New (Radio) Feature: Titles and Links in Radio-generated RSS.  It's good to see Radio now supporting the title and link tags in the RSS it generates. It would be even better to see Radio provide an optional setting to auto-fill the Link tag with the Permalink of the item. Exactly as CNet do in the example quoted on the description page for the new feature.

I read a number of Radio generated blogs in RSS. I'd like to be able to blog about posts I see without having to visit the site and wonder around trying to find the permalink, so I can point back to it. Curiously, Scripting News is one of the few that does include a permalink in the Description tag. It seems to me that most of them don't although I'm not sure if this is Radio's default behaviour.

At the end of last week, I went live with a new site for Ecademy at http://www.theecademy.com. The focus is on E-Commerce and Web Services, primarily in the UK. The site uses a number of our favourite technologies.

RSS News import from 60 or so feeds, grouped into topics

Slashdot style articles and comments on web services topics

RSS export of content generated on the site

Group Blogging, somewhat like O'Reilly

Blogger (& Drupal) API for blog input

Automatic Weblogs.com ping 

A link to WSindex, a directory of Web Services resources on the net

Needless to say, if anyone wants a similar niche portal for some other industry or market, I'd be happy to help set it up. For money! ;-)  

Following my rant last week, here's a Java-based Passport client. It lets a Java based web site put in Passport sign in support for their users.

BWahhaahhahahaha! MS refuse to ship a PERL interpreter with XP and IE6. Quick, sue them for...  ONE BILLION dollars! It's not fair they refused to ship a Python interpreter. Sue the bastards. There's no PHP interpreter shipped with XP. Call the lawyers. Back in the real world, they stopped shipping a JVM and licensing Java from SUN. So SUN sues them for 1 billion Dollars! So the poor consumer has to download a 10Mb install instead. Except that they haven't upgraded to the latest JDK this week, so it's another 10Mb download that leaves the old JDK still installed. And there's some Borland code on the machine which brought it's own JVM and JIT so that's another one. What's wrong with this picture? Can't SUN compete by just shipping better code, dammit? Macromedia seem to be able to manage this with Flash and Director, why not SUN?

But seriously now folks. There's a number of things that you just can't do in HTML with plain old Javascript especially when the document model[1] isn't common across all browsers and platforms. Like build a decent wysiwyg html editor to replace the brain dead TEXTAREA. Or use a tree control. Or have linked combo boxes. Or update some text without refreshing the whole page. Or embedding an IRC/Chat control. And the only safe, platform neutral technology we've got to do this sort of thing is Java. We do actually need a common solution to this, that's painless and generally pre-installed. But it seems that as long as SUN, MS and plenty of others insist on picking fights, we're not going to get it. Now how long is it since the whole Java vs ActiveX battle started? 7 years? Isn't it time these idiots worked out a solution or agreement?

[1]Can someone please explain to me why Opera, Netscape and Mozilla don't support the MS IE document model? As someone else said, is this a "penis size bragging" thing? If it is, then boy, have I got some spam for you.

TotL.net Human Virus Scanner : How infected with memes are you? Or are you just surfing the pulse of the zeitgeist and have a brain like a sponge?

Radio Community Server Userland are getting close to releasing their central cloud aggregator. So we have distributed Radio clients. That collect news. And then publish output and stats to a centralized community server. That is itself distributed, so that any group of users can run a server. What I haven't seen is if there's a layer above this. Can the Community Servers talk to each other and do the next level of aggregation?

From what can be seen of RCS at the moment, it could have been coded on many different platforms. The functionality could have been written in PHP, Python, PERL, as an Apache MOD in C++, Java, .NET and probably many others. Userland have made a virtue of building it in their own proprietary technology so that it can be run on their own client side codebase (ie Radio). But I would have a hard time justifying putting up a system that several users depended on, based on proprietary code on top of MS Windows or Apple desktop technology.

There's a pattern here of Desktop Client code, talking to private Server Aggregators talking to public Global Aggregators, where each player can choose to take on any one or more of the three roles. It's a very powerful pattern. The question that is left to the various implementors (and their market) to answer is which bits should be completely open source and free, which open source and charged and which closed source and charged.

O'Reilly Network: Stop the Copying, Start a Media Revolution [Mar. 08, 2002] : The only successes for old media moguls consist in holding back progress through laws and lawsuits. No comment. Because it's self evident.

ASPN : Web Services : Simple Web Services API : PHP Web Services Quickstart A library to work with SOAP4X that encapsulates WSDL support for PHP.

BombStickers from Way.Nu. Take little text ads, and combine them with Googlebombing, to create an automated way to do grass-roots google bomb campaigns.

	BombStickers Stickin' it to the man!

It seems that the Radio Web Bug system is not for public pinging (yet?) so I've taken it down again. Don't try this at home, kids.

Who needs banks anyway. : It is logically unnecessary, and very inefficient, to send all of our transactions through banks.

A couple of days ago I said I might code something up to get VoidStar to ping Userland's Radio Community Server Web Bug thing with the counts of new items on the feeds I'm collecting.

Well it's running.

So, Dave comes up with a new idea, publishes the interface and other people join in. Great!

That previous rant was of course me going off half cock as usual. A bit more digging turned up the Passport SDK documentation. In the appendix at the back is a section on installing Passport support on non microsoft servers. It appears that somewhere there is a set of code that ends up as Apache .so, CGI and NSAPI code for Solaris, Red Hat Linux, FreeBSD and HP-UX. The objects are accessed from C++ CGI or Perl ASP (whatever that is). And Passport support is to v1.1 not v2.1.

Now most of this is going to be pretty much impossible on hosted servers, so I'm not going to pursue this any further for the moment.

And I'm left with a nagging doubt about the protocol that's actually used between the Server Passport code and the Passport Nexus (MS term for the Passport centralized authority server). Was it too much to hope that this was a documented SOAP interface? Or can we speculate that MS wouldn't have been able to secure this interface sufficiently using SOAP in it's current state?

Now I'm definitely not saying that MS MUST do better than this in supporting non-MS environments. They're a commercial organization and must do what they see as best for their business interests. But let's call a spade, a spade. Passport may be a bit more open than previous functionality but it's not open in the sense of a documented and supported SOAP interface, callable from other platforms. And I suspect that this story will be repeated in many other areas of .NET MyServices.

So here's a question. How do you enable your website to use Passport for authentication? If it's built with Apache on *nix? Because after all Passport uses SOAP, right? and it's a standard that anyone can talk to, right? And MS want to encourage the other 60% of websites to support single sign in via Passport, right?

So you go to passport.com, which leads you to the Passport dev zone on MSDN, whch leads you back to passport.com dev zone, which says the docs are in the SDK available from the MSDN downloads site. So you download a couple of megabytes of SDK setup file. And run it. To be told that you need to install it on a copy of NT Server. So you dig a little deeper into MSDN and it becomes obvious that Passport support on a website actually requires a set of ISAPI DLLs and is consequently tied completely to NT, 2000 or XP Server.

Now why am I not surprised?

So I guess it's off to PingID and Liberty to see if they can do any better. Or maybe I should just implement the Drupal multiple authentication code which can already check your id from : Blogger, Delphi Forums, Drupal, Jabber, Manila, Yahoo. Because after all I want Code Now, not vague promises of Jam Tomorrow. Dammit!

I don't often read Spiked mostly because I'm too busy trying to keep up with all the technology. But every time I do I'm enormously impressed with the quality of writing and the level of research that goes into it. And because they frequently take a contrary line to the more immediate media. This one is excellent and poses some serious questions. America's axis-tential crisis President Bush's 'axis of evil' tells us far more about the USA than about Iraq, Iran or North Korea.

The one annoying thing about the website is the tiny font they use for the main body text, but that's easily dealt with.

Here we go again. "Dear Yahoo! Groups Members, The service is down for maintenance. During this time the web site will be unavailable and all email will be queued. All email sent during this time should be delivered once service has resumed, but further delays may occur due to backlog. Please do not resend email to your group. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. The Yahoo! Groups Plumber"

The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference promises to be one of the best conferences of the year. So how do I get myself to it?

I've been vaguely watching Userland's latest corner turn, the beginnings of the Radio Community Server. It looks like it's time to see if non-Userland clients can play too.   

So the latest version of War in Afghanistan is not over yet. Perhaps we should remember that the Russians were there for 10 years and eventually got their asses kicked out. Just like every other invader in the last Millenium. So how long will the US stay there?

With all the shenanigans around Morpheus, I thought it was about time I go and check out Gnutella again. One download and install of Bearshare later, I was up and running and collecting a Timo Maas track. I have to say that Gnutella still has this "not quite ready for primetime" feel about it. It does basically work, but in Bearshare there's still a bit too much weird parameter setting going on. I know plenty of people who would manage to screw this up due to lack of technical knowledge and some weird home firewall that someone else setup. Interesting that even Bearshare has a Heart of Iron as it's first point of call as it tries to find an entry point to the network is three Bearshare.com servers. Making a genuinely distributed starting point is a non trivial problem. And as long as there are persistent initial starting points, they will be attacked either legally or technically.