The Blog
12 Jan 2002 Slashdot | Philips Says Compact Discs Can't be Copyprotected Fascinating. Philips hold the rights to the CD logo. They have come out and said that copy-protected CDs do not abide by the Red book standard and so cannot carry the logo they are in fact "silver disks that look similar to audio CDs but are not audio CDs". Further if they produce a CD/RW device for copying CDs and the customer puts "silver disks that look similar to audio CDs but are not audio CDs" in and the copy works, it's not their problem because they never said the device would work with these, only with CDs.
Wouldn't it be great if one of the co-authors of the standard (and a major company with big pockets) sued the big record companies for using the logo illegally because they had abused the standard? Even if they just got a temporary injunction freezing sales, it would kill copy protected CDs immediately. TUX: Term Unit X : Issue Seven - Reboot The Adventures of Tux, the comic book.
[ 12-Jan-02 9:37am ] 11 Jan 2002 Happy little flash cartoons from DiegarVision
[ 11-Jan-02 8:20pm ] England - business culture: Welcome topics of conversation in England : From ExecutivePlanet.com in their guide to "Business etiquette and culture in US top trading partner nations" Do not make references to the mediocrity of British food, since it has now improved significantly. But talking loudly about football when you don't mean soccer is perfectly acceptable.
[ 11-Jan-02 6:44pm ] Burningbird OpEd: UDDI UDDI -- Don't need, don't want Good piece. More later.
[ 11-Jan-02 7:40am ] 10 Jan 2002 [ 10-Jan-02 4:00pm ] 08 Jan 2002 Stick up for chickens! United Poultry Concerns [UPC] - www.upc-online.org : Dedicated to the Compassionate and Respectful Treatment Of Domestic Fowl
[ 08-Jan-02 8:26am ] 07 Jan 2002 When did Yahoogroups start bumping up the advertizing noise? You can't move around the website without hitting ads. Pop behind; interspersed between messages as you move through them; and the ads in the email messages seem to be getting larger and more annoying. And every message has a terms of use reminder. Back in the days of eGroups you used to be able to pay them money to lose the message ads. In the early days of Yahoogroups they carried this on. But now the web page for this has disappeared. It's all just getting too annoying so it's time to look for another system methinks.
And I still want to know how you back up all the old messages. One day they'll close down and then where will all that data be? [ 07-Jan-02 9:30pm ] Decentralization Message 5007 : Review of The Seattle Wireless Network meeting. Seattle says they're just going to build a whole parallel, free, internet. Amazing stuff about the growth of free 802.11b networks.
[ 07-Jan-02 9:05pm ] Content Wire - Who Owns XML? with reference to the RSS-RDF issue over patents.
[ 07-Jan-02 7:15pm ] XML.com: <taglines/> Anti-Awards 2001 [Jan. 02, 2002] Most excellent awards list for services to XML. And as is often the case, there's way too much unpleasant truth in the satire. I'm particularly amused by the use of a notional tag in the headline forcing me to hand encode it so it makes it through HTML and XML safely. And that the tag isn't even XHTML conformant! (shouldn't there be a space between the "e" and "/") ?
05 Jan 2002 Survey: Which version of Windows do you use? The one that's not on the list, Dave. Windows ME. Doh!
[ 05-Jan-02 4:24pm ] 04 Jan 2002 First an essay on why XML sucks.
grieve with me, blue master chickenz : Furthermore the encoding in XML encourages people to believe in 2 extremely dangerous falsehoods: Neither of these sentiments is at all correct. For each concept introduced into an XML specification, corresponding software must exist or else the specification is nothing more than a wish list. And then Mime-RPC. This has to be going for the record for shortest spec with the most power. The main spec is under 2/3 of a sheet of A4. I'm also fascinated by where this is going as it's what I was trying to achieve with CGI-RPC It's effectively saying that we don't need SOAP or XML-RPC because we already have everything we need in MIME, HTTP GET and POST. The catch I hit was that CGI only defines the request and says nothing about the format of the returned data. They've solved that by saying "just use MIME". Awesomely simple and awesomely powerful. So will the spec stay nothing more than a wish list? Or will they be able to generate enough momentum to rival the 55 odd XML-RPC toolkits and the 80 or so for SOAP. EUROTRASH: It's only money is a blog tracking, not strange scandinavian sex practices, but the Euro.
[ 04-Jan-02 8:45am ] Slashdot | Canadian Company Claims RDF Patent and CNet has an article here. The Patent Wiki is tracking the news.
[ 04-Jan-02 8:33am ] 03 Jan 2002 n/a
[ 03-Jan-02 3:15pm ] Essay on how to write unmaintainable code [thanks, ia/]
[ 03-Jan-02 8:54am ] A number of people in the Syndication arena are under patent attack for writing code that parses RDF. Excuse me while I scream and shout and rage and bang my head against the wall. A brief reading of the patents concerned suggests that it's so broad as to be useable against anyone or anything that parses XML.
'kin great. Several of the people who've received warnings are enthusiasts such as Jeff Barr at Syndic8.com and are not in a position to fight a long legal battle. It's completely absurd that they should have to. [ 03-Jan-02 8:22am ] 02 Jan 2002 Seen on a mailing list. "I am an optimist, so I only ever get unpleasant surprises."
 [ 02-Jan-02 7:53pm ] 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. [ 02-Jan-02 8:40am ] 
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