Movies from the Blogzone 
Joshua Allen on leaking tomorrow’s announcements.
Jeff Sandquist on Pahrump, NV.
Miguel de Icaza on the name Miguel and how it feels to be at a Microsoft event.
The scene at the Blogzone.
Today’s links
BART tips on commuting in the New Bay Area.
Scoble is hosting a geek dinner for Hugh MacLeod in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Dinner tonight, 6:30PM, Grand Lux Cafe
Bloggers dinner tonight at the Grand Lux Cafe at the Venetian at 6:30PM.
Sign up, comments, on the wiki.
Seeya there!! 🙂
PS: My flight gets in at 3:30PM.
PPS: Get ready for weather shock. High of 94 today. Hot!
PPPS: I’ve got my Sprint Ambassador phone with me. 415-871-7163.
Major Bay Area highway outage
This morning there’s a report on local news that a critical piece of Bay Area roadway is out, and may be out for weeks or months.
The biggest traffic bottleneck in a traffic-challenged metropolitan area is known as the MacArthur Maze. Four major freeways, 880, 580, 24 and 80 all come together from the East Bay, and from the other side — the Bay Bridge connects all that with San Francisco.
Early this morning a gasoline tanker truck caught fire on a ramp connecting 580 westbound with 880, causing 250 yards of freeway to collapse.
Google map of the maze.
Reports from SF Chron, KGO, Mercury News, Contra Costa Times.
New Twitter support in OPML Editor
Yesterday I released new code that allows you to browse the posts from all the people you’re following on Twitter.
How to: 1. Choose Update opml.root from the File menu. 2. Click on OK. 3. Quit and relaunch the OPML Editor app.
There’s a new Twitter sub-menu of the Community menu, with two commands: 1. The Preferences command allows you to set your Twitter username and password, and 2. My Twitter Friends opens an outline window with a list of your friends.
In the window, when you double-click on a friend’s name, after a short delay, we display the last 20 status messages posted by that person. If the the message contained a URL, the outline node is a link, if you double-click it, the link opens in your web browser (screen shot). Although I haven’t tried it yet, if the URL ends with .opml, it should open in-place, since that’s a hack the OPML Editor uses to trigger an OPML inclusion. 🙂
As usual, report any problems here, or on one of the mail lists.
PS: Amyloo got it before I even wrote it up. 🙂
Scripting News Annex 
Posted by kosso on April 29, 2007 at 8:17 am
Dave,
Re: OPML Editor
Would I be right in saying that the OPML.zip download is up to date? (Or should it update when installed?)
As I still can’t get it run as normal (without hacking it) on a PC with IE7.
I really need to this work as I have ALOT of OPML on the way.
Posted by Dave Winer on April 29, 2007 at 8:24 am
It’s up to date, but the crashing problem hasn’t been fixed.
If you’d like a solution to this problem, I suggest raising the issue on the Frontierkernel list.
Thanks…
Posted by kosso on April 29, 2007 at 9:15 am
Thanks. But I can’t see me having any success there if you didn’t.
Oh well- shame – enjoy the Mix.
Posted by Dave Winer on April 29, 2007 at 9:31 am
I think that’s the mistake, you’re all looking to me to do it, but until they get the idea that there are users and developers over here, no one is going to pay attention. There’s a long history in the Frontier community of them not thinking what I’m doing is important. Really fucked up, but real nonetheless.
Posted by kosso on April 29, 2007 at 10:28 am
Yeah. I hear ya. Bummer.
I wonder if there will be anyone at MS Mix who could help?
Re: Twitter – i’ve built a few server/system alerts via Twitter for when things go awry – posting to custom private account. Pretty handy.
‘Coral Reef’ – NICE idea!
That would be the dream situation for podcast.com, where we’ll offer MANY data ‘trajectories’ into the users’ data – via OPML, RSS, XSPF, FOAF, M3U etc etc. – making so many mashups of ‘connections’ between content, user/members and feedback/recommendations possible on a variety of desktop, livingroom and mobile platforms.
XML really does make it easy.
S’funny – I often get asked about our API – until I make various functions available, I point people to all the OPML and RSS feeds we have 😉
RSS/OPML *does* provide an API of sorts.
Also: fyi – the bespoke Twitter ‘status.xml’ format is much more useful at the moment than the RSS feeds, as they give you a load more info on the ‘twitterer’ and are updated as soon as someone posts (according to Twitter devs). The RSS feeds appear to be pretty delayed/cached – which is quite sensible too though.
It all depends how ‘live’ your system needs to be in reading twitter data back.
Posted by kosso on April 29, 2007 at 10:58 am
Another one of the reasons I really wanted to get the OPML Editor up and running again, was to try and look back at the Instant Outliner. As I see it very much like ‘threaded Twitters’
A while ago a had a crack at ‘Subscribing’ to an OPML version of my friend’s Tweets : http://kosso.co.uk/twitter/opmlFriends.php
I think ‘OPML Subscription’ and OPML Inclusion will be VERY important as we see more and more systems outputting RSS and OPML from all these emerging disparate and related social networks and ‘METworks’ 🙂
OPML makes it really easy to stitch them all together to navigate and traverse
Posted by Donovan Watts on April 29, 2007 at 12:50 pm
I’ve got a Twitter menu, I can set Twitter prefs. I can see my Twitter friends in an outline. What I am missing is a Twitter button in Today’s Outline. I’ve updated, restarted and asked for help in the Yahoo group, as well as read the online docs found on the support site but nothing has helped. Can you point me to the definitive document on how to reinstall OPML Editor, maintaining my data? I figure that may be my best option at this point. Thanks, looking forward to twittering with my Editor.
Posted by Dave Winer on April 29, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Donovan, don’t reinstall the OPML Editor, that’s really radical (although it’s easy, just copy everything out of the Guest Databases folder from on installation into the new one, with everything located at the same file paths).
Try setting the date back on updating process to something like March 1, 2007.
It’s located at user.rootUpdates.servers.opml.lastupdate.
Then choose Update opml.root from the File menu. That will make sure you get all the parts that have been updated since March 1.
There’s no other explanation I can think of that you’d be able to do all that Twittering in one context, but not in the other.
Posted by John Blake on April 29, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I have not been able to post to Twitter since I updated today. Worked fine yesterday. Please help. I will try to follow your suggestions to Donovan.
Posted by Dave Winer on April 29, 2007 at 4:25 pm
John, that’s not much of a bug report.
1. What I did.
2. What I expected to happen.
3. What actually happened.
Seems unlikely that the problem you’re having will be cured by the guess I took for the solution to Donovan’s problem.
Posted by John Blake on April 29, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Just restarted my web browser, OPML Editor and it is working now…all is well!
Posted by Raines on April 30, 2007 at 5:22 am
Dave, thanks for the outage note; I was aware of it last night and found that enough people were avoiding the freeways that the alternatives for crossing the affected area (9:45 PM Sunday) were virtually traffic-free en route from Berkeley to OAK (tip: don’t go down to 80 West; instead cross town and end up on on MLK at the 51st St. onramp to 980 W which connects to 880 totally bypassing the problem area); there appeared to be some kind of BART backup, however.
Note that the BART advice you point to is out of date (and the linked article is not updated to point to the latest info): ignore all the farecard info, fares are free today by decree of the Governator. Here’s the latest
Posted by Donovan Watts on April 30, 2007 at 9:38 am
Thanks, Dave. Resetting the clock for last update pulled down 19 new parts but still no Twitter button. So, I reinstalled per your instructions and finally I can Twitter! Thanks so much.
Posted by Jean Doute on June 3, 2008 at 12:01 am
OPML editor does not appear to work when File Vault is enabled on OS X Tiger. Please advise if I can do something to make this work (short of disabling File Vault) or if/when you will fix this.
Tks