Day: September 25, 2002

Russ:

But hey, I must say that I’m impressed. After my rant on numeric URLs, there’s been some movement out there in blogland. Woohoo! I won’t claim responsibility for it, but just say that I’m happy to see that URLs are a changin’! And as soon as I can get some of the Journal written, you Radio guys can swap over too!

I’m running radio at a unique URL (http://postneo.com).  It requires slightly more geekiness, a little ftp, and a web provider ($8.95 a month or less).  I do miss out on some of the referral rankings and other cool stuff that sites on Radio Community Servers get, but referrer logs are good enough for me.  I don’t even consider web hosting a cost, because I pay it on a quarterly basis (and promptly forget about it) and I had it before I started this weblog.

I can’t wait to see Journal take shape, though.  I might have to deploy it and play when an alpha or beta is released.

Linux and Main: The best application you’ll never use.  Dennis E. Powell makes a strong case for modern bloatware.  It’s a good read, it makes me miss MultiMate, the first word processing program I ever used on DOS 2.11.  And OS/2 for that matter.

Linux Weekly News goes subscription-based.  Even a publication/website about open-source costs money.

Ed Cone’s latest weblog entry is about hearings for the Berman-Coble bill:

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 9 a.m., Thursday, September 26, (2141 Rayburn House Office Building). The Berman-Coble bill will be discussed. The hearings are open to the press.

As was discussed at the Cato debate, little changes in wording can have profound effects.

Phillip Pearson’s Blogging Ecosystem has passed the 10,000 blog mark.

Yahoo Finance (thanks Jeremy!): Apple is officially open-sourcing rendezvous as well as releasing a new version of Darwin.  Here are some details:

Starting today, developers can download Rendezvous as open source under the Apple Public Source License from http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/rendezvous . Rendezvous is part of a broader open source release today from Apple at http://developer.apple.com/Darwin which includes the Darwin 6.0.1 operating system and additional Open Directory plug-ins. Together, these underscore Apple’s commitment to making core protocols freely available as open standards and open source.

Leo on blogging in school:

One of the Leoville Town Square regulars, BEACHTechie, aka Sam, is a high school student in Virginia Beach, VA. He recently got busted by the school administration for blogging, of all things. They seem to think blogging from school is a violation of their acceptable use policies. Perhaps it is. Sammy will be blogging from home from now on. But it seems to me that instead of discouraging blogging they should encourage each student to create one. After all, most writing classes encourage their students to keep journals, and that’s exactly what a blog is.

If only educators realized how powerful and educational blogs can be.  I’m sure getting 500 words out of a high school student is like pulling teeth.  If students were encouraged to blog, they’d be writing hundeds if not thousands of words a day.

I’m sure blogging in class probably isn’t the best thing in the world, though I’ve done it several times.  The reaction of the school sounds way too harsh though.  From Sam’s blog:

I was in the office again today, balling my eyes out. Lets just say one of the options is to have me expelled from the school. I was gasping for air half the time I was in there. I had to write this affidavit telling them everything I knew about my blog, how long I had been posting from school, who else from my school had a blog and everything. I was crying the entire time. And don’t you dare joke me for crying. I mean, you’d cry too if you had a PERFECT perm. record and then have it screwed up in high school and mess up your chances of getting into the college of your choice.

This can’t be good.

 

Wired News: A great article about accesability, maps, and comp sci majors. [via Mark Pilgrim]

The Smaller Picture: A mindblowing project by Kevan Davis (and he has a blog).  What does the hive think the letter K should look like?  After you’ve contributed on the alphabet, click on a particular letter and look at its animation.  It’s eerie to see some of the letters take shape. [via Kenneth Hunt]

DPReview has the first samples from the Sigma SD9 that I’ve seen.  They look good, though it still ain’t film.

Chris Gulker:

News Aggregator: did you notice I finally decided to play around with the streaming news feature in Dave Winer’s Radio product (we edit www.gulker.com with Radio)?

The bad part is the headlines from other sources dilute the ‘voice’ of a given observer. The good part is that a skillful editor can weave a more convincing presentation from many sources.

Radio really offers everything (actually more than everything – Radio has the source blogs where journalists go for story ideas) that a modern newspaper or broadcast station newsroom offers: all the AP, New York Times, Reuters and other newsfeeds are there, and Radio is considerably easier to use than most proprietary editorial systems.

Radio costs $40… a Web server, the printing press of this millenium, sets you back maybe $1000… a handful of good editors can compete with just about any news outlet on the planet. So how do we pay our good editors… I actually ahve an idea about that… stay tuned…

This sounds so right that I decided to quote the entire article.

Greplaw has an RSS/RDF feed.  This doesn’t appear to be highly advertized (it doesn’t show up on Syndic8 or NewsIsFree, and isn’t on their page).  I think this is the second or third source I have been able to subscribe to that does not readily advertize their RSS feed.  It’s all about applying the postnuke/php-nuke rule (backend.php) and the slashcode rule (sitename.rdf).  Great stuff.

Charles Miller:

“Why don’t we stick it on the AS/400?”

Next time someone tells me Write Once Run Anywhere is pointless, or just a myth, I shall beat them with my clue-stick.

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

<Carlton> Heh, we just got JIRA running on an AS/400.

Scale baby, scale!

Yeah, baby!

Universal Rule points out an article in BusinessWeek about the potential for Apple switching to Intel to run its OS.  For all kinds of reasons, I don’t see this as likely, the number one reason in buried in the article:

It all sounds too easy, and to an extent, it is. The big potential losers if Apple should switch chips would be software developers. They would be forced — perhaps for the second time in two years — to rewrite their programs, this time to make them work with a Pentium-based Mac. That’s no small task — and could be a disaster for the Mac community, since many of its developers are small shops. And without software support, the Mac would truly be dead.

Yep, that’s it.  I’ve been following the OSX thing since before the piublic beta.  From what I can gather, developers were pissed that they had to port their software just to make it work on the new platform.  It cost then tons of programmer-hours just to make their work function correctly, not adding more features or fixing bugs.  If Apple asked all the defvelopers out there to re-port their programs again, even in the next few years, they would probably stage a revolt.

Who wants to buy VA Software?  Jeremy Zawodny ponders this, promped by a post by Ask Bjørn Hansen.  I’m still amazed that VA Software is still around.  I can’t imagine how they can make enough money consulting and selling a proprietary version of SourceForge to offset bandwidth and server chargest.  We’re talking slashdot, freshmeat, newsforge, oh my.  That’s a lot of bandwidth.  A lot of bandwidth.

I suppose it might be cool if one of the big guys picked them up, but I don’t think any big company would see VA Software as an attractive buy.

“Please pass the putty meme.”  Yes, go now, and watch a big ball of silly putty go splat. [via k5]

The pingback spec looks interesting.

Film Gimp deserves Linux app of the day.  It’s like photoshop (or the gimp) for moving stuff.  Tres cool.

Ya know, as of a week ago, I had never actually recieved a Nigerian cry for help in my email box.  Over the past week I’ve been averaging 2-4 a day, often in pairs.

Really interesting.

Sam Ruby hurts my head:

P.S.  This post was entered in Radio, extracted using a batch file via some UserTalk, parsed using Perl, cleaned up by tidy and a C program of my own design, transferred to intertwingly using scp, and then ssh triggers unpacking on the destination site, where a shell script takes over: invokes indexing using Jakarta’s Lucene, and then a python script pings weblogs.com and blo.gs.  The final product is viewable via three different versions of blosxom.

Yup, I’m a sick puppy.

Yes.  Yes you are.  It’s so sick, it’s evil.