Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 4/9/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:4/9/2000; 6:50:39 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 4/9/2000
Msg #:16049
Prev/Next:16048 / 16050

Newsweek: "Microsoft engineers are busily rejiggering familiar programs like Windows and Office so that your software itself, and even the information you once kept snug in your disk drive, will be spread over the Web."

Like yesterday's NY Times article, this piece paints Microsoft as the once-again lock-in mongerer. SOAP is anything but a lock-in. I've never heard lock-in accused by anyone who's actually studied the spec. I sent an email to Levy. "What if Microsoft did something smart? Could you write that piece?" I'll let you know if I get a response.

Survey: What is your favorite scripting language?

A stylish and simple and easy-to-read Manila site.

On to the next thing. Let's do a sidebar for Mozilla from the Favorites navigator. Ha! A good use for the sidebar?

Jeremy Bowers got there first, he has a weblogs sidebar, although it's not based on Favorites, it has an outliner expand-collapse display. Good work Jeremy!

Duncan Smeed explains how he did it.

Jim Roepcke has a favorites browser that runs off the same database as the one on Weblogs.Com. It has an interesting feature, not seen elsewhere -- you can see how many people include a weblog in their favorites.

Marc Canter: The Lost Episode of the Marc Canter Show #1.

David Brown has a pre-pre-pre release of ZopeFish.

Netscape: My Sidebar Developer's Guide. Time to RTFM.

Andrew Wooldrige: "I'm working on the dropdown menu for Manila and I got over a big hurdle, I can get the menu to change based on what page you are on!" Cooool!

Pike beta: International Character Fixes.

Let's do some UI work. "Let's get some pictures into the standard vocabulary of Web applications."

Here are all the icons we have from Jeffrey Zeldman. An endless source of amusement and what ifs. What if every weblog had an identifying icon? How would favorites look then?

Garret has some good icon design pointers today.

Susan Kitchens has been playing with icon designs for the Favorites navigator on Weblogs.Com. Now I get to play user, and I'm thinking maybe another approach is in order.

NY Times: For Women in Silicon Valley, It Seems Like Strikeout.com.

Brad Pettit has a picture from ManilaPalooza with me talking with John Foster and Danny O'Brien from NTK.

Dale Dougherty tells a Jumping-With-No-Parachute story that's better than any I've heard before. Man jumps out of plane with no parachute. Plane cuts its engine and goes into a nosedive. Door stays open. Before both crash and die, the man goes back into the door and straps himself in. Plane powers up, regains altitude. Now that's guts!

In the early heady days of Manila, back in early December 1999, I must have missed this review by Luke Tymowski.

I used to wonder what would happen if we got Slashdotted. No problems so far. Note that there's a link to this page, which is served by a Qube running at Exodus, but there's also a link to a Manila page, served from Frontier running on NT on our Seattle LAN. Both servers are handling the load well.

John VanDyk: "Don't worry about being Slashdotted by that thread. I see it's degenerated into the normal uninformed flailings about Ritalin, Hitler, and God even more quickly than usual."

I'm learning (again) that no matter what I say I offend someone. Sometimes that person is me. Yesterday I deleted a paragraph asking if a certain reporter was a "ringmaster of a circus of lies" which I thought was an apt description, but geez if I ever want to work with him, maybe he won't want to work with me after I say something like that. I had a long phone talk with Doc Searls about this. I have to suck it in a bunch of times every day, it's the old JLG thing, the higher the monkey climbs the more people can see his derriere. I wish we could all take apparent criticism or unwanted fact-exposure more gracefully. It's not like you can take it with you.

Talking with Doc yesterday about "intellectual property". I asked him to prove to me that such a thing actually exists. Then I went further. I'm not sure I believe in "property". I ask my trees if they are my property and they laugh at me. "Hey sucker you're going to be dead a long time when we die." OK. The trees are very smart. Good teachers.

I wonder if people will be using "Frontier" after I die? I don't know. If Frontier came alive and I asked it if I owned it, would it laugh at me too?

Hey I took pictures of the trees but I'm lazy. I'll upload them later.

Here's a picture of some other things that I don't own.

Megnut points to a page on Fray where people tell about the stupidest thing they did as a kid. Many of the stories are things people did to their siblings that they feel guilty about. I have such a story. When I was a kid I played baseball. I joined a Little League team and they had a raffle. We were supposed to go door-to-door selling them so the team could get new uniforms, or something like that. The grand prize was a new car. I sold a ticket to my little brother, who often did exactly what I asked him to do. That was the only ticket I sold. But I never turned the stub in. So my poor cute sweet trusting little brother never had a chance to win. To this day I feel horrible pangs of guilt associated with this. I've apologized to him, and he told me not to worry about it, but I still feel terrible. Maybe now that I've told the story publicly the guilt will dissipate. (Aside from that, what would a little kid do with a new car?)

No outages yesterday according to the Track-PacBell agent. Could the outages be over? I hope I hope.



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