Apparently, I'm still in a funk (bad mood). Updates will resume when this situation changes. Later.
First there was Slashdot. It was great. Then the idiots came in and ruined with too many stupid posts. Then there was MetaFilter. It too was great. Then the idiots came in and ruined the discussions with too many stupid posts. Now there is Plastic. Please let the pattern stop. I wonder if this is related to the fact 33% of all time spent online last month was by AOL users.
Please allow me to clarify. I am increasingly frustrated with the low level of quality found in online discussion forums. More and more people are treating online discussion forums (like MetaFilter and Slashdot) the same way they treat email and chat rooms. More than once, I've downloaded email in the morning only to end up skipping past hundreds of messages that lack thought-out depth and commentary. This same thing is happening with discussion forums. In its early days Slashdot was an amazing source of information that equalled Usenet in its usefulness. Over time, as more and more users discovered it, the kinds of posts decreased in quality and usefulness. The smart people who normally contributed such useful information left for greener pastures where better conversation/info could be had. I'm seeing this happen with MetaFilter as well. I don't want it to happen. I don't want to leave. But if the same thing happens to MetaFilter that happened to Slashdot, then I will have no choice. Like others in this industry I don't have the time to sift the good (quality info) from the bad (mindless conversation). What does this mean? How do we stop it? Perhaps we'll see more and more online discussion forums that are privatized for specific industries. Perhaps we'll see public forums that require heavy moderation. Something needs to be done, maybe an education campaign to teach users how to better use discussion forums.
Addendum: I would much rather contribute my knowledge, opinions, and ideas to a forum where smart commentary and knowledge are a regular feature. The fact that this kind of post gets drowned out by the mass of posts (often by the same people again and again) tends to work against it. When growing up we are taught to "think before you speak." Perhaps we need to extend this philosophy to online forums as well: "think before you post."
Please read: The Natural Life Cycle of Mailing Lists
Argus ACIA: Full Calendar of Events [IA/UI]
Integrating System Metadata and Documentation is a paper about the Meta Project.
Things I've seen in New York City recently:
Using some posts to the FoRK list I put together a quick chart of Open technologies vs. Closed technologies.
Boo!
Another thing you experience when managing an industry-wide mailing list is the number of bounced messages that goes up when sudden layoffs happen. People are too busy packing up their desks to bother unsubscribing...
OK, I couldn't resist. This is just too damn funny to not post. A very clever 404 error at this site.
Priceless.
If this animated GIF doesn't make sense to you, then you're not paying attention. It took me a while to "get the meme" as well...
Salon: "The truth is, this guy seems to be coasting."
Usually when I get too ornery and frustrated, I take a break from my normal routine. So, that's what I'm going to do starting today. Updates to CamWorld will resume in a few days.
Last night I stayed up late watching The Virgin Suicides. Wow, a movie hasn't made me feel this way in a long time. Definitely a very emotional movie that reminds us all of what it was like to be a teenager. Director Sofia Coppola (daughter of Francis Ford Coppola and married to Spike Jonze) certainly has a promising career ahead of her as a film director.
Rant: I see this all the time. Why do people think it's OK to cross-post to multiple mailing lists? This is a really bad idea since many people tend to hit "reply all" without thinking, which results a crapload of work for the mailing list administrators. Realize that not everyone is subscribed to the same mailing lists as you and that when they try to reply to your post, it will bounce on every list they are not a member of. People who do this are either not thinking or have no freaking idea how email works. Hell, I'm now just auto-unsubscribing these people from the lists I manage. It's just not worth the effort to try and train everyone on how to properly use their email clients and the lists they belong to.
Holiday weekends suck. I always screw up my sleep schedule watching late movies with the laptop on the couch. So when it comes to getting to sleep the night before you have to go back to work, you're wide awake...
Zeldman's most recent Glamorous Life column cleverly pokes fun at various web personalities and their favorite crusades.
Oh yeah. A beta of the Opera web browser for the Mac will be out on Thursday [via Zeldman.]
Last week, Mozilla 0.8 was released. I'm finding that I'm using more often than I used to for daily browsing. And it looks like they finally added scrollwheel support for the Mac. Cool.
One last point about the WaSP Browser Upgrade Initiative: Web designers need to stop thinking so much about the display of web pages and refocus their energies on the data contained in them. The data comes first in importance, and then comes the display and page layout.
CamWorld: It's All About Your Audience. A well-reasoned response to the WaSP Browser Upgrade Initiative
Calebos: Supporting Older Browsers
Kuro5hin: The Unchanging UI
WebTechniques: Open Source, Breaking Through the Hype
Sigh...Macromedia and Microsoft have teamed up to offer a Flash player for PDAs using WinCE (er, Pocket PC). This is just another example of Macromedia pushing a technology that perhaps isn't the most appropriate for certain applications. I have a huge problem with designers who mis-use Flash, but I believe that Macromedia is mostly at fault for this for pushing Flash as a "web design" technology. Flash is an amazing technology that has many uses, but I get frustrated when Macromedia tries to extend it into markets where it possibly doesn't belong. Flash definitely has a market somewhere, however web design isn't one of them.
Why do some sites make changing personal data so complicated? For a long time now, I've been receiving a lot of spam to a special email account I set up for eBay transactions. To protect my own online privacy, I want to change my email account at eBay to a Yahoo Mail account. eBay, in its infinite wisdom has decided that all Yahoo Mail accounts are considered "Anonymous Email" and are forcing me to give them credit card information before they'll process the change request. My question is this: why are they doing this if they already have my name and credit card information verified using the old email account? Maybe a better question is why is eBay allowing spammers to scrape email addresses from their user profile database?
Microsoft: "Who do you want to copy today?" The fact that this screenshot is in German only underscores the obvious similarities between Mac OS X and Windows XP.
It's too bad Macromedia is requiring the use of Flash 5 for this site design contest. It'd be pretty fun to "design a site for usability" that didn't use Flash at all and then enter it. Heh. Just had a thought: Design the site to use Flash for a silly skip-intro splash screen and build the rest of the site using standard HTML conventions. Hee.
Damn. Just because it's a holiday doesn't mean the building's managers should turn off the heat. My hands are freezing! Please see the NY Times article linked to on Friday for more crap about this building I work in. Damn.
Microsoft is attempting to cram the Pocket PC (ahem, WinCE) operating system into cell phones. While this is an intriguing idea, I'd like to remind readers that the technology is proprietary. Good luck getting your data in and out of the phone using non-Microsoft software and technologies.
Mathieu Lacage: Gnome's Component Model. Mathieu is the guy writing the Bonobo book for O'Reilly.
BRL is a language designed for server-side WWW-based applications, particularly database applications.
LinuxPower: User interface consistency and Linux
The Web Site From Hell is a good example of some things you can avoid when doing page layout. Funny.
Danny Yee: Free Software as Appropriate Technology
Lane Becker on the Google acquisition of the Deja Usenet archives. There's also a great anonymous letter from a "Deja Refugee" that talks about Google's lack of forethought regarding the Deja archive.
I suppose another reason to continue to use Netscape 4.x is to avoid all the lame DHTML advertising that we're starting to see. Not to mention all the really bad UI design done with DHTML. Just because you can cut and paste a chnunk of Javascript to do expandable menus doesn't mean that it's the best choice of navigation schema for your site.
Letter on Privacy of Domain Name Registration
Would you like fries with that?
This is funny.
Flipping channels this afternoon while I catch up on email, I stop at UPN. The voiceover says "'To Kill a Sunrise,' our afternoon movie." I think to myself, I've never heard of that movie. Off to IMDb to look it up. No matches. Huh? So, I wait for the movie to start. Mel Gibson. Michelle Pfeiffer. Kurt Russell. Wow, big names. Why have I never heard of this movie? Then the title comes on-screen: "Tequila Sunrise." Ah, I see. The announcers at UPN must be complete idiots.
OpenOffice.org: Interview with Wilfredo Sánchez, former lead developer, project Darwin (OS X)
The NY Times has an article today about the office bulding I work in. It's a very negative article. I hope all the bad press spurs the building's owners into improving some of the long-standing problems that are mentioned. And it is true that it can take up to a half hour to catch an elevator, but usually only when one of them is broken (which is often). Of course, I left work last night at 2:30 AM, so I didn't have an elevator wait. I don't expect it to solve all the silly union problems in the building, though. That's like trying to deal with the Mafia.
Salon: Life, liberty and the pursuit of free software. Hee-hee.
Advogato: Thoughts on the world of GUIs
Craig Burton quotes:
"No wonder no one trusts Microsoft." "The reason Jim doesn't like the open source movement is because it is doing the same thing to Microsoft that Microsoft does to other companies." "One of the effects of the open source movement and the success of Linux is the commoditization to some of Microsoft's intellectual property: Windows." "The only threat the open source movement presents to Microsoft is that of keeping it honest in its dealings with the industry, its customers, its partners, and its competitors. What a concept."
"The reason Jim doesn't like the open source movement is because it is doing the same thing to Microsoft that Microsoft does to other companies."
"One of the effects of the open source movement and the success of Linux is the commoditization to some of Microsoft's intellectual property: Windows."
"The only threat the open source movement presents to Microsoft is that of keeping it honest in its dealings with the industry, its customers, its partners, and its competitors. What a concept."
This pisses me off. I wonder if I can get back the $1000+ or so I've spent on domain registration in the past 5 years. I highly doubt it. Fuckers. Damn.
Doc Searls wrote a great article called "The Shrinking Subject." A must-read.
Psst, spammers! Want a targeted list of email addresses for people running weblogs? Wait no more... [via Cardhouse]
Or if you want to scrape this user profile database for email addresses, you could easily write a little script that starts at one user profile (like this one) and then proceeds to follow the "Next Member" links until it gets to the end. Boy am I glad I asked Userland to remove my various accounts from their system a while ago. Don't read me wrong. I think Userland's software is quite interesting and useful in certain instances, but I worry about this breach of user privacy.
So Dave emails me this morning:
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 06:32:21 -0800 From: Dave Winer Subject: What many people do.. ..is get an email address at Yahoo or Hotmail, or even worse, they make one up. It's like a URL, a unique string that has an at-sign in it. Also, you'll see [ed. Daves' email address removed upon request] in that list, so I get spam too. It's not such a big deal, to me at least, I just ignore it. Have a nice day. Dave
..is get an email address at Yahoo or Hotmail, or even worse, they make one up. It's like a URL, a unique string that has an at-sign in it. Also, you'll see [ed. Daves' email address removed upon request] in that list, so I get spam too. It's not such a big deal, to me at least, I just ignore it. Have a nice day. Dave
Bloomberg: Microsoft Executive Says Linux Threatens Innovation. "I'm an American, I believe in the American Way," Allchin said. "I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat." Apparently Microsoft hasn't read this Gartner Group report or this report on Open Source software within the government. Or what about this report saying that NASA is starting to use Open Source software over proprietary solutions. And then there's this excellent discussion about public policy supporting Open Source software. Oh yeah, and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee released a report last year urging the use of Open Source software for high-end computing (PDF).
OGS Project: Creating an open definition for Groupware Client to Server communication
ZDNet's Talkback Central: XUL is here, Microsoft.Net is not
XUL: Microsoft's Worst Nightmare?
Technology News: From FUD to Trash Talk
Microsoft plans to sit inside your refrigerator. Oh crap, my ice cream will never make it.
Today is my one-year anniversary with CollabNet (previously Alphanumerica).
ComputerWorld: The Interface Revolutionary. A good interview with Jef Raskin.
O'ReillyNet: Why Flash is Significant.
Microsoft has given us a look at the Windows XP GUI. First impression: it reminds me far too much of Apple's MacOS X, but with a FisherPrice bent to it. What the heck did they do to the Start Menu? I don't see that scaling very well. It looks like a GUI designed for children. I can't imagine hardcore programmers and business executives adopting this OS.
Attention New Yorkers: Now accepting story submissions for NYStories.
Kevin Werbach: It's All About the Mobile Internet
Doc Searls talks about how infrastructure is free. Go read.
XML.com: The Politics of Schemas: Part 1
Sun: Java Technology Makes Front Page News. A good article about the Cofax content management system used by a number of newspapers.
Evolt: Your clients need a Content Management System
I am Popo Deepdelver, of Middle Earth.
A comment about an a person I know online: Sure, you are a very smart man. Sure, you make some excellent points. But that doesn't give you an excuse to be such an asshole when you don't get your way.
Simon St. Laurent: XML's Impact on Web Development, Remodeling 'Traditional' Web Applications for XML
There's an amazing discussion on the XHTML-L mailing list about the importance of bringing the HTML, XHTML, and XML communities together. Read the whole thread and then re-read Molly Holzschlag's post. Sigh...
Next Generation Web Search: Setting Our Sites
Here's an interesting look at evolving conventions in web-based UI design.
The presentations from the recent Information Architecture conference in San Francisco are now online.
Excellent Wiki discussion on Project Management.
This is an interesting idea, but I don't think it would work very well for my identical twin brother and I.
The network connection between our NYC office and our San Francisco office has been down all day. Can you tell? At least I'm getting caught up on email...
Joel on Software: Human Task Switches Considered Harmful. Joel basically says that managers should never assign their programmers to more than one project at a time. While this is an ideal situation, it's probably very difficult to do in any real-world situation. Most good programmers are very capable of multi-tasking on multiple projects as long as the team setup supports it. What you don't want is for your programmers to get bored with a project and do a half-assed job completing it just so they can move on to the next (and possibly more exciting) project.
A literary atlas for the city that never sleeps. On that note, I'm putting together a site called NYStories, which will be part of Derek Powazek's CityStories network. I should have a design up within a week or so.
How can you lose $6.8 billion in one quarter? That's billion with a "b". Wow.
From the recruting department: CollabNet is hiring in both the Bay Area and New York City. Email me if you're interested in exploring these opportunities or want more info.
Is Amazon dropping the ball? I ordered some DVDs from them on Saturday, and immediately got a confirmation in my inbox. It's now Tuesday afternoon and their site has no record of my order? Very odd. I wonder if their recent layoffs have something to do with it.
binarycloud is an open source platform for building web applications with PHP. Interesting...
There's a couple of good mini-rants about UI at Turing Studio. Read "The Mac OS UI and how it should change" and "More UI elements in HTML". Though I really wish they would remove them from that silly Javascript pop-up window so that people can link to the rants themselves. Hmmm....
Hee! Apparently, the folks at BarnesandNoble.com haven't read the "Harnessing the Power of Databases" chapter Jeffrey Veen's new book The Art and Science of Web Design. Check out the cover image. [Screenshot]
David Walker: Content management systems: short-lived satisfaction
Advogato: Are Unix GUIs All Wrong?
Very cool! Google has bought the DejaNews UseNet archives. A beta search is available.
The geniuses over at Lycos just sent out a mass email with a subject line but no body. Doh!
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 13:15:00 -0700 From: Lycos Network Users [wiredmail-info@lists.wired.com] Reply-To: wm-unsub-lycos_network-xxx=camworld.com@lists.wired.com To: Lycos Network Users [wiredmail-announce@lists.wired.com] Subject: Get Custom Wired News Alerts Delivered to Your In-Box
Wilfredo Sanchez, one of the people responsible for making Apple's Darwin an open source project, has left Apple to work at KnowNow. Interesting...
"Windows XP also will sport a new look that inevitably will draw comparisons to the user interface found in Apple Computer Inc.'s new Mac OS X operating system, according to those who have seen the new software." But, of course.
MP3Newswire: Big Music's Best Tool Against Napster - DVD
This journalist wants to see the Simpsons cancelled. Well, I want to see George W. Bush removed from office. Neither is going to happen anytime soon...
I hadn't heard from my old business partner Matt in a while so I found myself digging through his personal site. And I came across this "Rules For Buying Gifts For Matt" list. Classic!
Jaron Lanier elaborates on what could happen to the world of digital music and movies should the courts decide Napster is illegal.
LinuxWorld: Jon 'maddog' Hall plots a course for Linux
HardCoreLinux.com: Alien Internet Conspiracy. Is this a joke?
W3C: Common User Agent Problems. [via aaronland ]
DevShed: So What's A $#!%% Regular Expression, Anyway?!
Waferbaby cornered me. Uh-oh.
I'm up late playing with my new Powerbook G4. Wow. Wow. Wow.
x180.net: Titanium Powerbook G4
Sun: An Open Response to Microsoft
I don't think I'm going to make it to SXSW this year, despite the number of people who emailed offering free beers. It's mostly a time issue for me, and I don't think I can take four days off next month -- especially since I want to attend CHI 2001 in April in Seattle.
Microsoft is saying that the upcoming versions of Office XP and Windows XP will have a limited number of installs (like five). What bothers me about this is that re-installing the software (or OS) is often the only solution to many technical problems when dealing with Microsoft software that has overtaken your system. Sorry, you gotta FedEx your computer to Microsoft if you want it fixed. Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will require you to re-purchase the software you already own.
DaemonNews: Insights on Open Source Release Engineering, or: How NetBSD 1.5 Was Born
CVSSearch, A Search Tool for Code
cms-list: Java versus XML based WCMS
Good resource: XML and Databases
The last paragraph of this story is classic. The reader who submitted this is using Netscape 3.x on a 68K Macintosh. Just goes to show you that you can't always assume your audience is using the most up-to-date technologies.
This is a good idea, but what's stopping the state of New York from then selling your contact information to companies that aren't doing telemarketing?
"Smith & Wesson - the original point and click interface." Ha!
InfoWorld: It doesn't matter if Linux wins, as long as Microsoft loses its desktop dominance
How can a company as large as Microsoft not have done a trademark search on Xbox prior to launching their marketing campaign?
Sun: Java APIs for XML based RPC
My friend, you need a swirly. Remember those from high school? I'll bet you do...
BrowserWatch: These Aren't Your Father's Browsers...
Gotta love the Internet. Where else could you buy things like a Frog Purse, Disembodied Farrah Fawcett Heads, or a Santa Toilet Seat Cover.
Email me and tell me why I should go to SXSW this year. I'm not convinced I need to be there. I have to decide by tomorrow.
NYTimes: HTML-Email Sucks Bad, Really It Sucks Bad, So Stop Using It Already. [Ed note: That's not really the title of the story, though I think it's better and gets the point across.]
I hope that when Microsoft does things like this that it drives even more users away from the platform by forcing them to choose easier alternatives. [via rc3.org]
CNet: Empire building, Mozilla style. I wrote a brief blurb about .NET and some other Web-based application platforms to a mailing list last month.
I see that Microsoft's marketing is also following their golden rule of confusion. They recently announced that the upcoming versions of Windows and Office will be called Windows XP and Office XP. Everyone knows that the XP acronym has been used by developers for years to mean Cross-Platform. In fact, many of the technologies in Mozilla have used it for a long time: XPConnect, XPCOM, XPFE. But Microsoft, in it's infinite wisdom, has decided that XP stands for ExPerience. Huh? Somehow I think Microsoft is making decisions like this solely to confuse. If you recall, Microsoft also did this with the acronym DNS (they claim Digital Nervous System).
BusinessWeek has a good article on the recent Microsoft vs. Crossgain incident. "Flessner said that Crossgain competed [with Microsoft] because its technology would allow users to exchange data over the Internet." What? Hellooooo Microsoft, I use many non-Microsoft technologies to exchange data over the Internet. Are you going to sue me too? How lame. I see Microsoft hasn't changed a bit since the antitrust trial.
Here's what I think. Microsoft knows it's way behind in developing an Internet-based application platform on which to run its upcoming Web-based services. And that Microsoft hoped that since Crossgain was a company with lots of ex-softies, they could simply let Crossgain build their tools and Microsoft could then acquire them. Problem solved. But, since Crossgain chose to instead build their tools/services using non-Microsoft technologies from Sun and Oracle, Microsoft saw that as a slap in the face and went in with lawyers to enforce a non-compete agreement signed by a number of the ex-Microsoft Crossgain employees.
An IBM executive thinks that Sun is finally admitting that a Linux strategy is probably best, since the recent Cobalt Cube (aquired by by Sun last September) products are still running Linux instead of Solaris.
OpenInteract is a Web application environment written in Perl and geared to run on the Apache web server using the mod_perl plugin module.
LinuxWorld: The Death of Microsoft Office [via WebWord]
SatireWire: Microsoft Says Rival Linux Has No Future, So Linux Industry Will Stop Now
InternetWorld: Why the Sun-Microsoft Settlement Hurts
MacCentral Forums: Why the Apple Menu sucks, and the Dock is superior
The Apple Store emailed me saying that my Powerbook G4 shipped from Taiwan today. Now I know how a dog feels when waiting for Little Billy to come home from school...
I'm told that as a signed O'Reilly author, I get free access to their new Safari service, which is a searchable online database of the entire O'Reilly book catalogue. For $9.95/month, anyone can have access to the complete text of up to five books. It's the innovative and foward-thinking ideas like this that make O'Reilly such a great company. Bill Pena, the guy who designed (front-end) Safari for O'Reilly, emailed and said he's been a long-time reader of CamWorld. Thanks Bill!
Excellent overview of the do's and don'ts of CVS. [via Have Browser, Will Travel] I also just found out that CollabNet is now hosting and supporting CVShome.org, the official site for CVS. This makes sense, since Karl Fogel (of CVS fame) works for CollabNet, out of the Chicago office.
Had drinks and dinner last night with James Duncan Davidson, an open source manager at Sun, who worked on Tomcat (part of Apache's Jakarta Project) and created Ant. He let me drool over his new Canon EOS D30 digital camera, which is their first digital single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera on the market.
"OpenReference is a Servlet/JSP based database application to manage your or your group's research references." Yeah, kind of like a weblog.
Advogato: The Perfect User Interface
Interesting...
Yesterday at lunch with our O'Reilly editor, I learned about O'Reilly's new site called OnLamp, which covers a technology called LAMP (an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl). LAMP is being called an open source Web development platform. Apparently, this acronym is being used pretty heavily in Europe, though this is the first I've heard of it.
I learned about a new collaborative weblog called Plastic based on the Perl code used to run Slashdot. The design is way better than Slashdot, and the content seems pretty good.
IBM invests more money in Linux. I think corporate support for open source development is awesome.
This is interesting. Microsoft is building a "gated community" around their latest Windows release, which gives access to the source code to a select group of vendors and software companies. This is clearly something they learned from the open source movement.
I'm afraid of Ouchy The Clown. Hey, he does meetings.
Book Update: Today, we met with our O'Reilly editor about the book we're writing regarding Mozilla. We came up with a final title and tag line (may change slightly). The book will be called "Creating Mozilla Applications" and the tag line will be "Using Javascript, CSS, and XUL." The tentative ship date is sometime this Fall, but because the Mozilla 1.0 release date slips so often, our book schedule has been on a kind of sliding schedule. Now all we have to do is finish writing the book!
Ask Tog: Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks. Even if Apple does keep the Dock in OS X it will only be a short while before some enterprising shareware author writes a replacement for it, much like Hugh Kawahara did when he wrote TaskMenuBar to replace Apple's floating/detachable application window.
This Evaluation of New York City Web Guides is simply amazing.
Lonely Planet Guide: New York City
O'Reilly: Charting the Linux Anatomy. Awesome! I'll have to try and get some of these posters. Sweet! There's a PDF you can download and print out!
