Morbus has updated his entry on iCal, vCalendar, and Moveable Type. If you're an MT hack, he needs a plug-in that strips links in a post and gathers them as footnotes at the bottom of the post.

Morbus has updated his blog entry with information on the linefeed issue, his script, and the fact that Mike at NewsIsFree now has Slashdot posts running into an iCal file.

Morbus Iff over at Disobey.com got his blog iCal-ified. Subscribe to it here.

Here's wishing the best to Dave, who is in the hospital, and will remain there through this week.

John Robb thinks that k-logs (fancy word for weblogs) in the corporate environment are a good thing becuase they are archived for posterity.

AmphetaDesk continues to draw rave reviews, not least because its creator pays attention to his product's users, and is eager to listen to valid criticism if it will make the product better/faster/stronger, i.e., more useful.

AKMA blogs Forgiveness, in a deep and touching way:

Forgiving wrongs requires us to take them utterly seriously as injuries to one another and to the relationships of which we form a part. And: I tell myself, "It doesn't matter"--but I am not the one who may make that discernment. I'm not in a position to know how badly Margaret wanted pepper on her eggs, nor even of whether she ought to have wanted pepper that much. David Weinberger follows up with: My religion, Judaism, ... puts particular stress on making whole what one has ruptured through one's bad behavior. Yes, you resolve not to do it again, and yes, you don't let that behavior rend the fabric of the relationship. But you also run out to the store immediately and buy Margaret some more damn pepper. As a married man (going on 4 years now) I find that these lessons are the most valuable, and the hardest to face, and the hardest to learn. Part of marriage to me is letting go of "I want"; every day, every hour, loving the other person more than yourself. You can do this (theoretically) because the other person is doing the same. Of course, we are none of us perfect, which brings us to the essential necessity of forgiveness.

Eric S. "Got me a blog and I'm not afraid to use it" Raymond:

Gun-control boosters are virtuous crusaders animated by selfless love of children and small fuzzy things. There will come a day when all guns are banned, hallelujah, violent crime will plummet, and we can stop being embarrassed for being Americans. (link) Heh.

Ok, follow me here. Jenny at The Shifted Librarian asked why people use Google over the local library when researching.

Boy, wish our cable modem could fly.

Note to Dave - Mark may have said he does not like outliners; however, he DOES understand the power of an outliner:

I like to edit Python code in an IDE (or in Emacs in python-mode), which autoindents for me and allows me to "fold" code blocks (collapse an outline node) that I'm not currently using. He's already got what you're offering him in Radio's outliner (the one Frontier programmers all love)- but without the ability to easily edit that same script in some other text editor.

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.

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.

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.

John Robb wants a P2P photo app:

Sharing photos is still too hard. I can send photos via e-mail or post a couple to the Web, but I can't easily share whole albums with friends and family. What I want is a desktop content management system that lets me organize my photos into albums using a browser interface. I then would like to share these albums with friends and family using P2P.

Mark Pilgrim has posted an Accessibility statement for his site.

Ugh. Jim wanted to report a bug in Userland's Radio Userland, and ask a question. The reward for his trouble?

Dave writes: "We're going to make Web services work for Web developers. That means getting rid of arcane stuff that makes sense only to C programmers. "

Well, I understand where Dave is coming from, but I have to argue that without C and its practitioners of arcana, the "web" in "web services" would not exist. The xml parser in Frontier's web services support would be 100 times slower. Google - don't tell me that's not a web service! ;-) - would not exist.

Dave, you're not being fair to people who use those languages. I totally appreciate what you're doing in the scripting world. Seeing web services brought to the masses through your involvement in XML-RPC is a huge deal. We all talk about web services being about inclusive: don't lock out or insult those developers who choose to use .NET or whatever.

I mean, who cares that there are six extra lines in that script? How many lines is a common web service? 5? 100? 1000? If a developer wants to write those 6 lines (which are probably generated for him) why can't he? Is it just because it offends your aesthetic?

Dave points to my coffee cup radioFeedIcon. It was really easy to do with Conversant's Resources. I just put \radioFeedIcon\ in my template or message.

Conversant offers a LOT of options when it comes to outputting your content. Any page can have it's MIME type set, and templates (cf 1, 2) can be anything, including HTML, XML, I even tried RTF once. (No go on that one. ;-))

In the case of my RSS feed, the feed is a WeblogViewPage. The WeblogViewPage lets me create any number of ways to deliver my weblog content, in the past I've seen RSS, Avantgo, and OPML versions of Conversant weblogs using this technique.

Oh, and Dave, it's Steve, please. ;-)

Dave is making a point on Scripting News regarding IDL (or in this case WSDL) for Frontier, and other non-typed scripting languages. His point is that he cannot generate at runtime the WSDL directly from the code, as can C# or Java developers - b/c their runtimes have information about the types and numbers of parameters to a call.

This means having to handcode the WSDL for a web service in these environments, which can be a PITA if your service is at all large.

I have an idea though. One way to get around this would be to implement a meta-data header for these environments similar to javadoc. I'll use Frontier as an example.

In Frontier, scripts are outlines. Frontier already has a rich set of functionality dealing with rendering outlines into other formats, esp. HTML. You can use #directives in your outlines, which get translated into information in the symbol table when rendering the outline (or any other datatype for that matter).

So, I would propose a simple set of #directives that can be inserted into a script outline above the actual script code, as a commented block. That block can be grabbed and processed to generate whatever idl format is desired.

This is just an idea, someone with more Frontier experience could come up with a better design. I also know that Perl has Perldoc and POD (inline support for manpages), so including this information in perl scripts in a long tradition in that community.

Also, at least someone is working on WSDL support in Python (which has an easily introspected runtime). "Therefore I am planning to write a WSDL generator that will examine our exposed methods and write out a valid WSDL file."

So, I think that lack of explicitly typed data should not be the final reason not to support some sort of IDL for web services. There may be other, better reasons, but I have not seen them yet.