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Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.
 
Permanent link to archive for Thursday, April 18, 2002. Thursday, April 18, 2002

I talked with Adam on the phone this morning, and asked how he prepares the music for his weekly radio show. "If the song I'm looking for isn't available through Morpheus, it doesn't get played on the show." 

Jon Udell blogged a new term today from Sean McGrath that I'm going to be using in the future, probably a lot. "In XML land, not only are the equivalent of 'global variables' created with wild abandon, but their creators often see fit to invoice based on the number they create for you." Creating global variables with wild abandon. Wow. What a picture. It's so true.  

Sounds like Peter Drayton, Simon Fell and Ingo Rammer are adding all kinds of rest-of-the-world friendly bits to Microsoft's .NET, which would be totally welcome news, of course. 

Phil Ackley: "Watch for flying dogs." 

Pedro Ornelas's XML-RPC library for Flash. 

Oh yeah, we're in trouble now. Read this article if you think there's a chance that the USPTO isn't fucking us. Hard. 

Warblog peace blog warblog peace blog warblog peace blog warblog peace blog, I'm just a blog blog. 

Google Answers. Interesting. 

Russ Jones is watching PayPal. 

Jeroen Bekkers is blogging Groove. 

Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein. TIAA Cref. Archer-Daniels-Midland. Sudexo Marriot. The Catherine T and John D Macarthur Foundation. 

Harry Nillson: "Good bad good bad good bad good bad." 

Jon Pugh: "Every OSA script ends with 0xFADEDEAD." 

Andrew Duncan: "0xDEADBEEF was used, IIRC, for null pointers in PowerPlant, Metrowerks' app framework for Mac." 

Ryan Cox: "The first 4 bytes of every Java class file has the magic value 0xCAFEBABE." 

Steve Zellers reports that they love the cafe babe at Apple too. 

Paul Simon: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" 

Note to Scott Andrew. Yes, it exists. But we prefer the XML-RPC approach for all the reasons you state. It's easier to transmit complex structures. Less work for the scripter and it's more conservative of the centralized resource. 

Looking for a fun Google project using Radio's outliner? I spec'd one this morning, in my Instant Outline, of course.  

Brent Simmons who used to work at UserLand says something funny on his weblog this morning. "Since I work for myself, I can choose to be impolitic when I want to." Read what he says. Why is it funny? Because what he says is official UserLand policy.  

BTW, imho, laughter is when the truth connects to your funny bone. The louder and deeper the laugh, the closer to the truth. It's kind of obvious that the BigCo's spread their seed over a very simple format to try to add value to justify their existence. That they accomplished so little by doing it, is evidence of one thing, we don't need them. They had a lock on the communication system before we all learned how to use the Internet. Not no more. 

Some of my detractors say I have attention deficit disorder, and I'm sure it looks that way to them, but actually sometimes I figure out which way we're going before most other people do. Then, the only thing to do is to wait. An example of this is the SOAP and XML-RPC interface for Manila, which we came out with in 1999, three years ago. Today I read that Google and Microsoft are the only ones with real world apps that support Internet scripting. See what I mean. If you're not there at the right time, it doesn't matter. This doesn't trouble me. We need Google to get everyone looking at this stuff. And in the intervening three years we had time to figure out more stuff and get it implemented too. 

Today I'm having fun with Eric Norlin, via email, talking about how centralized Web apps were training wheels funded by VCs and the public stock market. We needed to do centralized apps first, they were baby steps on the way to decentralized apps, like Radio. I wrote about this in DaveNet. Here's a pointer to the piece where it all came together, in early 2001. "It costs money to buy servers and keep them running. When you add features you have to add more servers, because it's inevitable that those features consume CPU cycles. But investors aren't buying us free servers any more, so we have to make the ones we have do more work by distributing the work." 

BTW, if you're looking for a simple SOAP app to play with, I think you'll find this one is almost as much fun as Google's. 

Wired: "Kazaa users, angered by the network's inclusion of secretly embedded spyware, can now connect to the peer-to-peer network using a hacked version of the application called Kazaa Lite." 

Too little too late and the train already left the station

Edd Dumbill: "The frenzy over Google's new SOAP API is just plain silly." 

Daniel Berlinger: "At least they're trying." Amen. 

Seattle Times: "The federal government might use Microsoft's Passport technology to verify the online identity of America's citizens, federal employees and businesses, according to the White House technology czar." 

Interested in what's almost certainly the first SOAP site? This was a private site I set up for notes about UserLand's work to coordinate with Microsoft and Developmentor in March 1998. Wait there's more. Here's a page we did for Netscape about Frontier 4.1. Oh the memories. 

Wow, spring is in the air. I just got an email from O'Reilly asking if I'd like to do an XML-RPC interop workshop at the Open Source Convention. Yes yes yes, totally, absolutely, far fucking out, yes, please, great, how many different ways can I say YES! Go go go. Let's do it.  

Henry Copeland: "At Google, roughly 170,000 people a month search for The Beatles, while 850,000 a month search for Jesus." 

Opera for Linux beta 2. 

Blake Winton: "If you're debugging a PocketPC program, and the debugger loses the connection to the device, you will get back an error code of 0xBADCAB1E." 

If you live in Baltimore and use Radio, check out the Baltimore Sun's new RSS feed. Bing! 

Russ Lipton: Managing Your Subscriptions

     

Last update: Thursday, April 18, 2002 at 8:50 PM Eastern.

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