At last, a use for web services,  Query a Quake 3 Arena Server and return rules and connected players.

Most excellent music and video on the perils of Consumption and the Branding of America.

Giants forging Web services consortium - Tech News - CNET.com : Web Services Interoperability Organization due to be launched on Wed by MS, IBM, BEA and Intel.

Integrity  A community I'm on have a couple of rules.

Own your words. Meaning that when you publish and hit the send key, your words go out to other people and you can't retract them. Even if you delete the post on a blog or send a kill message to Usenet, people may have already read them.  Your words are out there so you better accept responsibility. Sometimes anonymity is necessary and useful, but generally you are traceble so assume there is no anonymity.

Assume good will. The written word is easily misunderstood and imperfect for conveying meaning and thoughts. If you think you've been flamed, assume that you haven't been and the apparent slight is in your own interpretation and not in the sender's intent. Even when people apparently go on the attack, they're trying to tell you something. Only rarely is it malicious so don't jump to the conclusion that it is.  

These are a pretty good code to live by and useful to remember when communicating on the internet.

As another example, as moderator of email mailing lists I only have one rule. No personal attacks. If a conversation looks like it might be degenerating into this, both parties get one warning that if they persist they'll be chucked off the list. I've never had to do this. The end result is some quite highly emotional discussions, but all taken in the spirit of "Assuming good will".

Here endeth the lesson.

Why settle for the lesser of two axes of evil, when you can have the greater evil of Chthulhu.

I blog, therefore I am [BBC] Jeesh! Who comes up with these headlines? I used to work in the B2B industry and I got sick to death of articles entitled "To B2B or not 2B". Can't anyone write a decent lede any more? 

Blogging your way to knowledge : Why hasn't Yahoo! brought out a blogging service? and It annoys me that my news headline feeds are limited to Yahoo approved publications. Why can't I include Slashdot headlines, or headlines from my favourite blogs? NewsIsFree is presently leading the way in this type of news customisation. Good questions.

New BT boss to halve cost of broadband access. Wholesale cost to drop from 30 pounds per month to 15 pounds. That's more like it. I wonder what the tipping point is? 10 pounds?

Cube is a first person shooter. Unlike most, it supports in-engine multi-user editing of the game world (no precalculation is needed, so all changes are immediately visible), and a rendering engine that can automatically adjust the level of detail and efficiently manage complex views. [thanks, sweetcode] I wonder if this could be the basis for a shared 3D space.

Postscript: The nasty site crossed a new boundary today, and we cut the cord. It wasn't my decision solely, everyone at UserLand agreed. It's time to say goodbye. Enough is enough.   [thanks! Scripting News] . So Winerlog is gone. And I'm left with this nagging question. What did they do? And of course, Where will they turn up next?

That'll be http://winerlog.weblogger.com/ then.

Most excellent use of tech to promote community. A coffee pot linked to a web site and rf transmitter. When the coffee's ready co-workers get pinged and encouraged to gather round. The best bit is the remote coffee aroma devices that emit lovely coffee smells when they get the ping. [thanks, bOing bOing]

Dave W writes: ...they'd know that hierarchical models with very tight scripting connections offer more performance and a higher level application model. Relational databases are good for factories and stores. Object databases map the model of the Web. Another puzzle for us. What does he have against relational databases? Did he get bitten by one once? I think we should be told. Yet again, this all seems curious to me. There's an awful lot of web sites out there built with PHP, Perl and Python built on top of MySQL. Also interesting that an increasing numbers of Mac OSX machines have MySQL pre-installed along with the scripting languages I've just mentioned. Now how many machines and web sites have an object or hierarchical data store as the back end?  Of course, differences in installed base don't actually constitute any sort of argument, but Dave does seem to be listening to a different drummer here.

Note, there are no feral "H"s in this post

Interview with Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin.org on (among other things) the future of coummunity driven news sites.

I'm strangely amused by the idea of a mailing list that rejects all mail from MS Email readers. And more amused by inserting headers that deliberately make the mail awkward or impossible to read on MS Email readers. [thanks, Slashdot]

When Boobs Attack! Life imitates the classic 70s soft-core B-movie, "Deadly Weapons" starring (!) Chesty Morgan.

British Group Calls for Internet-Free day. Today, heh-heh! Already I'm getting flack from the wife...

Serious work getting done on SOAP toolkit interoperability including WSDL interop. SOAPBuilders Interoperability Lab

Excellent .Net for newbies article written from the POV of Mac programmers. wiltgen.net | articles | A .NET primer for Mac users :

it includes this piece from IBM.

Web services
The best definition of web services that I could find was written by Doug Tidwell of IBM:
Web services are a new breed of web application. They are self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the web.
Web services perform functions, which can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes. A simple web service might provide stock quotes or process credit card transactions.
Once a web service is deployed, other applications (and other web services) can discover and invoke the deployed service.

For lovers of conspiracy theories everywhere, There is no Bovine Illuminati  Fnord.

An alternative weblog update ping serviceblo.gs. Similar to weblogs.com