Monday, September 30, 2002

Change notes for the RSS 2.0.1 spec. In progress. 

O'Reilly: Photos from the Mac OS X Conference. 

Doc Searls: "The Net was born without an Identity service." 

BusinessWeek: "If you try to print or copy sections of Middlemarch on an Adobe eBook Reader, you'll be informed that Adobe allows users to copy only 10 sections every 10 days. Readers of Aristotle's Politics, which as far as anyone knows was never copyrighted, aren't permitted to copy or print any text." 

Brent's Law of CMS URLs: "The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs." 

Do all the women of the world have the hots for this man? 

Scoble: "It's pretty obvious that RageBoy is in love and that his lover doesn't want him to talk about her." 

Chris Croome has pics from Saturday's anti-war demonstration in London. Three guesses which pic most people click. 

NY Times: "'I couldn't conceive of a situation with my software applications today where I need a computer with a 2.4 gigahertz Pentium processor,' Mr. Schreiner said." 

Mark Pilgrim's sample file for RSS 2.0. I've subscribed to it in Radio. This example will be linked into the section of the 2.0.1 spec that talks about namespaces. 

Sunday, September 29, 2002

"rssflowersalignright"With any luck we should have one or two more days of namespaces stuff here on Scripting News. It feels like it's winding down. Later in the week I'm going to a conference put on by the Harvard Business School. So that should change the topic a bit. The following week I'm off to Colorado for the Digital ID World conference. We had to go through namespaces, and it turns out that weblogs are a great way to work around mail lists that are clogged with stop energy. I think we solved the problem, have reached a consensus, and will be ready to move forward shortly. 

Joshua Allen: Who loves namespaces?  

Don Park: "It is too easy for engineer to anticipate too much and XML Namespace is a frequent host of over-anticipation." 

Three Sunday Morning Options. "I just got off the phone with Tim Bray, who graciously returned my call on a Sunday morning while he was making breakfast for his kids." We talked about three options for namespaces in RSS 2.0, and I think I now have the tradeoffs well outlined, and ready for other developers to review. If there is now a consensus, I think we can easily move forward.  

Mark Pilgrim weighs in behind option 1 on a Ben Hammersley thread. On the RSS2-Support list, Phil Ringnalda lists a set of proposals, the first is equivalent to option 1.  

Fredrik Lundh breaks through, following Simon Fell's lead, now his Python aggregator works with Scripting News in RSS 2.0. BTW, the spec is imperfect in regards to namespaces. We anticipated a 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 in the Roadmap for exactly this purpose. Thanks for your help, as usual, Fredrik.  

Law and Order 

A great line in a recent Law and Order. Lenny Briscoe, played by Jerry Orbach, is interrogating a suspect. The suspect tells a story and reaches a point where no one believes him, not even the suspect himself. Lenny says: "Now there's five minutes of my life that's lost forever."

Rule 1 

In the discussions over namespaces in RSS 2.0, one thing I hear a lot of, that is just plain wrong, is that when you move up by a major version number, breakage is expected and is okay. In the world I come from it is, emphatically, not okay. We spend huge resources to make sure that files, scripts and apps built in version N work in version N+1 without modification. Even the smallest change in the core engine can break apps. It's just not acceptable. When we make changes we have to be sure there's no breakage. I don't know where these other people come from, or if they make software that anyone uses, but the users I know don't stand for that. As we expose the tradeoffs it becomes clear that that's the issue here. We are not in Year Zero. There are users. Breaking them is not an option. A conclusion to lift the confusion: Version 0.91 and 0.92 files are valid 2.0 files. This is where we started, what seems like years ago.

BTW, you can ask anyone who's worked for me in a technical job to explain rules 1 and 1b. (I'll clue you in. Rule 1 is "No Breakage" and Rule 1b is "Don't Break Dave.")

Really early morning no-coffee notes 

One of the lessons I've learned in 47.4 years: When someone accuses you of a deceit, there's a very good chance the accuser practices that form of deceit, and a reasonable chance that he or she is doing it as they point the finger.

Don Park: "He poured a barrel full of pig urine all over the Korean Congress because he was pissed off about all the dirty politics going on."

1/4/95: "By the way, the person with the big problem is probably a competitor."

I've had a fair amount of experience in the last few years with what you might call standards work. XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS, OPML. Each has been different from the others. In all this work, the most positive experience was XML-RPC, and not just because of the technical excellence of the people involved. In the end, what matters more to me is collegiality. Working together, person to person, for the sheer pleasure of it, is even more satisfying than a good technical result. Now, getting both is the best, and while XML-RPC is not perfect, it's pretty good. I also believe that if you have collegiality, technical excellence follows as a natural outcome.

One more bit of philosophy. At my checkup earlier this week, one of the things my cardiologist asked was if I was experiencing any kind of intellectual dysfunction. In other words, did I lose any of my sharpness as a result of the surgery in June. I told him yes I had and thanked him for asking. In an amazing bit of synchronicity, the next day John Robb located an article in New Scientist that said that scientists had found a way to prevent this from happening. I hadn't talked with John about my experience or the question the doctor asked. Yesterday I was telling the story to my friend Dave Jacobs. He said it's not a problem because I always had excess capacity in that area. Exactly right Big Dave and thanks for the vote of confidence.

Saturday, September 28, 2002

A summary of what we learned in the last few days about XML and namespaces. It's not a pretty picture! 

Simon Fell: "I can't see how RSS 2.0 can be both fully backwardly compatible with RSS 0.9x and introduce namespaces, as we saw earlier, tools written with the assumptions that are valid for RSS 0.9x are just going to break when faced with a RSS 2.0 file that uses modules." 

Don Park: "My recommendation for RSS 2.0 is to support namespaces but not require them to be declared unless they are needed and require only default namespace declaration to be used." 

Jake Savin: "[Don Park] speaks with the benefit of first-hand development experience with a partner whose software didn't understand namespaces. He also quite rightly points out that 'the primary value of RSS format is that it is being used widely and anything that breaks that voids the value of RSS.'" 

GNOME has a RSS 2.0 feed for the latest files on their FTP site. 

Late afternoon (Pacific time) status on the namespaces conundrum. On the RSS2-Support list Phil Ringnalda sums up the options. Ben Hammersley's thread has reached an impasse. Simon Fell tests the popular aggregators for namespace support. At this time there is no consensus on how namespaces should work in a plain vanilla format like RSS 2.0. That's what we're looking for, consensus. And it will probably have to be a compromise. 

LM Orchard: "I don't think that this is a fundamental flaw with RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or namespaces. This is an issue of versioning, understanding the technology's implications, and reverse-compatibility." 

Ben Hammersley: "If this was 0.94, the breakage would be unacceptable. But as this is 2.0, we've got to take the hit." 

CNN: UN backs dwarf tossing ban. "The pastime, imported from the United States and Australia in the 1980s, consists of people throwing tiny stuntmen as far as possible, usually in a bar or discotheque." Thanks Daypop! 

Hixie's Natural Log: Trackback vs Pingback. 

Reuters: Turkey seizes weapons-grade uranium. 

Phil Wolff: "What would you be willing to do as a journalist to improve your chances of getting your story listed on Google's front page for a prime time hour?" 

Justin Klubnik released a RSS module for trackbacks. Why do I like this? Because he claims support for RSS 2.0, a format I'm trying to build support for. A win-win. That's how flow works on the Web. We help each other, and share our gratitude. I know it sounds corny, but that's how it works, when it works. Thanks Justin.  

Relationship between RSS and weblog APIs 

I got an email during the week from Steve Zellers asking if the MetaWeblog API spec would be updated to call for RSS 2.0 item-level metadata, instead of calling for RSS 0.92 metadata. I told Steve I'd look into it, and at first glance it seemed like a good idea.

I just reviewed the relevant section of the MetaWeblog API spec, and don't see any problem, because 2.0 is totally a superset of 0.92, we now have some new vocabulary, like pubdate, comments, guid, etc that can travel over the MetaWeblog API, so unless there are any objections, I'll change the spec next week; and people who have a MetaWeblog API implementation can start thinking about how they might want to use the newly defined struct elements.

Thanks for keeping an eye out on this Steve. Good work.

Also note that there are rumblings of change re the Blogger API. We expect a new API from Pyra shortly. Let's hope it's forward-compatible as the MetaWeblog API is. Or, even better, it would be fantastic if they adopted the MetaWeblog API. Now that would be super cool.

Friday, September 27, 2002

Ed Cone: "As the only opponent of the Berman-Coble P2P bill to speak at yesterday's hearings, Gigi Sohn got a grilling from Howard Berman. 'He took every pot shot at me he could,' says Sohn, president of an advocacy group called Public Knowledge." 

On BlogTree, Rebecca's Pocket lists Scripting News as a parent weblog. Cool. 

Le weblog de Jean-Yves sur Radio UserLand pour les utilisateurs francophones. Le rock star. 

Thanks to Charles Cooper for the good vibe. News.Com still delivers great flow.  

News.Com: "These versions of wireless networks using the Wi-Fi, or 802.11b, standard create a wireless zone of up to 12 miles long, far beyond the usual 300-foot-radius range that Wi-Fi typically achieves, Zakin said." 

Jeremy Zawodny: Google, News and Making Money. 

BBC: "Until a year ago, customers at the chain were able to download music and burn it onto CDs in-store." 

Russ Lipton is looking for inspiration on his Radio book. 

Lisa Rein: Give Peace a Chance. 

Did Microsoft patent SOAP? 

This newly issued patent (9/24/02) makes it appear that they did. However this is not the SOAP that's in use today. One clue is the date it was filed, 11/10/97. Work on XML-based SOAP didn't begin until March 1998. Further, the description is of something quite different from what we call SOAP today. People at Microsoft liked the name SOAP, and when the binary transport for COM was stillborn, they wanted to re-use it for the XML-based SOAP. I confirmed with Microsoft that they had not patented XML-based SOAP, and they said they hadn't. Another large software company told me at the time that they were sure that they had. No matter, had Microsoft wanted to patent XML-based SOAP they would have needed to get me on board, and I never gave permission to do that.

Postscript: I have confirmation from Microsoft people in the know that this interpretation of the patent is correnct. We may have some more info tomorrow.

What about patents? 

However, at lunch today with an old friend, we talked about new ideas for spreadheets, and I said if I worked on that, I definitely would file for patents. After watching so many pigs feed at the trough, I realized that being the only honorable person is totally unfair to me. Further, to other anti-patent people, generosity seems to buy no consideration. If I have some patents, they'll have to negotiate. So if I invested the time to create a better spreadsheet (just an example), I would patent it, and make my competitors pay for the right to use my ideas. Maybe I'll change my mind again, it's quite possible; and it's also possible that I'll never have a unique software idea again, so this might be moot. If you're anti-software-patents, give it some thought. You might be being a chump too.

Change in RSS 2.0 support in Radio 

This morning an esoteric update to the RSS feed generator in Radio. We now omit the xmlns attribute on the rss element because some parsers, especially homegrown parsers, can't correctly interpret it.

This issue arose when Ovidu Predescu had errors polling Sam Ruby's and Simon Fell's feeds. Anyway, the fix was to drop the xmlns attribute. It's still RSS 2.0 without it, and Radio wasn't actually using any namespaces, so there's no functionality change, and it should unbreak Ovidu's parser, and any others that have trouble with namespaces.

Now, I'm not backing off namespaces in the Scripting News feed, through its use of the blogChannel module. This way, any breakage that's reported will come just for my weblog, not for Radio users' weblogs.

I apologize for the difficulties. I promise, it's for a good cause -- if we wanted to allow modularity (we do) in the XML feeds we would have hit this problem at some point. Now if people are concerned, they can update right now and all aggregators should be happy and life goes on.

Thursday, September 26, 2002

News.Com: "I've never received such notoriety from a bill that I did not introduce," Coble said. "But if Howard Berman asked me today to co-sponsor it, I would do it again. It is our responsibility to promote efforts to reduce infringement or piracy of intellectual property."  

I can't tell you how much I missed the Daypop Top-40. Smooch! 

Brian, the support manager from Omni says: "Just wanted to let you know that the version of Outliner that supports OPML hasn't officially been released yet. I screwed up late one sleep-deprived evening and it was posted for a day or so, but this was unintentional. If you could do us a favor and spread the word, we'd appreciate it, since it's causing a bit of confusion. It's coming soon, though." 

David Weinberger wrote a column where he said programmers are cynical and this is a good thing. This bothered me. I don't think of programmers as cynics, that's too negative. I played around with the thesaurus a bit, and think cynic is the wrong word. I think the correct work is skeptic. Or if you're British, sceptic. And when he talks about programmers telling the truth, that's something else entirely. "You can't lie to the compiler." People with an imprecise understanding of the truth don't make software. They can't. 

The Guardian's list of top British weblogs. 

I started a directory of RSS resources. 

BBC: "Popular file-swapping system Kazaa has released a new version of its software which is certain to anger the record industry." 

NY Times: "Bob Wallace, a pioneering programmer of the personal computer era who helped invent "shareware" software marketing , died on Friday at his home in San Rafael, Calif. He was 53." 

Mark Pilgrim is developing a RSS 2.0 template for Movable Type, documenting his design decisions as he goes. Nice work. His guid element is not a permalink, which is totally valid, and his is the first feed to do that as far as I know.  

Kevin Hemenway: Extending RSS 2.0 with Namespaces. 

Syndic8 is starting to track RSS 2.0 feeds. The list is not complete, yet, because it doesn't include Scripting News, which has been a 2.0 feed for quite some time. 

Phil Ringnalda: "The first RSS feed I created was done essentially by hand, in my favorite text editor at the time: Notepad." 

Puzzles 

I saw an ad yesterday with a puzzle. Two men play five chess games. Each wins three games. No ties. How is this possible?

Another puzzle that's not so difficult, from 1997: During the Cold War, a Russian plane crashes at the border of Poland and Germany. Where were the survivors buried?

Solutions to the first two puzzles for people who must know if they got it right. (Not fair to sneak a peak if you don't know.)

And finally for those who have never experienced the magic. Count the F's and be surprised by your cognitive disability.

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Daypop is back. Ye-hi. 

Gracie Allen: "Never put a period where God has placed a comma." 

Ed Cone: "The House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property will hold a hearing on 'Piracy of Intellectual Property on Peer-to-Peer Networks' at 9AM., Thursday, September 26, (2141 Rayburn House Office Building). The Berman-Coble bill will be discussed. The hearings are open to the press." 

Libération: Les jouebs, stars éditoriales du Web. 

Ken Dow reports that the current version of OmniOutliner can read and write OPML. This means, for example, with a little Radio script (or an AppleScript) you could use Omni as an Instant Outliner. 

Jeremy Zawodny on life in Silicon Valley: "I came out here to work at a company that has since forgotten how to innovate and take risks. Yippie." 

Wired: "Stronger ties between ISPs and file-trading companies could bolster Kazaa's defenses." 

Thanks to Jenny for the pointer to this Yale Law article about The Wayback Machine removing articles about Scientology. "While Lawmeme doesn't know all the details of Scientology's request to the Internet Archive, especially the extent of websites removed, we do know that the Internet Archive is blocking all archived versions of one of Scientology's leading critics and the main target in the Google Affair, Xenu.net." 

Last year on this day: "It's been not-correct for most of my life for Americans to say we love our country. That's a big bug. We're the world's greatest country and we know it. I love the USA. It gave me life, an education, role models and a philosophy. And if you think we're stupid or decadent, just try fucking with us." 

Fred Grott: How to Keep RDF and RSS Straight. 

Jon Hanna, on the RSS-DEV list, says that RSS, was "not designed to be of any particular use to bloggers, aggregators, or metadata providers." This is not true. Half of RSS 0.91 was scriptingNews format, which was totally designed to model a weblog in XML.  

Great email from the RIAA's Hillary Rosen to execs at Yahoo, Real, AOL and Microsoft, on how to crack down on the millions of Morpheus and Kazaa users. Is this for real? 

Ben Silverman, the publisher of Dotcom Scoop, says the Rosen email is real, and part of a confidential internal memo that outlines the RIAA's legal strategy re Kazaa, Music City and Grokster.  

Jeremy Bowers: "None of the trackback mechanisms has reached the critical mass necessary to see the negative effects experienced in all other community models." 

Ray Ozzie: "How long before we see auto pingback generator spambots?" 

John Robb: "Yesterday, AT&T; upgraded my cable box to a digital system." 

Reuters: "Pets may not only provide good company for their owners, they may also help lower stress, according to new study findings." 

A productive thread 

"rssflowersalignright"A productive thread on RSS-DEV confronts the negativeness about RSS 2.0 head-on. This will go someplace interesting.

I left a big hint there in the way the blogChannel module is designed, patterned after the Syndication module designed by the RDF folk. In other words, the place where they're expressing discomfort with RSS 2.0 is where they can make it their own. Lead. Instead of feeling disempowered, be powerful.

At one point I saw clearly where the compromise between RSS 0.9x and 1.0 was. We could have gotten there in early 2001, so instead we get there in late 2002. So what, not a big deal. Think about how much better it will be when we're all advocating the same format. Visualize peace. That's basically what I did when I did the 2.0 spec. I know it's hard to swallow, but swallow anyway. If I did it, you can too.

Medical notes 

Mixed news from yesterday's heart checkup.

First, I went seven minutes on the treadmill. That was pretty good. My heart was racing like it hadn't since I was in college. They also did an extensive ultrasound on my carotid arteries, they're in the neck and supply my head with blood. More good news there. They're clear, free of plaque, healthy, not diseased. So it appears I just have coronary artery disease, not general artery disease. That's good because there would be a risk of stroke if they were sick, and not a whole lot they can do about it (as they can with the heart).

Now there was some not-good news. A small part of my heart isn't working very well. There are a few possible reasons for that, some fixable, some not. I asked the doctor, does this mean I'm going to die sooner, and he said no. Does it mean I have to restrict what I do, he said no. So what does it mean? Really not much, other than I should watch, as before, for recurring symptoms, the ones that brought me into the hospital in June. If they come back, we'll do an angiogram, and maybe an angioplasty, but the likelihood of another bypass because of this is small. That's quite a relief. I don't like the idea of part of my heart not working, but what can you do about it?

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Bruce Loebrich has scraped RSS feeds for Google news, and a RSS 2.0 success story. In other words, it's okay to use the features in 2.0. We're doing it at UserLand and so is Bruce. 

Sam Ruby: "Yup, I'm a sick puppy." Me too! 

Note to self: Read the pingback spec. Form opinion. 

Dotcom Scoop: "CNET's Download.com is set to introduce a new program for its Download.com software portal. Beginning Sept. 30, software vendors will be charged a fee to upload their wares. There is also a monthly-package to get better placement on the site." 

MacNet Journal reports that OmniOutliner will support OPML soon. That's very good news indeed.  

Ray Ozzie: Software Platform Dynamics. 

Jeremy Allaire: Wholistic Web Services. 

News.Com: "Linux is a serious competitor," said Ballmer. 

Scoble: "I'm just not that excited by much that Microsoft is doing." 

NY Times: "Google's automated editors appeared to match the work of human competitors." 

BBC: "Some critics have been less than impressed with Google's news service." 

Looks like Google did a deal to index the NY Times. If you do this news search, and mouse over the link, you'll see there's a partner attribute on the URL, like the ones in our links. What are the implications of this? Here's one. Martin Nisenholtz may now have a chance of winning his bet with me.  

Lance Knobel of Davos Newbies does a quick review of Tony Blair's case against Sadam Hussein. 

Aaron Swartz: "If everyone is afraid to speak, who will defend our right to download?" I'm not afraid. 

Lest anyone doubt that Brent has a good heart. "I laughed, because here's the irony -- on this site, on my own personal weblog, Radio UserLand rather than NetNewsWire is the most-used aggregator." 

Iowa: "There was frost outside this morning!" 

Wired: "An urgent business proposition and requests for urgent assistance from a so-called Nigerian official were heeded by a Detroit bank secretary in the latest example of how the ubiquitous e-mail scam actually works." 

9/2/00: "In the overworked world of Web development, there's no time to study, there's only time to do." 

Monday, September 23, 2002

Jeremy Zawodny who works at Yahoo Finance offers an RSS 0.91 feed for every stock. It's a beta feature. Here's the feed for Microsoft and one for Marimba. Thanks to Jon Udell for the pointer. Nice. Jon also notes that Microsoft doesn't show up too strong in the weblog world and describes a conversation with John Montgomery about this. What a small world. John and I got to know each other when we did the work on SOAP in the late 90s, and weblog software is one of the major reasons we were interested in SOAP. So close, but so far. But it's never too late! 

"rssflowersalignright"I've gotten to know Phil Ringalda over the last few weeks in all the discussions about RSS 2.0, and I like him, and would like to work with him in the future. I don't say that lightly. This evening he posted a note on his weblog that he was giving up trying to get RDF to make sense inside RSS. As I read his essay I could feel two-plus years of exhaustion overwhelm me. I found myself writing a comment after his essay saying, among other things "RSS is not a brilliant format. It is a compromise. It is for syndicating news feeds. That's all it is for, for the 18,000th time." It's time for RDF to pack its bags and leave. RSS deserves some dignity, as does RDF. Emphatically, once and for all, they are not the same thing. Peace be with you RDF. Leave RSS alone. Thank you. 

Ed Cone: "I told my grandmother goodbye." 

Paul Everitt: Interop in the Bazaar. 

CNN Headline News: To Blog or not to Blog. 

Phil Wolff: Dave Winer books I'll buy. Sweet!  

Halley: "When is someone going to create audio fonts for Christ's sake." 

NY Times piece on reporters with weblogs. 

Sheila Lennon was interviewed for the Times piece. 

Slashdot reports that Amazon still wants to patent the Web. 

News.Com: "Amazon.com is hoping to use more than the honor system to protect a payment method it established online last year." 

Shelley Powers raises some interesting questions re whether RDF has a place in syndication. She says that RDF is trying to build a persistent database (aka the Semantic Web) and RSS is trying to flow news that has a short lifespan. I had not heard this point before. It's worth thinking about.  

I've been hearing a lot about FOAF, which is an acronym for Friend Of A Friend. It's an RDF-based file format that lets you walk a network of people who are friends. It's a lot like a network of blogrolls.  

Google PR sends a message that they have a new News service. Maybe I'm slow this morning, or maybe I'm spoiled, but what's the big deal. I thought they already had this. My personal aggregator is better, it shows me what I'm interested in, it's not one size fits all. Help me figure this out. I'm sure there's something innovative here, I just don't see it. 

News.Com: Google search gets newsier. 

Gold Lake Mountain Resort looks pretty gooood. Man there are a lot of cool relaxing places to stay in Colorado. Keep the suggestions coming.  

After posting my comment yesterday about next things I want to do, I'm starting to get job offers. Hey I wasn't expecting that. But I like it I like it. Especially in this stinkin economy. On the other hand can you imagine me with a job?  

Sunday, September 22, 2002

100 days no smoking Dave. Ta-dahh! 

Dan Gillmor: Valenti presents Hollywood's side of the technology story. 

Tara Sue got Slashdotted yesterday. I could see the secondary effects, I was linked to from the article that they linked to. They are still the flow machine. Good for Tara Sue. Coble got Slashdotted too. And the link to his bio is still broken.  

What incentivizes Xian? Orgasms, praise and money. Sounds about right to me.  

My next project, Murphy-willing, is to finish the Weblog Outliner tool. It lets you use Radio as an outliner to write for Blogger, Movable Type, Manila and/or Radio, or all at once. Screen shot. I had almost completed the project in June and then Murphy put me in the hospital. That's why I always say "Murphy-willing" and remember His first commandment. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Second commandment. It's even worse than it appears.  

Next problem. I have two free days in Colorado after the Digital Identity conference. Looking for a place to go with scenic beauty, hot tub, fall colors, nice accomodations, not too far from Denver, maybe near a river or a lake but probably near a ski area. Where is that great place for rest really nearby Denver?? 

Howard Greenstein and son pay a visit to the baseball team that's steeped in deep philosophy, the NY Mets. 

10/21/00: "We all must know that the world will go on even if the team we love loses. That's the Mets philosophy, we're steeped in love that's not conditional on defeating the other guys. The Mets in the early 1960s were very futuristic in that way." 

Adam Curry: "Ever since the Osbournes' mega-success in the states (now world-wide) we'd been receiving offers to do a similar show in Europe." 

Ed Cone: "And how was the food?" 

It's interesting to watch Phillip Pearson, a Python programmer, learn how to program in Radio. The two languages are quite close. 

An email from a reader who is offended. Maybe you should just stop reading my site. Or maybe being offended isn't such a bad thing. God knows I find your complaint offensive. What would you be willing to do about that? 

What's next for Dave? 

I've given a lot of thought lately to the question of whether I will return to UserLand full-time at some point in the future. I still don't have a final decision, but I'm leaning towards not going back. It's a tough job even for people with strong bodies, and that's not me, now, and maybe not for quite some time. I haven't been involved in the company since mid-June and it seems to be doing fine. I'd like to try some different things out, perhaps teaching, maybe I'll write a book, travel, spend some time pondering what's next. I'm still not sure what I'll do, but like I said, I'm doing a lot of thinking about this.

Saturday, September 21, 2002

Weblogs and healing, part four. Rod Kratochwill sent me an email after my last essay on the subject, saying that his weblog was helping him process the loss of his wife in a car accident earlier this year. I just read his weblog and got some small sense of his pain. By telling the story in public, by sharing -- even with strangers, it spreads out, and perhaps the sense of alone-ness dissipates. Best wishes Rod, if nothing else, you're being heard. 

99 days no-smoke Dave. Tomorrow is 100. What does it mean? I can smell stuff. Tuesday is the big doctor's appt where I find out how my heart is doing. I go on the treadmill and get an ultrasound and EKG. By then it will have been 100 days since the surgery. Meanwhile after the last couple of weeks, starting with Seybold on Sept 11, I'm sleeping a lot to catch up on my 12 hours per day that I had been missing. I also decided I should go to Denver for Digital ID World. Not speaking, just as an attendee. What a luxury. No work to do, just schmooze and play. 

Seth Russell: "The RSS 2.0 spec just reflects where the market is and where it wants to go. It's simple, uncontrived, and preserves the momentum of RSS. It is truly going to be difficult for a committee to come up with a better spec." Thanks. 

I have a new test version of the channel compiler. If you've been seeing doubles after installing the last version, try this one out and see if the doubles don't stop. They have here, so far. But you have to wait for a variety of channels to update and convert to 2.0 to see the problems. I'm going to keep testing for a couple of days before releasing. Postscript: After three scans, it works great. No doubles. It's guid-aware. Yippee! 

Michael Sippey wants to know what RSS is useful for beyond syndicating and reading news. Answer: nothing. That's what it does. Yes synthetic channels are a good idea. For TV program guides and interfacing with calendars. But if you want to do the Semantic Web, you need a different format. They're still discussing it on the RSS-DEV list. At some point I will write up a Where We Are document, that also explains the last two years of RSS and why it was so confusing. It won't be about blame, we can move beyond that now. Here's the synopsis. RSS stayed pretty constant while we all argued about what it is. We wasted a lot of time. Let's hope that's over now. 

On this day in 1999, Jon Udell became a RSS channel in BYTE. And on this day in 1997 I was reading Microserfs. Did you know they came up with a new application for Lenin? I thought this was especially brilliant. As I said then, "It's not just about Microsoft" and it's not just about Lenin either. 

BBC: "Californian authorities have decided against prosecuting former astronaut Buzz Aldrin after he punched a documentary maker who claimed his moon missions were faked." 

IBM DeveloperWorks: "XML-RPC is the granddaddy of XML Web services." 

Wired: "Crowley set up a website called iCalshare.com, a clearinghouse for sharing calendars created with Apple's new iCal calendaring program, which allows people to publish calendars online." 

Courage on the Web 

Yesterday the weblog community found a peaceful solution to a war that was brewing.

It was the world vs Erin Clerico. There were so many people savaging him, I didn't see anyone looking for a way out of the dispute betw Erin and blogger Dave Johnson. For some reason I got a lot of email about this. I told everyone that as far as I could tell Johnson was being a gentleman, and that even though I'm not a lawyer, it seemed that Erin didn't have much of a case (he was threatening to sue). But I also asked people to stop calling Erin names, and try to see it from his point of view. He's worked hard to build a business that people respect, and he's upset that someone is doing something that may harm his business. He has a valid point, and probably would back down if people would just listen. So that's what I did, I listened, and it worked, they both backed down and peace came about.

Proves a point, sometimes someone has to be strong for there to be peace. When everyone is cowardly except the person being attacked, there's no way out. That's why the logjam over RSS broke. Mark Pilgrim had the courage to get the facts. That was a big deal. Yesterday some of Erin's detractors called him a bully. He's not a bully, he was just scared, but they were bullies. A mob, no better than white men lynching black men. No thinking going on. A blood sport. I am ashamed to be associated in any way with this. Think before you join a mob. Use your mind, and when you see people being cruel, have the guts to say it's wrong.

Bullies have a way of backing down when they feel the presence of just a tiny bit of courage. It takes courage to say "Let's find a way out of this." And that's how you can tell the difference betw the abuser and the abused. One doesn't want a way out, and the other desperately does.

Friday, September 20, 2002

A security hole was closed in Radio Community Server last night. Highly recommended that all RCS installations update asap. 

Here's a feature request cast into the wind, not for anyone in particular. When I post a comment on weblog, as I do more often these days, I'd like to be notified when someone else posts to the same item, or perhaps the same weblog. It would automate something I do manually now. It would require a lot of cooperation to make such a feature work. More ideas here, in a comment thread, of course.  

Introducing the North Carolina Ladies of Liberty. "Their turn-ons are long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners and free-market economies." 

John Robb: "I still think that the only way out of this mess is to force people to pay to communicate with me." 

Thanks to Web standards, now the text on Scoble's weblog is impossible for me to read. This is progress? 

The BBC's Ivan Noble is blogging the treatment of his malignant brain tumor, diagnosed in August. 

Tara Sue: "It's not about music, it's our privacy stupid!" 

Tara, it's not just privacy (although that's important) it's also about protecting private property. When Hollywood hacks our computers, they might destroy my property while they try to protect theirs. What if they destroy a recording I made, that I own the copyright on? Wouldn't that be ironic. I wonder if Michael Eisner would let me come check his system without a search warrant and delete stuff I didn't think he should have? No I didn't so. 

Help Halley get WiFi for her conference in Cupertino. 

Did you know that there are almost 60,000 ex-Apple employees floating around out there? Organizing a reunion is quite a job, it turns out. 

I delayed the release of the new channel compiler I talked about yesterday. I'm seeing some problems I want to look into. It's a pretty delicate piece of code. 

Are you going to Digital ID World in Denver? 

Jason Lefkowitz: "If you asked the average citizen to tell you where important things were happening in American politics today, odds are that not many would point to Guilford County, North Carolina." 

Morning coffee notes 

It's been a while since we had a little pseudo-intimate conversation, also known as Morning Coffee Notes. I write these in the morning, while drinking coffee, of course. At the beginning of a MCN you're getting the mind of a well-rested Dave, but one whose alertness hasn't yet been enhanced. But by the end, you're hearing from a new improved Dave, you might think of him as "Dave Plus" -- and the extra not so secret ingredient is -- you guessed it -- coffee!

First note. Thank heaven for Joel Spolsky. A pundit almost everyone can disagree with. Let's pop the stack on that one. First everyone likes Joel, but he says outrageous things that set my head spinning and make me want to rebut him and of course point to him, which is probably the secret to Joel's high flow.

Yesterday I read on Brent Simmons' personal site that Joel had dissed the Mac again, saying you had to be a hobbyist to develop for it, because you certainly can't make a living selling software for it. Now Windows, there's a platform a developer can profit on, boasts Joel. He quotes Robb Beal saying that venture capitalists run the other way when they hear "Mac" -- but that's too easy to dispense with, they do the same thing when you say "software" or "Windows" (they believe in the power of antitrust), or "Internet" (how times change), and aside from that, these days, who the hell cares what VCs think anyway? They're about as influential as an ex-CEO of General Magic, or a Lisa product manager from the early 80s.

Further, as I said on Brent's site, today's Mac market is ten times the size of the PC market in 1982, the one that made Mitch Kapor a mega-gazillionaire with his hit spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. The Mac market may actually be 100 times the size of that market. Further, it's a lot easier to reach Mac users through free marketing channels, the kinds of channels a sole practitioner like Brent can afford.

Thursday, September 19, 2002

Matt Croyden reviewed tonight's Cato Institute debate in Washington entitled Let Hollywood Hack.  

The SF Chron asks how much we should blame journalists for the dotcom craze.  

Radio Free Blogistan: Reading blog books. 

Sjoerd Visscher started a mail list for support of RSS 2.0.  

I'm having lunch today with a bunch of ex-Apple people at the Computer History Museum at Moffet Field in Mountain View. This year is the 25th anniversary of the founding of Apple. Next year they're going to have a gala to celebrate. I'm encouraging them to include developers in the celebration. They want to use a weblog to coordinate the work. An opportunity for a win-win, and a chance to see some old friends. 

Early this evening, Murphy-willing, we'll release a new channel compiler for Radio and Frontier that is guid-aware, per the evangelism I posted on Monday. Before doing the release, it would be great if a few adventurous Radio users downloaded the part, installed it, and verified that the News Aggregator still works. The cool thing about the new version is that now the aggregator will only show truly new items. In the past it had to guess which items were new. Now it can tell for sure. (But only for 2.0 feeds that support guids.) 

Chilling Effects: "Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you." 

John Robb: "If you had complete control over a browser connected to Radio, what would you add to it that would improve the experience?" 

Brian Buck: "I wanted to start a weblog about my cancer treatment long before I had the guts to actually do it." Brian helped me see that I could use my weblog to get back in the world before my body was ready to. He's an innovator, which really isn't a surprise, I knew Brian before he got sick, and he was an innovator then too. Life doesn't end when you get sick, and for people who are healthy, hearing from people whose bodies are sick can be very fear-evoking. But when there's a screen and a net connection between us, that can create enough distance so that we can communicate. Information can save your life. Weblogs can help disseminate that information. And it's possible that just being in contact with the rest of the world can save lives too. Intuitively I believe that's true. These days when you get heart surgery, they have you take your first walk within 24 hours of the surgery. They want you out of bed asap. Weblogs, in a very real sense, get your mind out of bed, and back in the world. They can help alleviate the endless aloneness that's part of recovery. 

A long time ago I offered to develop for a hot startup called General Magic. I was going to do the work for free. I wanted to explore a new platform. They turned me down, saying they already had enough developers. Yesterday they announced they are shutting down the company. Now no one knows if one developer's software would have made the difference, but it's been known for a long time that exclusive platforms die and inclusive ones have a chance. It's why the Mac worked and Lisa didn't. If you're lucky enough to get a gazillion dollars invested behind your ideas, never say no to a developer. They might have the next VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, PageMaker or Mosaic. 

Eric Vitello: "I highly suggest that we start from scratch, and not worry about backwards compatability." This is exactly the kind of thinking I was writing about in my Discontinuities piece. He goes on to say that developers won't mind, which shows that he understands that there's an issue of the installed base. He's wrong about developers not minding. They do, generally, mind when they have to do work just to stay in place. We like to do work to delight our users and make our product work better. 

The trouble with Jeff Barr and Bill Kearney continues. 

Wednesday, September 18, 2002

Jason Levine: "Did you hear? There's a virus that's causing infected websites to display only XML today." Hehe. 

Fredrik Lundh sent a pointer to his EffNews project to build an RSS news reader for Windows. He says there are some problems that we need to fix on our end before he can support RSS 2.0. I cc'd his email to my namespace rabbis, Tim Bray, Sam Ruby and Sjoerd Visscher. It's great to work with Fredrik again. It was his early support of XML-RPC, in Python, that got the ball rolling.  

Very quietly earlier this morning I removed the caveat from the RSS 2.0 spec. Anxiously awaiting the end of the universe.  

I also removed the caveat from the blogChannel module and added support to the Scripting News feed. 

A copy of the email I sent to Evan Williams, Ben Trott and Jake Savin re support for RSS 2.0 in Weblog tools. 

Economist: Can Don Logan repeat at AOL what he did for Time Inc? 

I posted some thoughts below on Health and the Web. 

I'm testing a new guid-aware service compiler for Radio's aggregator. When I change the text of this item, it should not reappear on the News page in the next scan. This addresses a long-standing feature request, made possible by RSS 2.0. (The change is not yet released. Just testing. Hi Jake.) 

Jeff Barr says I lied about Bill Kearney's message about deathbeds. I don't see how Jeff could possibly know. 

NY Times: "Sun Microsystems plans to throw its weight behind the 'open source' software movement on Wednesday as part of an industry effort to offer an alternative to Microsoft's Windows." 

Last night I got a thoughtful email from Sean Palmer on a way to make RSS 2.0 work for people who want to develop in RDF. While reading it, I took a break to look at last year's archive for this day, and found an essay written by Palmer explaining the Semantic Web. I really appreciate the time and effort he's put into this. It's totally worth seeing if we can all use the same format going forward. If anything his email is too generous to UserLand (but that's a flaw I can easily overlook). RSS must also work for our competitors. Yesterday I sent an email to Ben Trott at Movable Type asking for his support. Later today I'll write to Evan Williams (I think Evan is busier, I could be wrong about that). I've been emailing with Sam Gentile, Brent Simmons and Juri Pakaste, all of whom make aggregators. The goal is to lay a frozen foundation for interop so the market can straighten out and then stabilize. There's a good mix of tools and aggregators. Some are commercial, some are open source. All platforms are covered.  

Health and the Web 

I don't write much about my health because I don't like to dwell on it here. My weblog is one of the few parts of my life that is realtively unaffected by the disease that I have and the recovery from the surgery that I had in June to treat the disease. In the coming years I think we'll find that weblogs are very good for promoting recovery. I'm glad to report it really helps when you're limited physically, to still be able to be part of the world through the Web.

In some of the discourse over the last few days I've heard people say that I've recovered, so now I'm fair game. Well, I don't subscribe to the belief that just because someone writes in public that that makes them a fair target for attack, but in case it's not clear, I am not recovered. I am running at a much slower speed than I was before. I am weak.

I think most of these people are young. Their bodies are strong. They don't see me so they don't know that I'm older than they are, and even if they did see me, they probably wouldn't see the weakness. But it is there.

I want to keep working, but if the choice is between my health and work, health is going to win. If your body is healthy here's a chance for you to learn. Some day it won't be. You may ask other people to cut you some slack because of that, as I am now. I believe that offering a kindness comes back in the form of kindness; and that being cruel comes back as cruelty. So take a moment before posting a flame and ask yourself if you really have to do it. And never make assumptions about the strength of person on the receiving end of your attack. They may not be able to speak up for themselves as I can. And they may not be able to handle it.

On one of the threads a blogger named Stavros said that he wanted to see me take on all comers. I sometimes get the idea that people show up for the flamefests as a form of entertainment. It is not entertaining for me. In one of the threads I asked if people really cared. No one said they did. Now I know some people will attack me for saying this. So be it. I'm going to keep working and creating as long as it makes sense to. But if it gets too heavy I'll stop working altogether, permanently. I'm too good to be wasted as a form of entertainment.

I have a pretty good idea why Jon Postel died at such a young age. And why Douglas Adams did. The pressure of living a creative life is enormous. When that intersects with the Internet the pressure can increase to an unsustainable level. If other people doubt that lives are at stake, I don't.

Tuesday, September 17, 2002

JRobb: "I am proud to announce the launch of Frontier 9." 

Based on a feature request by Mark Pilgrim, I designed my first RSS module today, called blogChannel. It was fun. Scripting News already supports it.  

It feels good to get approval. Thanks Sam. 

Daypop: "It turns out Daypop is out of disk space." 

Don Park: "I am for open source, but I am against wholesale adoption of free software because I believe it harms the health of software industry." 

How to ruin your life in one email. 

Michel Vuijlsteke: "And the hits started rolling in." 

Brent Simmons: "For RSS adoption to continue, stability is important. Developers should not spend their time scrambling to support new specs: they should spend their time building better apps." Exactly.  

Aggie is the first aggregator to support RSS 2.0. 

Mikel Maron: "With this tool, the Radio Community Server can act as a RSS Cache for Radio Userland Aggregators." 

With almost 2.5 million page reads in the last year, Scripting News would not qualify for the small-flow categories in the Online Journalism Awards. Their cutoff is 200,000 visits per month. We did more than that. 

Sean Gallagher: "Detroit is a city that looks like you might expect a city to look after a neutron bomb went off in it; most of the buildings are still standing, but the people are gone." 

The NY Times reports that there's a move to push Steve Case out as chairman of AOL-Time-Warner; and that Charles Simonyi, an early Microsoft employee, has left to start a new software company. 

Discourse in the RSS community has reached new lows, but none of this means that RSS 2.0 will be delayed by even one moment.  

Monday, September 16, 2002

A note to developers of RSS aggregators about a feature in RSS 2.0 that they may want to take advantage of. 

Daniel Brandt: Google's Original Sin. 

USA Today: "We're on the threshold of a whole new system," says Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. "The time where accountants decide what music people hear is coming to an end." 

More discussion of RSS evolution on Blogroots, Loosely Coupled, and Ben Hammersley. 

MacMerc explains RSS from a Mac user's point of view. 

News.Com: "Why does the White House refuse to tell Microsoft to get tough on security?" 

9/7/01: "Since when do lawyers negotiate this way?" 

Sean Gallagher reviews the Courtyard by Marriott in Detroit. Which reminds me that when I stayed in San Francisco last week at Le Hotel Argent, I was given a non-smoking room that stank of smoke. I groaned at the irony. Just a few weeks ago I would have been annoyed at being given a non-smoking room. This time I was (more than a little) annoyed at the utter stench of the room. BTW, 94 days of non-smoking. Seems to be working. On Saturday I didn't get the urge for a cigarette until late morning. Not bad. 

Jeremy Allaire: "Real-time computing is essentially a new, uncharted world." 

News.Com: "Sun Microsystems, backed into a corner by competitors and by economics, is launching new projects in an effort to revitalize its diminished computer-industry leadership." 

Murphy paid a visit to Jenny The Librarian, who we missed dearly, since early August. She explains what happens. Oy. 

Sunday, September 15, 2002

JY Stervinou starts a mail list for Radio users who speak French. 

The Second Open Source Content Management Conference will take place "at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, from Wednesday, 25 September to Friday, 27 September 2002." 

Karlin Lillington: "Just over a year ago my friend Maura lost her beloved sister Anne, one of the Irish 9/11 victims in the Twin Towers." <img src="http://www.sc