Always move forward, going straight will get you nowhere.

I still laugh whenever I hear that.

Woohoo! Starcraft 1.09 supports direct UDP play. No more battle.net!

Here's a pretty good 2002 Formula One Season Preview. [Saltire News]

A woman walked into a bar and ordered a double entendre. So the barman gave her one.

Try The Zen TV Experiment, from Adbusters.

Yes, I did That Memetic Virus Detection Test

Read the rest of this entry…

Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbours

A Zen Master lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief sneaked into the hut only to find there was nothing in it to steal. The Zen Master returned and found him. "You have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty handed. Please take my clothes as a gift." The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away. The Master sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, " I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."

After the world's cutest fish went to bed, I hung around at home for half an hour or so, then I went down the road to get a pie and chips for dinner. The pie was very, very hot. My mouth is still feeling rather burned. Dinner over, I stood outside "Shakespeare's Pies" (heartily recommended), and decided that I was going to satisfy my peripatetic urge from earlier in the day, and go for a walk.

Walking is a tricky art. There are four main ways to do it. You can travel in a circle, which means you've decided before you start how long you'll walk. You can walk in a straight line until you guess that you are halfway done, and then walk back. You can wander, such that you travel a lot of distance, but never really stray incredibly far from your starting point. Or you can do what I did, which is just keep walking until you realise that if you go just a bit further, you can catch the train home.

In my case "just a bit further" was Town Hall station, in the middle of the city, after an hour of putting one foot in front of the other. It was refreshing, relaxing, and got all sorts of cobwebs out of my system. I should do the same thing tomorrow, in the opposite direction. Or maybe wander up Erskineville road and see where it takes me - not having a car means I rarely travel away from train lines.

Town Hall station is next door to the big movie complex in the city. I couldn't decide what movie to go see - I ended up with Lord of the Rings again, because nothing else grabbed my attention. I almost walked home afterwards, but my shoes (very old and falling apart) were very uncomfortable.

Fellowship of the Ring Peeve

Early in the movie, there's a bit where Gandalf is talking to Bilbo, and Gandalf (who up til now has been this harmless, chuckling old guy) gives a hint that he's really pretty tough. In the movie, this is done with a camera trick that makes it look like he's growing on the spot, and a major lighting change. The relevant passage from the book is: He took a step towards the hobbit, and he seemed to grow tall and manacing; his shadow filled the little room.

Later in the movie, Galadriel (Oooh! Cate Blanchett with pointy ears!) does something similar when Frodo offers her the Ring. This time her voice gets distorted, and she's shown in negative with rushing wind around her. Once again, the book:

She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beatiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful.

Both these effects annoyed the living crap out of me. I know Jackson was just following the book, but things that sound neat on the printed page can come across really overdone when put on the big screen. Both of the actors involved are particularly talented, and to me, the scenes would have had far more impact on me if the director had left it up to them to portray the menace, and left the FX shots out.

I'm in a very peripatetic frame of mind.

It's too hot. It's too humid. I'm stuck in cubicle-land out in Alexandria for two weeks, consulting. Yick.

I'm not dead, I'm just working too hard.

I've redone the style on the front-page of my journal so it doesn't look mightily crap in Internet Explorer any more. It's another 'table-free' layout, no tables were used in the creation of the page at all. As such, if your browser doesn't support CSS absolute positioning, it's going to look a trifle weird (but hopefully it'll still be legible). I stole the style-sheet from here, but I changed a bunch of stuff so that the main body text was the browser's default size, and paragraphs weren't indented and stuff. I'll redo the colours some time but right now I can't be bothered.

Of course, since everyone just watches their friends pages anyway, it's a total waste of effort.

I have managed to accumulate a significant ReadingDeficit at the moment. Here's the list of books that have backed up on my reading-list. (In no particular order)

• The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger. (2/3 finished, my current "train reading" book.)
• Gonzo Marketing (Winning Through Worst Practices) by Christopher Locke (1/3 finished, suspended so I could read Cluetrain first, since the book assumes you've done so)
• The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien (re-reading, 1/2 way through)
• The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien (re-reading)
• Kant and the Platypus by Umberto Eco
• Neuromancer by William Gibson (re-reading)
• Zeno and the Tortoise (How to Think Like a Philosopher) by Nicholas Fearn
• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1/3 of the way through, trying to work up the interest to continue)
• Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstaedter (1/2 way through. I really, really should finish this, although given the time since I read the first half, I'm going to need to start from the beginning again. Ooh, neat. I only just realised that "G-E-B" (or "E-G-B") is an E-minor chord.)
• Core J2EE Patterns (Best Practices and Design Strategies) by Deepak Alur, John Crupi and Dan Malks (Sort of 1/3 finished, I really should read this for work)

From Mark Pilgrim, a parable about the way technology has streamlined our lives.

Back in the Stone Age, you took a roll of pictures (24, maybe 36), trudged down to the local photo development shop (or, more recently, supermarket), stuffed your film in an envelope, filled out a form, dropped it in a box, trudged back, picked them up, and stuck them on your refrigerator. Total wait time: 3 days.

In the new-and-improved Digital Age, you can take as many as 200 pictures at a time in your spiffy $400 digital camera, download them to your hard drive, stay up until 3 AM writing custom scripts to organize them and auto-create thumbnail galleries and HTML pages for them, buy a domain name, install weblogging software, and upload them to your web site. Total wait time: 7 months.

America-bashing

In the USA, the government is demanding that bookshops disclose the purchasing habits of their customers. This is a chilling prior restraint on free expression. If people know that buying a controversial book will get them on a government list somewhere, people are less likely to read controversial books. When this was tried in the 80's with libraries, 48 States reacted by passing laws limiting the information that libraries can disclose about peoples' reading habits. Bookshops have no such protection

At the end of a column on the subject (which I can't find online), shop owner David Unowsky noted:

"One further piece of irony: Attorney General John Ashcroft, citing the sanctity of the Second Amendment, refused to search gun purchase records for information about weapons purchases by terrorists. What we have, apparently, is a misguided (at least in this case) administration that fears books and ideas but loves guns."

Australia-bashing

Just before the recent Federal election, pictures were splashed across newspapers across the country of refugees, arriving in Australia by boat, throwing their children overboard in an attempt to stop themselve being turned away at the border by the Navy.

This information, and the pictures were released by the incumbent government, who had been using a fear campaign against refugees to support their "hard line on boat people", and thust boost their very shaky popularity rating. This story was harped on repeatedly - "Look! These people just want to get in the country illegally. Look, they'll even throw their own children into the sea to try to get picked up! We should keep turning them away, or locking them up in camps for up to three years while we decide what to do with them."

The problem is, it never happened. The pictures (and the later-released video footage) were taken the day after the alleged incident, of a completely different boat which was sinking, hence the need to be rescued. The government invented the report from whole cloth to get themselves re-elected.

And who's going to pay for this? Nobody, of course. The inquiry into the event names Defence Minister Peter Reith as the culprit, but of course he retired after the election, and a reputation as a ruthless lying bastard is only going to help his career as a corporate consultant. It states that senior public servants in both the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister's departments knew what was going on, but the obvious fact that this means the two politicians knew has been omitted from the report. We have the smoking gun, but chances are the bastards responsible will all get away scot-free.

I know this is a really old link, but it's still incredibly scary.

Washington, D.C. (SatireWire.com) Ñ Abandoning the last-minute, panic-inducing warning system it has used until now, the FBI today said it will begin issuing regular, five-day terror forecasts. Today's outlook: light, scattered terrorism early, tapering off by noon. Tomorrow: Clear, and seasonably dangerous.

And JOHO does a perfect parody of the Blogger Manifesto.

Oh. Addendum to the last post. If you're connected to an ISP in Australia, then chances are you're already going through proxy server. Australian ISPs are charged for their bandwidth per byte downloaded, so the caching web proxy is the first line of defense against huge bandwidth bills.

And as an aside, a friend of mine who works for iiNet in Perth tells me that the traffic flowing over their network as a result of the Morpheus file-sharing software is 1.5Gb every 20 minutes, which costs the ISP approximately $30,000 per month.

Hardly deserves a medal. News.com: Comcast to stop storing Web users' data [via Tomalak's Realm] Next up: Comcast executives to stop beating their wives. Alert Ted Koppel. [diveintomark]

As far as I've been able to see, what happened was that Comcast decided to set up a network of transparent web proxies. This is a good thing, IMHO - next time there's a big world tragedy, all the Comcast customers will hit the caches instead of the CNN front page, and there'll be a few thousand fewer people bringing the net to its knees during emergencies.

I've only dealt with two proxy servers before, Microsoft Proxy Server, and Squid. Both of them kept, in their default configuration, detailed logs in the same way that Webservers keep detailed logs. IP address. What was being requested. What was the response. You can get packages that analyse Squid proxy logs so you can see what your ratio of cache hits to misses are, and so on.

It looks like all that happened was the sysadmins who were installing the servers knew about the logs but didn't think about the privacy, this was just business as usual, the default configuration. Someone else knew what proxy servers generally logged, and kicked up a stink. Comcast said "Well, it's accepted industry practice, and the logs can be useful", and then stopped logging.

Where's the big deal?

Dave Winer wants Google to write a program that indexes his hard drive.

This is way outside Google's sphere of excellence. Google's search technology is designed to index things that are part of a hyperlinked environment (the core being their Page Rank™ algorithms), and designed to run on big, dedicated servers where the most important factor is speed of search through a massive database.

This can sort of translate to intranets - you have the hyperlinked environment, and the search tool would run on a server. It doesn't translate at all to local hard drives, where you would need to optimise the index in the other direction (space over speed), and none of the documents you are searching through are linked to anything else. The only leverage Google would get from their existing product is the trusted brand-name, and a few routines to index PDFs and Word documents.

On top of this, Google would be putting themselves firmly in the sights of Microsoft, who have made no secret of wanting to replace their filesystem with a database (an idea that is at least five years overdue, and final proof that the Linux guys don't innovate - or we'd have done this ages ago). Presumably once Windows has SQL Server in the background, full-text indexing is only a matter of an add-in module. That would really put Google in the same boat as Netscape.

<deleted/>

Chris Pirillo posted The Blogger's Manifesto recently, and while some of it is obviously specific to Chris and/or his circle of friends ("I egosurf Daypop, Google and Blogdex nightly" and "I like linking to Dave, Doc, Evan and Cam"), the rest is a pretty good list of rules to live by if you're blogging, or journalling, or whatever.

Except for 2 and 3: "You have no right to judge me" and "If you don't like what you see, look elsewhere"

I'm sorry, but the act of performing an act in public, be it preaching on a street corner or blogging on a webserver, is an invitation for public comment, and an invitation for the rest of the world to judge what you are doing, and react accordingly.

Human beings are judgemental. It's one of the things that is hard-wired into our brains. When presented with information we evaluate it based on our existing knowledge, form opinions on it, and act appropriately. This behaviour is one of those things that defines us as the thinking animal.

Add to that the web is a two-way medium. If somebody posts their opinions and I disagree with them, there are thousands of avenues for me to post a contradictory opinion, and it's always just as valid for me to do so as it was for the original writer to exhibit theirs.

Similarly, if someone is saying something I disagree with, and I walk away and say nothing, then I am being intellectually dishonest. It is my duty to the shared medium that is the web to balance what I perceive as disinformation, with information. If I don't like what I see, I will look at it, evaluate it, and say why I don't like it.

Seeing something I disagree with isn't quite the same as seeing something that just doesn't interest me at all. Complaining about that sort of thing leads to the platoon of whiners who infest slashdot saying "That's not News for Nerds!", "It's not like it used to be!" and "Why didn't they post my article instead?" In the end, a blog belongs to the people who write it, and that right of ownership should always be respected.

It would be glib to say that the Internet is not a place for the thin-skinned. The truth is that the Internet is no more a place for the thin-skinned to wear their hearts on their sleeves than the "real" world is. In fact, it's substantially less so, because online your detractors can hide behind anonymous, flaming identities.

So, if you blog, and you get readers, you will be judged. If you don't want controversy, don't be controversial. If you don't want your opinions examined, don't be opinionated.

Contradictory opinions welcomed.

(The Australian Newspaper, February 14 2002, Front page)

Phone bill has a bastard fee

The extra $NZ337.50 charged to James Storrie's mobile phone account gave him a bit of a fright. But the Kiwi businessman—who had earlier complained to Telecom New Zealand for wrongly disconnecting the phone—was stunned when he read the explanation printed on the bill: "Penalty for being an arrogant bastard."

I wish I could have done things like that to people when I was in tech support. :)

A birthday-card came round the office for one of my bosses. He's turning 50, or so the card says. So I wrote "Don't worry, you're only 32 in hex".

I wonder if there's a therapy-camp for terminal nerds?

Does anyone out there, anyone have an example of a non-trivial application that benefitted from the use of XSLT more than it would have if developers had used another language to manipulate the XML?

XSLT is almost the perfect example of the product of architecture astronauts. I have this vision of the working group's deliberations as they came up with it. They'd have started off with a pretty simple premise: Let's write a language to convert one XML document into another XML document. Good starting point. There's lots of benefits to having this. OK. There's a need for this, lots of people would find it useful.

OK. Now wouldn't it be cool if the language itself was valid XML? Why? Because... er.. because then you'd be able to make an XSLT document that takes another XSLT document and converts it into XSLT! Wouldn't that be cool? Er, yeah, sure. And it'd also make it impossible to read, and change even the simplest operation into a morass of tags and attributes, just so we can get some weird, inflexible kind of code reuse that's a total bitch to manage compared to the alternatives.

Meanwhile, despite the whole move to completely separate logic from presentation so web designers can write templates, and coders can write the code that fills them, let's write a language that makes template and logic inextricable.

But... but doing everything in XML is cool! In the future, everything will be in XML. Your shorts will be in XML! We'll do it that way anyway! Oh, did I mention that we have to do it this way, because there's no way to take two documents as input, and merge them into a single output document? That would make things far too complicated. It's so much easier to write an XSLT template that takes the first document, and uses it to produce a new template that you run the second document through. Isn't that so much better? Of course, it's dog slow to code because the programmer has to wrap his head around all these nested meta-templates, and dog slow to execute because the processor has to recompile the intermediate template every time, but it makes things so much more conceptually clean!

Oh, and Bob here's a professor, and he's really into functional programming and recursion. Let's make it a functional language. Why? Well, because functional programming is really clean and neat, and we all studied it at university and haven't been able to use it since! Oh... you mean what do we tell everyone else? Well, I guess if we did that, then an XSLT processor would be able to parse lots of bits of the document at the same time, rather than having to go from one end to the other and saving state along the way. What do you mean, "there's probably a very good reason you've not used functional programming since University"?

Practical benefits? Oh, I'm sure it'll speed things up in the long run, even if it means we'll make simple things like a for loop take up four pages of coding, force any non-trivial operation to use heaps of recursion, and generally make programming in the language an exercise in gritting your teeth and fighting through it. For the moment, we'll just ignore the fact that the entire trend in web application programming has been towards sacrificing straight-line speed of applications in order to shorten development time.

Let's face it. In pretty much every language, coverting an XML document into an object graph is trivial. Massaging objects to come up with a document is trivial. XSLT takes these two trivial operations, and makes them intensely painful. The whole language, the whole specification, every single book written on the damn subject needs to be burned, page by page. I'll volunteer with the flamethrower.

What's Wrong with OPML

1. The most recent expansion state of an outline node is not an attribute of the node itself.

   For editing, this means that when you insert or delete an outline node, you have to recalculate all the line-numbering and regenerate the "expansionState" up the top of the document.

   For displaying, this means that the user-agent needs to keep track of line numbering of outlines to determine which should be displayed. If expansion state were an attribute of the nodes themselves, you could choose to display (or not display) children of an un-expanded node using simple CSS selectors.

2. Outline node content is an attribute of the outline node.

   For editing, this means that a lot of characters that would normally be fine have to be escaped as entities, making the document less humanly-readable.

   For displaying, this means that to display the OPML file in an XML/CSS aware agent, you first have to perform a transformation on the OPML file in order to turn the attributes into text nodes. This adds a completely unnecessary step - usually involving XSLT, one of the world's most sucky languages. If outline content was just a text node, you could display OPML purely using CSS, with no transformation step at all.

It seems that the Radio 8.0 directory has been reorganised to make it easier to find information. This is cool. I think it's easier to find stuff there now, although I may just be getting used to it. I still think that Manila's directory theme gets in the way of good information architecture more than it helps. Think of how the Yahoo! look might help in finding things below the top level faster, for example.

There's another Directory of Radio Resources maintained by Andy Sylvester, much in need of a reorganization. Or possibly organization in the first place. I'll have a go at a better structure myself, I think, and see if it catches on.

It was pointed out to me last week that the XML button on the directory delivers an OPML file containing the entire directory as one outline, that you can then look at in Radio. This makes things a lot easier to navigate. For Manila directory sites that don't have the XML buttons, the way to get at the OPML file seems predictable - for a directory at http://ruminations.weblogger.com/directory/143, the outline is at http://ruminations.weblogger.com/discuss/reader$143.opml.

Now this is stupid. I'm watching bits of the Winter Olympics, because there's nothing else on TV. It's the ski-jumping. You'd think that ski-jumping would be a pretty simple thing - guy goes down a slope, you measure how far they go before they land.

But no. Ski-jumpers get style points. Five judges give them scores that get added to the length of their jump. How lame is that? Surely the best style for a ski-jump is the one that makes you land the furthest from the take-off ramp? Could you imagine this sort of thing happening in the long-jump? "Well, I'm sorry Vladmir. You jumped further, but Terry's landing was just so much more graceful, so we're giving it to him."

There is justice in the world. Artificial boy/girl group "Scandal'us" were the winners of last year's Popstars show in Australia. After the TV series was finished, their number one single (the name of which escapes me) was a certainty.

This morning, I saw an advertisement on TV. "Scandal`us" are performing live, but they are now second billing to Dorothy the Dinosaur from the Wiggles. Not all the Wiggles, just the dinosaur. It's nice when Andy Warhol is proved right.

Adults at children's prices. *snicker*

Slightly more unsettling is the advertisement from McDonalds that's on now, complete with a singing Ronald Mcdonald. The subtext of the advert seems to be "if your mother loved you, she'd buy you a hamburger".

The Frontier Scripting Tutorial came out on this day in 1998. It was written by Matt Neuburg and adapted by Brent Simmons. I just reviewed it. It's a little out of date, but it's a very good tutorial for Web scripting. [Scripting News]

Just reminding myself to read this. I've had my first "Web Application" running in Radio about half a week now (nothing earth-shattering, it just sends email), and I'm busy documenting how I got around to it.

lonita posted a complaint from a Trillian user about AOL blocking access from Trillian users

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In the spirit of the "Five favourite albums" thing, how about "Five websites other than Livejournal that you try to visit most often (preferably daily)"?

My list is particularly nerdy

• Scripting News
• Slashdot
• Joel on Software
• Dive into Mark
• OurPlace

A meme from mtffm. Unfortunately I couldn't just stop at five albums.

My Top 5 Albums (in no particular order) (as of Feb 8 2002, this list changes a lot) (only counting contemporary music).

• Disintegration, by The Cure. (To hell with "no particular order" for the top spot, this is number one)
• Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, by The Cure (To hell with one album per band, too)
• Portishead, by Portishead
• Nevermind, by Nirvana
• Aenema, by Tool

Honourable mentions: The Wall (Pink Floyd), Abbey Road, Revolver and Sergeant Peppers (The Beatles), Grace (Jeff Buckley), Different Class (Pulp). Doolittle (The Pixies) Artists whose body of work (or best of) (or multiple albums) belongs on the list but individual albums just didn't cut it: Blur, They Might be Giants, The Smiths, Massive Attack, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Regurgitator, Madness, Elvis Costello, The Police, New Order, Joy Division, Crowded House, Queen, The Church, Nick Cave, and I've probably forgotten quite a few.

Also see http://www.pastiche.org/wiki/AlbumsEveryoneShouldHaveACopyOf.

Phew!

Linux-loving McNealy dons penguin outfit. In a move to erase doubts about the sincerity of Sun Microsystems' move to embrace Linux, CEO Scott McNealy took the stage at the company's annual meeting wearing a penguin suit. [CNET News.com]

From the "images we'd rather do without" department.

On logging on to a Unix server, the sole welcome message was "Unauthorized use not permitted."

Well, duh.

Two contributions to The Mirror Project

We're Moving

Things Are Looking Up

While we're on things pictorial, here's my first two contributions to The Mirror Project:

We're Moving

Things Are Looking Up

I have no idea if this is having a go at me or not (sarcasm translates so badly to text that it becomes easy to mistake it where none, perhaps, exists), but for the record, I really, really want one of the new iMacs. If I weren't saving for a holiday, and paying off my TiBook, I'd have ordered one already.

Seen in a busy food court:

Good advice for the materialists out there:

Well, it's released: Java 1.4 overview from Sun. From the first paragraph of the article:

212, 504, 1781, 2130, and now 2738. These are the number of classes and interfaces in the standard edition of the Java™ platform, from versions 1.0 through 1.4.

That's too many. Stop now. It'd be really cool if 1.5 had 500 classes, and a bunch of optional modules.

Don Box on the Importance of Being WSDL:

I quickly found out that C++ programmers are the smartest programmers in the world, as each one I met would quickly point out to me.

Michael Moore seriously puts the boot into George W Bush over Enron.

I've been following this story on and off. Here's a company that has the President and Vice-President of the USA in its pocket, is in bed with its auditors, and is being given the chance to make up the laws that govern its industry as it goes along, and it still tanks. How's that for incredible incompetence in the face of overwhelming advantages?

Don Box writes an emotive plea in favour of WSDL, from the point of view of a programmer in strongly typed languages trying to interface with weakly-typed scripts. [Scripting News]

As nifty as scripting languages are, I'm still of the opinion that strongly typed languages scale better (in terms of development, not runtime) than weakly typed languages. Sure, if your unit test coverage is heavy enough you can compensate, but why write extra tests just to cover something that your compiler can catch if you're using types?

I also liked the line: I quickly found out that C++ programmers are the smartest programmers in the world, as each one I met would quickly point out to me.

In answer to the question "How stupid can people be?" we discover the answer. "Really fucking stupid." - They Want Their ID Chips Now (Wired News).

Now let's see. We have a chip that can hold "six lines of text" I assume that's a standard 80-column line - 6 * 80 = 480, which is close enough to 512 bytes to make it a reasonable guess. The chip has no processing capability, and the data on it can't be changed. That makes it about as useful for identification as having a henna tattoo that says "Hi, I'm Charles", and significantly less useful for medical purposes than the Medic Alert bracelet my friend from school used to wear because of his haemophilia.

People. Feh.

In answer to the question "How stupid can people be?" we discover the answer. "Really fucking stupid." - They Want Their ID Chips Now (Wired News).

Now let's see. We have a chip that can hold "six lines of text" I assume that's a standard 80-column line - 6 * 80 = 480, which is close enough to 512 bytes to make it a reasonable guess. The chip has no processing capability, and the data on it can't be changed. That makes it about as useful for identification as having a henna tattoo that says "Hi, I'm Charles", and significantly less useful for medical purposes than the Medic Alert bracelet my friend from school used to wear because of his haemophilia.

People. Feh.

Adam Curry talks about a calendar application he's writing for Manila: CalServices. [Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]

Funnily enough, this was sort of the direction I was going to go with the "To Do" application I'm going to write for Radio. Step One was to get it working. Step two was to publish RSS feeds. That way you could subscribe to your To Do list from the News Aggregator, and have things you're due to do turn up amongst the reading material.

The problem with Adam's idea is one he vaguely refers to in the link - There is no doubt in my mind that .NET's myCalendar (or whatever they call it) will have thought this issue through, and everyone with a 'passport' will probably be able to pass meeting messages to other members - We all know Passport is evil, but what do we have to replace it? SOAP and XML-RPC are inherently insecure. If we want to set up an open, P2P network of web services, we need an open P2P authentication service.

Roland Tanglao read my Hacking Radio piece, and told me that I could buy the O'Reilly book on Frontier, but it's out of print.

Believe it or not, that book's been sitting on the remainder shelf in the Dymocks shop in the middle of Sydney for months. It's half-price, even. I almost bought it today (on the way to getting the NIN and Muse CDs), but I read in the book that it was written for an old version of Frontier, and that even when the book was coming out, they anticipated substantial changes that would make the book obselete. Is this true, or should I rush off and buy it tomorrow?

Dave Winer responded to my Radio problems. [Scripting News] I guess that means I now have a Dave Number of 1.

Yes, Radio needs better documentation. If it's any help, the only language I ever managed to learn purely from the product homepage was PHP. It's well organised, very easy to navigate, and the open commenting feature on each page means that the community fills in the gaps over time, as well as adding tips, caveats and useful patterns.

I get the feeling that is a lot like PHP - a simple language where the power lies in the library of available functions (and in Radio's case, the integration with the Object Database). The difference with Radio is that it's putting this power on the desktop rather than server.

I also get the feeling that Manila, while good for blogs, doesn't really have any mature templates when it comes to organising information non-chronologically. Its search function is bad enough that it makes it harder to find information (if it was absent, I'd have used google to start with), its directory template is almost painful to use, and it doesn't seem to organise meaningful relations between pages very well.

A weblog, and discussion groups/bulletin boards are accretions of knowledge. You read them day by day, and you absorb information as you go. Occasionally, you'll need to find something that happened a week ago, and you go back through the calendar. Very rarely, you'll think "Yeah, that was mentioned last year", and you'll need a search function. Other than that, the information put on a blog fades with time, and rarely organises itself along any other lines.

Compare this to, say, Wiki, where following information chronologically is impossible, directories are almost always only one level deep, but the site self-organises on the way pages (information) relate to each other.

Anyway, I've digressed.

Memo to self: write story about how Radio's price-tag makes it more likely to need good documentation than a $10,000 program, but least likely to get it than Open Source.

I tried to start programming in Radio today. I didn't get particularly far, basically because it was so difficult to find out how any of it worked:

Addendum, October 2002. There never was a part two to this series.

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And now for something completely different. From my friend Lonita (who got it from someone else)...

Dr. Leroy, the head psychiatrist at the local mental hospital, is examining patients to see if they're cured and ready to re-enter society.

"So, Mr. Clark," the doctor says to one of his patients, "I see by your chart that you've been recommended for dismissal. Do you have any idea what you might do once you're released?"

The patient thinks for a moment, then replies, "Well, I went to school for mechanical engineering. That's still a good field, good money there. But on the other hand, I thought I might write a book about my experience here in the hospital, what it's like to be a patient here. People might be interested in reading a book like that. In addition, I thought I might go back to college and study art history, which I've grown interested in lately."

Dr. Leroy nods and says, "Yes, those all sound like intriguing possibilities."

The patient replies, "And the best part is, in my spare time, I can go on being a teapot."

If you're one of those people who are dread Valentines Day, despair.com have just the thing for you!

As cringer points out, yes, winamp has an off switch for the nagging. :P

Bugger off, Winamp. No, really, bugger off. If I wanted a new version, I'd go look for it. The simple fact is, all I want is a program that plays my mp3's, and manages my playlist. If I wanted anything more, if I wanted bells, whistles, minibrowsers and related shite, I'd go looking for them.

Software reaches a certain stage where it does everything a reasonable person wants it to do. After that, any upgrades are just dancing paperclips and changing file formats to force people to upgrade. This is why Microsoft wants you to rent their applications now instead of buying them - people are starting to realise that Office '95 does everything that Office XP does, just with a different colour scheme and an incompatible .doc file.

Of course, if you're making software, the last thing you want is for people to stop upgrading, even if the software is free. Stagnation is death and redundancy. So you do stupid things like nagging perfectly content users into trying your new version.

Well, it's only so long, only so many repetitions of that popup window before the annoyance exceeds my inertia, and I go looking for something that won't tell me off for not keeping up with the Joneses..

(Some thoughts in this entry stolen from Joel Spolsky)

Winamp has started nagging me about a new version being available.

Up yours, Winamp. No, really, up yours. If I wanted a new version, I'd go look for it. The simple fact is, all I want is a program that plays my mp3's, and manages my playlist. If I wanted anything more, if I wanted bells, whistles, minibrowsers and related shite, I'd go looking for them.

Software reaches a certain stage where it does everything a reasonable person wants it to do. After that, any upgrades are just dancing paperclips and changing file formats to force people to upgrade. This is why Microsoft wants you to rent their applications now instead of buying them - people are starting to realise that Office '95 does everything that Office XP does, just with a different colour scheme and an incompatible .doc file.

Of course, if you're making software, the last thing you want is for people to stop upgrading, even if the software is free. Stagnation is death and redundancy. So you do stupid things like nagging perfectly content users into trying your new version.

Well, it's only so long, only so many repetitions of that popup window before the annoyance exceeds my inertia, and I go looking for something that won't tell me off for not keeping up with the Joneses..

I need a haircut.

It's conspiracy theory time! Feel free to add as many "allegedly"'s below as are legally necessary.

Exhibit A: Mono class libraries are released under the MIT X11 license. This means that anyone can take the Mono code (Mono being the GNOME project's implementation of .NET), add their own features and release a proprietary version without contributing their code back to the open-source project.

Exhibit B: GNOME head programmer says that it will be based on .NET

My cynical little head here says that Ximian (the company that Miguel de Icaza, the head of the GNOME project started to support GNOME) is planning mischief. They'll leverage the Open Source community to help them build their .NET clone, and then pull a fast one. Ximian will license code from Microsoft for the bits of .NET that MS aren't giving away - the important things like Passport and My Services (Hailstorm), integrate it with the Mono class library, and having Ximian sell the "Enhanced Mono/GNOME".

If this is the plan, it's very, very bad. It's derailing one of the major Free Software projects, tying it to a closed standard that Microsoft are free to embrace and extend to their heart's content, and then pulling the rug out from under it in a way that delivers everybody's souls to the Beast. Nice one, Ximian.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists at the World Economic Forum predicted on Friday a grim future replete with unprecedented biological threats, global warming and the possible takeover of humans by robots. [Link stolen from excess bloggage

Here's some blatant Australiana for you, (complete with short glossary). Heard on JJJ

(Oh, and for foreigners, a stubby is a 375ml (12oz) bottle of beer)

Nobody Likes a Bogan by Area 7

Read the rest of this entry…

Ellison: Oracle's "whole business" will run on Linux

By "whole business", he means he's replacing three HP-Unix boxes that run the company's business apps with an Intel/Linux cluster. Ellison's prediction that big boxes are going to die is a trifle premature. IBM's Great Server Heist campaign comes to mind as a counter-meme.

A nice aside comes when you look at where this puts Microsoft in Server-Space. On one side, you've got the Big Boxes. You can't run NT on anything but Intel hardware, so Microsoft can't go there. On the other side, you've got the clusters of commodity Intel hardware. For NT servers, the OS licensing costs are quite likely going to approach the amount you're spending on hardware. That's a powerful incentive to go with Linux.

(It's also a rather loud warning to IBM and BEA's Java application servers. JBoss is at about the same stage today as Linux was when it hit kernel 2.0 - used by a lot of hobbyists, but with the big players looking down on it as untested, and missing several enterprise features. I have this feeling that it's only a matter of time.)

an overview of JXTA. Gene Kan gave an overview of JXTA. He admits that Jini is dead; Java was holding it down like a weight. The edges of the universe are growing faster than the center but inequality of load is growing, not shrinking. Porn is too hard to find on the Internet today. They're using the Apache license; screw Richard Stallman. He touts that JXTA isn't IP-only, which is a dubious advantage IMO. [Hack the Planet]

I sort of liked Jini (I own enough bloody books on the subject), but it was one of those things that was really hampered by Java's more bondage-and-discipline tendencies. It was also a complete bastard to get an environment running, but from what I've seen, so's JXTA.

US Senate debates the merits of face-recognition technology. Deleted commentary, I didn't read the article close enough, and I knee-jerked.

The Onion: Judge Orders God to Break Up Into Smaller Deities.

WASHINGTON, DC: Calling the theological giant's stranglehold on the religion industry "blatantly anti-competitive," a U.S. district judge ruled Monday that God is in violation of anti-monopoly laws and ordered Him to be broken up into several less powerful deities.