Scripting News

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 20:03:53 GMT

Ed Cone: How to Fight the Corporate Hacking Bill.

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 21:42:05 GMT

Nick Denton: "Weblogs are a testament to capitalism, and the importance of clear property rights." Amen.

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 21:31:34 GMT

Sean Nolan: Amazon RSS. "Wouldn't it be nice to have an RSS feed for all weblog-related books at Amazon, so that when new books became available you'd know about them? Thanks to the magic of web pipelines, it's become a pretty trivial thing to put together." Excellent!

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 20:26:01 GMT

NY Times: "Much weaker than expected job growth in July and some disappointing earnings reports sent stocks sharply lower today."

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 18:57:24 GMT

New Bryan Bell themes for Radio. ";->"

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 12:11:38 GMT

On this day in 1999, the NY Times ran its first piece on weblogs. Some have claimed that weblogs didn't get started until late 1999, a few months after Blogger was first deployed. This is contradicted by the Times article and an earlier one by Scott Rosenberg at Salon, in May 1999. Both pieces reported on a weblog world that was already established and growing. The first note of Blogger on Scripting News was 8/23/99. It's possible that was not its release date, but I think it was close. BTW, it's really cool that the Times and Salon both keep archives back that far. Most pubs don't.

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 12:59:01 GMT

Bryan Hoch, the man behind the MetsOnline site, shut down by Major League Baseball, now has a column at FoxSports.

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 13:58:34 GMT

Kevin Werbach: "Starbucks lost the chance to sell me an over-priced doppio, while I got my email al fresco."

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 12:31:03 GMT

Perhaps HP has some honor after all.

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 19:43:24 GMT

What is tangent.cx?

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 11:59:05 GMT

NY Times: "There is a lot of hand-wringing at AOL about whether it's a media company or a technology company," said John Squires, president of Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc Interactive. "I think the question is sort of irrelevant. Of course, they are going to be a big media company. Don Logan knows how to run a media company."

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 14:39:33 GMT

Phil Hewitt, who is working on connecting Visual Basic to Blogger says: "The Blogger API server seems to be down at the moment, therefore I can't test it." Phil, you can use our test server to verify that your code works. It's been pretty reliable. And you can download a 30-day free trial of Radio, and test it on your own machine.

1/1/1904; 12:00:00 AM

Sjoerd offers a theory why Dave Rand is the #1 Dave on Google.

Recovery update

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 12:47:13 GMT

Yesterday I did a vigorous 1.5 hour walk, up hills and down. The iPod came with me.

Talked with a guy who had bypass surgery in 1981. He and a friend visit bypass patients in local hospitals. He called, after my walk (how did he know) and we talked for a long time. He said there was a 47-year-old woman at the hospital right now, for her second bypass in 2.5 years. He said that a couple of years after his surgery, the artery blockages were coming back (how depressing), but so far he hasn't needed more surgery. The difference? Smoking. The woman hadn't quit, he had. I guess the purpose of his call was to check up on my life as a non-smoker. Heh. It's okay, so far. Today is my 49th consecutive day with no nicotine.

BTW, there's some controversy about whether nicotine is okay or not. My GP says go ahead and use the patches if the urge gets too bad. So far I've not done this, because I don't want to have to withdraw at a physical level again. I asked if nicotine isn't bad for the heart, and (get this) she said it isn't. But I think it must be. It constricts the arteries. When you have blockages in the arteries, the last thing you want to do is constrict them. Another reason I'm not using the patches.

Alwin Hawkins: "If you don't need nicotine, then don't take nicotine."

They love Apple, but why?

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 19:20:57 GMT

Is it me or is it weird that so many open source purists, people who swear by it, argue it to death, and would die for it, seem to like Apple, which isn't open source? Maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe it makes sense, if you need to charge for the software (so you can pay the engineers, for example), to hold on to the source. Hmmm. Sorry. ";->"

BTW, imho, "open source" is a vestige of dotcom mania. Sure, you can do anything with free money, but that's over, for good (fingers crossed) so let's get real, okay? Thanks. One more thing, open source zealots, like all zealots, checked their minds at the door when they joined the party. They're anti-intellectual, can't handle disagreement, are about anything but freedom.

A bonus BTW -- to people who are borderline open source zealots -- consider this. In the late 90s open source defined a club that excluded many well-intentioned hard-working developers. Now it no longer has the power to do that, because the hype is over, and the money that was funding it is gone. So if open source, as a cause, tries to pretend that the barriers still exist, you only cut yourself out of the mainstream, and become more and more irrelevant. And here's the most important point. There's lots of work to do. In Washington they're passing laws that any developer, whether or not he or she develops open source, should be working to stop. The fact is that if you use a computer, you probably depend on some of both kinds of software -- so stop seeing the world so black and white, stop seeing an enemy in anyone who dares criticize the most bizarre zealotry, relax, and see that the world is a lot bigger than it may have seemed, and let's work together for real freedom, for all of us. Now, really, have a nice day, no kidding.

A correspondent writes: "The answer to the question is 'Unix.'" Yes that's right. Much of the misplaced open source zealotry is really love of Unix. No problem with that. I grew up with Unix myself. Totally. You can see that in the design of Frontier and my outliners. I've written about that many times. That's how I learned to write code, by studying the source code of the original Bell Labs Unix. Now we're getting somewhere.