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

scriptingNews outline for 9/19/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/19/2000; 8:09:55 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 9/19/2000
Msg #:21498
Prev/Next:21497 / 21499

Something to think about: What is P2P?

Clay Shirky: XML, No Magic Problem Solver. "HTTP plus HTML–was probably the last instance where standards of global importance were designed and implemented without commercial interference." I agree with everything in his article but this. I have hope. Too often the sources of "commercial interference" awake too late, a defacto standard already exists. Plenty of people thought it was all over in the early 90s while the Web was catching on. Actually I think that's a good time to gestate new ideas without commercial interference.

Inside.Com: "The looming combination of high-speed connectivity to American homes, ever-increasing desktop processing power and home data storage capacity plus peer-to-peer file sharing is more incendiary than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine."

WSJ: "The public-relations backlash from putting users in jail would cause them more problems than they now face."

Stewart Alsop: Wireless Web on Phones? Forget It!

If you're running a weblog, nbci.com would like to get your site in their directory.

Terri Schewitzer installed Nautilus on a Linux machine. "Most of the installation went smoothly, except for the last command to actually build the application."

Stephen Beale: "Now that I've used OS X, it's easy to see why it's aroused such passions. This is a new kind of Macintosh experience, one that's arguably better in many ways, but one that seasoned users may find difficult to adjust to. The Dock is cool--and the Aqua interface is visually stunning--but you won't appreciate how much you've relied on the Apple menu and Application Switcher until you run Mac OS X."

Got some news about Philadelphia? Philly News has a new policy. Anyone can post News Items. They will delete inappropriate posts. Brave move by Karl Martino!

Harold on AppleScript 

Elliotte Rusty Harold: "When inventing AppleScript, Apple designed a language that was supposed to be easy and intuitive enough for a novice non-programmer to use. They added lots of 'easy-to-use' features like optional keywords and named variables that pop into and out of existence at unexpected places. The result is a morass that drives experienced programmers to distraction and is totally inaccessible to novices."

Later he says: "What I really want is a Java-like language that can access the Open Scripting Architecture (OSA) on the Mac."

You might want to give Radio UserLand a try.

Mark Aldritt sent a pointer to his JavaScript OSA component.

aggregator.root 

Frontier developers: I'm looking for a community leader to take custody of aggregator.root after I release it. I've got the whole thing working on my desktop now. There are a few glitches, and bits that I want to straighten out before releasing the code. This is an experiment for the Frontier community. Forks would be permitted, but there would be a single thread that's endorsed by UserLand. The only limit is that the code may not be ported to other environments.

The perfect person for this job would be someone who has deep experience in the runtime model for Frontier servers. From a political standpoint, someone who's liked in the community, and someone who likes working with me and my team. It would involve a part-time commitment for a few weeks, to document and test and enhance the code. After that I'd expect the project to wind down, to respond to requests for help from people who are running aggregators, and coordinate further work. There would be a Manila site for documentation and download, and a companion mail list.

If you're interested send me a private email. I believe aggregator.root is worth an investment by the community, and that this could be a template for projects we can do together in the future.

Morning stuff 

Scripting News will be abbreviated today, I'm speaking at a conference in San Jose at 11AM, so there won't be much time to find and link to stuff this morning.

Sun is buying Cobalt. Little blue box, we hardly knew ye..

Tim O'Reilly held a P2P "summit" yesterday.

David Stutz, Gene Kan, Ray Ozzie and Dan Gillmor were there. I wish I had been. I could learn a lot from each of them. Wouldn't you have wanted to hear what I think about P2P? I'm curious. Are you? If there are going to be more meetings like this, I want to be there. Ask Tim to explain why I'm not invited, and see if you accept the reason.

A bad news day. Cobalt was a shining star. P2P routes around outages. I guess it's going to be another "open source" milked to death by middlemen. I'd like to think there's another Cobalt around the corner, waiting for us to love them and wanting that love. And I hope someday there are technologists who want to work with other technologists without having middlemen who are scared to be looked at running the show. We've been in that loop for so many years.

Technology requires integrity, you can't lie to the compiler, and integrity can't happen without people looking at what you do and raising questions when they need to be raised.

Thanks for listening.



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