Scripting News

Wed, 21 May 2003 22:22:05 GMT

MSNBC: "A bomb exploded Wednesday in a mail room at the Yale University law school."

Wed, 21 May 2003 21:57:00 GMT

Ben Edelman, a Harvard Law student and fellow at Berkman, has been studying Gator, one of the leading advertising servers. He's got a Web app that simulates a Gator client, and sends messages back to Gator asking for ads to display on certain sites. For example, here are the ads you get when you visit Microsoft with Gator running. A few more: Apple, Yahoo, American Airlines, Ford, Harvard, UC-Berkeley. It doesn't seem to know about weblogs.

Wed, 21 May 2003 20:54:29 GMT

Hey the cute little load balancing thing works. Now we can do 11000 queries a day. Each search can make as many as five calls via SOAP to the Google API. I've wired the search box in the right margin on Scripting News to the weblog search page. This new page lists the 100 most recent searches.

Wed, 21 May 2003 18:46:58 GMT

Marketing Profs: "Blogs offer the human voice, which can be loud, controversial, and even wacky. But the realness of the blog inspires trust and piques people�s curiosity. A blog can create a community and a dynamic discussion."

Wed, 21 May 2003 22:08:15 GMT

Susan Kitchens: Photos from the Lunar Eclipse.

Wed, 21 May 2003 23:15:09 GMT

Limon is a photo sequence captioner and uploader.

Thu, 22 May 2003 02:46:06 GMT

Meet The Berkmans: Wendy Koslow. First in a series.

Wed, 21 May 2003 23:53:31 GMT

Bryan Bell is just the man.

Wed, 21 May 2003 23:57:46 GMT

NY Times: "Eight years ago, when Carnegie Mellon first discovered that the number of men named Dave outstripped women, the university decided to tackle its Dave-to-Girl ratio head on, with surprisingly good results."

Wed, 21 May 2003 18:21:43 GMT

Waypath has an XML-RPC interface for keyword searches on weblog content.

Thu, 22 May 2003 04:36:39 GMT

A few people have suggested asking people to send Google API keys they aren't using and rotate them to work around the fatal flaw. It's probably a good idea. But I'd rather not ask, I'd rather have people send them to me voluntarily. Then I'll add some code to do some "load balancing" among the keys. How does that sound?

Thu, 22 May 2003 04:20:06 GMT

Lilacs and wisteria are in bloom in Cambridge. I guess the snow is finished for now?

Thu, 22 May 2003 04:28:08 GMT

BTW, some people said the Nikon took better pics than the Sony I use now, but I don't think so. The lilacs pics today came out great. And the camera is smaller so it goes more places. And the lens cover works automatically so it doesn't get scratched. It takes better pictures than the Nikon if I actually have it with me when I see something photo-worthy. And scratches tend to screw things up pretty well. ";->"

Thu, 22 May 2003 04:08:30 GMT

Edd Dumbill: "I'm in Budapest, Hungary, attending the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference."

Wed, 21 May 2003 12:28:49 GMT

Evan Hansen: "Paralyzed by fears of piracy, the record labels have taken years to get their act together for online distribution. In that time, they have nearly squandered their biggest sales opportunity ever by demanding complex digital rights management features that hinder copying at the expense of turning off paying customers."

Wed, 21 May 2003 12:43:38 GMT

Bloki is "a Web site on which you can create Web pages, right in your browser, with no additional software required. Think of it as a word processor for the Web."

Wed, 21 May 2003 09:50:58 GMT

Microsoft's decision to support RSS without arguing over what it is looks smarter every day. Somehow MS has taught its people not to care about issues that are not related to success or failure of products. Here's how I like to look at it -- formats and protocols are tools, details; the important thing is functionality delivered to users. For HTML it's the page. With OPML it's the outliner. In RSS it's the aggregator.

Wed, 21 May 2003 10:07:40 GMT

Scoble, who works at Microsoft now, says he likes using a desktop app to write his internal weblog. Right on. I've been using a desktop app to write Scripting News for years. The browser is not a great writing tool. Ironically, MS is the best company to solve that problem. They don't want to do it, clearly.

Wed, 21 May 2003 10:09:22 GMT

Microsoft's top developer guy, Eric Rudder, has a weblog.

Wed, 21 May 2003 12:24:12 GMT

Tom Watson is a Labour MP with a weblog.

Wed, 21 May 2003 09:13:29 GMT

Well the fatal flaw in yesterday's killer app is Google's limit of 1000 queries per day. Now all the sample queries display Google's error message. 1000 queries per day is nothing. If there are any busdev people I need to talk with at Google, I guess now's the time to do that. Unfortunately I don't have any money to pay them for this, but I'm afraid that's what they're going to want to talk about.

Disclaimer: I've been trying to work on weblog-tool compatibility issues with Google for the last few weeks. I've noticed that it colors how I think about them, not in a positive way, and felt I should disclose that, since I write about them here on Scripting News.

Wed, 21 May 2003 09:21:44 GMT

On this day in Y2K I was leaving Amsterdam for Italy. In 2001, I was leaving Amsterdam for Denmark. On this day in this year I'm looking for a rental in Boston. Then I give two speeches and then I gotta get out of here. ";->"