Discuss

Sunday, October 03, 1999

NY Times: Akio Morita dies at 78. "More than anyone else, it was Morita and his Sony colleagues who changed the world's image of the term 'Made in Japan' from one of paper parasols and shoddy imitations to one of high technology and high reliability in miniature packages." Matt Neuburg: Shortening URLs. I did some work today on mainResponder.menu and along the way wrote docs for user.menus. xmlhack is doing an excellent job of covering developments of the XML world. I'm not going to replicate their links here, but if you're interesting in XML, I highly recommend bookmarking this site. BradLands: Why I Weblog. A new feature for channel developers forces an XML file to be read immediately, it's compiled, the html rendering is recalculated and any new stories are sent to the affiliates. A visible debugging process for the new My.UserLand software, including links to debugging pages that will help us track down problems in the future. New channel: Developer Nation. MacWEEK: New iMacs to debut next week.

Saturday, October 02, 1999

Yesterday I had a four-hour meeting with Dale Dougherty at O'Reilly. We talked about everything. Open source, the web, communities, the new technologies we're developing. We are already working with O'Reilly on important projects, and plan to expand that significantly. We have so much in common with O'Reilly, yet our areas of expertise are so complementary. Exchanging email with Dale this morning, I asked him to post some of his thoughts about open source and the Solaris release. He said "open Source should be a spectrum, not the extreme end of the spectrum. Community licensing fits nicely on the spectrum and shows that Sun is moving in a useful direction." An example of how broad our discussions were, we talked about turning Scripting.Com into a joint venture between O'Reilly and UserLand. Wouldn't that be interesting! But that was just one idea. Matt Neuburg: Exploring MainResponder. "The most important thing to grasp about MainResponder is how it decides what object to serve and how to serve it. Is it a file on disk? Is it an object in the main database? Is it an object in a guest database? If it's a script, should it be shown or run? If it's a wptext, should it be handed back as is, or should it be rendered as a web page object through the Web page rendering framework?" Red Herring: Sun Flips to Open Source Trend. "Sun's critics suspect Sun's plans are smoke and mirrors. 'It's interesting, but it's not open source,' says Melissa London, spokeswoman for Red Hat Software, the leading Linux distributor. 'It still makes the developers beholden to Sun.'" Wait a minute. Isn't Red Hat smoke and mirrors? Their market cap is $5.844 billion. What is their product? Hello. Where have we seen this before? In the early days of the PC industry, Softsel controlled the flow of software. They were the gods. Didn't last long. When you sell a commodity you're very open to price competition. Distribution is a thin business model. In the shakeout that followed one of the CEOs of one of the leading distributers likened it to flying at a thousand miles an hour two feet off the ground. You feel the bumps. Eric Raymond says no: "'Sun has tried this scam before with Java and Jini and we are not going to buy it,' said Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative and one of the leaders of open source community. 'They are trying to use us as free labor, without making us a partner. Sun retains all the rights. These terms are therefore unacceptable.'" How do Solaris users view this? I suspect Sun was not too concerned about Eric Raymond. (Thanks!) Instead it's likely that the move was a response to requests from Solaris users. As a software developer with a growing customer base I am very curious to know how Solaris users view this development. Sun's market cap is $71.811 billion. Because there's something really there. Thursday is the fifth anniversary of DaveNet.Big wheel keeps on turning.

Friday, October 01, 1999

A progress report on categorization for syndication. Red Herring: Internet bubble popping American business ethics? "I think it's really important for all you entrepreneurs out there to remember this: This will ultimately come crashing down because companies will go public too soon, they will miss their earnings and the whole thing will just cascade down." WSJ: Sun makes code for Solaris publicly available. "Sun Microsystems Inc., in a major shift, plans to begin making the source code of its Solaris operating system freely available to the public in an attempt to parallel the success of the popular Linux operating system." Motley Fool: Sun to Pull Back Shade on Solaris. "Under the plan, Solaris source code would become openly available, but users would still have to pay Sun licensing fees to use it in any commercial environment, the Journal reported." Wired: The Delisting of Craig's List. "One of the world's most successful online neighborhood bulletin boards is ensnarled in an un-neighborly tiff over domains, branding, and links." David Carter-Tod did his own interface for the DocServer website. Excellent!

Thursday, September 30, 1999

The My.UserLand aggregator is back on the air. Sorry for the outage. There was a bug in xml.compile. An assertion failure that was silent. Fixed. It's churning and interfacing again. Murphy is good and kind! New sample: Simple String Remover. "I needed this script because I wanted to markup the text on the Scripting News home page with categorization strings delimited by double square brackets." Eric Soroos responds with his version of my script which uses Regex. Excellent! ZDNN: Dell Livid at Analyst Report. "Dell Computer Corp. is livid with an influential computer analyst for issuing a critical report that faults the fast-growing computer maker for allegedly attempting to cover up a series of miscues." Salon: A worm in the Apple? "Quicktime 4.0 is like nothing you've ever seen on a Mac. Has Apple broken its intuitive user interface?" Linux.Com: Microsoft Fundamentalism vs Linux Spirituality. "Microsoft has been and continues to fight for its survival with FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). It also uses power and control to force compliance. It is a top-down organization, struggling to control and monopolize the avenues of information transfer. Its top down model and insistence maintaining itself as the one and only way, is easily compared to fundamentalism. And what do fundamentalists stoop to when challenged by superior knowledge, technique or insight? You guessed it, FUD." One man's "spirituality" is another man's FUD. By focusing the spotlight on MS, they blow off independent developers and also the Mac, and Solaris, and basically everything else. Proof that not only are there self-centered jerks in big companies, but also self-centered jerks in the open source community. Murphy's Law was born at Edwards Air Force Base, in 1949, as was Stapp's Ironical Paradox -- "The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle." Amen! XmlHack.Com is "a web site covering essential news, issues, opinions and programming advice from the XML developer community". Welcome! It's also our newest channel. Schwinnnng! Dictionary.Com: "The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself!" Excellent! OS Opinion: What if Solaris were free? Would Linux survive? Matt Dornquast reduces the Third Voice debate to its essence. MSNBC: Amazon Repositions. "Starting Thursday, Amazon.com refashions itself into a Web superstore with more than 500,000 new items. Vacation packages, handpainted miniature football stadiums and, yes, even local bookshops will be available on Amazon.com through its new zSHOPS program." NY Times: Aesthetics of Plain Old Text. "Using Ascii 'is a flag indicating an attitude that image-making with computers is not merely the technical pursuit of creating the perfect simulation.'" We'll extend the "grace period" Frontier pricing for another ten days. This allows us to catch up with questions and work with the credit card service bureau on problems (their service is relatively new and not without glitches) and gives us a bit of breathing room on the Support Associate program.

Wednesday, September 29, 1999

CamWorld: Content Management Systems. Thanks for including Frontier. BTW, our top price changed, it's now $899. Vignette's top price is more like $2 million, not $100K. Also, we do not have Tcl/Tk specially embedded but on Windows we can connect thru Active Scripting. Further, Frontier is special because it has great text editing tools the others don't have. And we support the Mac, where lots of web content originates. We also run behind IIS and all major Mac web servers, as well as having our own integrated HTTP server. Everyone help Cam get the full story. This is great! Progress report on My.UserLand. "Now there is an aggregator and an affiliate. The interface is implemented in XML-RPC, and it's going to be open and documented, so that affiliates can be written in any programming environment that can make XML-RPC calls and field them. You need to be both an XML-RPC client and server to implement an affiliate." Murphy taught me much today! I shouldn't have boasted that He is my partner. No no! I am His humble servant. An insignificant sinner. I am repentant. Tomorrow is another day! With the help of Our Lord, My.UserLand will be churning and interfacing once again. Still diggin! 4/24/95: The Baseball God. "Anna Chavez, the anchor on KGO-TV said: 'Isn't it great Pete! No matter who wins, *we* win!' Imagine her putting both of her index fingers to her cheeks, twisting them slightly and swaying her head from side to side. I groaned when I heard her say it. 'This is not good.'" Question: Murphy. Man? Or Woman? The Register: Transmeta patent reveals plan. "The company's processor is intended to be faster than anything built using current technology, and to be able to run any of the operating software for any existing processors - faster than the original." Great news for scripting! Red Herring: "For Scott Kurnit, life on Internet time means constant movement, like a shark in motion, always pushing forward. Resting means sinking to the bottom, disintegrating into the sands of time." Chris Nolan on Patrick Naughton, July 1998: "Patrick is the kind of guy, you go, 'Patrick, you're a genius.' He says, 'Yeah.'" MSNBC: eBay wants to stand alone. "We have a business to run here," said Rock. "Part of our business is to make sure that the user experience on eBay and the sites out there are accurate. The costs of allowing the aggregators doesn't outweigh the benefits." Boston.Com reviews Tim Berners-Lee's new book: "If your requirement is to make a large amount of money, then your options in life are rather small," he said in a recent interview. ComputerWorld: Will Third Voice turn your Web site into a voodoo doll? "If your company has a controversial product, your own Web site could become a protest rallying point." Third Voice might start responding to web developer concerns if the reputations of their lead investor, and the companies they have invested in, were linked to the company. The company has a much brighter future, imho, if it finds ways to collaborate.

Tuesday, September 28, 1999

Reuters: US, NSI work out Domain Name Deal. "As part of Tuesday's agreement, Network Solutions will recognize the authority of ICANN, which it had resisted until now." Director-Online: XML and You. "You can't swing an expired IDE drive at your local magazine rack without hitting a glossy publication extolling the virtues of XML." News.Com: Corel, others legitimize IM software. "Corel will add the instant messaging client in a partnership with Webb Interactive Services, which has taken a keen interest in Jabber's project to produce an instant messaging client based on XML." Salon: Do Penguins Eat Apples? "Do you want to sell colored plastic all your life or do you want to change the world?" What if SOAP or XML-RPC connected Linux and Mac? You'd get PhotoShop connected to Zope. Dreamweaver and PHP. Quark and MySql. AppleScript and Apache. Don't forget Director, Illustrator, BBEdit and WebSTAR. Think different. There's a new registration page for My.UserLand channels. This is part of the process of separating the server into two parts, aggregator and affiliate. It's realllly difficult work. If you registered a channel in the last 24 hours, please re-register using the new form. And if there are problems, please report them on the DG, and include all information you possibly can. If there are errors from the server, what did it say? What's the URL of your XML file? What's your channel ID? New Frontier Sample: Close All Windows Safely. "After a day's work I end up with a couple of dozen windows open in Frontier. To clean up my work environment I have to step thru them one at a time, deciding if it's a guest database (which I want to hide) or a window contained in a database (which I want to close)." Cameron Barrett: "I recently implemented a pretty cool little feature on my web site that allows my readers to choose whatever color scheme they want." Java Report: XML as a Distributed Application Protocol. "Even the OMG has had to support XML, with some obvious reservations. But with the OMG, that is probably more of an effort to appear open to new technologies and directions than any belief that it may be a good replacement for the core CORBA technology. Better to say 'XML has its uses, and here's how it can fit with CORBA,' than to put your hands over your ears and chant 'I can't hear you.'" News.Com: Sun Posts Java Beta. "In development for the past year, the Java 2 Enterprise Edition competes with Microsoft's programming model called Windows Distributed Internet Applications. The two companies are at odds because Sun wants programmers to use Java so the software they build can be used in all computers. Microsoft primarily wants developers to create software that operates with its Windows operating system." I don't think the last part is true.