Marc Canter asks "where's Scoble when you need him?" He wants Microsoft to support Zeroconf (easy networking that doesn't require a DHCP server).

Heh, Marc thinks I'm an executive or something. :-)

Anyway, I probably won't be on much for the next two days. Have a great weekend.

Linux Today: RedHat announces a new beta, named "severn."

Can anyone let us know what the top five new features will be?

John Robb notes: "Scoble is blogging like a maniac on his moving day. Wow, where does he get all that free time?"

Tomorrow is the big moving day, so won't be on. But, we're only moving from temp housing to our house in Bothell. The Graebel Movers show up with the semi-truck on Wednesday.

Greg Ritter: "Why RSS should is (or should be) as irrelevant as HTML."

GeniusEngineer features a weblog of the day -- every day. Good stuff.

Bjorn Brems shows how to install Litestep on Windows. Litestep is an alternative shell. Not for the faint of heart.

Christopher Laco hates Microsoft. He even spells it like a lot of the Slashdotter's do. You know, "Micro$haft."

So, when he admits something Microsoft does is pretty good, I take note. Here he admits that Windows Media Player is better at ripping his CDs than other tools.

Eric Norlin talks about the importance of PR.

If you ever are in a position to come to Silicon Valley for some Venture Capital, make sure you visit Bucks in Woodside and get to know Jamis, the owner. Here's the questions he'll ask you when you pitch. Make a good pitch, and he'll probably know at least three VC's sitting in the restaurant. Particularly now that all the tourists don't visit anymore.

Matt Williams talks about FrontPage and Sharepoint and how suprised he was at the feature set. Me too. Microsoft, in 1996, named me one of the top five FrontPage users in the world, but recently I've been building an intranet site in Frontpage and wow, has it come a long way. I'll write more after I get done.

One big hole, though: I wish it did RSS. (Although Harry Pierson is working on a Sharepoint RSS generator).

You think I'm good at ripping people apart? Look at how Ken Camp at IP Adventures rips apart Andrew Orlowski: "Methinks Andrew is missing a packet or two in the data stream on this judgement. But somehow, I don't think retransmission of the lost packets would do any good. The destination just isn't capable of grasping the message."

How can I match that?

Andy Ruff: "Scoble is on a ripping-apart-Scott-McNealy frenzy!"

I just point to comments about Microsoft, both good and bad.

Tim Bray is looking at traffic from his RSS feed.

Of course, who needs Fry's if you have Gizmodo? Visit there and see the Minox digital spy cam and the Tivo killer from Time Warner.

Question of the month? When will Fry's Electronics open in Renton? Here's Paul Andrews' latest about Fry's (he writes for the Seattle Times, so if he couldn't figure out when they are opening, I doubt anyone can).

Six Apart's TypePad looks real interesting. Weblog service launches on Monday.

Mike Sax: "Yukon will cause a polarization in IT departments: The developers will absolutely love it, the database administrators will hate it, passionately."

James Robertson asks a very good question: "Why do I want an explosion of new API's [in Longhorn, aka the next version of Windows]?"

Two answers:

1) To make it easier to program. For instance, the team I'm a part of is building something. It is easier to use the managed APIs that are part of the .NET Framework than to use P/Invoke and drop down to the older unmanaged APIs.

2) To make new things possible. Hey, look at the APIs in DOS. They were pretty rich, right? Well, they were until the Mac and Windows came along. Those OS's brought us thousands of new APIs that'd let programmers do things like draw Windows, and handle the mouse.

Longhorn will bring both advantages. New APIs to make "old things easier" and new APIs to "make new things possible."

Any reasons not to use the new API's? Simple: your apps won't run on older OS's. Just like Windows apps wouldn't run on DOS, or like OSX apps won't run on OS9 on the Mac side of the fence.

But, to answer James other question: yes, there are gonna be new things that you can only do with Longhorn. See ya at the PDC!

Chuq von Rospach (who works for Apple) takes me on regarding market share.

Hey, Victors makes a better cup of coffee than Starbucks does, but to say that Victors has more market share than Starbucks seems a little wacky.

Rob Fahrni wants to meet me. Dude, anytime! I'll probably have a potluck once we get moved in and get everything unboxed.

Sorry, I probably won't have rock bands like Mark Eppley had at his shindig. And I don't have a waterslide either. But, we'll have fun. Maybe some whiskey tasting. Anita says that's a good idea.

Oh, Mark says that one of the bands, the Cribb, signed a record deal the day after his party.

Windows users: I don't know if you've checked out what Stardock has been doing lately, but they are pushing Windows XP to do things I never expected. I'm gonna play with them more after I get moved, but their stuff is wild. I hear their developers are planning on being at the PDC. I can't wait to meet them.

Earlier I told people to check out Phil Ringnalda's rant on IE bugs with weblogs. Problem is, I forgot the link. Sometimes I post too fast.

Have a good weekend. We're moving, so I won't be on very much. I hate moving.

I haven't said it in a while, but I love DayPop's Top 40. Good way to see what's on weblogger's mind.

Chris Pirillo is looking for a Gnomedex "Amen." I'm just jealous that I wasn't there.

Kottke: "The clearest evidence yet that Google is busted."

I don't know about that. I think Kottke +is+ an expert on all those things.

Just in case it wasn't apparent, snopes.com is one of the sites that really is doing a lot of good. They debunk all sorts of hoaxes, and other things. I use it often, especially when my dad sends me various wacky emails.

Macromedia's John Dowell points at an interview with the creators of Snopes. Here's a direct link to the Mark Glaser interview, which is on Online Journalism Review.

Macromedia's Christian Cantrell: "what is an RSS aggregator to do?" He talks about how to handle all the various RSS types that are out there.

My reply to Steve Anglin: You claim that Apple is gaining market share. According to the latest industry sales figures, that is incorrect. Apple's market share of computers sold in the past quarter has gone down and now is about 2%. Linux on the desktops is scaring Microsoft, but it gets installed on far fewer systems than OSX does.

I think Steve has been hanging out on the weblogs and at conferences too much. Apple's market share at conferences and weblogs is MUCH MUCH higher than it is in the real world. At recent conferences (like O'Reilly's) it seems that half of the computers are Apples.

If you live in this space, you gotta realize that you live in a distortion field. It's like if you only eat in downtown Palo Alto. You'll never experience junk food (the last Burger King was kicked out more than a year ago). But that doesn't mean that McDonalds doesn't sell more hamburgers than Spago does.

O'Reilly's Steve Anglin: "Microsoft has no monopoly."

Andrew Orlowski: "Blame game starts as WiFi bubble pops."

Burning Bird talks about President Bush trying to find a way to make gay marriages illegal. This is so lame. 20% of my family and friends are laid off, and the President is going after social issues? Dude: remember how Bill Clinton kicked your dad out of office? Remember, it's the economy stupid.

I've run into the IE 6.0 scrolling bug quite often on various weblogs. Phil Ringalda says I'm not alone and has pointers to various ways to fix the bugs. Must be sites done by folks with Macs or who use Mozilla exclusively. Yet another reason to use RSS.

Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman has rules for URLs. I wish everyone followed these rules, but sadly they don't.

Chris found a RSS news aggregator for Outlook Express. Cool, but I don't like OE, and hope to use it less and less in the future, not more.

Dave Winer is talking about naming products today. I've found it's really easy to name products when you only have yourself to worry about. But, when other people are involved, it's very hard to sell them on a name. Often names don't get out of the first stage, cause someone on the team isn't excited about it.

It explains how products get such boring names. Usually beta names are far more interesting.

Alright, there's new SQL Junkies weblogs. Let's see, we have .NET Weblogs, we have SQL Weblogs. Now we just need some Windows weblogs and we'll be ready for the PDC.

Hey, mom, stop hitting the refresh button! Radio reports I had almost 1300 hits yesterday. I don't believe it. Only about 20 people ever leave any comments. There can't be 1280 people lurking here without leaving any comments. So, it has to be my mom hitting refresh. Knock it off mom!

Or, is it all those news aggregators that keep hitting my site?

Either way, there's no way I have that much traffic. Or is there?

Anyone notice that Drew and folks have been doing some work on TechED blogs? Now they are working on TechED Japan. It'll be interesting to see if there are any Japanese webloggers. I've found that is one country that I've visited that had a very large language and culture gap with English speakers, so it'll be interesting to see if there are any webloggers who'll attend the TechED show there.

Alright, you've seen the .NET blogs. Now here's the Java blogs.

Bill Venners, from Artima Software, invited me to check out its Artima Technology Buzz. He says they have 16 different communities, all focused on different topics like Java, Python, .NET, Design, XML, etc.

Anyone try this out? What do you think?

Oh, great, are people gonna spend the weekend alterating those pictures of Saddam that were released today with Adobe's Photoshop or JASC's Paint Shop Pro?

Looks that way. Here's my boss's (Robert Hess) rendition. Here's Jeff Sandquist's. Will this be the new "my base belong to us" meme? I doubt it.