Sunday, March 03, 2002

[CNET News.com] Morpheus network goes open source. Days after being shut out from the file-swapping network pool that includes partners Kazaa and Grokster, Morpheus returns with new software--and new friends. 11:03:41 PM

[Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog] Hi, my name is 0101679.  You might also want to check out my friends 0101915, 0100887, and 0100213.  Oh, and especially check out pocketsoap or need-a-cake, because while not everybody remembers my name, they can remember these and often use these sites as navigational aids. 11:01:35 PM

[Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog] More photos, this time from Bob Cunnings: photos1, photos2 and photos3. 11:01:22 PM

[Slashdot] TiVo Service Cost Rising  -- Guess I'm glad I bought the life time service option... I heard they don't still offer that... too bad... gives me incentive to upgrade this Tivo as far as I can though... 11:00:29 PM

[Codingstyle.com] Aspect-Oriented Programming 10:26:34 PM

[ZDNet Tech News] .Net Server release delayed. Oops, they did it again. Microsoft pushes back the launch of Windows .Net Server for the second time, potentially leaving customers to wait till next year for a key part of the .Net package. 10:23:05 PM

[Tomalak's Realm] Newsweek: The Customer Is Always Wrong. Steven Levy. The Disney Corp. was once celebrated for its crowd-pleasing recipe: underpromise and overdeliver. But Eisner and his copyright-holding counterparts, drinking deep from the fountain of fear, seem to have adopted a new motto: overcharge and disable. 10:22:43 PM

[Scripting News] New Radio 8 feature: Web Bug Simulator.  10:19:49 PM

[Scripting News] In stealth mode, I've been working on a project called RCS, or Radio Community Server. It's basically at an alpha level now. The idea is to make installing the centralized side of a Radio community as easy as installing Radio on a workstation. It's a fascinating bootstrap, the software is ready, but I need users. How to entice them? Features, of course. So this morning I'm turning in a different direction, I'm working on the Web Bug Simulator for XML feeds. It's very interesting, along the lines of the articles by Udell and Gillmor. A lab for developing community services. OK, here's the idea. We can track hits and referers for HTML by putting a web bug in the page, and when the browser loads the page it asks for the bug, and with a little Javascript magic, we can tabulate and rank the sites, and count the referers. But how to do that for an XML feed which only goes through the browser after being digested by the aggregator? Not so hard to figure out when you phrase the question that way. But there's an opportunity for refinement because my client code is less crude than the meager power the HTML browser gives me. I'm tracking the number of new stories times the number of people who read it, so a site that doesn't update its XML feed falls off the chart, as it should, because it's not saying anything new even if a lot of people are subscribing. Anyway I hope to have some results to show for this shortly. Diggin. 10:19:04 PM

[Hack the Planet] Bruce Sterling: Information Wants to Be Worthless. 10:09:35 PM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] The Economist.  Wow.  The US economy was out of the recession in the fourth quarter.  The fourth quarter numbers were revised upwards from an estimate 0.2% growth rate to a 1.4% rate, marking this recession as one of the mildest on record if it was one at all (a recession, if I remember correctly, is strictly defined as two sequential quarters of negative GDP growth).  Is this something new?  Should it have a new name? Granted, the last year and a half felt like a recession (or a depression in the technology industry) but was actually merely a stasis period were our growth slowed as a means to sort out excesses (look at all the great purging of poorly run companies going on).   Further, if our economy's new bottom during a stasis period is nearly 1% growth, it will have a major impact on our long-term wealth and the wealth of the world.  This is an extremely gross simplification, but the historical formula for our economy's growth was: two steps forward - one step backward.  Contrast this to what we just saw:  three steps forward - one step forward   Effectively, this is four times as fast as historical patterns.  As Flashman would say:  Huzzah! 10:06:48 PM