Year: 2002

Library Planet:

My new Lindows-based Microtel computer has arrived and I am posting this from it. So far, an excellent oobe.

I’d love to hear how it works out for everyday stuff and I’d also love to hear about general impressions.

A Klog Apart has a great rundown of ways Google can charge for Google News.

John Robb has unleashed a Google search box for weblogs and a Google stock quote macro for Radio.

A moment from a day in the life of Jason Kottke:

While I’m in the shower, I think about what I want to do today. Nothing comes to mind, except for the things I have to do.

 

Loosely Coupled has a great article/blog entry on hosted web services.  Hopefully the hosted web services of today will succeed more than the hosted web-based services of the dot com era.

Sam Ruby on the RSS fray:

And then he talks about parsers which properly handle namespaces as if they are the ones that are broken.

I thererefore must change my opinon.  Where I previously thought that RSS 2.0 suffered from a simple omission, now I must consider RSS 2.0 fundamentally busted.

 

Dave:

Yesterday we tripped over what may be a very serious issue in XML. As with many things related to XML, it’s highly politicized, so I’ll try to cut through that and stick with what we know and hope that people will add data they have where I got things wrong.

Some RSS aggregators choked on Radio’s RSS 2.0 feeds, and Dave is feeling the frustration.  If you’re in the RSS fray, this is a good read.

Slashdot: VNC has a new sponsor, and VNC 3.3.4 has been released.

PHPortal: A zope-like portal system written in PHP.  Version 0.2.4 (a pre-beta) is out.  From Freshmeat:

This release is made under the ZPL 1.0 license. It adds a PHPortal method to restrict PHP variables and functions used within the PHPortal Method Object, a PayPal subscription model and software download option in the Members App, and an a internal security check method. The Document Parser “eregi” has been fixed to allow spaces before the close tag. The new Xpc Method (SecMethPermChk) allows internal security access checks.

 

Sam Gentile and Brian Graf noticed that I’ll be at the Web Services DevCon.  Ingo Rammer will also be there, along with a bunch of other webloggers who will be speaking and attending.  It’s gonna be CRAZY!

Russell Beattie:

I’ve also started seeing a bunch of new blogs and block links that I’ve started adding to my daily readings. I’m going to have to start cutting some of those blogs on the left that only update rarely… I’m only interested in constant flow of information and dedicated (addicted) bloggers!

How long will it take to find out which part of the brain releases what chemical while blogging and aggregating news?

From Ed Cone’s Berman-Coble hearing followup:

But Sohn says that just being invited to the hearings was a sign of progress. “I was pleased they had a consumer advocate,” she told me. “The industry is used to not paying attention and having their way, but these issues have changed. Now you have people calling their representatives because they understand what this means for their own computers.”

ZDNet.com.au on Open Source Content Management Systems:

As the demand for easily maintainable content increases, the Content Management System (CMS) industry continues to grow. Expensive proprietary or custom-built systems continue to rule this domain, but open source initiatives such as Open Source Content Management (OSCOM) are targeting goals, such as interoperability and low implementation cost, that proprietary systems won’t touch.

Wyona is an open source CMS mentioned in the article, as is CMS-list, a mailing list for CMSen. [via Ranchero]

Most. Insane. Use. Of. CSS. EVAR!

Click on a thumbnail of one of the pictures on Steven Champeon’s weblog (he’s on hiatus).  It’ll open to a full-sized image.  Now view source and bow down to the CSS masta. [via metafilter]

Extremetech: A roundup of the *BSD’s. [via Slashdot]

System.Error.Emit:

Thanks to some very understanding, caring and generous individuals, I am going to be able to attend the DevCon after all – and I won’t have to break the bank to do it!  I can’t wait!  I haven’t been this excited about a technical event since Guerrilla COM VII back in 1998.

Sweet!  Another blogger out there that I can’t wait to meet.

Transmorphic on JIRA: “Indeed, its so slick that its easy to forget its a web application!”

Blackboard Version 6 is released. I found this link via Serious Instructional Technology. I have to say that I used a version of blackboard a year or two ago, and it was slow (could have been the school’s servers), buggy, and the UI was painful to use. I’d be curious to see how they’ve improved things since then.

Radio plays nice with aggregators:

“system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeRssFile changed on Fri, 27 Sep 2002 14:44:34 GMT: Drop the xmlns attribute on the rss element. Its presence breaks some parsers. Instead, I’m letting Scripting News bear the brunt here, it’ll retain the xmlns attribute, for the time-being, and shake out the broken parsers. They’ll have a choice of fixing them or not. Note that with or without the xmlns attribute it’s still a valid RSS 2.0 feed.”

Brett Morgan:

“Something all commercial unix sysadmins should do right after installing a box. Install all the gnu command line tools. They actually work as advertised. Rates up there with installing gcc and perl in my mind. Oh, add bash and xemacs while you are at it. ;)”

I was so confused when I first logged into my Sparc box. Everything was so familiar but so different at the same time.

Sunfreeware is also a great site for freeware stuff for Solaris.  The website is painful to the eye, but it’s a good resource.