Snappy the Clam

This is what you get when you let your sloppy thinking and your biases harden up into a catch-phrase. No need to think about the subject anymore, you can just blithely trot out your 3 sentence rejoinder to the subject and go on your merry way. The problem is that it's never really been about asking people to work for free, though I'm not sure how asking people to do your research for you, provide you with free graphics, and write features your staff is too busy to write is different from asking people to work for free. Oh right, in your case it's working together. This guy is either suffering from total disconnect or is the biggest scam artist in the business.

Posted by John at 9:16 PM | Permalink

An article from Newsweek which will inevitably be used as more evidence of the revolutionary nature of blogging:

One of these "bloggers," Doc Searls, got an e-mail from a friend across the country, who noted that Nacchio - who at that moment was onstage complaining about how tough life was in telecom - had sold huge amounts of stocks over the past two years. Searls located a page from Yahoo Finance with the particulars and linked it to his log. Another blogger in the room read Searls's log, and copied the link to his own site, acidly commenting on the inappropriateness of Nacchio's whining. Though it's not clear how many in the room were reading the Web logs, apparently there were a lot. In any case, it seemed that the room palpably chilled toward the pugnacious executive. This is a dangerous trend for public speakers everywhere.

And a real journalist would have raised his hand and said, "Mr Nacchio, how can you continue to complain about how tough things are in telecom when you've been dumping stock for the past two years?" And then we could see what he says. And somebody could blog that. Instead we get the electronic equivalent of passing notes in class. This is what happens when you're more in love with your pen and paper than the words you're writing. A dangerous trend for public speakers everywhere? Yeah, it's going to be real hard for guys like Nacchio when that room "palpably chills" on him. Or maybe he'll just think it's the hotel air-conditioning. Give me a break. Bullshit hype like this is going to make blogging into the next push.

Posted by John at 7:02 AM | Permalink

Captain Delusional Megalomaniac is back:

Another comment. Because there are no patents on any of this stuff, it's likely that Radio Community Server will become a universal architecture for Internet-based groupware apps. HailStorm, Groove and Liberty Alliance don't stand a chance. Too encumbered by crazy intellectual property constraints.

What with this and the recent comment on how the BigCos are cruelly ignoring his LittleCo with respect to Web Services (never mind that they really mean something entirely different by the term than DW does. Yet another example of appropriate the term, mean something else by it, and then berate other cos (sorry, BigCos) because they don't include you in the discussion. In psychiatry they call this a delusion) we're probably in for some stormy weather. Major hissy fits should follow momentarily.

Posted by John at 12:48 PM | Permalink

Hey, this site is now the #1 result in Google for "snappy clam." My gradual worldwide domination of wiseass mollusk folklore continues apace.

Posted by John at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So is Winerlog now finally, completely dead?

Posted by John at 6:19 AM | Permalink

Luke gets a feed:

Not one to shirk from a challenge I had an RSS feed for my blog working within an hour or so. It's a good thing I did it, 'cause the masses were clamoring for it... don't know how they've live without it. Yeah, that's sarcastic. I don't see it getting much use. But it was fun.

Why, what's useful about it is that you can now syndicate the living bejesus out of your blog to various places like weblogs.com, or newsisfree or blogsnob or any other of the sites clamoring for fresh new voices. Hook up with them and soon you're on the A-List, man (DISCLAIMER: No such A-List, real or imagined actually exists. There is NO elitism among Webloggers. Weblog may be closer in mirror than it appears. Closed site, professional coder. Do not attempt. Your mileage may vary. Man, this is good coffee.) being read over the am oatmeal by discerning digerati everywhere.

Posted by John at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

How many questions are answered by the fact that this article on XML vs MARC for library cataloging is online as a pdf of a bad scan from a paper journal? Bad, bad, bad. I wonder how deeply Docbook has penetrated the library world for documentation? A little research may be in order.

Posted by John at 3:27 PM | Permalink

How many questions are answered by the fact that this article on XML vs MARC for library cataloging is online as a pdf of a bad scan from a paper journal? Bad, bad, bad. I wonder how deeply Docbook has penetrated the library world for documentation? A little research may be in order.

Posted by John at 3:27 PM | Permalink

Luke, where's the RSS feed, man? :)

Posted by John at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Which I intend to upgrade to this weekend. MT is just such a nice piece of software. Ben and Mena have come up with the Nokia of blog software. :)

Posted by John at 1:23 PM | Permalink

TV is not my favorite thing in the world (esp having worked in the business for a while, but the Nokia Mediaterminal looks like it could be pretty interesting - ITV, browser (Mozilla, yay!), Linux. Packed with good stuff. About the only thing I'm not seeing is Java someplace. Probably easily rectified. Nokia, if you've ever used their phones, is very very good at UI. I think of them as the Mac of cellphones. After having always had a Nokia phone, I recently played with a Motorola a bit and thought it ugly and hard to use.

Posted by John at 1:14 PM | Permalink

A few weeks ago some Cocoon guys were talking about crushing UserLand. Now there's a Cocoon weblog that uses Radio. That's the way to go.

This is the usual UserLand put-down and disrespect masquerading as appeals to playing nice. I'll start believing this sort of thing when I see someone at UserLand using a non-UserLand product to do a weblog. The only thing UserLand ever means by cooperation is basically "what mine is mine and what's yours is mine." Even the Blogger API, which may have been the one time I ever saw them make an exception to this rule, is about to be supplanted by this SuperMetaUberWeblog API, and you can bet your boots that if this thing gets implemented in the usual slaphappy way, DW will start pushing it as the "standard", and will fragment that community in precisely the same Microsoftian "embrace and extend" way he did with RSS. If I were Evan Williams, I would be very very careful here, put the additions to the Blogger API on high priority, and be on the lookout for another hissy-fit landgrab.

Posted by John at 12:55 PM | Permalink

And it would also seem that, looking at the longish post below, it's not a good idea to set auto-fill-mode when typing entries in the blogger client in emacs, because your posts will then break way too funny. Yeesh.

I am also carefully choosing the first five words of the post to make a nice title. Can you tell I'm waiting for some database stuff to happen? And why do I sound like a teenage girl on 5 double espressos? Next up: getting abbrevs to work on Win2k XEmacs. UPDATE: got abbrevs working. Man, that took all of 5 seconds and a look at the (wait for it) MANUAL.

One last thing: I have discovered MMM-mode for XEmacs and it is a godsend. I have been doing a number of Embperl pages the past few weeks, and editing embedded Perl code in HTML pages is a PAIN. Especially when indenting regions. MMM-Mode makes it posible to do all that and get Perl syntax highlighting and indentation in the midst of correctly formatted and font-locked HTML code as well, even though psgml mode does complain about the embperl delimiters. Highly strongly recommended if you use the One True Editor and have to work with mixed-mode sources.

Posted by John at 3:18 PM | Permalink

And it would also seem that, looking at the longish post below, it's not a good idea to set auto-fill-mode when typing entries in the blogger client in emacs, because your posts will then break way too funny. Yeesh.

I am also carefully choosing the first five words of the post to make a nice title. Can you tell I'm waiting for some database stuff to happen? And why do I sound like a teenage girl on 5 double espressos? Next up: getting abbrevs to work on Win2k XEmacs. UPDATE: got abbrevs working. Man, that took all of 5 seconds and a look at the (wait for it) MANUAL.

One last thing: I have discovered MMM-mode for XEmacs and it is a godsend. I have been doing a number of Embperl pages the past few weeks, and editing embedded Perl code in HTML pages is a PAIN. Especially when indenting regions. MMM-Mode makes it posible to do all that and get Perl syntax highlighting and indentation in the midst of correctly formatted and font-locked HTML code as well, even though psgml mode does complain about the embperl delimiters. Highly strongly recommended if you use the One True Editor and have to work with mixed-mode sources.

Posted by John at 3:18 PM | Permalink

And it would also seem that, looking at the longish post below, it's not a good idea to set auto-fill-mode when typing entries in the blogger client in emacs, because your posts will then break way too funny. Yeesh.

I am also carefully choosing the first five words of the post to make a nice title. Can you tell I'm waiting for some database stuff to happen? And why do I sound like a teenage girl on 5 double espressos? Next up: getting abbrevs to work on Win2k XEmacs. UPDATE: got abbrevs working. Man, that took all of 5 seconds and a look at the (wait for it) MANUAL.

One last thing: I have discovered MMM-mode for XEmacs and it is a godsend. I have been doing a number of Embperl pages the past few weeks, and editing embedded Perl code in HTML pages is a PAIN. Especially when indenting regions. MMM-Mode makes it posible to do all that and get Perl syntax highlighting and indentation in the midst of correctly formatted and font-locked HTML code as well, even though psgml mode does complain about the embperl delimiters. Highly strongly recommended if you use the One True Editor and have to work with mixed-mode sources.

Posted by John at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I took the mods out. I couldn't handle the responsibility. Besides, I want to think about what it working right might look like.

Posted by John at 2:18 PM | Permalink

Is that I did a very simple mod to
Movable Type's Blogger API implementation to allow me to distinguish
title from post by means of a string delimiter. This is not such a
great idea, because it requires the user (me in this case, but you
know what I mean) to remember to type in the delimiter, and it also
means that if I now post sans a delimiter that bad things will
happen. Where this really needs to happen is in the markup. A protocol
so to speak in the post payload. I can see where the first 5 words of
the post as default title thing came from, but I'm not crazy about it,
it almost always sounds stupid and breaks in a clumsy place. (There's
probably something of interest to be said about English word
frequencies in there, but I am not the person to say it. At least not
right this very minute.) Or perhaps the title thingie should go away
altogether. Or become optional. I read somewhere recently (Perl!
Perl! No time to Google) that people are put off by having to come up
with clever titles for every post they write. I always have a pretty
vague feeling of dissatisfaction with mine. Of course, if you want to
dissuade me of this notion, and tell me that I am just the best old
title-writer, you know where to find me. I hope. Because if you don't,
my title-writing abilities are the least of your problems.

Posted by John at 2:15 PM | Permalink

That sometimes bletcherous bad delimiter-string based crummy string-plitting hacks work. But are not solutions. Don't try this at home.

Posted by John at 2:06 PM | Permalink

And this is test content

Posted by John at 2:04 PM | Permalink

Hey, wait a minute, I am still head down on code. Perl perl perl. My mind is starting to go a little batty. S'all right. We should be completely loaded up in the db and delivered to the underresourced QA dept RealSoonNow.

Posted by John at 1:58 PM | Permalink

It is my very great hope that Boxes and Arrows can be that place. A place for designers—who think design is more than pretty font colors—to exchange ideas. A place for programmers—who realize the elegance of code means nothing if people can’t use your application—to learn to make their interface just as elegant. A place for marketers—who know that click-throughs are no good if people click away a second later—to sort out what really creates brand loyalty. A place for information architects, interaction designers, information designers and interface designers to come together with the UXs and EDs and HCIs and build a discipline that will make a difference.

You know, I don't mean to ncessarily pick on these people, but already this reeks of Designer Hubris. You'll notice that everybody she addresses -- except the designers -- doesn't so much have something to contribute as they have something they can learn. From designers. I need to have design understanding to write good software. Designers need to have engineering understanding to design within the parameters of the technically feasible. What this means is that doing mockups in Photoshop and then handing it off to HTML grunts is irresponsible, especially if you have no understanding of HTML. I know that geeks can sometimes be entirely unconscious to the nuances of design, sometimes arrogantly so, but there's more than enough typography-minutiae Flash-coolness-worshipping elitism to go round in the design camp as well.

Posted by John at 6:08 PM | Permalink

Hey, when you sign up for email notifications at Boxes and Arrows, a new site for 'Information Architects and others who focus on “user experience.”' (according to Zeldman) you get absolutely NO feedback after pressing the 'Tell Me!" button. None. Nuttin. At ALL. Page just reloads. Not even "It worked!" What kind of user experience is that?

Remember, kids, God and UI are in the details.

Posted by John at 5:52 PM | Permalink

From Megfinch:i like oxy pads because im gross and i like seeing all the gross stuff that comes off of my face.

00:19

Man, after a day of slogging through the usual hand-wringing "whither the weblog?" stuff, this seems so simple and direct. Kinda funny too. I don't think Meg and Wes and Ev and fuck all'll be blogging this from across the table at SXSW.

Posted by John at 5:37 PM | Permalink

The weblog world would never support or even tolerate orchestrated manipulation of Google, it's too valuable a resource to screw with.

How does this explain obsessively attempting to manipulate Google in order to be the first result for the John Doerr query? I sense major disconnect here...

Posted by John at 12:46 PM | Permalink

Gotta fix that title tag thing though.

Posted by John at 11:51 AM | Permalink

I also want to do some work on this page - I'm using a barely modified version of the default MT stylesheet, and I think it's time I made it my own. At least enough that I don't have to worry about overwriting the whole shebang at the next MT upgrade.

Posted by John at 11:51 AM | Permalink

Hmmmm. Doesn't handle markup very well, though (see last post), so need to look into that problem too.

Posted by John at 11:49 AM | Permalink

Incidentally...<br>I am now using bloggerbot to publish to this blog. It's working quite well. I had to make a couple mods to the script, but it's running on my home <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> box quite nicely. And seems to be working reliably. I may hack it to do <a href="http://www.moveabletype.org">MT-style</a> title tags. Need to delve a bit more deeply into that first though.

Posted by John at 11:48 AM | Permalink

The first release of the Perl CMS I've been working on in my current job went to QA today, here's hoping we get through testing OK. Now we're spending some time getting clean data into the db and dealing with the many logistical details involved in getting a software product ready for testing. Head a bit more up than before, but still fairly downish. Bug fixes as the week progresses, I am sure...

Posted by John at 10:56 AM | Permalink

So I think I have bloggerbot working ok now with an MT blog. You know, like this one. I just wish there was a provision in the Blogger API for a title field in a post.

Posted by John at 9:38 PM | Permalink

OK, this is cool. I'm using bloggerbot to post items to this blog via AIM (actually, GAIM in this case, or maybe Trillian. So far so good. seems to work great.

Posted by John at 11:57 AM | Permalink

OK, this is cool. I'm using bloggerbot to post items to this blog via AIM (actually, GAIM in this case, or maybe Trillian. So far so good. seems to work great.

Posted by John at 11:56 AM | Permalink

OK, this is cool. I'm using bloggerbot to post items to this blog via AIM (actually, GAIM in this case, or maybe Trillian. So far so good. seems to work great.

Posted by John at 11:56 AM | Permalink

Via Kottke: a Visual Calendar. Each day is a pic that links to the blog entry for that day. Verrrrrrry nice. Reminds me of the Sesame Street skits where they'd count while showing the numbers on buildings and bridges and the like (God, I cannot write today (some people'd say ever (hmmm, the paren depth is getting positively Lispian)))

Posted by John at 4:25 PM | Permalink

Poor Dave. We never write, we never call.

Oh for codsakes, get over yourself already. Maybe you need your own magazine. Weblog Life. Oh wait, you are your own magazine already. Are weblogs ever going to be about anything but the revolutionary nature of weblogs again? I'm starting to think that it was a lot more revolutionary before it started being almost entirely self-referential, which in a largley post-modern world may be impossible, I realize, but Jesus. Most of SN has become one long ad for UserLand products, a sort of constant infomercial complete with washed-up former MTV veejay.

If I have any hope for weblogs at all to get over the Kevin Kelly tone, it's been through a link I got from feelinglistless on MetaTalk, which loads a random weblog. There's a damn lot of blogs out there, and most of them, thank God, are being written by people who aren't only interested in the revolutionary nature of weblogs. Who are actually writing about what's happening in their lives. I find this stuff much more refreshing than the endless rounds of navel-gazing self-congratulation rampant in whatever may have passed for the "A-list" long ago, before the A-list took delivery on their Black Helicopters and became the new generation of pundits. If you're going to SXSW, you probably think about this stuff too much. And I'm probably talking about it too much. Nuff said.

Posted by John at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well, as it turns out, the entry below, originally entered into my Palm on Thursday, carried (I assume) no date information, because when I remembered to sync the pda this afternoon, the entry, which is the one imediately preceding this one showed up as just the next entry. I had been thinking it might show up further back, but no.

Posted by John at 2:52 PM | Permalink

I'm sitting waiting foa a meeting to start, and thought I'd test this interface (Palm) again.

since this won't actually post till later when iget home and sync, it'll be interesting to see where this shows up in the postings.

Posted by John at 2:18 PM | Permalink