Blog Posts

May 2004

• 2004-05-21

  Fair Use of Share-your-OPML?

  One of the core goals of BlogBridgeis to give a newbie a quick and delicious taste of the world of blogs. One of the very first steps of course is to decide what feeds to follow. Other blog readers come with an initial set of feeds built in or offer the user to pick from a bunch of them. (I hear that the authors of those readers, once they become at all well known, are inundated with bloggers who would like their particular blog to be in the built-in initial list. Here’s a different approach. In BlogBridge I want allow a user to use someone else’s subscription list as a base for their own. In other words, give me a subscription list that matches Jon Udell’s. Or ...

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• 2004-05-20

  Words do matter, Part Deux

  I don’t know, this seems to be a topic near and dear to my heart! Thanks to Eric Heelsfor pointing to this classic Dilbert:

• 2004-05-20

  BlogBridge – Major progress!

  This is getting interesting. In the last few weeks we’ve added a bunch of new features and we are now in the final stabilization of this release to make it suitable as a beta. While it is still way less featurefull than for example FeedDemon, we do have some very neat wrinkles that others don’t have. Try it!

• 2004-05-18

  Words DO matter

  I was scanning Jon Udell’s blog and came across the following: “Plog is a brand-new word that’s even uglier (if possible) than blog. But the words don’t matter. What’s striking is how the art of storytelling — our instinctive human way of making sense of the world — has woven itself into the science of information technology. “

  Jon, I am going to take totally the wrong point from this paragraph, so appologies in advance.

  What strikes me about the word “plog” is part of Michael Schrage’s genius, which is coming up with just the right, clever, memorable word that will make me and you remember what he said. The idea may not even b...

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• 2004-05-17

  Still can learn more,,,

  If you are doing Java programming, check out Hardcore Java by Robert Simmon Jr. It’s a idiosyncratic tour through many very interesting advanced Java topics. My wife who sees another Java book sprout on my table every week wonders why it’s taking me so long to learn this “Java” thing 🙂

  #programming
• 2004-05-17

  Opera and RSS

  Various peopleare saying that Opera, with it’s new release, is the first email client to integrate RSS access. Not true. Oddpost, a very nice and unique web-based mail client has had this for a while. I recommend it.

  #technology
• 2004-05-17

  Moving from Radio to Movable Type

  I’ve seen some discussionon the issues related to changingblog infrastructure from one system to another. In my case, I moved from Radio to Movable Type. My experience is that is was pretty easy to move the data (no data lock in) but the problem was the urls. Even if you take steps to make sure that the root url doesn’t change, the individual post and archive urls will probably change which means that anyone linked to your blog before will stay linked to your old blog and so you will experience a disruption in your traffic.

• 2004-05-17

  Can we charge for an open source BlogBridge

  As you know we are developing BlogBridge, “a new kind of blog reader.” As you may know, BlogBridge is open source(see https://sourceforge.net/projects/blogbridge/.) With all our recent progress, I feel that pretty soon BlogBridge will be functional enough that it will actually be usable, and suitable for a beta. And after a successful beta, we plan to start charging for it, in some form or another.

  The $64,000 question is: “How does it make sense to charge for a product, when all the source code is available for anyone to download for free?” Our theory right now, is that people who would be willing to ...

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  #business
• 2004-05-14

  BlogBridge – coming along!

  It’s been quiet but we’ve been busy. We are getting ready to put up a major new revision of BlogBridgewith goodies such as drag and drop of Channels, Collapse/Expand groups of articles, based on age, Next Unread processing, a bunch of new User Preferences. Also we are doing a bit of a reorganization of this site. The ‘Tasks’ page has become a nuisance to maintain and really not that useful, so it’s gone. And the Specs page is being totally revised to be more useful. Expect lots of additions to the Specs page as we move into another phase of development. Keep those cards and letters coming in!

• 2004-05-13

  Best leather cases for Treo 600 and others

  Scott Kirsner turned me on to Vaja Leather Products. This outfit supplies what look to be the coolest possible leather cases for Treo 600s, other PDAs, Digital Cameras, Cellphones or what not, that you’d like to attach to your hip. Very cool for the jet-set. Take a look.

• 2004-05-12

  BlogBridge – Quiet but Busy!

  It’s been quiet but we’ve been busy. We are getting ready to put up a major new revision of BlogBridge with goodies such as drag and drop of Channels, Collapse/Expand groups of articles, based on age, Next Unread processing, a bunch of new User Preferences. Also we are doing a bit of a reorganization of this site. The ‘Tasks’ page has become a nuisance to maintain and really not that useful, so it’s gone. And the Specs page is being totally revised to be more useful. Expect lots of additions to the Specs page as we move into another phase of development.

• 2004-05-11

  Had enough yet?

  Hard to believe what we are hearing these days, isn’t it? The link is to an summary about the Prison scandal, with lots of links to other reputable publications, putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

  #politics
• 2004-05-10

  I’ve confronted this…

  And reached the same conclusion. I hope we are both right.

• 2004-05-10

  Decentralization, again…

  Remember when the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union ended up breaking up? People talked about the power of decentralizaiton, about how simple faxes were used by individual Soviet citizens to tell the world what was going on and topple the ultimate centralized power?

  Or the impact of the television coverage of the Vietnam war had such an effect on the way things turned out? Or Tiananmen Square? Or the impact of consumer camcorders on the impact of the Rodney King trial and subsequent riots in L.A.?

  The shameful and shocking scandal of prisoner abuse and torture follows the same pattern. Who can imagine what was going through the minds of these people as they were co...

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  #politics
• 2004-05-10

  [GEEK] Is Log4J not doing what you expect, or not finding its properties?

  Here’s a handy bit of esoterica: To force Log4J to report on it’s initialization sequence do this:

  java -Dlog4j.debug=true

  (And no, I usually don’t use log4j, I use the Java 1.4 built in logging facility, but some of the libraries I like still use log4j.)

  #programming
• 2004-05-08

  [GEEK] Bootclasspath

  In order to debug a hairy problem, I need to step into some Java system classes (hashmap.java) HashMap.class is to be found in rt.jar, part of the standard Java distribution (1.4.2_04) but it does NOT have debug info compiled in.

  So what to do? I think I did a pretty exhaustive set of steps but I was still stumped:

  I can’t locate an rt.jar with debug info From what I read, you can’t easily rebuild it from the java system sources because some stuff does not compile I tried recompiling hashmap.java with -g to get debug info and putting the resulting .class files into a .jar and placing that jar at what I believe is the front of the classpath. I did this in Eclipse by adding it as a library i...

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  #programming
• 2004-05-08

  Programming Esoterica

  As I delve into programming esoterica, in the past I’ve written down little handy items of information that I discover through a lot of work, for possible future reference. 6 months later, the details will have escaped me, and so I have my written notes to refer back to. Well, I thought, why not use my blog as a handy place for these notes?

  It’s just one fewer place to look, and who knows someone else might benefit from it. The downside, it will be a jarring bit of geekdom to throw in the middle of my other random ramblings and for many people it would be patently meaningless.

  So forgive me ahead of time, this is just another foray into my experimenting with blogs and what they mean and what they are good for. And here we go…

  #programming
• 2004-05-07

  The “dark” side of LinkedIn

  Well, not really dark: This is in reference to Shel Isreal’s recent bit about LinkedIn. Shel notes that LinkedInis actually good for recruiting. He cites some examples of folks who assembled a team using LinkedIn to locate candidates.

  Think about the other side: You’re the CEO of a company. You’ve discovered LinkedIn. It’s kind of cool. You introduce some of your team to it. Before long everyone is on LinkedIn.

  I remember a recuriter friend cautioning me that we shouldn’t have people supply both their first and last names in the their voice mail greetings in our brand new startup. It would make it too easy for the best people to be poached by other recruiters just dialing through the directory.

  LinkedIn is an order of magnitude worse/better/more.

  #business
• 2004-05-06

  New version of iTunes

  Good evening sportsfans. There’s a new version (4.5) of iTunes for Windows. All I can see after a quick look-over is a new feature called “Party Shuffle” that appears to create a quasi-random mix, based on a few parameters. Suitable for parties, I guess 🙂

  #technology #apple
• 2004-05-06

  A new kind of EVIL Spyware

  One of my computers has gone totally haywire with spyware, popups popping all over the place, and more. Here’s the new spin, which I hadn’t seen before.

  When surfing the web, arbitrary words on web pages are turned into links, and when you innocently click them, you are sent off the deep end with ads, popups, software installing itself or claiming to do so. It’s really ugly. I had never seen that before.

  Anyway, my usual medicine for thar problem was Ad-Aware. It’s free, and it has been very effective in the past. In this case, it didn’t successfully clean the machine. In fact it seemed to have no noticable effect!

  I checked Download.com, where an app called Spy Sweeper was said to have been the PC Magazine Editors Choice. I ran that and it was far more successful. At least with the regular spyware. The word highlighting one is still there. More later.

  #technology