Georg Berg's Notizen

	Freitag, 8. Oktober 2004

Raising Children.

Raising children is a never-ending job. Just when you think you have an upper hand on them and think yourself the perfect parent, they surprise you into realizing how little you really know. There are no training courses for parents, but the Internet has some fascinating resources that can help…. By rss_feedback@lockergnome.com (Family First). [Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics] 6:42:20 PM

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If you want to understand podcasting, get an iPod, get the software, subscribe to some feeds. Then go for a drive, ride a subway or an airplane, take a walk, do something away from the computer and take the iPod with you. Listen to one of the new programs. Then let me know if it works. Fact is, you can't use your eyes when you're driving, they're busy. Same with walking. It's pretty hard to type on a subway. Annotation, if it's going to happen, will be in voice, and implemented in the iPod. It's easy to see if you just use it. Use it. Use it. Nike says just do it. The iPod commands: Use it. [Scripting News] 6:40:17 PM

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Engadget: "Besides playing MP3s, Auvi's new 256MB USB-style flash memory has an FM tuner, a built-in voice recorder, and can record MP3s from radio broadcasts." [Scripting News] 6:38:31 PM

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Turning Off the Radio. Because I wrote the book on Radio UserLand, my decision to stop using the software on Workbench has raised a few eyebrows.

By tradition, the first thing a weblogger must do with new software is publish a vicious excoriation of the old software, warning others to keep away, like a courageous relief worker marking a land mine.

Textbook example: When Mark Pilgrim concluded that a Movable Type licensing change would have cost him $535, he declared the software a dead end, switched to WordPress, and donated $535 to its open source developers:

Movable Type 3.0 changes the rules, and prices me right out of the market. I do not have the freedom to run the program for any purpose; I only have the limited set of freedoms that Six Apart chooses to bestow upon me, and every new version seems to bestow fewer and fewer freedoms.

I migrated from Radio for more prosaic reasons. I need software that can handle the Drudge Retort, a server-hammering menace that in seven months has amassed 4,500 weblog entries and 110,000 visitor comments. Though Radio development has been hearteningly brought back to life by Steve Kirks and UserLand, it's a desktop tool that publishes Web content as static files. That's a poor fit for a psychotically active site with constant user contributions (or should that be a constantly active site with psychotic user contributions?).

I could have chosen a server-based program such as Movable Type, the subject of my next book, or Manila, the software I'm using to host 3,000 free weblogs on Buzzword.Com. But I work faster in PHP than I do in either Perl or UserTalk, the scripting languages required to extend those two programs, and I'm skeptical that either program can handle a million-comment-a-year onslaught.

The money I would have paid for Radio, $39.95 a year, will be spent on Guinness and hookers. [Workbench] 6:30:23 PM trackback []