I-Plus : I was just walking down Oxford Street at lunch time and spotted this chalk which i thought was pretty neat. I only read about all this stuff on Wired PDA on my way home last night. I logged on without an ssid, but I'm not quite sure what the speed of the connection provided by the kiosk is. These i-plus kiosks are popping all over London, I'll have to check which of the others I've seen have wireless antenna.

I can't find anything on the web about I-Plus kiosks or who is installing and running them. Does anyone know? If it's true that every one is a WiFi free WAP, that's very cool!

A funny thing happened to my broadband connection last night; roughly half the web disappeared. I could get to some websites completely as normal while others were completely inaccessible. Unfortunately, one that had disappeared was Ecademy. I did all the usual things like waving a dead chicken at the computer, re-booting the machines, power cycling the cable modem, checking all the network settings, refreshing the IP on my gateway but no dice. I used SSH to get a text window to my private server and then used Lynx to retrieve Ecademy and it was running fine. Ping, ftp, pop3 were all working fine, my DNS was working fine. I eventually decided that it must be NTL with some sort of strange outage as I had an inkling that they were intercepting port 80 and putting in a proxy so I fired off an email to their support people and got the expected auto-response back.

This morning, I went through the usual IVR - wait on hold listening to terrible music telephone hell for 10-15 minutes until I finally got an engineer. He told me that one of their Inktomi proxy servers was broken and it was on the segment I use. They'd just found out about it when they saw an email to their help desk. After a bit of complaint and pressure on my part, he gave me an alternate IP address to put into the IE proxy settings and I could get everything again. Now normally I don't have a proxy set so this all starts to look a bit strange. In  response to more direct questioning, he finally let on that yes, they do intercept all port 80 traffic and route it through a proxy.

Now I can understand why they do this, because serving even some web pages locally will save them upstream bandwidth costs, but I'm also extremely bothered about the implications. It means that all port 80 traffic from me, (eg web sites, Kazaa music sharing, IM, RSS news collection), is all being routed through their servers. And proxies typically have an access log which means that a large part of my internet useage is being logged. And given the recent talk about RIP and the Home Office admissions that "we're already getting all the data anyway" it's all the more worrying. Now of course, I'm not a criminal (though I play one the internet!) and I've got nothing to hide, (though what they'll make of my fascination with Japanese kitten asciimation I don't know) but it's the principle of the thing. As I seem to be repeating all too often, all I want from my broadband connection is a fixed IP, fast up and downloads and an affordable price, and that's it. If I want to use a proxy I will, but don't force me without telling me you're doing it.

Good tutorial at RSS Workshop

I have a very beta version of blogToaster up and running, feel free to give it a go [you need MSN Messenger]. Add "toaster@zaks.demon.co.uk" as a new contact, and start a chat session, enter "add http://www.pocketsoap.com/weblog/" and hit enter, repeat with all the URL's of the weblogs you want to get notified about. enter "list" to see the list of URL's you've registered. When BlogToaster picks up a change from weblogs.com of a URL you've registered, it'll send you a message. [thanks, Simon Fell]

How cool! But I'm not sure I need yet another notification system for reading more news. I think this is why I much prefer offline async methods like Email or an RSS reader. I want to deliberately go out and read news and mail when I'm ready not when the other party is ready. In fact even though Messenger is quite useful I've grown to really hate it in the same way as I hate the phone. Because it interrupts me and demands my attention when it wants to, not when I want to.

Having said all that it's a useful tool if you're tracking or administrating a site where other people frequently post (like a Drupal site)

This would be great as a Jabberbot, especially with Jabber's ability to bridge all the different IM systems.

QDB: Top 25 Quotes :
< kritical> christin: you need to learn how to figure out stuff yourself..
< Christin1> how do i do that

Swhack Weblog: HAPPY BURTHDTAY TO TEH ASH!!!! : Coming up next... Giant Man-Eating Zombies: Should they be allowed in W3C Working Groups, or not? Are Aaron and Morbus somehow related? I think we should be told.

Oh, and it's an interview with Morbus about Amphetadesk 0.93.

Blogging talk at Inappropriate Tech

Neil: I like scripting.com because it winds me up every time I visit it.

Userland have made a change to Radio. Radio UserLand : More visibility in referer logs So now the RSS collection appears to come from something like http://frontier.userland.com/xmlAggregator?userWeblog=http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/ Maybe I'm missing something here. Why didn't they just make it "http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/" ? That way I wouldn't have to strip bits out before displaying it in a referer log.

Further to that last post, so what are the options for XMLRPC in .NET? There's nothing specifically mentioned on XMLRPC.

Another tiny RSS and RDF newsfeed viewer (with).NET source code [thanks, Markup World] to go with Aggie. The extraordinary thing about both of these is the tiny executable (33Kb and 50Kb) once you've downloaded the 20Mb of .NET CLR. There's a lot of support code in the CLR. If MS can keep the update process reasonable for the CLR and the price down on Visual Studio .NET, this could really help the development of 3rd party desktop apps. Now consider that SOAP support is baked into the CLR and you begin to get the MS Vision; "Program for the desktop, not the web". Lots of fat-client desktop apps running locally but using central resources via SOAP helps to keep the Windows OS entrenched.

With apologies to Eric Clapton and Leon Russell :
I knew all the time but now I'm gonna let you know:
I'm gonna keep on rocking, no matter if it's fast or slow.
Ain't gonna stop until the twenty-fifth hour,
'Cause now I'm living on meme power.

There's a curious thing happening in BlogSpace this week. We've got Blogdex tracking links between blogs; Google tracking related websites. Then there's the whole Radio Userland blog community generating lots of metadata around weblogs.com and the Radio Community Server. Some of this is open to all, while some of it is extracted from Radio users only. In particular they track all the RSS news headline channels that are read by Radio users. The next piece is the habit Bloggers have of building a "blogroll" of blogs they frequently read and posting it on the site as a set of links, often with links to the related RSS. And then there's people trawling their referer files and turning it into pages of backlinks.

Then something happened on May 30. Matt Griffith posted a suggestion about putting a link to the RSS for a page into the html of the page. Mark Pilgrim picked up on it and started evangelizing it. Within hours, people throughout the Blog community started implementing it. This leapt up the Blogdex and Daypop charts and spread like wildfire as people built support into all the major Blog CMS. Within a day people had started creating bookmarklets and other tools to take advantage of the new data.

Then one more latent meme got tossed into the mix to do with trying to find ways of navigating through the vast number of blogs. If we start mining all this data, maybe we can start at a weblog and explore it's neighbourhood in blogspace; all the blogs and sites that are "close" to this one. And so some new services were born. eg

Radio Neighbourhood and an example.

A Blogdex neighbourhood and an example

A Google Neighbourhood and an example

All this is certainly fun and it may or may not be important, but what I find fascinating is how fast it spread. From initial spark, to widespread adoption, to secondary code to exploit it, took 6 days. We used to joke about "Internet time" but this is getting ridiculous. But that's what you get when you're "Living on Meme Power"

OK. Who uses Outlook Express?

You *NEED* Quote-Fix http://jump.to/oe-quotefix

Please download and install it now.

Note this doesn't apply to Outlook users only Outlook Express. I'm still searching for an equivalent for you.

What it does is to fix Outlook Express' stupid quoting system for quoting text in replies and make it compliant with the dominant non-MS conventions that were around long before MS had an internet email
reader. Things like:-

1. Use a one line attribution
2. Wrap text at 72 chars
3. Use > as indent on quoted text
4. Put your Sig at the bottom with "-- " as a sig seperator
5. Auto-remove Sigs before quoting

As a side benefit it colours quoted text so it's easy to see what text was quoted and written by whom and what text is new.

If you like it, please pass it on to other OE users that you know.

And if you haven't read it yet, you might want to check out my rant "Coping with mailing lists using Outlook (Express)" One question I have to ask is why this was even necessary. Microsoft should be doing this as a matter of course or at least offering it as an option in the standard package.

Aaron is putting together a comprehensive index of weblog coverage of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. [thanks, Hack the Planet] This is well worth digging into as there were an amazing collection of people and ideas there.

A graphic example of why the mainstream news outlets serve no useful purpose any more. How many slavish clones of the press release can you see in this Google Search: "illegal copies of Star Wars"

Progress on tcp.im  ... Progress on tcp.im  [thanks, Scripting News] WS (SOAP, XMLRPC etc) protocols over IM has enormous potential not least because it can indirectly address any machine out there, neatly bypassing our NAT and firewall problems. This is going to open up all sorts of possibilities as finally we'll be able to more or less guarantee that when we need a call back, the other machine will be able to talk to us. It's great to see several initiatives working on this around Userland, Jabber and AIM.

As always there's some downsides. First the IM market is fragmented, which means we really need support for MSN, AIM, ICQ as a minimum. Just a SMOP right? Then we have a bigger issue about async, non blocking code and some assumptions built into the RPC view of WS. IM generally assumes that both parties are online and that messages flow from one to the other more or less instantly. But this is not necessarily true. Apart from inherent latency, some IM systems support a store and forward model more like SMTP. If we go into this with the RPC mindset then IM will be treated just like http and we'll write lots of code that assumes an immediate response. The code we write will be blocking and will sit there waiting for the response until timeout. Wouldn't it be better to take notice of the "messaging" part of IM and deliberately build this as a message queue architecture instead of an RPC architecture? There's some good work being done on SOAP over SMTP and IM is enough like SMTP that we should be able to use a lot of common code and effectively bring on both at once with common entry points. 

Now the SOAP SMTP spec suggests using the existing SMTP message IDs and in-reply-to headers to provide the control over which message refers to which call. But of course IM doesn't implicitly have any of this with different implementations across different IM systems. It's going to look more and more unfortunate that IM is a proprietary protocol mess with competing standards rather than IETF RFC driven sanity like smtp, pop3, irc, nntp, http et al. 

WS over IM is indeed a mind bomb. But watch out for the gotchas.

EU to tax e-commerce with the US As a good EU VAT payer, I laughed at this until I realized that this would affect me. Voidstar is hosted with a US hosting company and paid via credit card. From July next year, I'll either be chucked off because they haven't registered in an EU country or have to pay VAT. I can understand the reasoning but I also can't imagine how this is going to work.

05/02/02 21:07 CEST A new blogging company.As covered in Microcontent News, Nick Denton, co-founder and former CEO of Moreover (not to mention venerable British blogger) has announced his new venture, which is going to address, in his words, the "need to make weblogs more accessible: to turn them from a cult phenomenon into mainstream media, without corrupting the form." Of course, it'll only be an 80% company. [thanks, EVHEAD [via News Is Free]]

Go live is early 2003. Come on dude! What happened to Internet time? Or is the wait because he only wants to work a 4 day week?

Hell hath no fury like a FriendReunited. Well it made me laugh anyway.

O'Reilly Network: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Decepticons [May 01, 2002] : How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Decepticons

Alan Cox attacks the European DMCA Wake up call [thanks, The Register USA] If you thought the DMCA was bad, just look at what the EU is cooking up to try and keep us in line.