Sunday, March 24, 2002

Radio UserLand : Text-editing cheat sheet. "This page lists a set of tricks that help turn off some of the automatic text processing that Radio does when it's publishing your pages." [And don't break Dave... or give Dave a break. Heh.] * [With a little help from Evan Archipelago now works perfectly with Blogger. (The confusion was that in the docs he has a boolean construction that doesn't work in every environment (amd specifically not Blogger). As I write this newPost has been updated. editPost has not.) Onward!] * John Robb's Radio Weblog. "So, it is possible to build a system, within the US alone that replicates all the revenue generated by the industries at risk with an all-you-can subscription model." [Commenting on Michael Fraase's "When Elephants Dance". Unfortunately, subscription models require trust. When you subscribe to to a magazine, you know what you're getting. Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly coverage of a relatively known quantity. Subscriptions for software require more trust. Is this company going to continue to innovate over the course of the next year? You look at their track record, and you makes your choice. I don't trust the labels not to shift things out of my subscription. "You're subscribed to company A, this is a new company...". Of course, no where in John's back of the envelope analysis did he say that the subscription model needs to come from the BigCo's. It should come from the artists themselves. It won't, but it should.] * [Sorry about the outage again this morning, strange, how Frontier crashed just as I was going to sleep, at five this morning...] Steve Zellers. "The big loser in Mac OS X is the file system fragility problem. In Mac OS 9 applications always kept aliases to applications, or used the desktop database to search for the information they wanted. Now, people hardcode paths to things and expect that the view of the filesystem as shipped by Apple is going to be consistent. Apple applications do this too." [And he doesn't even mention the file extension nonsense...] Interop, the old fashioned way... * Tonight (read this morning) I spent a few minutes testing Blogger API implementations. I needed to tweak blogger.newPost as Blogger, the original implementation, requires at least a single character be posted where as other implementations do not require this. No big deal. The next version of Archipelago out to testers can be used (and has been tested) with Manila, Radio (both Blogger API and MetaWeblog API), and Blogger. Hopefully more if I can get someone to help me test Movable Type. Conversant testing is under way as well. Macrobyte's been very helpful (Thanks!) As I write this... I couldn't get to my new blogspot site. [There it is... I'm not sure why I had to click the publish button... Hmmm. Posts don't seem to be publishing despite my setting publish to true. Guess there's more digging to do tommorrow.] * Programmatic Interfaces. "Movable Type features a full implementation of the Blogger XML-RPC API (where applicable)." [Yeah.] Using XML-RPC with Ruby. and xmlrpc4r - XML-RPC for Ruby. [Heh.] Programming Ruby. "The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide" Ruby Central. "Welcome to RubyCentral, a growing web resource for everything to do with the Ruby language." 11:08:06 PM    comment

[Jud Spencer who wrote the back-ends for TouchBase, Square One, Emailer, FastPace Instant Contact, Outlook Express 5.0, and Entourage has a question. He's also bringing LetterRIP Pro to OS X. Jud's started blogging... cool.] World According to jud: When dumb servers happen to good services. "That is the way to solve problems, just go around screaming 'Denial Of Service", "Denial Of Service". Meanwhile they should update their friggin software." World According to jud: My life as an ISP. "Wireless, hmmm. Months later I finally got off my duff and bought a Linksys WAP11 Access-Point. That takes care of one neighbor." [I've been thinking about this as well.] winterspeak.com. "Scientology vs. Google I'm glad the Church of Scientology used the DMCA to block Google archiving some site in Norway that talks about its (copyrighted) space alien nonsense. It highlights nicely why the law is so corrupt." [Go Zimran!] DIGITALCONSUMER.ORG: "On March 21st, Senator Hollings officially announced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), formerly known as the SSSCA. Not only will this bill further erode your personal use rights, but it will mandate that every electronic media device must be built with goverment- standardized security technology. If passed, this bill will be very bad news for those of us who are concerned about our rights in the digital age. To send a new fax about the CBDTPA, please follow this link." A message for Al Hawkins Evening Al, I hope things are gettin' better. I know you've been feeling kicked around lately. I'm also fairly certain that you have not written about the worst moments -- and I know that your job at its very finest is incredibly difficult in some ways. I recently mentioned a favorite turn of phrase "helpless, speechless, breathless". I think you're feeling some of that and I want you to know that I'm with you. I've been singing the blues myself. Generally speaking my life is grand. But it's hard to stay focused on the good stuff and easy to look at what isn't going right. Join me for a chorus or two, and let the blues wash through you, and listen to what they say "The night is here, The day will come, 'n thing'sll be awright..." Yeah, baby. Sing it to me Al! Finest kind! 'n thing'sll be awright... 12:28:27 AM    comment