Month: 2002/09
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2002 September 28
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Pingback and embedded metadata in (X)HTML
More on Pingback vs TrackBack on Hixie's Natural Log. How embarassing - he points to my referrers as a typical list. :) Mine are crap. Look at how Mark Pilgrim handles referrers. Yesterday I was working at making my referrer tracking harvest titles, clean out false links, and collapse redundant backlinks, but I'm far from perfecting that. But, at the same time, I agree: Referrers are not enough. They're one source, the most noise-ridden but the most effortless on the part of the outside contributor. But you can only do so much with almost nothing. :) I think, when it comes down to it, my only issue with Pingback is not a Pingback-specific issue at all: How to harvest machine readable metadata from a web resource. This applies to my referrer links, Pingback, and TrackBack alike. TrackBack has a bit of a solution, with embedded RDF, but that's got its own issues. Ian suggests a few things to me in comments, such as harvesting the title from the HTML title tag (a no brainer), and then harvesting further data from DublinCore-based data in meta tags in the page. I've seen this last convention only once before, in the geographical data consumed by Syndic8.com. Is this a pretty common convention? I've not seen it done much, but the I obviously have not seen everything or a large chunk of anything. :) If this is a known convention, it makes me happy and I think it would answer a question I asked back in May. Update: Duh. Yes, it's a known convention. It's even got an RFC: RFC2731: Encoding Dublin Core Metadata in HTML Simple Google search. Sometimes I can be so daft. :) Now I just have to start using this more - and I wonder why more people aren't using it? Most likely because there's been not much in it for them. [ ... 313 words ... ]
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On RSS and Namespaces
Dave writes on "RSS and Namespaces":... there are some XML parsers that don't properly deal with namespace attributes on the top-level element of a source. Agreed. These parsers are often cheaper to deal with when you know that the format you're expecting doesn't involve namespaces. You trade some flexibility for some ease of development.For these guys, just introducing an xmlns attribute is enough to make them reject the feed. So while they could handle a 0.92 feed, as soon as we introduced the xmlns attribute, they gave up. Yes, because they weren't expecting to be fed something with namespaces, since they'd been designed around v0.92 and family, and had been fed v2.0 with the expectation that it was 100% backward-compatible....Presumably RSS 1.0 doesn't have the same problem we tripped over yesterday with RSS 2.0. So I looked at a few RSS 1.0 feeds, and guess what, they do the same thing we were doing with the 2.0 feeds. ... I conclude that the same broken parsers that didn't like the 2.0 feeds with the xmlns attributes, must also not like the 1.0 feeds. And your conclusion would likely be correct - because those parsers weren't expecting to consume namespace-using XML, and they shouldn't be expecting RSS v1.0. If an application is designed with RSS 1.0 in mind, then the author should be using a namespace-aware parser and correctly handle the namespaces, since that's the nature of the beast. To neglect or mishandle namespaces in consuming RSS 1.0 is a mistake. Admittedly, some applications which apparently consume RSS v1.0 feeds correctly may be broken in this way - this is not unique to RSS v2.0. If they're broken, they need fixing. But that's another story... So, on to the conclusion:If this is true, we can't design using namespaces until: All the parsers are fixed, or Users/content providers expect and accept this kind of breakage (I don't want to be the one delivering that bit of bad news, got burned not only by the users, but by developers too, people generally don't know about this problem, or if they do know are not being responsible with the info). Anyway it looks to me like there's a big problem in the strategy of formats that intend to organize around namespaces. Well, of course, end users should not expect breakage. This is obvious to me. No one really wants that. The big problem I see in the strategy, though, is this: RSS 2.0 claims to be backward-compatible with the 0.9x family, but the addition of namespaces in XML is enough of a fundamental change to break this. I think what Shelly wrote in RSS-DEV is correct: "Namespace support is NOT a trivial change, and will break several technologies, including PHP if namespace support isn't compiled in. This isn't something that can be hacked out." When I originally read about the emergence of something called RSS 2.0, I said "Go man, go!" But I also said, "What's the catch?" Well, this appears to be a catch. But I think it can be worked through. This is not a fundamental problem with namespaces themselves. This is a versioning problem, and a problem with anticipating all the implications the new version brings to the table. This goes for RSS 2.0, as well as RSS 1.0. The first thing is to nail a few things down about version numbers and reverse-compatibility. It's been my experience that, when some thing experiences an increment to its major version number, reverse-compatibility is not guaranteed. So, I would assume that from a v0.94 to a v2.0, things are sufficiently different that using it would require that, indeed, "All the parsers are fixed" to support the new major version. So for the most part, v2.0 follows the v0.94 tradition faithfully, but on this issue it parts ways - and yes, potential consumers of v2.0 feeds will need to adjust from their v0.94 code. Thems the breaks, I've been told, when it comes to major version upgrades. So, again, I don't think that this is a fundamental flaw with RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or namespaces. This is an issue of versioning, understanding the technology's implications, and reverse-compatibility. [ ... 918 words ... ]
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2002 September 27
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Yes, chicks do dig Mac OS X.
Mark Pilgrim seems to have implied that chicks dig Mac OS X. Well.. I certainly can't dispute him. :) [ ... 20 words ... ]
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Packaging tweak to MTCleanHTMLPlugin
Quick update to MTCleanHTMLPlugin: renamed the directory extdir in the tarball to extlib, which is what it should have been for easy drop-in installation. Thanks to John of illuminent.com, whose weblog gets me funny looks at work. :) [ ... 144 words ... ]
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2002 September 26
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MTCleanHTMLPlugin - borrowing a page from LJ, literally.
Tonight, I borrowed LiveJournal's comment filtering code and made it into a MovableType plugin: MTCleanHTMLPlugin After all that ramble about having open system and not having been the victim of an exploit, SamRuby inadvertently revealed one gapingly wide hole for me. Not that he did anything to exploit it - I just realized that a bug he tripped over could be used for more nefarious purposes. So, I closed the hole, and after a bit of quick research went a bit further and made a new MovableType plugin. Borrowing LiveJournal's code yields a filter which strips out most nasty ?JavaScript exploits, and attempts to close tags left lazily open. Hope someone finds a use for it. [ ... 416 words ... ]
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2002 September 25
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Automated Pingback vs Human Talkback - Which is more humane?
I completely disagree with Ray Ozzie ("I'm thinking right now that I'd prefer to stick with human talkback rather than automated pingback"), John Robb ("I don't want pingback, trackback, or refererback."), and Sam Gentile ("Amen to that."). I want as much automated and intervention-free invitation to participation in my blog as I can provide. I want manufactured serendipty to operate here while I'm away or asleep. I want this site to help me discover connections and uncover links, whether by automated agent or by friendly visitor. I want to lower the thresholds to interaction as far as I can. I love it when I've seen a few visitors to my site talk amongst themselves while I was on my drive to work. Of course, I've never been cracked or assaulted by an exploit of my systems. I don't have unwanted stalkers or abusive anti-fans or malicious kids or babbling spammers after me in this space. Perhaps if I did, my systems might not tend toward such openness. I think this is a statement on many things beyond blogs, but that's a post for other days. Maybe some day I'll have these negative elements facing me, and I'll have to revise my systems and their direction to account for them. On the other hand, I've got a naive notion that the openness itself can counteract much of the reason to become closed in the first place. Should the need arise, I think I can come up with some measures to deflect inane and juvenile attacks. As for spammers, I tend to think that their days are numbered anyway - but if they do arrive on my weblog I think I can leverage many of the technologies I use right now with great effectiveness on my email inbox. But, to defuse real frustration behind attacks, I tend to think that more communication, not less, is what's needed. But I'm not sure at all, though, whether or not the threat of abuse is what motivates Ray and John to leave automated discussion channels closed. It's just one motive I've seen discussed before. I think they want more "human" and personal contact. With regards to that: The irony in my life is that, with my lack of much free time, automated agents, aggregators, and weblogs have given me more personal contact with human beings than I might have been able to achieve without them. I'm trying to remember the thread a few months ago between DaveWiner, JonUdell, and others concerning humans with the uncanny ability to connect other people together. This very thing was supposed: That aggregators and weblogs could augment one's ability to act as such a superconnector. In that regard, I consider my agents, aggregators, and weblogs as integral to me as the new and improved pair of glasses I picked up last week. Just as I can't see road signs without my glasses, I can't keep track of people without my agents. ShareAndEnjoy. Update: And happily, Greg Graham, someone I've not met before, sends me an unexpected TrackBack ping and invites me to another blog I've never visited. [ ... 781 words ... ]
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Exodus to JohnCompanies in progress
Okay. Enough's enough - the phpwebhosting server's disk filled up again, and my JohnCompanies server has been idle all this time. I've moved everything over, made a cursory set of tests to see if everything's okay, and flipped the DNS switch. Hopefully, you're seeing this post. Otherwise, you probably saw a test pattern until the DNS wave of mutilation reached your corner of the net. In the mean time, a few random things will likely be broken. I'll be sorting through those in the next week or so. If you feel like letting me know when you find something, I'd be much appreciative. Thanks! [ ... 141 words ... ]
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2002 September 24
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TrackBack strikes back
And of course, Ben of MovableType is not unaware of Pingback:In current implementations of TrackBack, the user sending the ping must take some action: either by selecting the post he wishes to send a TrackBack ping to via a pulldown menu, or by retrieving the ping URL and pasting it into the entry form. And yes, we agree on the point that transparency is the ultimate goal*. But note the emphasis on "current implementations"--there is nothing inherent in TrackBack that would prevent an implementation from making it completely transparent. Interesting. Let's see where he goes with this. He does raise a concern with more automation though:* (I do worry slightly about the impact of content management systems fetching and scanning every external link in an entry to determine if it's ping-able. But that's not really the issue.) Hmm - I suppose if a site gets heavily referred to, that's a double-Slashdot-effect? And this investigative process has the potential to add more overhead to the publishing process. But.. hmm, until I see some convincing ConsideredHarmful arguments, I think the flow producing qualities of this sort of thing are worth it. [ ... 260 words ... ]
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Pingback may one-up TrackBack
I've got some further thoughts on Pingback, provided that my server humors me. David Watson says, "uh, no," citing a horrible experience in actually trying to see the spec in the first place, and a lack of working code. Not to mention that my site was having a seizure last night - not good things to recommend that one check out a new technology. Well, I did manage to see the spec, but haven't tried implementing it yet. (Though it shouldn't be too hard, given a few round tuits.) A few things, in particular that I like about Pingback: URIs are used to specify the source and target of the ping, no other information is involved in setting up the relation (ie. arbitrary IDs, etc). This makes site-wide integration of Pingback drop-dead simple - everything's already identifiable via URI. If one implements Pingback HTTP headers, one can allow non-HTML resources to be pinged. (ie. Ping my FOAF file when you add me to yours, and I might add you to mine. That might be pushing the spec a bit, though.) The XML-RPC server is not tied to any sites it may serve. I could offer one here, and you could point to it from your site, and if I allowed it I could record pings for you as a service. All-in-all, Pingback just seems like a more direct, intentional form of referrer log. One thing I don't like about Pingback, though (and the same for referrer logs): It's just about URIs and links between them. It says nothing much about titles or excerpts or comment bodies. The spec suggests that a Pingback server might retrieve "other data required from the content of Alice's new post," but makes no statement on how this is to happen. I like that TrackBack sets down how to provide a bit more information. I've got a vague idea in my little head, and I think it's something Sam Ruby touched on: ShowReferers, form-submitted comments, TrackBack, and Pingback are all just different on-ramps to inviting open participation in discussion on one's blog. I want to take a shot at implementing Pingback very soon - but I might also try taking a shot at implementing a unified comment system that accepts comments for any URI from any of the aforementioned sources. I'd also like something that scans a blog entry I post for links, then investigate those links for Pingback/TrackBack availability - all to make the system even more automatic. I doubt that it would be very difficult, though I am notoriously naive. On the other hand, I've been on a run of making hard things simple lately. :) But I sense my round tuits slipping away - back to work! [ ... 1108 words ... ]
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2002 September 23
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Pingback one-ups TrackBack
Amongst his heavily medicated rantings, Mark Pilgrim points at something called Pingback. At a cursory glance, it seems to answer all my initial gripes about TrackBack. So, I think I'm going to take more than a cursory glance, and make an implementation in the next few days if I can't find one ready-made. Some initial wishes for Pingback: How about making it two way? Ping a URL via its autodetected Pingback server, and also retrieve a list of pings for that URL from that server. Another idea, add a pub/sub method: I supply a URI to monitor and a URI of my own, and the remote Pingback server will ping me at my URI (via my Pingback server) when the monitored URI gets new pings at the remote URI. Require that the subscription be renewed weekly/daily. Make sense? One way to track conversations. [ ... 144 words ... ]
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2002 September 22
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Per-post comment RSS feeds
After following the thread on Sam Ruby's blog about Dave's comment tracking feature request, I figured I'd try RSS-izing comments on each of my posts. As things seem to have been going lately, I'd underestimated MovableType, and it turned out so much easier than I'd thought. :) I'd had an RSS feed for comments overall on my site, but now I have individual RSS feeds for each post. (Notice the in the comments section now.) The RSS feed is also linked in the head as per RSS autodiscovery discussions. I don't think aggregators are really ready yet for these per-post comment RSS feeds, but the availability of the data gives food for hacking. Being that they're pretty disposable and of interest for a very short time, aggregators will likely need to implement expiry times for feeds, or watch for a period of inactivity before unsubbing. Grouing feeds would be nice too, in case I wanted to round up all my points of weblog discussion participation. I've got a few things of this sort in my AmphetaOutlinesWishList, with which I hope to play with further aggregator ideas. If you use MovableType and you're interested in trying this, check out these two templates: recent_comments_rss.xml.tmpl, for blog-wide comments; and archive_entry.rss.tmpl, for per-post comments. The former template is added as an index template in MovableType, whereas the latter is an archive template. Also, the per-post archive template will need to be added to the list of individual archive templates in the Archiving section of your blog config. You'll want to give it a template for the filename, perhaps something like <$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.rss. At present, I'm publishing in what I think is vaguely RSS 0.92 format. Whether it complies with the spec, I'm not quite sure because I was lazy. I plan to revisit this soon to make it at least comply with RSS 1.0. ShareAndEnjoy. [ ... 681 words ... ]
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2002 September 21
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Running Classic from a disk image?
So I was just reminded by Mike James about this tip on running Classic from a disk image on OS X that I'd previously found via Mark Pilgrim. I think I need to try this the next time I feel like wiping and reinstalling my iBook. I've been meaning to try a different file system under OS X - like, you know, one that's case-sensitive so that something like /usr/bin/HEAD doesn't overwrite /usr/bin/head. That, and I just don't have very much use for Classic anyway, other than for 2 or 3 apps. [ ... 93 words ... ]
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2002 September 20
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FOAF me, FOAF you, FOAF everyone
For the hell of it, I have a FOAF document now: lmo-foaf.rdf. I don't yet completely understand the spec, but via a referrer left by Tanya Rabourn, I found Leigh Dodds' FOAF-a-matic and gave it a shot. Need to do more research. [ ... 51 words ... ]
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I like JohnCompanies servers
Oh, and a quick thing I feel compelled to share: JohnCompanies is the best hosting I've had so far since I started this domain. I have yet to move everything over to it, but I'm so very impressed at the notices I've been getting. There were two brief outages recently, one planned and one not planned, but the important bit is that I received email telling me about them and what happened before I was even aware there was a situation. I like that. Update: Shawn Yeager commented that the outage wasn't really all that brief - 9 hours in fact. So... well, that does suck. Personally, I didn't suffer from it, having yet to completely rely on them. I do, still, enjoy having gotten the email. :) [ ... 291 words ... ]
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The line between man and machine
Saw this on Jon Udell's blog via the #RDFIG chump feed, from Sergey Brin: "I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand." Well, sandro on #rdfig writes "Why am I arguing with a sound-bite?" Why not? :) Here's a counter-sound-bite: Use Newton handwriting recognition, then try Palm's Graffiti and come back and tell me which seemed more worth while. The way I look at it, people have muscle memory and can form habitual patterns and can adapt around interfaces that can become transparent and second nature. That is, if the interface doesn't go too far away from usability. I think Graffiti was a good compromise between machine and human understanding. Let the machine focus with its autistic intensity on the task at hand, and let the human fill in the gaps. This is why I fully expect to see Intelligence Amplification arrive many, many moons before Artificial Intelligence arrives, if ever. I doubt that machines will ever come up far enough to meet man, but man and machine can meet halfway and still have an astonishing relationship. So, one can spend enormous resources trying to make computers understand people (who barely understand themselves), or we can make understandable interfaces and mostly intelligible systems and fudge the rest. [ ... 657 words ... ]
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I'm finally timeshifting radio again
Today's bundle of little discoveries: DSBRTuner has been updated to support AppleScript since last I downloaded it. DSBRTuner has been updated to record to MP3 on disk. MacOSX has a command called osascript with which you can launch AppleScripts (among other things) from a shell. Like perl, osascript has an option -e to run a one-liner from the shell. Given these discoveries, I was able to cobble together a quick pair of scripts with which to schedule recording radio broadcasts to MP3 via cron. Wow. Another little project that became, all of a sudden, so much easier than I thought. I love Unix and OS X. Before this, I'd been looking high and low for all the parts: a scheduler, a sound recorder, an app controller, etc & so forth. Given the source code to DSBRTuner, I was almost about to hack some solutions into it, but I'd never gotten the time. Now, I can happily record and listen to my favorite late Sunday night radio show during the week again! Oh yeah, and the ugly scripts: dsbr_start_recording#!/bin/sh FREQ=$1 MP3_FN="$2-`date "+%Y%m%dT%H%M%S"`.mp3" OSA=/usr/bin/osascript TELL='tell application "DSBRTUNER" to' open /Applications/DSBRTuner.app $OSA -e "$TELL set frequency to $FREQ" $OSA -e "$TELL record to file "$MP3_FN"" dsbr_stop_recording#!/bin/sh OSA=/usr/bin/osascript TELL='tell application "DSBRTUNER" to' open /Applications/DSBRTuner.app $OSA -e "$TELL stop recording" $OSA -e "$TELL quit" [ ... 260 words ... ]
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Personal contact data aggregators?
John Robb writes: "Wouldn't it be interesting to have an RSS variant (new name obviously) for subscribing to personal contact data off of weblogs?" I read that DJ Adams was just playing with FOAF not too long ago, and at the time it made me want to dig into RDF more. But, work got busy and I promptly got distracted away. If anything, though, I could see something like FOAF being really nice as a start for this purpose. Of course, there's vCard, but I think it wouldn't be very hard to convert to it from FOAF. The universality and connectivity that RDF could bring to this seem terribly nice. Throw in periodic auto-refresh, either literally by scheduled re-query, or by pub/sub notification, and you've got a neat auto-updating address book just for starters. [ ... 632 words ... ]
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2002 September 18
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MT-Search + Wiki for K-Logging?
A very interesting side-effect I hadn't thought of yesterday when I integrated MT-Search into my wiki is that every wiki page is a mini-content index to my weblog. Even the really sparse wiki pages where I've only blurbed a sentence or so about a topic - now they have some decent content in their pointers back to the weblog where I mentioned them. One idea that immediately strikes me is that I need this at work. I've got a barely attended-to experiment in journalling started there, using a LiveJournal installation. If I could get a similar search hacked into LJ, or scrap LJ and give everyone a MovableType weblog... we could very easily integrate up-to-date topic indexes into our existing company wiki. For instance, wiki-word-ize a client's name, and create a short wiki topic page for that client. Or, refer to the wiki words belonging to our products. Then, be sure to include those topic strings in any weblog entries you post internally, and those wiki page will pull in your contributions. The cross-threading of this seems great to me. Show me all mutterings about ?ClientAlpha, and then show me all mutterings about our ?InstantWin product. In some cases, a particular weblog post will appear in both. Wow. That's getting very close to what I wanted. [ ... 367 words ... ]
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AmphetaOutlines doomsday prevention update
One more thing, before I go to bed: An AmphetaOutlines update. I'm not sure how many of you are still using the thing, but I've been using it hourly since I embarked upon the experiment. And then, very recently, the thing became insatiable with desire for my CPU and memory. Turns out, in my spiffy new XML channel/item metadata files, I wasn't deleting data associated with old and no longer available items. This resulted in multi-megabyte XML files which AmphetaOutlines happily munched through for each channel to which I'm subscribed. Well, this update now regularly cleanses those files, leaving metadata stored only for those items that appeared in the current update of the channel. So, if AmphetaOutlines has been becoming a dog for you, you might want to give this a shot. Upon the first run, the new code will wipe old data from the files. If your poor, battered machine can't survive another run in the current circumstances, then wipe the contents of data/channels_meta and start again. (But don't wipe your subscriptions or channel data! Just the channels_meta data.) Let me know if this does good things for you. In the meantime, I'm thinking about what I could do by applying these ?BayesianAlgorithms (and those not-quite-so-BayesianAlgorithms) people have been tinkering with for use against spam. What if I could have AmphetaDesk initially sort my news items into ordered buckets of interest, according to my past viewing and scoring behavior? I really need to do some machine learning research. Hell, what if I could go further and have a spider crawl blogrolls, looking for weblogs that seem to match other things I find interesting? Seems promising, though I think I'm still too naive about the subject. Okay. Time for bed. [ ... 783 words ... ]
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TWiki + Automatic MT-Search = WeblogWithWiki
I just discovered and integrated MTSearch into DecafbadWiki by using a TWiki include to pull in a search constructed with the current wiki topic's name. It took all of 15 minutes, including the time to login and download MTSearch to my server. This, along with my MTXmlRpcFilterPlugin, completes a simple but effective automatic loop between blog and wiki. I think this pretty much satisfies my original goal of a WeblogWithWiki. That was so much easier than I'd thought it would be. One of those things I kept thinking "Wouldn't it be nice if?" but kept procrastinating because I thought it'd be so much harder. I'm still amazed that ItJustWorks. [ ... 599 words ... ]
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2002 September 17
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The libraries, they are a shiftin' again
In happier news, I'm very glad to see string of annoyances and disasters along the way. I still think she should've switched to a Mac though. :) [ ... 40 words ... ]
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More on the Monster Mash
I don't really want to add noise to the signal and would really rather just see some work get done, but I'm still disgusted by what Dave is writing:...One of UserLand's competitors Kevin Hemenway, the author of Amphetadesk Competitor? He was originally a customer of yours. Then, just for the fun of it, he made his own implementation of the news aggregation features of your software, and even acknowledged his source of inspiration when he released AmphetaDesk, calling Radio "a wonderful piece of work". AmphetaDesk isn't for sale - it's free and open source. If that makes him a competitor to your selling product, I think you need to work harder or smarter....explains on his weblog how he intends to kill me. Even he says it's too harsh; and it may be a joke, if so, it's not funny. I don't see the humor in my own death, esp at the hands of a person like Hemenway. (He also coined the term Jewgregator, Morbus is over the top on a frequent basis, and sometimes too far over the top. This is a known fact - his sense of humor is obviously dark and a bit off kilter. He also produces good working software, and writes useful articles. But three obvious things: 1) He didn't state any intention to kill you - it's just that it seems his mere presence would be enough to set you a-boil. 2) He referred to Kevin Burton's account of meeting you, which depicts you as someone very easily set a-boil. 3) You're providing an example in support of the account.and calls RSS 2.0 "Hitler" for some reason.) The "some reason" to which you alude is this bit Morbus said in IRC: "I say 'proposed' rather innocently - its more 'shoved down everyone's throat by nazi dictator'... we should code name rss 2.0 'hitler'". There's frustration in there, and his wasn't the only head nodding in the room. Morbus is over the top and says charged things I'd choose not to, but the frustration is real and genuine, and shared by more than one member of the community out here. Yet, you always seem to "take the high road" by focusing on the over-the-top aspect, no matter the degree, ignoring the genuine gripe....Bill Kearney has sent me private email about my deathbed, and what he hopes to teach me there, so I've chosen to filter his mail to a place where I never see it. Referring to private email is cheap - it's your word and his.I tried to come up with a word to describe how I feel about these people, this is what I came up with: monster. What a nasty thing to call potential collaborators and customers. And what a viral, contagious thing, as you later demonstrate with Ben. This doesn't seem very cluetrain-ish....Hemenway has crossed that line. What happens next is stuff that will involve the police. I won't stand for these kinds of threats. What threat was made, and when will you be calling the police? And how seriously will they take you? You said yourself that you knew he wasn't seriously threatening you. What stuff "happens next"?None of this means that RSS 2.0 will be delayed by even one moment. Thus, you avoid having to address the concerns all the "monsters" raise.I thought competition in the software business in the 80s was rough, but this is so much worse. Competition used to require a certain collegiality and professionalism. It's not true today. Anyone who works with Hemenway or Kearney should be aware that these people are nothing less than monsters, who will stoop to any level to get their way. Their perversion may even be the reason they're involved. But the funny thing about all of this is that most of this isn't business - it's hobby. You've got a business, he's got a hobby, yet somehow he's competing with you. I'm not a businessman by any stretch, but this comparison seems very odd. (Hint: Morbus is not acting as a professional in this context. He can correct me if I've mistakenly assumed this.) These are people screwing around, trying things, playing with code. And in order for these people to "get their way", they have to be nice to people and convince them to help out. Otherwise, the cats wander off in search of fatter mice. It becomes apparent rather quickly what sort of people they are from just a short bit of interaction with them. And I've seen them "triangulated" as very nice people.Mr. Hemenway goes by the name Morbus Iff on his weblog, and writes for O'Reilly Associates, and for Ben Hammersley's syndication weblog. Mr. Hammersley is a reporter for the UK Guardian newspaper. Postscript: Ben Hammersley threatened to sue me if I don't remove the previous paragraph. But every statement is true... Specious reasoning, at best. Yes, Mr. Hammersley invited Morbus to write with him. So, you feel free to splash him with the monster paint by association?The Guardian requests an apology. For what? They ran a tainted review. Oh, now we see the reason: He didn't plug your product in his review. Though, he did say in the article, "Did you notice how all those programs are free to use?" Perhaps he should have made that more a focus of the article, but he was writing about free programs. I'm neither in his head, nor in the head of any Guardian editor, but maybe they didn't want the article to become free advertising for a commercial product? Who knows. He didn't mention you. So that makes him a monster?Hammersley is a participant in the debate over the future of syndication technology, yet he wrote a review for the Guardian where that was not disclosed. This is obvious: Many people who write about technology are involved with technology, even helping shape its direction. It's what makes them most qualified to write about it. This argument is starting to sound like politics - from whom did he get his funding? I don't see you complaining when a "participant in the debate" does mention your product in an article.Now, either Hammersley didn't tell them, or they don't care, or British newspapers run ads without saying they're ads. Or maybe they didn't want to run unpaid ads? Okay. I'm done. This has distracted me from work for long enough today. [ ... 2403 words ... ]
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We can be Monsters, just for one day
Dave writes:Discourse in the RSS community has reached new lows. Yes, yes it has, and I feel ill. There's more I'd like to say, but I've got to get to work now. [ ... 32 words ... ]
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2002 September 16
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Trip into BlogWalking
From Kevin Burton:Are these guys serious? Blogwalking? Yup. I'm vaguely serious. At the same time, I think it's funny as hell. Can't speak for anyone else.Do they actually own a Zaurus? Ha! Nope, I said I don't, yet. Duh. :) But, he does.The keyboard is totally unusable. I don't even want to type 'ifconfig' and I couldn't even imagine writing this blog entry on the Zaurus! Hmm. Well, I can't speak to that. A friend of mine is pretty happy with it and hacks perl on his. If anything, that endeavor exercises the keys. Then again, I'm very tolerant of bad interfaces in early stages of an experiment. It's the combo of Linux and Java on a PDA that I'm more interested in. Hell, if the keyboard pisses me off after awhile, I'll implement a Dasher-like UI (and walk into telephone poles), or a dictionary-completing UI, or make it interpret a personal code of taps on the space bar. I used to put up with graffiti, and later FitalyStamp, to post entries to my LiveJournal account. So my first interest, once I have a Zaurus, is to see how difficult it is to get it into the publishing loop of a blog. Then, I want to play with the UI. Actually blogging and walking at the same time, with the present UI, would obviously be comical at best and stupidly tragic at worst. But if it could somehow become streamlined, demand little attention, and become as easy as talking to oneself... I'm reaching here, but I think it would be neat. I also think digital watches are neat. (See: NeatLikeDigitalWatches) [ ... 268 words ... ]
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2002 September 11
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Beware the fink update-all
Ahh, the joys of upgrading Fink for OS 10.2. I started it Monday morning on both my iBook and the dual G4 450 I have at work, and they're both still going at it. [ ... 94 words ... ]
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What Would Murphy Do?
Getting religion, Dave says:Nathan Torkington is a humble servant of our lord, Murphy. I wonder if Dave, or Nathan, or anyone would mind if I used CafePress to make available a set of merchandise based on phrases such as "Praise Murphy", "Murphy Willing", "What Would Murphy Do?", "Murphy Saves", "Have you accepted Murphy as your personal savior?" I might type them all up in a sufficiently imperious gothic font and set up shop. See, although they might get popular, I wouldn't want to do it for the money. In fact, I'd give it away to charity. I just want the merchandise :) [ ... 138 words ... ]
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Blogwalking on a Zaurus in progress?
Neat! I love the blogosphere. Bryce is attempting to implement what I'd babbled about last week: BlogWalking with a Zaurus. I'm still saving my pennies, and I've yet to acquire a Zaurus of my own. So, I'll be watching this experiment eagerly. I don't expect it to be perfect or necessarily go smoothly, but it's a first step. Someone had mentioned that a PDA is inappropriate to host something like MovableType, since it's usually off or easy to lose. Personally, I want to head toward having an easily wearable or pocketable device that contains (or at least has seamless access to) all my personal data, so a PDA seems ideal to me. However, maybe a large server at home behind my cable modem would work better as a personal data sink, with the the PDA being more like a personal data buffer. This was suggested in comments on my previous entry as well, I believe. So, MovableType itself on a PDA and paired with rsync may or may not be nifty in the end. I'd like to try it, and then maybe think about doing something like a BloggerAPI / metaWeblogAPI client that can buffer up entries and fire off the XML-RPC calls at a given sync time. Hmm... more to think about. [ ... 214 words ... ]
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From Amiga to Macintosh
About switching to Mac, Torrez says (among other things):I haven't loved a brand in a while. The last computer brand I had the hots for was the Commodore Amiga, and that was over 12 years ago. It's nice...but weird. My thoughts exactly. My first home computer was a Commodore 64 (if you're curious, you can see a picture of me getting it for Christmas). While I was learning to program on the Apple ][e and the Atari 800, my C=64 was home turf after school. Man, I miss 6502 assembly and screwing with a kernal whose complexities I could mostly encompass in one brain. And then, when the day came that I could afford a new computer.. I saved my pennies and bought an Amiga 1200 (sorry, no picture). That lasted me all through college as friends bought and upgraded (and upgraded) PCs. It wasn't until I was a year or two past graduation, when my poor A1200 was really straining to keep up, that I finally broke down and built a PC. But now, I feel like I'm back full circle, and the PC's days are numbered in my home. The Mac is my new Amiga, and Apple my neo-Commodore. Now I just hope that they don't munge the whole company like Commodore did - I was there on [#amiga](/tag/amiga) on EFNet on the day when they announced the first of many buyouts. I'm not too worried though - Commodore didn't have anyone like Steve Jobs. [ ... 322 words ... ]
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2002 September 07
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Zauri, BlogWalking, Smart Mobs and other oddities
A strange little idea I had on the way home today: Movable Type on a Sharp Zaurus equipped with wireless ethernet? Or maybe Bloxsom if/when it has static publishing? Just use rsync to publish whenever the thing finds itself on a network, wireless or otherwise. Maybe that happens while you're out Warwalking - better yet, maybe that wireless network detector you cobbled together autoblogs what it finds while in your pocket. But, beyond that, I wonder what else having your blog in your pocket might give you? Toss in a GPS unit somehow, maybe some other things like a thermometer device? A compass? Thinking about ways to automatically capture metadata about your present environment. Why? Why not, I'm sure if I thought longer, that stuff would seem useful. And then there's the non-automatic writing you might do: jot down thoughts occuring on the spur of the moment; capture the scene as you sit in the park; report on the scene of an accident - or a disaster? If you have a digital camera, and if both the PDA and camera had bluetooth, integrate the two so that you can easily combine the picture and 1000 words while they're fresh in your mind. But what about the other end of things - aggregation and reading? Install AmphetaDesk along with, maybe, a web cache and spider that proactively slurps down new news items when it's near a firehose net connection. If you're in a town with frequent dips into the bandwidth pool as you wander around, maybe you'll catch another BlogWalker in your referrers, linking to what you just posted. Meet up and have some coffee. Hell, become a smart mob with a few other BlogWalkers. Eh, I think I'm starting to ramble and get carried away, but in between reading VernorVinge and RayKurzweil books lately, I'm in a mood to immanentize the eschaton and tinker my way on into the Singularity. (And, oh yeah, I'm in a pretentiously linky mood. (And could that be a valid mood in these days?)) [ ... 931 words ... ]
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2002 September 06
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Idle horsepower leads to insanity
John Robb says:Damn. I have 95% of my PC's processer available at any given moment. In a year that will probably be 98%, in three years it will be 99%. This model of the Internet is so messed up. The fact that over 90% of the computing horsepower on the Internet sits idle at any given moment is insane (in fact, 98% of my DSL connection is dead too). It is going to change. It has to change.... Exactly. This one of the main reasons I don't think I want to run a "LiveJournal done right, according to me" site. I'd rather help build a decentralized mutant spawn of LJ, Radio, Gnutella, JXTA, and other things I've yet to realize I should be looking at. I really need to get some time this Winter to research, think, write, and tinker. And the thing John says about everyone converting to notebooks is dead on for me. I haven't touched my desktop in ages. My iBook is becoming more and more my primary computing device. When I first got it, I thought it would be a satellite. Instead, all my other computers have become peripherals for it - extra storage, little daemon processes, all serving me via my laptop. Now I just need an excuse to go get myself a ?TiBook :) [ ... 411 words ... ]
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2002 September 05
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Once more into the RSS breach - what's the catch?
Dave says about adding namespaces to RSS v0.94: Could peace possibly be that simple? Could RSS 0.94 be the format everyone agrees to go forward on? If not, how long would a 0.95 take to get in place? I say: Go, man, go! And then, time permitting, weave some nice hooks into Radio's aggregator to let us make Tools that register to handle the intrepretation/display of a namespace's tags. I'd like to play with some more RDF eventually, but I don't know that RSS is the place. The thing that I really like are the namespaces and the possibility to throw plugins into aggregators to handle alien elements. [ ... 108 words ... ]
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RSS "2.0" - What's the catch?
On the hypothetical RSS 2.0, Mark Pilgrim says:A basic RSS 2.0 document is no more complicated to learn (or type by hand) than a basic RSS 0.9x document, and a complex RSS 2.0 document can be just as metadata-rich as a complex RSS 1.0 document. Great - I love it - let's go! If Rael already mocked this up many moons ago, why hasn't it been adopted? What's the catch? I just snatched Mark's RSS 2.0 draft template for MT and tossed it into my config. Try out my 0xDECAFBAD feed in the RSS 2.0 draft format and tell me what part of it burns down your house or frightens the children. [ ... 138 words ... ]
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Further down the LiveJournal spiral
Got an email today from David F. Gallagher with regards to my pondering why LiveJournal seems largely ignored. He pointed me to his new article about LiveJournal in the NY Times: "A Site to Pour Out Emotions, and Just About Anything Else" All in all, it seems a good article for which the right amount of homework had been done. Good exposure for LJ, yay! It also again answers my question in the same way a lot of you who responded to my first post did: It's the culture, stupid. I also just noticed a referrer from over at Radio Free Blogistan that echo much of what I've been thinking: What's interesting is that feature-by-feature, LJ's functionality is comparable to or better than that of most other tools. The difference seems to come more from how the tool tends to be used than from its inherent capabilties. I wonder if having the word "journal" in the name (see also diaryland) tends to promote the more diaristic uses of application? See, I think my problem is this: In a lot of ways, LiveJournal is my old neighborhood. My first successful attempt at semi-sustained online narrative happened there, so much of what I consider a part of the experience comes from LJ. Now, 0xDECAFBAD is my attempt to get a foot into the bigger neighboor out here. But ever since I stepped foot out of LiveJournal, I've been trying to figure out ways to bring things I miss from in there to out here. In one of my quickies from yesterday, I vaguely mentioned maybe launching a LiveJournal-based site whose explicit goal is to be more outward-facing to the blogosphere, and to be more blogish than journal-like. I think a site like this would be a good idea, maybe. But... here are my problems with being the guy to launch that site:I like making and breaking toys, not taking care of and feeding them.Unless you pay me a lot and then don't bother me at all, I don't want to host your junk. :)I've been wanting to see journals & blogs more decentrallized, to avoid the growing pains that LiveJournal has. In short, I've seen what trouble the LiveJournal team have gone through, and I'm not all that interested. Besides, I think that a decentrallized solution could all but erase the maintenance side of things, if everyone's responsible for their own personal servers. Maybe a pipe dream, but it's the only one that I think will eventually work. Hmm.. have to think some more, but must get back to work now. [ ... 428 words ... ]
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Some quickies
Et tu Dave? I'm mostly in catch-up mode on the hubbub surrounding RSS, so I can't say much other than that I like both flavors though I prefer the RDF approach best. But... it's strange reading about UserLand's abandoned trademark application for RSS. Chimera rocks my socks: Mark Pilgrim likes Chimera. Personally, I've been using it as my primary browser for about 5 weeks now, and update to the latest nightly every few days. I had a glitch or two, but it's come light years from when I first started playing with it and it already seems to leave Mozilla-proper in the dust. Caffinated scraping: I've been cobbling together an (X)HTML-to-RSS scraper using what I've learned of Java, XSLT, and XPath lately. I've been tempted to slap together an aggregator of my own, too, but no: AmphetaDesk has not made me itchy enough to do it. The scraper might be of some use to someone though. Strange connectivity urges: I've been having these strange urges lately to start playing with P2P-ish things again and build a collection of rendevous that piggyback on a number of existing infrastructures (ie. IRC, IM, NNTP, email, etc). I want to get back on the path of investigating complete decentralization, or at least some robust thing which lies in between. At the very least, though, I want to start doing some sort of IM-RPCish thing between behind-firewall PCs. And this Jabber server I just installed on my new JohnCompanies system should be nice. (It's at jabber.decafbad.com) Soaking in LiveJournal: Blessed be, I need help: I've convinced them at work to let me pilot a weblog/journal system on our intranet - and I've started by installing the LiveJournal source. I've also installed LJ here on my new server from JohnCompanies, but I'm not quite sure what I want to do with it beyond tweaking and personal hacking. I've been musing at possibly enhancing some bits - particularly with regards to RSS syndication and aggregation, maybe some backlink tracking. Maybe I'll polish the thing up a bit and offer it up as a sister to LJ where the 15-year-olds will not reign and reciprocal connections with the outside world are encouraged and facilitated. Would any of you pay for something like that? This seems pretty ambitious, and it's likely I'll never do it, but hey. And on other fronts: Still in the underworld with Java, trying to get this project dragged past the finish line. Jaguar rocks and I took my girlfriend to the Apple Store opening in Novi, MI; we didn't buy anything, though it was close. There's a second Apple Store opening in my area in Troy, MI; the danger has not passed. And finally, I have succumbed lately to playing Grand Theft Auto 3 and it has affected my driving and given me pedestrian-smacking instincts to subdue while walking around town. That is all. For now. [ ... 591 words ... ]
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2002 September 03
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XML-RPC to NNTP to XML-RPC to ...
Hmm, just read that Charles Nadeau released an XML-RPC to NNTP gateway. I still think it would be neat to have an NNTP to XML-RPC gateway to use as a wonky, distributedish message queue. [ ... 298 words ... ]
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2002 September 01
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Construction on the orbital mind control laser platform has begun
So I took the plunge and snagged a FreeBSD "colocation" account with JohnCompanies, to address my desire for more experimental freedom on a server hosted Somewhere Out There. I may eventually hook up with a few fellow hackers to spread the monthly rent, and I may even consider floating some trial balloon for-pay services - assuming I hack together something I'm presumptious enough to think is worth money. :) But for now, the cost is very affordable for what I get. So, I haven't dumped my current webhost yet, but I'm slowly going about installing services and software up there, including but not limited to: Apache, mod_perl, PHP4, Tomcat, Jabber, INNd, IRCd and whatever else seems like a good idea (whether or not it actually is a good idea). I might even throw a LiveJournal installation up there. And, once I come to my senses, I may pare this list down and disable things until I get around to actually doing real things with them. More soon, I hope. [ ... 489 words ... ]