News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
 

Sunday, July 04, 1999

This morning we topped-off the Manila-ization of the main UserLand discussion group. If you want to try out the new way, use News.UserLand.Com as your port of entry to DiscussionLand. The good news is that if you prefer the old way of DGing, you can keep coming in thru discuss.userland.com, it still works. Lots of new stories on the Buck's home page. Today's best link (so far) came from Misnomer, pointing to Scott Rosenberg's Salon piece from 1997 about Microsoft and their claim that removing MSIE from Windows would cause the system to crash. Rosenberg says: "Removing IE actually prevented crashes." Salon: Penguin Wiggles its Flippers. "We've had friends who have started companies, the most famous being Excite -- seven friends started this company, and within a year all of them combined owned less than seven percent, and most of the decision makers were these new implants from IBM and Sun. I just think that's incredibly boring." 6/8/99: "Like a scene from Microserfs, there were a couple of reps from Penguin Computing outside the event being young and enthusiastic and handing out leaflets. One was dressed in a penguin costume!" Yesterday: "If you have a winner, the ones you leave behind will always make barking noises. The trick is to know when you have the winner, and stick with it and ignore the barking." NY Times: AOL Everywhere. "An astounding 39 percent of the time Americans spend online is spent using services the company controls, 10 times the share of its nearest competitor, Microsoft." Mozilla.Org: "There are many people who care about standards and would like to help our push at Mozilla.Org for compliance, but who aren't C++ engineers. Well, here's their chance--the Gecko BugAThon." Red Herring: AOL and Prodigy woo users with hardware deals. "The key right now is to get as many people as possible onto your site and worry about the business model later." Dan Gillmor: "If you're wondering why the biggest companies in the technology universe are fervently wooing consumers to their instant-messaging services, consider the stakes. This is the beginning of a new kind of telephone system, but also much more."

Saturday, July 03, 1999

New channel: Russian Nuclear News. InfoWorld: Bob Metcalfe adds nothing factual to the Linux vs NT debate. Bob, what if powerful turnkey servers went for less than $1000? What kind of new networking markets might develop? Will Linux force Microsoft to match its price with an easy NT-based web server? I bet it does. Servers everywhere. MacWEEK: Getting on Apple's Ship List. "Reports that Apple has been showing a cascading directory-tree folder interface give me a serious case of the shakes." It'll be interesting to watch the My.UserLand.Com story list over the holiday weekend in the US. It's usually a quiet period on the big corporate sites. Does the weblog world take a holiday too? The Linux version of the My.UserLand.Com story list. (The URL is temporary.) It's a clone, the only way you can tell it's on Linux is the cute little penguin on the page. We now have the content flowing from the batchJobServer app running in Frontier on Mac OS, to the main My.UserLand.Com server running on NT, and flowing thru Zope and the Postgresql database on Linux. This reflects our philosophy of being an Internet developer, not specifically a Mac or Windows or Linux developer. They're all excellent operating systems, and they all have an important role to play in the evolution of the Internet. TechWeb: Citrix CEO on Thin Clients. "Ed Iacobucci, the founder and chairman of Citrix Systems, is starting to see his vision of thin client-server computing take root in the technology landscape -- 10 years after he left IBM to start the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based software company." NY Times: Hackers redirect Network Solutions site. Wired: Starbuck's stirs literary brouhaha. "The idea that there are any publications that are somehow completely pure and devoid of any contentiousness is naive." MSNBC: How Microsoft Plans to Remake Windows.

Friday, July 02, 1999

BBC: Net Users Take Over News. "If Slashdot were a mammal, most of our news sites would be the dinosaurs. Many journalists don't understand this and don't think it's journalism." Hey I got top billing on today's NTK. Don't be fooled by Microsoft's report on PC WEEK's benchmark comparing Linux and Windows NT. The tests measured performance of super-high traffic static sites. Neither Microsoft or PC WEEK considered price-performance, nor did the tests measure performance of dynamic database-stored sites. David Rothgery points to a PC Magazine comparison of dynamic web servers on Linux and NT. Eric Kidd asks a strange but interesting question. "Is anybody working on XML-RPC for Emacs?" Indeed! CNN: Mario Puzo dead at 78. "The Godfather sold more than 21 million copies worldwide. With the help of director Francis Ford Coppola, Puzo adapted the series to the big screen. Two of the movies earned Puzo and Coppola Best Screenplay Oscars, and Marlon Brando won a Best Actor award." 6/7/96: "I wish DaveNet were a TV show so I could show you a clip from one of my favorite movies, The Godfather, starring Marlon Brando and eighteen other great actors doing their best work." Techweb: Lotus Chooses Linux, Dumps Netware. "It's a sad thing," said Mike Carey, president of Information Technology Consulting Group, a midsize reseller in Hicksville, N.Y. "People don't realize there's a lot of NetWare out there. My NetWare business is as strong as it's ever been." PC WEEK: IBM Revises Open Source Agreement. "We're an 800-pound gorilla, but we have impeccable manners." SiteExperts.Com: Building Documents with XML, XSL, CSS. Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, has feedback on My.UserLand.Com. All of Guido's comments are right-on. I'm going to use his comments as a template for the next rev of the user interface. It's time to do a cleanup. Lots of loose-ends. Former 49ers coach Bill Walsh had breakfast at Buck's with Rams coach Mike White. Coach Walsh is one of my heroes. He knows how to compete. He would always say how great his competitor is. "Oh they're very strong." What respect! It was also great tactics. His team wouldn't be over-confident, but maybe the other guys would. And if he won, well he just beat a great team. Now, if you trash the other guy and win, well, you just beat a loser. I've always felt that Walsh would make a great software company board member. He has a great appreciation for competition. A total class act. I hope to meet him some day, shake his hand, and thank him for being such a great teacher. News.Com: Tripod Founder Promotes Digital Village. My family vacationed in the Berkshires when I was a kid. Fond memories! Can we agree on a single content syndication format? I've spoken several times this week with people from Netscape on the next step with RSS and scriptingNews formats. I proposed that we agree on a single format, and a loose way of moving forward in the future. News.Com: Are Portals Slaves to Windows? From Steven Ivy's weblog: 'I didn't know that a developer can create a Sherlock plugin which will allow Sherlock to interpret and display search results which are returned in XML.' UsefulInc has an XSL style sheet for scriptingNews format. Arnold Lesikar has a cool new Frontier site! MobileStart: Palm CEO Resigns Unexpectedly. (MobileStart is a My.UserLand.Com channel.) MacWEEK: Apple Fights iMac Knock-Off. "Apple announced that it has filed a complaint against Future Power and its backer, South Korean PC manufacturer Daewoo, for illegally copying the iMac's industrial design with its forthcoming all-in-one E-Power system." News.Com: Warner Bros Targets Yahoo's Backlash. Mozilla.Org: "We at mozilla.org want to clear up any misconceptions resulting from the comments reported Wednesday by an executive at Sun. Our contributors and staff are responsible for the management of all browser development. As a major mozilla.org contributor, AOL completely supports our efforts. Commercial open source software development is in its early stages, and Wednesday's comments demonstrate that it is still regarded with skepticism by some in the industry. We would like to stress that Sun was not speaking for mozilla.org or for AOL." Thanks for clearing that up. Baratz made some very puzzling statements.

Thursday, July 01, 1999

Happy July! It's the month of BBQs and beer. It's hot hot hot. Outdoor weather. Wear your sunscreen. David Gewirtz: Windows CE Power's Channels. "Each month, we need to produce about 27 articles of 1,000 to 2,000 words each, 12 tip mailings, and about 240 news stories. We need to generate hundreds of pages of HTML and about 230,000 lines of HTML code." There's an article about David in US1 Magazine. It sounds like he's going into competition with Vignette! Right on. Red Herring: Slashdot Founder Finds Fulfillment. That reminds me, a little bird told me that Red Herring has an RSS file. For five points, anyone know where it is?? Denver Post: Town Celebrates Headless Critter. Is the person who does a weblog a weblogeer? A weblogster? MacWEEK: Linux and OS Politics. "My advice: Get out there and support Linux. As critical as I may sound of the OS, it's drawn an impressive following that is committed to evolving the OS continually. The question we have to ask ourselves as Mac OS users: Can Apple keep up?" Oooops! InfoWorld.Com has a problem. More on the flipside of the Cluetrain. MacWEEK reports on Web99.

Wednesday, June 30, 1999

This evening we reached a milestone. My.UserLand.Com is now a writing environment. Check out our new Weblog Editor. If you find great links, share them with us. It's never been easier to get your ideas on the web. UserLand.Com membership required. Here's the channel I've been working on to test this stuff out. Hey, I like this tool. I like it better than what I'm using to edit Scripting News. This is, by the way, mass market stuff. It's easy. Commemorative screenshot. What is desktop.com? EmailJournal.Com is a Frontier site. Tim O'Reilly answers a reader's question about component technologies for Linux. XML-RPC gets a mention. Wired: NetoMat, the Non-Linear Browser. A perfect match for the content flow that's building on My.UserLand.Com! News.com: Playing Domain Name Hide-And-Seek. News.com: Sweeping Net Restrictions in Australia. Here's a domain I wish I had thought of grabbing. No doubt someone will complain about this. New directions for My.UserLand.Com. We've de-emphasized, for now, the Choose Your News and Favorites pages on My.UserLand.Com. They're still there, you can still use them, and we will preserve the functionality as we go forward. Next, I think very few people are aware that we're doing static rendering of channels as they change. For example, here's the static rendering for Scripting News. So, if you want, you can write your own page, running on your own server, that selects the channels you like, and arrange them any way you want. You don't have to like the way we do it, you can create your own interface if you have a moderately powerful server scripting environment. (This is Scripting News, after all.) Next, we provide the full uptodate service list in XML. So, if you don't like the way we render channels, write your own channel renderer. Open it to the public. I think it would be fun to get aggregators running in every scripting environment. Now, looking at the service list, I can see room for improvement! Why is no one making suggestions there? NY Times: "How can the record establishment make money by selling music for digital download online? The challenge might not be so difficult if a healthy music trade were not already in place in the form of unprotected MP3 files, the digital audio compression format that can easily be copied and distributed illegally."

Tuesday, June 29, 1999

Big News: Slashdot Acquired by Andover.Net. "We had 2 options: get cash from some investors and hire a staff, or or find a company that we felt understood what we wanted to accomplish here, and use their money to hire help." Congrats! Coool! I just was offered a virus. (But I didn't fall for it.) Wired: CmdrTaco on SlashDot Sale. Salon reviews Microsoft's retail presence at SF's Metreon. MacWEEK sneaks a peek at PhotoShop 5.5. Bernie DeKoven: "WebEx is a platform for technography." What is WebEx.Com? I know two people at WebEx. Mark Altenberg and David Thompson. It's a small world! Soundbites on the state of XML for a piece on InfoWorld.Com. Microsoft: Windows Scripting Host 2.0. Thanks to Lindsay Marhall for doing a Tcl version of the XMLizer script, adding to the PHP, Cold Fusion, Perl, AppleScript, Java and Frontier versions. This may be the first script to be ported to all these environments, and provides an interesting contrast between all the popular scripting syntaxes. Wired: "Yahoo, which launched its Yahoo-GeoCities site Monday, says it owns all Web pages, articles, and images on member sites and has irrevocable rights to them for all time." Jim Roepcke started a new weblog. He says "I've wanted to take advantage of Frontier 6's CMS features, but until now the only interface that actually used 6's features was the discussion group." Either Jim's missing something or I am. We have been steadily deploying and releasing apps that build on mainResponder. MSNBC: AOL in talks to enter PC business. Red Herring tells the story of Critical Path's IPO. Industry Standard: The Selling of TheGlobe.Com.