Year: 2003

Jason Kottke has the big MovableType-related annoucement from ETCon:

Ben, Mena, and Anil announce TypePad:

TypePad is an upcoming hosted service providing powerful tools for creating full-featured weblogs. Built in response to the needs of webloggers, online diarists and writers, TypePad harnesses the power of Six Apart’s popular Movable Type personal publishing system into a turnkey service, suitable for beginners and experts alike.

Think of it with Blog*Spot, except with MT handling the content management bit. Drooooool….

Ben Hammersly also wrote about the announcement for The Guardian.

Everybody needs a weblogging package, even people who program in Ruby (not the intertwingly kind).

Here it is: rb.log 1.0.1:

rb.log is a full-featured weblogger written in Ruby. It features file uploads, comments, blog- rolling, side-bar editing, bookmarklets, the Blogger API, searching, RSS syndication, and archives. It also performs well on slower machines by regenerating static pages after posts are made.

Slashdot doesn’t get it.  It’s not that this is news or anything.  They linked to an interview with Firebird (database) project admin Ann Harrison.  CmdrTaco‘s interpretation:

As always, a small group of users are being real asses about the whole thing. Yay.

Yeah.  They’re pissed off.  They just got their name hijacked by the Mozilla project.  They’ve got name recognition.  If you had asked me what Firebird is three months ago, I would have told you that it was an open source database derived from Borland’s Interbase.

At this point I’d be more likely to sigh loudly and walk away.

Disclaimer: Slashdot has rocked my world over the years.  They’re not perfect; I realize this.  I used to get all of my tech/geek news from Slashdot.  Nowadays I usually read it firsthand or secondhand (from blog linkage) before it is slashdotted.  I also use and love Mozilla and Phoenix.  I just wish that they had done a little bit of reasearch and seen this prominent open source project with the name Firebird before choosing the name.

I’ve noticed that the signal to noise ratio of a few comment feeds that I monitor have been getting out of hand recently.

It’s a shame.

Sam Ruby has been pouring out thoughts on RSS today:

• RSS Namespace Proposal
• RSS: It’s Not Just for Syndication Anymore
• Ghosts of RSS Past

These entries read either as an essay that looks like a series of posts or a series of posts that look like an essay.

Definately check out the comments in these entries.  Lots of stuff is happening there.

The thought of using Photoshop on Linux is quite appealing.

<drool/>

Infoworld notes that Opteron has lots of support from hardware and software vendors.

I’ll be heading up to Baltimore tomorrow morning to attend one day of ISPCon.  I only have the free exhibits pass, but I’ll do my best to report back here tomorrow afternoon/evening.  Hopefully I’ll find some way to run into Scott Mace and/or Doug Kaye.  I’ve been reading both of their blogs for quite some time.

ISPCon also gets props for having a wiki, and a wiki entry for each session.

Linux Magazine via NewsForge:

Why are we so jazzed about this box? Newisys and AMD have managed to fit twin Opteron processors, up to 16 GB of RAM (yes, sixteen gigabytes), an Ultra320 SCSI disk system with 2 drive bays, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, twin Gigabit Ethernet ports, and an integrated systems management card (think web-based Compaq Insight Manager on steroids, running its own dedicated PowerPC embedded Linux machine) all in a 1U rackmount machine. And the thing practically makes no noise and gives off no heat whatsoever.

I’ll take two.

My portfolio sucks (dave diluted his shares), so I need to claim my blog.  Blogshares could really use a stock split rather than just creating new shares.  This brought down my portfolio from well over $1200 to less than $300.

What goes up must come down.

Congrats to Chris Sells, who has taken the red pill.

Microsoft has been on a buying spree lately, and they’ve been investing wisely.

Lockergnome:

Blogger, which was recently acquired by Google, is launching a new version of its interface. Existing users can now create new blogs in the new system, and you will be able to migrate your existing blogs in about a week’s time. The New Blogger web site has more.

Check out the Dano FAQ and Release Notes for more info.

Here’s an informative comment from Mark in Sam Ruby‘s blog, emphasis mine:

Despite the coherent look and feel of my site, it is controlled by a ragtag collection of half a dozen different systems.  I have several separate Movable Type weblogs site up, one for the main weblog, one for the projects, one for the 100.  The photo galleries are generated by a homegrown script.  The Safari CSS hacks pages are generated by another.  The main Safari page is handcoded.  There is no one CMS available that does everything I want to do on my site; I use a best-of-breed approach and glue the pieces together myself.

I recently redesigned my entire site.  I don’t know if you saw the previous version, but it was very minimalist layout, with the big Orb O’ Zen on the side.  No section-specific colored headers, no tabs.  Search box at the very bottom of the page.  About the only thing the designs had in common was the breadcrumbs along the top.

You know how many files I changed during my redesign?  One: my CSS file.  My markup didn’t change at all.  I have 4000 pages of clean HTML markup, generated by half a dozen separate systems, and I didn’t have to touch a single one of them.

If you think tables are simpler, use them.  Enjoy your redesign.

OSNews:

Following the source and binary release of NetBSD 1.6.1, now the ISOs are up and ready for your downloading pleasure. Choose among almost 40 architectures.

I haven’t installed NetBSD on anything recently, though I still have 1.5.x installed on a 486.

I got an email this evening from Mike Cannon-Brookes.  It turns out that he’s moved his blog and I managed to miss it.  That has been corrected.  I’ve subscribed to his new RSS feed and the blogroll will update automatically.

Russ:

I think we may have come back around to the point where anyone can throw up a web site again! Remember back in the mid 90s when anyone could throw up a server and be on the web? Then things got out of hand. Application servers demanded more power, hardware was relatively expensive and hosting centers cost a ton. I remember when I was looking around in 1999 for similar disk space/bandwidth for my multimedia project and it thousands of dollars a month for this type of service. But now, it’s really possible!

I’m currently reading Jeremy‘s three month old MySQL 4.x article from Linux Magazine.

I knew before that 4.x rocked, but now I’m starting to get a better idea of how much it rocks.

Larry O’Brien:

Honestly, in my Big List of Programming Projects, I no longer automatically move mobile applications to the bottom of the list — .NET CF makes them absolutely approachable. I’m convinced the next five years in software will be all about mobility: handhelds, phones, and Tablets.

Mark is fed up with standards again.  This time it’s RSS.

That’s really not supposed to sound absurd, I understand his frustration.  RSS in all of its various forms has baggage.  A lot of baggage.

Someday his trunk will have one of those safety latch things that lets you escape.

Then again, there is no trunk.

Update:

Speaking of RSS, here’s Dave from earlier today:

Mark Nottingham has prepared a draft of a spec for RSS 2.0 suitable for submission to the IETF.

I’ll shrug my shoulders just about as much as Sam.