Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Greenspun: "While Microsoft is trying to replace Google with MSN Search, Google will be trying to replace Microsoft Office with Google Web-based Office." 

Giles Turnbull reviews aggregators for Mac OS X. 

According to Ray Daly, Lyris is adding RSS support to their "great email list manager software." 

Steve Hooker offers free Manila hosting to any weblogs.com author. Steve is a pleasure to work with, a real pro. There are other such offers in the works. Note, we won't have to wait until July 1 to do these transfers, and I will install redirects, so links won't break.  

No question, Orlowski is writing comedy. I laughed five times reading this. Especially the parts about BloggerCon. "The only way I would attend such a conference is with a bottle in front of me or a frontal lobotomy." 

Dan Mitchell takes issue with Orlowski's piece. BTW, the free hosting was for four years, not two. 

Press release: "The Mozilla Foundation today announced the immediate availability of a new preview release of its next generation web browser, Mozilla Firefox 0.9." 

Adam Curry reviews Blogmatrix Jager. 

Thanks to Doc Searls for explaining what's going on with free hosting at weblogs.com. So far there are 44 sites that will looking for new homes shortly after July 1. If you're running a Manila hosting service and would like to adopt one or more of these sites, that would be great. If you can work with people to convert their sites to other formats, that would be great too. If you have an offer to help people with free weblogs.com sites, please send me a link and I'll pass it on. 

Engadget: "With our crack-like addiction to RSS feeds we’re pleased to see that SmartPhone users have an interesting option to view RSS feeds on their phones." 

Steve Rubel: Contrary to Reports, RSS Feeds Can Be Searched. 

Monday, June 14, 2004

Steve Gillmor: "If John Lennon were alive today, he might be releasing direct to Net via RSS enclosures." 

Packet Storm Security is offering three RSS feeds. 

Jager for Windows supports RSS 2.0 enclosures and HTTP and XML-level redirection. 

According to John Palfrey, Gator, the adware scorge of Internet users worldwide, is going public.  

Some professional reporters mean well, but still can't get the story right. I spent an hour on the phone with the reporter, I didn't say the things she says I said. It's totally mangled. Oy. RSS 2.0 is extensible, and it's totally clear now that Atom is no more "open" than RSS is. 

BBC: The seven-year-old bloggers. 

Highly recommended, the PBS biography of Ronald Reagan. 

Audio for 1/2 of the Bill Gates keynote at ADAPSO in 1991. I'm on this tape proposing that Apple and Microsoft work together on interapplication communication, which is the pre-Internet precursor to XML-RPC and SOAP. I talked much faster 13 years ago. There's another tape out there somewhere, where Gates says okay, he'll work with Apple, but I don't seem to have it. The rest of the story is here. 

Tim Berners-Lee: "There would have been a CERN Web, a Microsoft one, there would have been a Digital one, Apple's HyperCard would have started reaching out Internet roots." 

The Guardian: "It is always necessary to declare an interest when the journalist is writing about something with which he or she has a significant connection. This applies to both staff journalists and freelances writing for the Guardian. The declaration should be to a head of department or editor during preparation. Full transparency may mean that the declaration should appear in the paper or website as well." 

I'm looking for info on some really strange hubcaps. 

Gizmodo on Nokia's new phones. I wonder if Russ changes his advice on the next cell phone this newbie should get.  

A milestone 

Two years ago today I stopped smoking. Today I occasionally want a cigarette, but much less than I did a year ago, and that's much much less than two years ago.

On that day: "It's going to be a light day here on Scripting News. Lots of non-Internet stuff going on." Indeed. Shortly after writing that, I stopped at a Woodside gas station and got two packs of Marlboro Lights. Rolled down the window and lit one. Drove to the cardiologist's office. I was having severe chest pain. Weakness. Difficulty breathing. A feeling of doom.

When I got to the office they wanted to put me on a treadmill, but I refused, I felt too frail. They did an EKG. Nothing wrong. Then an ultrasound. Also normal. The doctor sat me down and said there's probably nothing wrong with my heart, but let's do an angiogram just to be sure.

We walked over to Sequoia Hospital, luckily it was downhill. I undressed, signed papers. They explained that if they found a blockage they could fix they'd put in a stent. I said I hoped that's was what it was. They wheeled me into surgery, put me half-under. I was sort of conscious through the operation, but have almost no memory of it. I woke up in a private room, with no idea what had happened.

A couple of hours later the cardiologist came in. I was still in a daze. He was yelling. I got the impression I was very sick. Didn't know what was happening. Later somehow I learned that I had four blocked arteries feeding my heart and that they'd do bypass surgery on Monday. I cried and cried. And learned a lot. Maybe I'll write some more about it.

When I stopped smoking 

On the Sunday before my surgery, I said to Tori -- "You know I haven't decided to stop smoking yet."

Then after the surgery, not sure which day it was (probably Tuesday morning) in the ICU, the surgeon comes to see me, really sharply dressed, with a sharply dressed woman with him (not sure who she was).

The doctor says "You're a computer guy, right?" I said I was. "What's the word you guys use for seeing something?" I asked if he meant visualize. "That's it!" he exclaimed.

"Now I want you to visualize yourself as a smoker." Since I had been trained in meditation, I thought I was about to be deprogrammed. Okay, I'm visualizing.

"You're dead!" he said and started laughing.

What do you mean? I asked. "People like you who keep smoking are usually dead within three years," he explained. Gulp. Somehow, in all the doom and gloom it had never really sunk in that I had almost died. If I had waited another couple of weeks to deal with this, well, I don't even like to think about it.

Anyway, that was the moment. That was when I decided to stop smoking.

Sunday, June 13, 2004

Maybe the IETF has found the answer for itself and for the W3C. Perhaps both should start processes to create a format for syndication and protocal for content management. Maybe then we can see the strengths of each process. Standards organizations compete. Maybe if each had to work to get developer and content support, a better format will emerge. It's been proven that competition makes for better listening.  

Time: Meet Joe Blog. 

Gotta try the Findory Blogory. Love the name.  

Terry Heaton: "The Federal Communications Commission yesterday took the first step towards reassigning frequencies to enable high-speed, wireless broadband in the US." 

I can now convert audio cassettes to MP3 format. The first things I'm going to convert are exercises and lectures from Jeru, my meditation teacher. This is really important because he died a few years ago, and the tapes are not easily available, if they are available at all. I'm converting one of two Quantum Light Breath tapes first. Amazing stuff. I have more Jeru tapes. I also have a recording of a keynote with Bill Gates, Larry Tesler, Dave Liddle, Esther Dyson and myself from 1991. This is so cooool. 

Turns out I only have a tape for half of the 1991 keynote. It ends at the moment I ask Bill Gates and Larry Tesler to work with each other on a common interapplication communication layer. Tesler was an exec at Apple and they had the Apple Event Manager. Later in the session, Gates said he'd bake it into Windows if Apple would give it to them. In the end, Apple wouldn't answer the question, and it never happened. How different the world might be today if they had gotten together on this in 1991. Desktop networking could have been much more powerful much sooner. I'll have the recording available for download tomorrow morning. It's 35MB. 

Adam took Freecache for a ride. 

Daniel Abrams wonders about SOAP interop. 

Scoble is cleaning out feeds. I'm seeing the opposite problem. I am now hosting the weblogs.com sites started in Y2K, most of which are inactive (or so it seems, I've yet to quantify this). All of a sudden I'm hosting hundreds of inactive RSS feeds, and since this base of sites was where RSS was bootstrapped, there are a fair number of subscribers. I need a way to tell the aggregators, forget it, these sites are in mothballs, stop asking for the feed. A couple of years ago I proposed a way to do this, but as far as I know only Radio and NetNewsWire support it. If you know of other aggregators that do, please let me know. It's important to support both HTTP and XML level redirects because some authors don't have control over HTTP. 

James Robertson reports that BottomFeeder supports redirects per the 2002 proposal. 

Rogers Cadenhead and Sam Ruby comment. 

Ben Hammersley, a reporter for The Guardian, objects to the idea of XML-based redirects. I've heard this before of course, but the fact is, a lot of people can't change how their HTTP server works. Still it's important that they be able to tell aggregators that their feed has moved, or that their feed is finished. It's so disheartening to see this constantly reduced to religious terms, when it's a user issue. Further, Hammersley is not an independent observer, as this post clearly shows, he has a strong partisan opinion. Even so, the Guardian, a respected UK publication, has assigned him to report on developments in the RSS community as if he were independent. Puzzling.