Oh man! I've just tried shoving Voidstar through the Pornolize filter. Too funny!

Stick up for chickens! United Poultry Concerns [UPC] - www.upc-online.org : Dedicated to the Compassionate and Respectful Treatment Of Domestic Fowl

When did Yahoogroups start bumping up the advertizing noise? You can't move around the website without hitting ads. Pop behind; interspersed between messages as you move through them; and the ads in the email messages seem to be getting larger and more annoying. And every message has a terms of use reminder. Back in the days of eGroups you used to be able to pay them money to lose the message ads. In the early days of Yahoogroups they carried this on. But now the web page for this has disappeared. It's all just getting too annoying so it's time to look for another system methinks.

And I still want to know how you back up all the old messages. One day they'll close down and then where will all that data be?

Decentralization Message 5007 : Review of The Seattle Wireless Network meeting. Seattle says they're just going to build a whole parallel, free, internet. Amazing stuff about the growth of free 802.11b networks.

Content Wire - Who Owns XML? with reference to the RSS-RDF issue over patents.

XML.com: <taglines/> Anti-Awards 2001 [Jan. 02, 2002] Most excellent awards list for services to XML. And as is often the case, there's way too much unpleasant truth in the satire. I'm particularly amused by the use of a notional tag in the headline forcing me to hand encode it so it makes it through HTML and XML safely. And that the tag isn't even XHTML conformant! (shouldn't there be a space between the "e" and "/") ?

Survey: Which version of Windows do you use? The one that's not on the list, Dave. Windows ME. Doh!

First an essay on why XML sucks.

grieve with me, blue master chickenz : Furthermore the encoding in XML encourages people to believe in 2 extremely dangerous falsehoods:

That once the DTD is written, the software somehow already exists to interpret the semantics

That as a result, the semantics can become much more complex without causing any trouble
Neither of these sentiments is at all correct. For each concept introduced into an XML specification, corresponding software must exist or else the specification is nothing more than a wish list.

And then Mime-RPC. This has to be going for the record for shortest spec with the most power. The main spec is under 2/3 of a sheet of A4. I'm also fascinated by where this is going as it's what I was trying to achieve with CGI-RPC It's effectively saying that we don't need SOAP or XML-RPC because we already have everything we need in MIME, HTTP GET and POST. The catch I hit was that CGI only defines the request and says nothing about the format of the returned data. They've solved that by saying "just use MIME". Awesomely simple and awesomely powerful. So will the spec stay nothing more than a wish list? Or will they be able to generate enough momentum to rival the 55 odd XML-RPC toolkits and the 80 or so for SOAP.

EUROTRASH: It's only money is a blog tracking, not strange scandinavian sex practices, but the Euro.

Slashdot | Canadian Company Claims RDF Patent and CNet has an article here. The Patent Wiki is tracking the news.

n/a

 Essay on how to write unmaintainable code  [thanks, ia/]

A number of people in the Syndication arena are under patent attack for writing code that parses RDF. Excuse me while I scream and shout and rage and bang my head against the wall. A brief reading of the patents concerned suggests that it's so broad as to be useable against anyone or anything that parses XML.

'kin great.

Several of the people who've received warnings are enthusiasts such as Jeff Barr at Syndic8.com and are not in a position to fight a long legal battle. It's completely absurd that they should have to.

Seen on a mailing list. "I am an optimist, so I only ever get unpleasant surprises."

Well what do you know. Yesterday I linked to Dave's link to me. Today, the text has disappeared and in it's place is a  sermon about being generous on the web and not promoting negative vibes by linking to them. I could be paranoid and think that Dave has now labelled me as a Wiener. Or I could agree that the words that got cut just weren't very interesting and looked too much like an angry riposte. Whatever.

I'm in another community that has two catch phrases to live by online to avoid flame wars and keep the discourse civil. "Assume goodwill" and "Own your words". That is, assume the other person is arguing the debate and not making a personal attack, even if the words are brimming over with emotion. And understand that you own what you say online. In most systems you can't take the words back, so you'd better live with them. You'd better also pause and re-read before hitting that Enter key.

And that's quite enough sermon for a wed morning.

Falling asleep in front of the TV is so great. I feel so much better now. Almost human again. As I write this, there's "Shakespear In Love" on the TV which is a little distracting. Having the laptop in the living room does get me accused of being obsessive, but I get to be with the family without being bored!

Anyway, at my urging another Drupal site has just gone up. It's aimed at people involved in the business of creating online communities. Communitybuilders.info I'm helping out with some technical advice. The other reason I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front is that I've been hard at work writing code for the Drupal system. In the last few weeks, I've powered up a new site for NetProz. At the moment it's at voidstar.com/netproz/ but should be moving to the correct domain sometime soon. I've also got a demo system running at /test/ as an example of what Drupal can do.

This all needed a few new modules. So I've written

• An events module for maintaining a database of coming events.


• A contacts database for keeping names, addresses and details.


• A mailing list mirror for providing a web interface to a mailing list such as Yahoogroups, Majordomo and so on.

I'll be packaging these and putting them on the Drupal hacks page before the end of the week. Anyway, I've now got a package of Drupal code that can bring up a complete community website in a day or two. This could be used for a corporate intranet, a corporate extranet/customer relations site or for a niche community. This thing has so much function now, it's ridiculous. If you want one of these or know someone who does, drop me an email and let's deal. My time's chargeable, but I'm cheap.

Now all of this is GPL, free, open source code, built on a free platform of PHP and MySQL. I do it for love, and because I need it, and because it's an itch that I can't help but keep scratching. I wish I could work out how to make money at it, but I haven't managed that yet. Maybe this year.

While all that has been going on, I've written an MS Windows news reader and blogger in Borland Delphi. I'm using it right now to write this. It collects and displays the 75 or so RSS sources I read every day. It's got a Wysiwyg editor. It synchronises blog items with voidstar.com via xml-rpc. It's 'kin great! The problem is that my programming ability is not quite good enough to finish it. The threading doesn't work right and it crashes too often. I can cope with that, but it's not ready for prime time. But if it was finished I reckon there's a shareware program in there somewhere. What I probably need is to partner with a competent windows or java programmer and treat what I have now as a prototype. If you seriously think you can help, drop me a line.

Here's the Slashdot story on the Euro. This is a momentous day. Not least because the Greek Drachma was >2600 years old. And now it's gone. I'm betting that the UK doesn't join the Euro during this Labour parliament. But in 10 years time, we will have joined.

Conducting conversations via email can get pretty strange and disembodied at times. But doing the same thing via almost real time blogging is truly bizarre. Dave writes, "Compare Julian Bond's update to his rant from yesterday. Today he points to me, and yesterday he made a point of not pointing to me. What changed? Hah. Now here's a demo of respect. I don't know. Julian, what changed? Why did you link to me today and not yesterday? Well Dave, that's for you and me both to try and work out. There's not that much thought in it. I was trying to make some point yesterday, but it's a brand new day (and year) and I'm trying to make another point today. And seeing as it's currently 7:45am in California, I think we can safely assume that Dave didn't go out and drink too much last night. Unlike me who's trying to write this and make sense through a haze of hangover, at 3:45pm in the UK.

Well, well. Dave linked to my rant yesterday about UserLand's marketing via weblog. As usual, I don't really understand what he's on about or how his comments relate to my comments. But I think he's saying that UserLand doesn't deliberately provoke debate for marketing reasons and not as much thought goes into the process as I suggested. But whether it's deliberate or just a happy side effect of random spewage, the effect is the same!

I wondered how my post came to his attention and found this on diveintomark/TGINYE : (This is not to claim that Userland is going under. AFAIK, they're doing great, and I wish them the best of luck in 2002 and beyond. We'd certainly all miss them terribly if they were gone. Well, maybe Julian wouldn't. But I would.) I'd better state here that I don't wish UserLand any ill-will. And I would miss them. And I do wish them well as a software company even if I've rejected their products because I don't like them and they don't fit my needs. And I'm sure I'll go on reading Scripting News, and the other UserLand weblogs because they're a good read and they throw up interesting links.

But I'll still get annoyed at the time and thought I'll waste mulling over yet another of Dave's or John's contentious statements. Maybe I should make a resolution, not to stop commenting on their output, but not to get so wound up by it.

Common Source You may not agree with this, but it's a thought provoking view of open source.