History Repeating

Interesting press release from Microsoft about promotional media for the Windows XP launch. I guess there’s one member of the musical/artistic community who’ll be getting coal in his stocking from “Steve Jobs” this Christmas.

But wouldn’t you think that Microsoft would have learned from the Windows 95/”Start Me Up” controversy to read the lyrics before choosing a promotional song? “I’m eating and laughing and loving myself/I never watch TV except when I’m stoned…slip inside this funky house/Dishes in the sink/The TV’s in repair/Don’t look at the floor/Don’t go up the stairs…I’m achin’, I’m shakin’, I’m breakin’ like humans do.”

The radio edit version that’ll ship with the OS will replace those lines about watching TV with “We eat from our plates and we kiss with our tongues.” Oh, that’s an improvement… But it’s comforting to know that XP will still be “breaking like humans do…”

Sorry about the delay in posting today. In addition to work I was bringing a new contributing editor for the site up to speed. Watch for more news later.

Industry Update

Today’s posting is fairly disjointed, as I don’t seem to have the brainpower to offer a coherent writeup. But there are lots of bits and pieces:

Web Services


For those people who still want to know more about XML-RPC and web services, here’s a registry of publicly accessible “web services” that can be addressed using XML-RPC. It’s not exhaustive–there are ways to address Google, for instance, using XML queries that aren’t covered here. But it’s an interesting start.

Microsoft BraXP


Last week I pointed to a story about a Swiss Microsoft ad being pulled because it was too racy. That may have been a little hard to understand if you never saw the ad in the first place. Fortunately, AdCritic mirrored the ad. (Warning: AdCritic is a pretty high traffic site and so the download will probably be slow.)

Frank Willison


It’s too bad that some people have to pass away before you hear their advice. Frank Willison, editor-in-chief at O’Reilly, passed away on 30 July 2001. Today O’Reilly posted a tribute to him that included a long list of excellent quotations from him, including this one that seems particularly pertinent (even though I’m married and not writing code):

“Don’t spend the whole summer inside writing code. You have your whole miserable adult life to do that. I’m forty years older than you are, and I spend all my waking hours typing on a silly computer, answering emails from people I don’t know. If I hadn’t spent my teenage summers at the community pool flirting with Sue Jenkins (what a babe!), I’d be a miserable old goat now. Plan to have some fun this summer, in person. Note that ‘internship’ and ‘internment camp’ both start with ‘intern.'”

Fun with the DMCA


I’m almost afraid to start writing about the DMCA because it’s a long black hole of a no-win argument. Putting consumers’ rights on the one hand against the rights of content providers on the other would normally be no contest, until you put yourself in the content provider’s shoes. Still, I think there are some interesting points that can be made about the law without touching the rights argument. I especially like the point raised in this MSNBC article by Richard M. Smith of the Privacy Foundation:

“Virus writers can use the DMCA in a perverse way. Because computer viruses are programs, they can be copyrighted just like a book, song, or movie. If a virus writer were to use encryption to hide the code of a virus, an anti-virus company could be forbidden by the DMCA to see how the virus works without first getting the permission of the virus writer. If they didn’t, a virus writer could sue the anti-virus company under the DMCA!”

WOMAD Day 3

This is day three of my WOMAD USA coverage. For days one and two, please see my new music index.

I was pretty worn out Sunday morning, and I had some things to do before heading over to WOMAD — update my resume and a conference call with my collaborators in e-MIT. It was after six before I headed over. I listened to a little bit of an act on the Windmill Stage and some Imbizo. Then I grabbed some food and started working my way into the crowd.

For the last day of the festival the weather finally cooperated. It had been gray and windy Friday night (wind whipped up dramatically during the Blind Boys of Alabama set), gray and rainy all day Saturday, so it was a relief to seen the sun today.

I found a spot behind a camera stand that hadn’t been there Friday or Saturday. The camera was a big HD (High Definition) rig. There was a crowd camera on a long arm on the other side of the stage as well. I was next to a forty something mom in full festival regalia with her teenage daughter and their friends, all having generally a good time and grousing about the people who were pushing past to fill up the area in front of the stage.

After a bit of a wait, Peter came on stage, bald as an egg except the little graywhite tuft of beard on his chin. At the beginning of the set it was just Peter and Tony on stage. Without a lot of fanfare, Peter acknowledged the crowd, stood at the keyboard, and started playing some really familiar chords. “Here Comes the Flood.” The crowd was silent for the first time all day.

Now the rest of the band came on stage. Surprisingly, also bald were David Rhodes and the drummer. It used to be Tony Levin stood out in the band for having no hair. Must have been a sympathy thing when Peter decided to take the plunge. James McNally from Afro-Celt Sound System was providing additional keyboards, but this set was decidedly a low-tech affair, with David playing an amped acoustic, Tony alternating between bass and Stick, the drummer, one back-up vocalist (about whom more later) and Peter on a simple keyboard. Peter said, “Continuing on with the moisture theme,” and the drummer launched into the opening hi-hat riff from “Red Rain.” The crowd went nuts. I had to fight to keep from singing along like a madman.

If I keep going on a song by song update, this’ll go on for pages. The set was selected by having people write in to the official PG website to request their favorites. These included “Digging in the Dirt,” “Family Snapshot,” “Come talk to Me,” “Mercy Street,” “Solsbury Hill,” and “Signal to Noise.”

When introducing “Come talk to Me,” Peter said, “This next song was written about my youngest daughter. I promised I wouldn’t say this, because it’s her first public appearance, but that’s her standing on the end.” I thought she had a fine, pure voice that held beautifully on the high notes. The mix was a little too muddy to be able to tell much more.

“Signal to Noise” was introduced as having been written with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, “who I miss greatly.” Filling in on the vocals was Iarla Ó’Lionárd, who turns out to be a vocalist with the Afro Celt Sound System. [Signal to Noise is a track from Peter’s as yet unreleased new album, called “Up.” So I guess this was kind of a world premiere?]

Everyone was on stage for the end, including Imbizo and percussionists from Afro Celt Sound System, for “In Your Eyes.” Afterwards, Peter surprised the presenter by coming back on stage with Tony Levin while he was whipping the crowd up. He introduced the encore by saying it was about his father, with whom he had had about forty rough years. He said the two of them experienced a powerful healing time at a yoga retreat, and the song had been written about it. He then performed “Father – Son” from the OVO album (I always thought the song didn’t really fit in with the rest of the album).

Afterwards Afro Celt Sound System came on and rocked everybody’s block. My back is still sore from dancing so hard. Don’t pass up an opportunity to see them.

WOMAD Day 2

This continues my writeup of WOMAD USA.

Yesterday I went late, having first stopped in at a company picnic that was a bust (gray and rainy, lots of kid’s activities but few for adults, cold food). I got there in time for Kathryn Tickell’s performance, and it’s a damn good thing as it was the second best thing (after the Blind Boys of Alabama) about the festival so far.

Kathryn is a master of the Northumbrian pipes, which are (as her introducer said a bit clumsily) “less scary” than traditional Scottish pipes. They’re smaller and quieter, and are fed by a bellows rather than by the performer’s breath. She is also a master fiddler and treated us to alternating sets on both instruments. She’s been playing with rock musicians, including Sting and Peter Gabriel, as well as doing her own music. I can’t really describe her performance musically without feeling a bit New Age (the whole “talking about music is like dancing about architecture” problem), so I tried to write down some things she said about the tunes instead:

I was commissioned to write about Otterburn, a battle that happened six hundred years ago between the English and the Scottish. In Northumbria everyone is a little of both, so I didn’t know which side I was supposed to be on. I didn’t know whether to make it a slow sad song or a happy little victory jig, so I compromised. After six hundred years it seemed the right time.

I wrote this reel for my brother – he’s fifteen and a great fiddler, but at present he’s more interested in beer.

I play these songs [fiddle tunes] in the village pub with my uncles. They have the same haircut, the same clothes, the same red accordions… Being farmers or shepherds they don’t get into town much to buy clothes, that’s not important to them. But they do get the Farmers Weekly, and you can buy everything from there. So they all have the same Farmers Weekly checked shirt… If there’s a wedding or funeral you see them all wearing the Farmers Weekly suit. There are only four choices after all.

This song [I wish I had written down the name. Sting had Kathryn play the beginning of it for his song “Island of Souls” on The Soul Cages] – do you know what’s happening to coal mining and shipbuilding in Northumbria? It’s all shutting down. The coal pit shut down. With the closing went 60% of the town’s jobs, and really the heart of the town. My grandfather worked in another pit but knew about this one. He said the mine tunnels extend for miles under the ocean. I asked how they would close it off, and he said the entrances to the tunnels would be sealed off and the sea would slowly seep in. So I wrote this song picturing the sea slowly seeping in from the top and bottom of the coal tunnels, reclaiming its own.

The rest of the day? Well, the Neville Brothers started off strong and went directly to hell as soon as Aaron Neville took the lead vocals. His version of “What’s Going On” only showed how inferior his vocal technique was to Marvin Gaye’s and started me wondering why I had paid a lot of money to hear the band do covers. Then he started in on “Don’t Know Much,” his crapulent song that was made famous when Linda Ronstadt did the duet with him. Between his singing both parts, the unbelievably low-rent keyboard accompaniment, and his air guitar during the solo, my respect for him went straight down the tubes. I stuck around to hear the group do a little more New Orleans style stuff, but split soon thereafter.

There was supposed to have been a performance by Iarla Ó Lionáird, an Irish solo vocalist, but there was an unscheduled switch and an awful bazouki band was on that stage. I watched DJ Peretz (aka Perry Farrell) playing records for a while. If I had been in more of a dancing mood it would have been a lot of fun, but I was pooped and went home instead.

Dancing about Architecture

Just got back from the first night of WOMAD USA, the world music and dance festival founded by Peter Gabriel. The USA festival is held in Marymoor Park in Redmond.

I arrived about 5:30, straightened out my ticket (why does Ticketmaster only ship to your billing address? If Amazon figured it out, shouldn’t they?), and entered the festival grounds. The first act I wanted to see was at 7:00, so I wandered around to get the lay of the land. I heard the first few minutes of Baka Beyond’s show, but came to the same conclusion I had reached after a couple of months of listening to their debut album “Heart of the Forest”: they’re world pop too watered down to be really engaging. I moved on to Savina Yannatou. She had a fantastic voice, but unfortunately her more meditative material couldn’t be heard well over the sound of Baka Beyond coming over from the next stage. I grabbed dinner and headed over to the main stage.

The stage crew took forty-five minutes longer than they should have to get all the mikes set up for the first act, but finally Isaac Hayes took the stage. He played a set that dipped pretty heavily back into “Shaft,” “Hot Buttered Soul,” and some of his other early works. Both “Walk On By” and “Hyperbolicsyllabicsequedalymistic” were fantastic. Because of the late start, I decided to leave before the set was over. As I was walking back to the other stage, I heard him start into his classic hit from South Park: “Chocolate Salty Balls”! How wonderful for all the little children (and their parents) in attendance! Fun song, though.

All those thoughts were put out of my mind by the next act, though. The Blind Boys of Alabama are a gospel act that have been around for over sixty years. The three members who were there from the original group came out, led by a sighted guest vocalist and the band (two guitars, bass and drums). They started with “Run On for a Long Time,” which I was familiar with both from Moby’s remixed version and from the version by Bill Landford and the Landfordaires. I looked around and the crowd were on their feet singing and looking happy. As the group proceeded through “Do Lord,” “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” and “Way Down in the Hole,” people got more and more energetic. Clarence Fountain interjected a few commentary points along the way (“We’re not trying to save you, we’re just going to give you a good time. I’m having a great time. Compare how old I am to how old you are and see if you think I’m having a good time.”)

Then they got serious. Their version of “Amazing Grace” (to the tune of House of the Rising Sun) got people swaying and a few witnesses from the crowd. Then with “Look Where He Brought Me From” and “Soldier (in the Army of the Lord),” one of the other vocalists gradually worked his way into the crowd for about twenty-five minutes, shouting and generally getting into the atmosphere of a revival. At the end, they left the stage, then the core members plus bass and drums returned for a quick run through “Jesus Loves Me.” As the organizer said after they left the stage the second time, what a way to start a WOMAD.

By that time, I was pretty drained and only stuck around for a few tunes by Youssou N’Dour, including “Shaking the Tree” and a few songs I recognized from his early nineties releases. Then the rain came up and I went home. Two more days of this!

Hammered

I learned a new usage for the word “hammered” in my office. I kept hearing people saying that they were “totally hammered” on a particular day. Since they didn’t look drunk (hammered usage 1), I investigated further and found that they had a lot of meetings that day, very few of which connected directly with their project (usage 2). I think that too much usage 2 leads to usage 1, myself.

I’ll be pretty hammered (usage 2) today and therefore won’t blog too much. Fortunately this weekend is WOMAD USA, the big world music festival. It’s being held less than two miles from where I work. I’m especially looking forward to Isaac Hayes, Youssou N’Dour, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and Kathryn Tickell. Oh, and Peter Gabriel should be good fun too.

Great term for what seems to happen on a lot of these websites, including mine: blogrolling. (Thanks to Doc Searls for the term [hey, that’s blogrolling in action!]).

I have my own theories about why Microsoft’s Swiss subsidiary pulled its sexy ad for Office XP. Having seen the ad, the detail that’s missing is that the “Microsoft prompt” that appears is in response to a menu item chosen from a Smart Tag popup. Now that’s the missing “killer app” for Smart Tags: pr0n.

Interesting “spam bake-off” on CNET today. Personally, I take advantage of free email accounts and use them wherever I feel I might have spam exposure risk. Then I check them until I have my answer and move on.

Also: I used a new method to post yesterday’s story and it screwed up navigation via the calendar. To get to the stories for the last couple of days, you may want to use these links:

Wednesday: “Ni!”
Thursday: “A Steampunk Party”

A Steampunk Party

Update 2:25 pm: The appeals court just struck down Microsoft’s petition for rehearing on Finding of Fact 161–that it had illegally co-mingled IE and Windows code.

My sister sent me an email reminding me of a passion that I share with my family for obsolete technology. I visited the website and was blown away by what was available on the website–and by some memories:

ROUGH AND TUMBLE ENGINEERS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION is a unique museum in that we don’t clean the dust off our artifacts – because we’re often out kicking up the dust WITH them. During our show days almost everything on the grounds is run! And during our annual Threshermen’s Reunion EVERYTHING on the grounds that will move under it’s own power can be seen in our daily Parade of Power, a ninety minute parade of antique and obsolete machinery and automobiles.

Talk about steampunk. In a corner of Lancaster County, PA, there’s an organization devoted to keeping antique machinery operating–not Commodore 64s, not Ataris, but steam engine tractors. They have several events a year that can only be described as mindblowing and headsplitting (steam engines aren’t quiet). My great-grandfather, Arthur S. Young, was instrumental in getting the association going. His idea was to keep the old machinery that he loved going and expose the wider public to it so that they could experience the sights, sounds, and smells of these well-built, well-loved machines.

Along the way, though, something funny happened. As the shows went on, the appeal broadened. People started coming for other reasons than the steam engines: I remember seeing people’s crafts, meeting family, watching kids ride model steam trains, eating fried dough made on an antique machine, and generally having a great time. The steam engines were fantastic, and the Rough and Tumble guys had built a community of people who were really passionate about that technology and about keeping it working. And then there was a second community around the first one who weren’t passionate about the steam technology per se, but who enjoyed the heck out of the party and made their own contributions to it in completely different ways.

The Moral, in Geek-Speak

Rough and Tumble is a platform. It’s a hardware platform–serious hardware. Steam engines are the key platform technology. It took people loving the key technology, plus people who dug the platform and could add to it in creative ways, to make the platform a party–a community that lots of people could engage with and which made them all happier.

And me? I’m part of the family that started this party. I just happen to live on the software side.

PS — Steampunk is a term used to describe science fiction written in the historical past. It takes the attitude of cyberpunk and puts it in a world where the gears are big and the engines are loud. I was introduced to steampunk by The Difference Engine by William Gibson (who coined the term cyberspace) and Bruce Sterling.

PPS — I’ll be updating my great-grandfather’s genealogical record shortly to include some of this information, and pointers to the Rough and Tumble page.

Also: I used a new method to post a story and it screwed up navigation via the calendar. To get to the stories for 7/25 and 7/26, you may want to use these links:

Wednesday: “Ni!”

Thursday: “A Steampunk Party”

Virii and Ecosystem Health

I rambled a little yesterday. It’s like that sometimes before 8 am. One of the points I forgot to make in my comparison of IM wars and single sign-on wars is that sometimes keeping a diverse ecosystem is critical to the ecosystem’s health. In English? Two or more strong players in the market are better than one. Common sense, really, except in the computer field, which has for the last ten years had a strong whiff of winner take all about it.

Economists talk about network externalities driving the explosive growth of Windows and of Microsoft Office. A “network externality” is an effect that makes a particular good or service valuable the more other people are using it–at least that’s the common definition.

But I think most people forget that occasionally network externalities can be negative as well as positive. And that’s how we get things like SirCam and other Outlook virii. The Outlook virii bother me because of what they say about email clients. What network externalities can be gained on a large scale from everyone being on just one email client? Within an organization’s firewall, sure, you get value by adding extra components like calendaring (and don’t get me wrong–for corporate email, this is a killer app). But I’m aware of very few companies who extend access to those apps to people outside the firewall. So why does everyone run the same email client?

The real externality in Internet mail is the mail format itself, good old RFC 822. It’s a transfer protocol, just like SOAP. Any client that can speak it can participate in the discussion. If you believe in the logic of network externality, in the email realm there’s no reason that Outlook or any mail client should have the overwhelming market share that it does.

I used to feel fairly secure about email virii. I was the only Mac user in the MBA program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and we used Eudora as the school’s email application. There were always a few people who persisted in using Outlook in spite of the fact that there wasn’t a calendar server anywhere in the school. They spread their fair share of virii, but I was never infected. My diversity protected me. Unfortunately we’re changing over in the fall, largely because of a lack of a unified calendar feature for Outlook. I’m grimly looking forward to discussions with my IT-savvy but Outlook-bigot classmates after the fourth or fifth email virus comes around.

Ni!

Sad but true: Nabokov story submitted anonymously to online editors. Asinine criticisms ensue.

New story: Virii and Ecosystem Health. Why does everyone use Outlook? Really?

I saw the re-release of Monty Python and the Holy Grail last night. It still has the nervous lunacy of a first time film. The rerelease didn’t really clean up the visuals all that much–the picture quality simply wasn’t that good to begin with. I saw it in a theatre with about 12 other people. Quite a different experience from college, in a packed lecture hall with a bunch of people raging drunk reciting the script a step ahead of or behind the action. But still a very funny film:

Oh, I am afraid our life must seem very dull and quiet compared to yours. We are but eight score young blondes and brunettes, all between sixteen and nineteen- and- a- half, cut off in this castle with no one to protect us. Oooh. It is a lonely life: bathing, dressing, undressing, making exciting underwear.

Also: I used a new method to post a story and it screwed up navigation via the calendar. To get to the stories for 7/25 and 7/26, you may want to use these links:

Wednesday: “Ni!”
Thursday: “A Steampunk Party”

Single Sign-In

Interesting reading today. AOL is now promoting its Screen Name Service as a single sign-in across multiple services and web sites. Sound familiar?

Single sign-in. Hard to believe as an end user that this is the next killer app that Microsoft and AOL are going to fight over. After all, isn’t instant messaging more important? Certainly to the end user it is…

But that may be the issue. It’s hard to make a case that single sign-in is a compelling technology for the end user. But it’s also hard to make the case that instant messaging has much of a business case around it, except as a feature that compels vendor platform loyalty. IM buys lock-in as long as IM platforms are proprietary and don’t interoperate. But it doesn’t do anything else for the platform vendor except drive a lot of headaches. Look at the collapse of the MSN messenging service a few weeks ago–an expensive public relations nightmare from something that doesn’t drive revenue. And I hesitate to think how much AOL spends on revving their protocol and platform so all the AOL clones out there break every month or two.

So what’s compelling about single sign-in for Microsoft and AOL? Microsoft’s Passport, as part of its Hailstorm services, is a big cornerstone of the .NET platform of value added services they’re rolling out on top of SOAP. It’s the authentication part of .NET — and the information store. You keep your information (as much of it as you want) in the service, and you have discretion about how other sites access it. AOL’s service is much the same.

There are some important differences between the services, or at least the way that they’re being rolled out. AOL’s sign-in services are limited to web sites; the Hailstorm service is supposed to be accessible across multiple devices, including Stinger, PocketPC, and the Xbox (I suppose for online gaming, although it might be useful for online registration too).

I think Microsoft is thinking bigger than AOL on this one. It’s already a few steps ahead. While it’s not clear how a web site can use AOL’s Screen Name Service to drive revenues, besides gaining customer loyalty, Microsoft’s got a whole new platform waiting in the wings that businesses can take advantage of to offer value added services to customers once they’ve signed in with Passport. Think all the wireless carriers, for instance, will turn down an opportunity to make additional revenue per subscriber? You haven’t been looking at their financial statements.

Dave Winer thinks that single sign-in is important too. His model places membership data in the cloud–allowing multiple players to host the information. I’ve heard that language from Microsoft too. Dave wants to take the work that AOL and others have done and unify it behind a common XML-RPC/SOAP interface. Here’s the $64 (million) question: is it enough to interoperate? Can distributed membership and preferences get enough momentum to become the de facto standard?

Eventually standard wars end. We are, for all intents and purposes, in a one-browser, one-client-OS world (although I use other browsers and other OSes, I’m not statistically significant). That happened because of the compelling benefits of being on one platform. I think single sign-in is going to be a major battle in the war for the next Internet platform.

Who do you want to see your secrets today?

Found Clay Shirky’s article on Hailstorm again. Six weeks later, it’s still a good article on the technology and the issues from a non-Microsoft developer’s perspective. I’d challenge his last section on page 3. Maybe they aren’t tying Hailstorm to the client as deeply as they have in the past. But what about the server?

Today’s essay: Single Sign-In. I’m starting to think harder about this whole single sign-in thing. I don’t know whether it looks more like a format war or a business model war, or just a land grab.

Q: What do common sign-in on the Internet and Katharine Graham’s funeral have in common? A: This man.

Change in format today: I’m going to start to post big long articles like last Thursday’s piece on Apple in a separate place. Cleaner and easier for the short attention span crowd. In return, I’ll update the home page more frequently and post small tidbits during the day. It’s more true to the blog style, but it’s also the only way I can keep the site current. Five minute updates are a little bit easier to do than one hour essays.

Have you seen “Where do you want to go today?” recently? Seems to have disappeared from Microsoft’s ads and online presence.

More or Less Back to Normal

UPDATES
Eudora Welty has died at age 92…

ORIGINAL STORY
Things are just about back to normal here. Starting early this Friday, I got a bunch of hits (2000 pageviews and counting, up from a normal baseline of 30-40 for a really good article) to the site from MacInTouch and Scripting News readers, looking at my article on SOAP and XML-RPC in Mac OS X 10.1. I think that I scared most of them off from returning with Friday’s piece, though.

For the record, this site isn’t about the Mac, or travelling, or Seattle. It’s more about me and what I’m going through. So you can expect to see me ramble on about a number of topics at any given time. I do recognize, however, that people reading the site may want a little more structure than that. So I’ve added some links in the Navigation area that pull together stories on topics about which I tend to write more frequently. If you’re interested in this site just for one of those topics, you can now bookmark the topic page of your choice. If you don’t mind reading all my chaos, by all means come back to the home page.

Seattle Update

This Saturday I got really sore. I probably should have learned my lesson after last weekend’s exercise in pain management. I was back in Lake Union again on Saturday, this time kayaking with the other MBA interns at my company. We went a little further in the kayaks than I did before in the rowboat. If you look at this map (provided by the Moss Bay Rowing and Kayaking Center, who rented us the canoes), we started at the point marked with the cross and paddled around to a point near the Museum of History and Industry, then back. It was an overcast day, so I was spared the utter blistering sunburn I should have had after three hours on the open water without sunscreen. But I did really pull something in my right arm, so that even today I’m finding it hard to lift anything heavy, move my fingers, or apply a lot of pressure with my hand.

Sunday was a little more painless: I attended Bite of Seattle with a few friends. I was a little apprehensive, but it turned out to be a much better event than similar ones I’ve attended in Washington, DC and other places. The food was much better (although I still got a little sick on something I ate) and the crowds were less crazy. I did get sunburned on Sunday, but not too badly.

Evolution

Quick note: Good funny criticism of yesterday’s article on Jim Roepke’s site: How to bury an important article about an important announcement that was buried by Apple.

So, evolution: This is a note in two parts. Part is from my writing side and part is from my technical side. You can read one and skip the other if you choose.

The Writer’s View

I used to write quite a lot. When I was in high school, I wrote really bad poetry and science fiction. In college, I wrote marginally readable poetry, humor, and music reviews, as well as a lot of English papers on Beowulf and 20th century poets.

Then I graduated and moved to Northern Virginia to work as a consultant, and something changed. I still wrote a lot, but now it was code. Eventually I started documenting the software. Then I started writing design and requirements specs for the software. Then technical support documents. Toward the end, I wrote a lot of technical architecture documents, documenting technical approaches for the other members of my team. But I didn’t write anything for myself.

I also started my own web site a few years ago. Originally I hosted it using Personal Web Sharing on my old 90-MHz Power Mac. It was slow but it worked. But most of the content was static on my site and I updated it only about every six months.

I went to school and moved my static web site to an MIT server. It was more useful now — it could reliably be accessed by other people and had my resume on it. But I still only made changes about every two months. And writing for it was still pretty painful.

This summer I remembered this site that I started on editthispage.com a few years before. I was lonely and aimless most nights after work. I decided to start trying to write a couple of times every week. And a funny thing happened: writing got easier and my writing got better. It’s like anything else, you have to practice.

The Technical/Platform View

I built my first personal web site with Frontier, which I admired for its depth as a programming system. I still found it to be a bit difficult as a content management system for the Web, though (open up the software, write a story, publish the web site. Make a change to the template and iterate a few dozen times until it looks right — this one is an especially slow process on a 90 MHz system).

When I got to MIT, I couldn’t run Frontier on Athena (the custom Unix system that’s the academic computing environment at MIT), so I rebuilt the static web site using Adobe’s GoLive and threw it up on an MIT server. GoLive is a nice product. It feels like PageMaker for the web — and by that I mean the recent, industrial strength PageMaker product, not the one that everyone used to make crappy newsletters in the late 80s that looked heinous. You can do some really nice web design using GoLive and it will view reasonably well across multiple browsers. But it’s not a content management system and it’s hard to update frequently unless you’ve got a live wired connection all the time.

Then I came back to this site that I started a few years ago as a lark. Being able to add a new page through my browser, anywhere, turned out to be the killer app. There are other people who have known this for a few years (Manila’s been around for a while), but it took me a while to get the time to mess around with it enough to appreciate its value. Why was doing this important? There are browsers everywhere. When I had an idea to write about something, I could find a browser and sit down and write about it. Practice, practice, practice.

What’s next? Well, I like Manila for editing a web site but sometimes it gets in my way too much. To load a new page, I have to press a button, wait for another page to load, press another button, type or paste in my text, and save. I like Radio Userland but I don’t really want to lug a client that full featured around all the time. Sometimes like now I just want to write a piece in a text editor. But cut & paste doesn’t feel cool. What about a piece in the system that takes my writing out of BBEdit or TextEdit and just throws it up to the web page without my having to open a browser or Radio? It’s possible with SOAP and XML-RPC, and with the system frameworks in OS X.

One of the things I’ve learned this summer is that you can make a big difference in people’s lives if you’re willing to work with them where they want to work. I think SOAP and XML-RPC are what gets us there from a software perspective. And that kind of integration makes it easier for someone like me to keep practicing and keep updating.

Searching this Site

Okay, so the info below is interesting, but largely out of date. Here’s what you need to know about searching this site:

  • I use Google search. Google indexes the site pretty aggressively.
  • Google has search results for both my new and old domains. Because of some configuration issues, you won’t get a radio button for my old domain in the search results in Google. I’m working on it.
  • I’ve added Feedster search, but until I get a way to give them one honkin’ massive RSS feed with all my old posts from 2001, it only finds posts from about April 2003 onward. But it does provide results sorted by date!
Yesterday I tried to add Google Search to my web site.

There were some issues.

For one thing, as I noted, the graphic caused IE to flag my site for a privacy violation. For another, it turns out that Google indexes this site so infrequently that none of my newer content is available. So while it may be a kick that my copies of Lee Keath’s Hoover strips with Reggie Aggarwal show up really high in Google, it doesn’t help the site’s users.

Fortunately, the good folks at UserLand who built Manila (the software that serves this site) also built an open search engine for this server. So the site has been indexed by this search engine all along. Now I’ve added an input link to allow you to use that search engine to find my site.

The only thing I’d like to fix is that the search results take you to their page, which is a little jarring (different look and feel). But it works.


For a while I’ve been looking at my referral logs and have been amused by the number of referrals for various keywords that I’ve seen. The list below is mostly for my information as I track the referral hits, but you may find it interesting. Unless otherwise noted, all referrals are from Google.