Synch the Browser.
“When Microsoft abandoned Internet Explorer development to concentrate
on fixing the browser’s security vulnerabilities, it opened the door to
the emerging RSS revolution,” says eWEEK’s Steve Gillmor.
An interesting speculative piece on how the web might be taken over by RSS technologies.
The Mozilla Foundation celebrates its first anniversary, and what a busy year it has been!
Dan Bricklin writes in Dan Bricklin’s Log: “Software that lasts 200 years.
I just posted a new essay that grew out of my exposure to the state of
Massachusetts’ work on open source and open standards, as well as from
my thinking about open source and software development business models
in general.”
“It looks like the structure and culture of a
typical prepackaged software company is not attuned to the long-term
needs of society for software that is part of its infrastructure. This
essay discusses the ecosystem needed for development that better meets
those needs.”
Read “Software That Lasts 200 Years“.
Microsoft issues seven security patches, two critical.
Software updates released today by Microsoft include fixes for
previously unknown flaws in the Windows OS, including critical holes in
the Windows Task Manager and HTML help features. [Computerworld News]
HTML Help, Task Manager and IIS 4.0 under NT 4 all get patches. Hot stuff. Get patched.
I thought anti-viruses were supposed to be the good guys. Somewhere
between installing Microsoft’s latest patch and installing Norton
AntiVirus 2004, my Windows XP laptop has lost its ability to do all
things IE-related without superfluous “Scripts are usually safe. Do you
want to allow scripts to run?” dialogs and “Internal Program Error”
dialogs. Attempting
to restore XP to a restore point failed, as it always has on the
machine — wonder what magic is involved in setting it up to work
correctly. It would be no problem if it only took out IE, as I prefer
FireFox for browsing, but it has also disabled QuickBooks and the
Norton AntiVirus user interface. Integrating their products with
Microsoft’s IE engine may not have been the smartest move. The
solution, according to Symantec’s
email support , is to completely remove NAV and reinstall IE, a process
they document in 21 pages in their email and knowledgebase.
Off to try the cure. Hope it’s not worse than the disease. Wish me luck.
Microsoft boosts partner investments. Company also reallocates one-third of its worldwide direct customer-marketing to joint-marketing with partners. [CNET News.com]
Putting its money where it’s mouth is, Microsoft is trying to lure partners who buy into its vision.
Gates: Open Source Kills Jobs [Slashdot] Steve Jobs claims reports are overblown.
I do wonder if there is any proof of those claims.
RSSAggregatorPrograms. A place to list and vaunt the better RSS aggregation programs available. [FoxProWiki]
Hit the sites and get your votes in, folks.
Very cool. Years ago, I picked up a D-Link DSB-R100
– a USB-powered radio that’s an antenna and FM tuner with an audio jack
for output. Sadly, it doesn’t look like D-Link is selling them any
more, but they only cost $29 originally, so you might be able to pick
one up cheap second-hand (there’s one on eBay today). Originally, the
software it came with only ran on Windows 98, although D-Link is
offering drivers for other Windows versions now. However, Open Source
advocates got their hands on it, and provided software for Linux and for Mac OS X. Now, I can write a simple script to capture my favorite shows and listen to them at my leisure.
Steven Black has started self-publishing an RSS 2.0 Feed for the
FoxForum wiki, using a Web Connection routine that generates the RSS
on-demand, I think. It’s hard to tell, because he’s not including
the optional “lastBuildDate” in the channel header.
Steven and I made some different design decisions in how we formed the
feeds that are educational to look at. Steve stuffs nearly the entire
content into the feed. This certainly provides a richer stream, and
means he doesn’t have to serve the content twice. On the other hand, I
prefered to serve a “light” feed, that would encourage traffic to his
site, since I didn’t want to take away from any revenue-raising efforts
he has on the site. In addition, I can easily skim the headlines
of the site, and then navigate to the topics I’d like to read, and
often contribute.
UPDATE: Steve’s modified the feed with optional parameters so you can get shorter descriptions or none at all. Bravo!
WikiRssDocumentation. Here is how the wiki software determines what to include in the WikiRss feed. [FoxForum Wiki]