Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: August 2002

  • John Robb:

    Just to point out the disparity of costs between decentralized publishing and centralized publishing.  Say you have 100,000 people that you want to enable to publish a weblog.  Given that these are weblogs and not simple homepages (like GeoCities) that are published once and forgotten, a couple of things change.  People use the functionality daily, if not several times a day.  They also build massive sites.  Compared to a one or two page “designed” personal home page on the last generations site builders, the user of a weblog system will quickly find themselves publishing sites with hundreds if not thousands of pages.   They get big fast.

    He has a little more to say about p2p/distributed weblogging, and I think he’s on target with what next-gen publishing/weblog systems will have to be in order to succeed.

  • CompactBSD: Roll your own lightweight/embedded OpenBSD-based solution.

  • Bitkeeper: The source managing system of Linus’ choice is thinking about changing its license.

  • Mono 0.15: Judging from the release notes, lots is new here.

  • The R in RSS 1.0: A primer for RSS/RDF.

    The use of RDF in RSS has produced reactions ranging from support for the use of RDF so strong that its proponents can’t envision a sane argument against to a dislike verging on a phobia (often related to onomacoelphobia – the irrational fear of namespaces).

  • Slashdot: shells.open-network.net gets Slashdotted!  I grabbed an account last night after reading the article on deadly.org.  It will be interesting to see how long this lasts.

  • DPReview: Nikon Coolpix 5700.  It looks awesome.  It’s beefy, 5.0 megapixels with a huge zoom on it.  Good stuff.

  • Gnomedex Blogroll: here’s a list of webloggers attending Gnomedex.

  • Stand Up Eight:

    How might we define, as a community, suggested formats for the “tunneling” of weblog posts? For example, I quote Sebastian, who is quoting David…how does someone who looks at my post make sense of the whole concept? I am only now getting used to the disjointed conversations that take place in this medium.

    It’s a tough problem that won’t easily be standardized, IMHO.  Maybe someone will come along with a way that works, though the memetrail idea that I’ve used ([via here -> there -> elsewhere]) seems to do okay but isn’t a solution that just works.

  • Kottke:

    NetNewsWire works just like most email clients with a 3-pane setup: feeds/folders on the left, headlines/subjects lines in the upper right, and the summary/preview in the lower right. But I skim news like I skim weblogs or Google search results, not like I read email. I want the headline and the summary all in one shot…I need more than just the headline to decide if I’m interested in reading the full story and clicking through all the headlines is a bit tedious.

    He also offers a mockup of what such a layout would look like, and I love it.  I’m not running OSX, so I’m not running NNW, but I think this layout could work well in any RSS aggregator.  It’s clean, baby!

    Brent Simmons with the update:

    I intend to add this feature, but I’m not sure yet if it will be Pro-only or if it will appear in the Lite version but after 1.0 ships. Feedback is, of course, welcome.

  • IDG New Zealand: Sun’s release of a Linux server at LinuxWorld in San Francisco last week shouldn’t be seen as a defensive move, says the company’s Asia-Pacific head.

  • Akra: An interesting Java-based massively multiplayer online strategy game.  It is early in development, but has potential.

  • Desktop Fishbowl: Kill the Hello World app for first time Java programmers?  He has a point.

  • Cockeyed Absurdist:

    When I first started saying stuff online, over at MeFi, after about 6 years of roaming the Internet consuming content, I did it basically for the hell of it, just to see what kind of conversation would happen, or to see if I’d be acknowledged at all.

    Then as I got deeper into online writing it sort of precipitated something which took the form of an inferiority complex at first, envy for other’s accomplishments and pursuits. This prompted me to put away some things that I figured were getting in the way of me pursuing more meaningful things(whatever the hell that means), like smoking and drinking, for instance, and try to figure out what my pursuits would be.

    Well take away those distractions and you’re left with ruthless self-examination, my freind, and oftentimes you won’t like what you see. I’ve looked at all my “opinions” and “beliefs.” What are they really? Half-remebered song lyric cliches, postures that seemed cool at the time, imitataions of others, carefully crafted evasions of anything concrete.

    What I see when I strip it all away is….nothing. Not nothing as in worthlessness, nothing as in void. I just feel this utter lack of definition, this emptiness and it scares me.

    This is probably the first time I’ve ever tried to verbalize something I’ve felt most of my life. Do I make sense? I dunno.

  • #include <sleep>

  • TTYLinux: Version 2.4 is out today.  TTYLinux is a minimalistic Linux distribution.  It can run on a few megabytes of disk space.  It is also currently being maintained, something that many other barebones Linux distros are not.

  • JPublish 1.2 Released: It looks like mostly a bugfix.  [via All Things Java]

  • I’m back from California.  It’s been one of those 3am Pacific to midnight Eastern kind of days.

  • Ack!  I can’t take any more information while on vacation!  I’m heading down to LA around 4am tomorrow morning, so I think it’s time to get out the bullet list of stuff to read when I get home:

    I think that’s it before I head out, I’ve still got some RSS backlog that I’ll have to deal with tomorrow.  Take care.

  • mod_blosxom: An Apache module that allows users to blog with blosxom.  It looks like whoever wrote/adapted the module speaks very little English, but I think this is a pretty big thing at 5:30 in the morning.