on the off chance that you find yourself in need of free forum software, phpbb has been updated. it's easy to install, easy to use, and purty too.

adding fuel to the belief that making money of access to public wireless lans is a losing proposition, sputnik decides to not charge for access to the sputnik network:

"Sputnik is relinquishing its plans to eventually charge subscribers for using the Sputnik Network. After a lot of careful analysis, we have not been able to overcome growing doubts about the long-term financial prospects for paid subscriber 802.11 networks. Eight months ago we thought a "bottoms-up" subscriber network was a killer idea, but the landscape has changed a lot since then." "We also appreciate the bug fixes and patches that community developers have contributed to our code base. We are committed to continuing to support you by providing, among other things, free authentication and roaming services."

so where's the money? sputnik aims to, "focus exclusively on being a product company, with an emphasis on the enterprise software market." while it's certainly smart to recognize that it's going to be tough to pay the bills with subscription revenues from mom-and-pop public hotspots, it's still hard to see this as a positive strategic move. i mean, this thing called "the enterprise" is a tough market full of people who like to buy from brands like cisco.

i don't think i can ever understand how difficult it must have been for bob cringely to write about his son's recent death:

"Chase Cringely sounds like the name of a NASCAR driver. Chase Cringely was my son. He died this week after 74 days of life, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). He literally stopped breathing lying in my lap while I did e-mail. There was no sound, no struggle. I just looked down and he was no longer alive. I have no idea whether he had been dead for one minute or 10, but we were unable to revive him. He was never sick, he just died, and now there is a void in our lives that we can never fill."

robert has decided to devote significant time and resources to inventing sensors to help fight SIDS ans is looking for help:

" I need your help. I need hardware engineers, software engineers, I need people experienced with biomedical sensors and sifting mountains of data. I need folks who make tiny processors and RAM chips. I need people who know more about this stuff than I do. Yet they must also be people who are willing to believe that there is an answer, since the medical establishment seems to have given up.

Nobody will make money from this, but everybody will benefit. Whatever we learn will be given to the world for free. "

a long time ago, i had a cousin who died very young, very unexpectedly and without a established cause ever found. it was, of course, completely devastating for the entire family. i remember simply not being able to wrap my head around the fact that she had died. for a long time. best wishes to bob as he picks up the pieces and learns to live with void. [ via doc ]

it's official. after years of crappy customer service, confusing calling plans and increasing cellular usage, kris and i decided to ditch the run-of-the-mill long distance scene for good. goodbye at&t , worldcom and sprint . you milked the last stupid "service" charge out of me. you will never, ever, ever again trick me into some wiggedy-wack call plan with tiny, tiny print [ especially you worldcom ]. nay, i say, it will never happen again. not while there are companies like onesuite around. 2.9 cents a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no monthly charges and no minimum usage fees. nope 2.9 cents per minute. that's all, nothing else. yeah, baby. i wouldn't be investing in long distance carriers anytime soon :

"Phone and cable carrier AT&T Corp. reported its loss widened to nearly $1 billion in the first quarter, blaming the performance on falling long-distance sales and a slide in the value of its investments."

via adam kalsey i ran across a methodology from ibm for picking patterns for web applications:

"The Patterns leverage the experience of IBM architects to create solutions quickly, whether for a small local business or a large multinational enterprise. As shown in the following figure, customer requirements are quickly translated through the different levels of Patterns assets to identify a final solution design and product mapping appropriate for the application being developed."

as with most methodologies there's always the danger of getting into a "big mac vs the naked chef" situation with this kind of thing, but there's actually some useful tidbits throughout.

david hyatt clarifies his position on forking the netscape and mozilla UIs. it seems so straighforward, that i'm surprised it's rankled some feathers:

"The Netscape suite and Mozilla suite are constantly at war as features go into the Mozilla tree that Netscape doesn't want, and Netscape is forced to take byzantine routes to include its own desired user interface because it ends up being blocked by Mozilla. The issue of whether these UI changes are good or bad is completely irrelevant. There is a single fundamental principle that those who happen to disagree with Netscape's UI decisions overlook: that Netscape has the right to completely and utterly control the user interface of its application and mozilla.org has the right to control the user interface of its suite.

None of the other applications built using Gecko work this way. It's an insane no-win situation to be in, but we've tolerated it in order to make it to 1.0."

is it just me or is two thirds of the web timing out today? wierd.

mike's wondering how i got my rss feed. well, it's very much homegrown, but, inspired by blogify. basically, i'm using dublin core metadata in the pages for the channel description and marking up the text with divs and spans. xpath and a little perl do the rest. "conflux style" posts are marked-up differently than "machina style" posts and, as jon udell noticed, i rather unelegantly truncate the descriptions for scannability. when i wrote the script, i think i remember trying to get Lingua::EN::Sentence to elegantly pick off sentences, but my horrid punctuation and general disregard for capitalization made it, um, less than reliable. i should probably look back into it, since i agree that's it's a bit jarring the way it currently is implemented.

so, here's xhtml2rss with the usual, "you break it you get to keep the pieces" caveat. and i know it ain't exactly the purtiest thing in the world [ why exactly do i clean the text twice? ], but i don't want to hear from some snot-nosed kid who can compact the whole thing into a one-liner.

awhile ago i contemplated exploring topicmaps and weblogs using touchgraph . while i never really got past installing touchgraph, chris langreiter mocked my procrastination with his excellent vanilla vista .

as with most things i did my best to forget about the whole thing, but chris has done gone and linked to not one but two recent developments. first is the Google-API related pages Graph-Browser :

"after playing around with the SOAP Google-API and Chris Langreiters Vanilla-Vista use of the the TouchGraph Java-Applet, I came up with this alternate 'related-pages' browser."

and there's also a new wiki browser :

"A new type of node has been added to represent pages external to the wiki. Thus, if an external URL has been mentioned repeatedly on several wiki pages, one will see multiple incoming edges for the corresponding node. A Show BackLinks checkbox allows back links to be shown or hidden. A Stop button has been added for stopping the graph motion. ...and more... All these features really give one the ability to explore the structure of the Wiki."

wired is runnning some pushback on the new oqo devices:

"But by the time the device hits the market later this year, it will be competing against other miniature-sized computers such as beefed-up personal digital assistants. Unless OQO heavily markets the computer, consumers may mistake it for a very expensive Palm handheld, Elsasser said."

while i think the point is valid, i do think that thanks to the ability to store 10 gigs in your pocket, there is an emerging demand for a variety of devices that sit between pdas and laptops, as the popularity of ipod hacking demonstrates.

given its built in networking capabilities and already reasonable pricepoint, it's intriguing to think of what could happen by taking away the m$ , which looks plausible:

"And that's not all. LinuxDevices.com learned from an undisclosed source that OQO is also developing a low-powered FM radio transmitter that will allow users of the device to wirelessly broadcast music from MP3s stored on its hard disk to their home or car stereos.

What about Linux support for the device? "We're primarily a hardware company," says Hunter. "What we've developed is a fully compatible PC, that will run whatever OS would run on a PC, so yeah, Linux should run just fine -- I'm sure it'll happen," he adds."

hmmm. what could you do a cheap portable device that streams mp3s, runs linux and knows 802.11b? well, install sputnik with mesh networking and turn your portable broadcast unit into a node in a mobile mesh network .

douglas rushkoff has a new blog and he's, um, not holding anything back:

"Everyone knows that Israel has to go back to 1967 borders. And everyone knows that the insane (Israeli) settlers of the West Bank would rather die than leave. For Israel to get them out of the settlements, the Israeli army will have to kill a few Israeli Jews. There's just no other way. These people demonstrated their intentions by killing Rabin when he tried to make peace offerings.

But before Israel is going to go ahead and kill Israelis, they want Palestine to go ahead and kill a few Palestinians, first. It sounds a bit mad, at first, but follow the logic. Israel needs to know that Palestine will take care of their crazies - the suicide bombers and angry terrorists who will never ever agree to an Israeli state. And, in return, Israel will remove and, in the process, kill a few of its own crazies. "

whoa.

whoohoo! blogger pro now sports a mozilla interface. and it's not some ugly red-headed stepchild interface. it works with the Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 1.

tara created a nice little script for date-based searching using the google api:

""What if you gave Google a query and a certain number of days back you wanted to go, and Google just pulled the number of results for each day and then wrote them to a file, so you'd have an idea of how often a query word set appeared in indexed results over time.""

if you did a little deviation detection and multiple correlation analysis with thresholding, filtering and notification, you could have a nice little "business intelligence" application.

for example, it'd be pretty handy to easily look at correlated deviations in frequency, "notify me when "wlan" and "nokia partnerships" occur more often than normal in a single month."

i admit it. i have this wierd desire to read martha, inc. not so much to dig into the swearing-bitchy-i'll-run-you-over side of martha. no, i'm more interested in how she's managed to accomplish such a staggeringly successful parasitic invasion of kmart:

"The numbers are very clear on this. There's no ambiguity in them. Kmart's revenues have basically been flat for a decade. They haven't grown at all. What's grown is Martha's share of those revenues. And what that means is that she's just sort of moved into that business like a kind of virus that's spread from Aisle 6 all the way to Aisle 1.

A lot of the merchandise in those stores now carries the Martha Stewart brand name. And it didn't begin that way. They're not selling more. She's just cannibalizing shelf-space and everything else."

alan reiter comes through with another superb example the "strong blog voice":

"I don't know whether the PR people who write press releases like this and the executives who approve these releases are clueless, amoral or both. Do they not know the difference between right and wrong or are their I.Q.s merely a couple of standard deviations to the left of the center of the bell shaped curve?

Don't these dolts ever learn? It's not enough that the wireless industry screwed itself and its customers by lying and misleading to the public about the speeds, capabilities and value of WAP. Now, they want to muck up PR and marketing for 2.5G networks."

yeah, yeah. i know. you read the manifesto and you think i'm stating the obvious with "strong blog voice" posts. maybe i'm just having an out-of-blog experience and becoming hyperaware of just how much i take it for granted.

so, dave uses the expression "fuck" or some variant thereof twice today. ask yourself when the last time was that you heard the ceo of an influential company say the word fuck in a public forum? twice in one day. my point, which might not be so obvious, is that love him or hate him dave's got a voice.

Perl and XML on the Command Line:

"Processing XML with Perl does not have to mean buying into a huge XML-centric application with a steep learning curve or departing from Perl's long history as a command line tool. You may not use all of the tools or techniques described here, but it is nice to know that they are available when and if you need them."

hey, is it just me or is there a sudden proliferation of "mozilla bloggers"? maybe it has something to do with the brand-spanking-new mozilla 1.0 release candidate 1. whoohoo!

at the risk of being accused of turning into all-google-api-all-the-time, i thought i'd pass along that the fine folks from the google api support team responded to my e.mail about the phonebook: operator:

"We'll take a look into adding support for this. Our intention is to support all of the Google features through the API; some are more work than others to enable."

so i guess that means that support is coming sooner or later.

nice. scott andrew has developed mozilla/google api demos:

"These pages demonstrate the built-in SOAP tools in Mozilla in concert with the Google API. The calls are invoked and processed directly from JavaScript."

for bonus points, can you guess what's been occupying my thoughts over the past few days?

aaron cope's net::google is up on cpan, so if you're into perl you might want to take a gander.

matthew thomas gives his take on why free software usability tends to suck and the number one reason is interesting:

" 1. Dedicated volunteer interface designers appear to be much rarer than their paid counterparts - and where they do exist, they tend to be less experienced (like yours truly)."

if it is a true statement, why would volunteer interface designers be such a rare breed? is it just that there are fewer interface designers and therefore a smaller pool of potential volunteers? or is there something different going on?

there is no doubt that the weblog bookwatch is going to get linked all over the place, but i'm throwing it into the annotated bookmark bin anyways:

"The Weblog Bookwatch searches weblogs that pass through the Recently Changed list at weblogs.com looking for links to books at Amazon.com."

and there's even an rss feed so you can imagine all kinds of pub/sub fun.

no progress on the google phonebook operator issue other than the odd bit of evidence that for a given query the "results returned" value will be correct, but there's nothing in the results array. for example if i search for "phonebook:snowdeal, maine" i get 23 results using the web interface and the api says that it's returning 23 results, but nothing is in the results array. hrrrm.

the ever-informative tara, of research buzz fame, was nice enough to let me know that there actually several undocumented phone operators:

rphonebook:
bphonebook:
phonebook:

presumably, the r and b indicate residential and business. anyone else, please feel free to let me know what dopy thing or another i'm doing wrong that's sabotaging my evil plan for a cheap nationwide address/phone conversion available via instant messaging.

when i saw the google api, i thought one thing - phonebook. i think it would be useful to use have a instant messaging rosterbot that gets phone numbers, or addresses and links to maps and maybe even additional information about the location. if i link it to jabber, then i could use something like umessenger to access it over my i85 phone. nothing too complicated to start out with, just quickly getting a phone number for an address or an address for a phone number would be useful.

but alas, it appears that the undocumented phonebook operator gets removed from api queries, even though it still works on the website. looking at the search query that gets returned from the api request, i can see that phonebook: gets removed. other operators like related: still work. hmmm.

from the pretense-smackdown-department, comes the results from testing the wine testers:

"Psychologists have fooled a group of wine experts into praising a white wine that had been coloured red."

"It says none of them realised the wine had been doctored - they thought it was a legitimate red because of its colour.

It also says the experts praised a cheap wine that had been poured into an expensive looking bottle."

[ via cameron ]

as mozilla approaches v1.0 we're starting to see the inevitable, traditional journalism. while that's all and good, it's far more rewarding to see things like confessions of a mozillian, where i can find nice little nuggets like this peek at portability decisions in mozilla.

slashdot reviews programming jabber and it's interesting to see the number of negative and critical comments directed towards jabber, with many complaining about lack of stable interoperability with other IM systems. it's also instructive to see the responses to a poll on what would make people switch to jabber - with the vast majority responded that they wanted reliable gateways.

i've been running a personal server for quite awhile and use the transports on occasion, but they aren't really the reason why i use jabber anyway. i know it probably doesn't work for everyone, but i've never had a problem getting anyone to get a jabber account if they want to IM me. if they don't want to download a client, i probably don't want to IM them anyway. i realize that's an untenable situation for most people, but interoperability with other IM systems is not a technical problem, it's an business issue. i think there's more interesting fish to fry, but my opinions don't mean much if most people are just looking for an IM client.

congratulations to everyone who has contributed to mozilla over the years. it's really been shining lately, and it's a pleasure to finally see the latest-1.0.0 directory. get it. test it. love it.

me thinks that nick is on to something with his 80% company proposal:

" That particular company went bankrupt; the frenetic activity of the dot.com years has produced about a dozen lasting companies and a generation of burned-out cynics. They will never again believe that a business can be built on enthusiasm – and venture capital – alone.

And this is why I intend my next company to be different. No more late nights. No more monomaniac workaholics. Less heat, more light. If I keep my nerve, I’m going to institute a four-day week as the norm. Call it the 80% company."

i never would have guessed there was a google directory dedicated to workweek reduction resources complete with a link to the shorter work time action page from the monty python-esque "society for the reduction of human labor". maybe i should start a midwest chapter of the society, if for no other reason than i like how it trips of the tongue.

Building Your Own Linux Based Audio Component looks like exactly the type of thing that i'll wish would occupy a bunch of free time, while i'm entrenched in playing the part of Bob Villa for the next couple of months:

"One day I decided I needed a Linux based stereo component to unify all my music. I NEEDED it you see. I'd been reading slashdot's occasional articles on music and MP3 devices. I've had discussions with friends and co-workers that all dream the same dream. I've heard and read about people building similar machines, but none just like I wanted. Is it possible to will such a device into being? Here is the chronicle of my project to build the ultimate Linux audio device."

[ via hack the planet ]

it looks like tibet has been released as beta. i still haven't played around with it, but it sounds enticing enough to warrant a look-see:

"TIBET just saved you 91.6% of your server hits, 88.9% of your bandwidth, and kept the user waiting over 3 minutes less."

i don't remember how i happened on the following quote from frank zappa, but it's been sitting in my bookmarks for awhile. sure, it's a little wide-eyed and pollyanish, but i read it every now and then and it makes me smile:

"I think you devise your own limits for your own personal convenience. There are some people who wish to have limits, and they'll invent as many boxes for themselves as they want. It's like, you know, men invented armor. They wanted to protect themselves from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and so forth. And people do the same thing psychically and psychologically. They build their own armor. They build their own rathole, whatever it is. And they choose their existence. Whether they do it consciously or whether it is helped along by a government or an education system, somebody is helping to shape this imaginary box you live in, but it doesn't have to be there."

--Frank Zappa

what a drag. harper's epilepsy is on the upswing. he seemed to responding well, but his seizures have been increasing in frequency of late. he had a hardcore grand mal tonight and it's only been a month since his last seizure. we've seen this cycle. we'll up his dose of phenobarbitol and he'll go a few months seizure free, only to have them start up again. right now his quality of life seems pretty good, but i'm not sure how that'll continue to be true.

while it's been blogged a bit, i've been moving so cut me some slack. clay has a new essay on Communities, Audiences, and Scale which makes several points nicely:

"Prior to the internet, the differences in communication between community and audience was largely enforced by media -- telephones were good for one-to-one conversations but bad for reaching large numbers quickly, while TV had the inverse set of characteristics. The internet bridged that divide, by providing a single medium that could be used to address either communities or audiences. Email can be used for conversations or broadcast, usenet newsgroups can support either group conversation or the broadcast of common documents, and so on. Most recently the rise of software for "The Writable Web", principally weblogs, is adding two-way features to the Web's largely one-way publishing model.

With such software, the obvious question is "Can we get the best of both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?""

clay also has a new low volume list for spreading his gospel on Networks, Economics & Culture .

i haven't been reading salon lately and missed the predictable results of what happens when thomas kinkade builds a subdivision. much of the criticism is like shooting fish in a barrel, and it's probably a bit much to ask thomas to become the posterboy for new urbanism . in any case, the following blurb caught my eye:

"Perhaps the greatest losses in the translation of the Kinkade fantasy to real life are the church with its familiar steeple, and the ever-present village square. No matter what you might think of Kinkade's artistic merits, his celebrity suggests that he's tapped into a collective longing among Americans for real community. Some would argue that Kinkade's idealized vision of America is a Frank Capra/ Norman Rockwell fantasy. But no matter how gauzy Kinkade's vision, there is no question that the current suburban aesthetic makes us want it -- bad. "

i just moved from woodstock, illinois , which has an actual town square and it's likely what i'll miss most about the town. it was nice to be able to walk the dogs down to the square, grab a cup of coffee and stop by the farmer's market. even though woodstock never seemed to take advantage of the square - how many rubber stamp stores and quaint curio shops does one town need - the square as a tangible community building construct always seemed self evident. i'm continually surprised that more new developments don't take advantage of a community commons as a differentiator. then again, maybe i'm skewed by being brought up in the northeast, where town squares are the norm. maybe developers are onto something. maybe most people want to lock themselves up in their subdivisions and stare at tacky fabrications of community from the Painter of Light™, while waiting for the next episode of the osbournes .

ugh. painting trim sucks, but it doesn't suck as bad as removing wallpaper which has seemingly created a superhuman bond to the wall, impervious to enzymatic digestion, scraping and copious amounts of elbow grease. ahh, the joys of updating a "new" home that happens to be 80 years old.

wow. four days without posting seems like a lifetime. after the move, i temporarily lost broadband and was forced to go back to a dial-up connection, which became a little too much for me to take. but lo! i'm back in the saddle with a cable modem. i had a bad exerience with cable around 3 years ago, which was due to mediaone obnoxiously oversubscribing their networks, but things don't seem nearly so bad now.

i'd like to switch back to speakeasy because their customer service was always so good, but because i've received a new phone number they have to wait for a month for me to be entered into a mysterious, official telco billing database before they can initiate anything. this means that, if everything went optimally well, i'd perhaps get service in two months. ahhh, the reminders of how much fun it is to operate in monopoly markets.

for those of you that are into xul, xulplanet has updated their xul tutorial to account for changes that xul has undergone in recent releases of mozilla. although it doesn't look like the xul application tutorial has been updated in awhile, it doesn't seem to matter, since i just fired up my personalized xul notepad which i developed using the tutorial and it still works fine. xul provides an easy way to quickly develop cross platform user interfaces. it'll be interesting to see if it develops a following after mozilla 1.0 ships and things have settled down api-wise.

noted from the referrer logs. the september 11 digital archive is a project to collect and preserve digital content related to 9.11.:

"Our goal is to create a permanent record of the events of September 11, 2001. In the process, we hope to foster some positive legacies of those terrible events by allowing people to tell their stories, making those stories available to a wide audience, providing historical context for understanding those events and their consequences, and helping historians and archivists improve their practices based on the lessons we learn from this project."

amongst other things they have a section on weblogs, and i'm humbled to see that they've highlighted my site on their short list of blogs that, "...highlight the immediacy and diversity of "blog" views on September 11."

well, alrighty then. i'm back after a brief hiatus due to moving. the move was not without its pains, primarily due to the sheer incompetance of uhaul . i don't really have the energy to describe the depths of transportation logistics hell that i was forced to endure, but rest assured that i won't be using uhaul anymore in the future and i wouldn't recommend that you do either, unless you have the luxury of gambling on whether or not they'll actually have the right equipment at the right time. hi. ho.

i guess i'll link to one april fools satire, because it's well done and likely to get a cease-and-desist soon - MTV Gets Burning with the Man :

"Is the world ready for a mud-covered Carson Daly introducing the newest Blink 182 video?

Executives at MTV seem to think so. Today they announced an exclusive five-year broadcasting and merchandising deal with Burning Man LLC, the organization responsible for the wild annual festival of the same name."

i was almost fooled, until i noticed the cnn url-hack.