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

scriptingNews outline for 4/11/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:4/11/2000; 6:11:12 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 4/11/2000
Msg #:16079
Prev/Next:16078 / 16080

Survey: How cross-platform are we? Quite.

Part two of our hardware upgrade today is complete. A few glitches. Our static server got a lot beefier. We're now running Linux on a Subhonker. Lots of ram, disk space.

AP: AOL Chief Talks to Editors. "Those who try to hunker down and keep tight control of their online content, he suggested, will fail. 'What the Internet has done is taken control away from the gatekeepers.'" Amen.

NY Times: "Ralph Reed, a senior consultant to Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign, apologized today for lobbying the governor on behalf of the Microsoft Corporation and promised not to lobby him again on behalf of Microsoft or anyone else."

View from an Iowa Homestead: A new baby! Welcome.

Andrea reviews the Körperwelten exhibit. "There is a variety of displays, for example whole bodies of which the skin has been removed to show the muscles etc., or everything but the arterial system or the nerves has been removed. Some of the objects combine several of these."

Doc reports from a Montreal bathroom. "I had to go so bad there wasn't a rational neuron in my brain. So it was with infinite relief that I found a bathroom, grabbed a stall, and sat there, organizing the days ahead with my daytimer. Then I heard ... female voices." Uh oh.

A joke that women who date engineers would get.

SD Times: XML Integrates Webs and Databases. "SOAP and Blocks both go about adding some depth to solving the problem of querying databases via the Web. They aren't really markup languages, but they leverage XML in interesting ways and define separate and incompatible architectures and protocols so that you can build more powerful Web-based applications. While they are similar in their intent, they are very different approaches."

Weblogs.Com: Choose your Icon. "If you have a weblog site registered, you can choose an icon. We will use this icon to link to your site in features we're dreaming up now." People talk about programmerish features, well this is a webloggerish feature. If you don't run a weblog it might not make sense. There's a chance to play with a graphic language for changes in weblogspace. I've been rolling this out slowly, so there are already some good icons taken. It's a land-grab, and if it's successful, we'll get more visual images for our collective writing work. It can't possibly *not* be interesting. ";->"

Weblogs with icons that changed in the last 24 hours.

The weblogs XML file now includes icon names.

Jacob Levy: Why you don't want Gnutella (at least not yet).

Andrew Wooldridge: "I've been sick as a dog for the past 2 days. I was finally able to crawl out of bed today and try to catch up on Real Life. Anthem stuff will follow depending on how fast I can catch up. Ugh. Being sick sucks." Get well soon.

Frontier: Encrypted Cookie Format. This is the "hashed cookie" feature I was talking about yesterday. What does it mean? Manila systems are now more secure. The change is transparent to the user.

Dan Gillmor: "But it may take infinite shamelessness for a company that is so progressive with its own employees -- and in the causes Bill Gates supports when he's giving his own money -- to be paying big money to the poster child for the forces of intolerance, ultra-right maven Ralph Reed." Thanks Dan. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Infolets is gathering a list of Web Apps for Web Developers.

MacInTouch Reader Reports: Netscape 6 PR 1.

Joel Spolsky: "When Pete got alerts, he tried to dismiss them using the space bar, like he's been doing subconsciously for the last six years. The first time, nothing happened. Without even being aware of it, Pete banged the space bar harder, since he thought that the problem must be that the Mac did not register his tapping the space bar. Actually, it did -- but it didn't care!"

Microsoft: BizTalk Server 2000 Technical Preview is available for download. Registration required.

Here's what I want. A set of public interfaces deployed on a server that I can experiment with. I want to toe-dip. I want to be able to use their services without being on Windows. I don't have a spare server to install their preview server on. Many of the people I work with are on Unix and Mac.

Elliotte Rusty Harold asks a question I've heard a lot lately. Basically, just because SOAP and XML-RPC are open, how do we know that what MS builds on top of these protocols is open? The answer is we don't. And further, why should we care? If it isn't let's reject it. There's so much power outside of Microsoft, but it sits there doing nothing but complaining, at least if you read the Times and Newsweek. I wrote about this in response to a posting from Dan Dees. "What Microsoft is doing is cool for sure, but we're doing something even hotter." Microsoft would like us to focus all the attention on them, can't blame them for that. (Well maybe you could, but that's another story.) The people Levy and Markoff interviewed aren't working in this area, clearly. If they were, imho, they would be excited and enthusiastic, not pissy and whiny.

Yesterday I paid property taxes on my non-intellectual property. For the first time I made it a ceremony. I wrote the check outside and thanked my trees for going along with the little myth that I own them (and the land they're rooted in). They didn't seem to have a problem.

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



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