hey. good to have you back. he. he. gotcha.

congratulations to peter and everyone else working on the ietf submission . news.com seems to have taken notice :

"Jabber, the XML-based instant messaging application that interoperates with multiple IM services, is close to winning approval for its own dedicated working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a development that would elevate the technology from one of many competing IM also-rans to that of a potential industry standard."

apple has recruited quiet the crew of contributers to it's internet developer site , including kevin hemenway [ a.k.a morbus iff ] who made my life a little bit easier by slapping together "Installing Perl 5.8 on Jaguar" .

now, if he'd just hurry up and write that tutorial on installing freeradius on jaguar :-)

Remote Administration of Linux Systems :

"Linux provides useful services for remote administration that even allow you to disconnect a monitor and keyboard from the server, leaving only a very secure system case, while keeping the full functionality and comfort as working with a local console.

In this article we will examine remote administration using the Red Hat Linux distribution. Path names and the format of configuration files in other distributions may vary."

[ via dangerousmeta ]

nope. today was not a good day. not by a long shot.

did you miss the new version of program e, which is the php and mysql version of alice?

Setting up a Site Server with Jaguar :

"You probably know that Mac OS X ships with a built-in Web server, and you might even know that it's of the famed Apache variety.

But did you know that almost all of the software to set up a heavyweight, full-fledged site server -- a machine that not only serves Web pages, but handles DNS and mail as well -- is already on your machine? With a little bit of tweaking, and the compilation of one piece of software, you can turn any Mac OS X machine you happen to have lying around into a first-class server. All that's needed is a little time and a roadmap -- and this article will provide you the roadmap."

mark pilgrim has kindly compiled an exhaustive list of jaguar links.

the good news. i'm getting healthier and stronger as i recover from marathon training injuries. i biked 40 miles today after running 16 miles in a pool last night.

the better news that was almost really bad news? i came inches from being a biking mortality, due to one really dumb decision.

cool. Browser Bookmarks And OPML Directories is getting at part of what i was getting at the other day:

• locate the workstation's default browser,
• translate its bookmarks file to OPML format,
• store the resulting file in an upstreamed, dedicated folder
• I could add an option to keep the OPML version synchronized with the browser's version automatically at startup.

this way, the upstreamed file could be parsed into a blogroll, while the local copy could be imported into amphetadesk or netnewswire.

is there a mouse in your house? why, yes, there is.

hmmm. i wonder if clandestinely replaced friends and family's internet explorer installation with mozilla and its ie skin if they'd ever really know the difference. [ via blogzilla ]

Jabber Server Farming How-To:

"This document was started on June 06, 2002 by Ryan Eatmon to explain how to set up a Jabber Server Farm using the Jabber.org Jabber Server (http://jabberd.jabberstudio.org).

This document is broken into two main sections. What is, and what will be. As of the writing of this document the Jabber Server does not have all of the pieces that are required to do full farming. There are steps that can be taken to get partial farming, and those will be covered. There are also steps that we are going to take, and those are covered to so that others can contribute and comment. "

i don't want to turn this into "all-rss-autodiscovery-all-the-time" , but brent highlights the rss invisibility thing quiet nicely:

"Here's how things work for me now. When I'm at a site I want to subscribe to, I copy-and-paste its home page URL into NetNewsWire's subscription dialog. The app then searches for the RSS feed for that site. If it finds it, great. If it doesn't find it then I delete the failed subscription--even if the site actually does have a hidden-away RSS feed somewhere. I don't go looking for it manually: it's too much trouble. And thus I don't read that site.

But of course even the above scenario is too many steps: ideally, when I'm at a site I want to subscribe to, I should be able to choose a menu command to subscribe to that site. (Or maybe it's a bookmarklet, or a contextual menu command--some Subscribe to Site command that's always in the same easily-accessible place.)"

i've rambled on about this and similar things before, in ways that are confusing enough to force innocent bystanders to email me asking just what the bujeesus i'm talking about [ morbus you know who you are ]. see, i not only want rss to be invisible, but i want by "blogroll" to be invisible too. and i want them all to be linked by my bookmarking behavior.

i see a site i like - i bookmark it. that bookmarking process should form the foundation for rss subscription and blogroll formation. and no, i don't have it all figured out, but someday i'm going to move past just rambling on with incoherent, staccato statements into crisp, coherent requirements.

i don't want to turn this into "all-rss-autodiscovery-all-the-time" , but brent highlights the rss invisibility thing quiet nicely:

"Here's how things work for me now. When I'm at a site I want to subscribe to, I copy-and-paste its home page URL into NetNewsWire's subscription dialog. The app then searches for the RSS feed for that site. If it finds it, great. If it doesn't find it then I delete the failed subscription--even if the site actually does have a hidden-away RSS feed somewhere. I don't go looking for it manually: it's too much trouble. And thus I don't read that site.

But of course even the above scenario is too many steps: ideally, when I'm at a site I want to subscribe to, I should be able to choose a menu command to subscribe to that site. (Or maybe it's a bookmarklet, or a contextual menu command--some Subscribe to Site command that's always in the same easily-accessible place.)"

i've rambled on about this and similar things before, in ways that are confusing enough to force innocent bystanders to email me asking just what the bujeesus i'm talking about [ morbus, you know who you are ]. see, i not only want rss to be invisible, but i want by "blogroll" to be invisible too. and i want them all to be linked by my bookmarking behavior.

i see a site i like - i bookmark it. that bookmarking process should form the foundation for rss subscription and blogroll formation. and no, i don't have it all figured out, but someday i'm going to move past just rambling on with incoherent, staccato statements into crisp, coherent requirements.

ugh. the title says it all. " How to Go From Kernel Panic to Clean Install in 14 Long Hours".

ever wondered how many access points you'd find if you flew a beechcraft bonanza airplane over the seattle area while stumbling with an ipaq? well, now you know.

The Semantic Web: 1-2-3:

"This resource is also known as Stupid Berry Pickers Make Idiot Jam and that fact should add suitable weight to the following declaration: I'm new to the Semantic Web. I cobbled this fair piece together in an attempt to collect my thoughts, answered questions, path-of-learning, and requisite bookmarks so that other XML hackers may follow in my footsteps."

"This document is not intended to teach you RDF via my own words, but rather to hand-hold you through the "good" parts of the same journey I took. If it looks like a big link-list with menial comments from the peanut gallery, then you're not far off the mark of my intent. "

well, it's way passed due, but all of the vast wasteland now supports rss autodiscovery . if that doesn't mean anything to you then fughetaboutit, otherwise read on for the gory details.

i was rereminded that i wanted to support autodiscovery after reading mark pilgrim's excellent ultra liberal rss locator :

"One of my biggest pet peeves about the current generation of news aggregators is that they don't work very hard at finding RSS feeds. The other side of this coin is their stubborn insistence on making RSS visible. RSS should be completely invisible."

oh, how i long for the day when we can be rid of all those silly orange xml icons cluttering up valuable real estate and confusing my grandma.

then, with impeccable timing, brent simmons throws in support for rss invisibility in the latest beta of netnewswire , so i download it and gave it a shot for the various pages on my site and found out that it's not quiet as liberal in its design as mark's ultra liberal rss locator . hi. ho. so i decided to do the right thing finally and support not-so-liberal rss location.

although segway news beat 'em by a week, a few major publications are reporting the rumour that segway isn't ginger:

"THE CLAIM REVOLVES around inconsistencies between the description of Ginger contained in publicity for a book written by journalist Steve Kemper and the actual scooter-like invention. There are also some alleged patent irregularities."

i'm still voting for the hovercraft theory, just because it makes like a little more tolerable.

coincindence or not? aol has a big case of unhappy customers:

""Scores this low are rarely sustainable in competitive markets," University of Michigan professor Claes Fornell said in the report, regarding AOL. "Either there is improvement or the company is forced to leave the market--unless, of course, it has significant monopoly power.""

and earthlink is getting all customer-focused by allowing you, the unwashed user, to block popups:

""The pop-up blocker is the most exciting feature," said Jim Anderson, vice president of product development. "About 4.1 billion pop-up ads are served on the Internet, and we have had consumers tell us that is the most annoying experience on the Internet.""

of course, aol subsidiary, netscape, should be beaten with a cluestick for killing this very feature in the netscape 7.0 release:

"Although pop-up window/ad blocking has been a part of Mozilla for quite some time now, Netscape 7.0, which is based on Mozilla, will not have the pop-up blocking features of Mozilla when it is launched. A previous pre-release version of Netscape 7.0 also did not contain pop-up blocking.

An analyst from Jupiter Media stated, "Netscape is a commercial offering; it's not in its interest to offer a browser that could kill pop-up ads.""

if a former high-level rebublican advisor warns of armageddon if the u.s. goes to war with iraq and the asia times claims that the u.s. is already at war , then does that mean i should spend a little more time keeping a lookout for a few horseman meandering through the neighborhood?

i think the public comments from scowcroft about armageddon have more to do with party member positioning that only one or two mere mortals can claim to fully understand. but hey, it's always fun to watch either party air their dirty laundry in public and try to be polite about it:

"I am aware that some very intelligent people are expressing their opinions about Saddam Hussein and Iraq," Bush told reporters outside a community center in Crawford, near his 1,600-acre Texas ranch. "I listen very carefully to what they have to say."

hmmm. what kind of wierd market force is at work here?

why on earth does it cost $25 grand for cheap trick while blackalicous goes for a paltry $7 grand?

ever seen a malamute with anal sac problems? well, c'mon over, 'cause mauja seems to have developed a nasty case of impacted anal sacs.

lovely.

Demystifying Extreme Programming: Cutting through the hype of XP:

"Object-oriented programming in the Java language has become immensely popular. It is even revolutionizing software development to some degree. Still, recent studies show that half of all software development projects are late, and one-third are over budget. The problem isn't the technology; it's the way we develop software. So-called "agile" approaches coupled with the power and flexibility of object-oriented languages like Java, just might be the answer. The most popular agile approach is called Extreme Programming, or XP, but many people don't really know what it is. Using XP on your software development projects can increase your chances of success dramatically. This new column by Roy Miller, which begins by revisiting his popular article, "XP distilled," will strip away the rumors and the hype to help you understand XP and explain why it is so important. "

maybe it's just me, but sometimes when i see an article like 10 tips on writing the living web , i can almost hear the whooshing sound of it rocketing up the daypop top 40 .

on occasion these rising stars will be filled with pleasantly platitudinous gems like "write for a reason" and "write often" and i can't help but notice that the author is the chief scientist for a $195 content management system .

in the end, i'm left with the vague notion that i'm witnessing a new, savvy form of blog-powered production and consumption that makes me want to take a shower or obsessively wash my hands.

or maybe i'm just testing out tips 5 and 6 on writing the living web - "find good enemies" and "let the story unfold".

nathan torkington shares his version of "everything you wanted to know about ibooks, tibooks and mybooks, but were afraid to ask" , including the all important aphorism, "when the ad says "Airport Ready", they don't mean "ready with an Airport", they mean "ready for you to buy an Airport card".

maybe you've gone and downloaded the ipod update , and you've developed a hankering to play with the new calendar feature, but don't want to wait for ical to be released? how do you reward your curiosity? well, you export any vcal capable calendar :

"A quick test revealed that the Calendar feature on the iPod uses vCal format. So, you can simply export you Calendar in vCal format and then copy it to the Calendar directory on your iPod. When you unplug your iPod, you can go view the calendar, and it will show you all of your appointments."

no, but seriously folks, somebody needs to beat the pto patent examineers with a cluestick. it just gets curiouser and curiouser .

this is what happens when the burden is put on overworked and underpaid examiners. jeez louise, it takes 2 seconds to find prior art.

what kind is today? today is the kind of day that starts with me downloading a new mozilla 1.1 nightly build only to discover that all my bookmarks disappear. gone. sweat really started forming when i look in my profile directory and see a brand spanking new 96 kilobyte bookmark file where a meg-sized bookmark file used to be. oddly, reinstalling an older build brings my bookmarks back and leaves me feeling pretty good at having escaped a devastating brush with bad computing mojo.

minutes later, in a fit dark humour, the universe causes netnewswire to crash so completely that i lose all my rss feeds. for the 2nd time this week. sigh.

david hyatt is a very funny man. in a very geeky kind of way :

" So here you are, a multi-billion dollar corporation with a sagging stock price that has spent hundreds of man-years and millions of dollars on a layout engine and a Web browser. You've thrown all this money into the support of this cool "standards-compliant" layout engine, and you don't even know what that means! You're out all this money, and you have to find some way to make it back."

"The first monetizing technique I'll show you is called "Stealth Infection." Under the principle of stealth infection, you must insert ties to your Web properties in seemingly innocuous locations. The idea is to rely on the user's poor hand-eye coordination. They'll be shooting for Open File.. and they'll end up buying furniture instead! It's brilliant! It cannot fail!"

somehow, it seems appropriate to juxtapose this with scott rosenberg's piece on why the the media titans still don't get it :

"In one embarrassing anecdote culled from an Industry Standard article about the aftermath of the winter 2000 Time Warner/AOL merger, Time Warner CFO Richard Bressler hears about plans to promote Time magazines on AOL and asks, "What are these pop-ups? How big are they? Can you send me some information on them?" AOL's legendary deal-maker, David Colburn, responds, "Rich, why don't you invest $21.95 in an AOL subscription and consider it due diligence?" Ouch.

What might have been due diligence for a corporate exec was already a way of life for tens of millions of people. Motavalli contrasts the New York media honchos' cluelessness with the insight of AOL's Ted Leonsis that, online, it's "user experience" that counts."

it's probably entirely coincidental, but brent scopes out the netnewswire/blogrolling.com opml compatability that i was rambling on about the other day .

he figures out fairly quickly the weak spot in my little dreamworld, namely that the blogrolling.com opml export doesn't contain rss urls and is therefore pretty much useless for importing into netnewswire . d'oh! that's what i get for rambling on.

hi. ho. sounds like a job for a little script fu and syndic8.

Piccolo Version 1.0-beta and Jazz Release Version 1.2:

"Our goal with Piccolo was to create a ZUI that had a similar feature set to Jazz, but that was easier to use from a programmers standpoint. Almost all the differences between Piccolo and Jazz are changes that are meant to make Piccolo easier to use."

i can't say as it ever occured to me to encode music with windows media player, but if i did this would make me a very unhappy man:

" By default, Windows Media Player encodes your music collection using your machine's unique key, so that you can't share, loan or give away the tracks you rip to your machine. What that means is, if you have some file-system or OS corruption and reinstall from scratch, then restore your music collection, it will be unusable. "

yeah, i've seen netnewswire users in my referer logs. quiet a few of them, which is impressive considering it hasn't been around that long. and i've seen the rss reader "in action" and admired the 3-pane layout from afar. but until today, i hadn't bothered to download it and give it a spin.

what a nice, nice piece of software. it immediately blows away my prejudice that somehow rss news readers "belong" in the browser. you can browse 3-pane style and toggle a preference to view aggregated items. smooth. i'm just guessing, but i suspect that since blogrolling.com spits out opml , you should be able to immediately import your blogrolling blogroll into netnewswire . too bad blogrolling.com doesn't import opml to complete the circle.

to make a good thing better, brent mentions that netnewswire will soon support drag-and-drop grouping of feeds. hopefully these groups will be available via the opml export that's available. if so, i could then parse that file to produce the "grouped" blogroll that you see over to your right. alternatively, blogrolling.com could support importing of "grouped" opml feeds. doubly alternatively, i could try to hack "groups" into amphetadesk , which already stores subscribed channels in a format "based on" opml . hmmm.

ray on leverage:

"Bottom line: if you care about getting software out to your users as quickly and as broadly as possible, the code beneath you that you can leverage makes a world of difference. When it comes to time and money, leverage counts. It's not a commoditized environment: things like the choices of OS, tools, and environments like .NET do indeed matter."

as happened to me recently, it looks like others are starting to notice a new metablogging tool called organica , presumably the their referer logs.

there's not much going on with the site now, so it's tough to say much about it. hopefully the developer will be able to live up to his proclamation that he started developing organica because he, "...didn't think blogdex worked all that well."

the ipod update is superfine. it now has a calendar, which will integrate with ical when it comes out and will have alarm and notification functions. as you'd expect, it seems fairly natural to use the ipod wheel to quickly move through calendar dates.

what fun week for search phrases. i'm in the top ten for "os x wardriving" , "guantanamo haliburton" and my personal favorite - "metaphors origination".

truth truly is stranger than fiction. who needs pulp fiction with news about the possibility of vending machines beaming messages directly into my head, a rapper allegedly eating his girlfriend and a mother being forced to drink her bottled breastmilk before boarding a plane?

nothing against schlotzsky's deli , but they were pulling up the rear on my list of national chains that would get a clue when it comes to wifi. i guess i was wrong:

"Schlotzsky's is hoping the 4-foot antennas will provide Internet access to laptop users up to a mile from its restaurants. At some locations, the hope is to provide free access up to four miles away.

Schlotzsky's expects to wire 10 of its Austin restaurants in the next week. Eventually the company hopes to roll out the service at its 650 stores nationally."

it's one of those things that seems so obvious that it's worth repeating every now and again - one of the very tangible benefits that i get from reading blogs is getting to catch up on the latest from the likes of ray ozzie , dan bricklin and doc searls .

can you remember what life was like before you could just go and watch ray ozzie riff on collaboration ?

"The way that I explore is to build products, and to see how they are used. To see what works, and what doesn't. To listen, to interact, to refine. Because cooperative work exists at the intersection between people, organizations, and technology, collaborative systems are truly fascinating: in order to serve people effectively, technologists must, for example, understand social dynamics, social networks, human factors."

blogzilla points out a bevy of mozilla UI changes which are in the works.

i'd like to personally thank the person at our local canine rescue league for professionally dealing with an e.mail my wife sent about the options for caring for dogs with "uncontrolled seizures" - aside from the obviously unpleasant prospect of euthanization.

she was kind enough to forward the e.mail to dozens of people who feel compelled to share the excruciating details of their journeys into the depths of anectodal epilespy therapy for dogs.

"dont give up!" they say, in a well-meaning attempt to boost spirits. don't give up until you've tried gold bead implants in his head and if that doesn't work there's always the "all meat diet" or maybe the "raw foods diet" and sometimes you might need to supplement with this herb or that herb and well sometimes that therapy only works for a few weeks and so on and on and on.

CVS Version Control for Web Site Projects.

i can't say much for the navigation interface. but topazon still has potential:

"When Amazon published their WebService interface to their dot com site in July 2002, I thought I would see what I could do with the functionality they were opening up.

Rather than produce an imitation of the Amazon consuming experience, I thought I would look at trends in numbers of books published in different subject areas."

dang. i downloaded l.m. orchard's new amphetadesk "outline skin" and started moving this and changing that without backing anything up. you can guess the predicatable results. adding insult to injury, i didn't back up the "syndicated channels" file, so if i want to keep using amphy i need to go back and add all the feeds that i track regularly. ack.

on the upside, it looks like l.m. has been adding scads of goodies to the skin.

ladies and gentleman. if, for some odd reason, you needed reassurance that capitalism is alive and well on ebay then you'll be happy to know that pringles can wifi antennas are going for $23 , plus shipping and handling.

that's a pretty tidy mark-up, considering you can build two for 10 bucks.

it's two for the price of one from mark pilgrim today. Bullet-Proof CSS Rounded Corners and moveable type search version 1.31b. i should be so lucky everyday.

OpenLDAP with Linux and Windows.

and the there's bruce sterling. he's good with the words too:

"What the hell kind of industrial policy is that? Teddy Roosevelt would jump down off Mount Rushmore and kick our ass from hell to breakfast for tolerating such a situation. It's the Palladium Security State. It's an operating system that hates and fears you."

someday, i want to write more like dean allen. i mean, he's writing about the judging the 5k competition for crying out loud:

"Scarce, I thought, were designers who embraced the smallness; who looked it in the eye and, instead of squinting, tried to imagine what good could come if such a space was all that was ever made available to them. Those who see that every container, no matter the size, can give only a portion of itself to the carriage of something else, and that (for want of a better word) appropriate presentation tends not to do well in crowded conditions."

PHP-Pal Shopping System:

"This project shall provide a free and open source shopping cart system for users of the PayPal Online Store solution for small web-based businesses."

[ via aaronland ]

i know it's not good science to base conclusions on anectodes, but i think any dog owner could have told saved the researchers behind the "Dogs are smarter than people think" study a load of time and money:

" Scientists are convinced that dogs can count and researchers at the University of California, Davis, say they try to convey different messages through the pitch and pace of their barks. "

our malamute is superb at figuring out if he's getting one less treat than our german pointer. although it often sounds like a cross between a wolf and chewbacca, malamutes also have an amazing ability to convey nuanced meaning when they "talk".