Month: August 2002

books.agmweb.ca: Search for book at 7 online bookstores using web-based forms, XML-RPC, or RSS

Gooood morning!  My channelroll is foo bar at the moment, I’ll have to fix it tomorrow when I get back to my machine.  Not a big deal.

Will Apple go Intel? Someone at CNet thinks so. It would be suprising considering the ‘megahertz myth’ campaign and all. The other hot tip in the article is a perdiction of Dell and Sun teaming up.

Then again, maybe they are: Sun and Apple may, perhaps, possibly, be working on a Staroffice port for OSX. When is the next MacWorld, anyway? 🙂

On missing the whole point: I haven’t read Rebecca Blood’s book, nor do I intend to.  I keep hearing that all of the books about weblogs are missing the point.  I used to take it for granted, now I understand.  I have a problem with something: Jargon while describing weblogs.  The whole point of weblogs is allowing many people to distribute their ideas, issues, thoughts, links, and writing.  Using jargon is an elitist cop out.  It’s bullshit.  Weblogs are by their very nature open, why close them down and shrowd them in a cloack of mystery?

I don’t get it.  Via workbench:

In The Weblog Handbook, Rebecca Blood uses a term frequently that I haven’t seen employed before: linktext, the words used to describe and provide context for a link. Example: “Composing linktext has given me practice in thinking through a subject by writing it down.”

The person who appears to have coined and popularized the term is Jorn Barger, publisher of Robot Wisdom. He defines linktext as all of the text used to describe a link, even if some of it is not included in a link, and calls the actual text of a link anchortext.

An interesting observation:

Sign of the times: Sun’s Java Web site, which was redesigned recently, no longer uses applets on any of its well-trafficked pages. The last design featured applets that scrolled Java-related news and presented a directory of user groups, but Sun appears to have come to the same realization as most of the Web: The load time required for the Java virtual machine makes applets a poor choice for popular pages.

DPReview posts a review of Fuji’s FinePix S2.

The MP3 Party: Now officially recognized!

The UK Electoral Commission has agreed to the registration of the MP3 Party, which aims to radically simplify British government and civil administration. The Electoral Commission had initially refused the registration on the belief that the party’s name constituted a trademark violation, Ciaran Buckley writes.

Linux in embedded systems: and all the legal issues that entails.  Rules to code by from the article:

1. Start proprietary software from a clean code base.
2. Use only LGPL libraries.
3. Don’t modify the interface to the Linux kernel.

Gadgets Aplenty: Over 60 of ’em!

Python Cookbook: The making of.

Fuji releases a bunch of digital cameras using the silly new xD-Picture Cards.  Market supersaturated.

Tweak your PC: O’Reilly’s article about how to keep your computer up to date without buying a new one.

Endquote: Trippy auto-linkage.

Jack Bryar signs off his weekly business column on Newsforge.

Information overload.

What do you do when you can’t access your news aggregator? Freak out and
go to Meerkat, I guess.

PHP XML Classes: A project hosted at SourceForge that includes an RSS parser among other things.  It looks like a great toolkit that any XMLing PHP-head could use.

Get your search on: htdig

Cool idea: Recently read radio script.