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

scriptingNews outline for 6/1/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:6/1/2000; 12:27:18 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 6/1/2000
Msg #:17506
Prev/Next:17505 / 17507

Web Apps conference, second try?

I wanted to have a conference of web application developers in April, but couldn't pull it off in in time. Should we try again?

Survey: Web Apps conference?

I called Sylvia Paull who knows about these things, and asked where would be a good place to have a one-day meeting to talk about web apps in the Bay Area and she immediately suggested Mills College.

She said it's a magical place. In Oakland, close to the airports, and probably could schedule a meeting on short notice and it might would be inexpensive. We'll look into it.

BTW, 30 people, so far have said they would come to a Web Apps conference.

Opening the XML-RPC validator

The validator is now running.

If you have an XML-RPC server, and would like to help, please implement the validator1 suite (it's easy) and test it with the validator app. Let us know in the XML-RPC discussion group if it worked or didn't.

Yesterday, Hannes Wallnöfer posted a message saying that he had implemented a validator1 server suite in Java, and wanted to know if the validator would work against it. So I ran a test, and it passed on the first try. That's pretty good! Good work

Hannes posted the source for his server. I encourage others to post their source. I posted the source for the Frontier server yesterday. I find it interesting to see how the various environments compare, I'm sure others would as well.

Ken MacLeod has the Perl implementation validating now. (He warns that it's a temporary URL, just set up for this test.)

A new proposed validator, countTheAngleBrackets, tests whether an implementation is correctly encoding characters in strings according to the XML 1.0 specification.

The W in NGWS

Reading microsoft.com this morning, I found that I made a mistake yesterday. The W in Microsoft's NGWS does stand for Web, at least in one article. This is good news, hopefully the vision will live up to the name. BTW, at one point the W did stand for Windows.

Easy on easy off

It was relatively painless for me to swtich to Windows because of the Web. There are minor differences between the Mac desktop and the Windows desktop, some things are on the right others are at the bottom. It's kind of like driving in the UK or talking in Italy. Even worse is using Italian currency. There's a taxi driver in Firenze who's happy he met me! Anyway..

Easy on easy off, says the Web. This is why it's promising that the preliminary hype for NGWS is that it will enable applications running on all platforms to hook in. Presumably this means Palm OS, as much as it means Win CE. And to be weblike it must create room for editors and browsers created outside of Microsoft, running on Windows and other operating systems.

To be clear, I have not signed a Microsoft non-disclosure agreement. I don't know anything about NGWS other than what's been said publicly.

There are so many ways Microsoft could be going with NGWS. We're going to learn a lot about what's been going on there when the vision is shown publicly.

BTW, today was going to be the day they did that. Now they'll wait until June 22. I'm totally planning on being there, with lots of coffee and lots of questions.

Mitch Makes Sense

ZDNet: Former Lotus guru Mitch Kapor speaks out. "Kapor notes that the angel investors are put off by ventures that are too risky with so little prospect of immediate return. 'The average VC is looking to get a company to market within six to 12 months and see it make money within a couple of years.'"

Hopefully Mitch can change that now that he's a VC.

At lunch the other day, a CEO of a high-tech startup mistook me for Mitch. There were even witnesses. We were both at VisiCorp in the early early days of the PC software industry. Mitch did VisiPlot and went on to start Lotus. Smart guy.

SOAP

News.Com: IBM donates SOAP to Apache. "We want to move at Internet speed and respond to the needs of the developer community by making it available to the open-source community," said Marie Wieck, IBM's director of e-markets infrastructure. Coool!

Peter Osbourne: "My team is working on a pilot project. The goal is to provide a means for a major airline partner to connect to a car rental reservation system. I proposed using XML and SOAP as a means to provide this connection."

Phone-to-Web

I'm going to start a wish list page, and this is going to be the top item on the list.

I want to dial an 800 number, record a voice message, get back an email with a URL, and point to the message from Scripting News.

The message would be served via HTTP. This would allow me to open a new channel with my readers (they would become listeners). I would be willing to pay money for this.

I would also be happy to be a partner in a new venture to provide this service. Think about it. There is no chicken and egg, you know at least one content provider, me, would use the service and evangelize it. We've got money and servers. We lack the expertise and human resources to build the service. But we would know how to use it. Right away.

The next step would be to turn it into groupware.

Followup: I got several pointers to PhoneTalk, which appears to be exactly what I want. I recorded a message, which you can listen to through this link. (It might be a temporary link.)

HearMe.Com is in this area too.

Patents and poundings

News.Com: Juno files patent suit. "In the filing, the New York-based company alleged that NetZero and Qualcomm are "producing, distributing and encouraging" the use of software that 'unlawfully' installs Juno's patented technology into the latest version of Qualcomm's Eudora email software."

David Sims: WAP takes a pounding. "It's clear there's no stopping WAP, at least in the short term. Nokia, Motorola, and Siemens are already selling WAP phones in Europe, and they're expected to roll out in North America in the second half of 2000."

TrellixWeb is open

Tripod's new Site Builder is powered by TrellixWeb. I created a site, you can browse it if you like. Let me know what you think, create your own site. How would you like Manila to be more like TrellixWeb?

More site ranking

On 5/12/00 we started tracking hits on all UserLand-hosted Manila sites on all servers.

This resulted in the Most Read Sites Yesterday page.

Now, here's the cumulative page, the Most Read Sites since 5/12/00.

Pointers

Mary Jo Foley: Has the Linux bubble burst?

osOpinion: Underwhelmed by WAP.

Doc. Geek. Sprezzatura.

Daniel Berlinger's Discussion Group is using the new CSS-for-the-DG Manila feature.

Great links today on Qube Quorner.

NY Times: "Campaigns, of course, have always whispered nasty little nothings about the opposition into reporters' ears. But just as e-mail has ushered in a new era of epistolary ease and connectedness for the world at large, it has also created a hyper-efficient form of press release, a paperless document that not only links the political world to the nation's assignment editors, columnists and news anchors in seconds, but also allows the campaigns to fire at each other at will, all day long."

Oliver Breidenbach: The Oregon Coast by day, at sunset and at night.



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