Congrats to Dave and Userland on releasing Radio Community Server 1.0. In my alternate universe, I'm going to replicate RCS in Python. Next millenium.

I was lucky. Jodi works at Mac retailer and Apple Specialist Re-Mac. So Charles the tech was kind enough to spend 4 hours completely disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling my beloved TiBook. Pictures coming.

So... lots going on lately, haven't blogged a bit if it. What's interesting? Userland and others have been building a new weblog API (xml-rpc and soap), and Userland released a new driver-based architecture for Radio Userland. Sounds interesting, but I don't have RU, and my organization is too invested in First Class to look at other information distribution solutions.

The Guardian reports on a possible EU reaction to the steel tariff Bush imposed. They're likely to impose tariffs only on states and districts that are key to the Republicans this next election.

Andrew Grove responds to Hollywood:

"Is it the responsibility of the world at large to protect an industry whose business model is facing a strategic challenge?" [...] "Or is it up to the entertainment industry to adapt to a new technical reality and a new set of consumers who want to take advantage of it?"

I posted yesterday a response to some comments by Doc Searls at SXSW. Jim responded, which prompted me to respond again. I think my response was one of my better explanations of my political leanings, so I've formalized it here. Seth also had some comments worth checking out.

via /. - Cory Doctorow at SXSW:

There's an amazing story about the day someone sent the first hotmail message with 'Get your free email account at hotmail.com' at the bottom to India. The traffic statistics the next morning, they quintupled overnight, on the strength of one email.

From SXSW, Cam reports:

1:38 PM: The weblogger community will route around hate speech and bigotry online. I wonder if that's true. We've seen the Google effect when webloggers start linking to something. Someone spouts some bile - can the weblog community resist linking it? That's my idea of routing around it. If we link it, it is soon rising in Google's ranks, the internet equivalent of a PR victory. So yes, maybe we can route around it, but I'm not certain.

Via Dan Brickley's RDFWeb (dev page), I found a link to this most-amazing tool for creating RDF files. RDFAuthor is a Mac OS X application that loads RDF vocabularies and lets you graphically create instances of those schema. I used it to create my new FOAF-enabled about page.

More from Cam at SXSW:

1:52 PM: Doc asks the audience how many have political opinions that are left of center. Most of the audience raises their hands. He then asks how many people are afraid to talk about it on their weblogs.

Tinderbox is a Mac OS (Classic only for now) application that lets you manage information in a multiview graphical way; including an outline view and a very cool-looking map view. Tinderbox is also a sort of content-management system and can be used to generate HTML, XML, and syndication files (RSS feeds), as well as consume RSS feeds. As soon as the Mac OS X version comes out I'm gonna seriously check this out.

NewForge is reporting that AOL is going to switch users from IE (or their own woefully behind browser) to a browser based on Gecko, the core browser engine in Mozilla. (Mozilla being the open source browser project quasi-funded by AOL/Netscape). From the article on the switch:

"With Gecko, we have control over the client software and don't have to worry about Microsoft screwing up our streaming [audio and video]," says one AOL sysadmin And later: A browser shift by AOL is going to leave an awful lot of companies that assume their Web sites only need to work with Explorer scrambling to rewrite their code so that they don't lose AOL's 30 million-plus subscribers...

For those that need it.

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Macrobyte has released one of the core components to Conversant (which runs redmonk.net), the Attribute Search Engine. If you're a Frontier developer, check this out. Seth has been a Frontier developer since like, the stone ages, and is Smart³.

Jargon file, under clue-by-four:

...your editor once heard a hacker say "I smite you with the great sword Cluebringer!"

I was wondering whether Python had the concept of interfaces, like Java does, when it hit me - what I want is a search engine that will let me search using formal analogies, they way they do in the SATs back in high school. "a is to b, as c is to ?" I was really good at those, probably because I think in the abstract very well (and was destined to be a programmer -)). Anyway, I want to ask Google "Show me anything that has the same relationship to Python that Interfaces do to Java".

Working on Mac OS X for the last year and a half, I've come to the following conclusion, again: writers of unix utilities have an interesting idea of "usability" - "Fail Hard, Fail Fast, and Fail Painfully. That way the User more quickly gains the ability to do it right."

Has anyone worked out embedding the mozilla html editor component in a webpage, in place of the usual "textarea"? This would make a lot of webapps/webloggers wery wery happy.

Wil Wheaton in this article:

"I picked dot-net because in the original creation of the Internet, dot-com meant a commercial venture, and dot-net meant a network of people, or a personal thing or organization..."

More fun with Photoshop, and a digital camera: