News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
	Mail Starting 6/19/97

---

From: steve@ora.com (Steve Clark);
Sent at 6/22/97; 3:34:58 PM;
Re:Scalable Content

Cool, I think you are on the right track. I use a 2.02 browser at home on my old slow lack of RAM machine, and can 3.01 at work. I feel content is important, and it shouldn't matter what the browser is.

There is a HOT debate on over at ZD concerning a message board change. The problem is the content got lost in the graphics. This was NOT a good thing, especially when it was a useful business tool before the change and now it is almost worthless.

Thanks for taking the time to make this happen. It was an important step. SC

---

From: hofo@bellsouth.net (Howard Fore);
Sent at 6/21/97; 11:22:09 PM;
Re:Killer Clouds

>What's the killer app of Windows?

Marketing.

---

From: mattj@qm.fallon.com (Matt Jannusch);
Sent at 6/16/97; 6:00:44 PM;
DaveNet 6/13/97

I was looking through your DaveNet pieces as I typically do once a week or so and noticed your little blurb about Mac Webmasters in your Friday the 13th article. I'm currently the person in charge of Web Technologies at Fallon McElligott and thought I'd let you know that we are still using Frontier to automate our information gathering for our websites. Almost all the Frontier code is new and now supports multiple websites on one "Statistics Server" and uses the freeware Analog program in place of ServerStat.

Analog is several times faster in processing logs, and has a great program for doing DNS lookups (I can process about 100,000 logfile lines with 10,000 DNS lookups in 5 minutes now, where it would take me most of a day to do it before with ServerStat). Integrating Analog and DNSLookup into Frontier only took me about 15 minutes to get the core communications working between them and Frontier. The rest was almost as easy. We process incoming logs from 14 servers every 3 hours and process upwards of 400,000 hits per day all with Frontier's help, and on a single Macintosh. The new system uses a combination of Analog, DNSLookup, MacGZip, StuffIt Deluxe, Deltagraph, Clip2Gif and Frontier.

Without Frontier, we wouldn't have been able to do anything remotely as nice and slick as the system we have now. Nothing else out there ties things together in such a nice way as Frontier does. Thanks!!!

Matt Jannusch Web Technology Manager Fallon McElligott mattj@qm.fallon.com

---

From: david@webdeveloper.com (David Fiedler);
Sent at 6/20/97; 2:33:34 PM;
Re:Web Economics

I don't know if you remember all this, but "the rest of the story" is that a company in Atlanta (run by a couple of college students) had a really cool program that completely blanked out banner ads. They were bought out and the product disappeared overnight. The company that bought them out was not GM suppressing the magical 120 mpg carburetor, but -- of all people -- pgp.com.

I wonder why...

---

From: aedmonds@mindspring.com (Andy Edmonds);
Sent at 6/20/97; 2:38:41 AM;
What a long and winding road! (Who said that?)

The Beatles eh?

---

From: henri@binaryCompass.com (Henri Asseily);
Sent at 6/20/97; 10:47:59 AM;
MacOS 8 & Rich Siegel

Well, I wouldn't want to be as clear cut as Rich is when he blasts system 8. System 8 is not a huge upgrade to 7.6.1. No, it doesn't deserve the "8". And yes, some of the settings dialogs are in weird places (not as weird as Windows 95/NT though).

However, the finder IS speedier. Emptying the trash is MUCH faster, even faster than Speed Doubler. Finder operations are faster, after an initial delay that wasn't there in 7.6 (probably because of thread spawning).

The icons look cute, and the location manager is awesome (powerbook users, this is a must). Tabbed folders in combination with the View by buttons make great multiple launchers, and the spring-loaded folders are a good addition.

But of course most of the system 8 features can be installed on top of system 7.6, so this is by no means a required upgrade. But, on my home system (7300/200 with 1 meg L2 cache and Ultra wide SCSI3), system 8 is here to stay. And on my powerbook 1400, same thing.

I have never crashed system 8, and I have been running it for over a month now on 3 machines. It is definitely stable.

Yes, system 8 has its flaws, but overall I like it. There. I said it. Flame away. :-)

PS: if anyone can figure out how to set "snap to grid" as a default for all the windows, PLEASE contact me. I just do not want to believe Apple screwed this thing up, I hope I am the one who's stupid.

---

From: tlundeen@lundeen.com (tim lundeen);
Sent at 6/20/97; 10:47:53 AM;
Re:Killer Clouds

This is pretty interesting stuff, and I've been thinking about it a lot since this piece and the followup on Anyone But Microsoft.

It seems to me that the sole reason for Java's success is that it is a platform, and has near-universal availability. That it is a good (but not great) language is a far distant second. If Java wasn't a platform, I wouldn't be writing code in it, I would just stick with C++. But as a platform, I can write Java applets that run everywhere, without regard for the actual hardware and native operating system. This is a tremendous advance for the business, and this is the main reason that Java has been making such strong headway.

Java doesn't completely deliver on its promise yet. The two main problems are that the AWT objects such as buttons and pull-downs are implemented differently on various platforms, and that each Java implementation has its own bugs. We test our applets in 8 different environments, find work-arounds for any problems, and occasionally compromise the design to get it to work everywhere. But when we're done, we have a *single* deliverable for all hardware/OS environments. (Well, actually we have .class version, .zip version, and .cab version, but they are all generated from the identical source :-).

It may be that a platform needs multiple languages, but I'm not convinced. And I'm sure that if there was a demand for it, you could map other languages onto the Java byte-code run-time.

With regard to Microsoft's J/Direct, this is just saying that you can now use Java as a Windows development language. With J/Direct, if you want to develop Windows apps in Java, you can do it: Great. This has no effect on Java's ability to provide a platform. Personally, I'll just stick to the standard Java platform because I need to write universal apps.

Keep 'em coming, I still stop everything and read your pieces when they come in.

---

From: pholmes@ucsd.edu (Preston Holmes);
Sent at 6/20/97; 10:25:05 AM;
Re:Thirty Miles of Air

A real connect here Dave.

I try to spend more weekends than not in the mountains. And as you may already know I'm into kayaking in a big way. In a lot of DaveNets you speak of the importance of respect. Nothing deserves respect more than nature. Respect of its asthetic wonders, it fragility towards environmental abuse, and also its power to harm.

I experience my deepest feeling of respect, the most pure form of respect, when watching several thousand cubic feet per second of water pour over a 10 foot ledge, and knowing that I will try to become connected with that water in a way that I might survive. That mixture of survival, respect, and total concentration on the moment, is an exhileration unmatched in normal day to day living.

If you have a chance this summer I encourage you to go whitewater rafting, I think you would have a blast with the magic that is a river, you'd zooooom.

---

From: jpump@researchmag.com (Jason Pump);
Sent at 6/20/97; 10:14:31 AM;
Re:Thirty Miles of Air

Hi Dave. When you've got 10 minutes, read the beginnings of this book:

http://www.adaptivex.com/~dataalchemy/book/book1.html

http://www.adaptivex.com/~dataalchemy

---

From: RYoung097@aol.com;
Sent at 6/20/97; 4:21:26 AM;
Killer Clouds -- MS Office

I'd say MS Office itself was the killer cloud -- other apps "somehow" just didn't seem to work right.

Windows finally worked with 3.1 and MS shipped versions of Word and Excel that installed and operated without crashing all the time. I worked as a PC tech at the time and spent a year converting 120 machines to Win3.1 and getting them on a LANTASTIC network. It seemed that year a bunch of apps died because they didn't install or work well in Windows. WordPerfect, AmiPro, Harvard Graphics, Lotus 123, QuattroPro, Paradox, dbase (kinda) come to mind -- and seem to just as faded as Wordstar.

---

From: rlai@best.com (Roger Lai);
Sent at 6/19/97; 6:52:31 PM;
Re:Anyone But Microsoft

Thanks for that ABM piece. Insightful as always, but even more important, now I know where I can get Okonomiyaki in San Francisco! I fell in love with it when I visited Japan last summer.

---

From: correia@barebones.com (Jim Correia);
Sent at 6/19/97; 3:46:36 PM;
File System not Native

I would double check on this. The Finder is indeed multi-threaded and supposedly native, but making the file system native is a big undertaking - one that I think we will not see until HFS plus that is to be part of Rhapsody and the sucessor to MacOS 8.