Scripting News for 2/18/2007

It took a few hours, but I got my cool Panasonic webcam working with my Mac over the net. Thanks Chris! Hi Ponzi! 

Public Radio Manifesto, part II 

I’ve been spending lots of time thinking about the talk in Boston later this week.

1. Proof that we have a problem with discourse in our country — we got into a crazy war without discussing it.

2. This little problem isn’t something theoretical. It’s costing us nearly a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives, and the problems it causes will last for generatins because kids are growing up in the world today with no respect for the US, and we don’t deserve their respect bedause we don’t think.

3 We need a thinking upgrade.

4. What better time to do it than as a national election is approaching.

Some of these ideas are outlined in a 1/2 hour podcast I did yesterday.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/cn07Feb17.mp3

Looking forward…

Springtime in Berkeley 

There’s always a moment when you realize this is it, spring is here; and this year, that moment came this week. It’s warm, you don’t need to bundle up when you go out.

The air smells like perfume, every time you turn a corner, there’s a new version of heaven for your nose; and visually, it’s pretty stunning too — the colors! Oh man.

The weather in California is pretty amazing, and every year it peaks, right around now, and there probably isn’t a more lovely place on the planet.

Another sign it’s spring: you can sleep with the windows open.

And, as “Solo” reminds, you can sleep with the windows open in NY too, but you’ll freeze your ass.

Continuing with codecasting 

Two changes to how the feed is generated. 1. Only output a part once, no need to update a part more than once, when updating, the last version will overwrite all previous versions. 2. Because of the first change, we have to change the order of the feed to reverse-chronologic. The result of this changes is that the size of the feed decreases, and the time spent processing it on updating decreases, and the cost of running the server decreases. A three-way win, so an obvious improvement.

If all goes well, I’ll release the client code to OPML Editor users. It won’t be turned on by default, but I will turn it on in all my copies of the OPML Editor, so it can get a good test before deploying to user sites.

People ask what’s so great about codecasting, and the answer is, for users, nothing in particular. For developers who manage environments with users who need to update frequently, it might cut the cost of providing updates. For me, it certainly will cut my costs, and since the software that I will update is open source, and produces no revenue, cutting costs means I have more money to go to the movies, eat out, buy toys, pay for health insurance, save for retirement, give to good causes. I write about stuff on my blog because I like to keep a record of my work, so it may not make sense to you, or even seem like a good idea, if so, so be it.

Actually, there is an advantage for users. The current method of updating requires the user’s app to call teh server on port 5337, but we’ve received complaints that some corporate firewalls don’t allow traffic on that port (contradicting the assumption, btw, that some critics of XML-RPC offer, saying we’re just tunneling over port 80). Using RSS and a plain old web server, now we really are doing updates on port 80 and the corporate firewalls won’t have any issues with it.

Another reason I document my work here is so that I can include pointers in my comments, saving me having to document my work twice.

Influential pundits 

It’s great to see Marc Canter get the recognition he deserves. It’s been a long road for him, a lot of the pundits are put off by Marc’s directness, enthusiasm, certainty.

I always listen to people like Marc (there aren’t many) because I want to get new ideas, and over the years I’ve gotten plenty of them from Marc.

Speaking of influential pundits, what’s Clay Shirky’s problem with Second Life? He seems to be making a career of overhyping how overhyped it is.

Scripting News for 2/17/2007

Podcast: What I hope to talk about at the Public Media conference next week in Boston. 

Essential On the Media segment on NY Times coverage on the Iran connection. Pay close attention to the interview with NY Times reporter Michael Gordon, who sounds sincere, but has no sense of how his stories are read. Interviewer Gladstone holds back nothing. This is the kind of courageous challenge that the Times needs, they seem to have learned nothing from the run up to the war in Iraq.  

NY Times: “Seth Godin published a book under a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to republish and sell it. But he was a little surprised when someone actually did.” 

Law.com: The No-Asshole Rule.  

Public Radio Manifesto, part 1 

When Judith Miller went to jail, I was against her getting a special deal because she’s a journalist. I want all of us to have equal protection, everyone is a journalist now, or no one is.

The case of Josh Wolf re-opens these issues. The prosecutor said Wolf is a journalist only in his imagination, and I agree, and that’s the point. What other ratification should it require to be a journalist. In the country as the founding fathers imagined it, we would all be so involved in the governing, and in the evaluation of government, that there would seem nothing unusual in one self-proclaiming as a journalist. It’s a sign of how far we’ve wandered from the ideal that the prosecutor seems to be ridiculing Wolf instead of celebrating his pride of citizenship.

Progress on ‘codecasting’ 

In the wee hours of the morning I got code working that reads the code-feed, importing objects that are new or updated since the last time we looked. It was a very straightforward continuation of the project I discussed yesterday, and will easily fit into the OPML Editor (and Frontier as well if the developers there want to adopt this method).

Scripting News for 2/16/2007

What is codecasting? 

Have a look at this feed…

http://bits.codecasting.org/opml.root/rss.xml

It’s got enclosures, like a podcasting feed, but instead of linking to MP3 files, it links to bits of code.

Seems like a rational next step. The code updating process for the OPML Editor is based on XML-RPC, as was the process for Radio and Frontier, but it’s always been possible to turn it into an entirely static process. Now that I’m doing a sweep over my servers, trying to reduce the cost of running them, and at the same time make them more durable, I put it on my to-do list, and posted a heads-up a few days ago, that I was planning something new (at least for me) with RSS.

BTW, the parts that the feed links to are real, they really do contain code, it reflects all the part updates for the OPML Editor since it shipped in the summer of 2005. I haven’t yet written code that interprets the feed, that receives updates from it, so there may yet be changes in the approach. But in the spirit of sharing my work in progress, here it is.

Public radio manifesto, preamble 

I’ve been a user and critic of public radio for my entire adult life. I’ve even produced my own form of public radio, called podcasting, and helped other people get started doing it.

Radio is so much a part of the way I think that I named a product Radio. I thought of the tools we were using as a new form of radio, where the wires were carrying TCP/IP signals and HTTP formatted packets, and XML structured data.

Change has been coming to radio, for a long time, the same way change has been coming to all media, and the change that’s coming is the same one for all — decentralization. It’s the mode of our times. When our parents and grandparents were in the prime of life the flow was the other way, toward centralization. Who was the best singer, the richest business person, the smartest doctoral student. We worshipped superlatives, most of us could only admire those who were more blessed than we were. There was only one Sandy Koufax, Jackie Robinson or John Kennedy. One Marilyn Monroe, one Martha Stewart.

There once was a time when we entertained each other. If you wanted music on a Saturday night you’d have to perform it yourself or listen to a neighbor. Before there was broadcast radio, music was personal. It will be personal again, and it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, because the joy of creating is something we should all share. We learn how to draw and write and sing when we’re children, but we were taught not to do that so much as adults, but it still feels good, even if we’re not the best at what we do.

So when people talk about the Long Tail, or crowd-sourcing or participatory democracy, I think they miss the point. The new way of doing now involves the minds, knowledge and creativity of everyone, not just a few.

Gartenberg 

I was speechless yesterday on hearing the news that Michael Gartenberg was becoming a Microsoft evangelist.

Today I have a speech.

The people who know Michael are universally supportive. It’s quite an endorsement for Microsoft, certainly there are a lot of big tech companies that would be happy to have him on staff. He’s open minded and knowledgable, fair and tough. I’ve seen him in action, I’ve argued with him, and more important than anything given his new role, received lots of support from him, even though in his past job at Jupiter, it wasn’t in any way his job to support people like me.

Now at Microsoft, his job is to help people like us. The people who read this site are all enthusiasts, that’s virtually what defines this site. When I ask a question about technology here, no matter how obscure, we get to the answer in an instant, often with lots of interesting sidebars along the way. And we’re the people who Microsoft lost in the last few years. Look at this graph to get an idea. 24 percent of the readers of this site use Microsoft’s browser. Just a few years ago that number was in the 80s.

A lot of the analysis of Gartenberg’s move has been about how he might influence us, but to me that’s the blogosphere not understanding its own importance. The true measure of his effectiveness is how much we influence them. Remember this is the world after the audience. If you add up the smarts in their room and the smarts in our room, we win, because there are so many more of us than there are of them, even though Microsoft is a very large company. Their challenge has always been to find a way to harness our power, to make them smarter. When Microsoft has achieved its mission it’s been because they did this better than anyone else. Of all the tech companies this is their area of strength, more than Apple, more than Google, Microsoft is of the people, not such an ivory tower, although in recent years, it’s looking and acting more like all the other tech companies.

That they hired one of our most brilliant people is good on them. But a big organization like MS not only generates its own gravity, they have their own laws of physics. Over time, people like Gartenberg and Jon Udell (another recent hire from outside) succumb to the logic of their law, and communication starts becoming one-way and therefore ineffective. But for now we have someone inside Microsoft who speaks our language, who doesn’t rush to explain everything to us about how things work inside their firewall (as if we care, or should) and instead focuses on solving problems and leveraging opportunities.

Good luck to Michael and good luck to us!

PS: I’ve received a number of emails asking what percentage of Scripting News readers are Mac users. Answer: 38 percent.

Scripting News for 2/15/2007

Holy guacamole 

Michael Gartenberg at Microsoft?

Speechless.

CNN carrying Bush water 

I watched yesterday’s Bush press conference. There’s absolutely no doubt that he’s selling war with Iran. And this morning, I saw CNN help him with the pitch.

According to CNN, our sometime enemy in Iraq, radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, may now be in Iran. He may not be there, but it’s possible that he’s there. Right now. That was the news, it was a headline, scoop-level story. We’re not sure he’s there, but he could be. That’s news? Eh.

They also said, but didn’t emphasize, that if he were in Iran this wouldn’t be anything new, he’s often in Iran.

He’s also part of the coalition that forms the government of Iraq, the one that we’re supporting, the one that we’re funding, and arming. But this time, today, they didn’t mention that he’s our friend in Iraq, because today he’s being portrayed as our enemy in Iraq. But given that he’s part of the government of Iraq, him being in Iran is like Ted Kennedy being in Mexico. It’s conceivable that al-Sadr has legitimate business in Iran. But it’s hard for us to conceive of that, supposedly, because the picture that’s being painted is that Iran is the country that’s killing our soldiers. And we’re supposed to conclude, of course, that al-Sadr, being in Iran (if he actually is) is more evidence of that. They don’t say it, but we’re left wondering why this is news. If he isn’t there plotting the deaths of more Americans, exactly why is he in Iran? (Assuming he is.) Clearly he’s up to no good.

In other words, they’re just moving around words to make it sound like something new and dangerous is happening, when in fact nothing new is happening, and if it is dangerous, it is something that in the past, the same people have asked us to overlook the danger in.

One more thing — in the Bush press conference, not only haven’t the reporters asked Bush to explain who the enemy is, they also talk about the enemy themselves, although if pressed, I doubt if any of them could explain exactly who the enemy is. Maybe they should do a Frontline special explaining the complicity of the professional journalists in U.S. propoganda.

Summary: One day al-Sadr is the enemy and another day he is our ally.

What could “winning” in Iraq possibly mean?

Problem: We have no clue who we’re fighting.

Great balls of fire 

Daring Fireball is a huge-flow site, when they point to me, lots of traffic, and not idle clickers either, they seem to read the pieces, their emails are thoughtful.

Today they point to a piece I wrote after CES, about how Microsoft used to be a great seducer, which fit well with their tail light chasing method of competing.

Today’s Microsoft: Not so much.

Ponzi and Chris 

Last Friday I spent the day with Chris and Ponzi Pirillo at their new house in the Seattle area.

A day with the Pirillos means lots of talk about gadgets, for sure. Their house is filled with cool electronic toys.

I was raving about Fractional Horsepower HTTP Servers, and that got Chris started, and he showed me a Panasonic webcam that I had to get, so I did.

Quick impulse decision that it was, I didn’t remember until later that the difference between my house and theirs is that theirs runs on Windows and mine runs on Macs. Of course I have the obligatory Windows machine (and Chris has a Mac Mini) so I was able to get the webcam configured and working (and it’s very very cool) but what I really want is to be able to use it from my desktop and laptop. And for that, I have to be able to use it with a Mac, which I have not managed to do yet, even though it appears to be compatible, based on this member review on the Amazon site. And there’s software that claims to work with it on the Mac, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet.

It’s a personal issue I’m sure, probably has something to do with the post-op haze that’s enveloping my mind. Expect me to rave about it once I get the booger working properly with my Macs.

Scripting News for 2/14/2007

A cell phone with a RSS button. (!) 

Congrats to Kevin Marks on his new job at Google. 

Love and technology 

Here’s a great story…

Dave Jacobs is PKD survivor, a hereditary disease that destroys the kidneys. Both Dave and his sister Cher received kidney transplants in 2004. His younger brother, Brant, died from the disease. Dave has three sons and is raising his nephew — each of these boys have a 50 percent chance of having inherited the disease. So the Jacobs family is very well motivated to solve this problem.

Dave is healthy again, really — you should see the guy, it’s a real miracle. We go out to eat, go to baseball games, take long walks, and kid each other about stuff that doesn’t matter, and cheer each other on as we go forward. And Dave is doing some amazing stuff, which I want to tell you about today.

His new company, Silverstone Solutions, has developed software that automates something that used to be done informally, manually and inefficiently, and the result is new kidneys for people who, without them, would likely die. Here’s how the system works.

Suppose you have a friend or relative who wants to donate a kidney to you, but for some reason that kidney isn’t transplantable in your body (wrong blood type, for example). So you register with your hospital, and they enter your data into the Silverstone software. Another person has a friend with a kidney that’s incompatible for them, but works for you. And suppose your friend’s kidney works for them. Bingo. Two people survive where before none would. The software of course can handle three-way combinations, and so on.

They’ve spent a couple of years getting it to work, and have signed their first customer, California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. And today, Valentine’s Day, they performed their first transplant.

There’s no doubt that Big Dave survived his disease to find his purpose in life, to combine technology and knowledge with medicine and love, to save lives. I’m proud to know Dave, and honored to be among the first to tell this story.

A new feature for story pages 

A simple new feature, story pages now have a cookie crumb navigation trail at the top of each page, pointing to the day, month, year and entire archive. This way, when the story is indexed in a search engine, you can find your way back to the context in which the story appeared.

PS: I added a second new feature. Each paragraph on each story page now has a purple pound sign linked to a permalink for the paragraph, making it possible to point to individual paragraphs inside stories.

Slowdown 

Things have been a bit slower here the last couple of days — I had minor elective eye surgery yesterday under general anesthetic, and it knocked me out pretty well. It seems to have been a success, had some problems with the retina in my left eye, still a bit wiped out from the experience, but overall feeling pretty well. Nothing like the surgery I had in 2002.

Pipes, five days later 

Richard MacManus writes about Pipes. It has the chicken and egg problem, the same one every programming language has when its new, there’s not much interesting data to operate on. In this case, the target is the huge, rich base of RSS feeds, which is designed to work with one kind of aggregator, a River of News, and if you structured Pipes around that — a filtration process for a river, it might bear some immediate fruit, but its built on a different model.

It assumes that each feed can be dealt with as a procedure call, which according to the REST philosophers, it can, but in practice, feeds don’t take parameters, so they’re the least interesting kinds of procedures, like clock.now in UserTalk. Sure there are some verbs that build on that verb, date.month, date.year and date.dayOfWeek, but nowhere near as much as verbs that have rich parameter lists, which are like the gateways that Tim O’Reilly and Jon Udell are so excited about.

See XML-RPC for Newbies for background; a Pipes that could do XML-RPC could be interesting, esp because the Metaweblog API is an XML-RPC application, and is widely supported by blogging tools and CMSes.

In the RSS world, and therefore in Pipes, there’s no way to tell if items in two feeds are talking about the same thing. The best you can hope for is keyword serendipity, which all the demos so far do, and those make for unsatisfying demos, because you know you couldn’t deploy a useful app out of the concepts they illustrate. Very much like the early demos for HyperCard, Marimba, and my own Frontier.

Now it’s possible that a company like Yahoo, with its diverse flows of information, and nearly universal support of RSS, could add enough metadata to their feeds to be sure two items in different feeds were talking about the same thing, and then we’d be somewhere interesting. However at that point, I’d like a nice procedural language, something like Python’s treatment of XML-RPC, not the visually appealing but information sparse IDE that so many marketing people fall in love with, but not many programmers actually use.

Scripting News for 2/13/2007

James Hong on what it takes to motivate a successful entrepreneur.  

Chris Carfi on putting the public into public radio. 

Appian Way: “When Mac is broken, we are faced with a small number of bad options, all of which will cost us a lot more time and brain damage than calling Dell.” 

Boston next week 

I’m planning my trip to Boston, next week. Wed through Fri is the Public Media conference. I’m speaking on Thursday, in the slot that Dave Sifry was originally going to speak in (he couldn’t make it).

Then I think I’ll head up to New Hampshire over the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, with my digital camera and laptop, to see if I can catch by some of the Presidential candidates, returning to California on Monday.

People wonder how you do it. The events often aren’t scheduled until the last minute. In 2003 there was an RSS feed put up by NHPolitics.com, that listed the events as they became known. I’m hoping there’s something like that for this year. I’ll probably just get a room in Manchester, that’s usually where the campaign HQs are, and ask questions.

People often think you need some kind of ticket or reservation, but politics is open to all in NH early in the campaign, and you usually just have to show up. Weekends are the best time to look for events, that’s when the schedules are packed. And this early in the season with so many candidates, it seems it would be hard not to run into some kind of campaign event.

Scripting News for 2/12/2007

That’s what I’m talking about! 

Niall Kennedy reports on a Nokia video podcatcher.

This is why I say the iPod is nice but it isn’t the ideal podcast device. We need more designs that are centered around what we do. USB cables are very primitive channels for synchronization. Way too limiting. I’ve got a device in my pocket that’s got local storage and an always on net connection. Now how hard could it be to teach it how to do RSS? Nokia shows us — it’s not so hard!

It’s the flipside of the fractional horsepower HTTP servers that are popping up in so many consumer electronic products. What do you need to feed of all those FHHTTPS? Why its a hand-held podcatcha, of course.

Hey, dat’s waht I’m tawkin about!

WNYC spam 

9 times out of 10, I don’t give money to public radio stations, because once you do, you never hear the end of it.

A few weeks ago, in response to a request for support from On The Media podcast, I gave $100 to WNYC. I don’t even live in NY. Now I’m getting a steady stream of spam from them with all kinds of special offers. This really sucks.

Of course I have asked to be removed from the spam list, and how tacky is it to ask for a pledge less than a month after getting a gift of $100.

Unconference for journalists? 

Reading these notes following the We Media conference in Miami, I’m happy to report that there have been unconferences for journalists — all unconferences are for journalists (and of course for everyone else too).

We had professional journalists, many of them, at the first couple of BloggerCons at Harvard in 2003 and 2004.

Maybe it’s better to flip the question around — I wonder what is served by continuing the hierarchic speaker-panel-audience conferences, where the action migrates into the hallways? Why keep organizing that kind of conference, when the newer models are so much more effective at sharing information and ideas, so much more inclusive and interesting, and so much more fun!

In any case, if there’s an interest in an unconference specifically for professional journalists that’s open to all interested parties, I would be happy to help in the planning of such an event. Anything to help my brothers and sisters in professional media embrace the changes that are in process.

Iran IEDs new? Nah 

Dan Brekke notes that the U.S. has been trying to sell the idea that Iran is a source of weapons in Iraq for quite some time. Nothing new here. We’re being manipulated again.

Wouldn’t it be great if Bush resigned early so we can start fresh with an administration that might not be lying all the time.

Perhaps we could deal with this at an unconference for journalists.

Pre-N perf boost? 

Earlier this month Apple shipped its new Airport Extreme wireless router, and compatibility for certain Mac laptops and desktops. By now some people should have them.

Question — how’s the performance? Is it delivering 5 times the throughput? How about increased range?

Thanks for all the info about the Airport Extreme and pre-N routers. This is what makes Scripting News so great, all the smart generous people who are willing to share what they learn.

Scripting News for 2/11/2007

John Roberts: Who actually covers local news? 

Mike Arrington wants to know who created MyBarakObama. “It launched basically feature-complete and bug free, which would be very hard to do without an extended beta.” 

Steven Levy: “The way Zune handles its song sharing, its draconian DRM is slapped on tunes indiscriminately, whether the artists want it there or not.” 

Ed Cone on Google’s strong-arm tactics in North Carolina.  

Jason Calacanis: “If I was CEO of StumbleUpon I would raise $10M and pay the top 250 folks $500 a month for contributing to the system.” 

Biz Stone likes the changes I’ve made to Scripting News in the last few weeks. More are coming. I have some ideas about RSS feeds. I’m also going to do something bizarre for the 10-year anniversary, coming on 4/1/07. 

Iranian weapons? BFD 

The NY Times ran this story on Saturday, today there’s a mysterious US press briefing announcing that they had discovered that weapons imported from Iran to Iraq are killing American soldiers. So what exactly are we supposed to conclude from this? They don’t say.

On the Sunday talk shows, the politicos don’t say what’s obvious to this voter.

1. If you don’t want Americans blown up by Iranian weapons, get them out of Iraq.

2. It’s a big surprise? We’re calling them names, threatening them, moving our aircraft carriers into their ports, and we’re supposed to be shocked that they’re helping people who are fighting with us in Iraq? I would be surprised if it were otherwise, if they weren’t helping them.

3. Who’s providing more weapons to our enemies, Iran or the U.S.? I don’t have the slightest doubt that the American taxpayer is the largest single source of support for people killing Americans in Iraq. We’re pumping billions of dollars into Iraq every month, a lot of that must be in the form of weapons. Our supposed allies in Iraq are actually Sunni or Shi’ite militia. There are virtually no non-partisans in Iraq, everyone is on some side, and aside from the Americans and British, they’re all trying to blow our guys up.

4. We’ll leave behind a power vacuum in Iraq if we leave now? Seems doubtful to me. The place is already in chaos. We have 150,000 troops in Iraq (or thereabouts) in a country of 27 million people. How many of them are armed? Even if it’s only ten percent of the populace that’s still about 15 Iraqi combatants for every American. We’re not keepting them from killing each other now, we’re not keeping the peace, but we are getting killed. And here’s the thought that scares me the most — it could get a lot worse.

5. Reality-check. Does the U.S. government have any credibility on such things? The people doing the briefing did it on the condition of anonymity. That the Times, of all the publications, is willing to report this as a straight news story is unreal. How stupid are we supposed to be, according to them? Pretty damned stupid, it seems.

Route this to Wikipedia 

For the podcasting page on Wikipedia (which I don’t edit because I’m one of the people it talks about, or should).

Here’s a screen shot of the RSS enclosures prefs page from Radio 8. As you can see from the timestamp at the bottom of the page it was last modified on 11/24/2001. It was created some time before that. Adam Curry, who wrote iPodder, three years later, was an avid user of this software.

Credit matters 

In most intellectual and creative fields they call taking credit for someone else’s work plagiarism. It’s an ugly word, which is good, because it is an ugly act.

For some reason programmers are supposed to not care about credit for their accomplishments. The idea almost certainly came from someone who wanted to take credit for someone else’s work. Creative people of all ilks share this one thing, they want credit. That’s why the credits in a movie or an album are so long. That’s why when someone receives an award they thank the people who made it possible. Credit matters.

When a reporter makes light of this, and I’ve seen them do it, ask how they’d feel if you ran their most popular article on your website with your name on it.

This really came home when I met with Richard Stallman a couple of months ago. I was surprised to find out that he cared who created a piece of software. To him the act of authorship was important. I had been led to believe the opposite. How about that.

Google saved my ass 

This is pretty technical.

I needed to find out where in the sea of software that’s the OPML Editor I’m installing a listener on port 5335. It should be easy, set a breakpoint in the inetd.startOne glue script and give me a stack crawl when it’s opening that port, and it’s not impossible, but it was easier to just give the string to Google and see what came back. It was a long shot and a couple of years ago it wouldn’t have worked, but today it did. I found out which root file was making the request and from there it was a simple search to find the bit of code.

Good work Google!

Oh the humanity 

I’m doing a careful review of all my servers, trying to reduce my monthly spending, and improve the durability of the sites I care about, and I’m finding some amazing things.

For example — each of my servers that runs Frontier automatically has a copy of the Radio Community Server installed and turned on. One of its features is that it takes weblogs.com compatible pings from (supposedly) sites in its community, by design it was supposed to also support a community of Radio users. At least that was the design, five years ago when the software shipped. Anyway, there is no community gathered around most of these servers, but they’re ready if one should pop up. And the Internet being what it is in 2007, they do pop up, selling their wares, the usual stuff that spammers are interested in.

Of course now that I know, I’m shutting them all off.

Here’s a screen shot.

Scripting News for 2/10/2007

Wealth Bondage would rather his blog not survive him.  

As a Mac user, I wish Microsoft would run an Apple-like ad about the process by which Mac users get service for broken hardware. It would be really hard for Apple to respond, because their system for dealing with broken hardware is itself horribly broken. They need serious incentives to fix this. 

Sue Polinsky: Why do you care about RSS? 

Yikes, I’m missing the Newspaper 2.0 meetup in Santa Barbara today. You’re probably missing it too. :-( 

Once again, thanks to Continental Airlines for the free wifi access outside their President’s Club lounge at Gate B11 at Sea-Tac.  

I usually don’t write about dreams on this blog, but last night I had a weird one that sorta seems on-topic. I was reading an article about the most popular new digital cameras and was tripping out over one called The Megnut, designed by Meg Hourihan, Blogger founder, food blogger, presumably a mega-millionaire after Google bought them out. I was thinking how strange life was, how I knew so many of the people responsible for the popular memes of the day, and how it was expanding beyond the worlds of blogging, podcasting, etc. Well, I guess it was just a little too strange to be real. :-) 

Scripting News for 2/9/2007

NY Times: “A report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war.” 

Caterina: “Pipes is getting us closer and closer to nerdvana.” 

Don Park: “Another case of reality tormenting geeky ideals.”