Month: October 2002

another RSS-based app/service

Over a convocation of barley beverage sampling, one of the assembly raised the idea of an aggregator he could use to both collect the feeds he was interested in and then publish that as a meta-feed (Sean’s reading list). I think it’s possible to do that now.

At the same time, it would be interesting to have a way of taking the XML-RPC pings that are used to alert scripting.com and blo.gs of new items and reflect those out to the decentralized community of aggregator users. Right now, an aggregator application makes periodic requests for a new feed or in the case of the smarter ones, checks the modification time of subscribed feeds. Would a ping reflector/repeater network that took the inbound pings at scripting and blo.gs and re-sent them use less resources? I suppose if a subscriber was offline there would be some waste as the connection(s) to that user timed out.

sing a dirge for public transport, not a paean for the man who dismantled it

The Seattle Times: Nicole Brodeur: The man who could move a city

Before he died in 1964, M.D. Mills left his daughter with a small part in the city’s transportation history.

She was on board when the city’s last cable car and streetcar were driven into the barn.

“We had a big party,” she said, “and my father autographed the tickets.”

The next morning, she was up early for the first run of the city’s first trackless trolley, and the first diesel bus — her father behind the wheel.

The dismantling of street rail was the biggest mistake the progress-minded big city officials of the 40s and 50s made, followed by the routing Interstate highways through their downtown cores instead of around them as Eisenhower envisioned.

It’s all very well to talk about how nothing has been done with the monorail, how expensive it will be, etc. but what of the cost to replace what we already had? This area was linked by streetcar lines from Everett to Tukwila. Neighborhoods were platted and built at the end of streetcar lines, linking them with downtown. And we tore all that up in the name of progress.

Beginning during the 1920s, a General Motors Corp. (GM) Bus Division subsidiary purchased streetcar lines in Springfield, Ohio, Kalamazoo and Saginaw, Michigan. gm set up a corporation staffed with dedicated functionaries, funneled dollars into it, bought private and municipal transit systems around the country, and then ensured through tightly worded contracts that the transit systems could buy only GM and Mack buses, Firestone tires, and fuels and lubricants from Standard Oil of California.

from http://www.njtpa.org/

This is often alluded to by anti-transit activists as a myth: it’s anything but. It was a real court case, with [sur]real damages (a $5,000 fine for GM: what a burden that must have been), and now a festering mess for every city that sucumbed to the allure of NCL’s siren song to clean up.

It makes me mad as hell that cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Seattle were enticed to squander their infrastructure to inflate the profits of the auto cartel.
Continue reading “sing a dirge for public transport, not a paean for the man who dismantled it”

the tycoon: nature or nurture?

Forbes.com: The Psychology Of Success

“To understand the entrepreneur,” Zelaznick told The New York Times in 1986, “you first have to understand the psychology of the juvenile delinquent.”

“That’s a great quote,” responds Kelly Shaver, a professor of psychology at William & Mary College who is working in the field today. “But I think it’s really not true.”

Yeah, it is a great quote, irresistibly so. The meat of the article is in the excerpt below.

Nor, says Shaver, do the entrepreneurs seem to be devil-may-care risk takers. Only a subtle difference in the way they appreciate risk emerged. The entrepreneurs are worse at coming up with reasons they might fail. “Being able to generate more unpleasant possibilities might be making non-entrepreneurs more afraid,” Shaver says, but we don’t know that.

So far there is one other big difference between those who go into business for themselves and those who don’t, Shaver says. Entrepreneurs don’t care what other people think about them. “They really don’t care as much,” Shaver says. “They’re just happy to go ahead and do what they’re doing.”

Statistically speaking, then, [John R.] Simplot and [Bill] Gates would seem to have two things in common: They have trouble imagining failure, and they don’t care what you think.

Interesting article. It’s not surprising to see a mixture of self-confidence and charisma in the successful entrepreneur, but I’d be interested in seeing more detail on how they respond to the setbacks they face. If they can’t imagine failure, how do they deal with it when it happens? Cited in the article are such luminaries as Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs,as well as Simplot and Gates: how does the charismatic leader who laughs at disaster move past it without losing momentum?

Found in Rebecca’s Pocket

a misfeature


pkg pine version ###
pkg pine version 4.44-2
The following package will be installed or updated:
pine
curl -f -L -O ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/old/pine4.44.tar.gz
curl: (19) pine4.44.tar.gz: No such file or directory.
### execution of curl failed, exit code 19
Downloading the file “pine4.44.tar.gz” failed.

(1) Give up
(2) Retry the same mirror
(3) Retry another mirror

How do you want to proceed? [2] 3
curl -f -L -O ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine4.44.tar.gz
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Curr.
Dload Upload Total Current Left Speed
100 3396k 100 3396k 0 0 176k 0 0:00:19 0:00:19 0:00:00 169k

Any reason why we don’t just try a different mirror without asking?

fighting a monopoly with subsidized competition

Don Park’s Blog

This is very energetic thread: this comment opens things up in a new way.

Just to make a new point in the conversation, there may be an America/Europe divide opening up here. Don’s comments seem to me unarguable: if there is a choice between a commercial monopoly on the one hand, and a free alternative on the other, there will be no room for the market, and that is a bad thing. But it is not the fault of Mitch Kapor. The market vanished once the monopoly was established. The remedies Don suggests might have restored the market, but the American government, which alone could have enforced them, shied away.

So what can we do about that? Within America, the only people who can do anything are the rich and idealistic, like Mitch Kapor or Andy Herzfeld. I wish them well. But companies and governments outside America have to pay the MS tax too. And there is nothing in European culture to stop, eg the EU from subsidising open source development. Doing so seems to me a prime example of enlightened and far-sighted self-interest. An office suite, pim software, and a browser are by now pretty much as necessary for a modern economy as a road system or functioning telephones. Why shouldn’t they be developed in our universities (thus teaching generations of students practical software engineering) and then delivered free to the wider world, thus doing something to repay the taxpayer costs of student education?

Comments by Andrew Brown [alloneword at dial.pipex.com]

the buzz builds around “intertwingledness”

Mitch Kapor’s Weblog

We are trying to make a PIM which is substantive enough and enticing enough to make people want to move to it from whatever they are currently using, which statistically is probably Microsoft Outlook. I’m not going to bash Outlook here. Suffice it to say that while feature-rich, it is very complex, which renders most of its functionality moot. Its information sharing features require use of Microsoft Exchange, a server-based product, which is both expensive and complex to administer. Exchange is overkill for small-to-medium organizations, which we think creates on opportunity we intend to pursue (as well of course as serving individual users)

So when a giant like Mitch Kapor jumps into the pool, it ought to get people’s attention. A lot of what he’s planning sounds a lot like a more complete Zoe, and that sounds really appealing. The linearity of email replaced by an organizational tool to pull out the threads, automagically collect the contacts, and extract the themes and context: it’s exciting stuff.

From the sound of it, it can run alongside Outlook until it outstrips it, since it will be open source and platform agnostic. I want to see the OS X and UNIX versions. Why should the Windows crowd have all the fun?

true platform agnostic windowing?

What is wxWindows?
wxWindows gives you a single, easy-to-use API for writing GUI applications on multiple platforms. Link with the appropriate library for your platform (Windows/Unix/Mac, others coming shortly) and compiler (almost any popular C++ compiler), and your application will adopt the look and feel appropriate to that platform. On top of great GUI functionality, wxWindows gives you: online help, network programming, streams, clipboard and drag and drop, multithreading, image loading and saving in a variety of popular formats, database support, HTML viewing and printing, and much much more.

Now this is interesting. A true multiplatform GUI toolset, at long last.