Archive | 2003

According to Mythography, “in Greek mythology, Charybdis was a deadly whirlpool personified as a female monster.”

A great fear for web surfers is that site you start surfing, and you can’t get out. Just one more picture. Just one more link. Just one more
entry.

So went my Sunday, at a site that Laura found, describing the joys of moving into and rehabbing a Chicago bungalow, filled with the treasures and… interesting items of earlier residents. Very entertaining reading. Don’t start reading unless you have some time to spare.

Oops, Dave Barry Does It Again

agdv writes “After the success of his first article
providing the phone number of the American Teleservices Association,
and the ensuing reaction by said organization, columnist Dave Barry
attacks again, providing the ATA’s new phone number. Read all about it! (the number is 317-816-9336, long distance charges may apply).”
[Slashdot]

An interesting argument about music sharing, or stealing, depending on
your viewpoint. For the record, I buy the music I enjoy. But I listen
to music I haven’t bought. On the radio. Live. On a loaned CD. Or on
MP3s. Many artists find success by giving away their music, or some of
it, on the internet, and making money from concerts and selling CDs
themselves. The system for promotion of “pop” music is missing huge
opportunities.

As a copyright owner, I don’t like to think that people gain benefit
from my hard work without me receiving compensation. On the other hand,
those who never see my work don’t know it’s there. And it seems that,
at least for some, letting your works be found out there leads to
profits. It’s worked for Janis Ian, and for Baen Books. It’s surely not
a black and white issue.

“Where Nobody Knows You’re a Music Thief.
What’s remarkable about the controversy over music sharing is not how
many people are involved, but rather their fervent rationalizing. By
Daniel Akst. [New York Times: Technology]”

Time for a new install. I’ve been working some of the release
candidates for OpenOffice.org for a while now, and they seem stable.
The release version came out this week.
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1065147894.html

Final Matrix Set for Synchronous Release [Slashdot]

An analysis by Perseus
Development Corporation says that blogs are abandoned at a very high
rate, not surprising for free services. Like many free, cool internet
things, folks with free time, little cash and curiosity (teenagers) are
the primary users — the scouts of what will be cool later, risking the
equivalent later embarassments of polyester leisure suits. I wouldn’t
be surprised if there are similar statistics for free mail servers,
too. Unsurprisingly, Andrew Orlowski of the Register paints this in the
worst light possible.
It’s an amusing read, if you don’t mind reading slanted, biased and
bitter opinion mixed with the news. He writes well, at least.

My bad, partially. I called the FoxCentral.Net RSS feed as broken. In
fact, it seems to work fine in Internet Explorer, just not in Mozilla.
The line in question is:

<table border="1" style="border-collapse:collapse" bgcolor="#FF0000">
<tr>
<td style="color:white;font-weight:bold;font-size:8pt;cursor:hand" 
onclick="window.navigate('foxcentralRssFeed.fc')">RSS</td>
</tr>
</table>

where it is depending on the window.navigate function. Don’t know why they just don’t make it an anchor tag.

The link for the RSS feed is http://www.foxcentral.net/foxcentralRssFeed.fc if you want to access it directly. The authors will still need to do a little tweaking to get a feed that validates in FeedValidator though the Radio validator thinks it’s okay.

Congratulations to FoxCentral.Net at announcing their new RSS feed.
However, while the authors created the button, the link is not yet
active. I hope they also consider RSS auto-discovery, which will make it far easier for automated search engine bots to discover and register the RSS feed. Here’s the announcement:
“FoxCentral.Net available as RSS feed.
FoxCentral.Net can now be loaded into any RSS compliant news feed
reader. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is becoming a standard format for
Web sites to publish their content using a common simple XML format
that can be aggregated easily in various news feed readers. To access
the RSS feed, visit the FoxCentral.Net site and click on the RSS link
in the sitebar. You can use this URL with any RSS news aggregator. [FoxCentral]”