...more recent posts
Mozilla M16 (milestone 16) is up. I'm downloading now and will report back.
Today (among other things) I've been checking out the icab web browser. It is Macintosh only (how often does that happen?) and very good. Quick download (1.1 mb) here. No installation, no hassles, very well behaved program (this is too rare these days.) Just download and double click and you're off to the races. This is a pre-release version, but so far it appears rock solid (unlike that other preview release browser we won't mention.) The only draw back is that javascript support is lacking at this point, so for some sites it will not work. But for this site (and most others) it functions very well. It's fast. And it doesn't need a lot of memory. I definitely recommend you check it out. The final release promises javascript and CSS level II (!) support. Possibly I'm not thinking clearly, but if feels like they (gasp) tried to make a good product rather than corner the rights to a mountain of money. Go icab.
Oh my god. Courtney Love is my new hero. Here's a transcript of a speech she gave to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference. Long, but very worth it. Here's the quick (very) paraphrased version: "Take my Prada pants - fuck it. All I need is a good back end coder."
Looks like the RIAA is seriously going after Napster now. They are going to try to force Napster to remove all major label content from their servers. And they are trying to get an injunction to force Napster to comply while the legal battle is being fought. The obvious pro-Napster argument is "O.K., sure, done!" because the content isn't on their servers (only pointers to where the content is,) but my guess is that the RIAA might win this one regardless of such technical details. The funny thing is, defeating Napster will be the worse thing for the music industry. I'm not saying they shouldn't try. It might be that they have to pursue this or be seen as weak and ineffectual, but seriously, this will spell the end for them. As long as Napster is around I doubt that freenet or gnutella could break out to mass acceptance. They are simply not as easy to use. But if all the content comes down off Napster, people will switch. And at least with Napster the RIAA has someone to strike a comprise deal with. Stopping Gnutella would involve something like shutting down the internet - probably not going to happen. So while all this pirating may well be wrong, ethically speaking, I'm not sure that arguing ethical philosophy is really what the RIAA should be doing. To me it seems like they cut a deal with MP3.com, but are drawing the line with Napster. But what they should do is cut a deal with Napster and draw the line with Freenet and Gnutella.
Here's some speculation about the future of information architecture. 100% new buzzword compliant. Yet more proof that everyone is thinking the same thing these days. (I know this is just an illusion of (my) perspective, but that doesn't make watching this convergence any less interesting.)
I lived in Montana briefly many years ago. Although I wasn't there long, it made a big impression on me. Now if I'm missing it I can get a little taste of the big sky country here. (I've seen this site before, but now with the new redesign it's really looking good.) Weblogs really are everywhere.
Right now I have the feeling that a lot of people are thinking about the same problem. It might be called de-centralized network architecture. I guess Gnutella and Freenet brought these ideas to a wide audience, and now you can hear the gears churning and the light bulbs going on all over the net. Aha! Put the client and the server together, at every node, and really banish the center. WorldOS is trying to define a framework for doing just that. This page has some details about routing messages in a network without any central nodes. God, I am so excited about this stuff. It's part web architecture problem, and part deconstructive philosophy experiment. Today the web is more like several interconnected hubs (with the huge portal/search engines at the centers.) Tomorrow's web might really be a web, with messaging propagating peer to peer (to peer to peer...) and not "up" to some authority and then back "down" to a destination.
I'm really enjoying this new site. It's a news hub (with the very well designed look of xmlhack) for the enabling web authors technology field. The two-way web is where it's at, and this site hits it square on. (If you're a little foggy on the 'two-way web' idea, you can get up to speed here, but the idea is simply about enabling everyone to be a content producer.)
Adobe has released their SVG viewer plug-in for web browsers. You can download it here. I haven't installed it yet, but I played around with the beta a few months ago, and even that seemed pretty solid, so this should be ready to go. SVG stands for scalable vector graphics. Unlike bitmap graphics (which is everything on the web except for some flash stuff,) vector graphics allow for zooming with no pixelation of the image. Once SVG content is deployed, this will really mean a step up in visual quality of the web. Also, some really cool things are going to be possible with java script. It will be a little while before this really starts to happen, but it's great that Abode is pushing this forward. (Illustrator 9.0 will export SVG.)
Lots of coverage of the data haven being set up on the strange "country" of Sealand. Time must be speeding up because last year this was part of the science fiction plot of Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. And actually, the history of Sealand reads like an alternate version of parts of that story.