About the outage. It looks like we'll be able to do a full recovery. However it's going to take a few more hours. We've had this problem before, once, when we were first starting EditThisPage.Com, but we have a lot more sites now, so it takes longer to recover. Sorry for the outage, but.. what can you say -- it happens.
Oy Microsoft is still fighting with Sun over Java. Prediction: Java developers won't switch to Microsoft. They want Write Once Run Anywhere. It's such a boring argument. It's why things stay small. Better bet -- build stuff that embraces Java, not routes around it. It won't work. Bad philosophy.
Eric Kidd: "After speaking with Adrian Likins at RedHat, I've been thinking about ways to boxcar XML-RPC calls without changing the official specification."
A peek behind the scenes at how news is manufactured.
Wired: "Microsoft's websites were offline for up to 23 hours -- the most dramatic snafu to date on the Internet -- because of an equipment misconfiguration, the company says."
Wired: "Just when Microsoft thought its Web server woes were resolved, they returned."
I've been hearing great things about Apress. It was described to me as an author's book publishing company. If you write a book for them you get stock. Right on. Now we need an author's software company, one that won't disappear when the latest fad dies. One that supports software developers based on reality, not a 24-by-7 deathmarch and has values that go beyond the balance sheet.
Moshe Weitzman says Shakedown Street is what I'm lookin for for tonight. I'm listening right now. It's one of my favorites. "Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart." Too bright. I like the jazziness of Weather Report Suite. Dreamy and soft. How about The Other One? "Spanish lady come to me.." Michael Fuller suggests the entire Blues for Allah album. I'm listening to Blues for Allah right now. It's beautiful. Bluesy not jazzy. Quite dreamy and soft. I think it's a good choice.
Tonight's song is Franklin's Tower, a live version from One From The Vault.
BTW, the Grateful Dead channel, in addition to being an XML thing, now also has an HTML rendering. (And it almost validates!)
Murphy struck one of our servers last night. It must have happened as I was posting an email saying "Our servers don't crash anymore."
Anyway, one of our machines is offline, the one hosting EditThisPage.Com, and a bunch of user sites. We will probably have to restore from a backup, but we're not totally sure at this time. We're going to find out how good our backup system is. And we're going to find out how fault-tolerant (some of) our users are.
"curly"
Crediting sources
As the Desktop Website part of Radio gets close to completion, more people are using it (cool) and doing blogs with it. One of the nicest features is its "content router." Let's say I see a story in Tomalak or AppleSurf and decide to route it to my Dot-Com channel or my Macintosh channel (just examples). To do that, I click on the Edit button next to the item, it flips to the My Blog page, where I can add comments, and choose categories. Then I click on Post or Post and Publish. Off it goes to my blog and to the RSS channels for Music and Mac. But wait a minute, I just took something from Tomalak and AppleSurf without giving credit. (Some of our bloggers have been manually inserting the credit, they're good people, of course.)
Last night before going to dinner I added a feature that made credit-giving and flow-sharing automatic. Now when you blog something, the source information goes along with the link and is included in the RSS output. (This is why I added the element a few weeks back, anticipating this.) Now, I got an email from Heng-Cheong Leong, the editor of AppleSurf, asking about this, this morning, and I was glad to have last night's post ready to show him. Yes, as the author of an oft-quoted weblog, I share his concern. I want my name and a pointer to my site to go along with the routings.
Of course some idiot is going to patent this three years from now and sue me. "It's even worse.. etc."
Meanwhile Karl Lewin is working on a Radio-like website in Zope. And this is cool. Spread the load. Let's get a new content-routing network going. The more the merrier.
