Last night's BlogBowl was a resounding success. About a dozen people showed up for three solid hours of bowling, drinks, and great conversation. Brig and I even talked about organizing a San Francisco BlowBowl during my next trip to Bay Area.
First BlogBowl Bowling Get-Together: Tonight at 9:00 P.M. in New York City. Come join us!
Wow. I wonder if this is true, or merely tabloid journalism.
Controversy: Should Public Policy Support Open-Source Software? This debate is of special interest if the DOJ forces Microsoft to open source Internet Explorer, which may happen.
Mo Nickels: Keith's Hobbies. These Mo Nickels stories are amazing. Three-Card Monty. Kitty's Social Work Frustrations. Apartments. Pick-Pockets. Freelance. Wow. Read 'em all, folks.
So, reading today's Salon.com (viewed by date) I skipped right to the technology section, spotted the article about Microsoft, clicked, and started reading about Elephants. I was about two paragraphs into the story before I realized that the "elephant" wasn't Microsoft and I was reading the wrong story. Hmmm....I think Salon still needs to work out their production bugs.
Kragen Sitaker on the philosophy behind open source and free software.
A former Boo.com employee recounts some of the challenges they faced and points out that the biggest failure was the lack of understanding regarding front-end (client-side) technology being used. [via Metafilter]
Jeffrey Zeldman is writing a computer book. [As it happens, so am I! More details to follow soon.] I feel as overwhelmed as Jeffrey does. There are many things going on in my professional life right now that I can't talk about. All will be revealed soon.
Deepleap has launched deepleap.org, a site that will serve as the community hub for Deepleap developers. Does this mean that they're going to turn Deepleap into an open source project? That would be very cool, indeed.
ActiveState just announced that they're planning on integrating Perl and Python into Mozilla to create a cross-platform development framework.
O'ReillyNet: Why Our Dependency on Microsoft Makes Us Susceptible. Statistics don't lie. [via rc3.org]
Ars Technica has a really long, in-depth review of Mac OS X DP4. For those not technically-oriented, you can skip right to page six, which talks more about the UI issues and problems with Aqua. Overall, DP4 is looking pretty good. If Apple can solve the outstanding issues repeatedly being brought up, and make the OS more user-friendly for experienced users, it stands a chance at being the model for all OS development for the next 20 years, just as the original Mac OS GUI has been imitated by almost every OS on the market today.
I can always tell when I'm doing research, as I suddenly find an extraordinary amount of PDF documents saved to my desktop.
I'm sorry, but Big Mamma's House looks like a complete rip-off of Mrs. Doubtfire. Why can't Hollywood come up with original ideas anymore?
The boo.com team is available for new projects, as referenced at postboo.com -- Flash 4 required (no surprise). [via 2 Things at Once]
Adobe released Livemotion yesterday. Livemotion is a program that allows you to create Flash files using the familiar Adobe toolbox.
Using HTML For Early UI Prototyping.
Understanding JavaServer Pages Model 2 architecture
USA Today's understatement of the year: "Microsoft programs vulnerable to viruses." Gee, thanks for letting us know, USA Today.
QuarkXPress 5 due out by end of year. New features includes layers (finally!), export-to-web (eek!), and XML (cool!). [via Splorp]
Damien is praying that DSL gets installed tomorrow. Worst case scenario: he sits around the apartment all day due a Bell Atlantic no-show. At $150 an hour, that's an expensive mistake for BA to make.
The salon.com redesign has gone live. Initial thoughts: what happened to 640x480? Why so much wasted space? It seems like they're not using their white space very appropriately.
Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Pirated MP3s.
Please. Please make it stop. Somebody please extract the marketing hacks from the UI process. Please? [Entry edited 6/9/2000].
Amway cuts jobs, blames web. Perhaps it's the simple fact that people are becoming more and more wary of multi-level marketing. What a scam.
Microsoft: Fitts's UI Law Applied to the Web
Cardhouse: Comma-Separated Values/Tab-Separated Values Considered Harmful: A Case For Bar-Separated Values. [Note: A "bar" is also called a "pipe".]
A List Apart: Fragments of Time
O'ReillyNet: Mozilla as an Application Virtual Machine
O'ReillyNet: How to Change Your Look With Mozilla Skins
Metadata Creation -- Down and Dirty
Ron over a Leatheregg has an interesting look at line text lengths. While his observations are interesting, he's missing the whole point of fixed table widths vs. expandable table widths. Sites that allow body copy to expand with the browser's window size offer much more control to the end user than sites that contain body copy in fixed width table columns. By comparing column widths of online sites with column widths of newspapers, you make the mistake of treating the web like print design. While I agree that large blocks of text with long line lengths are hard to read, I think a lot of these problems can be solved by breaking the text up into smaller paragraphs. Which is why this paragraph stops here.
A reader wrote in saying that "you've made the content submit to the medium which is clearly backwards" and then proceeds to explain that the point of the medium is to convey the content. This is why books are printed in sensible sizes with readable typefaces. This is why people use the Verdana font so much in their web sites. What it boils down to is that you should use the line length that best works with your layout. Clumping a bunch of different sites with widely varying layouts together and comparing their line lengths isn't a very effective study. Lastly, I realize that CamWorld's line lengths get a bit ridiculous at resolutions higher than 800 x 600 . Unfortunately, I don't have an immediate solution to this problem, except to ask my readers to make their browser window smaller.
PurpleYogi is another IE-only personal privacy invasion tool masquerading as a helpful service. Ugh.
Today's reel.com has a picture of Woody Allen's head on a dinosaur's body. Truly bizarre...
Boy, user forums are often the best places to learn cool new tips and tricks. Never underestimate the power of the word "free". You think AOL is on to them yet?
For and Against Microsoft. [found at Glish]
Pssst, wanna buy a cow? [from Metafilter]
Seen in the June 2000 issue of LinuxJournal:
Windows: Where do you want to go today? MacOS: Where do you want to be tomorrow? Linux: Are you coming or what?
Unfortunately, I was too busy this week to participate in the NPR weblog interview that features Evan, Brad, Rebecca and others. It's a great interview. Have a listen. Great job, all around.
Had dinner last night with Elan. Lots of great conversation and whatnot.
In-depth review of Mac OS X DP4. It's looking pretty good!
Nope, I'm not surprised. The site was just too hard to use. E-commerce is about convenience and a good customer experience, not flashy graphics and technology. Don't get me wrong, I think the graphic design is very nice and well thought out. It's the over-use of technology that killed this site.
The Invisible Man Hand Puppet! Amaze your friends! Pick up chicks! Buy one today!
The Shrine of the Great Monkey. [found at Infohazard]
Styrofoam Man! [from Tara Calishain]
Verisign: Applied Hacking Training. It's interesting to see such courses being offered.
I'm not usually one to like Europop/Powerpop but I'm really liking this band called Headboard I found at MP3.com. Especially the songs called "See You Around" and "Tell Me How".
How to Lose a Fight So The Other Guy Goes to Jail. [via Jason Fried]
Chris Gulker on Microsoft.
Slashdot: Zeldman Bites Back [Design community commentary]
Quote of the Day: "It's not necessary to be anti-Microsoft if you consider yourself an Open Source advocate." This door swings both ways, too.
Why would you rent software when so much of it available for free? Unless, of course, this means that Microsoft is going to open source Windows and charge a monthly service instead. Hmmm.... OK, so say Microsoft moves towards a services-based revenue model, and retains their OS/browser monopoly. It's bad enough that we have to deal with the other service-oriented monopolies already (cable, electric, etc.), but to have to deal with Microsoft in the same vein would be horrific. All you have to do is look at the piss-poor security model the Windows scripting system has and you can see how bad an idea this might turn out to be. I'm not saying that Microsoft shouldn't do this, I just think they need to fix their huge security holes before subjecting the Microsoft network computer onto the world.
An inside source just told me that X-Files will be coming back for another year, with both Mulder and Scully. Whoo-hoo.
The Adventures of Action Item, Professional Superhero. Drop-dead funny. [via Dack.com]
In my latest Reel.com order, there was a flyer for this site. Too bad I already spent two weeks scouring Manhattan looking for some nice racks that can hold my growing DVD video library. I ended up getting some nice wooden racks from Straight From the Crate.
Idiot lawyers strike again....
Those guys over at MacOS Rumors either make stuff up on-the-fly, or someone is deliberately feeding them false information. A couple of the "rumors" today are totally baseless.
Today is web application day.
From MSWord to MSWorld: How Microsoft is Building a Global Monopoly [Well-informed]
Tim O'Reilly: You Must Read This Book. [OK, Tim. Your review has convinced me.] There's a Barnes & Noble on the corner near my employer. Er, in fact, I don't think you can be anywhere in Manhattan without being only a couple blocks from a Barnes & Noble. They're everywhere!
George Lucas in Love. The best part is at the end in the credits. [via Metafilter]
How did I miss this? Apparently, Bill Gates wrote an email last July demanding that his employees rewrite Microsoft software to interfere with the Palm OS. Maybe that's what Microsoft considers "innovation." [via Pigs and Fishes]
This article at Macledge reports that John Carmack (the inventor the Quake gaming architecture) is working on a port of X-Windows for MacOS X Server and hopes to also port it to Mac OS X.
Niel Bornstein over at Monkeyfist threw together an email-to-web tool. Very cool. Now, if only he would publish the code...
I can't tell for sure, but it looks like Monkeyfist is built using Zope. If so, they've done a great job of customizing it. [Actually, some quick research shows they're using PHP. I'm betting that they're using Fast-Template or something similar.] Nope, they're using custom scripts.
Themed web sites using PHP Fast-Templates [Cool!]
DSL Links:
Microsoft goes after Slashdot. Heh, good luck. [More on this. Still think Microsoft doesn't have a hidden agenda for everything it does?]
The Washington Post has published a correction regarding last week's article saying that Microsoft invented XML.
These minipops and micropops are simply amazing. Also be sure to check out the Mini Museum of Modern Art.
Oops!
This is very cool. Costas Malamas pointed me towards an open source project called PHPSlash that is basically a rewrite of the Slashdot engine in PHP.
I'm going to have to start reading SplorpBlog more often. Good stuff.
O'Reilly Network: Meerkat: An Open Service API
Spin, spin, spin....
O'Reilly's upcoming Creating Documents With XML looks like it will be a book worth buying.
Last weekend at a party I was talking with someone who had recently decided to move to England. I recalled reading something about British government's move to route all incoming and outgoing email through a massive spy center. As a kid, I lived near the U.S.-owned Menwith Hill Communications base in Northern England, which for decades has monitored a huge portion of Europe's over-the-air communications. So, it's not just the British government who thinks that quiet monitoring of communications is necessary, the U.S. has been doing it for longer than anyone cares to admit.
The X-Men theme song by Jewel is available online as an MP3. It's pretty good! [via Dandot]
Steve over at NowThis has some interesting things to say about the ILOVEYOU virus and Microsoft technology.
Slate: With Love, From Microsoft
Fray: 32,000 ft.
From 1989 comes Paul Saffo's ageless essay, "Information Surfing."
Rants from Owen Briggs, clearly a thoughtful and clued-in designer/writer.
Pork Meat Quotation? I get some of the weirdest email.
You want to do what with beef? [Mature readers only]
I hadn't seen this site, reflect.com, before seeing a blurb about it over at GoodExperience. After about two minutes of using the site, I realized it was the Boo.com nightmare all over again. Why do companies insist on creating such hard-to-use, technology-laden, and bandwidth-heavy commerce sites? It boggles the mind. It may be a pretty site, but it sure is damn hard to use.
Blither, blather, blah, blah, blah....
Fool: How are stock prices "set"?
Tim O'Reilly: Lessons From the Layoffs at Linuxcare [must-read!]
Here's an email exchange [posted with the author's permission] with one of the people who felt they needed to flame me last week regarding my opinions about Microsoft. What's funny is this person sent the email through a Hotmail account, assuming that they would be anonymous. It took me all of five minutes to trace the originating IP number and figure out who was behind the email.
Taylor sent me an email saying that most of the email I've received recently has probably been from people trying to defend their browser and/or OS choice. For what it's worth, I don't care what browser or OS you're using. What I do care about is that when you are using them (or developing for them) that you take into consideration people who are using a different browser or OS. This goes two ways, too. Feigning ignorance about HTML-based email is not an excuse. Developing web sites and software that strengthen an existing monopoly is also not very cool. Yes, IE 5.x on Windows is a pretty slick application, but only after you understand Microsoft's hidden agenda(s) do you realize what it's all really about. "Innovation," my ass. It's about hanging onto a monopoly, folks, and nothing more.
Statmarket reports that Microsoft currently has a 82% share of the browser market with IE 4.x and 5.x. Websnapshot reports that Microsoft currently has a 75% share of the browser market. How high do you think those numbers would be if Microsoft hadn't shipped a tightly-integrated web browser with their OS? Probably not very high at all. This is what they mean when they say Microsoft is leveraging one monopoly (in the OS market) to gain a competitive advantage in another (the browser market).
Responses to the email-to-web query:
Thanks go out to Aaron, Colin, Chris, Bill and Pete for sending in some very valuable links.
Like the webapps site, Browserware seeks to compile news and links about browser-based web applications.
O'Reilly Network: Interview with Keith Bostic
Zeal.com is a lot like Epinions.
Steven Champeon on Microsoft's responsiblity.
mattl.com gets a cease and desist from Mattel. While that's just plain silly, I think Matt's changeable caption thing on the home page is pretty cool.
This is such bullshit. A Washington Post article reports that XML was invented by two Microsoft technologists. Simon St. Laurent, author of "XML Elements of Style" and "XML: A Primer, 2nd Edition" sets the record straight on xmlhack. What pisses me off is that this journalist simply believed Ballmer's claims without doing his research. While Microsoft was involved in the later stages of the development of XML, it is certainly not a "Micrososft invention." It's ridiculous mis-reporting like this that makes Microsoft look incredibly stupid. But it's also Ballmer's fault for leading the reporter to believe such tripe.
Please note: CamWorld is a place for me to share my opinions with the world regarding my interests, hobbies, and work-related issues. It has never pretended to be anything else, nor should it be interpreted as anything more than one web geek's opinions about a bunch of stuff. If you happen to have a different opinion than me, please don't hesitiate to let me know. I'm a friendly guy and enjoy debating this stuff. The sheer amount of flames and email I get from people using temporary Hotmail accounts who feel they need to hide behind an alias in order to communicate with me is mindboggling.
My office is on 22nd Street in NYC and looks north towards the Empire State Building and Central Park. There have been three helicopters hovering over the park for about 10-15 minutes. What's going on? One of them has a huge TV camera sticking out its side. [I think it might be TV news coverage for the public viewing of Cardinal O'Connor.]
With software like ARDI Executor and Mac-on-Linux, I expect to see more and more people switching from Microsoft Windows, given the uncertainty of Microsoft's future. Companies like Eazel are currently building Linux GUIs that look and feel like the Mac OS interface and operating system, but safely get around all the problems and instability of Microsoft's operating systems and the aging filesystem (file manager) the Mac OS is built upon (which accounts for some of its slowness). It's entirely possible that Linux-based computers may outnumber all others within a few years. They've got a lot of work to do, but the preliminary direction they've established is looking very promising.
Hmmm, it's nice to see I have some "mature" readers. I think the HTTP_USER_AGENT speaks volumes, don't you?
The Phonefree TV commercial I asked about the other day? Chris Dove wrote in that it was the song "God Yu Takem Laef Blong Mi" from The Thin Red Line soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. I found the MP3 and downloaded it. It's very similar but not the same. Mark Roedel wrote in and said that PhoneFree.com customer service told him that the music was composed specifically for their use. Bummer.
Several people have asked if I was serious when I said that I use Pine as my primary email client. It's true. I keep it open all day at work, and when I get home I download all my email to Eudora 3.1 (Yikes!). For my work email, I use Outlook Express 5.02 (Macintosh Edition), which thankfully is not vulnerable to the many virii that plague Outlook users on Windows. Pine is awesome because you can access it from any computer anywhere that has a telnet client on it. Now, if I could only figure out the peculiarities of procmail...
It's also true that I save almost all my email, even the spam. I'm nearing about 100,000 messages at home since approx. 1996 and about 10,000 or so at work since February. And this was after I deleted some huge mailing list archives I had laying around from 1995-1997.
One of the things I want to figure out is how to get all of my email into a MySQL database so that I can put a web front-end on it. That way I can have access to all of my email archives from any web browser in the world. For all I know, someone has already figured this out. Send me links!
This is why I use a Mac as my primary machine and a shell account (pine) for email. Microsoft's software is just too damn easy to abuse. I 've received about 15 copies of the ILOVEYOU virus since last night. Here's the Visual Basic script that's causing all the trouble. BTW, you can always tell the Outlook Express users by their awfully-formatted email with all that crappy colored text and funky HTML text formatting. Sometimes I just want to smack those MS Outlook programmers upside the head and ask them, "What so wrong with ASCII-based text formatting that you felt you needed to unleash this type of usability/readability software abuse on the world?"
Is this a joke?
A harsh [but honest] opinion about what should happen to Microsoft. I still think the market will take care of Microsoft regardless of what happens. What's important is that people are being educated about Microsoft's tactics and business style. And most people tend to shop elsewhere when they learn of a company's dishonest/illegal actions. That's what I do.
A sample chapter from O'Reilly's upcoming book XML and Java, which is really more about Content Management Systems. I really need to look closer at Cocoon, but at first glance it looks pretty robust.
Evolt: Content Management Systems
USA Today: "When you have open standards, you don't fear one vendor," says Ken Wasch, president of the Software and Information Industry Association in Washington. "You don't have to buy all of your products from one company."
Voices From a Slashmouth.
Bob Young from Red Hat explains the open source nature of Linux OS's:
The best analogy that illustrates this benefit is with the way we buy cars. Just ask the question, "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" and we all answer an emphatic "No." So ask the follow-up question, "What do you know about modern internal-combustion engines?" and the answer for most of us is, "Not much."
Frank Hecker: Setting Up Shop: The Business of Open-Source Software
www.redhatisnotlinux.org. Oh boy, I can see the journalists misinterpreting this one. [via rc3.org]
Ohmigod! We're all going to die! [Heh.]
What would happen if...? This reminds me of the time a few years back when Borders Books & Music bought about 20,000 copies of Bill Gates' The Road Ahead at an extreme discount. (The buyer simply couldn't pass up such a deal.) This led to the problem of what Borders was going to do all these books nobody wanted. Someone in management decided they'd unload them on the online group. The executive management at Borders.com decided they'd give a copy away with every purchase. From an executive's point of view, this was an a great solution. Not only would they get rid of these useless excess books, but they'd be giving their customers a free gift. At the time, I was working for Borders Online and several of us immediately recognized that this was an extremely bad idea. Not only would be be accused of being in bed with Microsoft for giving away copies of Bill Gates' book, but we'd also subject our overworked customer service department with loads of hate mail. We voiced our concerns several times, but the promotion proceeded anyway. About a week later, the promotion was suddenly canceled with no explanation and the books were shipped elsewhere and sold as remainders. What's interesting is that the customer service department at Borders.com was reporting that a surprisingly high percentage of people were actually shipping the books back to the fulfillment center with notes asking Borders.com not to send them such bad free gifts.
The guinea pig "virus" in The Sims computer game is a stroke of genius. [via Tim O'Reilly]
It's about damn time...now if only we could get Spielberg to listen. [Waving fistfuls of money.]
Request: You know that TV commercial for Phonefree.com where people are standing on their rooftops holding their burning long-distance phone bills up in the air? What song is playing in the background? And can someone send me the MP3?
Lots of news about Microsoft lately, especially about Microsoft's public response to the DOJ. Everyone seems to think that Microsoft is being very arrogant, but now I wonder if they're maybe "putting on a show" in the hopes of getting exactly what they want. Maybe Microsoft realized a while back that they are going to lose the legal case no matter what they do to defend themselves. Then maybe they decided that a broken up Microsoft might actually good for them. And now maybe they're all playing us (the public, the government, and the media) for fools, spouting their nonsense "innovations" defense. Hmmm....
I mean, maybe Microsoft has realized that two Microsofts would mean twice the growth, twice the income, and twice the "innovation." [Shrug.]
Gwen's Trailer Trash Housewife Page.
Blast From the Past: Unix Convention Dweebs. [Check out the date on the email header!]
Template Resolution in XML/HTML
