Jun 2002
Sun, 30 Jun 2002
Fortune weighs in on Gates new role as Microsoft Chief Software Architect
Bill Gates is quoted in the rather interesting article:
Says Bill: "I talk to Melinda every night about how I'm feeling about work-related things. We talked a lot about how the whole value system got distorted during the dot-com era and how much that bothered us, and she was a big help as Steve and I were going through the transition and finding our new roles." [fortune.com]
I can't be the only one out here in the real world that finds this statement rather ironic considering the position that Bill's company holds in court. While I'll be the first person to condemn a lot of what went on in the dot com bubble, I think Bill's just bitter about what he paid for hotmail.
Posted at: 16:06 | permalink
Remaking Pittsburgh image
Pittsburgh image-makers battling to get message out, negate bad PR. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Jun 30 2002 7:34AM ET [Moreover - Pittsburgh news] From the Post Gazette article:
In a subsequent Q&A with Salon, Florida said that Pittsburgh is among the cities that "thought we really live in a patriarchal, white, corporate society and that the key to success was to strap on your tie, go to work 9 to 5, and behave yourself. There was no room for people with new ideas . . . They were thought to be troublemakers, difficult, weirdos, wackos, eccentrics."
Exactly. Those of us in the creative class that Florida refers to who've wound up here for one reason or another generally go off to work everyday to watch companies carry on the status quo with their good ole' cash cows while regarding any new opportunity as too risky and new ideas as a threat to the establishment. If it weren't for the universities acting as a gateway, a kind of cultural diversity catalyst against the blue collar monoculture, this place would have died an economic and cultural death years ago. It frankly surprises me that CMU stays here. As we've watched the corporate giants begin to migrate elsewhere, the universities would follow if it weren't for the fact that they are so heavily tied to the soil. Why they're so heavily tied to the soil is another question.
In the end, the essence of Pittsburgh's problem can be summed up by a single sentence in the aforementioned Post Gazette article, "As one example of how badly economic development agencies want to alter that image of Pittsburgh, the Greater Pittsburgh Convention & Visitors Bureau earlier this year orchestrated a campaign to get Pittsburgh's name on an AmericanStyle magazine poll of the most popular arts-related tourist destinations." Alter that image of Pittsburgh. Repeat after me, "Alter that image of Pittsburgh". Pittsburgh will get beyond it's image problem as soon as that phrase becomes "alter Pittsburgh". And that will happen as soon as the city begins to collectively unlearn the provinciality that has kept it an also-ran for as long as I've been observing it.
Posted at: 15:54 | permalink
Like Tibet, only slower and less violent
Whatever happened to Hong Kong? From the MSNBC article:
And suicide is on the rise. After one particularly bad week in April, when seven people committed suicide and three children died when their mothers brought them along on their suicides, one local clothing retailer rushed to sell T-shirts emblazoned with the anti-suicide message: “Treasure life.” [MSNBC]
Will we see bumper stickers soon that read, "Free Hong Kong"?
Posted at: 10:34 | permalink
Riding the Franklin, PA Trail by Bicycle (Bike)
Yesterday, I set out to ride the Franklin, PA trail which follows the Allegheny river from Oil City south to Franklin all the way to Brandon. I rode the section from Franklin to the Belmar bridge including the Sandy Creek extension and part of the unmarked rails to trails conversion on the west side of the Belmar bridge. Most of the main trail is asphalt. The unmarked section of converted rails to trails is fine packed gravel. All the trail surfaces will easily support speeds of 15-20 MPH by mountain bike. There are a lot of unmarked offshoots from the main trail that would provide more excitement for dualie riding headbangers.Click here to view all of the images from my trip, including trail shots and even an arachnid.
This first shot is looking at the Belmar bridge from the north. It's a beautiful structure that dates back quite a long time. The bridge carried train traffic prior to the trail conversion. When I was a kid, we walked this tressel. In those days, there was nothing but rail road ties spaced about a foot apart separating you from the Allegheny river.
Here we see the main trail running along the Allegheny River framed by the iron work of the Belmar Bridge.
This is a set of steps built by volunteers to take you from the main trail running along the Allegheny River to the Belmar Bridge and Sandy Creek extension. It's quite a hike while carrying a bike and probably not appropriate for many of the older folks that I saw along the trail. Still, it's easier than the rather circuitous trail that accomplishes the same feat. Note the plank on the right side of the steps for running your bike along.
This is a view of Sandy Creek from one of the many bridges along the Sandy Creek section of the trail.
This is a tunnel along the sandy creek extension of the trail. As you can see from this image, the tunnel is extremely dark so a light would be helpful. I've ridden it without auxiliary lighting but there are some stones and broken pieces of brick in the tunnel that make for an interesting ride in the dark. ;->
Posted at: 09:29 | permalink
Sat, 29 Jun 2002
The (cool) things I find via my recent referrer reports
I've noticed other bloggers commenting on the links that they discovered via their referer logs. Today, I discovered Ed Hill at the University of Iowa via my own referer report. He's got a JSP tag library that does some really useful formatting for displaying table data. Check it out. Not sure what it means when you find something this way. If I seek, I go to google. If somebody was referred to me, what are the chances that I'm interested in the referer? My experience has been that it's rare that I see something I've seen before via referers and it's often directly related to a subject that I follow closely. The most useful example of this that I've seen is disechanted.com's referer RSS feed. And if you think I've got referer spelled wrong, think again.
Posted at: 11:53 | permalink
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree
For Bush Daughters, (Night) Life Isn't Fair (washingtonpost.com) [( blogdex : recent )]
Posted at: 11:01 | permalink
Flight 427 Crash likely to be costly for rudder designer
Flight 427 crash tied to rudder. Pittsburghlive.com Jun 29 2002 8:39AM ET [Moreover - Pittsburgh news]
Posted at: 11:00 | permalink
More condemnation of BMW 745i
I'd like to meet the hypothetical mother referred to in this article because she's pretty unusual. Still, BMW's got a lot to learn on human computer interface and these guys seem to have views of the car's styling similar to my own. To my eye, the car has a passing resemblance to a Chevrolet Caprice SS. [wsj.com via MSNBC]
Posted at: 10:56 | permalink
Fri, 28 Jun 2002
How the pledge found god
Minister, now 91, gave Ike the idea one Sunday morning. [Pittsburgh Post Gazette]
Posted at: 18:02 | permalink
Glue, Gaia, Grid computing, Graham Glass and The Mind Electric
That's a lotta G's.
Here's what I like most about Graham. I asked him how two Gaia namespaces would federate. "I don't know," he said candidly, "but I've learned that when the time comes to do it, I'll figure it out." Good answer! An Internet-scale grid OS is going to have to be bootstrapped like the web itself was. A peer-to-peer clustering fabric for web services, done in a style that's closer to SOAP::Lite than J2EE, is the kind of approach that could light the fire. [Jon's Radio]
I couldn't agree more. I'm just dying to get my hands on Gaia. We're running Glue in our production environment at work now and I can only imagine the things we can do with Gaia. Hope the price is compelling as it is with Glue.
Posted at: 16:21 | permalink
Man eating fish making the rounds in Maryland
Freakish fish with monstrous appetite causes fear in Maryland [Washington Post via azcentral.com]
Posted at: 16:01 | permalink
Steve Case brother Dan succumbs to brain cancer
Silicon Valley VIP Left Legacy. Dan Case, a well-known banker and brother of AOL chairman Steve Case, left behind a medical foundation and a financial legacy of some the largest names of the Internet era. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]
Posted at: 08:02 | permalink
NPR changes link policy in response to weblog outrage
"The blogger community brought it to our attention that this (permission form) was sitting out there," she said, "so thanks to our friends in that group for that." Also, NPR realized that having people ask for permission "was not really in step with reality."
NPR Retreats, Link Stink Lingers. NPR.org no longer requires permission to link, but its insistence that it will go after those who use its content 'inappropriately' tells critics it still hasn't learned its lesson. By Farhad Manjoo. [Wired News]
Posted at: 07:55 | permalink
Morningstar Analyst George Nichols on Martha Stewart
"she's not looking so wholesome anymore", said Morningstar Analyst George Nichols referring to Martha Stewart. Stewart Inquiry Is Said to Focus on Lack of a Sell Order. Prosecutors are narrowing their focus to the apparent lack of documentation of the sell order for shares of ImClone Systems that Martha Stewart says she and her stockbroker agreed on. By Constance L. Hays. [New York Times: Business]
Posted at: 07:48 | permalink
Fascinating look at the Amish
All About the Amish. About.com Human Resources Jun 28 2002 3:29AM ET [Moreover - Pittsburgh news]
Posted at: 07:39 | permalink
Thu, 27 Jun 2002
Sam Wyly moves his proxy fight to CA's board
Sam Wyly of Ranger Governance is still after Computer Associates. Wa ha ha ha.[cnn money]
Posted at: 18:18 | permalink
Who fans mourn John Entwistle
John Entwistle dies before tour starts. [msnbc.com]
Posted at: 18:16 | permalink
Adam Curry would like Teoma to compete with Google - not yet Adam
Adam Curry says:
A word about developers and successful products on the Internet. Yesterday was the last day that my wife's company LaPaay was located in the same building as one of our other investments; CapCave. Both companies are growing rapidly and we needed to ensure everyone has enough breathing room, so we decided to move LaPaay to the ground floor of our other building on the canal, about 7 minutes walk from the 'old place'. I really hadn't given the move too much thought, especially since it's so close by.
Boy, did I underestimated the human aspect of this move.
There's about 25 developers, geeks and nerds at CapCave, and these guys have been living under the same roof with the most gorgeous girls and boys for 2 years. You can only imagine how sad they were to seee the LaPaayers go! They even shot and edited a video of all the geeks saying goodbye, too raunchy and personal for the blog, but very touching.
There you have it. Geeks have feelings.
And once you realize this, the more you will benefit from your rocket-science-relationship(s) That's exactly what LaPaay had apparently realized long ago, because this video tape was full of stuff like "just holler if the printer's busted again" and "anytime you need your mailing database purged, just shoot me a call".
Don't we all dream of such support?! This what Dave is talking about when he suggests taking a programmer to lunch once in a while. Show some normal human compassion, get over external appearances. There's a beautiful human hiding behind those glasses and pocket protector!
Companies can also benefit from the geek forces. Especially companies that sell technology, software, services or hardware. Send some love to developers. You won't regret it. Same bunch of geeks answered my question from yesterday about Teoma. Immediate response: "awesome! technically better than google!"
Now, which search engine do you think the developer is going to be thinking of the most? Teoma or Google, who have opened their geekishly named API so the nerds of the world can 'tinker around', in the process learning about google's technology and often improving it along the way.
Google became the defacto search engines because geeks coined it 'da bomb' in companies everywhere, just like altavista before it. In fact, wasn't this whole innernet thang just us geeks 10 years ago?!
Perhaps a long windup, but I really want Teoma to have a chance to shine. I'm a shareholder and hope management and the board are listening. Even Steve Ballmer knows it: Developers!! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Well, Adam, if you really want Teoma to have a chance to shine, let me give you some advice. Tell them to make their submit a site process as brain-dead simple as google's. Google gets it. Period. End of discussion. That's why they're #1. When I went to submit my site on Teoma, it's like going through some porn site indocrination with windows popping up all over the place and redirects to a third-party that wants me to PAY THEM to put my site on Teoma. That's bullshit and it's exactly the reason why Teoma will remain an also-ran as long as they don't get it. You might want to tell them to read Jakob Nielsen.
Finally, Teoma's usefulness as a search engine is directly related to the size of their crawled cache. If they understood that, they'd have already rolled out the red carpet on their submit a site. Unfortunately, Phd's get the hard part but they often overlook the simple stuff.
Posted at: 08:00 | permalink
I'm glad this moron's not my representative
Exactly the reason why these people should not be setting technology direction, or precedent: New Scientist New US law would allow music-sharing sabotage. [( blogdex : recent )]
Posted at: 07:49 | permalink
Wed, 26 Jun 2002
Maglev referred to as amusement park ride
The maglev folks can run this through my backyard anytime they want. I'd be glad to go to work at over 200 MPH. Resident calls maglev routes 'inconsiderate'. Pittsburghlive.com Jun 26 2002 0:34AM ET [Moreover - Pittsburgh news]
Posted at: 08:10 | permalink
Big business ethics continue to deteriorate
Massive fraud alleged at WorldCom - Poof, the big one just lit up [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Posted at: 08:04 | permalink
Fuji Finepix S2 Pro coming soon
I think I've finally found the camera to end my Nikon SLR film camera once and for all. The Fuji Finepix S2 Pro. Awesome.
Posted at: 08:02 | permalink
Tue, 25 Jun 2002
Jamie Heywood gets my hero vote as life saving techie role model
Dave Winer says:
I came to the conclusion that at some point our civilization will either value excellence in information technology, or will die. We're building so many systems on the little ones and zeroes, but yet our universities turn out crappy developers with no ladder to climb, few real heroes to look up to, no bonafide life saving techie role models. [Scripting News]
Few, but not none. My vote goes to Jamie Heywood who formed a foundation to save his brother who was diagnosed with ALS. My own brother-in-law, Michael Cavanaugh, died as a result of ALS last year. My wife and I moved back east from the west coast a few years ago to help the family when he was diagnosed so I can relate to Jamie's story. However, Jamie's ideas, focus, and effort are legendary.
Posted at: 13:14 | permalink
Mon, 24 Jun 2002
Internet speed encourages internet use
Use of Internet Is More Active at High Speed. People who use high-speed services to connect to the Internet from home have a much more active relationship with the online world than those who dial up. By Amy Harmon. [New York Times: Business]
Posted at: 07:11 | permalink
What is original?
Jazz Composer James Newton Appeals Beastie Boys Sample Ruling [eJazzNews.com : Daily Jazz News, Reviews, CD Releases, Jazz Events]
Posted at: 07:05 | permalink
Sun, 23 Jun 2002
Could Norah Jones get any hipper?
I've been listening to Norah Jones for a while now but I first visited her website just last night. It's one of the best I've seen from a new artist. Anybody that's heard her knows why her stock is rising. Fortunately for potential listeners, Norah understands the stock rising relationship between putting live and studio material online including real audio, mp3, and video and attracting new listeners. Norah's records appeal to me because they're one of the best examples of an old retro style done with modern gear; the result being an audio quality that's as close to a live feeling as you can get, which is a quality that a lot of jazz records strive for, being recorded in ridiculously short studio sessions to ensure the originality of the improv. It's also a great example of an artist defining her own style, eluding classification by the round-peg-in-a-square-whole fanatics. Now, seeing that she's not playing the rather pitiful excuse for a cultural mecca that I live in, I'm either going to have to drive a long ways to see her or move. I think I'd prefer the latter or a vacation.
Posted at: 10:43 | permalink
Americans pick up books, but are they reading?
The book club phenomenon, book sales, and reading... an interesting article from cnn.com.
Posted at: 10:33 | permalink
Fri, 21 Jun 2002
Mac OS X users get a neat google interface
I wish I had an OSX box so I could try this... OS X Software: shadowGoogle. stupidFish (boy, what a name) has released a simple, light Google search utility named shadowGoogle which allows users to search... [What Do I Know]
Posted at: 19:18 | permalink
Patent attorneys must end
Gary Reback: "The chief suit responded. 'OK,' he said, 'maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?" [Scripting News]
Posted at: 19:16 | permalink
Wired news reports on NPR linking policy
Dave is back online at scripting.com. Cool! Wired reports on a deep linking controversy at NPR. Cory Doctorow says the NPR ombudsman is either a liar or a fool. [Scripting News]
Posted at: 19:15 | permalink
More on the theory of evolution
Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense [( blogdex : recent )]
Posted at: 19:11 | permalink
Red Hat releases CMS based on acquired Ars Digita code
I'm glad I own Red Hat stock.
Red Hat Content Management Solution. Red Hat introduces their Content Management Solution, which they acquired from now-defunct ArsDigita, together with what remained of the whole company. [via rebelutionary]. [Be Blogging]
Posted at: 08:10 | permalink
We are slaves to the attorney class
Jeez, I can only imagine where I'd have wound up if I had actually published the parody I wrote 3 years ago that made Cheez-IT a product of Computer Associates.
Kraft sucks. Illustrator King Velveeda (Stu Helm) is being sued by Kraft to stop him from using his pen name. So far Kraft has gotten a temporary injunction against KV so he has had to remove his name from his website. [via Boing Boing]. [Be Blogging]
Posted at: 08:07 | permalink
Thu, 20 Jun 2002
John Robb prescribes a news aggregator and k-log pill to organizations
John Robb. How to boost employee productivity by using a news aggregator. [klogs]
A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday. That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand. Applied across a 200 person company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year. The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department.
If we are going to really boost productivity, we are going to need to focus on those improvements that provide the most bang for the buck. Small changes in work habits can have amazing results. To get at these nuggets, companies need to spend time really watching what people do with their time. If they did, they would find that much of the time they spend is wasted on simple tasks that could easily be automated.
Other things to focus on:
1) Auto-categorization of e-mail.
2) Integrated search (desktop, LAN, K-Logs, Web) with all proprietary doc formats revealed as HTML.
3) Voice mail on the desktop PC.
4) Accurate K-Logging of current activities: status, thinking, plans, projects, etc.
5) Online presentations, to-do lists, project plans via outlines.
6) K-Log personal portals that integrate all connection info (e-mail, IM, phone, address, bio, resume, picture).
Very simple stuff can yield big results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
But are organizations ready to swallow this bitter pill on a large scale? I don't think so. John's got some interesting ideas that I largely agree with on a small scale. However, the 200 people example is not as simple as it sounds. The underlying problem is not one that software can easily solve. That is, the sociological change required by most organizations to implement a technology such as news aggregators or blogging is fairly massive. Just because some of us really enjoy documenting everything doesn't mean that the passion or skill is widely distributed amongst the population. If the 200 people being referred to are all enthusiastic technology professionals, then you might succeed, but this still assumes that they have great communication skills - not a valid assumption from my experience.
I would estimate that the training costs of such a migration could be far greater than the cost of the software. Further, the support and maintenance costs could be even greater than that. I don't mean to rain on John's parade since I like Radio; however, right now, I don't believe Userland is set up to handle the support burden that volumes of naive users entail. And if you think a company will deal with the operational mistakes from Userland that some individuals have tolerated, you're sadly mistaken, no matter the price.
In time, the kind of organizational software adoption that John describes will be possible and profitable for some organizations but a large number of organizations will remain unable or unwilling to adapt (see Geoffrey Moore). I would expect the rate of adoption for RSS news aggregators to happen more quickly when they are integrated in tools that already have broad penetration such as email clients (see Ximian Evolution for an example). Broad adoption of weblog tools is likely to be slower.
Posted at: 18:41 | permalink
Team grows blood capillary network to manufacture organs
Boston Globe. Boston team grows blood capillary network—necessary for manufacturing organs.
>>>The new blood vessels are the product of an unusual collaboration that coordinates the work of doctors, chemists, physicists, and engineers in a local organization founded in 1994, the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. This project, for example, is headed by a surgeon but relies on advanced fabrication technology used to etch circuits into a computer microchip.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Posted at: 18:15 | permalink
Buy your best man speech for the upcoming wedding on the web
Are you the best man at an upcoming wedding and you can't think of anything clever to say to toast the married couple? Buy your speech. ;-> [msnbc.com]
Posted at: 17:57 | permalink
Sneezing is now a crime
This poor truck driver may be charged for crashing as a result of sneezing according to this article.
Posted at: 13:29 | permalink
Take me out to the ballpark
 |
Take me out to the game... My wife and I attended our first Pittsburgh Pirates game at PNC Park tonight. This was really beyond our expectations, particularly the sense of intimacy with the field. Thanks to my agent, Chris LaCamera at Raeder Landree, for inviting us and providing the tickets. It's an awesome experience - highly recommended. |
Posted at: 00:39 | permalink
Wed, 19 Jun 2002
Wal-Mart to sell PCs loaded with Mandrake Linux
Mandrake to Come Preloaded on Wal-Mart PCs [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]
Posted at: 13:05 | permalink
US widening income gap
Paul Krugman in NY Times Plutocracy and Politics:
In 1981 those captains of industry were paid an average of $3.5 million, which seemed like a lot at the time. By 1988 the average had soared to $19.3 million, which seemed outrageous. But by 2000 the average annual pay of the top 10 was $154 million. It's true that wages of ordinary workers roughly doubled over the same period, though the bulk of that gain was eaten up by inflation. But earnings of top executives rose 4,300 percent. [nytimes.com]
Nah, top executives aren't overpaid. ;->
Posted at: 09:08 | permalink
Does the DSM-IV have an OCD definition for waggle?
Over the weekend, I watched the US Open on television. This wouldn't have been a memorable event, save for the fact that Sergio Garcia is so painful to watch. I sent a sympathy card to Tiger Woods, who despite Sergio's persistent delays, managed to crush the field. On the first hole, Sergio stepped up to the ball and proceeded to waggle not once, not twice, but 19 times. The commentator counted for us, and that was the only mildly amusing thing he said all afternoon. It was so bad that by the second or third hole, I think the producer actually cut into the pre-shot routine after the waggle had started. Sergio should sit down and watch As Good As It Gets with Jack Nicholson, realize his disease, and see a psychiatrist. Meditate. Do something, anything; but please, stop waggling, stop whining, play golf, and win. Earn respect and adopt an attitude of humility.
Posted at: 05:58 | permalink
Joel on the Economics of Hardware and Software
Joel on Software - Strategy Letter V [( blogdex : recent )]
Posted at: 03:51 | permalink
Tue, 18 Jun 2002
Telling Responses from IBM Linux Team
IBM Kernel Hackers Respond [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]
Posted at: 21:41 | permalink
NPR shatters the moron benchmark with anti-web linking policy
How an organization with such interesting radio programming can screw up their web presence so severely is beyond me. I'd be curious to know what this means for links that I made prior to this policy going up. Caveat Emptor. This is the closest I will get to swearing on this blog.. NPR Sucks [BitWorking]
Posted at: 21:34 | permalink
Save Dixmont - Historic Insane Asylum
The fight over the abandoned and historic Dixmont Insane Asylum is heating up. Here's one of the best photo essays I've seen on the subject. I have no idea why, but something deep inside me says this place should be preserved. Doesn't the world have enough Wal-Mart?
Posted at: 00:08 | permalink
Mon, 17 Jun 2002
Audi Team Completes Third Successive Win at 24 Hours of LeMans
Go Audi Motorsport Team! Details are here. [news.kak.net]
Posted at: 23:40 | permalink
Dave Winer's in the hospital
There's a chasm where the RSS from scripting.com used to be in my Radio news aggregator that simply cannot be filled by anyone else. Godspeed Dave!
Posted at: 23:32 | permalink
Scientists Produce Human Thymus From Stem Cells
Heart-warming... Scientists Grow Human Thymus From Stem Cells [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]
Posted at: 23:09 | permalink
Modafinil - Drug enables 40 hours without sleep
Can I have some?. From The Washington Post: With a Pill Called Modafinil, You Can Go 40 Hours Without Sleep—and See Into the Future. It says: [Be Blogging]
Posted at: 23:05 | permalink
MSA buys GSX Assets
This was particularly interesting since I received the RSS feed from 33metalproducing and there's still no sign of it on my employer's website. If I were responsible for our marketing, I would be hanging my head in shame. I guess I can take some degree of pride in breaking the story here without violating my NDA. ;-> MSA Buys GSX Assets AKA Idapta. [33metalproducing.com]
Posted at: 23:00 | permalink
Wed, 12 Jun 2002
XML can help with accessibility via XSLT
Dave Winer says, "Is it just me, or do other people think that XML feeds like RSS can help make information more accessible to people with disabilities? What about outliners?"
Well, I think that XSLT has much greater potential to solve the accessibility problem since interrogation of the user agent can result in transformations that are appropriate to the user, whether it's plain text, HTML, PDF, etc.So fine, start out with XML, but use XSLT to produce your RSS via a transform. Then, there's nothing stopping the RSS being transformed to plain text or whatever via a pipeline or chained transform.
Posted at: 22:53 | permalink
The three biggest e-commerce myths
Disenchanted is at it again. This week, he's got another piece slamming Jakob Nielsen about some of Jakob's usability conclusions. I'm beginning to think disenchanted has an axe to grind with Nielsen. Not sure what the motivations are, but the logic is interesting.
First, there's this bit about weblogs: "The phenomenon of web logs tends to disprove that. Web logs are mini web sites that have little purpose than to increase the entropy of the Internet and cram your time full of spontaneous writing and ice-cream lists of links. You don't read “blogs” because you've a mission to complete, but because you're looking for time to kill and new things to see, which is precisely the audience most receptive to advertising. In fact, since it began competing with television for attention, the Web has become the primary means for killing time in many households. “Goals?” What goals?" Disenchanted nails it here. I think the real point in all of this is that despite our desire to see predictable behaviors from people using the web, those behaviors are anything but predictable. Confession, I've clicked on web banner ads. Fact is, I've read articles from start to finish that weren't written to Nielsen's web writing standards. And I don't think that the research necessarily reflects that kind of flippant behavior.
Next, disenchanted has this conclusion on micropayments: "Intellectual property has none of these traits. You can't pay for half a magazine article even though you could get bored halfway through reading it, nor can you predict the value of one before you read it. Finally, nobody has a monopoly on stories, music, or art, so there'll always be someone providing an option that's free." And they're right. It's gonna take a lot more thought before Nielsen can answer that effectively.
But before Nielsen has a chance to respond, disenchanted offers even more logic, "Flat-rate subscriptions will work on the Internet, but since no physical magazine gets delivered the successful ones will focus on the benefits of the service, not the quality or subject of individual articles or columns. Porn is sold as a service. The Wall Street Journal is sold as a service. But Salon is trying to sell the articles. We suggest that Salon partner with many smaller content producers and pay them the same way Cable and Satellite companies pay HBO. This way the customer pays a single flat-rate subscription to a trusted brand, then can roam anyone's premium content without limits. In the end, Salon may simply have a critical-mass problem." One thing that's somewhat overlooked there is the importance of brand. What do playboy, the wall street journal, and salon have in common? For the most part, customers trust that they'll get the highest quality porn, business reporting, and cultural commentary, respectively. Flat-rate subscriptions would not work unless that trust had been established.
Finally, disenchanted on the usability myth: "Ironically, many a company survives despite the voodoo because their own customers are determined to shop with them. Most people can figure out a poorly designed user interface when they're determined to place an order, and even keep trying in the face of broken systems. With a stab of irony, I ordered a Salon Premium subscription recently and my first attempt failed because their credit card processor wasn't online, but I tried again anyway until I was successful. And they're not the only ones I've had trouble with, The Economist's web site couldn't sell me an electronic subscription for the love of money, either." Exactly. If I had a dime for every site I've conducted business with that was a total nightmare experience, but I went through with it because of it's exclusivity, well, you know the adage. I've certainly bitched and moaned about it enough, but some of the most successful delis I've seen have the worst logistics. It's so bad that it would defy all the process analysts at the local Wendy's drive-thru.
Posted at: 22:45 | permalink
Layoffs begin at Divine
After reporting on Divine's plan to cut employee salaries by half for the month of may I received word that Divine's layoffs went down on tuesday. In the case of my confidant, the numbers were roughly 50% of a small team. Whether that extrapolates to the entire company is yet to be seen. I'm sure the trade rags will pick up the story if they haven't already. I've been a bit out of touch so I may have missed it.
Posted at: 08:27 | permalink
Tue, 11 Jun 2002
Nielsen Norman Group to work with Macromedia to improve web usability
Hmm, this is interesting, considering that Chris Wenham wrote about Jakob Nielsen last week.
Posted at: 17:17 | permalink
Sun’s Newest Strategy Leaves Linux Community in the Dark
A really interesting piece forwarded via email from my friend Mikhail Evstiounin this morning. Mikhail and I were discussing the role of linux in the enterprise since I had been digging around trying to find a linux distro to put on our sparc hardware. This is a very interesting look inside the sociopolitical environment surrounding Linux and it's threat to Sun.[sw-soft.com]
Posted at: 11:21 | permalink
Dog days of summer
When I came out of work and got into the car yesterday afternoon, the temperature gauge on the dash read 100 degrees fahrenheit. Now, I don't live in Phoenix, Arizona and somehow, it doesn't seem like working in that temperature is rational. Sipping lemonade perhaps, but working? Just say no.
Posted at: 07:06 | permalink
Cocoon, JBoss 3, Ugo Cei, Geoffrey Moore, install & config
Ugo Cei says: David, in case you care, CocoBlog is now hosted on SourceForge and the latest source is available via CVS. The module name is CocoBlog.[Be Blogging]
Thanks, Ugo. Yes, I do care. Unfortunately, right now,the biggest problem I've got is trying to get Cocoon 2 to run on JBoss 3 with JDK 1.4. On the positive side, it deploys cleanly. However, when I try to load the default context path /cocoon/ it throws a class not found exception on one of the SAX classes. I don't have the machine here, or I'd be more specific. I dug around in the various places looking for results and while there are a few notes from people trying to run this configuration, none are definitive.
Hopefully, now that Cocoon is post 2.0, install and config will become more of a priority. This remains a real impediment to progress for a lot of open source tools. That is, penetrating markets beyond an elite hacker club is virtually impossible without having broad interop and ease of install/config as design goals. It's a phenomenon that I believe was described best by Geoffrey Moore.
Posted at: 06:40 | permalink
Mon, 10 Jun 2002
Cars look more like airplanes everyday
World Premiere: First Car with Integrated UMTS Services.. With the first presentation of UMTS services in a moving car, the cooperation partners DaimlerChrysler, Siemens, Sun Microsystems, T-Mobile, Jentro and MBDS/Nice University Sophia Antipolis are celebrating a world premiere in Berlin. [CarsEverything]
Posted at: 18:40 | permalink
Investigating the move from Radio to Movable Type a bit further
Over the weekend, my little experiment in computing was to try and move existing posts from Userland Radio to Movable Type. I am pleased to report that it can be done, but such a conversion is fraught with issues.
I had help from Jonathon Delacour in the form of perl scripts and instructions. I believe the Perl was contributed by a friend of Jonathon.
The perl wasn't too bad as Jonathon's instructions are excellent. The only difficulty that I had was that I needed to run some of the stuff, like the comments bit, on my linux box so the scripts required a little hacking to make the file paths work. Other than that, no biggie.
I got the site converted and you can see the results here. The real problems occur when I try to actually convert the site that you are looking at, because I don't want to break links that google indexes since Jakob Nielsen told me not to and the unix file permissions present all sorts of problems when doing the conversion. I discovered by accident, for instance, that taking the directory tree that Movable Type is installed into and moving it to /tmp and then moving it back to it's original location, breaks Movable Type completely resulting with no working logins. I'm not sure why that is but it appears to be related to the Berkley DB stuff getting horked up.
So, for the time being, I'm still running on Radio and trying to figure out how to proceed reliably. In the meantime, I'm looking deeper at Ugo Cei's cocoblog, since I always thought cocoon was the way.
Posted at: 07:50 | permalink
Yes, the blog bubble will burst
Glenn says: "Sure. But it'll be like most Internet bubbles: the real bubble is in attention. Napster got a lot of attention a couple of years ago. That bubble has 'burst,' but there's actually more filetrading going on now than there was then. It's just not on the cover of news magazines. Similarly, someone will soon announce that blogs are 'over,' but weblogging will continue at a higher rate than it's going on now. It will just have become part of normal life. We don't hear much about the 'electric light revolution' anymore, but that doesn't mean we've all returned to candles."
[Scripting News]Posted at: 07:38 | permalink
Weblogging Software Feature Comparison Table
BlogComp: Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table. Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table [( blogdex : recent )] This is a useful look at features available in the various blogging tools that are out there. I'm sure we'll see more of this as the activity progresses. A comprehensive FAQ is probably around the corner.
Posted at: 07:34 | permalink
Efficacy of depression antidotes measured before symptoms
CNN has a report here.
Posted at: 07:03 | permalink
Sat, 08 Jun 2002
What went right today?
I always wanted to start a column called, "What went right today?" In that spirit, here's my first entry. For every kid that hoped to go to college, but viewed it as nearly impossible for one reason or another, there's this story.
Posted at: 08:10 | permalink
Pittsburgh worst for singles
If you're considering taking a job or going to school in Pittsburgh and you've been reading stuff like this, this, or this, perhaps you should read this first: Forbes: Pittsburgh is worst place to be single. Pittsburgh Business Journal Jun 8 2002 3:22AM ET [Moreover - Pittsburgh news]
Posted at: 06:20 | permalink
Fri, 07 Jun 2002
Touchgraph Google Browser - The Social Network Killer App
Ask and you shall recieve. A few days ago I posited that it would be really cool if somebody combined Mark Pilgrim's weblog neighborhood work with some UI like Kartoo. Well, Alex Shapiro at Touchgraph has gone and done it with Touchgraph Google Browser!
In the comments on my Weblog Alex Shapiro writes:
I think that you would be interested to take a look at the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html Here is a picture of your weblog: http://www.touchgraph.com/davidwatson.org.jpg
I think that it does social networks better then KartOO, tough since it uses Google's similar pages as it's dataset, the results are not as current or complete as those generated by Mark Pilgrim's script. I am looking forward to implementing this type of visualization when the dust settles on the best way to gather neighborhood statistics.
I am astounded. This is the social network killer app. Let's give a big round of applause to Alex Shapiro for Touchgraph Google Browser. Evolutionary, innovative, and profound are only a few of the words that I have to describe it. Great work Alex!
Finally, a brief commentary on comments. When I first implemented comments on this site, I didn't really think it was such a big deal. Now I do, and I'm reading them daily. There's not much there, but every now and again, a gem like this comes along. I get regular messages now from people thanking me for helping them with implementing this or that weblog feature and the gratitude doesn't go unnoticed. In the spirit of passing it on, Thanks Alex!
Posted at: 07:10 | permalink
Thu, 06 Jun 2002
handx weblog software for Palm OS
Just came across this new blogging software for Palm OS -> handx weblog. It doesn't appear to be very full-featured at this point but it does appear to be headed in the right direction. If they add support for posting over a wireless connection via the blogger API, then I'd be all set with my Kyocera 6035 smart phone.
Posted at: 16:52 | permalink
My Weblog Neighborhood
My weblog neighborhood is here thanks to Mark Pilgrim. [diveintomark.org]
Posted at: 07:26 | permalink
Adam Curry discovers RFOs
This isn't for the squeamish, but it is funny. Found an interesting site this morning, nerve.com. It looks like a weblog, but I haven't been able to find any xml feeds for it yet. Of particular interest is this essay written by Leif Ueland: Everything but the gerbil [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Posted at: 07:10 | permalink
RIAA gets weirder
Hilary Rosen is at it again, saying things so bizarre, they're beyond words. "Next India and Pakistan will be our fault," Ms. Rosen said. Actually Hilary, I think that if the RIAA had a nuclear weapon, it would have already blown up the internet.
King of Pop Wants a Promotion Budget Fit for a Jackson. Michael Jackson, who is said to be unhappy with the way his last album was promoted, teamed up with the Rev. Al Sharpton and Johnnie Cochran to criticize the record companies. By Laura M. Holson. [New York Times: Business]
Posted at: 07:03 | permalink
Wired News weighs in on UC Berkley Blogging Class
Blogging Goes Legit, Sort Of. Blogging, a latter-day home page for some and a place to pretend you're a journalist for others, is now part of a major university's J-school curriculum. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]
Posted at: 06:28 | permalink
Wed, 05 Jun 2002
Info needed on using Linux to provide homogeneous unix environment with Sparc and Intel
At work, I started researching the feasability of using Linux to provide a homogeneous environment between our Intel test servers and our Tatung Sparc clones in production. The most promising lead that I've come across so far is SuSE Linux 7.3 Enterprise but they claim this is a developer release with no support. I'm not sure what to conclude about that. Redhat appears to have decommissioned it's support for sparc and the only other one that looks like it might work is debian. If you have any experience trying to put together this kind of setup, I'd appreciate a pointer to any information regarding success or failure. Thanks!
Posted at: 12:39 | permalink
Deeply troubling: video game related suicide
This troubling report from CNN raises the specter of increasing government controls on the video game industry. It's clear that people with a tendency toward obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or the like should not be playing everquest. On the other hand, I can relate personally to a lot of the commentary being made here about not being able to pull oneself away from the machine, particularly with regard to weblogging and the new-new-thing-information-addiction that can be created by an obsession with the tools, people, and culture.
Posted at: 12:24 | permalink
Apple introduces 700 GIGAHERTZ eMac for retail consumers!
Warning Will Robinson, Satire Ahead: Officials at Cray are said to be cowering in the corner. How could Steve Jobs do this to us? That's right, you read it here first. This piece, from MSNBC via AP, claims that Apple has released a 700 GIGAHERTZ eMac for the retail market blowing by market leader Cray by an order of magnitude. Now that Apple is approaching the 1 terahertz mark, their future market dominance seems certain. I'm sure the text will be fixed soon, but here's the screenshot in case you don't believe me:
Posted at: 07:40 | permalink
Tue, 04 Jun 2002
Mind Electric releases Glue 3.0 Beta
This morning from the Mind Electric:
GLUE is a fast, simple, comprehensive platform for creating Java applications using web services, servlets and JSP. GLUE 3.0 beta is now available for download, and has a host of new features, including:
- fully integrated support for web services, servlets and JSPs
- easy 3-step approach for building complete web applications
- drag and drop web services and hot deployment of all resources
- integration with existing enterprise JAAS realms (NT/LDAP)
- Electric XML+ 5.0 toolkit, including transparent XML/Java serialization
- simplified integration with third party J2EE containers
- streamlined publication of EJBs as web services
- improved support for document/literal invocation
- TIBCO/JMS adaptor
GLUE standard is free for most commercial uses. GLUE professional includes additional features such as EJB integration, JMS integration, JAAS integration and a UDDI server.
Download Page:
http://www.themindelectric.net/download/
Interest Group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MindElectricTechnology/
GLUE Home Page:
Posted at: 12:08 | permalink
JBoss 3.0 is out
Ugo Cei blogs it by way of the rebelutionary. [beblogging.com]
Posted at: 09:22 | permalink
Sam Ruby on Joe Gregorio's Rest Issue
Sam Ruby says:
Joe Gregorio: That slapping sound was my head hitting REST. Be careful or the mobs of HTTP purists will light their torches and gather at your doorstep. I've too have been trying to avoid this discussion, but I'm not sure I can keep it bottled up much longer. [Sam Ruby]
Joe says:
To do either of these I need to communicate from a static web page back into Aggie. I would traditionally reach for my SOAP tool to solve this problem but then realized that I can't send a SOAP message from this static web page, or more precisely, I cannot generate a SOAP call via POST from a static web page. (That slapping sound was my head hitting REST.) So now I go back and read some recent articles on REST including Hyperlinks matter and TAG Finding: URIs, Addressability, and the use of GET I think I just hit some kind of RESTian ah-ha. I can encode all the info into a GET request and this would work from a web page read off the local hard-drive. The formatting of the data is irrelavent, it could be a SOAP message encoded into a GET request, the important part is that it is all part of the GET request. Yes, this does require me to implement a partial web server. I have to listen on a TCP/IP port and parse incoming GET requests and convert them into appropriate actions in Aggie. So if I still call up Aggie.html off the hard-drive, and you squint, and fuzz your eyes, and promise not to look too hard, it won't really look like a web server... Oh well, at least I learned about the importance of URL's and GET.
Sounds like this problem might be better solved by a web service? Microsoft .net supports the HTTP GET binding out of the box with ASP as does GLUE. We use small Java clients with the GLUE serlvlet embedded for purposes similar to what you describe here and we use GET or POST bindings to access them. Of course, that implies that some things about distribution and/or centralization of the web service. A web service might not make sense if you're concerned about the implications of hosting the web service or issues with proxy/firewall and the like. Still, it can be done.
Posted at: 09:17 | permalink
Taiwan encourages free software growth
Taiwan to Start National Push For Free Software [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]
Posted at: 08:47 | permalink
Attorneys sleep while clients burn
Sleepy Attorney's Client Wins Ruling - Salt Lake Tribune 06-04-2002. Justices give victory to death row inmate - Baltimore Sun
Victory For Sleeping Lawyer's Client - Guardian, UK
US court sides with inmate whose lawyer slept - Bahrain Tribune
Lawyer's naps may get inmate new trial - Chicago Tribune [Google US News]
Posted at: 08:44 | permalink
Mon, 03 Jun 2002
Apache Axis automatic WSDL generation still broken in JBoss 3.0.0 release
With regard to the thread that Sam Ruby and I had going regarding Apache Axis:
I upgraded my JBoss 3.0.0RC2 to JBoss 3.0.0 tonight and I'm sorry to report that the automatic WSDL generation still doesn't work with jws extension, ie. http://server:8080/axis/text.jws?wsdl I'll have to dig through the JBoss dev newsgroup and see what's up with that. I'd love to see it working. Perhaps I should take Marc Fleury's advice and try to fix it myself. :-)
Posted at: 23:07 | permalink
Sam Ruby responds to my Radio RSS question
With regard to my question regarding Radio reading RSS, Sam Ruby says:
The error message seems to indicate that an element that Radio perceives as required ("language") is not present in the feed. Apparently language was required in 0.91 and is optional in 0.92. This RSS feed asserts that it is conforming to 0.91 yet does not contain all the tags that 0.91 requires, including language.
Posted at: 23:01 | permalink
Song of the week
A fine jazz standard done in the studio by Dunne, Hankle, Watson & Weibel.
Posted at: 22:47 | permalink
Deeply disturbing dot com dot net dot o-r-g
Chris Matthews, MSNBC Columnist: "What do you want to be when you blow up?" [msnbc.com]
Posted at: 19:51 | permalink
Image of the week
The Bee Hive, Lake Louise, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada - Panorama, 1999
Posted at: 19:32 | permalink
Sun, 02 Jun 2002
Userland Radio Bugs and Testing Diatribe
On May 1, Scott Johnson had a well-reasoned response to my post in the Radio discussion group regarding the can't find www/#prefs.txt bug in Radio Userland:
David, I understand your frustration. I would caution you that things aren't all that dissimilar in BloggerVille. The grass is always greener you know. Bear in mind that Radio is in the middle of going from niche to mainstream and this stresses an organization to the breaking point. And then it heals and is better. UserLand will get past this. Feel free to email me if you need help. I do an increasing amount of Radio stuff and want to see it succeed.
On June 1 we get this piece of work by Bernard Goldbach:
If you land on this thread because your system is telling you it can't find www\#prefs.txt, chances are you created the problem yourself by using too many quotation marks in a post. If you use the Radio Search box and look up the error that your system gets you, at least 400 comments appear in the search results. To me, that means there's plenty of support out there already. It makes sense to use the tools (like the search box) to see if there's already an answer here instead of (erroneously) saying there's no support for paid subscribers. I've been on both sides of the fence.
Now, let's consider: you created the problem yourself ergo it is your fault because you are defective. Some people just don't get it. Does Userland want the user experience with Radio to suck? I doubt it. Let me try and explain. I pay money for a software application. I expect the software application to complete the task it was designed to perform without fault. If not, I'd like the software application to be fixed or I'd like a refund. I've watched the same bug creep up for two months in a row while Userland continues on it's feature creep train. It reminds me a lot of the hanging indent bugs that persisted in Microsoft Word from version 2.x to version 6.x.
Let's review software development 101:
-
Analysis
-
Design
-
Code
-
Integrate/Kit
-
Test
-
Bug Fix
-
Iterate previous steps till software meets quality standard
-
Release
-
Maintenance
-
Goto step 1
Members of various religions will argue about the precise order of these steps, or the steps themselves; however, that doesn't change the nature of the process. I believe Userland's problems stem from step 5 and step 9 and the impact of feature creep on the software development process. Of course, Userland is a black box to me so there are a lot of inferences being made.
If the edit box that I'm typing in needs to be tested, and I'm the QA engineer responsible for testing it, what's one of the first things I do? I try to break it. How? I slam all manner of broken character weirdness at it, either in monkey test mode, where I do the typing, or by writing a test program to do the typing for me. I run the classic stuff, white box, black box, in range, out of range, ascii printable and non-printable, positive and negative numbers, and so on. If the application breaks, then code needs to be written to protect the application from errant input. In this case, radio's parser needs to be able to deal with errant input. Radio shouldn't come apart at the seams because user input was incorrect. Dave complains about stuff like this all the time and to the best of my knowledge, nobody's saying it's Dave's fault. Notably, the errant unmatched double quote that I documented got into Radio via my cut & paste of some rendered HTML from a browser window.
I'm assuming that the parser is validating on some form of HTML and I understand how difficult that is for a variety of reasons. From a management standpoint, if the costs of insulating against all errant input outweigh the resources availabe, then at least document the issue. Document the issue. Don't rely on your users to document it. Don't learn your PR lessons from Ford and Firestone. If the future of the software industry follows the pattern of the auto industry as many predict, you'll wind up in court. I, of all people, don't want to see that happen. These things are relatively simple to solve, but it takes the right people and the right process to solve them.
It's also possible that in the case of a particular bug, I'm the only person in the known universe complaining about it. But that clearly is not the case here. Thus, this bug in Radio should be fixed. The input bugs in users will remain. That, I believe we can agree on.
Posted at: 10:07 | permalink
Mark Pilgrim goes captain insano on social networks
Mark Pilgrim says:
So I wrote this Python script (blogrollfinder.py, currently a mess) that takes a URL of a weblog and returns the weblog's blogroll, by analyzing the HTML source and extracting lists of links separated only by HTML tags and whitespace. Then I got all funky and recursive and made a meta-blogroll of all the blogrolls of the sites on my blogroll, and then a meta-meta-blogroll of all of those sites' blogrolls. And then I tallied up all the sites and sorted them by total number of links and compared it to my original blogroll to see who my social network feels I should be reading that I'm not.
Weblogs I'm missing
Name
Links
Dave Winer
45
Doc Searls
35
Jeffrey Zeldman
23
Evan Williams
22
Shelley Powers
21
Jason Kottke
21
AKMA
16
stavrosthewonderchicken
16
Wesley Felter
16
Mike Sanders
16
Meg Hourihan
15
MemePool
14
Meryl.net
14
Lawrence Lee
14
Gary Turner
14
Heather Champ
13
Garrett Vreeland
12
Meryl Yourish
11
Steven Vore
11
And so forth.
I think think the social network killer app is a few just a few steps away when Mark's python is combined with some UI like kartoo.
Posted at: 07:02 | permalink
Sat, 01 Jun 2002
It's the new cleavage?
Salon article from zaldor.com. I'm speechless.
Posted at: 11:23 | permalink
Dave Copeland suggests a Pittsburgh Blog map
Dave Copeland wonders:
I'm wondering if we should bite the NYC Bloggers map idea and make a Pittsburgh bloggers map. [davecopeland.com]
As Dave points out, it would be small, or maybe not, depending on your POV - small in the total number of bloggers, large in the total land area since I'm about 30 miles from the city. I always use Pittsburgh to describe my location since everybody knows where it is and I work there, grew up around the city, and despite the fact that I'm quite often critical of the ass-backward provinciality that a lot of people have around here, I have a certain kitschy fondness for the place.
Posted at: 11:09 | permalink
Radio Userland Change-o-Month bug
If you were overwhelmed by my RSS feed this morning, I apologize. There's a reason I had to re-publish so much. I was bitten by the change-of-month bug that several of us had documented in Radio Userland a month ago. Well, it appears the bug is still there. What's more frustrating is that it existed for a few hours in which I wasn't able to post, then it just went away. During that time, my new posts didn't save their titles even though I entered titles for every post. Establishing a causal connection between my actions in Radio and the bug's disappearance is impossible. However, it does appear to have some relation to the first day of the month. It hit me last month on May 1, this month on June 1. Last time, the problem appeared to be that I had a mismatched double quote pair in one of my posts. This time, it's not so clear.
One thing that is clear to me is that, as a Userland customer, I would be much happier if the company spent more time fixing bugs and less time developing new features. That's a balance that's tough to strike but I don't think that the company is doing a very good job of it, particularly with the large number of users involved, and the wide variety of configurations in which the software is being used. The bug page on the Userland Radio website is really a sorry excuse for bug tracking software.
I began to investigate the migration from Radio to Movable Type more deeply after running into this problem this morning. I've got movable type up and running. The problem I see there is that, while I thought that somebody had documented how to export posts from Radio and import them into Movable Type, I was unable to find any documentation of it on daypop, google, the radio discussion group, or movable type's documentation. If you have any idea how to do this, please comment. One of the problems that I'm having is that I can't quite infer what movable type is expecting for it's import from the documentation. If I could see an example of a working import file, then I could probably coerce Radio to produce that with a little script.
It strikes me that content management software, particularly in the weblog space, is a lot like old mainframe stuff. How? Well, one of the reasons that big iron has stayed big for so long is that it's really difficult to migrate out of 30 years of proprietary vertical market software. I've now got that problem with only a few months of experience with a content management system (CMS). I, of all people, should be well-aware of the problem since I worked on CMS stuff a few years ago but I'm probably asleep at the wheel. One thing that is clearly needed is something along the lines of RSS that would act as a glue format between content management systems so that migrating from one to the other wasn't so damn hard. I'm not sure if anybody's thinking about or working on this, but it's clearly going to be an increasingly large problem moving forward since the content just keeps growing.
The only other part of the movable type migration that isn't clear to me right now is how to handle RSS feed posts. I'm assuming that I can use some software like Joe Gregorio's Aggie to read posts but I'm not sure what people use to post an RSS feed item into movable type - more research required.
Posted at: 10:47 | permalink
Accused former archbishop apologizes for settlement
Accused former archbishop apologizes for settlement - Boston Globe 06-01-2002. Ex-Milwaukee archbishop apologizes - Chicago Tribune
Ex-Archbishop Apologizes for Payment Scandal - Washington Post
Former Milwaukee archbishop offers apology - Nando Times
Milwaukee Archbishop Apologizes for 'Sinfulness' - Miami Herald [Google US News]
Posted at: 10:13 | permalink
Hang Nine
Surfer attacked by shark at Stinson Beach near San Francisco - National Post 06-01-2002.
Surfer Bitten By Shark Off Calif. - Guardian, UK
Shark attacks man in California - USA Today
Surfer attacked by shark - News Interactive Australia [Google US News]
Posted at: 09:52 | permalink
Starjewel reports on the Kennywood Park tornado
Starjewel reports on the tornado that hit Kennywood Park near Pittsburgh last night:
Tornado: Yup, that storm turned out to be a tornado. It ripped through Kennywood and took out a ride, a picnic grove, and 50 injuries and at least one death have been reported so far. For those not familiar with the area, Kennywood is the amusement park next door, which is down the road from the Waterfront. Scary. [starjewel]
You can find more details on the storm that hit Pittsburgh at the Post Gazette. I was in the Beaver County area just north of the storms path last night. That area had extremely heavy thunderstorms but nothing resembling a tornado. Other reports:
Storm collapses amusement park roof - CNN 06-01-2002. Storm Kills Woman At Pa. Park - Guardian, UK
Girl killed, 30 injured as storm hits park - Toronto Globe And Mail
1 killed, 30 injured by storm at theme park - San Francisco Chronicle [Google US News]
Starjewel is also notably the second blog that I've found in Pittsburgh in addition to my own; Dave Copeland being the other.
Posted at: 08:12 | permalink
UC Berkeley Weblog Class
UC Berkeley has a class for Weblogs in the School of Journalism. [Scripting News]
Posted at: 00:40 | permalink
