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.

Happy New Year! Let's hope it's a better one than last year... Well we can always Imagine.

Alien Implant Removal and Deactivation Method Have you been abducted? Need help removing the implant? X-Files invading your real life? then you need this website.

There's yet another UserLand based non-debate raging about Open Source. it's drawn in so many bloggers that it's high on the Blogdex and Daypop indices. Maybe we should just not rise to UserLand's jibes. They do an amazing job of creating noise as a marketing tool. By responding to it, we're just playing their game. Most of it is just FUD to advance their own position anyway.

And it's about Open source. Inevitably Userland portrays this as some evil idea that is hyped to the max by people who don't understand software development. And that there are no successful Open source projects that matter a damn anyway. So I'm surprised nobody has come back and said that Userland is an Open Source company! Their products ship with the source to the majority of the function freely available. Doesn't that make them Open Source?

Which points up the most irritating part of the whole debate. Open source is not exactly the same as the GPL, which is not exactly the same as free, which is not exactly the same as group development. There are numerous examples of chargeable source. There are numerous examples of open source released under other licenses. Lumping everything into one big bucket that is owned by ESR doesn't advance the debate one whit.

So what's really happening here is an extraordinarily effective marketing campaign from UserLand via weblog. The basic tactic is to start an internal debate on some contentious subject by deliberately taking a provocative position. The moment other people dive in and start commenting, slip in references to your own products and why they're better than the competition. Take a position that says you're on the high moral ground and declare victory. Everybody ends up hating you for it, but who cares, you got the free publicity.

Note that there are no links in this blog entry. I refuse to add to UserLand's success at this by contributing to the Blogdex, Daypop and Google ratings. But if you're really interested, use google to find burningbird, doc searles, Joho, diveintomark.

Netcraft Web Server Survey 1 in 5 web server sites using MS IIS and with SSL installed have been compromised and are definitely vulnerable. You Scared Yet! Getting an SSL certificate is expensive and requires some effort, so these are not just default installed IIS servers.

Osama's bin made to look haggard : We may not have caught him or brought him to justice but, at the cost of thousands of innocent Afghan lives, billions of dollars of US citizens' money and the civil liberties of the Free World, we have got him looking haggard. Terry Jones, on the latest video.

Bah Humbug!

I'd just like to wish my three readers a happy mid-winter festival of indeterminate but mainly Northern European pagan orgin.

What scene from a movie (or several such scenes from different movies) do you regard as really consequential in your life? [thanks, JOHO the Blog] Answer: The final scene of "Two Lane Blacktop". James Taylor is ripping down yet another drag strip in his 55 Chevy Bel Air hotrod. The camera is in the back of the car looking at the back of his head and through the windshield. There's no sound. The film stops and burns up from the middle of his head. Perfick! 

CamWorld: Essays: Online Community Technologies and Concepts Pretty comprehensive rant.

The Bush doctrine is: We are at war not only with the terrorists, but also with those who harbor them. We've got to attack France. Hell Yes! The UK has been at war with France for 1000 years. We'll back up the USA when it invades!

For the irony impaired, that was a joke, right? Or was it just another example of American cultural imperialism?

From the Fast, Cheap and Out of Control desk comes a lovely piece by Cory Doctorow. the coming golden age of Zen acceptance of online unreliability. The close-enough-for-rock-n-roll revolution is a-comin' -- to the streets, comrades! [thanks, bOing bOing].  

"Every once in awhile we collectively need to get our asses kicked to remind us of what is important. We got our asses kicked big time in 2001, in every imaginable way." [thanks, Dotcom Scoop] Tell me about it. Gizzajob. I could do that.

This christmas give the gift that keeps on giving. An online business!

IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ CAREFULLY! : If that does not solve the problem, try banging on the side of your monitor a few times.