Month: March 2004

is this a fair way to fight?

Tim Bray, newly-minted Sun employee, alludes to a variation of the Valerie Plame affair, perpetrated by MSFT.

ongoing · Sunny Boy:

Personal disclosure: In 1997, as a result of signing a consulting contract with Netscape, I was subject to a vicious, deeply personal extended attack by Microsoft in which they tried to destroy my career and took lethal action against a small struggling company because my wife worked there. It was a sideshow of a sideshow of the great campaign to bury Netscape and I’m sure the executives have forgotten; but I haven’t. I should tell that story here sometime so that should my readers discern an attitude problem regarding Redmond, it ain’t because I work at Sun. Also, it has a funny ending.

He also mentions that he knows some smart, honest and ethical folks at MSFT: while I don’t doubt there are some, I would love for someone/some entity to poach as many of them as they could and set up shop with all that talent and none of the baggage.

vaporware?

Microsoft Notebook: Eyes are on Longhorn:

Microsoft has disclosed details about Longhorn so far in advance of its release in part to ensure that software developers are able to release programs in conjunction with its debut. The downside is that consumers, seeing what’s on the horizon, may be less willing in the meantime to upgrade to Windows XP from older versions of the operating system.

“Microsoft may have spoken about Longhorn far too early,” said Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research.

Michael Cherry, Directions on Microsoft’s lead analyst for operating systems, drew a comparison to automobile sales. “Everybody knows the new models come out in the fall,” Cherry said. “If it’s July, are you really going to rush out and buy a new car, or are you going to wait and see what the new ones look like?”

And earlier in the same article:

Although the company isn’t saying when the next major version of Windows will be released, analysts point to a number of signs that suggest the release is at least two years away. For one thing, many people in the Windows team have been focusing on a security-related “service pack” update to be released for Windows XP later this year.

Lots of opportunity for other vendors to build in features that either co-opt Longhorn or compete against it . . . .

iTunes subscription?

They already have the celebrity playlists, which are interesting, but now (well, as of a week ago) Apple’s music store is offering their own sampler: 15 tracks from recent releases.

buy_this_list

And as it happens, I have $15 sitting in my account @ the iTunes Music Store, too . . . .

an RSS feed I want

I want to be able to view the books I have

* checked out
* placed on hold

for all the libraries to which I belong. This would require some authentication, but I suspect that’s not a showstopper.

As it stands now, to check the books I have out (20-30 per week/library visit cycle), I have to:

* login to the library’s website/authenticate
* request a listing from my account,
* and then write down the names (printing them would be wasteful).

Why not an RSS feed? Then I can just call out the names and let my little bookworms go gather them.

I shouldn’t grumble: my two local[1] libraries[2] already do so many things right (they have websites, of course, but also allow you to query their databases, order books, request purchases, etc., including emailing you when ordered books come in).

fn1. Seattle Public Library

fn2. King County Library System

what happened in Madrid?

I have heard a lot of commentary and analysis about this, so what makes me think I have anything to add? Like that’s ever stopped me before . . .

The timing isn’t just a matter of being 6 months off from the September 11 attacks. If ETA was the culprit, that would strengthen the hand of the ruling party, and with an election coming up 4 days after this attack, that could be significant. But if someone else, like Al Queda, were the ones responsible and it’s considered retribution for Spain’s support of the Iraq war, then the anti-war side may have an edge.

What if ETA took a leaf from Al Queda’s book and used their style of attack? Of course, the goal of terrorism is to call attention to one’s cause and they have denied responsibility so far. So that’s doubtful . . .

This may mean Al Queda is not as moribund as we’ve been told and that they’re willing to strike outside their traditional targets but with their traditional methods.

What I haven’t heard referenced is any reference or link to the historical Islamic presence in Spain: it was a part of an Arabic, later Islamic, empire for seven centuries.

brutal anniversaries

PapaScott: Death in Madrid:

Death in Madrid

es311

At 7:40 this morning my commuter train had pulled into the main station in Hamburg, and I was on my way to the U-Bahn to go work. At the same time in Madrid, 190 commuters in Madrid were killed by at least 10 explosions at 3 commuter stations. I can only think of the words from the memorial service for the victims of 9/11. To paraphrase for todays events… this was not 190 people being killed, it was 1 person being killed, 1 person with home, family, friends, 1 person being killed…. 190 times.

While I realize that it is necessary to find those responsible, be they from the ETA or al Qaeda, but on the other hand I find the speculation on which group is responsible to be somewhat cynical. Does it really matter to the victims for which supposed cause they were killed? Doesn’t the attention given to the perpetrators and their motives give them a false legitimacy and encourage similar attacks in the future? At this moment, I would rather think of the father and husband who, unlike me, was not able to step off the train and onto the platform at 7:40 this morning, than about the twisted reasoning and motives of those who killed him.

Now the world has twice-annual reminders of the handiwork of terrorists. Scott’s words echo Mrs Thatcher’s resonant phrase “the oxygen of publicity”: the only thing of hers I can recall agreeing with.

(sorry for the redundant quoting, but I couldn’t find just one quote: one has to decide when to stop splitting a diamond.)

<update> the other eerie resonance is that the attacks were 911 912 days apart . . . . (so the resonance is lost, now that I have done the math correctly (it would have been right in a non-Leap Year))

[via Ton]

tallying subscribers, redux

Following up on an earlier post and something of Chad’s on the same topic, I decided to actually keep track of subscribers.

The best I can come up, given no registration, cookies, or other unique identifiers, is this:
egrep '(xml|rdf|atom)' httpd-access.log | awk '{ print $1 }' | sort -un | wc -l

That works out to 53 or so. I’ll run this at a few minutes before midnight (since logs get rotated then). The result will appear in the lefthand nav column.

(The logic, such as it is, is to find all instances of the files used by aggregators, pull out the requesting IP addresses, sort for uniques, numerically, then count ’em. )