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

scriptingNews outline for 4/25/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:4/25/2000; 6:05:35 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 4/25/2000
Msg #:16633
Prev/Next:16632 / 16634

Dan Gillmor is dealing with flamers. "Western civilization is in jeopardy. And it's all my fault." But wait it gets better. Dan takes on PacBell. "I don't think PacBell should be advertising its Internet offerings so prominently and pervasively when it seems that the company can't handle the customers it already has." So true. What a bunch of losers. Dan, go get em!

Dan's on a roll today. He took a whiteboard shot of Microsoft's vision for XML. So I did one of UserLand's vision. ";->"

Frontier 6.2b9 change notes. Andre says: "The Mac version comes with a new TCP layer, completely rewritten from scratch. If you have been reporting TCP-related stability problems with previous versions of Frontier/Mac, you should probably give this version a try. Initial feedback from testers has been very positive."

Tim O'Reilly: Beyond the Book. "My efforts have strengthened the relationship between O'Reilly and Amazon.com, and Jeff Bezos has joined me in my campaign for reform of the software patent system."

Survey: Do we want to work with Tim? Results so far. 100 percent of those responding say yes. A social experiment.

Duffer: Why is a Domino/Notes geek working on a Manila site? "I thought you'd never ask. Answers soon."

Doc Searls posts his report from last week's Futurize West event in Napa Valley.

XML-RPC: Derek Jones is having trouble getting AppleScript to talk to Python.

PS-HTTPD - a Web server written in Postscript.

An email that's either a virus or sent by an idiot. Watch out for this kind of stuff. Don't run email enclosures unless, well, I can't really think of a good exception.

Opilio is a web crawler, search engine and categorical directory built in Frontier.

Andrew Wooldridge update on XML-RPC in Mozilla.

Susan Kitchens in Panama: "I'm taking my computer with me. I'm taking my digital camera with me, too. I've checked out digital cafe sites in Panama City. But I reserve the right to live in the moment and abandon this site altogether for the time I'm gone!" Excellent!

Jakob Nielsen says what I have said several times. A split of Microsoft that leaves one company owning network services and the browser is a fox in a henhouse, makes no sense. Who cares about competition in operating systems. No one will bother. The action is on the Internet. I still say, if there's to be a split, it should just remove the browser from MS, and leave everything else as-is. The OS company would be precluded from making a browser. It would have a certain amount of time (1 year?) to decouple the browser from the OS, and as a proof of concept they would have to integrate Mozilla and ship it with the OS. End of problem. And a blueprint for dealing with any further competitive problems.

And yes, I have always been a proponent of browser integration with the OS. As an engineer I know that it can be done through a driver interface that's open to all. It's not difficult engineering and not unprecedented.

This week Zeldman reads like Scripting News. "We run an Internet business. We pay for high-speed access. For a week we've had blackouts lasting up to four hours, followed by connectivity as brief as fifteen minutes." It's a wonder that someone can't put together a business that fits Zeldman's needs. That would be a business whose stock is worth owning.

Before yesterday's outage some really interesting stuff was happening on the discussion group.

Oliver Breidenbach has been working on the design of his site. Interesting template! Very nice.

Rael Dornfest works at O'Reilly and is doing their Meerkat RSS scanner.

Scripting News via email update

Murphy struck hard! No mail went out at 10PM. The roll out was a dud because of the outage. Oy. I care so much about this feature. Please subscribe. It'll be worth it.

Time to reflect

An outage is an incredible opportunity for reflection. I had planned twenty small tasks that couldn't be done while the net was down, at first I was grouchy, then I went for a walk, and came back energized. The net was still down. I went for another walk. That's unusual for me, very, at least when I'm in California. When I'm traveling I walk all the time.

Here's what I realized, I don't like reflection. I don't like hearing how my thoughts reflect on others. A says something to B. I don't really want to hear what B heard. Now once I realize I don't want something, I choose to follow the advice of an old girlfriend who used to say "Then that's what we'll do!" Her voice is still very with me. What a great teacher.

In this Hall of Mirrors that we call the Web, most of what you see *is* reflective. I say what I see when Tim O'Reilly organizes the Open Source community. The response is their standard party line. My response would have been my party line if I hadn't had time to reflect and hear my own words, and then imagine how they play in OpenSourceLand. Tim and Brian aren't random Slashdotters. By feeding back to me, they helped me understand. This is what I worked on, on my second walk.

I'll try to do better. I want to open doors for communication. That means I'm going to have to do the A-B-A thing. Yesterday I suggested that we open embassies in each others capitals. That was premature. First we have to figure out what exactly we are doing here.

We need a clear statement like the one that ESR wrote for Open Source. We'll do better than he did, because we will leave out the exclusive stuff. But we haven't done it yet. The WebApps conference was premature. DaveNet didn't yield many standalone pieces. The outages and angst with Conxion raised integrity issues. I think perhaps all this needs to be organized and presented clearly before we can ask for help from any other community.

Next steps: Time for Zopefish?

Yesterday's outage

Our PacBell T1 line was down from 10:45 AM Pacific through sometime before 6AM today, an incomrehensibly long outage. The discussion group, EditThisPage.Com, and Weblogs.Com were down. More than UserLand was offline, but it was just Conxion customers coming through PacBell. This is embarassing and productivity-stopping. We had a really good thing going on Monday. On Saturday all the servers running behind PacBell-Conxion move to Exodus.

Heads-up. We're changing how DNS works for all of UserLand domains. This is part of the move off Conxion.

Eatonweb: "Is it just me, or has the web been totally dead today. No email, no interesting stuff, no news, no good memes." I had the same experience! ";->"



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