Month: January 2003

  • Weblogging Best Practices: Updates

    Reverand Jim is thinking about weblogging best practices as they pertain to updating content.  I tend to link out to external pages for longer standalone content and use an Update: to note changes or updates if they occur recently after the post.  If it’s been awhile (> 1 day) I will usually link back to the update in the present.

    My solution sounds like a 1-2-3 hybrid.

  • San Luis Obispo

    Doc Searls stopped in SLO (San Luis Obispo for those who have never been there) while on a road trip back to Santa Barbara.  The funny thing is that I stopped in Santa Barbara for lunch while driving between LA and SLO.  I don’t think that I knew that Doc lived in Santa Barbara at the time.  I also didn’t try to search out net access in coffee shops at the time.

    Here’s an entry from right before the trip.  I had been blogging with Radio for a little more than a month at that point, though I started Livejournaling in September 2001.

  • Revocable Open Source Licenses

    Nathan Myers thinks out loud about the revocable nature of open source licenses:

    A quick scan through the Free Software licenses I have immediately on hand showed one thing in common: none say the rights are waived perpetually or irrevocably. On the face of it, it seems, I could release a program under the GPL, and then announce five years later that it and all derived works are under my private control again.

    The rest of the article goes into ways to resolve this sticky issue.  IANAL so most of this stuff flies over my head.

  • WebCore in NetNewsWire?

    Brent is looking into embedding WebCore into NetNewsWire:

    WebCore is the framework developers can use to add Safari’s HTML renderer to their applications. There’s a pretty good chance NetNewsWire will use this. Step one for me will be to get it working with a simple test app.

    I really wish my old 8500 (hotrodded with a 400MHz G4 card) were able to (easily) run OSX.  I’m missing out on all this cool stuff.

  • Red Hat 8.1 In April

    LinuxToday confirms what I suspected: Hat 8.1 is due in April:

    Linux software vendor Red Hat plans to fortify its desktop Linux lineup by shipping Red Hat Linux 8.1 in April, a 32-bit technical workstation this quarter and a full-fledged corporate desktop in the next six to 12 months, the company confirmed.

    Today’s Linux Celebrity Deathmatch: UnitedLinux vs. Red Hat Corporate Linux.

  • New Bill Kearney Weblog

    Heads up: Bill Kearney has set up a new weblog.  His new blog also has an RSS feed.  RSS subscribed-a-go-go.

  • Weblog APIs

    Go read Sam Ruby’s post about weblog APIs:

    Why do I say it is dramatically simpler?  Let’s propose a challenge.  In the spirit of the BDG to SOAP 1.1 which exposed all of the machinery of SOAP, I’d like to request that proponents of either the Blogger API or the MetaWeblog API produce a similar BDG for their protocols, and would like to request that it include the first item from the Radio Weblog Post Module example.  I’ll start by providing a sample for RESTLogPost.

    Any takers?

    Has anybody implemented any clients or servers with the Blogger2 API?  I read the specs and the arguments back and forth after the specs were released, but I’m not quite sure if things were resolved.

    I personally like (and have more experience with) the metaWeblogAPI since it has support for stuff like titles and anything else you want to drag out from the RSS2.0 spec.

    So what else do you have up your sleeve, Sam?  Your RestLogPost sample leaves me wanting more.  🙂

  • SPOT

    Thanks to Steve “Furrygoat” Makofsky for a pointer to Microsoft’s press release on expensive smart watches with SPOT (Smart Personal Object Technology).  I’d love an RSS aggregator on my wrist, that would be geeky-cool.  It’s interesting that Fossil, one of the initial manufacturers, is hedging its bets: it released a palm-based wrist PDA just a few months ago.

    If you go to their Tech page, you can see Microsoft technology on the left and Palm technology on the right.  Freaky.

  • Microsoft .NET Connected

    Phil Wainewright:

    How long before some version of Linux earns the “Microsoft .NET Connected” badge? That day may be closer than anyone expects — I predict it will be in the first half of 2004.

    Bold prediction.  I’d love to see it happen.

  • Blogger Pro Does Not Play Nice With Safari

    Dave Hyatt on Safari:

    Blogger, if you’re listening, you can treat us just like Mozilla. We will work. What do you think I used to post blogs on the Mac before you started blocking it? 🙂

  • OutBlog 0.1 Released

    Ingo has released OutBlog:

    Let’s spread the word: Version 0.1 of my highly anticipated (well, at least by the two people who read this weblog) Outlook and Exchange 2000 powered weblog toolkit OutBlog has been released. More information (and a sample blog & download package including source code) is available at http://OutBlog.IngoRammer.com.

    Amazing, Ingo.  Wickedly amazing.

  • Dave Winer @ Harvard

    Dave Winer:

    It’s true, it’s true. I’ve been offered a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and have, of course, accepted.

    Hmm, I see a special weblog edition of Celebrity Deathmatch coming on: Winer vs. Lessig (or Harvard vs. Stanford).

  • Vulcan Mini-PC

    Erik pointed to a blurb at Gizmodo about the Mini-PC:

    Mini-PCA new half-size laptop that weighs less than a pound and is just one inch thick from Vulcan, a company owned by that other Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen. The Mini-PC will run Windows XP, and have integrated WiFi, a 5.8-inch screen, a 20GB hard drive, and a built-in mini-keyboard.

    I’m enthusiasticly RSS-subscribed, by the way.

  • Weblogger Manifesto

    You might notice a difference in tone between posts done at work and those done at home or on the road.  Most of my posts right now between 10am and 7pm are done at work from a computer on the sales counter of a mom and pop camera store.  It pays the bills and I enjoy most of it (except passport and immigration pictures).

    I have recently noticed that posts done at work have a rather urgent (curt?) tone to them.  I type them quite quickly between customers or during slow periods.  I try to find and correct typos, but this weblog is 100% spellcheck free.  I’m not exactly happy about it, but my blogging on the go doesn’t afford me a spell checker.  (Mental note: find a light weight BloggerAPI/MetaweblogAPI client with a spell checker)

    My posts from home or out and about after work tend to be composed with a little more care.  Project updates and random hackery tend to happen at home.  I tend to roll out of bend and fire up my aggregator in the morning.  My first volley of posts tends to be pre-caffeine.  I usually fix typos that I catch (my built-in spell checker sucks though) and occasionally enrich a previous post with an update or correction.  I try my best to make an update or change obvious, but every once in awhile they might not be.  Every once in awhile I will tweak a post a few times just after publishing, but that probably won’t impact any readers.

    As a pseudo-resolution, I’ve been trying to write more original content for the blog this year.  I recognize that I’m a better linker than writer, but I have definately enjoyed writing a few longer mini-pieces so far this year.  They’re still flying low under the radar, but as I write more, the quality of my work will improve. Perhaps I’ll jog another weblogger’s brain and they’ll take it to the next level.  That would be awesome.

    I’m a big picture guy and I take pride in broadening the big picture of others.

  • Minolta-Konica Merger Update

    I spoke with my Konica sales rep this afternoon and have some more information on the merger.  Aparently Konica did not notify any of its reps or employees before announcing the merger.  Speculation within the company is that Minolta with retain the camera brand while the Konica brand will focus on film, paper, chemisty, and digital supplies.

    It looks like the merger has more to do with office and business machines with the photo side as an afterthought.

    CNN reports:

    The companies aim to cut 4,000 jobs by 2005, from their combined work force of 38,500. The companies also hope to trim 50 billion yen ($418 million) in costs a year.

    My sales rep tells me that Konica has a slight majority in the merger, which is most likely a very good thing.  Traditionally, Konica has been a much more responsive company on many levels including repairs, retail, and to the dealer.  Their engineering is well done, their cameras outperform and outlast some of the bigger manufacturers.  They don’t have a vast line of digital cameras, but the ones they make (except for that crappy 2 megapixel one) are feature packed and of high quality.

    Unfortunately I don’t share the same enthusiasm for Minolta.  I’ve never seen a sales rep from Minolta (and I’ve been working photo retail for seven years now).  Their products are good but not great.  They should discontinue their line of SLRs, as nobody takes them seriously.  They are quite bad about discontinuing parts for their cameras.  I will say that I’m completely satisfied with my Minolta Autometer IVF, which I’ve been using since I was a kid.

    I really hope that the Konica Way prevails.

    Disclaimer: I don’t think any NDAs were violated in my conversation this afternoon, but my apologies if there were.

  • News Aggregators

    Ernie the Attorney:

    My News Aggregator is like CNN, except I have my own selection of reporters out there in the field.  Adam Curry reports from the Netherlands, Chris Cloud is my travel advisor, and Jenny is my librarian.  I have lot’s of other sources.  The subscriptions are cheap.  Why not get yourself a news aggregator?  You deserve it.  It’s changed my life even more than TiVo.

    For what it’s wroth, Ernie, Greplaw, and Lessig are my dream team of lawyers.  I scan 245 news sources [OPML] entirely too often.

  • WS-Reliability

    WebServices.Org covers yet another spec for the WS- bucket: WS-Reliability:

    The purpose of WS-Reliability is to address reliable messaging requirements, which become critical, for example, when using Web Services in B2B applications. SOAP [SOAP1.1] over HTTP [RFC2616] is not sufficient when an application-level messaging protocol must also address reliability and security. While security is getting traction in the development of Web Services standards, reliability is not. This specification is intended as an initial proposal for defining reliability in the conte xt of current Web Services standards. The specification borrows from previous work in messaging and transport protocols, e.g., SOAP, and the ebXML Message Service [ebMS]. It proposes appropriate modifications to apply this work to Web Services.

    Grab the spec from your choice of vendors.

  • Creating a Web Application with Ant and Tomcat 4

    Paul Wood has put together an article for O’Reillynet that looks like it may be that perfect length: long enough and in depth enough without being too much for an online article.  Here’s the lead in:

    I have decided to use Tomcat 4 Servlet/JSP Container technologies to implement a Web application. This still leaves many options, and choosing between the various available technologies is not easy. For this article, I have chosen to keep it simple and use Java Server Pages (JSPs) in combination with Java classes.

  • Rick’s OPML Directory

    Rick (codemonkey that he is) sent me an email in response to my post titled “Open Source OPML Directories?”  He has a working OPML directory renderer on his site that is powered by PHP, Javascript, JSRS and is backed by a database.

    It also renders with some pretty wicked DHTML.  Maybe if we poke him enough he might release his code under a CYA open source license of some sort.

  • (Airport Extreme)^2

    Wi-Fi Networking News has some more dirt on Apple’s Airport Extreme (802.11g).  Glenn Fleishman has deduced that the chip manufacturer is Boradcom.  Hopefully the base station firmware will be upgradable to interop with other chipsets.  I like this part:

    The new Apple Extreme Base Station supports access point and bridge mode simultaneously. Deploying several base stations is now a simple solution for smaller networks that need more client access is different places.

    I also like the option for adding an external antenna.  That’s what I’d do.