disobey.com

I was interviewed a few weeks back by the San Jose Mercury News, and the article(s) were just released. One, "RSS feeds are catching on with Web community", quotes thusly:

"At this point in the scheme of things, we've got new aggregators and new uses of RSS appearing everywhere,'' said Kevin Hemenway, the creator of AmphetaDesk who is also known by his Web alias, Morbus Iff. "All of these are just steps in a staircase, and I doubt we'll run out of steps any time soon -- there's a lot of potential here.'

And "News-reader software can do your Web surfing for you":

"Aggregation is about saving time,'' said Kevin Hemenway, the creator of AmphetaDesk who is also known by his Web alias, Morbus Iff. "If you want to have a lazy stroll through the Net by following links, then that's not aggregation. Aggregation is meant to bring your stroll into one location.''

Why am I always behind on my reading? The simplest answer is the most accurate: I read an awful lot, as you'd guess if you boggled at my original 217 site subscription list in AmphetaDesk. As previously mentioned, I started over, and began anew with a slim 29 channels.

I decided to do the same with the sites I read that DON'T have RSS feeds (or else have feeds that have so little data in them, they're pointless). That's easily another 150 sites, and after going through them and weeding cruft, I'm pleasanty surprised to see that of the 100 remaining, 30 had usable RSS feeds. That's awesome. I'm saving more time.

I am FINALLY caught up on all my news reading. That's where I've been the past few days, deciding to forego commenting so that I could get everything read faster. First order of business now that I'm free again:

Delete all my AmphetaDesk subscriptions and start over.

It's very enlightening. Having to rebuild your subscription list is like rebuilding your bookmarks after a fatal crash: you only remember the sites that really stood out in your head - sites that you enjoy, are useful, or otherwise have character and data that touch a nerve. After about twenty minutes, I'm at 29 channels, down from 217.

This has been linked everywhere, but hey, I had a chuckle: The Sun Will Explode In Less Than Six Years! That's right - those Dutch scientists aren't like us pansy Americans:

"It's a sign that the Sun is ready to blow . . . I don't know if I can put it any more plainly than that," says Dutch astrophysicist Dr. Piers Van der Meer, a top expert affiliated with the European Space Agency.

NASA refuses to confirm the Euro-pean scientists' assertions and a White House source said, "We don't need anyone spreading more panic now."

The Perl Journal is back, IF they get 3,000 subscribers:

Since 1996, The Perl Journal has been the definitive publication for and about Perl programming. Now as a monthly e-zine for the first time, TPJ is set to bring you more, better Perl stuff than ever before. But we need your help. TPJ is totally reader supported. To provide TPJ to you, we need 3,000 subscribers. Bean counters and suits being what they are, our bosses won't let us publish the e-zine if we don't have enough subscribers. We're offering the new TPJ for $12/year - That's just $1/month! So click on the
"Subscribe Now" button at http://www.tpj.com/ to sign up.

If you love me, you'll subscribe.

Two days ago, I asked a question. (why is RSS 2.0 bad?) The answers prompted me to write an "end-level, low-tech bundle of joy" document ("Extending RSS 2.0 With Namespaces") addressing some of the immediate complaints. 45 messages later, I get frustrated and write a 12k email with the most footnotes I've ever used.

A long, all-over-the-place article from IEEE Spectrum Online entitled "Weaving a Web of Ideas" caught my eye today (ok, that's a lie, it's been a "Read Me" bookmark for a while):

What companies like Google, Autonomy, and Verity are doing, in other words, is figuring out better ways of doing what search engines have always tried to do: deliver the best documents the existing Web has on a given topic. The advocates of the Semantic Web, on the other hand, are looking beyond the current Web to one in which agent-like search engines will be able to not just deliver documents, but get at the facts inside them as well. One thing everyone can agree on: even with its billions of pages and countless links, the Web, only a dozen years old, is still in its infancy. As Berners-Lee puts it, the next generation of the Web will be as revolutionary as the original Web itself was...

It came out nearly a month ago, and I've been using it for nearly two, but I've just barely been able to peruse the Apple OS X 10.2 Technical Note. Things that piqued my interest:

APPLESCRIPT: An option was added to "do shell script" that allows you to turn off translation of line endings in the command output from LF and CRLF to single CRs.

BSD: Cron jobs now use the new BSD program "periodic" for scheduling. Python 2.1.1 is now installed with Mac OS X. inetd is being replaced with xinetd. xinetd offers a much easier way of adding, deleting or modifying entries in the inetd daemon list. The bash command shell is now installed with Mac OS X, and has replaced zsh as the default /bin/sh.

CLASSIC: A problem where applications in the Classic environment could not connect to localhost tcp servers running in Mac OS X has been fixed.

COCOA: Users can now use cmd-shift-` to send keyboard focus to a drawer. Previously, it was only possible to do so by clicking on a drawer.

CORE: Kernel panic information is now recorded in NVRAM and at the next system startup that information is written to the /Library/Logs/panic.log.

MACH KERNEL: Panic dumps to the screen are now a boot-time option. To turn off the dialog and get the old textual presentation of info on the screen, set boot-args to debug=0x100. Kernel panics are now displayed in a dialog box. It is possible for developers to turn on the older display when it is needed.

SECURITY: The list of trusted root certificates is now user modifiable, so that additional roots can be added, or existing roots marked as not trusted.

Nothing all too exciting in the 10.2.1 Update though.

Wired, Is This One Nation, Under Blog?:

A recent Newsweek article claimed that a half-million blogs populate the Net. But weblog software companies and industry experts say many new journals are authored by the same people who've abandoned older ones, just as AOL users stop using screen names they've outgrown.

Sounds like Geocities, especially in tune with Ghost Sites. A few years back, it was pretty easy to stumble across a Geocities site that hadn't been updated in years (it still is). This is just a natural progression as normal people get more familiar with how the 'net works. Geocities originally helped people out of the "how do I get a domain name" by making it easy enough not to want one, and ever since NetSol lost its monopoly, many domain name registrars are offering the same sort of simplicity with combined registration / hosting services. Just like your URL in Geocities was based off your content (movie sites under /Hollywood/, for instance), customized domain names are being used as an expression of self (as the Wired article correctly posits), as delicately and emotionally fickle as your favorite movie, actress, etc.

From Dave Winer comes some comments about MORE, an old outliner that he helped developed (which last saw work back in 1991), and Lawrence Lessig's comments on software copyright that inspired them:

My proposal has two parts that it helps to keep separate. One is that the terms for software should be much shorter than they are today: 10 years rather than 95 years (for software written by an author but for a company). The other part is that the source code for that software be kept in escrow, so that when the copyright expires, the source code becomes free (as in both free beer and Free the Mouse!). Both parts, imho, would benefit the "small and independent developers."

I've never used MORE myself, but I'm a hearty fan of OmniOutliner for OS X. How does MORE compare to the outliner in Radio Userland? How do they all compare to OmniOutliner? (And yes, I know Dave originally posted those comments on August 29th. I'm woefully behind. Damn you, Game Studies, damn you!)