Scripting News for 1/4/2008

Trade Secrets 2.0? 

Just got off the phone with Scoble.

He told me about a blog post he just put up, entitled Erased.

He says something really simple. When Facebook had an issue with him, they erased his presence.

Seems they could have frozen his account leaving his presence as-is until they could figure out what to do about it.

Anyhooo…

We want to do a podcast from our phone conversations. I’d love to use Twittergram, but we’re limited there to 30 seconds. I wanted to use BlogTalkRadio, but their service does so much more than we want, and you can’t just call it when you have an idea you want to record. I’d like to try something other than Utterz, so if you know of something, please let either Scoble or myself know.

Think of it as Trade Secrets 2.0. It’s the same idea that got me doing a podcast with Adam Curry in 2004. We were having interesting private phone conversations where we’d get around to saying sheez why the fuck aren’t we recording this stuff. Scoble and I are at the same place now.

So if you know of some service we could use, or if you can convince the BTR guys to give us the service we want (that would be my first choice) please let me know.

Today’s song 

And I keep on fighting for the things I want
Though I know that when you’re dead you can’t
But I’d rather be a free man in my grave
Than living as a puppet or a slave

Jimmy Cliff, The Harder they Come.

FlickrFan public demo 

At the public demo on the 17th, I will talk about the idea of the Networked Living Room built on RSS. Low-tech, open, all moving parts replaceable. Not just photos, that’s step one.

Sign up on Upcoming. Still some space left. 🙂

Question about Amazon web services 

I’m working with the new Amazon SimpleDB web service, and have found the docs kind of useful but as often is the case, the one piece of info you need is impossible to find. Here’s what I’m looking for.

1. I can use their Javascript “scratchpad” app to create a URL that creates a domain. When I paste the URL into a browser window, the domain does in fact get created.

2. When I try to do the same from a script, using the Unix command line curl tool, I get a response that seems to be saying (not sure) that the GET method is not supported for this web service. Here’s the exact text of the error message. And here’s the command I used. (The signature is obscured for obvious reasons.)

3. This is what a good response looks like.

Update: Charlie Wood came up with the answer. 🙂

Quote of the day 

Huckabee: “People would rather elect a president who reminds them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off.”

More 10-year anniversaries 

In April of last year we celebrated ten years of Scripting News.

December was the 10-year anniversary of scriptingNews format along with Netscape become what we now call RSS. The first applications started coming online in January 1998. Roughly ten years ago, more or less. 🙂

And we’re approaching the 10-year anniversary of XML-RPC, a format whose Wikipedia page says “the entire description can be printed on two pages of paper.” And it’s one of the few bits of Internet work that I’ve done that has withstood attempts to muddy its origins and confuse its developers.

Today’s XML-RPC is exactly as it was 10 years ago, which, if you were developing XML-RPC apps means that your apps still work, and that’s a good thing. Nothing that’s come along before or since rivals XML-RPC for simplicity and utility.