Sam Ruby

Select coffeeshop from * where town=...

Doc Searls: Hey, coffee and wine shops, I'll be in town for the next day with a laptop and a PDA that are wondering who's ready for my business ?

This problem doesn't seem all that much harder to me than syndicating and aggregating weblogs. In particular, both ends of the equation are likely to be behind a combination of firewalls, NAT, proxies, etc. Question to ponder: what technical, sociological, and legal innovations will be required to make this come about?

One interesting thing this scenario highlights is the potential need for multiple credentials to be transmitted along with the request

Towards robust intermediaries

Jon Udell: The basic LibraryLookup bookmarklet is a kind of intermediary. It coordinates two classes of services -- Amazon/BN/isbn.nu/AllConsuming and your local library's OPAC -- to facilitate a lookup. I couldn't resist trying to create another intermediary that would facilitate a purchase request.

Excellent.

Question to ponder: what is the chance that this code will continue to work, unmodified, three years from now? What technical, sociological, and legal innovations will be required to make this come about?

Trackback Threading

Greg Reinacker: So, everyone, how about implementing TrackBack and/or Pingback on your weblogs - and let's see where it takes us? My guess is that the next logical step is trackback threading. This represents a small challenge for those of us who comingle trackbacks and direct comments, but I'm sure that this can be overcome.

Amusingly, trackback is to linkbackparser as Mark's cite logic is to mine.

Show Me the Code!

Shelley Powers: Additionally, I would also like people to start putting their code online. This last week there was a great deal of discussion about the CITE tag and how it can be used to provide specialized processing. Well, that's great and good, but let's see the processing? Can we see the code that Mark used. Or Sam's code?

I publish the code for my weblog, such as it is. Search for "cite" in blosxom. The index page is generated by a separate script. You can see the similarity between the two... given how quickly this was thrown together (I had no advanced knowledge of what Mark was working on), I did a bit of cut and paste instead of a proper refactoring. Also note that contrary to popular belief, my implementation is not based on the cite tag.

Command line RSS validation

curl -i -d "<rss><channel/></rss>" http://feeds.archive.org/validator/ curl -i -d "<rss/>" http://feeds.archive.org/validator/

The latter demonstrates a bug in the validator, which I will leave unfixed for the moment to demonstrate fault responses (complete with server side python stack traceback). This can be put into a script on Unix/Windows thus:

curl -i -d "`cat $1`" http://feeds.archive.org/validator/ curl -i -d "@%1" http://feeds.archive.org/validator/

Thanks go out to Jeffrey Winter for this nugget.

bookmark me

Mark Pilgrim: Now, there is a way to specify permalinks in HTML, but virtually nobody uses it. Ok, I've updated my templates so that the preferred permalink is marked with a rel=bookmark.

Open Source Dynamics

Stefano Mazzocchi: it's an design pattern: "good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not". This is extremely hard to understand, it's probably the most counter-intuitive thing about open source dynamics.

Obligation Free

Sam Gentile: it seems very difficult to get people to collaborate freely and consitently in a medium where they feel like they have an obligation.

Something worth saying

Words for the day: serenity, triage, and quixotic.

Rich Content

Mark Pilgrim: I am amazed, bordering on appalled, at the attention garnered by my use of the cite tag. I too, am amazed, and quite frankly amused. Mostly, I'm amused that a number of people assumed that I had used the cite tag, when in fact, everything was done with a few regular expressions strategically placed in the code that selects entries to be displayed.

Like Mark, I want to be able to reuse my own content in millions of ways, including things nobody has thought of yet.

Weblog backed by SQL Server

It looks like Greg Reinacker has felt the itch, and is writing his own weblogging software. He claims to be pingback enabled, but hasn't pinged me yet. ;-)

Simon continues to amaze

Give Simon a challenge in the evening, wake to a solution in the morning. Despite bugs on my part, unclear specs (it looks like the space is legal, in any case it is inserted for me by the Apache/CGI interface), Simon comes up with an complete and elegant solution for a VB client to the RSS validator:

    Dim v As New Rss.Validator
    Dim vr As Rss.Response
    Set vr = v.Validate(tFile.Text)

Welcome Rodent of Unusual Size!

Fellow ASF director, Ken Coar has a blog! Though it looks like he as yet to learn about referrer logs or rss. He's a quick learner though, and I'm sure he will be teaching us a thing or two on these subjects quickly. Meanwhile, he does have permalinks, (note to Andy: look for the thingies that look like quite substantial chain links).

Hmm, I wonder if we should invite Ken to lunch? Hmmm, Ken and Andy in the same room?

Update: It looks like Ken has been outted! LOL!

WSDL Wizard

Simon Fell: Finally wrapped up RC1 of the WSDL Wizard. It supports doc/lit and rpc/encoded, SOAP headers, enumerations, complex types and import . Can it handle this? What would a VB/VBScript client look like?

Universal Personal Proxies

It looks like Les Orchard and Russell Beattie are discussing unwarranted leaky abstractions. Sounds like fun!

P.S. FWIW, the original REST thesis explicitly endorsed the idea of intermediaries.

Weblogs and Discovery

Mena Trott: weblogs are changing the way we're finding (and asking for) information on the web. I especially like the reference to mini-universes coming into existence within the comments of a post.

Eclipse on .NET

Jeroen Frijters: I got Eclipse to run I wonder if something like NGEN could be used to address the startup time issues.

Andy's Gump saga

Andy Oliver: I suspect is the configuration that Sammy boy uses to run Gump on his Thinkpad... It is building all of Jakarta/XML/etc., so its understandibly a lot for my T-30 to do. Somehow, I manage on my T-23. Also, I think you underestimate the community. Centipede is getting on board - by starting small. My guess is that the JAXP stuff can all be removed. FYI: here is a complete list of dependencies that are required for a full build.

SOAP Routing

Phil Windley: Level 5 Routing for Web Services. See also Rohit Kare's presentation and notes.

Blosxom 0+6i BETA 1

Rael Dornfest: I spent a little time over the holidays whipping up a nice little prezzie for y'all: Blosxom 0+6i BETA 1 -- now with STATIC RENDERING! It seems to me this could be mixed with a little funky caching. After all, why generate citations hourly when they can be generated on demand and cached.

Posts by citation.

Mark Pilgrim: Posts by citation. What a cool idea! Done.

Mr. Subtle

Andy Oliver: I hate programmers, everything has to be stated precisely or argued to the bitter end. I think I'm done arguing. Dont agree? Bite me...or just EAT MY CODE.

St. Nick

Robert Scoble: here's the truth about Coca Cola and Santa.

Optical Illusions

Reverend Jim: I don't generally announce this sort of thing, but these Optical Illusions are really good. Number 6 is my personal favorite. It literally knocked me out of my chair. (Flash Required)