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Jim Roepcke: "I have been a customer of Natrificial for a couple of years now. I use The Brain just about every day. I am very disappointed that you intend to use your patents as a barrier to entry for other people who might create competing products."
Jim's comments are interesting, since he's a weblogger, I'm wondering if it would make sense to have an index relating weblogs to products they cover. I didn't know that Jim used The Brain. It would be interesting to get that bit of information recorded in a usable way in the Category Browser in Weblogs.Com.
It might also be interesting to have a weblog that "shadows" each company that is active in patents. This would allow someone who wants the full story on the company to get it. The press release was three levels off the home page on the Natrificial site. Neither Amazon or Geoworks are advertising that Amazon is part-owner of Geoworks. On a shadow site this information would be easy to locate.
There's more we can do than sign petitions and send emails. Information is key. Until this morning I thought that The Brain was a friendly product.
Ask Slashdot, 10/24/99: "I am writing a Linux and PalmPilot clone of a Windows program (The Brain by Natrificial - www.thebrain.com). It has come to my attention that there are patents pending on 'all fundamental aspects of The Brain.' What exactly does this mean for me?"
Inspiration and SemNet may be prior art for The Brain.
Newsweek: The Great Amazon Patent Debate: "Yes, the law, as well as the prevailing corporate ethic, may be on the side of Jeff Bezos and his current course. But Amazon.com has become a globally known brand valued at $21 billion not because of exclusive technology but by its vision, its aggressive focus on customer service... and its embrace of the Internet, which offers an alternative ethic of sharing technology. Who better to break the mold of predatory patent litigation than its celebrated founder?"
In the true spirit of the Internet, Andrew Wooldridge proposes a short list of truly significant web apps.
Pokemon League: "Toy's R Us in San Mateo joins the website today. They play on Saturdays from 9:30am to 11:30am." This site is being run by UserLand's Bob Bierman and his son Alex.
Blogger! Blogger! One of the new features the Blogger folk have in the pipe is Remote Editing. I'm not quite sure what it is, but after some more coffee I'll give it a whirl on my Blogger site.
And, congrats to the Blogger team, esp designer Derek Powazek, for a great redesign of the Blogger site. They've raised the bar on sites for managing Weblogs. As always, an inspiration!
Weblogs pointing to the new remote editing page on Blogger.
Late last night I did a redesign myself. James T. Kirk says once again, "To boldly go where no man has gone before." Jeff Bezos's eyes loom over the landscape. Dorothy is nearby saying "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." My heroes, Mr Ed, Mahatma Gandhi and the Spicy Noodles get ready to defend the honor of the Internet. The Zeldman icons assemble. Mark Cuban reclines, in faux relaxation, not knowing what to do with himself after sucking billions out of the Internet. And Stewart Alsop grins, beneath the shadow of George Bush the Elder, on behalf of all the VCs who seek non-volatile competitive advantages through the legal system.
NY Times: Chairman of Amazon Urges Reduction of Patent Terms. "At the least, Mr. Zittrain said, Mr. Bezos is trying to make the best of a possible image problem. 'He took a P.R. problem and turned it into a P.R. opportunity,' he said."
Luke Tymowski says it very well. "If [Amazon] really respected what Tim had to say, they would say they're not enforcing their patents, apologise for taking advantage of a wacked out PTO, and work publicly to get rid of software patents. Instead they blame the PTO for the mess, and refuse to let go of their half-witted patents."
Like many others I am watching this space.
Press release: Netmarket Group Inc. Issued U.S. Patent for Hagglezone E-Commerce System. "Hosts start off the bidding process close to the manufacturer's suggested retail price, but the consumer can offer any price they want. The Host instantly responds to their offer with a new price -- sometimes the Hosts accept the first low-ball offer. Shoppers can always get better deals by honing their haggle skills through repeat visits."
| | Friday, March 10, 2000 |
DaveNet: Speaking of the Cluetrain.
Doc Searls: Talking Patents. "I hate them, but we all have to start talking about them, because our world is being mined at an accelerating pace."
Where we're at with patents. "The not yet published innovations we developed in 1999 and 2000 are as unobvious as outlining was in the early 80s. They are quite patentable, imho, and they will be valuable patents."
PC Week: Hype aside, WAP has worries. "The Geoworks issue seems to have the WAP Forum worried. One new member said a recent forum meeting in Rome was crowded with lawyers who whispered to forum executives every time the conversation got contentious."
2/16/99: Amazon.Com Purchases Minority Stake in Geoworks. "Amazon.com has invested $5 million in Geoworks common stock, representing approximately a seven percent interest in the company."
SightSound.Com: "The royalty rate for the License is one percent of the total price charged to customers per transaction for the download sale of music or other audio recordings."
3/31-4/1 in Boston: Geek Pride Festival. "Go figure. Go geek!"
Steve Yost wants to start a Charity Banner Portal.
Jacob Levy: "In a previous life, I was part of a team that was trying to get VC money to do a start-up. The VCs made a big deal about having a 'non-volatile competitive advantage' in what we were doing, to assure that we would have the prospective market to ourselves."
Yesterday Mike Murry had trouble reading comments in response to Jeff Bezos's open letter. Me too, works now.
NPR's Elaine Korry reports that the "online retailer Amazon.com recently received a patent on sales links between webpages. If enforced, Amazon would be able collect royalties from online companies that refer sales from one website to another."
Dan Gillmor: "Later Thursday, in a phone interview, [Bezos] defended Amazon's actions and amplified on his patent aims."
Inc: What Business Is Amazon.com Really In? "It's unprofitable, of course, but that's just the superficial answer. The tsunami of red ink, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has long maintained, is part of the plan. On to the deeper question, then: What on earth is the plan?"
Irish Times: Loss-making Amazon turns to bullying. "As the Web grows almost grotesquely commercial, harking back to the community-mindedness that built the Web is at the very least, quixotically admirable. But don't underestimate the power of community."
I found out about the Irish Times editorial from its author Karlin Lillington who sent me a response she received from Amazon PR, which explains a lot. Here's a screen shot of the email.
This email has lessons for lots of people. First to the PR guy at Amazon, Bill Curry, this is not a positive way to deal with the press! Second, to Tim O'Reilly who is cited as supporting Amazon, please consider what you're supporting.
And to all of us who are subject to criticism, even ridicule, myself included, it comes with the territory. As Jean-Louis Gassee used to say, maybe he still does, "As the monkey climbs the tree, more people can see his bottom."
Late in the day, apologies from Jeff Bezos and Bill Curry to Karlin Lillington.
Representing the other school of thought, Christopher Locke, one of the Cluetrain authors, mentions the Bezos-O'Reilly public posts as evidence of their clued-in-ness. But Chris, how would you feel if the art you practiced were subject to the kinds of nonsense rules the USPTO is trying to foist on software developers? Could you have published Cluetrain if Tom Peters had the patent on books that help businesses use technology?
Here's where the Cluetrain guys can get a clue.
Katiesoft "provides partners and portals a super sticky Internet opportunity, backed by patent protected features no one can imitate."
To Scripting News readers, please send me pointers to companies who openly use patents to limit competition.
Another thing to worry about. There's a two year gestation for patents. A harrowing question raised by the Sun people I met with on Wednesday, has Microsoft filed a patent application on XML-RPC technology? Since Microsoft cites me as a supporter of their work, I must find a way to ask this question without provoking the "You Don't Love Us" response from Microsoft.
11:20PM: It's been a remarkable and exhausting day. We did actually ship some new technology today, but I'll wait to explain that until tomorrow.
| | Thursday, March 09, 2000 |
DaveNet: Next week at Esther's.
UserLand.Com members: Will you buy from Amazon?
Amazon.com: An Open Letter from Jeff Bezos. "I also strongly doubt whether our giving up our patents would really, in the end, provide much of a stepping stone to solving the bigger problem."
News.Com: Amazon CEO calls for patent reform. "Amazon's patents have raised the ire of Net advocates because the features the patents would protect have been widely adopted by other companies. Many advocates argue that the features are not only obvious, but Amazon's enforcement of patents for them could harm Net commerce."
AP: Amazon moves to stem patent uproar.
Tim O'Reilly comments on the Bezos letter. "One thing about a call for action in Washington is that it could be seen as just a way of shifting the focus away from Amazon and onto the PTO."
An open letter to Doc Searls.
I got positive emails from Doc and Tim on the Tuesday night patent discussion at Esther's, so I sent an email to Kevin saying let's go ahead. If you're going to be in Phoenix next week, let's get together and talk. I probably will ask the question at the Web Applications panel as well. "Do any of you guys have patents we should know about?"
Kate Adams: "I sent Amazon a brief e-mail this morning saying I'm staying away until I either believe in the patent or some other positive outcome is reached."
Weblogs that point to the Bezos essay.
Steve Yost: Take It Offline XML-RPC Interface. "Take It Offline is written in Perl and lives on a Solaris box. Connected XML-RPC clients include one in San Francisco using VBScript on NT, and another in Paris using Perl on Linux."
Today's new feature for Weblogs.Com is the Recently Updated Weblogs panel on the home page. It shows your favorite weblogs in the order they were last udpated. To add a log to your favorites, click on its checkbox, then click on the Favorite button. Screen shot.
Wired: "Arizona's online voting experiment may have started smoothly, but it's becoming a bumpy ride."
My.UserLand.Com: Iraqi News Update.
USA Today: Could Linux outdo Windows? "What makes Linux different is that it's part of the Internet culture. It's essentially being built by a community," says Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a general manager at IBM, who is heading the Linux movement there.
March 25: Call for templates. "We're getting ready to open another server for free Manila hosting. In reviewing the site, I was asked if there was anything I wanted to change in the initial starter site we create."
MSNBC: The rise and fall of Netscape. "If there痴 a cautionary tale here, it is that you can稚 take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of 'open source,' and have everything magically work out," Zawinski wrote. "Software is hard. The issues aren稚 that simple."
Ken MacLeod: Distributed Whiteboard API.
Tim O'Reilly responds to Amazon patent questions.
Yesterday at a meeting at Sun I heard a harrowing tale about the Microsoft CSS patent, and a patent that IBM owns for calendars displayed on computer screens. For now, it seems that patents are tools that big companies use to squeeze millions of dollars out of other big companies. But big companies use their weight to crush little companies too. Some users ask why they should care. Well, do you want to get all your software (web apps too) from big companies like Microsoft, Sun and IBM? If you do, stay ambivalent about patents. You'll eventually get your wish.
Another thing big companies do is tell harrowing tales to CEOs of small companies. I'm well-practiced at receiving these stories. I tell them my story about buying a sailboat and cruising the Mediterranean, perhaps stopping off to work on pottery every once in a while.
More data from the Sun meeting. Unbeknownst to me, part of Sun has embraced XML-RPC. Unless corporate FUD kicks in, there will be a new server that will make some Frontier users quite happy! (And some Sun users too.)
Attention please: The Last Page of the Internet.
"Enjoy the rest of your life."
| | Wednesday, March 08, 2000 |
The Register: "Could it be that we are seeing a new facet of Microsoft, that there is the realisation that if you have the expertise, you do not have to use the dirty tricks?"
Ken MacLeod has an experimental implementation of SOAP for Perl. The readme is here.
Megnut says she may leave California. And then Garret says they're bringing cheap DSL to Santa Fe. Then I had this idea, let's start a Web commune in Santa Fe, great air, beautiful country, skiing, it's cheap, and they don't have stupid people who want to prevent other people from marrying each other. How childish.
There are Frontier developers in Santa Fe. Should we have a bootcamp, Web Commune, Manilapalooza in Santa Fe this summer?
In response to user feedback we have revised the last paragraph of the agreement for EditThisPage.Com members.
E&P;: Weblogs, From Underground to Mainstream. "Slow corporatization of the concept will probably be fine with many of the thousands of independent Webloggers who pioneered the concept. Romenesko says as Weblogging becomes more widespread among corporations, there's likely to be some resentment from the pioneers who see it as an anti-corporate concept."
FWIW, I think he's got it backwards. Weblogs may become corporate tools, but they're also Trojan Horses. Once a corporation becomes weblog-aware, it stops behaving so much like a corporation and more like part of the Web, where ideas are shared and linked to, even (perish the thought) across corporate boundaries.
New feature on Weblogs.Com this morning. Now there are Yahoo-style checkboxes on each item and buttons that do stuff with the checked items. Not everything is wired in yet. Here's a graphic that explains what's going on.
flashforward2000 conference, March 27-29 in SF.
New site: Patents.EditThisPage.Com.
The XML-DEV list is not working properly. Most of my posts yesterday are not in the archive. They didn't come in email either. If you're on the list and wondering where my posts have been going, I have been wondering about that too.
There are lots of free and reliable listserves. They're fast too, eGroups takes less than a minute to distribute an email, which makes a difference in how much work you can do in a day.
WSJ: Simon & Schuster to release story by Stephen King on the Web only. "The book, a 66-page ghost story titled 'Riding the Bullet,' is one of the first examples of a best-selling author creating a work purely for electronic download. Consumers will be able to buy the book for $2.50 through Web sites run by e-book manufacturers as well as online booksellers such as Amazon.com." Of course I'll buy this, but I won't buy it at Amazon, unless they wise up.
NY Times editorial: A Decisive Day for Front-Runners: "When he was attacked unfairly by the religious right in South Carolina, Mr. McCain returned the fire. That decision to counterattack now looks like a costly tactical mistake that damaged the aura of his campaign, revived old worries about his temperament and unsettled many mainstream Republicans."
I created thumbs of our two presidential candidates, but decided that the pictures without their faces were more interesting.
What got me interested in the candidates' pictures was this picture on the home page of MSNBC showing Gore making a sincere grimace, which looks like an imitation of the sincere grimace that Bill Clinton uses. I'd love to get a peek behind the scenes, how did they teach Gore to do this? The American people are going to love it. Did it require surgery?
Of course it did not require surgery to get George W. Bush to look like his father, but that may not be good tactics! Will they call him Poppy too??
Survey: Is Bush disgusting?
NetDyslexia: Same Horse, Another Photo.
Asparagus in spicy garlic sauce. (Hot!)
| | Tuesday, March 07, 2000 |
NY Times: A Sweep by Gore Assures Nomination; Big Lead for Bush in G.O.P. Delegates. "Al Gore crushed Bill Bradley in state after state tonight, assuring the vice president the Democratic presidential nomination, while Gov. George W. Bush piled up far more Republican delegates than Senator John McCain."
Salon: Who Owns Your DNA? "Genetic research that can save lives is often stymied by biotech companies' greedy patent claims."
Some people may consider this bug a feature. I have not been able to post to the XML-DEV list today, I've tried twice, but haven't gotten through. Here's what I wanted to say.
Nick Sweeney raised the issue of Amazon's patents with Amazon's president on CNBC today.
The UK now has a free Manila hosting service.
XML Magazine interviews Microsoft's John Montgomery on SOAP. "There's nothing hidden here; there are no tricks. But judging by that reaction, Sun was scared. They're realizing that once you have standard XML on the wire, their lock-in that they're trying to get with Java goes away."
I just realized something about Microsoft. To most people, including people at Microsoft, you're either anti-Microsoft or pro-Microsoft. Then thinking about it some more, this isn't just true of Microsoft. It's also true of Apple. And it's also true of Linux. And Open Source. And it's not just about computers either. It's pretty much everywhere. And it's total bullshit.
I re-ran the log analyzer on yesterday's traffic on Subhonker1. 95550 page reads, of which 74320 were non-members.
blackholebrain says about people watching this site, "We are all like greasy mechanics standing around a humming, hot-rodded v-8 engine: hood up and breathing in the fumes saying WOW! YEAH! COOL! And hey, that is cool! But to the non-mechanic we are engine geeks! Crazed and emphatic engine geeks."
This is so true. I've been trying to figure out what the Scripting News for Manila users will be. I'm not the author of that site. Already running at 80,000 miles per hour. If possible, I want to slow down. The real rumbling engine is over on EditThisPage.Com. I figure the next step is teamwork, mergers between logs, or new logs that are edited by groups of authors. We want to make the technology to support this activity, and that's what Scripting News must stay focused on, the technology.
There's now a Scripting News Drinking Game for people going to SXSW. I wonder if Dan Gillmor is going? Did you know that Dan has a Manila site? Hey check this out. Yesterday I heard that Mitch Kapor is on the board of Eazel, the company started by Mike Boich and Andy Hertzfeld. They're doing Open Source software. Excellent!
Evan Williams: "If you or anyone you know has office space in SF you'd like to rent/share with a few Pyradicals, even short term, please let me know. Thanks"
News.Com: Researchers work to eradicate broken hyperlinks. "If a document's URL changes, a search engine could be employed to automatically locate the missing page."
MSNBC: Bradley, McCain hope for upsets. "Voters from Maine to California are casting their ballots in a decisive day for presidential campaigns. More than half the delegates needed to win the Republican and Democratic nominations will be decided, and polls show Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush far ahead in nearly every race."
My.UserLand.Com: The FreeBSD Diary.
Beef, pork, seafood, poultry, rice or spicy noodles?
There are now four sites in the Dogma 2000 category on Weblogs.Com. Even so, there are ten sites in the General category.
Reuters: VeriSign to Buy Network Solutions for $21 Billion.
Network Solutions, or NSI, is the company that operates the master directory for the Internet. When a piece of software, like your web browser, wants to find out where given machine is, it sends over a string like "www.news.com" and it returns back an address, like "204.162.80.142". VeriSign makes software that authenticates documents, making sure you know who created it and when it was last modified. This is an important bit of technology if you want to do legal transactions using the Internet. I want to be able to prove that you signed a contract, and exactly what the contract said when you signed it, without having to print it on paper.
Jacob Levy is having a problem with NSI.
PC Week: AMD first to ship 1GHz processor.
Circle of Learning is a "free, online, open-source university, a center of story-telling, a community of people over the age of 50 learning, communicating, writing about their passions and sharing their opinions with an equal passion."
Montana News Daily reports on a cat wreaking havoc with dogs and birds in downtown Bozeman, including a picture of the cat.
Jon Udell: The Future Of The Programmable Browser. "In principle, XUL looks like a good approach to enabling regular HTML-literate folks (rather than GUI programmers) to create more powerful Web-top interfaces."
| | Monday, March 06, 2000 |
Steve Litt: Outlines, The Do Everything Tool.
Don Box: XML-RPC to SOAP Translator. Woo-Hoo!
I just found out that there's an Apache module for XML-RPC. How is it being used?
More data from log analysis. Last Friday 73,025 out 95,009 page reads on Subhonker1 were not members of the site they were reading. This means they were reading, not writing.
George W. Bush has something he'd like to say to you this evening.
RCFoC: Our Wireless, Wireless World.
Fortune: New Ethics, or No Ethics?
WebReference: RSS Viewer Applet.
osOpinion: Microsoft Owns the Web. "Netscape's poorly-implemented, non-standard features lost out to Microsoft's poorly-implemented, non-standard features."
March 25: "I want to be able to use elements from community sites in my site. I'd like to be able to connect to the shortcuts table in any site, grab a bit of HTML and have it included in my page. Like NetDyslexia's horse. Or the Zeldman icons. Or James Kirk, the newest addition to the global shortcuts."
Important: I want to audio webcast the March 25 meeting.
My.UserLand.Com: JavaScript Tip of the Day.
Meeting with Jeff Cheney on Saturday was a good thing! I learned that he thought that Pike would not run on the Mac. Not true. Pike will run on the Mac, and will have all the features of Pike for Windows. We punted on browser integration in 1.0. It's difficult for C programs on Windows to do in-app HTML rendering. There's no sample code, and we're running out of time for 1.0. Sorry, I wish it weren't so, because when it happens it will be a killer feature. You'll feel like you're in a browser, but it actually will be an editing and scripting environment with a built-in HTTP server. In 1.0, you'll get all the functionality, but no illusion of being in a browser. There will be a layer switch on both platforms.
User Friendly offers "tough love" for Amazon. Hi Jeff!
More "tough love" for Jeff Bezos from Spencer F. Katt.
Stewart Alsop: "I proposed that if we believe that we citizens of the U.S. can't control or regulate Microsoft's behavior as a monopoly, then let's withdraw government protection of the intellectual property making that monopoly possible."
Yesterday's Manila feature addition, easy entering of relative paths, is just the tip of the iceberg of the next Thrilla. The pipe is filling up again! Here we go.
Newsweek: "Muhammad Ali says his greatest bout was the Thrilla in Manila. But his whole life has been one great fight."
Brent Simmons: "We're working on something very cool right now. Grown men will faint. Women will weep. Children will look up from their TV sets. Cats will talk. Squirrels will ride motorcycles. Dogs will invent a new calculus. Roller coasters will run in reverse. Stars will move in closer to the Earth."
| | Sunday, March 05, 2000 |
Manila's new Set Relative Path feature allows you to set the site structure path from the Admin box that appears at the bottom of discussion group pages.
Jakob Nielsen: Profit Maximization vs. User Loyalty.
My experience with open source: "I wanted to shake him. Listen to my words dude, I did it, and you can't even hear me."
NetDyslexia explains why their horse can't talk. Why would he want to? No one listens!
Eric Kidd offers "tough love" for MacBird.
I updated the MacBird home page in response to private feedback from Eric. Now it better explains why it's unique, and how I feel about it and what it can do for non-Mac platforms.
Also note that Steve Zellers has checked in the source to a CVS, SourceForge, and has asked us a fair question that we will respond to.
Log analysis for Subhonker1 for Friday. Two reports, one ranking browsers, another ranking domains. Subhonker1 hosts Manila sites only, EditThisPage.Com and others. 95,000 page reads.
On the Weblogs mail list, Jorn Barger says: "
US culture for men is very much about pretending to be a football-fan kind of guy, and if you get caught in a more tender-hearted enthusiasm you may never hear the end of it."
That reminds me: "A lot of men, including me, don't feel as if we have permission to speak our truth, to say what we see. The barriers seem to be everywhere."
Cafe Boronne in Menlo Park is a European type hangout place smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Next door to one of our best bookstores, Kepler's. A block away from Be's headquarters.
History of Menlo Park. "When the railroad came through in 1863, this station had no name, it was just the end of the line, but it needed a designation."
Cross-post on the SOAP and XML-RPC mail lists. "Then the picture all of a sudden becomes clear. Oooops. We got left behind somehow."
The idled workaholic discussion. What if you had been working all your life to get rich, and then you were? What would you do?
Michael Swaine: More Patent Nonsense. "Since I benefit from that program, I have a moral dilemma to face, or at least I will if Amazon starts suing people over the affiliates patent. I hate moral dilemmas. Sigh." Get over it.
Money must be in the air today. On the March 25 site, Fredrik Lundh asks "Is it just me, or does this 'we're making lots of money so you gotta give us your stuff for free' argument feel a little strange?"
Jacob Savin sent me a pointer to an Escher print that's like my sky in a puddle picture.
Another sky in the puddle picture, only it's the light of my camera's flash reflecting off fat in Won Ton Soup. It looks like there's something fibrous on the surface of the soup. I had to look twice to figure out what I was seeing.
| | Saturday, March 04, 2000 |
It's a spicy noodles kind of day.
April 6 in SF: mozilla.party.
Links for W3C and IETF people: "I promised to put together a page of links of background information on what we're doing at UserLand to build the Two-Way-Web, for people in W3C and IETF who are getting to know us."
Sun's Michael Condry will host a B2BXML BOF at IETF in Adelaide. 5 acronyms!
LWProtocols.org is a "clearinghouse for information about distributed computing architectures that are more structured than telnet command protocols or CGIs but less complex or heavy than CORBA or DCOM."
Dan Gillmor: President gives online privacy some perspective.
Wow. I'm totally glad that former Suck guy Greg Knauss has an EditThisPage.Com site. Sarcastic!
The Suck parody of DaveNet from January 1996.
Eric Soroos: Amazon's Net Patents: "Amazon.com has lots of minority shareholders, and their stock has been falling. In today's legal climate, there's a significant possibly that they will have to defend against minority shareholder lawsuits."
Slashdot discusses last night's O'Reilly post.
Two other angles on the Amazon patent situation. First, a common theme, since Amazon loses money on every sale, boycotting them helps them. (Somehow I think that's too linear for today's economy.) A second angle. If you think standardized Web user interfaces are coming, as I do, Amazon may be digging themselves into a hole. Notice that the other booksellers are reverting to the shopping basket metaphor. Unless the market wholly coalesces around Amazon, they may end up switching to shopping baskets themselves at some point, if the Web is like computers, and if UI standardization catches on as it did with the Mac in the early-mid 80s.
The benefit of UI standardization was that users could use more than one app, a concept that, when translated to the Web, means a user can use more than one Web site. Today's Web has more in common with Hypercard stacks than it does with desktop apps, but the idea of Web applications is still pretty new.
Pictures from XTech on Thursday. Peter Murray-Rust, Simon St Laurent, Tim Bray. Familiar names to people who follow the xml-dev list, xml.com and xmlhack.com. As usual, meeting the people face to face makes all the difference. Peter is very cheerful fellow. Simon is young! (Who knew?) And Tim is pulling back from W3C, encouraging us to work with Apache.Org (no problem) and getting ready to launch his new web application, which of course uses XML, and will do something interesting with weblogs. Excellent!
Blogger pulling ahead of the pack on the Weblogs hotlist.
Out for a walk yesterday, it was so bright, when I saw this puddle I asked "Can the camera can see the sky in it?" Yes it can. Live oaks have gnarly limbs. Soon they will all have leaves. The structure is visible, for now. You like green? We got green.
News.Com: "AMD will try to trump Intel by releasing a 1-GHz Athlon processor on Monday, sources said today, although it's a good bet that Intel will try to move up the release of their one-gig chip to the beginning of the week as well."
NY Times: The Idled Workaholic. "His plan to get rich had never included a plan to be rich. He held a title at Yahoo, but it was mostly just a title, not like the jobs he had before. At the age of 41, he faced the question, What would he do?"
Thanks to Marc Canter for helping Dave Jacobs get his Manila site going.
| | Friday, March 03, 2000 |
I sent this email to the SOAP and XML-RPC mail lists. We have an understanding. I think this will please everyone who's interested in distributed computing based on XML and HTTP. Everyone gets what they want. Some time to soup up SOAP, and we can go forward building apps using XML-RPC, knowing that when the next-level SOAP is ready, our apps will be compatible.
5/23/96: "Embrace & Extend means that Microsoft Word reads WordPerfect files. Excel runs Lotus spreadsheets. It means that Windows runs DOS applications. And Microsoft Internet Explorer emulates Netscape where ever possible."
Tim O'Reilly: My Conversation with Jeff Bezos.
Talk to us on the Web. "O'Reilly made a very strong point in his initial essay. Amazon and all of us have been the beneficiaries of a mountain of free ideas. Amazon's improvements to the Web, while useful and innovative, are tiny little bumps on the mountain, yet they they stand in the way of its growth. That is what Bezos must respond to."
Andrew Wooldridge: Anthem Jr big update. "I have something really cool in store for you today."
WebMonkey: Adding Search to Your Site.
Matthew Rothenberg: "Apple is going to have a tough sell to Macolytes who've stuck with the platform largely thanks to their comfort level with its GUI."
Faisal Jawdat: Follow the Money.
Red Herring: Eazel, the comeback tour.
Salon: "When Priceline sued Mircrosoft's Expedia travel site for patent infringement in October 1999, the Net quaked. Suddenly, patents had teeth, and everyone wanted them. Intellectual property lawyers morphed into patent attorneys."
2/4/00: "Jay Walker, the founder of Priceline.Com, has 60 full-time people working in teams to do nothing more than generate patents. No engineering, no scaling issues, no customer satisfaction requirements (although Walker's company appears to be good at this too), they just a file a claim at various patent offices, and wait for the engineering of the Internet to catch up."
Lance Knobel: Tony Blair in Davos.
Problems on Subhonker1 today, there was about a 1 hour outage while I save-copied the big databases. It's back on the air now. Should be no data loss.
Hey I got an email from TBL re yesterday's piece. He took me up on my offer to buy him dinner. Looks like I'm going to Boston.
More namedropping. At the lunch where Tim O'Reilly got the call from Jeff Bezos, I talked with Dale Dougherty about The O'Reilly Network. I wondered then, and still do, if we can join up with O'Reilly, adding our network of sites to theirs, and vice versa. How would you all feel about being part of what O'Reilly is doing? I think some of our sites would be a natural fit, like Zope Newbies, Qube Quorner and Linux Newbies, as examples.
Hey I made #1 on Bloat this week, sharing it with Jorn, which is quite an honor. To truthfully answer the question that's raised there, secretly I do indeed feel that Time could have made a better choice for Man of the Year.
Survey Results: 73 percent of UserLand.Com members will only buy from Amazon competitors, not Amazon.
Cold Fusion News is a Manila site.
Best wishes to Evan Williams for a speedy recovery from dental surgery. Do I have any advice to offer? Well, this particular thing can only happen once in a lifetime. If his life is anything like mine (Bloat predicts it will) you'll spend many days programming like hell to get ready for some event or another. In the long-term all the marathon programming binges will melt into one, but you'll probably remember the pain of wisdom teeth forever. I sure do. (I still have two teeth that need extraction, and I've been putting it off for 10 years!)
Charles Moore on Apple's Acqua: I Just Want To Get My Work Done. "After playing with it for an hour, he concluded that this new OS is a completely new operating system. 'Nothing that you have learned using a previous Mac OS will be of any use to you whatsoever. It doesn't look like a Mac, it doesn't feel like a Mac, and it certainly doesn't work like a Mac.'" But it does run Mac apps, doesn't it??
Virtual China on Bill Gates: "He is a God without personal charm. A genius capitalist. One of his friends said 'Bill can conquer the world but he can't move anybody's heart.'"
| | Thursday, March 02, 2000 |
DaveNet: The Two-Way-Web.
Mary Mack: "Now Dave wants a patents weblog editor. I should do this. But can I? I've been enamored of the tools Dave's provided, but I'm clumsy in using them. Voice programming is so much easier." Mary asks for help from a Manila expert.
Tim Lundeen: "Making XML-RPC 1.0 a W3C standard would give more support and emphasis to what is already an incredibly useful standard!"
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has a weblog.
XML.com: Cool XUL Provides Cross-Platform UI.
Motley Fool interviews Steve Wozniak.
Wes Felter: Why it's a good idea to go to class.
Jeremy Bowers: Weblog Communities.
NetDyslexia is willing to show us the full picture of their horse if they get 25 votes telling them to do that. I voted in favor of full disclosure.
Another convert to NetDyslexia's Dogma 2000?
Cabinet: "My dad writes software and since this weekend he's been hopping mad about something you did with patting. He keeps saying amazon and there frigging patting!"
Ken MacLeod: "Dave Winer is also a principal developer of and a major proponent of XML-RPC." I have the same relationship to SOAP.
Wish: A lively weblog covering patents on EditThisPage.Com.
We're working with "Moreover.Com" to get an updated news box as a Manila macro containing stories that cover web patents. This will be a sidebar on the patents site. We need an editor, someone who has background either in software or legal issues, preferably both. There's a time committment, you have to be willing to update the site daily, at least when patents are a hot issue.
I've also been thinking about what to do when someone makes a good start at a weblog in an important area, but drops off. Two such areas are WAP and SVG. Both areas require coverage, there are new developments in each every day. I suggest if you are interested in these areas, send an email to the webmaster and ask if they'd be willing to make you a Managing Editor.
And be sure your site is registered at Weblogs.Com, I depend on it to know when sites I follow change, as many other people who run weblogs seem to. (That was the reason for starting the service.)
John Foster has a lot of nice things to say about Mac OS X, Developer Release 3.
Press release: Earthport claims prior art in Amazon patent.
Wired: Another Amazon Patent Furor.
Wired sucks. We didn't get a pointer or a quote in their story. How did they find Danny Goodman's position re Amazon's patents? Maybe Danny called them. It could have happened. And they say Slashdot is working on this, that's great, but we've been doing a better job covering the Amazon patents than Slashdot. They tuned in late. It's OK, eventually they'll want to work with us. I used to be a fan of Wired! Hey I used to work for them. Sheez. My feelings are hurt. I will not give them permission to run the Forrest Gump-like picture of Tim O'Reilly talking with Jeff Bezos.
Welcome to the Manila Zen-garden.
WSJ: Start-up stirred a media frenzy. "Today, Mr. Bowlin痴 company has quietly closed. Its demise illustrates the burden of overnight success, and offers a reminder that Web start-ups don稚, after all, defy the laws of gravity."
I can't tell if kottke is being sarcastic: "More Web theft! Dave's worked hard over the years on a design for Scripting News, and now all these folks (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, among others...) have gone and stolen it from him. Frankly, I'm appalled." The sites he points to are Manila sites. The default template for Manila sites looks a lot like Scripting News. I think he's joking, but sarcasm is hard to pick up in text.
| | Wednesday, March 01, 2000 |
DaveNet: March 25 in Cupertino.
I had an interesting day today at XTech in San Jose. Went to a BOF meeting held by W3C to talk about distributed computing protocols. It looks like Microsoft wants to turn SOAP over to W3C, and it also appears that W3C wants to re-work the whole thing! Wow. Here we go again. Tomorrow I'm giving the morning keynote. I think I'm going to ask for support for XML-RPC and ask that whatever W3C et al come up with be backward-compatible. I have some thinking to do tonight.
I also had lunch with Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at Il Fornaio in San Jose. While we were having lunch Tim got a phone call from Jeff Bezos! They had a long talk. Afterwards Tim said he now understands why Amazon is doing what they're doing. I said I'm looking forward to reading his report.
BTW, I got a picture of Tim O'Reilly talking with Jeff Bezos.
I met Edd Dumbill, who works at XML.COM, does the xmlhack weblog.
Here's the full set of pics from XTech, including three pictures of Don Box, the Microsoft SOAP guys and Eric Prud'hommeaux of W3C.
Web Techniques: Blowing XML Bubbles.
News.Com: Microsoft takes aim at Linux with reworked system. "Intel today said it will use Microsoft's reworked operating system--now called Windows for Express Networks--in a server appliance aimed at helping small businesses network their computers."
News.Com: Palm division hit with patent suit.
Paul Barton-Davis: "As one of the founding programmers at Amazon.com, I was very dismayed to learn of the company's legal attempts to enforce its 1-Click patent."
Danny Goodman: "I want to make very clear that I am not an affiliate with Amazon or any other bookseller. In the book info areas on my Web site, there are links to the pages of several booksellers directly to my titles. None of those links include those 'buried' affiliate codes in the URL."
Interesting! It's possible to use a member profile page on Amazon to state your position on Web patents. I took a screen shot of the page in case Amazon changes its mind.
Jeff Bezos has a member page and a wish list. Let's buy him something nice when he swears off patent abuse.
Even more interesting.. There are lots of comments about patent abuse on the Amazon discussion board. The Web Speaks!
On March 25 we'll have a meeting of people who use Manila, or who develop with Frontier, and their friends, and other people who participate in UserLand.Com.
Manila Newbies: The Manila Tip Sheet.
Last night we installed two optimizations on the server that's running EditThisPage.Com.
Linux Newbies: Understanding the RPM.
Luca Bolognese: XML as a bridge between client and server.
IBM: XML and Scripting in Perl.
Weblogs.Com: "I'm looking for ideas for taglines."
Jodi Mardesich: Why I'm Joining a Startup.
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