why the noticeable drop in posts in recent days? because kris, the dogs and i packed-up and moved from woodstock, illinois to grand rapids, michigan. and yes, i'm still gainfully employed at motorola. so, posting might be a little spotty as i unpack and get situated in my new environs.

Steve MacLaughlin writes a great review of Small Pieces Loosely Joined :

"Small Pieces Loosely Joined is the first meaningful treatise on how the Web has transformed the way we view the world and our place in it. "The Web will have its deepest effect as an idea," says Weinberger, and "after awhile, someone notices that we're not thinking about things the way our parents did." Democracy was once only an idea during the era of divine right monarchies. Personal property was once an abstract idea before John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Weinberger's ideas about the Web might take some time, but the results will be worth the wait.

it's probably not surprising that many of the book's concepts resonate with me and from everything i've read, i'm really looking forward giving the book a thorough reading.

because there's not enough satire involving french existentialism. french intellectuals deployed :

"The clean-up portion of the ground war in Afghanistan heated up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of the remaining Taliban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or ´Black Berets´, will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy."

so i decided to boot my mac color classic for the first time in about 3 years today. it's amazing that after sitting in the basement collecting dust, it came up just fine. my wife is wondering when i'm going to give "lisa" away, but i just quite bring myself to do it. hi. ho.

great. dan gillmor has a personal weblog . maybe now i won't have to resort to linking google cached versions of stuff that he wrote two years ago that just as relevant today :

"HEROES OF FREEDOM: They are champions of some vital principles, "the unsung heroes of the fight for free expression, intellectual freedom and access to the Internet"

"Librarians help us find things. They help us read. They help us learn. And lately they've been fighting the good fight for their patrons' right to have access to the unfiltered resources of the newest information resource -- the Internet."

o.k. kids, lets play the juxtaposition game. this is the one where i egregiously contrast out-of-context quotes for dramatic effect.

rohit khare is very exited about joltage :

"So Joltage is premiering at PC Forum, and I'm excited enough that I'm posting this while they're still on stage."

"Look, I can't tell you this will work or otherwise, but this is the most exciting step forward I've seen in some time. This is waay cooler than even boingo -- the business model is the innovation."

but others have taken a look at the model and come to an entirely different conclusion :

"Even if they don't take my money somehow, the nonchalant exposure of their "franchisees" to legal liability of bandwidth reselling is clearly an indefensible unethical business practice."

there is evidence of progressive ISPs allowing bandwidth sharing, as illustrated by the relationship between easystreet and the personal telco project , but they are pretty clear about where they stand on reselling:

"EasyStreet agrees with and supports the goal of PTP: to provide free open access to the Internet for the betterment of the local community. EasyStreet currently supports the project by condoning the sharing to the bandwidth of our DSL customers into the network. Our challenge will be for all of us to find a model that allows us to continue to do so economically.

The sharing of their bandwidth is for non-commercial usage. EasyStreet's bandwidth is not to be resold nor used for commercial purposes by the user of the shared connection (the end point user)."

rumor has it that sputnik is being more proactive about courting ISPs, but i think it's fair to say that it's a bit soon to be shouting "innovative business model!" in the streets.

me wonders why, if the oscars are so boring, i'm still watching the vacuous extravaganza?

then again, watching randy newmann and john goodman sing a duet from monsters, inc might just make me think i've been to quick to judge.

nope. i guess not. they followed with faith hill singing something from pearl harbor. sweet lord. time to go read or something.

if you're into mozilla you'll be happy to know that spellchecker is now working - at least with the march 18th build.

and in related news, i discovered the very useful livesidebar from asa's evangelism of the note-it tab. the livesidebar creation wizard has potential, but it doesn't seem to like my syndication feeds since it gives me a "string index out of range: -1" error when i try to import the url. i would think that creating syndication sidebars would be more valuable than creating a sidebar for "raw" webpages. hi. ho.

[ spellchecker link via blogzilla ]

via john robb i ran across a scary report on how drivers that talk on cell phones have slower reaction times and stopping times than those under the influence of alcohol:

"The research said reaction times were, on average, 30% slower when talking on a mobile than when just over the legal limit, and nearly 50% slower than when driving normally."

i'm embarrassed to admit that i've been known to talk on the phone in the car while trying to type an email on my 2-way pager and fish for change for the oh-so-frequent chicago toll booths. yes, i know it's stupid, but's it's amazing how easy it is to get seduced into thinking that your car is just a mobile office.

two brothers who are prussian mercenaries fight in the revolutionary war and marry two North American Indian sisters. the plot for a sunday afternoon movie? no, it's the story behind my last name!

thanks to a distant relative who e.mailed me out of the blue, i now have a great little story to answer the oft-asked question, "did you make up your last name?"

"The story goes, two brothers from Prussia came to this country as hired mercenaries. They settled in the Northeast after the war and married two North American Indian sisters (from the Seneca tribe). The Prussian name was "Schnedahl" or "Schnaudahl". I have seen it spelled both ways. Their new Indian family gave them their new American name "Snowdeal". And there you have it. "

thanks betty!

heh. the social life of paper reminds me of just how obtuse, to an outsider, the logic behond my stacks of paper and articles used to be:

"Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles—piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren't. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives."

i don't stack paper anymore. not even at work. i'm not sure why.

[ via webword ]

digital identity world was "soft launched" today and it has some interesting articles, including "Not all Identities were Created Equal" by andre durand :

"There's a big difference between an issued identity and an identity for which an individual has assumed true and unconditional ownership and accountability. This article examines the concept that there are in fact at least three distinct types of identity, for simplicity sake, referred to as Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3. Each of these identities are vastly different in their value to the individual, and the vendors who facilitate their existance."

jason points to singlefile, which looks like a pretty interesting application for organizing and sharing your book collection. i have quit a few books and have been mulling over looking into ways to organize everything for awhile. in fact, just yesterday i was digging through some stuff and found a cuecat scanner just begging to be hooked up with something like webqcat. i see that singlefile has an "isbn auto add" feature. i wonder if there's any way to input isbns with cuecat? hmmm.

so, i banged-out an email to peter saint-andre last night, who's work with jabber the protocol and jabber the company , i've admired for years [ and, in the interest of full disclosure, i might as well admit that peter's surveyor code, um, inspired pixie ]. the initial reason for the e.mail was pretty mundane, he mentioned that he was from maine and since i'm from maine, i thought i'd send a friendly "ayuh" and see if it really is a small world after all. these are the things you do if you're from maine.

much to my surprise, he actually took the time to link to the vast wasteland and bring up a very interesting point about the my recent post on music distribution [ i'd link to the permalink, but blogger has eaten it ] - namely the differences between recording and performance musicians:

"Of course, most musicians make money through performing, teaching, and the like, not recording. But given that I'm in substantial agreement with Glenn Gould about the value of recording over performance, I wonder what free filesharing will imply for the recording musician."

normally in situations like this, i'd fall back on a quote from ian mackaye who is one of my early, early influences [ warning: adult language ]:

"Napster may go by the wayside because it may just sell out. That's apparently what's going on now. But people will continue to find ways to share the music that has affected them. With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music. Fuck 'em."

but that doesn't really count, because ian is the posterchild for a performing musician and doesn't properly reflect the needs of musicians who focus on recording over performing. steve albini kind of gives me something to work with when it comes to recording contracts:

"Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke."

but besides being tragically amusing, steve isn't just wedging the recording musician between the proverbial rock of file-sharing and the hard place of recording contracts. hmmm. maybe robert scoble is on to something:

"So, what does the "music stealing" software do for me? Easy, it lets me try music out before I head down to Tower records and buy it.

I don't get why the executives and store owners don't understand this.

I'd buy even MORE music if I had a clue of what I was looking at. For instance, I was looking at the bins the other day and there was a DVD Audio by "Train." Now, I have no clue who Train is, so I didn't buy it. But, I asked around and one of my friends sent me some MP3s and I liked them, so I went down and bought the DVD Audio disk.

That's $25 that the music industry would never have gotten if I wasn't able to check music out before hand.

Is that stealing? Am I a thief? Well, I guess the music industry thinks I am. Hogwash.

Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities:

"Despite the decentralized, unorganized, and heterogeneous nature of the web, where millions of individuals with different backgrounds, cultures, and goals operate independently, the study shows that the structure of the web self-organizes into communities of related information.

The study shows that a remarkable degree of order emerges from the independent linking actions of individuals."

[ via peter ]

Using XML-Topic Map on a PDA:

"Palm Navigator is a shareware program that is designed to help import an XML/Topic-Map onto a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), and to enable navigation, jumping from one topic to another as easily as Web surfing. Palm Navigator is fully compliant with the ISO Topic Maps standard (ISO/IEC 13250) which enables exchanges between Web sites."

[ via aaronland ]

after months of ignoring signs of impending hard drive failure, i decided it was time to get a new drive and squeeze a few more months out of my aging dual boot wintel/linux box. of course, i don't back anything up. smart. really, really smart. it's funny - i'd almost forgotten that slight tingly sensation that comes about when you do something silly like hose the master boot record. and with a cavalier attitude, you think that the fact that the computer won't boot is no big deal, until you try a few quick fixes. and are still stymied. and then the tingly sensation turns to fear. fear that you're not cavalier. no, it's pretty clear that you're just stupid. and then the sweating starts. but, haha! i fixed everything and am now typing from a machine which is so rejuvinated that i'd say it's down right peppy. so, maybe i'm cavalier after all....or not. hi. ho.

The Old Mac That Went to Pot:

""The IBM PC was created by people who drank alcohol. The Mac was created by people who smoked pot.""

i have lived the Abilene Paradox on so many occasions and in so many contexts that it's pathetic:

"Four adults are sitting on a porch in 104-degree heat in the small town of Coleman, Texas, some 53 miles from Abilene. They are engaging in as little motion as possible, drinking lemonade, watching the fan spin lazily, and occasionally playing the odd game of dominoes. The characters are a married couple and the wife’s parents. At some point, the wife’s father suggests they drive to Abilene to eat at a cafeteria there. The son-in-law thinks this is a crazy idea but doesn’t see any need to upset the apple cart, so he goes along with it, as do the two women. They get in their unair-conditioned Buick and drive through a dust storm to Abilene. They eat a mediocre lunch at the cafeteria and return to Coleman exhausted, hot, and generally unhappy with the experience. It is not until they return home that it is revealed that none of them really wanted to go to Abilene–they were just going along because they thought the others were eager to go. Naturally, everyone sees this miss in communication as someone else’s problem!"

but now i've got a name and a pithy little story, which i'm going to use whenever i start to see the danger signs. i look forward to screaming, "abilene paradox!" and launching into the parable about driving to coleman, texas. indeed, i'm sure friends family and co-workers will benefit greatly from me shouting "abilene paradox!" as much as possible.

i've got a backlog of mozilla links that are begging to get dumped into the annotated bookmark bin .

mozilla 0.9.9 was released a bit behind schedule, but hey it's got support for mathml , so who's complaining . ahem. anyway, say you're stuck on a windows machine and you're really hankering to view some por...er..newsclip with windows media player, but you don't want to open up explorer - well, now you can :

"A few nights ago I ran into this problem, and copied np*.dll from Program Files\Windows Media Player into my plugins directory. After that I seem to recall having a working plugin."

and if you're not happy about that, maybe andrew leonard can pick up your spirits with mozilla's revenge :

"As I write these words, I've been running Mozilla for Windows for almost five hours. While that's obviously not enough time to make a detailed technical appraisal, I can say that Mozilla has already become my default browser and that it is as fast and slick and full-featured as I want. It may not be perfect, but there's no denying that it is for real. What's more, Mozilla isn't just a usable browser -- it's a powerful reminder of why free software engenders excitement and passion from both its users and its creators."

and lo' there's yet more evidence that aol is thinking about waiving mozilla's gecko in microsoft's face:

""We've been testing Netscape's Gecko on CompuServe since fall, and AOL is just beginning to test now," AOL spokesman Jim Whitney said. "We've invested significant resources in continuing to develop Gecko, and it is great technology.""

and lastly, but certainly not leastly, there's experimental bloggerapi support for mozilla composer, which compliments the great stuff that mike is putting together with mozBlog

maybe soon cory will be writing an article entitled, "how much ass does mozilla kick? all of it."

there's been alot of discussion lately on weblogs and social networks and microcontent news does a fine job of illustrating the point nicely with The Tipping Blog :

"Simply put, Connectors know people. Lots of people. Connectors may not always know about the hot new restaurant... but they always know at least five people who do. And once a Connector finds about the restaurant, you can forget about ever getting a reservation: they'll spread the word to their hundreds of friends, it will be reviewed in the Times, and you'll end waiting at the bar for an hour, drinking cocktails on an empty stomach."

sounds all fancy-schmancy, but maybe blogging is just a hopped-up version of strategic gossiping [i'm not touching the gender generalizations with a 10 foot pole]:

"Recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that reputation was an important mediator of access to resources in ancestral human environments. Reputations were built and maintained by the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about the actions and capabilities of group members-that is, by gossiping. Strategic gossiping would have been an excellent strategy for manipulating reputations and thereby competing effectively for resources and for cooperative relationships with group members who could best provide such resources. Coalitions (cliques) may have increased members' abilities to manipulate reputations by gossiping. Because, over evolutionary time, women may have experienced more within-group competition than men, and because female reputations may have been more vulnerable than male reputations to gossip, gossiping may have been a more important strategy for women than men. Consequently, women may have evolved specializations for gossiping alone and in coalitions. We develop and partially test this theory."

i don't know about you, but "strategic gossiping" sounds alot like manufactured serendipity :

"Jon Udell labels this phenomenon, manufactured serendipity. Serendipity is all about making fortunate discoveries by accident. You can't automate accidental discoveries, but you can manufacture the conditions in which such events are more likely to occur."

"So why do I blog? Because it works. It finds worthwhile things for me to read. It helps me refine and focus my thoughts and be more productive too. And most of all, creates the opportunity to interact with more interesting people. That's what's in it for me."

matt invents the blogdar:

"I noticed from surfing around a few sites mentioning "sxsw" at daypop, there are a lot of people here I haven't met yet. I kind of wish there was some sort of wireless application to solve this problem. I have my bookmarks stored on my laptop. Many of those bookmarked people are here but I don't know what they look like. What if we could send out little pings of our url, and whenever someone within your list was within 50 feet of you, you hear a beep. Getting closer to them, the beeps would begin repeating at an increasing rate. Then you'd find those people."

in certain cities blogdar would probably be useful at the bar too.

funny, in retrospect, doc comes close to seeing the need for blogdar:

"What I want to say anyway is: I run into friends I don't recognize until I read their name badges."

the new first monday is out and i'm amazed at its uncanny ability to remind me of college lit crit classes:

"The Internet, initially established by scholars and scientists to freely share information, is being transformed into a source of profit for entrepreneurs and corporations. Commodification, the process of developing things and concepts and even people into saleable products, calls for a representation of the foundational mythology on the Web and its manifestation as symbolic language. This study posits a textual analysis of Wired for the purpose of measuring this transformation on a mythic continuum (connectivity-location-being)."

via jon udell i found a great quote from jim mcgee on bootstrapping the knowledge network :

"In the first stage, the tools encourage a degree of commentary and reaction to what you find or create (in k-logging mode). However, it also encourages a degree of stream of consciousness style. Progress, in that it can represent a contemporaneous record of the contextual issues that were top of mind. Problematic, in creating new content that eventually needs to be revisited and processed at a level once removed from the moment."

i could be radically misinterpreting the intent of the quote, but i think it's getting at why i started the vast wasteland over two years ago.

i've often wondered how many people see a "mere" newsfeed when they visit conflux or {bio,medical} informatics . more than a newsfeed, the sections represent a structured forum for me to "revisit and process" a "a contemporaneous record of the contextual issues" in a "stream of consciousness style". the fact that it looks like a newsfeed is merely coincidental and a distraction really.

i happened to catch the 9/11 show last night and despite my inital reservations based on the fact that robert de niro was the host, i kept watching. i'm glad i did. cbs had to walk a fine line between commemoration and commercialization, and i think they did a fine job of telling a much larger story within the smaller story of documentary filmakers portraying firehouse life.

i was caught off guard by the frightenly loud and final sound of jumpers landing on the pavement. rightly so, it was deemed so disturbing that cbs actually edited the footage:

"Zirinsky explained that crashes came every 20 seconds or so in the footage, but that most were edited out because their cumulative effect was overwhelming. Several were left in, however, to reflect conditions the firefighters faced. "Some disturbing sounds you can't run away from," Zirinsky said. "You need to know that's the reality that existed.""

this little glimpse into the sensory overload that occured on ground zero highlights the incomprehensible and staggering heroism and sheer will needed by everyone, first responders and civilians alike, on 9/11.

i went to the mall today.

odds are that you don't know me, so you're probably not aware just how remarkable the previous sentence is. and don't get me wrong - i'm not passing judgement on anybody who likes shopping, because i wholeheartedly admit that it's my own bit of wierdness. i've settled on a loose explanatory structure for my mall hatred, which involves equal parts mild agoraphobia, disgust at the flagrant displays of rudeness perpetrated by otherwise ordinary sububanites, and the irritating fact that mass market retailers don't exactly cater to my, um, proportions. yup, that's right. i'm large. i'd like to think that it's not really a case of frightening obesity. rather, it has more to do with the fact that i'm just over six foot four and i do a pretty good job of filling out the frame that the good lord provided me. so, i'm a big man who hates large, rude crowds and i'm badly in need of pants and shoes.

indeed, the "pants situation" has gotten so bad that i've considered only wearing one pair of pants and telling anyone who asks that i've actually got sixteen pairs of that the same pants so i don't have to decide what to wear in the morning. of course, the problem is that i don't actually have sixteen pairs, which means i'd be forced to wash the one frequently worn pair more often, which means i'd just be decreasing the life of the pants, which means i'd end up having to go to the mall more often. so, after six months of procrastination, i decide today was the day that i'd muster the strength to get some pants and maybe, just maybe, some shoes.

today, i'm lucky on the pants front and set new land speed records in marshall field's . in less than 5 minutes, i found 3 pairs of gabardine slacks, which are 36 length and on sale. invigorated by the quick success, i decide that i should venture out and see if i can pick up some shoes. this is tricky, because trying to buy a pair of size thirteen shoes quickly is next to impossible. shoe stores really usually only have one pair of size thirteen shoes in stock, and the salespeople like to make you guess which brand it is, thinking that somehow they can upsell you on the really expensive pair of eleven-and-a-halfs, which "run large. honest." in any case, today i'm up for the challenge and enter the mall and round then bend when it catches my eye.

a large backlit apple logo.

shit. the mall has an apple store. and with that realization, i feel something i haven't felt since making the mistake of going into powell's bookstore . fear. fear that i won't make it out without spending an obnoxious amount of money in an ecstatic orgy of consumerism.

regular readers will know that i've been linking to more and more os x articles, and that i certainly haven't hidden my prediliction for goodies like the titanium laptop , but the actual exhange of money was supposed take place at some indeterminate point in the future. but no, the universe had conspired against me and my wallet and put me in front of exquisitely designed experience that is the apple store. staring into the store, i lose all self control and decide that i am going to hook myself up with one of everything, starting with the tricked-out titanium machine which is just a few feet from the entrance.

i walk in and make a pathetic attempt to pretend that i'm just browsing when i overhear a customer talking with a salesperson.

customer: "i think i need something called virtualpc. do you know about virtualpc?"

saleperson: "[nervous laugh] um, well, i think i've heard about it. i'm not really an expert."

customer: "[slight irriation on voice] well, i'm also thinking about getting a digital camera. can you make any recommendations?"

salesperson: "[ more nervous laughter] well, i've read the product stickers. i, um, don't really know that much about them."

somehow, by overhearing that brief exchange, the spell was temporarily broken. brought to my senses, i leave the store, new pants in tow, and decide that i can probably wait to purchase my new mac when i get my tax return. phew.

proving that rule that if you do something long enough, somebody will give you an award. o.k. it's not really an award, but i'm happy nonetheless that blogger decided to take note.

so a big hearty welcome to all you new people. have a look around and feel free to come back anytime.

Extreme Programming For One:

"A lone software developer is working on several small to medium scale projects. He needs to increase his productivity and resilience. While his management are amicable and approachable, they tend to frown on "over-designing" a system, since it is "liable to change in the future anyway".

This programmer has been using patterns with Java for a while, but he has no techie colleagues to pair with, and very limited contact with the end users. Requirements tend to "appear" at any time. The management seem to accept that and the resultant geometric increase in effort needed to add to and maintain the design/code.

Can XP help?"

[ via kumo ]

i've speculated on the bad mojo surrounding jabber, inc and hoped that it was just unfounded rumour mongering on my part. but alas, things haven't been getting any better:

"In its report accompanying the audited financial statements for the year ended Dec. 31, 2001, Arthur Andersen expressed substantial doubt about the firm's ability to continue as a going concern."

bummer.

How much ass does Google kick? All of it.:

"Remember when searching the Internet was hard? The dark days when we relied on dumb-as-sand machine intelligences, like those on the back-ends of AltaVista and Lycos, to rank the documents that matched our keywords? The grim era before Google, when searching was a spew of boolean mumbo-jumbo, NEAR this, NOT that, AND the other?

God, that sucked."

maybe you think weblogs are just some kind of wacky fad? a testament to weblogs' appeal demonstrates why maybe you'd be a little shortsighted:

"I thought you might be interested in an experiment with an online, interactive beat at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. I wrote an interactive blog at a four-day high school basketball tournament. I set up online forums and e-mail lists, and took a wireless laptop to the Arena for four days. I had about 80 blog entries. Some of them were my observations, others were ideas sent to me by readers by e-mail. The thing got so popular, and I was so recognizable by the end of the tournament that fans and even the players were approaching me to tell me stories. I've never seen anything like it in 21 years here. I received somewhere around 200 pieces of e-mail, and had an uncounted number of personal contacts."

weinberger cuts through the cruft and gets to crux of the problem with enterprise IM:

"They first have to build an industry, which you do through openness. But non- interoperability provides some short-term differentiating benefits to the IM vendors. In pursuing their short-term self-interest, they are hindering the creation of a market for the long term. And in sacrificing connection for control, they are removing from their product the very factor that has caused people spontaneously to embrace it."

morbus makes me laugh. go check out his new screed on installing mysql on osx. warning, don't read while drinking milk:

""Listen, lots of people have been asking me about databases and this ess-queue-ell stuff. They figure, with OS X and your skill, it should be easy to set up, right? I told them we'd demonstrate something for 'em this afternoon. See you at 3!"

You glance down at your watch. It's 1:30. Your stomach grumbles. Back to your watch. Eyes on the monitor. "See you at 3!" The grumbles are louder. Watch. Monitor. Stomach. Keanu Reeves whispers, "You've got 3 seconds; what do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?!""

dann sheridan points out that, while linux and other open source projects may have had some high-profile flameouts, many companies are very, very happy to have the technologies around:

"The companies that are making money from open source are being overlooked because they do not lead with an open source or technology centric pitch. They lead with a business pitch. One of these companies is my former employer, Accenture LLP. They attribute more than $500m in revenue to open source technologies. Of course, this figure represents consulting services sold that are associated with the design, development, and deployment of solutions using open source technologies. I think if someone were to ask the big systems integrators, and even regional systems integrators, what they are doing with open source technologies and how they are making money from these technologies, the world would be very surprised."

hey! it works - at least with the 0.99 branch i'm running. cool. i had tried installing it a number of times and could never seem to get it working.

so i guess steve can stop looking:

"Has anyone worked out embedding the mozilla html editor component in a webpage, in place of the usual "textarea"? This would make a lot of webapps/webloggers wery wery happy."

testing. test. test. this is only a test of mozBlog. it looks like it's working. i wonder what happens when i push that "post" bu....

joel adds his two bits to the perennial "how much design is too much design" debate. as usual, he strikes a reasonable and prudent tone:

"When Linus Torvalds bashes design , he's talking about huge systems, which have to evolve, or they become Multics. He's not talking about your File Copy code. And when you consider that he had a pretty clear road map of exactly where he was going, it's no wonder Linus doesn't see much value in design. Don't fall for it. Chances are it doesn't apply to you. And anyway, Linus is much smarter than we are, so things that work for him don't work for us normal people."

the point he raises about xp and design is worth highlighting. alot of people happily jump to the conclusion that it advocates no design, without taking into consideration that its chief evangelists will tell you that design is not dead with xp - it's just different and maybe just a bit harder:

"For many that come briefly into contact with Extreme Programming, it seems that XP calls for the death of software design. Not just is much design activity ridiculed as "Big Up Front Design", but such design techniques as the UML, flexible frameworks, and even patterns are de-emphasized or downright ignored. In fact XP involves a lot of design, but does it in a different way than established software processes. XP has rejuvenated the notion of evolutionary design with practices that allow evolution to become a viable design strategy. It also provides new challenges and skills as designers need to learn how to do a simple design, how to use refactoring to keep a design clean, and how to use patterns in an evolutionary style."

regardless, no matter how hard joel or martin or anyone else evangelizes the matter, you can rest assured that the dominant design pattern will always be the big ball of mud :

"While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD. A BIG BALL OF MUD is a casually, even haphazardly, structured system. Its organization, if one can call it that, is dictated more by expediency than design. Yet, its enduring popularity cannot merely be indicative of a general disregard for architecture."

Why titles matter:

"Titles form a human-useable namespace. Large-scale information systems that can be used effectively by humans require exactly such a namespace. It's hard to write titles at all, never mind write them well. That's why even when required (as in email's Subject: header) titles are rarely as helpful as they ought to be. Will this change in blogspace? Maybe no. But then again, maybe yes. In an environment where pageviews and channel fetches are visible and ranked, Darwinian forces may tend to favor the fittest information sources. Clean structure isn't the only measure of fitness, but it's an important one."

i'm not sure i'd go as far as jon does with the "fittest information sources" metaphor, but i do know that now that since i put together a syndication feed which basically clips the first sentence or two from a post [ compensating for blogger's lack of "title" capabilities when in started syndication ] , i spend a bit more time formulating the first sentence for a "hook". probably sounds a bit cheesy and certainly doesn't always work, but it's almost an unconscious tendency.

you hear that? that's the sound of the proverbial nail being hammered in the coffin that holds the chance that my next computer is going to be a pc. o.k. that metaphor might not make any sense, but maybe you still get the point:

"After spending a good part of the last month reviewing top-of-the-line DVD-capable computers in the Windows world, I am forced to conclude that Apple flat-out owns this new paradigm of personal computing."

via [ C:\PIRILLO.EXE ]

things that make you hmmm.

Location-Based Internet Communities:

"The idea that I've been rolling around in my head is what happens when you combine the idea of an Internet community such as Kuro5hin and allowing community members the ability contribute to a shared map? This idea would probably be realized in the form of a website that is user-driven (that is, users are distinguishable by identifiers and users gain reputations based upon the type and quality of content submitted) and user-supplied content consists of locations and interesting things or events that are associated with the locations. Users would be allowed to create private maps that consists of the base map and any content that the user would overlay on the base map, and users would be allowed to access content publicly provided by other users."

via [ jenny ]

hey, you learn something new about google everyday. today's undocumented function is a phonebook: syntax. how does it work? well, just type

phonebook:target, crystal lake, IL

to find out the number(s) for target in crystal lake, illinois or maybe:

phonebook:powell's, portland for powell's bookstore in portland. the possibilites are endless. [ via morbus via research buzz ]

probably about two of you will be interested to know that there is a new php implementation of a.l.i.c.e. called programe . while it's quit new, it's coming along nicely.

version 0.06 was just released over the weekend and it looks like version 0.07 will sport an xml-rpc interface. i've got a very basic interface running over on the beta page, which almost cetainly doesn't work on "older" browsers.

with the juxtaposition of brent's blogchat you can intuit where i'm heading. or maybe not.

coincidence or not? blogzilla asks where the 0.99 branch is, and then - in "ask and ye shall receive" style - it just appears.

i wish blogger pro would hurry-up and get a cross-browser facelift. it's creating a bad blogger brand experience when i have to open ie just to make a post. and while i'm every-so-slightly complaining, the archiving in blogger pro doesn't really seem to be any more reliable than the old archiving, which is a bummer.