Do you belong to lots of Yahoo! Mailing lists? Do you have a Yahoo! account? Then go to "Account Info, Edit your marketing preferences." You will probably want to set all the options to NO. You have about 55 days to do this, before they start spamming you.

Deaddog's doo-wop rarities I just got a shipment of fantastic doo-wop and swing rarities from Deaddog music, a microlabel bringing back old 78s and singles. ... I have one other disk of his stuff, but most of his vast catalog of 78s is lost to history.[thanks, bOing bOing] I wonder if there's a thing like the Gutenberg Project, but instead of digitizing and archiving, doing the same for early recorded music. If there isn't there should be. A quick Google turned up the Mutopia project to digitize music scores, but I'm thinking of a library of MP3s of old out of copyright 78s for free download.

I can't help but be amused by a post at Scripting News talking about Jabber in appreciative terms, that is followed four paragraphs later by a piece decrying the hype around Open Source. Last time I looked, Jabber, just like those other successful software projects such as Apache, Linux, PHP and many others was Open Source.  As usual, everybody's right at the same time as everyone's wrong. It just depends on which side of the argument you want to be and what point you're trying to argue. It's undenyably hard to make a living out of programming in an Open Source stylee. But that doesn't seem to be stopping a large number of programmers churning out code because they've got an itch to scratch.

The kind of website that really brightens up your day. s o r t a k i n d a . c o m "Jesus, always with you" was perfect as long as you're not too easily offended...

Want to see what music I like? Check this out.  [from, Scripting News]. Walk into almost anybody's house, saunter over to the record collection and surreptitiously scan the titles. Even if they lie about their age, you can immediately tell in which era they were 17-22. This is something I've never quite understood, because even though I still have all the records I bought then, I never stopped buying new ones and listening to new musics. Grateful Dead Live in '72 and Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid sits cheek by jowl with The Kruder and Dorfmeister Project and The Thievery Corporation. Anyway regardless of cheap shots about people's taste in music, it's nice to see the return of "Ourfavoritesongs". Hmm, that doesn't look right? That must be the wrong link into the mad scientist's lab ...

Dan blogging PC Forum : [Intel's] Barrett sees Moore's law and its equivalents lasting "at least 15 or more years more" with current technology. "No question about that.", Like he says Wow! Think about that. 2^10 times as much processing power as we have now. The equivalent of a 2048 GHz Pentium 4. Now will we have an equivalent increase in bandwidth? 512Mbps broadband?

The Internet is Missing A cluetrain.

The lack of addresses in IPV4 means that most systems can only be secondary participants without a public presence.

The .COM mania has hijacked the DNS and we no longer have the ability to maintain a stable presence and the net is guaranteed to unravel as registrations expire. And, worse, the gets scrambled as they names get reassigned.

The lack of encryption has encouraged meddling by those who second-guess the content, whether in a misguided attempt to help or a misguided attempt to have an Internet free of disruptive innovation.

When elephants dance We, The Consumers get trampled on. Tight analysis of the The Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act also known as the CBDTPA and previously as the SSSCA.

One of those conferences has just happened that just everyone has to be at. The PC Forum. Doc writes,  Here's how thick the wi-fi is here: I'm posting this from a stall in the men's room. There are two other stalls here. I hear keyboards tapping in both of them (I think... hard to tell).  How much you wanna bet that this gets quoted more than anything I'm writing today that's actually meaningful?  [Later...] Rafe Needleman just told me, "You're full of shit." and later, Nearly everybody here, it seems, has a laptop, and is listening with their fingers. I'm imagining a nation of court stenographers... (I just did a count.. it's about a third.)

This is all very techy cool and next minute, but I can't help but think that there must be a better way to get instant reporting. It's just a shame that real time web casting is so bandwidth, processing and money intensive.

What is it about Gnomes? Here's the Gnome Liberation Front (GLF)

Dan Gillmor: Bleak future looms if you don't take a stand : So, here's my line in the sand. I've bought my last CD from any major label or independent label that puts copy protection on any of its music. Or supports and pushes for absurd copyright protection legislation.

So that's no more CDs then. Is the slogan "Stop buying music, it just encourages them"?

Currenty listening to Timo Maas : Loud. on Perfecto Records.Which is great except that it's published by EMI.

Starbucks as clueless as KPMG? Starbucks joins the KPMG Memorial Hall of Cluelessness for sending a registered lawyer-letter to the community site Backwash demanding that they remove links to the giant coffee-chain because Starbucks believes that linking to them without permission is a copyright violation. Starbucks needs a clue.Link [thanks, bOing bOing] Quoted verbatim.

It's a link, It's a link! So sue me! Bwahahahaha. I'm not in the USA so I'm not in your jurisdiction! What is it about companies that they want to stop people linking to them? Don't they know how Google works? Anyway, I never did like their coffee. I'd rather go to Coffee Republic or Costa. But having seen what Spiders do on Caffeine, maybe I should cut down.

Google Relists Operation Clambake Update from yesterday's blog. The story about Google and CoS got blogged, linked, covered, commented on and announced by huge numbers of private and public websites. It would appear that Google has either allowed clambake back in to the listings, or perhaps is unable to exclude it without excluding big parts of the web. Any road up. Do a google search for "Scientology" and Operation Clambake - The Inner Secrets Of Scientology comes up number four. 

Anti-Copy Bill Hits D.C. : The completely absurd SSSCA has been renamed the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA). What a fine piece of Orwellian double think. "Promotion" indeed. but changing it's name doesn't make it any less absurd. Just so we're clear here, it will mandate that any electronic device that can play copyrighted digital media will have to contain US government approved anti-piracy hardware or software. In theory of course, this only applies to goods sold in the USA. Hah! I don't you need any hints as to exactly why this is absurd. Just try thinking about where these goods are made, Linux, Government approval, hacker challenges, digital to analog to digital recording and so on. and on. Then you might want to ask who provided funding and campaign money to the key backers of the bill. Hollings, Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisana) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California).

It would seem that like the US Steel industry, the media barons are spending more time these days on lobbying than adding value.

Google censored by the Church of Scientology and the DMCA  Sez Google: "We removed certain specific URLs in response to a notificationsubmitted by the Religious Technology Center and Bridge Publicationsunder section 512(c)(3) of the the Digital Millenium Copyright Act(DMCA). Had we not removed these URLs, we would be subject to a claimfor copyright infringement, regardless of its merits." (emphasis mine). Here are (some of ) the allegedly infringing links: www.xenu.net/  www.clambake.org/  home.kvalito.no/~xenu  [thanks, bOing bOing] Many years ago there was anon.penet.fi, an anonymous remailer in Finland that was shut down as a result of actions by the CoS. There have been numerous cases of harassement through Usenet by them. And now this. Enough already.

Microsoft Says XML Web Services Tool for Java Nears Completion : but Microsoft cautions that applications and services built with Visual J# .NET will run only on the .NET framework and will not run on any Java virtual machine. I have to wonder why anyone would choose to program in a Java that was not cross platform. I guess if you need to cross train, then it would mean you wouldn't have to learn C# to work in an MS environment. But isn't J# always going to be 6 months behind C#? And if you're not in an MS environment, it's apparently irrelevant.

If I wanted to read the NY Times, which I don't, I'd read it via RSS.

You gotta love it. spamradio does text to speech on all the spam they receive and then broadcasts it with a chillout/trance background.

One of the mildly irritating things about XML-RPC is that it doesn't support named parameters directly. This makes it slightly more awkward to have standard function calls with optional parameters. But there's a simple fix for this which is to encase all the parameters into a struct in which case all the data is held in name-value pairs. I think this is actually a strength of XML-RPC because it provides two ways of encoding parameters at a very small cost in extra complexity for one of them.

In the last few days, we've seen another outburst of creativity among the various people thinking about a universal weblog API. The push to build a replacement and extension to the original Blogger API had already thrown up 3 or 4 attempts. Now Userland has thrown another into the ring and done so with an implementation as well as a spec. This has also caught the attention of Ev and so might easily find it's way into Blogger and Blogger Pro. At which point the sheer weight of deployment will make it a de facto standard that everyone else has to support as well. Interestingly, most of the new attempts including the one from Radio holds most (but not all) of the parameters in a struct. This is a good thing but if you're going to use a struct for some of them, why not use it for all?

Which is all well and good except that the original API had a number of highly Blogger Specific features and was brittle as it used plain parameters. And it's pretty easy to see that every attempt so far has the same problem that some aspect is unique to the specific system that the author is really trying to support. It doesn't feel like any of the authors have completely taken on board the idea that this API should be universal across as many different blog system architectures as possible.

Then there's the social problem of how standards like this are developed. Very occasionally a standard is developed and succeeds as a group effort. But in almost all other cases, a single (more or less benevolent) dictator in the form of an individual or organization drives the standard forward and makes it happen. So we have Ev and Blogger creating the first. And Dave and Userland creating the second. The rest of us can scream and shout and moan that they got it wrong and we may think that they have a duty to listen and take our comments on board. But in reality, there is no duty. The standard will succeed or fail on a combination of it's merits and the extent of the deployment. We may not like this, but it's the way it is. 

So why am I saying all this? Well I wrote a Blogger API for Drupal and Drupal specific extensions and I use the Drupal version every day to communicate between a Delphi desktop blog editor and this blog in PHP. But frankly, I put no effort into promoting it beyond the Drupal community and in retrospect I got the API wrong. It works for me and gets my job done, but like everyone else I made it specific to the system I wanted to use.

I suspect the window has now closed for a while and the chances of producing an elegant and global standard are pretty slim. No matter how flawed the Blogger and Userland versions are, they've got the critical mass of deployment. But that doesn't stop me thinking about it and trying to come up with a solution in my head. I'm just not sure I've got the energy or time to justify and argue the case on the weblog-devel mailing list.

Enough ranting, here's some pointers.

Put everything in a struct and use named parameters. If a server gets a param it doesn't know, ignore it.

Have a bare minimum of primary function calls. I reckon you only need 4
setBlog() If you supply a postid, update, if you don't insert.
getBlog() Return a complete post
delBlog() delete a post identified with a postid
listBlogs() return a list of postids.

Use type string everywhere. You can't hope to get any commonality on the exact format of things like postid.

A post only has three elements. These are almost common across all systems. But if a system doesn't support one just ignore it. And if one is not supplied then auto-generate it.
Postid Every system has a unique id for identifying a post
Title If there's no title and you need one just come up with a heuristic to use the first n words of the body
Body  self evident.

Every system uses a userid/password to identify the user so we better put those in.

Quite a lot of systems allow multiple blogs. by no means all, but enough to make it worthwhile including something for this. So we better have BlogId as well.

So that leaves us with:-

setBlog(struct(userid, password, blogid, postid, title, body)) returns postid; //postid=0 for failure
getBlog(struct(userid, password, blogid, postid)) returns struct(postid, title, body);
delBlog(struct(userid, password, blogid, postid)) returns boolean;
listBlogs(struct(userid, password, blogid, count, [start])) returns array(postids);
//return the last count postids, unless start is specified in which case return count postids starting at postid=start.

So there you have it. Simple, elegant, minimal. Everything else is an extension for a specific system. Guess I better go and write some code now.

So RCS is free. Except of course, that it runs on Frontier or Radio which aren't. Is this the Razor-Razorblade business model?