www.intertwingly.net

Voice of an Angel

Returning back to the land of the living, I spend a moment and download a song that Phil and Shelley are raving about.  It blows me away.  Then I read about how it came about.  I am thrilled.  Makes my adventures with managed serendipity look tame.  Then I come across this.  I am speachless.  My only reaction is that I'm not worthy.  My wife beats me at Trivial Pursuit (though I am the one who knows how many feet are in a mile).  I can play twinkle twinkle little star on the piano only because I memorized the numeric sequence 1,1,5,5,6,6,5...

All in all, this story and song makes me glad to be alive.  Again.

P.S.  Shannon - your RSS does validate.

The siren call of autumn

Around these parts, this is the time of year for gorgeous fall colors on the trees, temperate days, crisp nights, and hacking coughs.  This particular household has been down for much of the week - missed school, doctors visits, heavy medication and the like, though things are seem to be getting better now.

Harmony and abstraction

Greg Reinacker: Can't we all just get along?  The first step is to stop making sweeping statements about "most .NET people" and "many Java people".  Want me to point out prominent .NET webloggers who are prone to make statements like "Java sucks"?  Don't worry, I won't.

EJBs are an abstraction that allow some global optimizations to be done on large systems that otherwise wouldn't be possible.  Small examples are needed sometimes to help people understand how to write such software.

Value of specs

Dave Winer: Now, while we totally appreciate Computerworld doing RSS feeds, they don't validate. And of course, most popular aggregators don't care, today.  Ouch.  The more people who don't follow a specification, the less value there is in that specification.

cocoon.apache.org

Stefano Mazzocchi: Cocoon as official Apache project.  +1!

Animal house

Point.  CounterPoint.  Almost as bad as those election campaign ads on television.

Planting a seed

When I was in my twenties, I did not respect authority.  I colored outside the lines. When a teacher or a boss told me what they thought I should do, I asked "why?".  Most didn't like this much.  When I told others what to do, they didn't ask me why, nor did they particularly enjoy the experience.  I found the satisfaction of being able to tell them "I told you so" later to be quite hollow.

When I was in my thirties, I did not respect authority.  Telling people what to do and asking "why" continued to yield similar results with people who "ranked" higher than me.  But I found that more and more people were coming to me and asking me for my opinion.  Some of them even asked why.  Those that did seemed to like the fact that I would try to answer the question.  Once, one of the people who had sought my opinion remarked about my tendency to color outside of the lines.  My response was instantaneous: "What lines?".

Now, I am forty.  I still do not much respect authority.  I still occasionally ask why.  But mostly I plant seeds.  I do things that cause other people to ask why. Generally, the response is along the lines of "why not?".  When asked for clarifications, I rarely respond with generalities any more, I try to cite specifics. It doesn't always work right away, but I've learned to be patient.  Trying to rush things that can't be rushed doesn't work.  

I rarely have the opportunity to tell people "I told you so" any more.  Instead, I now have people who come back to me and say, "it would have been more helpful had you been more direct in the first place".  To which, I smile, nod politely, and resume my planting of seeds.

Microsoft lowers their standards

Either that or Peter Drayton just got his PhD in CompSci.  In any case, a very heart felt congratulations go out to Peter for landing his personal  Dream Job.

Experiments in Blogging at MM DevCon 2002

Timothy Appnel: For fun and kicks I banged out a quick script that converts the data from [Macromedia's DevCon] SOAP Web service to an RSS feed every 15 minutes. My feed can be found here. It even validates. Bing!

Is it getting cloudy?

A bit earlier this year, blo.gs added support "for services like weblogs.com and blo.gs to share their data in real-time".  Perhaps if the participants were open to feedback, we could come up with a solution where no one organization controls the information.  It seems that blo.gs already has an extendedPing API with support for both the url of the weblog and the rss feed.  And a changes.xml which includes the rss information.

Content encoded

Phil Ringnalda makes some excellent observations on encoded HTML in RSS feeds.  What is needed is a glyph which visually looks like less than and greater than signs but with none of the semantics.  I'm tempted to use single guillemet characters.

‹foo›

Update: apparently double guillemet characters are more widely deployed.  «doubleFoo»

No Safety Net

James Duncan Davidson: I'm sitting in Dave Thomas' talk on Pragmatic Programming and he's making the point that a developer's career and their growth is up to them. I entirely agree. And I think it's true in life in general.  I have been employed for 21 years.  It took the first 18 for me to figure that out.  Some people are slow learners.  In my case, it was PHP that opened my eyes.

RSS Best Practices

Brent, Phil, and Ben are discussing whether RSS feeds should have relative or absolute URLs in encoded HTML.  This has bothered me in the past, particularly when viewing Joel On Software's RSS feed through the lens of the Radio Aggregator.  His feed has a number of instances of <a href="news/...> and <IMG src="pictures/...">.  Is it valid RSS?  Absolutely!  Does it provide the greatest value to the widest possible audience?  Well, perhaps it could be improved a little.  And perhaps the aggregators can do better too.

There probably are a number of things which are quite legal RSS, but are less than neighborly.  For example, a <script> tag.  Or a <meta> tag.  Or an <embed> tag.  Or an <object> tag.  You get the picture.  What I would like to do is to have the greater community discuss this for a few days, and then Mark and I will implement it in the RSS validator.  As always, validation and compliance will be completely voluntary.  We will clearly separate errors from warnings.  In fact, we will provide an option to not see the warnings at all, if that is your preference.

Dumbledore dies

Richard Harris dies at 72.  His 11 year old granddaughter talked him into playing Dumbledore in Harry Potter films.  "She called me up and said, 'Poppa, if you don't play Dumbledore, I will never speak to you again."  "I hung up and called my agent and said I'd do it. I can't afford to lose that kid"

Googlism

I got a few chuckles out of this: Sam Ruby.  Thanks Kasia!

Rotor Community Site

Werner Vogels reports that he is close to having a professionally hosted Rotor Community Site which would be a site similar to sourecforge for Rotor. He has worked out a contract with CollabNet, a professional collaboration hosting company, and Cornell. Exciting stuff! [Sam Gentile's Weblog]

Awesome!

weblogUpdates

Dave Winer:  For ten points, guess what this is the start of.  Mind if I make a few suggestions?  Actually, only one suggestion, and then a few nits.  The suggestion is to change "when=" to "etag=".  That way aggregators which support etags won't have to track an additional item.  As for the nits, I'm not sure that name is worth the bandwidth, but it would be nice if this element were renamed title.  Is this format only useful for weblogs or could it be used for other things?  And please don't name the file rss.xml, that's a bit confusing.

WSDL validator?

Don Box: Sam and Mark's RSS Validator Rocks!...I just took five minutes to convert my 0.91 feed to 2.0...Perhaps when the first CR goes out for WSDL/1.2, I'll hack one up for WSDL.   Care to collaborate?  Now that would rock.

Credit is not a zero sum game

Dave Winer: On the other hand, with my source out there, all of it, I don't see how I can get credit, in any way, for what I've created.  Those that seek credit are often disappointed.  Those that seek to minimize the public perception of their own role are often surprised.

Dave will verify this - when he called me, I minimized my role in all of this.  Yet Mark states that I deserve at least half the credit. All I can say is wow.

RSS Validator.  Open Source.

Trackback UI

Dave Winer: Question for MT experts. I want to send a Trackback message to Mitch's weblog referencing this post. I know how to do it with a script, but how do I do it through MT's user interface?

In MT 2.5, on the HTML page where one enter weblog titles, entries, and excerpts, there is a simple textarea for URLs to Ping, thus:

<textarea class="short310" name="to_ping_urls" rows="3" wrap="virtual"></textarea>

In my case, the user interface is Radio.  During my publishing process, I run a script which parses the entry for hrefs and automatically issues any pingbacks or trackbacks.