Well, that was interesting

I didn’t mean to stir up the shit today, but it looks like that’s what I managed to do. Among other things, I got some very rational observations in my comments on the piece about the Echo project that made me think twice about the whole issue, namely that this could be a way to avoid the whole RSS 0.9x vs. 1.0 vs. 2.0 battle for good (which would be great) and that Echo is aimed at building a full blown, honest to God standard, which would make RSS an easier sell in more conservative vertical markets like banks (see Tim Bray for a remarkably well written scenario that illustrates the problem). Thanks to Matt Haughey for the pointer, and for the reference to Evan’s post about the Blogger API vs. the MetaWeblog API which (in between some fingerpointing), Evan illustrates a serious technical concern about MetaWeblog, namely the lack of support for appkeys.

Then Dave rewrote his original pointer to my piece to quote a long snippet of it and posted a qualified endorsement of the Echo project, saying that if and when the format reaches closure, he will recommend that UserLand support it and RSS 2.0.

Today felt like a therapy session for me. I posted something that went against the groupthink that was starting to form around Echo, Dave linked to it and got the concerns out in the air, and then there was some forward movement. Amazing. This actually, despite some of the peripheral mudslinging that’s been happening, speaks quite well about how everyone in the community is going through this process.

Is the air cleared? Good, then here’s the takeaway from what I wrote today:

  1. There are sufficient technical and business concerns with the way RSS and the MetaWeblog API work today that Echo isn’t just about rebuilding things for the sake of doing it.
  2. Users and institutions who have already embraced the existing paradigms will continue, like me, to freak out about this. There better be a pretty good marketing guy associated with Echo to work will the existing adopters.

Fair enough?

A hamhock in your blog

Ah, it’s too nice a day to be pissed off. I will note, however, as long as I’m stepping in things, that I think the word “funky” is being misapplied to RSS 2.0 feeds with extra items; but for different reasons than Don Park does.

Fundamentally, funk is about booty, not XML. (Yes, I said booty. Loose booty! More Loose Booty!) What is funk? Funk is, like soul, a hamhock in your cornflakes. Funk is not domestically produced! Would you trade your funk for what’s behind the third door???

I think everyone needs to adopt this motto from Funkadelic:

For nothing is good unless you play with it. And all that is good, is nasty!

And remember, heads I win, tails you lose.

A civilian in the format wars

Brent yesterday declared his neutrality in the brewing revolution called the Echo Project which is working to displace RSS and the Meta-Weblog API (among others) as the blogging wire formats of choice. Good call, Brent. As a civilian observer and consumer of these formats, I’m going to have to go a little further. This is one of the stupider things I’ve ever seen, from a technology AND business strategy perspective.

Is there anything wrong with the technology that we have right now? No. Meta-Weblog works, though it needs wider implementation, as an API to allow multiple tools to work with multiple different kinds of blogs. RSS works, and if it doesn’t do what you need it to do you can expand it with namespaces. I understand the frustration of underspecified formats, but let’s get it straight: every groundbreaking 1.0 project is underspecified. And adoption happens anyway.

Furthermore, this couldn’t come at a worse time. Blogs are finally getting respect. RSS is gaining widespread adoption by BigCo publishers like the New York Times, the BBC, and Microsoft (I can’t imagine that MSDN’s RSS feeds will be the last, and more importantly both programmers and execs are blogging). The market has converged on a standard, and now it’s not about tech any more. It’s about implementation.

But all this is happening because RSS is essentially baked. If you re-open the debate with a project like Echo, you’re sending a strong signal that RSS isn’t ready for prime time—either the technology, or the community around it. And, more importantly, you’re also granting license to other people to do the same thing. One of the beautiful things about RSS is that it can be adopted without question, largely because it just works. What’s to stop some smart guy in a large software company from saying, “there’s no consensus out there, so I’m just going to build my own format.” And if the software company is large enough, lock in happens around that format instead and we’re right back where we started.

Update: Adam Curry and Don Park on the topic.

Update #2: Dave accuses me of eloquence and sums it up in a phrase: “anyone who uses weblogs and aggregators should be angry as hell when developers try to rip up the pavement, break everything and start over.”

QTN™: MacTarnahan Black Watch Cream Porter

MacTarnahan’s Black Watch Cream Porter won as best porter in the 2001 Great American Beer Festival awards, and it’s easy to see why. Made (according to the website) with oatmeal as well as malted and unmalted grains, the beer is actually pretty light in mouthfeel, but the flavor is incredible. (This may have been enhanced by the fact that I was drinking the Limited Edition version, which conditions the porter in used bourbon casks!) It pours black, with a slightly brown-tinged head. The nose is slightly malty but subdued, but then the first taste: creamy sweetish, with a lingering hint of something. A couple of tastes later and it becomes clear: vanilla from the cask, with a faint overtone of the sweet bourbon. Anthem America thinks it’s a slightly “burnt” flavor; he might be right, but I think it’s more “toasted.”

Honestly, after tasting so many Belgians, I don’t really have words to describe how good this beer is. It’s a completely different flavor vocabulary. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed this one last night over grilled lamb and garlic sausages, which were found at A&J Meats and Seafood on Queen Anne. Thank God, finally found a butcher out here. They aren’t the same old school style as our Boston butcher, Frank (really Francesco), but their stuff is top notch. Their hot Italian sausage is pretty good too.

Safari 1.0

I still have a few problems with Safari, including the fact that it doesn’t appear to support font-variant: small-caps; as a result my date headers appear in lowercase. But I bit the bullet and redid my CSS so I wouldn’t fall prey to the problem that was hitting me with a div nested inside my H3 tags, so most of my page now displays correctly.

For the record, I just appended the border effect I was using in my “grabber” div to the H3 style definition. It means I have to update multiple places in my style sheet if I decide to get rid of the blue bar effect, but it seems a small evil to put up with.

Democracy in action brings out true colors

MoveOn’s primary starts today. The organization is sponsoring an online primary to allow its members to choose from the declared Democratic candidates; the organization will then endorse and support the candidate who receives a plurality of the votes. (In the preliminary straw poll, Governor Howard Dean, Senator John Kerry, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich got the most votes.) If you are a registered MoveOn member, you can help this experiment in online democracy by casting your vote today.

The irony? There is just as much of a vast right-wing conspiracy on line, and it’s easier to find. Greg pointed yesterday to fellow Hooblogger Wyeth Ruthven, who pointed to an article at Common Voice in which conservative columnist Jimmy Moore gives step by step instructions on how to submarine the MoveOn primary by voting for Al Sharpton. While Sharpton is unlikely to get a plurality of the votes as a result, unless there are more mean-spirited Cassiuses out there than MoveOn members, the action is likely to deny a plurality to the candidates which MoveOn members would legitimately vote for.

Wyeth also points to a discussion thread on FreeRepublic.com which illuminates the depth of intelligence and gentility which would lead someone to pull a stunt like this:

Go Al go! “If de candidate fit, you mus’ run de dimwit”… (1)

This is not a FReeping opportunity – this is lunacy! These people are COMMUNISTS!

THINK ABOUT IT …!!

DO YOU REALLY WANT YOUR NAME ON A LIST ASSOCIATED WITH A COMMUNIST ORGANIZATION …??

HOW WILL YOU EXPLAIN THIS WHEN THE DOJ OR THE FBI COME CALLING AND ASKING YOU QUESTIONS AND POKING INTO YOUR PRIVATE AFFAIRS …??(2)

Heh. It was only a matter of time before someone dusted off the C-word to smear opponents of our current Administration. I find it humorous that the poster seems as concerned about Ashcroft’s DOJ as I am.

So business as usual, but I’m glad that it’s moved online. Here it’s much easier to turn over the rocks and find what’s crawling underneath.

About the blogroll

Esta asks about the asterisks showing up on my blogroll. I finally got the active blogroll religion with Blogrolling.com. The asterisks mean that the Blogrolling.com server shows that blog as being updated in the last 24 hours. I think as long as you ping Weblogs.com, Blogrolling picks it up.

I’m thinking about doing a complete site redesign, but I’m too lazy to do it right, so you might see things change in drips and drabs over the next month or so.

Alive…

…contrary to what my slack posting over the last couple of days might indicate. Twelve-hour recording sessions are no fun, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I won’t know how it all went until they do the post production and I get a chance to listen to the final product, but from the in progress recordings we heard it sounded good.

The engineer used an interesting recording technique: analog mics into a D to A converter, then fed simultaneously to a DAT and a CD recorder. The DAT never has to be rewound; you just have to cue up the CD if you want to hear something after you recorded it. I say “interesting” but for all I know it’s completely standard practice. The last time I recorded (with the E52s) it was being fed directly to a PC and mixed on a Mac; the time before that (with the Cheeselords) it was going to a portable MiniDisc recorder.

Another “Jenny list”: cool finds in iTunes and eMusic

The best Elvis box set around is now (mostly) online at the iTunes Music Store. That would be Elvis Presley: The King of Rock‘n’Roll: The Complete 1950s Masters. It’s only available by the song, but there are some great tunes on that set that are only available there, as far as I know, such as a full disc of a live performance from the 50s.

I also have to confess that I have in the past bought two albums by Dread Zeppelin, the short-lived reggae Led Zep cover band fronted by an Elvis impersonator, whose octave-lower version of Robert Plant sounds uncannily like the real thing. Dread Zeppelin’s first album, including their Elvis-meets-Zep “Heartbreaker (at the End of Lonely Street), is available at the iTunes store.

And, to rectify my embarrassing admission of lack of taste, let me point out that eMusic has lots of early Sonic Youth rarities, including b-sides and live performances.

Loving wife

Got to give thanks to Lisa, who has been very forgiving about my recording commitments this weekend. Our first session last night went until 1 and I got home after 1:30, but today is a day off. We are recording the commissioned works that both the full Chorale and the chamber group have done over the past few years, many by local composer Bern Herbolsheimer, who is also effectively co-producing the sessions. Fun, though if Sunday has as many cars and other random noises as last night did it’ll be a long day. (There’s nothing more frustrating than doing vocally perfect take after take only to hear “Redo! Car!”)

At least Lisa can relax knowing she’ll have the new Harry Potter book to fill her day tomorrow. It arrived this morning in a custom package from Amazon, labeled “Carrier: Please deliver on June 21. Do not under any circumstances deliver before June 21!”

Best random CD find ever

If you’re not into discovering mind shattering classical recordings you may want to skip this post.

Okay, now that everyone but my family has stopped reading: A few weeks ago I did something unusual—I bought a few CDs. Since the advent of online music purchases the physical article has seemed unnecessary, but what the hey, I was waiting for the Sears across the street to replace Lisa’s tires and I had nothing better to do. I listened to the Big Star disc and liked it a lot, but forgot about one of the others until yesterday, when I played it—and got crazy excited.

On the surface the disc is nothing special: an unfamiliar label budget two-disc set called “Music of the Gothic Era.” When I looked at the liner notes, though, I started realizing I had hit gold. The conductor, David Munrow, had revolutionized early music in the late 60s and the 70s by hiring top notch musicians, particularly vocalists, who were able to bring top performance quality to these ancient (in some cases 800 year old) works and make them sound like music to modern ears. And the group? Well, I had never heard of the Early Music Consort of London, but I had heard of some of the vocalists, among whom were David James, Rogers Covey-Crump, Paul Elliott, and John Potter. These are guys who were also in a little group called the Hilliard Ensemble—still one of the superstar groups of early music for their vocal performances which are so astounding they’re almost superhuman. And this recording has them before the Hilliard Ensemble took off, covering some of the same material for which the Hilliard Ensemble later became famous, under a director who had very different ideas about performance.

Very different. If this were a Hilliard Ensemble disc, it would probably have been recorded only with voices in accordance with modern understanding of medieval performance practices. Instead, in the pieces attributed to Léonin (the legendary founder of the Notre Dame school of sacred music, in which for the first time in documented history chant was augmented with harmony), the voices are accompanied by bells. In some of the anonymous fourteenth century motets (including a recording of “Alle, psallite cum luya,” which I sang as a Christmas processional—and sometime drinking song—with the Virginia Glee Club), a shawm and tabor are added. Other pieces have lute, fiddle, portative organ, and slide trumpet. But regardless of the amount of extra baggage added, the sound of the voices is still thrilling, bringing this ancient music alive.

Music of the Gothic Era stays my “Current Listening” today as I work my way through Disc 2. It’s definitely recommended—a two-disc overview of some of the most unusual and rewarding vocal music around.

Minor gripe

Okay, this one is entirely my fault for partitioning a 30GB hard drive two and a half years ago, and letting it get to the point that the boot partition has less than 250 MB free and the other has less than 60.

But why is it that some apps are so VM hungry that they can actually chew up almost 200 MB of free disk space in a session? It’s probably me. I am in the habit of leaving NetNewsWire open for days at a time, and I think the app archives all the RSS bits that it receives so it knows whether you’ve read them or not. Last night I couldn’t print from Chimera. I then started quitting apps, thinking I might need to reboot, and got told by iTunes that it couldn’t save my library file because I was out of disk space. I cursed, quit NNW and Mail, and logged out and back in.

When I restarted iTunes my library was fine. But NNW was another story—all my subscriptions were lost and so were my weblog settings.

I’m not sure about the moral of the story: don’t bother partitioning your hard drive? Don’t leave NNW running for days? Or maybe, don’t build up an MP3 collection that’s almost 14 GB on a 30 GB hard drive.

QTN™: Reinært Flemish Wild Ale

It’s been a while since I’ve done a QTN (Quick Tasting Note), but this Flemish ale drove me to it. The ale is a golden Belgian, 9% ABV (alcohol by volume), and pours with a thick creamy head that stays tall for at least ten minutes. Nose is, true to the name, wild, with hints of clove and peach. Taste is astonishing: sweet up front with more spice and fruit flavor, great bready yeast coming through, and a slightly bitter finish from the hops. Fabulous late spring or early summer beer, probably too heavy for a really hot day but refreshing on a mid-June cloudy 60° Seattle day.