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Tuesday, November 19, 2002 |
NetNewsWire and MovableType. I’ve been testing NetNewsWire‘s weblog editor with MovableType—and it’s working. Here’s my test site.
One of the painful parts of weblog editors is configuration, as Daniel Berlinger points out in his RFC on discoverability.
I had to send an XML-RPC request to get the blogID of my MovableType site. For Manila the URL of the site works as the blogID. I don’t know what I’ll find when I try other weblog publishing systems, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find them all slightly different.
This needs to get much easier.
Ideally all it would take to configure one’s editor is to know the URL of the home page of your site. (And of course you’d know your username and password also.) A user should never have to know or figure out the blogID, RPC URL, and supported API or APIs. [inessential.com]
9:23:29 PM 
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Speakeasy Networks offers its DSL customers Wi-Fi package for explicit sharing (follow link to new customer signup): Speakeasy Networks is offering a free SMC Networks 802.11a or 802.11b access point to new DSL and T-1 subscribers. Speakeasy is a national DSL/digital line provider, which in the spirit of full disclosure is my home and work DSL provider. Some telephone companies have offered limited discounts or promotions for equipment from Linksys and other vendors, but this is the first free promotion I've heard of. [80211b News]
9:17:01 PM
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Business Week. The revenge of the baby bells. Telephone service CLECs are making gains against the RBOCs (this is in contrast to the data CLECs that are mostly dead). The RBOCs are finding it impossible given current law and regulation to change the price they charge the CLECs wholesale (which they of course claim is below costs). So, they want to change the rules of the game by excluding switching services as part of the wholesale package. This would mean that in order to switch carriers, a RBOC employee would need to manually make a change to the routing path. The FCC may allow them to do this. If they do, the end of telephone CLEC business is nigh. Why?
This is the same tactic used by the RBOCs to kill the data CLECs. The RBOCs were able to delay, mangle, and obfuscate requests for manual switching by data CLECs. The result was that it was impossible for the CLECs to do business (due to stratospheric customer service costs). For example: a good friend of mine spent a total of 20 hours with customer service untangling his connection to a CLEC DSL provider. He was far from alone. Let's not let the RBOCs do this again. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
8:53:14 PM
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George Will. "Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings." [Quotes of the Day]
7:05:55 AM
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Vote Early, Vote Often. Miss World Gets New Judge: Wireless Phone Users
"The Miss World Organization today begins its first worldwide text vote, arguably the largest and most widespread campaign using wireless marketing.
Audiences worldwide will be asked to text in their nominee for Miss World, a beauty pageant now in its 52nd year. The poll will count for half the votes in deciding the winner of the Miss World 2002 title, and the judging panel decides the rest.
'Only cell phone users will be able to vote, but global mobile penetration is now higher than global Internet penetration,' said Lars Becker, CEO of Flytxt, the wireless marketing agency on the account along with marketing agency Regenerator.
The effort targets 2 billion people in 130 countries that Flytxt claims watch the contest. The event's final this year will be Dec. 7 in Nigeria....
Users in Britain, Italy, France, China, Spain and Germany have to pay a 40 cents premium rate for dialing the five-digit short code. Users in the rest of the world typically will pay 8 cents to 19 cents for texting in to a long number." [DM News]
So it will cost most people outside of the U.S. more to vote, but they actually use their cell phones for this kind of thing whereas Americans don't (yet). I'll be interested to see the results of this campaign. [The Shifted Librarian]
7:00:41 AM
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Peter Schwarz. GBN's top scenario maker, recently made an interesting point in an interview (thanks Mohan) with the Centre of Future Studies' "in Focus" e-zine.
Q: Do different sets of people come up with the same scenarios given the same information?
A: We just tried that experiment a few weeks ago for the first time. We had two back-to-backscenario groups both looking at political scenarios for the world. One was all non-Americans the other was all Americans to see if they came up with different views of the world and they did - quite strikingly so. We did the non-Americans first and then the Americans and about two-thirds of the way through we showed them the non-American results, and had them react to that as well.
Q: What were the big differences?
A: The overwhelming message was the antipathy non-Americans now feel towards the US. And Americans just weren't seeing that at all. There was no war on terrorism anywhere outside the US. In fact, there was a clear perception that the US was the problem. The scenario that everyone else was talking about was how could you constrain the US, not how could you defeat terrorism. So there are completely different perceptions of the world. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:58:40 AM
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slate.msn.com - Death by Spam - The e-mail you know and love is about to vanish.. One-third of the 30 billion e-mails sent worldwide each day are spam. That's 10 billion daily pitches for herbal Viagra, Nigerian scams, and genital-enlarging creams piling up in our inboxes. Neither legislation nor litigation against spammers has stemmed the tide, and they're not going to have much of an effect in the future, either. It's time to give up: Despite the best efforts of legislators, lawyers, and computer programmers, spam has won. Spam is killing e-mail. Or at least it's about to destroy the e-mail we're used to: the tool that lets a stranger respond to something you posted on your Web site or that lets a potential client contact you after reading an article you wrote. E-mail is pervasive because it's simple to use, remarkably flexible, and it reaches everyone. The trouble is that e-mail is too good at that third task. Because e-mail inboxes are open to anyone, longtime Internet users now receive hundreds of spams per day, making e-mail virtually unusable without countermeasures. [Privacy Digest]
6:50:02 AM
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Looking back, it's hard to believe
that we have lived as long as we have:
As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a
special treat.
Our baby cribs were painted with bright colored lead based paint. We
often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and
when we rode our bikes we had no helmets.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride
down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running
into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem.
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we
were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. We played dodge ball and
sometimes the ball would really hurt.
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were
never over weight; we were always outside playing.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team.
Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Some students weren't as smart as others so they failed a grade and
were held back to repeat the same grade.
That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem
solvers.
We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we
learned how to deal with it all.
THINK ABOUT IT!!!
5:41:50 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Paul W. Swansen.
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