OJR First Person: "Online News Users Have to Pay" Interesting rant about the state of online news.

puppet poppy pipeline regime. No comment, no opinion, just a link to a rant from someone saying I'm Mad As Hell and I'm not going to take it any more. And in the process describing a fairly coherent conspiracy theory about western states and in particular the USA.

10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001 (Alertbox Nov. 2001) : We saw a greatly increased emphasis on the intranet as a collaboration tool that lets employees exchange information through discussion groups and other features. The intranets also emphasize communication by encouraging departments to post news and other information of interest to different groups. [from UseIt] Also in here. One of the key ways to make it easier for average employees to contribute to the intranet is to use a good content management system (CMS). Instead of having everybody design their own web pages, a CMS handles the mechanics of posting and lets people focus on their content and message. I'm pretty cynical about Jakob (Guevara) because too much of his advice is self evident, and frankly the design of his own website sucks. But this one's right on.

This suggests to me again that the combination of /code, blogs and RSS news has a place in Intranets. Drupal is almost ideally placed for this, combining the whole thing into one codeset. Just add Apache and MySQL and it's almost complete. The one thing missing is a single extra stage in the submission queue to allow a manager role to vet submissions.

OK, Here's the deal. Take your 500 CDs and rip them to MP3. Take an old 486/DX120, install a SoundBlaster 16 card in it, put an old 3com 3c503 NIC into it, find a cheap 20gb HD, scrounge an old 36X CD player, install SuSE Linux, trot down to Goodwill and find a nice Kenwood 75 watt-per-channel stereo amplifier for $29.95 and a pair of bookshelf speakers for $7.95. So, for about $120 you have a complete Linux system with 20gb of music on it. Run it from an rlogin session running mp3blaster but, because it also runs Apache, set it up to broadcast music to every computer in the house. Export an X11 session to listen to internet radio and control it on any X/box. Set up SMB and NFS shares to allow the machine to be used as a file server AND music server. Run a Grokster client to up and download music from the 'net. ssh into the firewall, rlogin to the mp3 box, and wake your kids up in time for school from 1,000 miles away. Then run a Handspring or a Compaq with a wireless card and headphones for portable music round the house.  [thanks, Slashdot]

I hasten to add that the story above wasn't me. Like DiveintoMark says, "A lot of effort went into making this effortless".

iButton: Digital Jewelry An insanely great product. 64K of Java powered memory in something not much bigger than a watch battery.

SiliconValley.com - Dan Gillmor's eJournal : Associated Press: FBI Develops Eavesdropping Tools. At least one antivirus software company, McAfee Corp., contacted the FBI on Wednesday to ensure its software wouldn't inadvertently detect the bureau's snooping software and alert a criminal suspect. Dan quite rightly calls for a ban on using McAfee's products. But how real is this? Have the FBI really developed a keystroke logging Trojan? I wonder what the EU would have to say about this?

I've just finished a complete Blogger xmlrpc API for Drupal. Full documentation and a download can be found at http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=241 This post is coming to you via this system. It was quite a challenge finding all the documentation for the Blogger API, but I've noted all the URLs in the docs. I've also added a set of Drupal specific API functions. These are more or less equivalent, but leave out the parameters that don't make sense in Drupal. 

TouristGuy meets All your Base Blogdex #1 with a bullet.

Continuing an occasional series of Guevara sitings, here's Jakob Guevara on a T shirt from those nice people at NTK. Now who's up to doing a Linux Penguin Guevara?

Good morning Workers of the Web -- Unite!   [via Scripting News] Interesting to see who's blogging on the day after thanksgiving. Don't   they have a life?

This is the first test of my desktop blogging tool. Coming to Drupal via XML-RPC

Whoopee! It Worked!

Cher Guevara Excellent!

The Infinite Matrix has re-appeared with some sponsorship and acivity, including Bruce Sterling's weblog.

Levitated Daily Source : flash 5 open source modules | computational organisms | science | art | mathematics Totally awesome eye candy.

Dave Winer's Scripting News Weblog : Julian Bond's Celebrity Blogmatch. I'm not sure how it works, but if I say something about weblogs here, I guess it shows up over there. Is it based on RSS? Julian says not yet, but sooon. Can his server handle the flow? Will his page rise to the top of Daypop? What do the opinions of two bloggers matter in this crazy world we live in? And will the wienerboys show up? So many questions. BTW, the correct motto is "It's even worse than it appears

It's not quite like that. Blogmatch is a stand alone system. I had to do this because not every celebrity blogger generates RSS or can create a blog just for the match. I do create RSS from the words that get written. It's a shame, because the bloggers will have to use my tool. But it is a full function blogging environment. Behind it I've now got the administration to control it and setup new blogmatches. I can create a blog match that is in "planning" which is a sandbox for the participants to play in. Just before it goes live we clear it out and begin.

Can the server handle the flow? Probably not. Let's see. I fully expect it to crash if it gets slashdotted.

Will I get to the top of Daypop? Very possibly.

The concept is like this.

Run weekly blog matches.

Get two ego-driven bloggers to compete.

Get two noisy, sarcastic commentators to discuss progress

Let the audience vote on who's winning and shout from the sidelines.

And that's it. But then Dave's RSS query suggests an alternative way of doing it. Clearly I'm going to have to go away and write version two...

CMSWatch: Interview: The Case for Personal Web Publishing : Inside of corporations a weblog can be used in a knowledge management or market intelligence function. Every work group seems to have someone on the team who just sends links around via email to all the other people he or she works with. In an environment like that if you give them a weblog and all the sudden the resources start really working for you. Pretty soon everyone wants a weblog to share a resource they found and to annotate useful ways in which that resource can be used by the team. This is a pretty decent interview with Dave Winer, mostly about the similarities and use of weblog systems as a CMS in corporations. The bit I've pulled out is something I'm convinced of. The combination of Weblogs, Slashdot style community news and RSS new syndication is something that I'm sure has a place in intranets.

Celebrity Blogmatch is almost live. See the demo here.

Slashdot | Web Services - More Secure or Less?. Why are "Web Services" and "Security" so linked together and why do people see this as a problem? We know how to use SSL. We know how to do Authentication across the web. We know how to build VPNs across the internet. Web Services are just something we do once these controls are in place. The moment you write a CGI, you're exposing functionality to the outside world and a potential security risk. Web Services are no different.

This is what we need. Asia Carrera's (who? No lying now, you don't know who this is, right?) Pr0n Star Unreal Tournament skins. Oh yes. It seems that you're favourite pair of silicone implants is actually a Grrrl. Bless.

The Register : Researchers probe Net's 'dark address space' William Gibson wrote about a mythical Internet subset called the "Walled City" It was a publically accessible group of sites that had no links to the outside world. This could be built with a firewall but now we discover that 5% of the internet address space is inaccessible because no routers link to it. And that some of this is used to launch black hat attacks by hijacking a router, opening a link, doing the attack and then closing the link. This effectively leaves no trace because subsequent investigation leads to a blank wall. There's something slightly scary about this.