David Davies' Radio Weblog

You must take a look at Greg Smith's latest project [1]. He's working in an area that interests me greatly, Filemaker <-> Manila via RSS. He's done some terrific work on this latest site combining multiple FMP database search results using RSS as a common output format. What's particularly nice is the thought he's put into this demo web site with a well thought-out interface with explanatory notes. One tip, try searching fro 'smith' to get started. Check it out!

[1] Filemaker Pro Web Service : featuring FMPro Radio Userland & Manila

via hbwt - ZDNet: Story: How schools are tricked into using PCs--when Macs are better.

As you might expect this article provoked a flurry of messages in the talkback forum. Some of the most specious arguments supporting the use of PCs are based on the belief that "... school children should be taught on PCs because they are harder and less reliable than Macs. You acquire more understanding of computers and computing from solving these foulups than anything else, which can then be applied to any platform or application."

D'uh!

Update: Prompted by Brian's comments, Seth has come up with a perfect analogy that exposes the absurdity of the above claim.

The Register: SGI stays with MIPS at high-end

SGI has refreshed its high-end 64-bit MIPS line of high-end graphics servers, workstations and supercomputers with - a faster 64-bit MIPS line-up.

The SGI press release - SGI - Newsroom: SGI Introduces Faster Microprocessor Across Product Lines

via bbum's Radio Weblog - Web Entourage: Mac OS Scripting Solutions | BlogApp for Mac OS X

BlogApp for Mac OS X is here! Web Entourage is happy to announce a great new shareware application entitled BlogApp (download BlogApp). With great features like Edit Last Post and Spell Check as you type, BlogApp brings the most powerful method of posting to your weblog, and it's only on Mac OS X.

Hmm! Looks interesting. Will need to see if it works with Conversant's Blogger API. YADA-YADA! - Yet Another Displacement Activity - Yet Another Distraction Alas!

David B like my coining of the term 'RUG-rats' for fledgling Radio User Groups and their members. Calling them RUGs would have been the obvious choice but ever on the lookout for some tongue in cheek humour, I thought RUG-rats seems to be a perfect choice. For me it conjures up the vision of all us newbies still crawling around learning about Radio before we can stand on our own two feet ;-)

I wonder if there are any other Scottish Radio users out there?

On my way to/from work I walk past an art gallery with a large picture window. When the art gallery is open an indigo blue iMac sits in the corner in full view of passers-by. it looks cool and lends the gallery a certain air of sophistication!

When the gallary is closed, the iMac is 'hidden' from view by a 'shield' made from a cardboard box - presumably an attempt to make the corner look unattractive and unobtrusive and to deter smash and grab thieves. The delicious irony is that the cardboard packaging was used originally to ship a Dell PC and has "Dell' in huge letters written all over it B-} Even though I see this every day I leave work I can't help but chuckle at the sheer absurdity of it all!

Stunnel.org: Stunnel -- Universal SSL Wrapper

Stunnel is a program that allows you to encrypt arbitrary TCP connections inside SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) available on both Unix and Windows. Stunnel can allow you to secure non-SSL aware daemons and protocols (like POP, IMAP, LDAP, etc) by having Stunnel provide the encryption, requiring no changes to the daemon's code.

OpenSSL: The Open Source toolkit for SSL/TLS:

The OpenSSL Project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as a full-strength general purpose cryptography library. The project is managed by a worldwide community of volunteers that use the Internet to communicate, plan, and develop the OpenSSL toolkit and its related documentation.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Rotten Linkage

So I want to make my own position clear here:

Links are fundamental to writing and publishing on the Web.

Writing for the Web without linking is like eating without digesting. It's literary bulemia.

Disrespecting the links others have made to your work is irresponsible to their good intentions and disrespectful to your own authority as a source. It says fuck-you to the world and to your own ass.

Please not that the empahsis is Doc's and so's the bad language but that's OK since Doc is from New York!

What has brought this all about is the change to Dan Gillmor's e-Journal - see Dan's response at Silicon Valley | 02/09/2002 | More on Broken Links - that has 404ed everybody's links to his writings. No doubt there are few broken links like this in DJ.

Eve Andersson's Diary of a Start-Up is a precise and well documented summary of how VC's destroyed ArsDigita - the company she helped found.

"Lessons learned

Over the past 1.5 years, the VCs and their management team have taken a profitable, healthy, interesting company and:

• spent the profits that ArsDigita had saved
• spent all the capital raised
• destroyed an excellent software product
• released a horrible product a year behind schedule
• hired a slew of incompetent managers
• fired the people who made ArsDigita profitable
• repeatedly lied to customers
• repeatedly lied to employees
• repeatedly lied to the press
• repeatedly lied to the outside developer community
• and given themselves big bonuses as a reward

Greylock and General Atlantic Partners have mis-managed ArsDigita into the ground.

What can we learn from this? Be clear about control. Don't assume that people with MBAs know a thing about business, let alone technology. Don't throw out your prime source of revenue before another one is in place. Fashionable programming languages don't equal useful software. Don't lie. And steer clear of General Atlantic Partners and Greylock."

In his Archipelago: Daniel Berlinger's Archipelago News Weblog Daniel links to Dave's observation that:

"Now the class of 96 is coming back online, I'm not on the mail list because of all the flames, but when it quiets down I look forward to hearing people's ideas on the next steps in the evolution of our environment and tool set." [Dave that's a really nice olive branch. Good on ya!]

It's great to see the class of 96 come back online and I'd like to echo Daniel's thanks for the olive branch. There's a lot of positive energy rejuvenating the ScriptMeridian community - brought about, it would seem, by the release of Radio. Most of us seem to be tuning in to the real potential of Radio from a developer's perspective. One really wierd coincidence is the fact that three of the ScriptMeridianers were born within two weeks of each other in the same year - 1954. Spooky!

I'd also like to endorse Daniel's message:

"Don't read meaning into people's messages. If you're not sure what they meant, don't make an assumption, instead ask for clarification." It works for me.

I'm slowly learning this - after 47 years ;-) Feel free to seek clarification!

Dave's from New York too. Dave was of course referring to one of the stories that he was instrumental in bringing to our attention and which I cited in my The Doc Searls Weblog : Rotten Linkage backlink.

Linkrot is one of the banes of my life especially when at work my students use their own web-space to prepare and submit their group work for my Computer Architecture and Design class. Since much of the student work is of sufficiently high quality to merit dissemination to later cohorts of students, linkrot that set in within little more than a year was becoming a major PITA.