Jul 2002
Wed, 31 Jul 2002
Decafbad: Doc Searls OSCon slides
Decafbad blogs Doc Searls slides from OSCon - some insightful stuff about the clash between technologists and Hollywood.
Posted at: 22:15 | permalink
Jenny Levine: Playing PC-based mp3 and divx via PS2
The Shifted Librarian reports on a new device that will allow Playstation 2 owners to play mp3 and divx files on their TVs. Cool! Will XBox get it? Does XBox have it?
Posted at: 08:58 | permalink
Reporter Asked To Stop Blog
Dave Copeland reports that a Texas news reporter has been asked to stop publishing his blog. I can only imagine that there's a disturbing trend underway here that's being encouraged by the same morons that started the deep-linking debacle.
Posted at: 08:37 | permalink
Oh, My Aching Heart!
I used to ride Boston's orange line on a daily basis, and while it remains an excellent T system, I never saw anything quite like this. Sigh.
Posted at: 08:25 | permalink
Tue, 30 Jul 2002
Dave Winer on Free Software
Dave Winer says, "Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0. (I chose my words carefully, infrastructure is another matter entirely.) Further, it's weird to say, as Richard Stallman does, that by coercing programmers to work for $0 that that's freedom. To me it seems obvious that that's slavery."
Heh. Freedom is slavery. Go figure. Put another way, is coercing programmers to work for $100,000 freedom or slavery? Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for six figures either, Dave. Case in point? How much of the web qualifies as usable software? How much of the web has paid programmers? Are these numbers proportional? Further, is Adobe Photoshop usable software? Why is it that nobody I know has mastered such an application without a training course? In the end, why pay six figures for BEA WebLogic when I can get JBoss for free and have roughly the same problems to deal with and similar costs to fix them?
I'll give you this much: there's very little participation by usability experts in open source projects, a fact that some observers have attributed to the open source culture not being very inviting to anybody but the most dyed-in-the-wool hackers. Still, there is progress in this area. Notable examples include Gnome and Star Office Calc. Thus, where a commercial software team is staffed by software engineers, graphic designers, quality assurance people, information designers, technical writers, and marketing people, open source teams tend to be staffed primarily by software engineers and if they're lucky they pick up a few other disciplines by some minor miracle. This problem is explained in some detail in this article. It's a testament to the skill of the engineers that products such as apache, linux, or netbeans are as usable as they are.
I would state simply that the open source model hasn't been around as long as commercial software and therefore will take some time to mature and produce really major examples of usable software. The best example of this that I can find is still ClarkConnect Linux. I'd like to mention a linux desktop system here but unfortunately, end-to-end none of them are quite up to my personal standard of usable software, yet. I expect Lycoris and some of it's ilk may make an impact in that regard.
Finally, do I dare mention Movable Type? While I would admit the install and config is well-documented, it wouldn't qualify as usable. However, that doesn't change the fact that the web interface is one of the best I've seen and that many of my cohorts have been blown away when they've seen the UI. While Ben and Mena don't exactly work for free, I for one, gave them a donation, but their license does state, "Movable Type 2.0 and higher is free for personal or non-profit use".
Posted at: 23:39 | permalink
Everybody's Leaving Pittsburgh
My friend Jeff is on the ground in Prague and Bryan says he's heading for West Virginia, mountain mamma, take me home, country roads. Sorry, I couldn't resist, with a tip of the hat to John Denver. It's getting lonely around here.
Posted at: 22:58 | permalink
Mon, 29 Jul 2002
Ron Borges' Lance Armstrong Piece Provokes A Response
I read this piece with considerable ire yesterday: Great Feat But Not A Great Athlete by Ron Borges on MSNBC. After calming down and considering what incredible envy and provincialism inspires work like this, I decided to write a parody. What follows is the original text from Borges' article, edited for humorous effect.
Update: Ugo Cei picks up the story here, where he says, "I liked David Watson's parody of this piece by Ron Borges on MSNBC. But somehow I think he was too gentle with that stupid chauvinist who seems to think that basket, baseball, athletics and football (of the American kind, not soccer) are the only sports worth considering when one seeks out to find the greates athlete in the world."
You know, Ugo, the things that I was thinking were so vulgar as to be unprintable. My piece would probably have been a lot funnier had I just spewed those thoughts into the blog, but in retrospect I'm glad I left room for people like you with an international flair to put this guy in his place. That's why I used the word provincial, a word that I often use to describe the local yocals here in Pittsburgh. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought that Borges was from Pittsburgh.
Someone postulated on National Public Radio a week or so ago that Ron Borges was the greatest sports writer in the world. Greatest sports writer in the world? I wonder if he’s a writer at all.
Certainly Borges is a hell of a sports writer, but does that make him superior to Frank DeFord, Fred Bowen, Howard Ullman, or Stephen Wilson? Does it make him a better sports writer than Ken Peters? Does the ability to sit on a thickly padded office chair for hours on end and pump your fingers like a madman make you a great sports writer or merely a guy who does better without Hukt On Foniks than most people?
If Borges is a great sports writer, so are coal miners. Coal miners, for my money, must do more with their bodies than pump their fingers up and down. If that’s all it took, the Playstation addicts next door would have to be considered the greatest sports writers of all time.
On Sunday, Borges wrote a mediocre sports article for the fourth straight time. This is a great feat in his line of work, so good for him, but who really cares?
For the past two weeks, there were regular reports about how the American-bred frontal lobotomy survivor was going to catch the field of mostly foreign sports writers after they capitulated with another article about bicycling.
A few brainless men and women got quite excited about it, although Borges has done it with the kind of regularity that has made more than a few advocates of this fringe journalism wonder if he’s typing on heroin while his competitors are (mostly) drinking beer.
That a man can race around an office on a typewriter and live to tell about it is a noble feat, although I’d think more of it if he actually was using his brain. It would be more of a feat if he was forced to dine on dog food each night too and then lug those heavy Kibbles and Bits around with him the next morning. After a week of that it would be the National Enquirer because nobody would be reading his meaningless drivel.
Borges’ accomplishment was most certainly difficult, but so is the National YoYo Championship, and no one goes on National Public Radio and argues the winner is the best sports writer in the world. He’s just a guy who operates a yoyo better than the rest of us.
I would argue the same is true of Borges. He can type better than anyone. He probably didn’t even need Hukt On Foniks. But is he anything more than a highly paid typist?
How fast is he when they take the typewriter away? Is he as fast as Andrew Sullivan? Is he as fast as Dave Winer?
For my money, being the greatest sports writer in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your brain do things that defy description. Chief among them is not pumping your fingers up and down while your feet are strapped to a pair of Birkenstocks.
Do not misunderstand me. Ron Borges’ feat of typing a sports article for the fourth time is deserving of praise and recognition.
If you want, you can even argue that it is a great sporting feat. After all, there are people out there who actually think sports writing is a journalistic endeavor, although I feel if it is, so is the National Enquirer.
In recent years, a minority of media members in America have tried desperately to convince us that fringe journalism such as sports writing must be given it's due. It is a passion of theirs to try and convince the rest of us International sophisticates that the less we see of something the better it really is.
Fine for them. Just don’t be trying to give away the title of world’s greatest sports writer to a moron from the US who sits on a padded office chair for nine hours a day careening through the annals of pseudo-journalism, dark though those annals might be.
Praise Borges' grit, his determination and his fast fingers. But don’t try to convince me he’s the world’s greatest sports writer. First try to convince me he’s a writer at all.
Posted at: 08:22 | permalink
There Is No Spoon: Illusions of Freedom
In a definitive piece on blogging entitled Illusions of Freedom—Kantian Divisions in an Electronic Age, There Is No Spoon writes, 'In this paper, I argue that whether the Web changes the form of our elections (which is doubtful), or whether we get our daily “news” from a trusted blogger instead of a compromised corporate media outlet (which, again, does not seem to be in the cards for the majority of Americans, let alone the rest of the the world’s population), is largely irrelevant. Neither of these developments will change the underlying fact that the web has been unable to deliver on its socially progressive potential because it has been “born” into capitalism, a socioeconomic system that creates and depends upon the same “hierarchical classification systems” Berners-Lee would like the Web to eliminate. Further, I will argue that the crucial “hierarchical classification systems” upon which capital depends—the great divisions between public and private spheres—can be traced to, and are authorized by, Kant’s Enlightenment thinking. Using blogs and bloggers as exemplars, this paper will explore the implications of the Enlightenment’s divided worldview to demonstrate how starting from this division only deepens and perpetuates the problems the division purports to solve.' Check it out.
Posted at: 00:35 | permalink
Sun, 28 Jul 2002
Lance Armstrong Wins His Fourth Tour de France
Lance Armstrong has won his fourth Tour de France. Congratulations Lance! You are an inspiration to us all.
Posted at: 13:42 | permalink
Dave Winer Responds To My Post Regarding Editing Radio Templates
Dave Winer comments on my difficulty editing Radio Templates: "I just read on David Watson's weblog that he was having trouble editing the templates for his Radio weblog using the browser form. Perhaps he didn't know that you can edit the templates in any text editor. Open the www sub-folder of the Radio folder, and look for #template.txt. Open it in your favorite editor, make a change, save, refresh your desktop website home page in the browser. If you don't like what you see, bring the editor to the front, choose Undo, save, refresh. The browser interface is there for newbies and for light tweaks. For serious template work, use a real text editor, you won't be sorry. Screen shot." [scripting news]
Well, that's useful for folks that aren't aware of the text editor tweak, but that isn't me. What Dave describes will help you if you are editing something that lives in the main template (#template.txt) but if it's in another part of Radio such as the homepage template, you don't have the option of previewing in the desktop home page. That's a serious shortcoming in radio, one that needs to be addressed in order for Radio to compete effectively with Movable Type. In MT, it's quite easy for me to define another blog that I use for testing or development, a concept that content management folks generally refer to as staging. You can see this in action at Mark Pilgrim's site. Mark's main site is here, but his staging sandbox is here. Mark's redesign is slick, but I digress.
The point is that MT makes it easy to set up a staging environment but to the best of my knowledge, that's not something that's easy to do in Radio and thus, my moaning about publishing templates that were horribly broken. The whole concept of staging may be lost to the non-geek user who just wants to make a blog. But to the geek, it's more than just content, and the presentation matters. To a large extent this is a question of these products targeting specific consumer niches (with a tip of the hat to Geoffrey Moore) and learning to cross the chasm, something that many of them are finding exasperating and elusive.
Posted at: 13:15 | permalink
Man Charged for Wardriving
In the first case of it's kind, a man has been charged for wardriving a wireless network owned by a small government entity. [pghwireless]
If convicted, this will likely set a dark precedent for wardriving, even in cases such as this where the man was apparently trying to simply alert the owners of the network that there was a security problem. Of course, this sends a clear message to those of us roaming around with a wireless card and a laptop: "Keep your mouth shut and let the stupid bastards find out the hard way when some not-so-benign person comes into the wireless network."
Posted at: 10:20 | permalink
Thu, 25 Jul 2002
Pittsburgh Deli Company Has Wireless Network
My friend Bryan ate at Pittsburgh Deli Company this week and he says that they have a wireless network for customers in place now. I'm going to try to go there soon and give it a try with my laptop. If you haven't been there, the food's fantastic. My favorite sandwich is #4 Evan Nosh Day.
Update:
I'm happy to report that I'm sitting at the Pittsburgh Deli company enjoying my Evan Nosh Day and indeed, the wireless is working! It's actually quick and quite reliable with strong signal, etc. Beats the hell out of the network at work. I'm blogging this via Movable Type using my IBM Workpad running Windows CE with an Orinoco Silver wireless card. Awesome! I may learn to like this town yet. Now if I could just figure out some way to hang out at Pittsburgh Deli company all day, I'd be set.
Posted at: 17:22 | permalink
Jeff Zapotoczny Gets Published in Pulp
Jeff says his article about moving to Prague will be published in Pulp. Two reactions: 1) Congratulations Jeff! 2) Pulp needs all the help it can get from people like Jeff so that it can be taken seriously by people like me. Of course, I'll have a hard time reading it from the left coast. ;->
Update: Jeff has left a link to his article in the comments. I've decided to list it here for those of you who'd like to understand more about Jeff and his unique perspective. This article shows what Jeff's capable of and I can only hope we'll see more like this from him overseas. Great work Jeff!
Posted at: 08:00 | permalink
Powell Soldiers On
This NY Times article about US Secretary of State Colin Powell largely confirms a conversation I was having with my friend Jeff the other day.
Posted at: 07:55 | permalink
I wanna build web pages
My friend Bryan comments on the changing desires of the average 7 year old:
Mother: So what do you want to be when you grow up?
Boy: I want to build web-pages!
Mother: Okay, then you can go build web pages.
Posted at: 07:48 | permalink
Net Users Try To Elude The Google Grasp
This NY Times article paints a disturbing picture for those who may want to remain anonymous, even in the web age. I have one of the most common names in the world, yet this proves the article's point. One point that is encouraging is that this could enable a greater sense of community beyond suburban life. One could only hope.
Posted at: 07:31 | permalink
Computer Associates Pays to Keep Sam Wyly Quiet
From a NY Times article: "Computer Associates has paid Sam Wyly $10 million, thereby guaranteeing that the company's top officials will be re-elected to the board at this year's annual meeting."
Damn, I think I'll wage a proxy battle for control of CA and see if I can manage to get $10 Million out of the deal. Amazing. I'm not sure how this fits into the whole scheme of business ethics but I don't think CA's going to win any awards for exemplary behavior from the senate subcommittee on business ethics any time soon.
Posted at: 07:17 | permalink
Wed, 24 Jul 2002
Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett Digs Amazon's Jeff Bezos
In the NY Times, Warren Buffett stated what a huge problem option accounting is for big businesses: "All that is bad, but the far greater sin has been option accounting. Options are a huge cost for many corporations and a huge benefit to executives. No wonder, then, that they have fought ferociously to avoid making a charge against their earnings. Without blushing, almost all C.E.O.'s have told their shareholders that options are cost-free."
Later, Buffett mentions that a few companies are doing the right thing, without mentioning the companies themselves: "Recently, a few C.E.O.'s have stepped forward to adopt honest accounting. But most continue to spend their shareholders' money, directly or through trade associations, to lobby against real reform. They talk principle, but, for most, their motive is pocketbook."
In another related NY Times article, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon will take a charge against earnings to account for options: "Also yesterday, Amazon became the first technology company to announce that it would begin to take a charge against its earnings related to the cost of employee stock options. Such accounting treatment has been called for by government officials and corporate critics and has recently been adopted by a few companies, including Coca-Cola and the Washington Post Company. The idea has been opposed by many other corporate executives, especially at technology companies, which have generally lower salaries and bigger stock-option grants."
One can only hope that the market won't penalize companies such as Amazon for setting a higher standard early in the debate. Amazon's earnings are going to take a hammering at year's end as the article warns. With the various business debacles of the last few months, we should be celebrating the forward-thinking behavior of companies like Amazon.
Posted at: 22:45 | permalink
Would you like some liquid manure with your pizza?
From my friend Tony via email: When Pigs Fly [globe and mail]. Too bizarre for words.
Posted at: 18:07 | permalink
Movable Type: Templates, Stylesheets, Skins
I went searching and found these Movable Type templates and styles. Thought they might be useful to somebody. Skin your website with MT & PHP is more involved than the others as it goes beyond Movable Type's template system to require PHP in order to support the skinning functionality. However, it's one of the cooler extensions I've seen and may justify the PHP parse.
Posted at: 10:21 | permalink
Tue, 23 Jul 2002
Thanks to Ugo Cei for Mentioning my Redesign!
Ugo Cei wrote to say that he liked my redesign. In turn, I say that I owe it all to Ben and Mena at Movable Type since I'm just using the Rusty default template with a few mods. I also owe a tip of the hat to Mark Pilgrim for his series on accessibility. There are a lot of things beyond accessibility to be learned in Mark's piece. Also, I couldn't keep from hurting myself with HTML if it weren't for my friend Bryan. Finally, in Mike Myers' voice, "Did they mention the wife? Did they mention the wife?" She tolerates my affair with technology beyond all reasonable bounds and I am grateful.
Posted at: 09:27 | permalink
Blogs Have Business Value?
Well, yes but this article in Information Week underestimates the cultural transformation required to turn an entire company into a bunch of raving documentarians. I've said it before, but I'm not sure anybody can hear me scream.
Posted at: 00:30 | permalink
John Hiler: Comprehensive Weblog Software Review
John Hiler at MicroContent News has finally released his comprehensive review of weblog software. While there's considerable dissent about some of the content, you can make your own conclusions. I sent mail to John prior to this article's publication to try and clarify some technical issues. Caveat Emptor.
Posted at: 00:20 | permalink
Mark Pilgrim: Accessibility Series Now a Book
From Dave Winer at Scripting News: Mark Pilgrim's series on weblog accessibility is now available as a web-based book with both HTML and PDF versions. Thanks Mark!
Posted at: 00:15 | permalink
Mon, 22 Jul 2002
Real Networks Can Compete with Microsoft Media Player
I love Real Networks Real One player. However, if Real Networks wants to stay in the game as the NY Times says they do, they need to do one thing to compete more directly with Macrosloth Media Player. Grease the distribution channels for Real One. What does this mean?
Remove every bit of encumbrance from the Real One Free download. Don't hide it in the fine print at the bottom of the page. Dont' make me type email addresses, go through a registration process , and throw all manner of big brother advertising bullshit at me, just give me the download. That's the only way you're going to compete with a platform that distributes it's own player, a system which simply cannot be greased any further.
Posted at: 10:07 | permalink
Lance Armstrong Leads Le Tour
Lance Armstrong is continuing his lead (over 4 minutes) in the Tour de France. Go Lance! We can't wait to see you in yellow at the finish.
Posted at: 00:39 | permalink
Sun, 21 Jul 2002
IE6 Paint Bug Solved
I had run into an ugly IE6 paint bug in which my site would load but the bottom of the page would be truncated until you forced a repaint by either resizing the window or clicking a link and hitting the back button. I found a solution on the Movable Type forum. In my case, adding the 100% height to the content tag in the CSS was enough. For some reason, when I put the 100% tag on the link tag, a horizontal gap develops between the content and the navbar (white and orange, respectively).
Posted at: 23:41 | permalink
John Nash and his Beautiful Mind on 60 Minutes
I saw the story on John Nash, of Beautiful Mind fame, on 60 minutes tonight. I haven't seen the film, but the Nash story is one of the most fascinating I've seen. When asked about his schizophrenia, Nash referred to it as being "extranormally alerted to hidden truths" and "extraordinarily enlightened". Among the things that I learned from the program, I had never heard of insulin shock therapy. Being diabetic, I was alarmed to see the words insulin shock and therapy used in the same sentence and comforted by the fact that, like a lot of witchcraft practiced in the name of psychiatry, the practice is no longer with us.
Posted at: 19:53 | permalink
The Mind Electric Releases Glue 3.0
From the rebelutionary: The Mind Electric has released Glue 3.0 with a massive array of new features.
Posted at: 02:10 | permalink
Sat, 20 Jul 2002
Amazon Web Services API
I finally got a chance today to begin playing with Amazon's Web Services API. With a simple goal, I went through a series of different experiments to reach that goal. My goal was to produce a small Currently Reading HTML snippet such as the one you see in the navbar on the right of the page you're reading. Scroll down if it's not immediately apparent.
Ruby and the SOAP interface
I started out playing around with the SOAP libraries in Ruby and while I was able to get the basic SOAP client working against a simple echo server, I'm not familiar enough with the Ruby data structures to marshal and unmarshal the complex user-defined SOAP types that Amazon uses. I'd prefer to see an API that supports both the complex user-defined types and a simpler encoding of broadly supported string or integer types providing finer grained control without requiring custom marshalling. Sam Ruby refers to this as progressive disclosure. That is, with simple types, the learning curve is less steep in absence of the marshaling problem and enables a broader set of client libraries to participate fully. More importantly, it enables a broader set of novice coders to participate fully - a laudable goal.
Perl and the REST interface
Nonetheless, Amazon was thoughtful in it's inclusion of a RESTian XML API which suffices rather nicely for the simple type interface that the SOAP API lacks. I switched to perl for the HTTP GET interface since the http-access2 libs that Ruby uses are not at a stable release and I couldn't get them working. I started with this perl example and hacked to suit my taste.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use IO::Socket;
open (CUR, ">/var/www/davidwatson.org/currentlyreading.html") || Error('open', 'file');
= 'xml.amazon.com';
= 80;
= IO::Socket::INET->new(
Proto => 'tcp',
PeerAddr => ,
PeerPort => ,
Timeout => 10,
);
unless() {
die("Could not connect to :");
}
->autoflush(1);
print ("GET /onca/xml?v=1.0&t=webservices-20&dev-t=[YOUR DEVELOPER TOKEN]&AsinSearch=073820756X&type=lite&f=http://davidwatson.org:8086/cur4.xsl HTTP/1.0\nHost: \nReferer: http://davidwatson.org:8086\nUser-Agent: Simple Socket 1.2b\n\n");
= 1;
while ( = <>) {
if ( =~ /^\s*$/) {
= 0;
}
unless () {
print CUR ;
}
}
close(CUR);
exit();
Amazon's inclusion of a REST API makes testing parameter lists and such quite easy via the browser and it makes implementing clients relatively simple too since most modern languages have decent HTTP libraries.
Bonus! XSLT Support on the Server
Amazon was also very thoughtful in their inclusion of an XSLT facility whereby I can pass a URI to an XSLT stylesheet and Amazon's server will apply the stylesheet to the return XML. That's an approach that I've advocated in my own workgroup for some time. The only problem that I had with the XSLT facility was that the server seemed to cache the XSLT such that I had to rename the stylesheet whenever I made changes to it because the server had it cached and would return results from the old stylesheet.
You can see my final stylesheet here. I developed this from Amazon's included XSL sample. I had forgotten how tedious editing XSL can be, especially in vi! That took a bit of prodding and expletives as my mind warped around escaping the escapes. Still, it's pretty slick and powerful. I could envision someone like my cousin, who has self-published two of his own books that sell well on amazon.com, being able to produce a neat one page marketing collateral PDF for his books - something that might not have been quite as attainable before this release.
Integration with Movable Type
This is where I really ran into the biggest problems, none of which had anything to do with Amazon's API. Still, they're worth mentioning as they reminded me of the kinds of things that happened to Radio Userland when I pushed a little too hard on it. Basically, I attempted to incorporate the perl script into MT as a plugin module. That just didn't work. I started getting internal server errors in the MT CGI's after I created the plugin directory and moved the perl script into it per MT's instructions. I have no idea what was wrong with it but I was able to correct it by moving the plugin directory from my cgi-bin to /tmp. At that point, I was scared enough to settle for just running the script from the command line and using an MTInclude tag to put the content in my navbar.
Summary
Clearly, Amazon has hit a home run with their Web Services API. While I bemoan the lack of a simple type interface in the SOAP API and noted the caching problem with XSLT, that's like complaining that the seats are uncomfortable on the space shuttle. They really seemed to study the Google release seriously and tried to address the various shortcomings of that approach. I look forward to working with this API more in the near future.
Posted at: 18:27 | permalink
Paul Bausch has Trackback working on other blog CMS
This is cool. Paul Bausch has Movable Type's TrackBack system working against another blog CMS. It wasn't obvious to me whether he uses Metafilter but he explains that Metafilter's working with Trackback also. I didn't even realize that MT's bookmarklet would give you a choice of pings when you hit the bookmarklet on a page like this. You learn something new everyday. Thanks Paul! [onfocus.com : free to the public]
Posted at: 17:41 | permalink
Dave Winer Blogs Tim O'Reilly on Amazon SOAP API
Tim O'Reilly: Amazon Web Services API. From Dave Winer at Scripting News.
Posted at: 13:00 | permalink
Auto Linkback Referers And Search Now Online
First, it's been a long time since I looked at Stephen Downes Referral System which uses javascript and a perl CGI to work it's magic. It's online tonight. Look at the navbar at the right. See the referers heading? If you link to this page, you'll wind up in that list automatically. Thanks Stephen!
Second, I've got search online by way of the perl scripts available here. You can try the new search feature on my site right now.
Posted at: 03:48 | permalink
TCPA/Palladium FAQ
I got this via an email forward from my friend Tony: TCPA / Palladium FAQ. As Tony explained, it's really quite a troubling look at the implications of the fabled system. I'd expect Linux sales to improve as a result. In fact, I'd expect sales of any system that doesn't support it to improve.
Posted at: 00:13 | permalink
Fri, 19 Jul 2002
Jason Levine: Master of All Trades, Jack of None
I came across Jason Levine's weblog today via a post that Dave Winer made on Scripting News. Calling it a weblog is a mild understatement. It's a vast array of interesting stuff: commentary on his role as a pediatric oncologist, myriad photographs, technology notes, and so on. I'm not sure how he makes the medical commentary without violating privacy laws but it's one of the most fascinating reads on the web. It's also one of the most disturbing because these are kids he's talking about. Very few things on the web will bring tears to your eyes. A couple clicks from Jason's site did that for me. That's awe-inspiring - a weblog that has the same emotive power as music. Far out. I'll be adding this one to my blogroll. Keep up the great work, Jason.
Posted at: 18:59 | permalink
NY Times: Private Groups in Pittsburgh Halt Millions in School Aid
I'd like to think that eventually the US public school system would improve. Unfortunately, this report from the NY Times indicates that it may implode before it gets better: Private Groups in Pittsburgh Halt Millions in School Aid
Posted at: 09:30 | permalink
Penthouse Interviews Son of Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard
From memes.org: A fascinating look inside Scientology from the son of Scientology's founder.
Penthouse, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., and Scientology
Posted at: 00:18 | permalink
Thu, 18 Jul 2002
Ashcroft vs. Americans
This piece from the Boston Globe is so quotable that I can't even begin to quote it without copying the entire piece. Here, just read it.
Posted at: 19:41 | permalink
Google Lawyers Suck
Sigh. I was excited to report that somebody had developed a Google-like interface to Amazon via the new Amazon SOAP API. Then I realized that that valiant effort was killed by Google's attorneys. I'm gonna have to re-think where google fits in my scheme of things now. Previously, I thought that they were above this sort of thing. Now, I'm not so sure. It's really sort of ironic, considering that Google has benefited tremendously from the hype surrounding their SOAP API and are now going to learn a difficult lesson about negative PR when this hits Wired magazine.
You'd have thought that they'd have read the Cluetrain Manifesto.
"Markets are conversations."
That conversation just turned ugly and full of expletives. I wonder whether Amazon's legal people would get involved in the conversation?
Join me in your best Austin Powers imitation voice: I think I'm gonna vomit.
Posted at: 19:31 | permalink
John Hiler: The Dark Side Of Blogging
John Hiler at MicroContent News has an interesting article about The Dark Side of Blogging. It's interesting for one reason: it tells only one side of the story.
John says, "This is the dark side of blogging: the emphasis it puts on our egos. If I write something and someone else blogs it on their site... well all of a sudden, I feel validated and great about myself. Same thing goes with press mentions: you read a few articles that mention you by name, and you start feeling like you really are all that."
And I'm here to tell you something you probably already know. The web has a way of balancing this egomania quite well. For instance, examine this chat log about an analogy I made a few months ago. Now, how could I possibly develop an ego problem when I've got people saying such wonderful things about me?
Dave Winer wrote about this just the other day. In the article that Dave refers to, Andy Lester says, 'Second, think before you type. What you say will be archived, logged or otherwise stored in some permanent form for Google to pick up within days. This goes for IRC logs, too. "This will go down on your permanent record" has never been so literally true.' And that's exactly what we have here. Google has a wonderful way of leading me to these posts.
When bloggers post an article, some will agree, some will disagree, the emotionally mature among us will do it in a non-emotional way, but even that group will slip and go ballistic occasionally. We are human. With an attitiude of humility, I take the good with the bad, give it some thought, occasionally respond, occasionally concede, most of the time realizing that it's a fleeting issue that's not worth worrying about.
In the end, while I think there are corners of the culture that can be destructive, I think the blog world is moderating itself reasonably well. The clickstream has a wonderful way of promoting blogs that aren't spitting venom 24x7x365. Speaking personally, my self-deprecating ego is going just fine. Blog on, but in the spirit of the web, link a little while you're at it.
Posted at: 10:14 | permalink
Shameless Self-Promotion: Get Color Block Gear Now
In my never-ending quest to keep up with Dave Copeland, I've got gear: www.davidwatson.org | Powered by CafePress.com. Specifically, color block gear based on a screenshot of the blog that you're viewing now.
Posted at: 02:27 | permalink
Wed, 17 Jul 2002
Dave Winer Blogs Boing Boing on Amazon Light
Dave Winer at Scripting News: "Thanks to Boing Boing for the link to Amazon Light. A nice demo of the power of web services. A user interface for Amazon that's patterened after Google's. That's a good idea."
Amazon Light is a screamer - my new preferred interface to Amazon. Does Amazon envision it's front-end being usurped by the work of some wizardly SOAP developer? With Google, doing this kind of one-off was inconceivable, save for the command line, since Google was already taking the tastes great, less-filling approach. Since Amazon's front-end has gotten increasingly busy with the variety of merchandise it carries, there was a huge opportunity for somebody to do something like this.
What's interesting to me is the rate at which these applications are emerging this time around. With Google's SOAP API, it took a while for the developer community to wake up and realize what was possible. With the Amazon SOAP API, developers are on it so fast that it's just astounding. I thought I'd go home and do a few things but the stuff's coming out so quickly that by the time I have an idea, somebody's already implemented it. This is good.
Posted at: 18:24 | permalink
Have you gotten an 11% raise lately?
From the NY Times: Raise for Computer Associates Chief. At a time when the company's performance has been lackluster and the SEC is beating the door down, Sanjay Kumar gets an 11% boost from CA's rubber stamp board. I'm sure glad I sold the stock at $35. It can only get worse.
Posted at: 08:33 | permalink
Tue, 16 Jul 2002
Two Perspectives on Business Ethics
No matter what your perspective on the current business ethics fiasco, these articles are worth reading. A funny one from netfunny.com. And a deeply disturbing one from msnbc.com.
Posted at: 23:51 | permalink
Tech Job Market Getting Better Despite Economy
I haven't really posted much about this in the past, but my personal economic outlook appears to be improving. With the stock market largely decimated, it's been comforting to find that the phone has started ringing and the people who are calling are reputable and have interesting work to offer.
Last week, I had a call from CMU. They asked me to be a presenter and panelist for a symposium on software process and architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. This week, I got a call from a west coast dot com regarding a job. All this despite the fact that some companies are still laying off in the thousands. [msnbc] This article makes dot coms look like a great alternative to big companies.
BTW, if I hadn't made it clear previously, I'm looking for a new job. If you've got interesting work that would be a good fit for my skill set, please contact me. 
I'm willing to consider just about any geography but would prefer Boston, Seattle, or the San Francisco Bay Area. Of these cities, I've lived in Boston and Seattle previously so those are no-brainers.
Thanks!
Posted at: 23:36 | permalink
Blogs Helping To Fight Alzheimer's Fog
From Dave Winer at Scripting News: Blog to Cope With Alzheimer's Fog. This could be an interesting approach for some afflicted individuals that I know. Fascinating.
Posted at: 18:02 | permalink
Amazon Releases Web Services
From Dave Winer at Scripting News: Amazon.com Web Services. This is really cool. I can't wait to get home and write some code. Let's see if I can put it together as quickly as I did with Google. Ultramodular! Go Amazon!
Posted at: 17:55 | permalink
Mon, 15 Jul 2002
Mark Pilgrim: Using Relative Font Sizes
I read dive into mark/July 15, 2002 with anticipation today and indeed, Mark delivers. This is Mark's latest installment in his "30 days to a more accessible weblog" series. I copied and pasted the relative font sizing code that Mark gives for MT into my stylesheet, saved it, and rebuilt the entire site. I was always dissapointed by the fact that MT's default stylesheet didn't give users the option to resize text from the browser's view/text size menu. With Mark's code, mine does now. Try it, go to the menu and choose a different size than the default. Your browser should resize the all of the text in the page you are reading. Cool.
Posted at: 22:34 | permalink
Google's Great, But Not Infallible
Even with all of the PhDs stuffed inside google, they still make mistakes. For instance, take this example: I wanted to search for pages containing the words "trackback" and "kmping".
http://www.google.com/search?q=trackback+kmping
If you follow that link, google will auto-refresh to a search that includes the words "trackback" and "camping". This is a total semantic disconnect. I would imagine that the smart folks at google would understand why this would be so frustrating to users. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
http://www.google.com/search?q=trackback+camping&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=n&oq=trackback+kmping
Even if you could justify the design in which auto-refresh destroys my original typed query, it becomes very difficult to justify when you consider that I now have to retype my original query in order to make even incremental edits to it.
Posted at: 19:41 | permalink
Dave Winer: Duncan Wilcox on Google's Integrity
This is a must read from Dave Winer at Scripting News. Duncan Wilcox explains some of the details of how and why google works the way it does.
Posted at: 18:03 | permalink
Sun, 14 Jul 2002
Audi A8 Challenges VW Phaeton
It's not in English, but the pictures of the new Audi A8 are certainly interesting to the eye. [news.kak.net]
Thanks to Ken-Arild Kristiansen for the comment letting me know how horribly awry I had gone in describing his article. Sigh. The article's been corrected now. Can I get a computer program to teach me Norwegian?
Posted at: 22:55 | permalink
Canadians Consider Legalizing Pot
From my friend Tony, an interesting look at drug law politics in Canada, Amsterdam, and the US:
The Globe and Mail: Breaking News
POSTED AT 9:38 PM EDT Saturday, July 13
Would softer pot law stir wrath of U.S.?
By ERIN ANDERSSEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
"I thought, 'My God, what is this man talking about?'" said Vancouver MP Libby Davies, a New Democrat. "We can't be subservient to the ridiculous rhetoric coming out of the United States."
Posted at: 22:41 | permalink
Lycoris Desktop L/X Amethyst Beta
I eagerly downloaded the ISOs for the Lycoris Desktop L/X operating system on friday night. This was the system formerly known as Redmond Linux. I installed the OS on my Dell Inspiron 3700 with 384 MB RAM and 10 GB disk. While the OS shows a lot of promise, there's still work to do before I'd call this 1.0.
It's always exciting to me when somebody has the audacity to challenge MacroSloth in the desktop OS market. Many have tried including IBM, Lindows, and now Lycoris. IBM proved that merely emulating the competition's system well enough to run the other system's software is not enough. Lindows is likely to prove that nobody with a brain is willing to pay a subscription fee to get application software similar to the way companies pay support licenses with vertical market software.
And then there's Lycoris... what lesson will they learn? An old one, brought to the fore by the now defunct BeOS. It takes massive resources to be able to test and debug the myriad of hardware (peripheral) configurations in the PC world. If you walk through the halls of one of the OS groups at Microsoft, as I did in 1997, you'll see mass quantities of cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling with every conceivable hardware device and a few that aren't even on the market and may never get to the market. They can afford to do this because they're the big cheese. Lycoris cannot, instead having to depend on people like me to find the bugs, document them, and even run tests to verify that they've been fixed. That model might scale if you had enough interested testers and there was an incentive to do this work. To the best of my knowledge that incentive does not exist with Lycoris beyond the satisfaction of merely possessing a system that works.
Interested in my experience with Lycoris? Read on...
The Good
Lycoris has two things going for it:
- One of the best linux installs available.
- Arguably the best emulation of the Windows XP look and feel.
Note that I said emulation of the Windows XP look and feel. I believe taking advantage of the precedent set by Microsoft Windows is one of Lycoris' primary design strategies. That's not a bad strategy, but many in the linux community would argue that a company like Lycoris needs to shatter the benchmark set by Windows XP and Mac OS X completely. Unfortunately, that may not be easy to do while still depending on KDE - the basis of the Lycoris offering. Lycoris doesn't try to shatter the benchmark, but rather takes the more conservative approach of making Windows users feel right at home. Even the design of the control panel mimics it's Windows counterpart closely. I found the desktop to be quite usable and polished, probably more so than any linux desktop I've used.
The Bad
One thing that reared it's ugly head during the install was that the install asked for a PCMCIA floppy. On a system like the Inspiron, that's not possible because this system uses an architecture in which the CD-ROM and the floppy share a slot. Thus, it's not possible to load a floppy and have the CD-ROM operational at the same time. That made the Lycoris install a bit messy as this system is dependent on an Orinoco Silver 802.11b wireless card to get it's network connection.
The Ugly
Post-install, the system did load the PCMCIA drivers at boot-time, but it did not detect or install the Orinoco wireless card. That's troubling considering that the Orinoco is one of the most widely supported wireless cards on the market covering every imaginable operating system, including Windows CE. I have used the card regularly with Mandrake and Redhat on the same box. Typically, a card such as this will use wavelan_cs or orinoco_cs drivers depending on it's ilk. While there's a minor bug in the opts file on the mandrake 8.2 distro, it's easy to fix. I wish I could say the same for Lycoris, but I can't. I went to Lycoris forum and while I could find a lot of people with the same problem that I had - either Orinoco or some other wireless not working, none of the solutions that were offered, and there were very few solutions, worked.
Making matters worse was the fact that even when I added the wavelan driver via the add new hardware wizard, the system wouldn't save the configuration for the driver in the network control panel applet. The wavelan driver would show up in the list, but when I configured it and hit save followed by OK or Apply, the configuration was not saved. It also spewed a lot of ugly errors about binding to the .so file in the filesystem, despite the fact that the correct .so file appeared to be present.
Finally, with the driver in place a reboot would attempt to load the wavelan driver before the PCMCIA driver had been loaded. Suffice it to say that the wireless networking support in Lycoris needs to improve.
Summary
In the end, I had a beautiful desktop that worked admirably with a horribly broken wireless configuration that didn't respond to a variety of config hacks including but not limited to fiddling with the add hardware wizard and the network control panel applet, restarting pcmcia and network in /etc/rc.d/init.d, reboots, etc. I believe that Lycoris success will depend on it's ability to get regular users, ie. my folks, past hurdles such as these.
I only hope that they decide to fix the bugs before calling this 1.0 and I don't believe that's possible given their stated release date. I look forward to using the system once the bugs are fixed.
Posted at: 10:21 | permalink
Sat, 13 Jul 2002
Disintermediating The Music Industry
All this talk about mp3 players, the RIAA, and the music industry got me thinking. The problem with what Jenny describes, and most of the talk about the music industry in general, is that it presumes that the only distribution mechanism for recorded music is the CD. What's really lacking here is for the bootleg culture to become as ubiquitous as the mp3 sharing culture. If that were to occur, the alternatives to buying your record album at the local music store would grow dramatically, taking even more wind out of the sails of the RIAA. The dirty little secret of the business? Live performances are often a lot better than studio ones.
If you really want to have an impact on the way the music industry does business, follow these instructions:
- Get a nomad mp3 player (recorder) or a portable MD recorder. While you're at it, get a decent stereo microphone.
- Go to your favorite artist's concert.
- Record the concert.
- Publish the recording online or on the Gnutella network.
Congratulations! You've just disintermediated the music industry. Power to the people.
Posted at: 15:30 | permalink
Monterey Bay Aquarium: Live Otter Cam
Monterey Bay Aquarium has a live otter cam on the web. It doesn't quite match the live experience but it's still a lot of fun to watch the otters play with person squirting off the deck with a hose.
Posted at: 13:50 | permalink
Fri, 12 Jul 2002
Movable Type Search
Bryan asked me today how to add search to Movable Type. While google's always an option, this looks like the most integrated solution. An example can be seen here.
Posted at: 19:15 | permalink
Question for an Apache Axis developer
If I use the session support described here:
http://archive.covalent.net/xml/axis-dev/2001/06/0164.xml
is this broadly interoperable to non-java SOAP clients? That is, does this presume that I have client side access to the SOAP header from whatever language I'm implementing my SOAP client in?
Comments are welcome!
Thanks!
Update: Sam Ruby's answer is here.
Posted at: 17:34 | permalink
Thu, 11 Jul 2002
Clear Channel Sucks
From Jilly in a comment on Dave Copeland's site: ClearChannelSucks.org :: How many ways has Clear Channel sucked today?
Posted at: 18:06 | permalink
PDA Your Movable Type Blog
meryl.net says: "If you run a weblog using Movable Type, then you can easily make it available for PDA readers. It takes under 30 minutes to set it up."
Note to self: Try this later - PDA Your Movable Type Blog
Posted at: 17:57 | permalink
Robin Williams on the Tour De France
I was watching David Letterman interview Robin Williams on Late Night. Williams was discussing Lance Armstrong and the Tour when, with his usual panache, he described the Tour as "K2 with bikes". That's probably one of the best characterizations of the Tour that I've heard. Williams is still hilarious as ever.
Posted at: 00:23 | permalink
My First War Driving Experience
In a quest to understand just how much wireless is going on here, I took my Windows CE box in the back of my friend's car today on the way to lunch and let it look around for wireless connections. In the 5 miles or so that we drove through Pittsburgh's Point Breeze, Shadyside, and East Liberty neighborhoods, I was able to get 2 different wireless signals, one identified as ganguli and the other as fumc. Neither was strong enough or insecure enough for me to gain a live connection. I plan to try this in the downtown, south side and Oakland sections of the city which is where most of the action appears to be. I'll be at my company's media division on the north side tomorrow so maybe I'll give that a try while I'm over there.
Posted at: 00:12 | permalink
Wed, 10 Jul 2002
Bryan Mills: New Movable Type Blog!
My friend Bryan Mills has got a new Movable Type Blog. This is getting ridiculous - the number of MT installations is growing by the day. Jeff yesterday, Bryan today, next thing you know my grandmother will have an MT blog. It's cool though. You can look forward to some interesting stuff from Bryan. He's a wizard.
Posted at: 22:20 | permalink
Wireless Lan Is Operational
I finally feel like I've joined the rest of the tech world in celebrating the wireless network. Tonight after considerable effort (it's 4am!) I had everything working. I'm typing this blog entry in mozilla on mandrake linux over the wireless connection just to prove it. Of course, my requirements are a bit bizarre so I can explain why it took me 6 hours of jerking around to get this all together. I was very selective about which pieces I bought including a D-Link AP-1000 and Orinoco Silver and Gold Cards. The D-Link was PC Magazine editor's choice and the Orinoco cards have probably the broadest driver support of any cards. In the end, I still believe that these were good choices.
I followed the instructions for the AP-1000 software, ignoring the note about using it from a wireless card, instead connected over my ethernet network. Took all the defaults and everything was golden.
I setup the Orinoco Silver card in my IBM Workpad z50, installing the drivers over the serial connection with my Windows XP box. The Workpad uses Windows CE 2.11. It worked out of the box on the first try, loading google slowly but surely from the hideous IE variant that they ship with CE. I wish there was another browser available but hey, it runs Mozilla on X on BSD so I'll be looking to go that route soon, but I need to get a microdrive first.
Anyhow, the trouble started when I configured the other Orinoco card on mandrake. The OS recognized the card and installed the proper drivers but it just wouldn't connect. I was able to find a web page where a guy describes essentially commenting out the entire IEEE section in the /etc/pcmcia.opts file. I followed his instructions and voila, it works!
I felt it was a reasonable investment -> about $200 to be able to sit on the deck with my wife and still write some blog entries or whatever.
Posted at: 04:29 | permalink
David Gammel: Knowledge Management Trackback Blog
David Gammel has a new Knowledge Management Trackback Blog. It's got some really interesting stuff. David says, "This page collects and displays the last 200 TrackBack pings sent to the knowledge management category for KMpings. Use this address to add your KM-related TB pings to the page:
http://www.highcontext.com/MT/mt-tb.cgi?tb_id=10
MT users can also add this address to the ping box for any categories they have that are related to KM. Any posts they make in that category will then automatically ping this site. (Must be using MT version 2.21 or later.)"
I wasn't even aware of the category ping. Sigh. The cool new things that people teach me every day. I wish I worked with more people like this. Great work David!
Posted at: 03:45 | permalink
Jeff Zapotoczny: new Movable Type blog
My friend Jeff Zapotoczny has a new Movable Type blog. This wouldn't be notable except that Jeff's actually been at the blog thing for a long time, albeit in a different form. Jeff's a gifted writer and software developer. I'm sure there'll be some wickedly funny stuff showing up here soon.
Posted at: 03:26 | permalink
Back online again
Well, after a lengthy power outage here at home, everything is back online again. Even after the power returned, my main box didn't boot due to...
A Freakin' Floppy Disk
Duh.
Note to self: BUY A UPS!
Posted at: 01:38 | permalink
Tue, 09 Jul 2002
Dave Copeland: Born in dot-com ashes
Today Dave Copeland published an article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review detailing the acquisition of my previous employer, Metalsite, by my current employer, MSA. Nobody had really noticed outside the metals industry until today. That's not surprising given the low-profile approach that MSA takes with it's marketing strategy.
The article is noteworthy to the extent that it is post-dot-com era and shows that all of the work (and jerking around) didn't go for naught. In the end, smart companies everywhere are snatching up dot-coms that blew their wad and had to sell out to anybody willing to pay anything. Anything was often very little. Shockingly little. That produces a significant opportunity for companies to try their hand at ecommerce or whatever nascent market they're hoping to tackle. What's that yield? Old school companies learn a lot about just how hard it is to jam advanced technology down the throats of the unwashed and unwilling. They also learn a lot about the culture clash that occurs when you take a bunch of dot-com kids and try to integrate them into a larger corporate monolith whose culture isn't exactly new school. Whether that learning turns out to be productive will largely depend on whether the tech job market returns to full swing before these companies become profitable. Of course, software companies using cash cows to fund nascent products and markets is nothing new. Computer Associates has been doing it for years.
Update: A day later MSNBC runs an article on more surviving dot-coms.
Posted at: 22:13 | permalink
Question: Referer system for Movable Type
Does anybody know if there is a referer system available for Movable Type? I checked the usual places, but didn't find anything that looked integrated. I guess one of the perl scripts would be easiest to integrate but I'm looking for something specifically known to play well with Movable Type. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Comments are welcome.
Posted at: 10:12 | permalink
Mapping the Wireless World
I've largely ignored all the noise about warchalking though I admit to having a wireless access point laying here in my home office and I've got a couple of 802.11b cards on the way from ecost. But I found a note on Dave Copeland's site by way of starjewel this morning about a wireless map of Pittsburgh. What's really cool is that they cover several locales from Boston to Berkeley and also places like Germany. Finally, what excites me about this is that since I work for a bunch of maggots who don't get the fact that our T1 running at 4K/sec serving 800 people and probably the largest load of business data in the city isn't copacetic, I could theoretically take my laptop to work and get better connectivity borrowing somebody's wireless connection. Hmm...
Posted at: 09:04 | permalink
Dave Copeland: Email and book excerpt from Richard Florida on Pittsburgh
Dave Copeland has published an email and a book excerpt sent to him by Richard Florida, who authored The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. The book excerpt is worth a read and may inspire you to buy the book.
Florida says: "For the record, Elizabeth Currid was my research assistant, she was also a creative writing major as an undergraduate and won the competition in her graduating class to be CMU's valedictorian. She conducted a marvelous study of foreign-born students in Pittsburgh for Grant Makers of Western Pennsylvania and has been involved in trying to make this community a better and more tolerant place. She is heading to Columbia University to pursue her PhD in Urban Planning. She is certainly not a "groupie" of me or anyone else. And I certainly did not talk to her or try to influence what she would say. I would say, however, her views are not unlike the views of many students at CMU. Instead of asserting that these views are unfounded, local folks should try to understand why people hold these views in the first place. My view is that everyone that comes through this region is someone we should take seriously and try to see why they feel the way they do. Maybe there are reasons for their impressions? It is interesting to note that most of the people with negative views tend to be women, African Americans, members of the gay community, or foreign born people, who in essence feel this is a tough place for them to plug in But the main point is, I did nothing to sway any reporter, nor did I stack the decks with "ringers" to somehow promote my view. My view is Pittsburgh is a good place with a lot of potential. But to realize that potential the region needs to understand its problems, force its leadership to recognize them and begin to act on them, instead of hiding behind an overly crass "boosterish" love-it-or-leave-it rhetoric."
I feel left out, belonging to none of the minority groups that Florida mentions, but still belonging to the group with generally negative views about Pittsburgh. I still believe that tech workers are an important element of this social analysis. Of course, there may be a significant tech segment taken from the combination of the groups that Florida mentions since there is considerable overlap there. What am I trying to say? I've said it before: Pittsburgh lacks an authentic tech culture. Instead, it has manufactured one via the Pittsburgh Technology Council and the newspapers blathering about how terrific a bunch of dried up dotcoms were. Now, if you walk through the halls at CMU or dive into a few coffee shops here and there, you'll find elements of this culture that I so dearly miss from my days in Boston and Seattle. But we're not there yet. So when will we be there? When the undergrads at CMU stop taking that culture elsewhere. Until then, substantive change in this regard seems elusive.
Posted at: 08:46 | permalink
Mon, 08 Jul 2002
Will Merck be the next to fall from grace?
So says the Wall Street Journal via MSNBC: Merck reported billions not collected
Posted at: 11:02 | permalink
Ebay buys PayPal
From Scripting News via Reuters: Ebay buys PayPal in $1.5 Billion Stock Deal!
Posted at: 10:51 | permalink
Why Microsoft Outlook lacks a news reader
Jon Udell: Disposable email addresses and credit card numbers If Jon's correct and Microsoft is avoiding the news reader because corporate clients are moaning about their employees behavior, perhaps the corporations should look more closely because while they were complaining to M$ about newsreaders, their employeees started getting their newsgroup posts via the web!. Duh.
Posted at: 00:17 | permalink
Sun, 07 Jul 2002
The Economist on Sun's Scott McNealy
Sun's Scott McNealy - Losing his Sparc? Economist.com | Face value
Posted at: 23:49 | permalink
Google mirror
A google mirror, literally... elgooG
Posted at: 23:42 | permalink
jwz blogs the cenobite baby
I discovered Jamie Zawinski's blog this afternoon and I'm glad to see that some things haven't changed, at least if you liked HellRaiser.
Posted at: 23:38 | permalink
The irony of Apple's big brother commercials
The fact that Apple is strictly controlling who can visit the Mac World Expo show shines a bright light on just how coercive they are. Come on, Apple, WTF? I wanna buy a tibook or an ibook, but with behavior like this, I'll stick with linux on the dell laptop. MacNN | News: Apple bullies IDG into denying media badges
Posted at: 23:30 | permalink
Cygwin XFree86 4.2.0 on Windows XP
Apparently, this can replace commercial X servers such as Exceed on Windows. I'll have to give it a try at work. Cygwin XFree86 4.2.0 on Windows XP
Posted at: 23:08 | permalink
Colin McRae Rally 3 for Xbox
I've been saying that what XBox needed was a killer racing game. I love Sega Rally Championship so I look forward to playing this one when it comes out. This will definitely provoke me to buy an xbox. Colin McRae Rally 3
Posted at: 22:59 | permalink
Amber screen of death
Friday night I went golfing. When I returned to the A4 I started it to find that the Audi Symphony radio was glowing it's amber night-lighted color which couldn't be turned on or off. To my dismay, when I got home it continued to glow even after I had turned off the car, removed the key, and activated the alarm system. The glowing Bose was eery in the blackness of night. I found this post on the audiworld forums, followed the instructions, and everything was back to normal. The web's miracle continues unabated.
Posted at: 15:35 | permalink
NY Times examines Friedrich Nietzsche
Edward Wrothstein writes in the NY Times: Is There a Gay Basis to Nietzsche's Ideas?
Posted at: 09:19 | permalink
Fri, 05 Jul 2002
there is no spoon asks about Radio to Movable Type
there is no spoon says: "It hardly matters what this guy writes, it seems bound to be worthwhile. And if you don't care for the content, just dig the presentation. I've certainly never seen a Radio blog this nice. (Nothing against Radio, but I'm so totally ready to jump ship like David Watson recently did. I just would like to know how he did it and his comment system doesn't seem to be working so I can ask...)"
First of all, THANKS for pointing out that my Movable Type comments were broken. I took enough time tonight to debug the system, had no clue it wasn't working, and discovered that indeed a redirect in the cgi was killing the comment system. Solved that by eliminating the redirect and now everybody should be able to comment till their heart's content. Let me know if you have any more problems.
Secondly, my migration from Radio to Movable Type was a long and studied affair. I did several test runs on a variety of hardware/software that I have here before deciding on a system. In the end, of all the ones I looked at including Radio, Nucleus, CocoBlog, Roller, and Movable Type, Movable Type was the winner when considering features, usability, ease of install and config, quality of documentation, support, community, etc. Hopefully, there'll be a day when all the blog content management systems use a broadly interoperable post format that makes imports exports between disparate blog systems trivial but we're not there yet.
I cannot emphasize how much usability was a factor in my decision. A good example? When I tried to edit my Radio templates, I would quite often hork them up so severely that the site blew apart at the seams (would load in the browser but looked like a circus side show after a tornado went through) and I'd have to resort to a backup. I've already done a ton of customization with MT's template system and in every case, those changes went without a hitch, looked great, and were easy to intuit. Note: HTML editing is not my day job.
That being said, I had a lot of help with my migration. Most of that help came by way of Jonathon Delacour. Jonathon provided perl scripts, written by his friend Herman Coomans. I hacked the perl scripts a bit to work with differences in my environment. I've since written Jonathon to express my gratitude and ask for permission to document further what the migration involved. Jonathon's doc and scripts are excellent, work great, assuming you know enough technical stuff to hack the scripts to your paths, linux vs. windows, etc. Unfortunately, I haven't received any response from Jonathon. At any rate, Jonathon was very gracious in providing his scripts and instructions via email so if you want to pursue this as far as I did, send email to Jonathon and ask him to send you the zip. Good Luck!
Posted at: 23:32 | permalink
Jon Udell: what about web services usage analysis?
Jon Udell says: 'Now I'll relay a question asked of me at a talk I gave recently. Paraphrasing: "If you have a rich client like Flash 6 front-ending web services, then where's the clickstream, and what do we measure?"
To the extent we package back-end interaction as services, we'll get a better (higher-level) record of that interaction. Rather than infer from HTTP logs, we'll see things directly in database and service-broker logs. Since these sources are diverse, there will of course need to be a syslogd kind of mechanism to aggregate them.'
One approach would be to use a RESTian style to access the web services such that clients are using HTTP GETs. This approach has the advantage of maintaining complete compatibility with existing log parsing tools such as webalizer when used with a server that supports Common Log Format (CLF). If XML-RPC or SOAP libraries are required at the client, another approach would be to just make the web services spit out CLF and then use a tool such as webalizer to do the analysis. If employed comprehensively, this approach could probably provide as much or more data about the usage of a Flash client as any approach currently being used. I believe this approach is demonstrable using Glue from the Mind Electric along with JBoss 3, my preferred environment. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the boxes to demonstrate that right now.
You can get an idea of what I'm talking about by looking at my referer reports from webalizer. You see the entry for http://www.whatdoiknow.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi? That's an XML-RPC call served by CGI, typically via Apache. The article that I wrote last night talked about using the RESTian approach with XML-RPC and CGI. If enough people ping the TalkBack XML-RPC interface on my server, we'll see some interesting data appearing in the webalizer reports soon.
Also, another approach to the problem that Jon describes with aggregation is to use a proxy model to centralize requests. This precludes aggregating the logging since all of the requests would go through the same application server or cluster.
Posted at: 09:58 | permalink
Using Movable Type's TrackBack feature from Radio Userland
This is an example of how radio users can interact with the TrackBack feature of Movable Type weblogs. This is by no means exhaustive, particularly with regard to optional XML-RPC parameters, but it does demonstrate what is possible. The corresponding Radio article is here.
Update: if you are new to using usertalk scripting in radio, just paste the following code example into a new post, but make sure that the editor is in source mode first, not rich edit mode. Hit post/publish and the trackback ping should occur.
Caveat Emptor: You must change the text after the url= entry to refer to the URL on your site. Otherwise, the trackback ping will be recorded to the url listed in the code below, which is a temporary radio blog that I setup. Make the change before posting your entry
I used the following code:
<% scratchpad.s = tcp.httpClient (server:"www.davidwatson.org",
path:"/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi?
tb_id=386&url=http://radio.weblogs.com/0110393/2002/07/04.html#a2",
ctFollowRedirects:"5"); string.httpResultSplit (scratchpad.s) %>
This makes an HTTP GET request against the XML-RPC server running on the Movable Type blog. When successful, that blog will record the trackback to the URL (in this case the permalink of the post you're reading). You can see the effect on the Movable Type blog here.
I thought this was cool because it allows trackback to be used on a broader basis, demonstrates the possibilities of interop between disparate blog content management systems, and gets radio users involved in the referer linkback game. All we need now is for one of the enterprising radio wizards to make a simple macro out of this and we're all set. BTW, it looks awfully RESTian to me. ;->
Posted at: 00:06 | permalink
Thu, 04 Jul 2002
Born on the 4th of July
Happy Independence Day in the US! Let's rejoice in not working and think about the flag and what it represents to us as Americans. Celebrate the Fourth of July with a borrowed graphic from Dave Winer and two articles: the first from Dave Winer about the Declaration of Independence, and the second is an interesting article about the flag. [msnbc]
Posted at: 11:26 | permalink
Wed, 03 Jul 2002
2.4 GHz outdoor wireless router
A few days ago, I received email from these folks with the 2.4 GHz outdoor wireless router. This thing retails for $699, has Linux firmware, and can be placed over 100 meters from your switch or hub.
Posted at: 08:51 | permalink
Dave Copeland on Pittsburgh
Dave Copeland's been slamming Pittsburgh for a while and has said a hundred things I agree with and none I don't. Dave says: "And then we sit and bitch when, after their four year sentence is up, they high tail it out of here. CMU is the leading computer science school in the world, yet people like Starjewel can't seem to find jobs in the IT industry (archive link not currently working: go to her site and look for the entry that says "I hate Pennsylvania"). You'd think the enthusiastic grads would be so comfortable here they'd want to start their tech company in Pittsburgh. You'd think big tech companies would want to locate here to scoop up every outgoing graduate. But the reality is, Pittsburgh is very often a miserable place to these people. If you've spent your entire life as a geek (I say that lovingly), chances are you don't give two shits about a new baseball stadium."
Yep. I've worked with a variety of CMU grads over the years in several cities. Without exception, none of them stayed here past graduation. They were all phenomenal and all uniformly condemned the place for several reasons that went something like 1) lack of an authentic tech culture 2) lack of decent ethnic restaurants and food options in general, and 3) lack of opportunity, both short and long term. Basically, anybody worth their salt in the tech business here gets out and there are only a couple things that'll keep 'em here: 1) family, 2) disproportionately high salaries relative to the cost of living, and a possible but bizarre third reason -> an abundance of paradoxically cheap quality golf courses.
Posted at: 01:28 | permalink
Tue, 02 Jul 2002
What do George W and Martha Stewart have in common?
Paul Krugman in the NY Times: "But long before that ruling — though only a few weeks before bad news that could not be concealed caused Harken's shares to tumble — Mr. Bush sold off two-thirds of his stake, for $848,000. Just for the record, that's about four times bigger than the sale that has Martha Stewart in hot water. Oddly, though the law requires prompt disclosure of insider sales, he neglected to inform the S.E.C. about this transaction until 34 weeks had passed. An internal S.E.C. memorandum concluded that he had broken the law, but no charges were filed. This, everyone insists, had nothing to do with the fact that his father was president."
Read the whole article. It's too good to miss.
Posted at: 21:58 | permalink
Have you seen BlogSkins?
Check it out: www.blogskins.com. I love the subtitle, Who needs content?. They have skins for blogs based on Blogger or Movable Type. Cool.
Posted at: 19:14 | permalink
Dave Winer on big and little companies
Dave Winer says: "Just as blogs are the cure for integrity outages at the BigPubs, LittleCo's will be our haven from the excesses of the idiots who run the BigCo's. Microbusinesses and microcontent." And I say that's great, Dave. Somebody just needs to explain to me and my cohorts where to find these little companies. I've talked to a number of people locally, west, and east coast, all of whom express some difficulty finding a gig with any company, let alone a little company. I'll bet there are a lot of people out there just like me who'd love nothing more than to work for the proverbial little company like yours, but the hiring rate and resources of the typical little company aren't going to make that a reality for the majority of us anytime soon. I guess the real message in Dave's post is that if you have an idea and the energy, do it. That's what I'd like to do, but I'm not the first person to discover that it's real hard to keep the day gig and hack from midnight to 5am. Sigh.
Posted at: 18:28 | permalink
Freezing mountaineer saved by telemarketer
An unbelievable story from robertrainwater.com.
Posted at: 09:25 | permalink
Wayne Krantz Live
Listening to Wayne Krantz live with Tim LeFebvre on bass and Keith Carlock on drums. This is some wacked stuff. If your mind can handle it, check it out. Some wicked power trio grooves.
Posted at: 09:16 | permalink
Apple buys Emagic
What do I know: Apple buys Emagic, makers of Logic. You might not recognize the name if you don't dabble in the pro audio world, but suffice it to say that Apple's now a serious player in the pro audio software market. I'm real curious to see where this leads. Go Apple!
Posted at: 01:21 | permalink
The weblog revolution rolls on
gate39.com: Notorious blogger and journalist, Andrew Sullivan believes that:
"Weblogs are to words what Napster was to music ... and -- to invoke Marx -- [they] seize the means of production".
Read the entire article here. Be sure to check out the graphic also.
Posted at: 01:13 | permalink
Jon Udell explains Jon Schull's blog thread visualization
An interesting article from Jon Udell. This kind of clarity is hard to find in the web world. It's also really useful to explain to traditional media folks why this model is different, powerful, and profound.
Posted at: 00:59 | permalink
Update RSS feed to RDF feed
If you subscribe to my RSS feed which was previously here, please update your news aggregator to use the new RSS 1.0 feed or the RSS 0.91 feed instead. There won't be any updates to the old Radio blog or it's RSS feed. From this point forward, all the news that's fit to print is going right here in Movable Type. I've tried to leave all of the old Radio archives in place so as not to break searches coming in from Google and the like. Please let me know if there are any problems associated with this change. I'm sure I've missed more than a few things. Thanks!
Posted at: 00:24 | permalink
Radio To Movable Type - Done!
Well, after running into the Radio change-o-month bug for the third month in a row, I finally decided to really bite the bullet and make the long overdue migration from Radio to Movable Type. I beat on radio till 2am last night trying to get the dreaded can't upstream messages to go away and then I beat on it for several hours this morning to no avail. I decided that was enough. I had documented my findings months ago, received numerous thank you emails from people who ran into the same bug I did, and some flames too from people that thought I made too much noise about it.
Well, I'm glad it's behind me now. No hard feelings. I really like Radio. I think it has tremendous potential. I just don't think it got enough QA and the ratio of bug fixes to new features is a bit unbalanced IMHO.
Hope everybody likes the new site, I'm no graphic design wizard so I'm letting the CSS handle the layout, color, and fonts. I'll play around with it a bit going forward. I'm just excited to bang on a new system for a while, see what it's limitations are, bitch, moan, learn, grow.
Thanks to Ben and Mena Trott for a great application!
Posted at: 00:13 | permalink
Mon, 01 Jul 2002
Money Granted to Study How It Was Lost
Money Granted to Study How It Was Lost. Just when it seemed that lamentations of the dot-com meltdown had finally faded, an assistant business professor and a surviving Internet executive have opened an academic mausoleum for the official blueprints that started 1,000 ill-fated Internet businesses. By Andrew Zipern. [New York Times: Technology]
Posted at: 01:20 | permalink
