the browser wars are over, what would peace look like?
Wow! Niel Bornstein used the XML interface for the discussion group to flow the message structure thru Mhonarc. Hey that looks like the first bridge from our CMS to something running on Linux. Coooool!
Phil Suh: Notes from the October BAFUG meeting.
A new discussion group command lists all the top-level topics since we started discussing things.
News.com: It's The APIs. They finally figured it out! Ring the bells. Mark this day. They got it.
SJ Merc: Microsoft anti-trust trial focuses on Java.
NY Times: Microsoft Garbled his Language.
Tuesday, December 01, 1998
DaveNet: XML Groupware and Other Big Ideas.Tallent: DOM support for Frontier.
Forbes: Slay your Rival. Silicon Valley rivals decry Microsoft's tough tactics yet many of them are guilty of the same thing.
Last Thursday I forgot to thank Compaq.
Interesting story on Wired about China's firewall. Sites like MSNBC, News.com and Wired.com are blocked to people in mainland China. I wonder if Scripting News is. If you're reading this from inside China, please send me an email.
Brent Deverman was in China thru August and was able to get thru to Scripting News behind their firewall.
Apple: Scripting in Rhapsody.
SJ Merc: Case, McNealy talk to Netscape employees.
Santiago's message at the State of the World Forum.
Lotus Notes is getting an outliner for web content.
Welcome Lotus, Seriously! Frontier has been an outliner since 1988, and a web-content outliner since 1996.
Are you working on XML-based groupware? If so, let's compare notes (grin) and get some interoperation happening.
Back issues...
Check out Scripting News -- November 1998.
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