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

scriptingNews outline for 4/14/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:4/14/2000; 4:28:11 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 4/14/2000
Msg #:16249
Prev/Next:16248 / 16250

NY Times: "As breathtaking and unfathomable as the Nasdaq stock market's rise was from mid-October to mid-March, so too has been its decline. The ruthless unraveling process continued Friday, as the Nasdaq composite index suffered its largest point decline and second-largest percentage drop in its history."

Salon: Reactions to stock carnage. "Microsoft is an intellectual property company. Amazon is just a distributor. Distribution companies typically generate 2 percent profit margins."

AP: How Wall Street Billionaires Fared in today's stock market collapse.

Andrea takes us to Canyonlands' Dead Horse Point, one of the most beautiful places imaginable.

The migration plan is complete. We'll move the honkers to Exodus before the end of the month. So hang in there Edit-This-Pagers and Webloggers, help is on the way.

Jim Roepcke ranks Weblogs.Com members based on number of sites in their favorites, and most appearances in other's favorites.

I got my account on DeepLeap, but I haven't gotten the gestalt yet. They have a fantastic commercial, for sure. It supports an XML format, not sure what it's used for. Weblogs that point to DeepLeap.

Thanks to Metafilter for finding this copy of the yanked WSJ article about Microsoft losing MSIE. (Any bets on how long before the link breaks?)

Megnut says something important today. "Web people can tell you the first site they ever saw, they can tell you the moment they knew: This, This Is It, I Will Do This. And they pour themselves into the web, with stories, with designs, with pictures. They create things worth looking at, worth reading, worth coveting, worth envying, worth loving. They create Beautiful Things. We need more of those." Amen.

1/26/96: "Today we experience the rush of a new platform in the form of web energy. We've tapped into that energy flow before, but we've never before had the communications tools to talk about it. The Internet boom is being covered like no other new platform ever has."

The web is about sharing, and money, for the most part, is not. The .com people do want money, as Meg says, and I think that often puts them at odds with the web.

Springtime and apple blossoms.

Spring is also the time for more PacBell outages. We were out between approx 11:30AM and 12:45PM.

More outages? More pictures.

Weblogs.Com is today's Project Cool sighting. Thanks!

Joel Spolsky: Choices. "Now, some annoying help-index-engine-programmer at Microsoft with an inflated idea of his own importance to the whole scheme of things has the audacity, the chutzpah, to interrupt the user once again and start teaching the user things about making lists (or databases)." Amen brother!

BTW, the people making decisions about Netscape's future should read Joel's piece. Another quote. "[Microsoft] never got around to disbanding the toolbar team, who didn't seem to know when to leave good enough alone. They wanted you to be able to customize your toolbar. They wanted you to be able to drag the toolbar anywhere on the screen. Then, they started to think about how the menu bar is really just a glorified toolbar with words instead of icons, so they let you drag the menu bar anywhere you wanted on the screen, too. Customizability on steroids. Problem: nobody cares!"

Two new sites on the air today, one from Moreover and one from Cameron Barrett. We're proud to host these two sites, from two very clued in people, David Galbraith and Cameron Barrett.

After I pointed to Cam's Mozilla site he made some immediate changes. It's a thrill to watch Cam discover Manila, and hit its limits. Cam, I encourage you to write a review of Manila, if you find the time to do it. I took a screen shot of Cam's site on opening day. It'll be interesting to look at this over time.

Sometimes you have to be in the right mood to catch a bug. The bulletin-poster in Manila has had a bug for a long time. When you send a bulletin, you get one extra copy for every 10 you send. I have a list with 4000 people on it, that's 400 copies! So I'm motivated to fix it. I've stared at the code three or four times saying "It looks right!" but this morning instead of saying that, I checked the parameters to a tcp.sendMail call carefully and found that it was quite deliberately sending a copy of every batch of 10 to the sysop of the site. I took a screen shot to remind me that using my eyes is a good technique for debugging.

Late Night Software: "The XML Tools Scripting Addition allows AppleScript to parse and generate XML data."

Yesterday things got kind of heated over on the DG. But things were also friendly. I asked for a group hug, and got one! Man that felt gooood. It's been tough trying to hold this together, esp with all the outages. And then we got a turd-drop from a Vignette employee. (I deleted it.) That reminded me of a piece I wrote in 1991 (and published in 1995). "The person with the big problem is probably a competitor." I had forgotten that. You can't make some people happy, because that's not why they're there.

BTW, as a matter of policy I delete all DG postings that contain personal statements about people, anyone, but they're usually about me. If you actually know me, I'll delete it even faster. It's certainly OK to disagree, but when the statements attempt to make people's personalities the subject of debate, it's off to the bit-bucket. This is not SlashDot. Being open to ideas is not about being open to invasiveness. "Good fences make good neighbors."

Another key point. We offer free site hosting on two servers. And there's a special site for whining. There are plenty of options for people with complaints.

While all this michegas is going on, behind the scenes private business matters are developing in the "xml-rpc" world. New partners coming online. A surprising pair of names that don't usually appear together on one page. I have not signed any non-disclosure agreements, however I am under embargo on the comings and goings. Just this once, let me be a tease. This is part of the editorial integrity definition process. I have told you all that I feel I can, and to be forthright, what I think I have to. Still diggin!

I learned that the Blocks protocol developed by Invisible Worlds is gaining traction in IETF-land. It would be great if we got a study group site started on weblogs.com to keep track of development to make this world more visible to us.

I was looking for a pointer to Blocks and came across this world music site, with a guy that looks just like Rick Smolan holding a fiddle. What gives with that?

ASP Today: Adding Spell Checking to your Application using ASP and SQL Server. We need an xml-rpc callable spell checker. What an opportunity for a venture capitalist. I bet we could find a really good way to monetize it. Imagine all the words of a writer flowing through a recommendation engine. Don't even think about patenting it. There's your prior art, in the previous sentences.

NY Times: For Start-Up Workers It May Be Worry.com. "There was certainly an emphasis on camaraderie and fun and a lot of team building and bonding, which I'm all for," Ms. De Luca said. "But often I felt that it was at the expense of some good work getting done."

Omar Javid sent me a pointer to this old piece from 1994. "Interesting, isn't it, that what you're describing in this piece is the iMac," he said. I like the last line of the piece the best. It's what Steve Ballmer, bless him, would say if the shoe were on the other foot.

WSJ: Microsoft acknowledges its engineers placed security flaw in software. "The company planned to warn customers as soon as possible with an e-mail bulletin and an advisory published on its corporate Web site. Microsoft urged customers to delete the computer file-called 'dvwssr.dll'-containing the offending code. The file is installed on the company’s Internet-server software with Frontpage 98 extensions."

Marc Canter is studying SFgirls.

Good Vibrations: Masturbate-A-Thon. Hey it's not really about scripting, but everyone does it, so what the hey. Let's have fun!

I just got an email from the CIO at OASIS explaining why messages to the xml-dev list have been bouncing. I have no idea what he's talking about. I use Outlook Express and haven't fiddled with anything relating to headers or vcards or whatever. Maybe I should ask him to talk with someone at PacBell to figure it out.

The outages continued through the evening, one as long as 26 minutes, several in the 10 minute range. I spoke with Diane at Conxion at approx 8:15PM last night, she said she was going to work on PacBell. Diane is great, but we still get no work done when the line is down.



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