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Permanent link to archive for Sunday, April 30, 2000. Sunday, April 30, 2000

Has Microsoft peaked?

NY Times: "Employees, whose options from previous years are now under water, become restless. To keep them happy, Microsoft last week awarded 70 million new stock options at $66.625 each. The indicated value of the grant: $1.9 billion."

5/12/98: "If their internal developers become inefficient compared to those outside, it's possible for them to let go of that model and shift to a new one."

A SOAP Scanner?

Talking with Bob Bierman on the phone this morning, I say I want a scanner, I've been asking him to get me one for over a year, but every time we talk we hit the same problem. Neither of us think that I would be willing to put up with the amount of work needed to get my scans onto the Web.

I asked if anyone had developed an HTTP-based scanner as I described in Sept 1997. "Put a piece of paper into the scanner. Press a button on the machine to scan the paper. Open up my web browser on my desktop machine. Open the home page of the scanner. A list of GIFs appears, in reverse chronologic order. Click on the top one. A GIF appears in my web browser. Do a save-as, or drag-drop to get it into Photoshop."

When a group of Stanford researchers helped a group of students upload their pictures for a science fair, they tripped across the Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server idea.

Bob says that you still can't get such a scanner. I find that amazing. He said we might be able to do something like that with Frontier, but what communication protocols do the scanners use?

Of course, a sensible protocol would be XML-RPC or SOAP.

I want ZopeFish

ZopeFish Architecture and Problems: "It works fine if I'm logged in to Zope with someone who has the Manager role, but doesn't allow access (it prompts for a password) to anyone who is not logged in to Zope."

Pike and Zope working together is mission-critical for The Two-Way Web. Please help if you know Zope and we'll help with the Pike side.

Music & more

InfoWorld: "Rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers." Amen!

The new CD Player in Windows 2000 has a live connection to tunes.com, so I can see that it's playing Dire Wolf by the Grateful Dead. (Screen shot to come.)

Jakob Nielsen: Internet Client Design. "Napster connects many users to many servers and basically allows users to view the entire Internet as a collected resource for getting music (or, potentially, other content and services). At the same time, Napster also encourages users to contribute back to the richness of this resource by making their own music collection available as a small part of the whole. So Napster is also an example of a two-way user interface to the Internet. "

An interesting discussion, how would a separate Internet Explorer company make money? This leads somewhere. Imagine for a minute that Yahoo doesn't have a browser in development. How likely is that?

I like to see this. Andre is looking at docs that explain how to embed Python.

The move went well

Good morning, and welcome to UserLand's new land of many servers running at Exodus. The move went smoothly. We aimed for the gutters and Murphy was kind.

"I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy."

For some reason a hard disk in Seattle went out during the move. Totally died. A completely random event? Oh sure. If you believe that I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn I'd like you to consider buying. Murphy works in strange ways.

There was a configuration error on our Mail Transfer Agent (easily fixed).

At 10:49PM all the servers came back online.

Wes Felter was the first to update his ETP site. Makes sense. Now keep an eye out for breakage. How does the new LAN perform? We can't blame it on Conxion anymore. Good deal.

Down the street at Qube Quorner, Luke Tymowski likes the new Exodus performance of his site. "The static version of this site used to take 5 seconds to render, the dynamic version 15 seconds. Now the static version takes 1 second, the dynamic version 2 seconds." (Of course the rendering takes the same amount of time, on the server side, but the Internet gets in the middle of that. I guess Luke is saying that his path to Exodus is faster than his path to Conxion.)

Another change. After moving all the apps off the old Nirvana machine, I had to quickly come up with another name for the server last night in the middle of the move. I decided to call the machine "mainResponder". Nirvana was the codename for mainResponder. It was 1.0 a long time ago. So as we retired the Nirvana name (it now points to a folder of static files on our Linux server to keep breakage to a minimum), my new experimental machine keeps the family name going. You'd have to be a Frontier geek to appreciate this, perhaps.

One caveat, until I get DSL installed at my home-office, I will still be using Conxion's T1 line to connect to the Internet. So if there's an outage, it will knock me and only me off the net.

One final note, I guess I am pretty confident in my team. While I was waiting for the move to finish I fell asleep and didn't wake up until 5AM. Oh geez. Did they do a great job? Yes they did! I have the best team in the world. What's our secret? Good engineering and lots of prayer.

Next milestone: Birthday #45, on Tuesday.

Pinky and the Brain songs here.

     

Last update: Sunday, April 30, 2000 at 7:16 PM Eastern.

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