sometimes the most simple things are the hardest to see clearly:
“Email will become the killerer app. It continued to work when all else failed. Communication – not consumer storefronts – is the core value provided by the net and email is the star. The best things on the net make things easier and faster. Seems simple, but many of the failed business propositions of the
past year seemed to go in the opposite direction.”
[via kottke]
i’ve been thinking of starting my own webcast and the Streaming MP3 Server Guide looks like it’ll come in handy:
“The purpose of this document is to describe the process of using Linux based tools to setup a server used for streaming MP3 data. With a streaming MP3 server, a wad of MP3’s, and a microphone a user can create their own internet radio show complete with snappy banter.”
although it’s a drag that my new dsl line is asymetric and i won’t likely be able to host it on my box at home because the upload speeds are so pokey. hi. ho.
NET STRUCK BY WAVE OF TANGENTIALISM CLOUDS DEPRESS ME:
“Internet sites from Ashford.com to ZDNet today
reported being hit by a mysterious wave of tangentialism, with the content on many sites
rendered almost entirely useless as it trails off in obscure or loosely related cousin George
III was the crazy king.“What concerns us most is that the problem
seems to be getting worse, and that each
reference is becoming more loosely related to the
previous to this I was in sales,” said eBay
spokesperson Gil Blanc, who added that Buelah
would be a good name for a maid.”
someday i’m going to change my 404 page – and when i do, i’m going to be prepared because i’m going to remember that i posted links to Useful “Page not found” error pages and customize your 404 page.
i really wish i could see the grant application for theoretical analysis of a dripping faucet:
“While previous studies of continuous emission of drops from a faucet have shown the richness of the system’s nonlinear response, a theory of dripping has heretofore been lacking. Long-time behavior of dripping is simulated computationally by tracking the formation of up to several hundred drops in a sequence, rather than the usual single drop, at a given flow rate Q and verified by experiments. As Q increases, the system evolves from a period-1 system through a number of period doubling (halving) bifurcations as dripping ultimately gives way to jetting. That hysteresis can occur is also demonstrated. ”
sounds fascinating – at least as much fun as watching paint dry. i didn’t know what hysteresis meant either.
i’ll be darned – thanks to the fact that i was stumbling through jonas’ archives, i discovered that even though i’d read the semantic web: a primer , i guess i skimmed over a blurb about a nice little tool called, tidy. it can do alot of things, not the least of which is acting as a preprocessor for xslt:
“Once the richer information has been embedded in a page, a program still needs to transform it into the format it requires. At this point another W3C technology, XSLT, has a lot to offer. Given an XHTML page as input, it is useful for selecting and transforming the contents of that page. It provides an excellent bridge from older HTML technology to the nascent XML-based Semantic Web applications. A tool of
singular utility when used in conjunction with an XSLT processor is Dave Raggett’s “Tidy,” which can take HTML and turn it into XHTML. As most web authoring tools still don’t have XHTML support, HTML will be created by web authors for some time to come. Tidy facilitates the processing of normal HTML with XSLT, enabling authors of such documents to participate in the Semantic Web.”
whump also points to an older article in webreview on using tidy to convert an existing HTML page into XHTML:
“Weighing in at under 200 KB, HTML Tidy is the closest you’ll get to a perfect HTML utility.”
uh, oh. looks like the grand ideal of a seemless web of computational artifacts may be a little further off than the hype promulgators would like us to believe:
“The IEEE-1394 interface appearing in the current crop of digital electronics gadgets fails to provide the interoperability system makers promised. What’s worse, industry experts say, the problems dogging
1394 today — such as mushrooming software complexity — could hold back other wired and wireless consumer interfaces as well, postponing the arrival of truly plug-and-play home networks for perhaps a decade.“Plug anything — camcorder, PC, set-top — into Playstation 2 with 1394, and you’ll basically get no functionality,” said Mark Kirstein, vice president of research at Cahners In-Stat Group. “Similarly, only a few MPEG [D-VHS]-based VCRs can talk to DV camcorders. There is a chance of [consumer] backlash when things don’t work.””