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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Friday, July 30, 2004 |
Edwards
Leaves NPR to Host Satellite Radio Show,
reports NPR. What a disappointment. The voice millions heard on their
alarm clocks each morning is off on a new adventure. I think NPR
management handled his departure poorly. Glad he had time to write his
book and go on a book tour, and I wish Bob the best in the
future.
9:08:29 AM 
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Wednesday, July 28, 2004 |
Danese Cooper reports on a rare event:
Anyway, the presenter was doing his pitch in a polished way and at one
point he said he wanted to show us a "really cool" feature and he
looked up into the audience and said "Show of hands...How many of you
use Internet Explorer?". Probably 99 times out of 100 when he asks that
question all the hands go up, right? Well first there was a pause and
then a giggle and then a whoop of laughter as the audience looked
around and realized that NO ONE had raised a hand.
This was a pretty unusual crowd, but perhaps they know something...
9:47:58 AM
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Tuesday, July 27, 2004 |
Outrageous! Parody or Satire, the hysterical JibJib take-off on "This
Land is Your Land" deserves protection as a work of art. There is
something wrong with a copyright system that doesn't protect but rather
prevents the priviledge to use a song that has become part of American
culture. The song is sixty years old, and it's author sadly left us too
soon, nearly four decades ago.
Parody or Satire? Threat To Sue JibJab [Slashdot:]
The Founding Fathers intended copyright (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8)
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive
Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" and the Congress
created a 14-year term for copyrights, later doubled, doubled again and
has since expanded to many times. Let us return to the Founder's
Copyright or the doubled term, and return to the modern world the right
to use, derive and build on the great works of those who have come
before us.
9:54:29 PM
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Steve Gillmor makes some interesting predictions
in his news that Adam Bosworth has moved from BEA to Google: Google's
quiet in its pre-IPO phase, but Steve tells Microsoft: Be afraid.
Interesting news, too: ECMAScript has been standardized with XML
datatypes, effectively making it the XML scripting language. That
should make for some interesting applications. Thanks to The Doc Searls Weblog for the link.
8:16:11 PM
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Rick Strahl's got a great article on his site that shows how VFP can
consume more complex Web Services than the silly "Hello, World"
examples, using Rick's free wwSOAP classes. I recently worked with a
client who was transferring data back and forth (from a non-Microsoft
based service) using parameter objects, and the VFP work was not
trivial. Wish I'd had this article then. Great stuff!
"Article: Calling .Net Web Services for Data Access with Visual FoxPro.
Find out how to create a .Net Web Service that serves up data in a
variety of ways, then see how to consume this data with Visual FoxPro.
.Net Web Services are easy to develop, debug and deploy, but consuming
the data, especially with Visual FoxPro is not always as straight
forward as you might think. This article discusses how to pass complex
data between .Net Web Services and Visual FoxPro and provides several
tools to facilitate and standardize the process of building solid Web
Service clients for your applications and workaround some of the
limitations. By West Wind Technologies." Link via FoxCentral News
10:29:02 AM
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Monday, July 26, 2004 |
"Strength and wisdom are not opposing values."
11:01:50 PM
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Fifty bloggers were credentialed as journalists to blog the convention
from the Fleet Center. I just saw CNN cut to Dave Sifry of Technorati fame to tell CNN what the blogosphere was saying. Keep up with the bloggers at ConventionBloggers.com
9:16:42 PM
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Sunday, July 25, 2004 |
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Friday, July 23, 2004 |
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Tuesday, July 20, 2004 |
Marc Liyanage supplies this great page on "Installing and Tuning OpenOffice on Mac OS X." I'm running OpenOffice.org cross-platform on Windows, Linux and OS X, and I'm working at finding the optimal configuration to produce sharp PDF files.
1:47:01 PM
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Monday, July 19, 2004 |
I enjoy Joi Ito's blog - he's got his
finger on the pulse of the blogging companies, and shares an insightful
and different perspective on world and technical affairs. I am sure I
was reading his blog via my Radio Userland aggreagator, but spotted
articles on my NetNewsWire
aggregator on the Mac I knew I hadn't seen. When I looked at my list of
subsciptions, his was missing. When I tried to add it, I got an error
"". Feed Validator says his feed is fine. Must be a bug in Radio Userland....
1:46:01 PM
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Sunday, July 18, 2004 |
[Alex Feldstein]
blogs: "My VFP Tips & Tricks have an RSS feed. My Visual FoxPro
Tips & Tricks pages which I have been maintaining for years, now
have an RSS feed...I publish them in English and Spanish. You can find
both feeds at the following links:[Spanish] [English]Enjoy!"
Very cool! I notice that Alex is also generating the list in ListGarden
as well. I've been very pleased with it, as well. I've got it installed
in three places: locally on a Windows workstation, in server mode on a
Linux intranet server and on my OS X iMac. All work well. Imagine that!
Cross-platform, compatible, standards-compliant Open Source. Remarkable.
3:19:41 PM
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One of the problems with the blogosphere, like the web in general, is
that a passing reference may fly by only once, and if you don't grab it
then, it may be disappear forever. I've been searching for a reference
"someone" made to a website "someone" mentioned that would let you
submit a URL for your XML feed and it would, in turn, ping the major
news aggregators that there was something to read at your site. Google
turns up a disturbing number of *marketing* web sites that explain how
to juice the RSS search engines with your press releases {*shudder*},
but I'd like to think I'm actually posting news. I suppose they
probably do, too. So, anyone else catch that reference and hold onto it
better than I did?
Reminds me of one of the hundreds of incredible quotes from "Ocean's Eleven" Laura and I saw last night:
Reuben: Look, we all go way back and uh, I owe you from the thing with the guy in the place and I'll never forget it.
Danny: That was our pleasure.
Rusty: I'd never been to Belize.
11:04:59 AM
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Saturday, July 17, 2004 |
What a clever idea. Capture video from another machine using the free Virtual Network Computing (VNC) remote terminal, and transcode it into a Flash swf
file. Looks like a clever way to capture interactive sessions for bug
documentation or training. (Update: Thanks to Andrew for correcting the
link!)
8:55:29 PM
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Chad Dickerson writes in InfoWorld's CTO Connection column:
"RSS growing pains.
These days, despite near-universal acclaim for the technology, I have a
real love/hate relationship with RSS. The love part of the relationship
derives from the profound changes in my information production and
consumption habits during the past year and a half. During that time,
Iíve been blogging and producing content with RSS. Whereas my e-mail
client, MS Word, and Google used to rule my desktop, I now find myself
using Bloglines, Feedster, and Technorati throughout the day and
writing to my internal and external blogs using ecto. Although the
plumbing is quite simple, Iím still fascinated by all the background
pinging (as new Weblog content is posted) and the real-time indexing of
fresh content. When Dave Sifry at Technorati reports that the median
time from Weblog content posting until that content is available for
search on Technorati is seven minutes, I see a paradigm shifting.
Despite ìonlyî being XML, RSS is the driving force fulfilling the Webís
original promise: making the Web useful in an exciting, real-time way."
[InfoWorld: Application development]
10:34:50 AM
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On the FoxForum Wiki, I've started a page called "White Paper Directory" listing web pages I've found with useful Visual FoxPro information in the form of speaker's notes, reprinted articles and so forth. If you know of other resources, and I know there are many, please add to the page.
What a great application for RSS this could be! If each author were to generate and maintain their white paper directory using RSS (as Rick Strahl does in this RSS feed), a central aggregator could easily keep up with what's changing and offer the ability to search. Wouldn't this be a killer app?
10:07:19 AM
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Friday, July 16, 2004 |
Former Windows Exec Talks Microsoft.
Veteran Microsoft watchers will remember Brad Silverberg, the former
Microsoft exec who championed Internet Explorer and Windows 95.
Professional services firm The Milestone Group is featuring an
interesting Q&A with Silverberg in the latest issue of The
Milestone Quarterly. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]
4:51:09 PM
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Synch the Browser.
"When Microsoft abandoned Internet Explorer development to concentrate
on fixing the browser's security vulnerabilities, it opened the door to
the emerging RSS revolution," says eWEEK's Steve Gillmor.
An interesting speculative piece on how the web might be taken over by RSS technologies.
4:47:14 PM
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Thursday, July 15, 2004 |
The Mozilla Foundation celebrates its first anniversary, and what a busy year it has been!
9:39:27 AM
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004 |
Dan Bricklin writes in Dan Bricklin's Log: "Software that lasts 200 years.
I just posted a new essay that grew out of my exposure to the state of
Massachusetts' work on open source and open standards, as well as from
my thinking about open source and software development business models
in general."
"It looks like the structure and culture of a
typical prepackaged software company is not attuned to the long-term
needs of society for software that is part of its infrastructure. This
essay discusses the ecosystem needed for development that better meets
those needs."
Read "Software That Lasts 200 Years".
5:26:22 PM
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Microsoft issues seven security patches, two critical.
Software updates released today by Microsoft include fixes for
previously unknown flaws in the Windows OS, including critical holes in
the Windows Task Manager and HTML help features. [Computerworld News]
HTML Help, Task Manager and IIS 4.0 under NT 4 all get patches. Hot stuff. Get patched.
10:25:33 AM
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Monday, July 12, 2004 |
I thought anti-viruses were supposed to be the good guys. Somewhere
between installing Microsoft's latest patch and installing Norton
AntiVirus 2004, my Windows XP laptop has lost its ability to do all
things IE-related without superfluous "Scripts are usually safe. Do you
want to allow scripts to run?" dialogs and "Internal Program Error"
dialogs. Attempting
to restore XP to a restore point failed, as it always has on the
machine -- wonder what magic is involved in setting it up to work
correctly. It would be no problem if it only took out IE, as I prefer
FireFox for browsing, but it has also disabled QuickBooks and the
Norton AntiVirus user interface. Integrating their products with
Microsoft's IE engine may not have been the smartest move. The
solution, according to Symantec's
email support , is to completely remove NAV and reinstall IE, a process
they document in 21 pages in their email and knowledgebase.
Off to try the cure. Hope it's not worse than the disease. Wish me luck.
3:28:20 PM
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Microsoft boosts partner investments. Company also reallocates one-third of its worldwide direct customer-marketing to joint-marketing with partners. [CNET News.com]
Putting its money where it's mouth is, Microsoft is trying to lure partners who buy into its vision.
12:00:58 PM
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Sunday, July 11, 2004 |
RSSAggregatorPrograms. A place to list and vaunt the better RSS aggregation programs available. [FoxProWiki]
Hit the sites and get your votes in, folks.
3:33:37 PM
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 Very cool. Years ago, I picked up a D-Link DSB-R100
- a USB-powered radio that's an antenna and FM tuner with an audio jack
for output. Sadly, it doesn't look like D-Link is selling them any
more, but they only cost $29 originally, so you might be able to pick
one up cheap second-hand (there's one on eBay today). Originally, the
software it came with only ran on Windows 98, although D-Link is
offering drivers for other Windows versions now. However, Open Source
advocates got their hands on it, and provided software for Linux and for Mac OS X. Now, I can write a simple script to capture my favorite shows and listen to them at my leisure.
1:49:05 PM
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Friday, July 9, 2004 |
Steven Black has started self-publishing an RSS 2.0 Feed for the
FoxForum wiki, using a Web Connection routine that generates the RSS
on-demand, I think. It's hard to tell, because he's not including
the optional "lastBuildDate" in the channel header.
Steven and I made some different design decisions in how we formed the
feeds that are educational to look at. Steve stuffs nearly the entire
content into the feed. This certainly provides a richer stream, and
means he doesn't have to serve the content twice. On the other hand, I
prefered to serve a "light" feed, that would encourage traffic to his
site, since I didn't want to take away from any revenue-raising efforts
he has on the site. In addition, I can easily skim the headlines
of the site, and then navigate to the topics I'd like to read, and
often contribute.
UPDATE: Steve's modified the feed with optional parameters so you can get shorter descriptions or none at all. Bravo!
WikiRssDocumentation. Here is how the wiki software determines what to include in the WikiRss feed. [FoxForum Wiki]
4:07:55 PM
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Thursday, July 8, 2004 |
I've created a new RSS 2.0 feed
for the tedroche.com website. This should be a low-volume feed, a
website change log, focused on the posting of conference materials,
sample code and new articles. If you're not yet reading feeds with a
news aggregator, you can view it in HTML here.
Both the XML and HTML feeds are generated with the newly released version 1.0.1 of SoftwareGarden's ListGarden
product, running standalone on my Windows workstation. No installation,
no hassle, a perfect transient application. If you're thinking about
generating an infrequent feed, and dread the hassle of making sure the
brackets balance and the syntax is right in vi or notepad, check this
product out.
7:50:32 PM
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Jim Rapoza muses in his eWeek column:
I guess I have to admit it: Old, over-hyped technologies don't go away;
they just come back in more refined and useful reincarnations. When you
think about it, pretty much every technology that was formerly laughed
at and tossed aside has returned as a tool that is used every day.
4:31:34 PM
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Wednesday, July 7, 2004 |
Another Internet Explorer flaw found.
"A researcher shows how a hacker could bypass a Microsoft patch and
continue to exploit the software giant's Web browser." Article on CNET News.com:
Microsoft on Friday released a fix
that's designed to protect computers from one of three flaws that,
together, could be used to digitally slip past a PC's security through
the browser. This weekend, however, a security researcher identified
another flaw that could serve the same purpose and which isn't fixed by
Microsoft's patch.
Man.
9:07:40 AM
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Upgraded the tedroche.com web server from Red Hat 8 to Fedora Core 2 using the yum updater, following the instructions here. Installed the vsFTPd ftp server so that I could move updates more quickly to the server. Reviewing security issues, found this page, which had some good stuff on it. In fact, the entire YoLinux.com seems rich with hundreds of links (page down on the home page) and dozens of tutorials. Reconfigured and updated WebMin, including adding in a 3rd party module for vsftpd. Man, the richness of material available on the web is amazing!
9:03:32 AM
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Tuesday, July 6, 2004 |
As an adjunct to JWZís Law of Computer Envelopment ("every program
attempts to expand until it can read mail"), I declare that every
aggregator attempts to expand until it can read EBCDIC.
-- Dive Into Mark's blog entry on release of Universal Feed Parser 3.2
5:47:49 PM
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Monday, July 5, 2004 |
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Saturday, July 3, 2004 |
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Friday, July 2, 2004 |
A summer re-run for you: Joel on Software from June of 2000:
There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over.
Good reading. A great deal of my job is working with clients and
pre-existing code bases. From the many folks I've worked with, I've
learned that my tolerance level for Other People's Code (OPC) is much
higher than most. They shipped it, it works, well, mostly, it
paid for the ir kids orthodonture, and clients are using it to make
money. There's a lot of good in there.
3:21:31 PM
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Apple says no iMacs until September.
With inventories of flat panel iMacs dwindling, Apple has announced
that there will be no more iMacs until September. Details on the new
iMacs remain a mystery. [Ars Technica]
If you haven't see Steve Jobs' keynote from the recent World Wide
Developer Conference, you can catch it (in streaming QuickTime, natch) here.
For those of you without an hour and a half to kill, here's the
highlights: OS X Next is "Tiger" shipping 1H 2004, "years ahead of
Longhorn" stated at least five times, some cool little widgets,
excellent GPU integration for video and image effects native to the OS,
many, many enhancements and improvements. iPods got a special interface
with new BMWs (bleh) and Coopers (cool).. Latest cinema display: 30",
4.1 megapixels. Woah.
Oh, and Safari (the Apple browser) ships with RSS know-how built in. Looks promising.
9:15:50 AM
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Thursday, July 1, 2004 |
A pretty slick little package, ListGarden
is. A single downloadable file for Windows, it unpacks the Perl runtime
DLL when run and cleans up after itself. It runs on a local machine or
installed on a web server and presents a simple and easy-to-follow web
interface to generate RSS and an HTML page to view the RSS. This looks
like a great application for folks who just want to post a change long
on their home page or web project site. So far, I've installed it
locally and ran it through its paces. Next comes a web install, when
free time next pops up.
9:37:18 AM
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