Wednesday, August 11, 1999

XML-RPC for Preferences. User preferences can be shared among servers running in different environments on different operating systems anywhere in the world.

News.Com: Microsoft's New APIs. "To stem the flow of developers away from the fold, the company needs a development tool that does for Web development what its Visual Basic tool did to revolutionize Windows development back in 1991." Interesting!

BTW, I heard from someone in the know at InfoWorld, and their linking policy is for real. They really expect people to ask for permission to link to their stories. This is a big problem!

Matt Neuburg (1993): MORE, MORE Dinosaur.

The Economist: Bill Joy, the Brains behind Sun. "But whereas Bill Gates long ago said goodbye to geekdom (whatever Microsoft’s PR machine might say to the contrary), Mr Joy remains resolutely nerdy—a tall, rather shambling figure with a shock of ungovernable hair and a penchant for denim shirts worn with a slightly shiny suede waistcoat. True to form, Mr Joy can also be pretty hard to understand." Don't feel bad, I'm a geek and I find him hard to understand too.

Simple ToDo: "Simple To Do has all the features you'd expect in a list manager -- you can prioritize items, sort them, mark them as Done, and it's even hierarchical so you can create sub-items to your main items." It's an outliner!

Another excellent classic Mac outliner: Acta.

Dan Bricklin: Reactions to the posting of VisiCalc and Other History Sites.

New Channel: Frontier News. Excellent!

Jim Flanagan shows how a simple CGI can prevent deep linking. The lawsuits can end now. All they have to do is upgrade their servers.

A script that reads text from a MORE file into a Frontier outline.

Red Hat IPO a stunner. Congrats!

News.Com: "It's not your ordinary high-tech IPO."

Motley Fool: SGI Bids Farewell to NT.

MSNBC: Deadly Tornado Hits Salt Lake. "A sudden tornado touched down without warning Wednesday in the downtown area of Salt Lake City, damaging buildings, killing four and causing dozens of injuries."

Upside: The Man Behind Linux. "I hope that in five years you'll see Linux being a desktop choice. Maybe not displacing Microsoft, but at least being a real choice so [that] when people go into computer stores and buy their computers in 2004, they'll have to [stop and ask themselves whether they] want Linux installed, or Apple, or Microsoft."

ZDNet: Microsoft Aims at Linux. "At Microsoft we spend about $3 billion on development, so our operating system is tested in all environments. My concern is that if there are so many people developing Linux, customers will not have confidence that it will work so well."

Thanks to Wes Felter for a pointer to an Apple mail list about HTML Rendering.

Sadly, Jamis MacNiven, the owner of Buck's has remapped www.buckswoodside.com to a Best.Com server. We ran some great stories at and about Buck's. We wish Jamis and his team the very best.