Author: Tim Jarrett

Jay gets beta fever

Looks like Jay got into the Xbox Live trial. I guess there’s no NDA on participation :). This is good–we’ll get some really good perspectives from him about how that’s going. The man thinks critically about his gaming, a trait I admire.

First thoughts from Jay: “…the bad news is that I cannot log into the server where I have to register. Evidently, Microsoft is overloaded and cannot handle the situation! Hah, how funny is that, an online service that won’t even let you register.”

I hope it’s just congestion on the backbone between Redmond and Boston…

Reliable data about RSS usage?

Dave and a bunch of folks have been fighting out the question of how to take the next step forward for RSS. This is an important fight, but I have a different question: how big is the RSS market?

Dave has a good idea about the market for producers and consumers of RSS feeds from a tools perspective. But how many websites are out there actually producing RSS feeds? How do they break down by number of unique users–how many 1000 pound sites like the BBC produce RSS to increase their reach? Same questions apply for other syndication formats, too–like the New York Times’ custom headlines format.

Another question: Are websites that have to make a choice to adopt the technology (i.e. RSS syndication doesn’t come from their backend software for free, as it does in Manila, Radio, or Movable Type) doing so to extend the number of people who read their content–simply to grow traffic? Or do they find value in the contributions of people who consume their RSS feeds and comment on them?

Days like this, I wish I were totally self directed and could spin the cycles on figuring this out. But I’m hoping someone out there whose business is in RSS has actually done this. What does the market for RSS generation look like? I’ll be blogging a bit about this for a few days.
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Meetup

Looks like I might actually stir out of my house and make it to the monthly Weblogger Meetup in Seattle. (OK, the fact that Lisa is out of town has a little to do with it; I always feel guilty not spending evenings with her given that she has to be up before 5 every morning.)

I’m trying to talk Brent into going. He says maybe (if he can get his VCR working). Let’s make this a tech blog meeting. If we can get Flangy to show up tomorrow I’ll know we’ve succeeded.
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Back

Between a day-and-a-half long class at work, a long rehearsal last night, and taking Lisa to the airport (she’s going to Maine for Kelley’s wedding), I didn’t update yesterday. Did anyone miss me?

Blogging will likely be light on Friday through Sunday–I’m flying out Thursday night to follow Lisa.

Another friend found

I’ve lost touch with many old Glee Club friends since leaving Virginia, so it was a bit of a surprise to see a familiar name attached to a recruiting email asking for participants for a panel discussion with prospective students. But surely he wasn’t an assistant dean?

A little Googling confirms that Shawn Felton has indeed gone up the academic ladder after finishing his Masters in Music. Boy, I’m looking forward to seeing him in a couple of weeks…
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Whoah: Sybase ASE on Mac OS X

Sybase has released its core database product, Adaptive Server Enterprise, for Mac OS X Server. I suppose most of you knew that. But I didn’t know until just now that you could download its developer toolset for free.

I spent most of my professional developer years working with Sybase products–both database and the PowerBuilder developer tools, even before they were bought by Sybase–but this is only the second time I’ve had Sybase products on a Mac. The first was a beta release of PowerBuilder 6 for Macintosh, a product that never made it all the way to final production. That today, six years later, Sybase has ported its core product to the Mac platform says a lot both about where the Mac platform is today (i.e., UNIX) and where Sybase is (i.e. with rapidly vanishing market share).

Still there’s something pretty cool about looking at the 52-page Quick Install Guide and seeing the same information I saw about version 12 for half a dozen other UNIX systems…
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Source of my boyish good lucks no longer in question.

Herman Brackbill in photo dated 1939.
Courtesy my Dad: a spectacular picture of my maternal grandfather, Herman Brackbill (aka Pop-Pop), ca. 1939. His hairline is about where mine is today…

Pop-Pop was with my parents for a few weeks and by all reports is doing much better than he has been for a while. Esta reports that at my cousin’s wedding he was in great form, cracking jokes and generally having a good time. I look at how he’s doing in his eighties, and remember how my great-grandmothers on that side of the family both were–essentially non-responsive, at least as far as us kids were concerned–and I feel even better about how he’s been.

It better rain soon.

If the rain doesn’t come soon and put an end to our outdoor chores, I may end up dead. I spent about an hour or so on the roof today cleaning the gutters. Most comical thing found in the gutters: a peanut. Still trying to figure out how that got there.

Our late summer lettuce crop crossed the inflection point in the last week. We now have more arugula, frisée, and other mesclun-type stuff than we can consume. Time to start making friends at the office by handing out produce. We just planted some more lettuce, and Lisa transplanted the basil and rosemary into indoor containers–with a little luck we can keep them going all winter.

More iCal stuff

“Morbus Iff” has already taken my idea about using iCal as a website front end and written a Movable Type hack to export blog entries to an ICS format. The nice thing is he already figured out how to do some things that were tripping me up, like including links.

The bad thing is, Morbus seems like a real creep. I don’t normally say that about people I only know from their weblog posts, but scrolling down that’s the only word that applies to some of the obsessive nasty thoughts he/she has posted.

Check out the iCal Weblog maintained by Ole Saalmann.
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Frontier updates

Those wacky guys at Userland have gone and updated Frontier to 9.0. For those of us on Manila websites, the best thing about this update is that Lawrence collected all the change notes in one place (many of these things were released quietly in the past few months).

One of the cooler features that I hadn’t played with until today is the viewNewsItems macro. I was able to use it to finally give a more unified view of my old stories and my newer writing on my site navigation pages (the ones listed by name under “Navigation”). Now, on each page in addition to a link to the list of all news items there are the five most recent news items for that topic.

I may take advantage of this feature to add a “recent news” box on pages other than the home page. It allows use of custom templates, so I could run just headlines, change the typeface, etc. Maybe a project after I finish messing with OmniOutliner2OPML.

Brent: Hidden CoreFoundation XMLRPC classes

Brent points to the as-yet undocumented CoreFoundation XMLRPC header files and writes a sample app.

What does this mean? It’s now a lot simpler–in fact, it’s baked into the OS–for both Carbon and Cocoa programmers to make XML-RPC (and, one assumes, SOAP) calls. Before you could do this easily in AppleScript, leading to funny applications being released that were mostly Cocoa except for one AppleScript routine that was invoked by sending a Cocoa message to a hidden button…

Maybe I’ll play with this a little next week. First I have to live up to a promise I made to get OmniOutliner2OPML to actually produce parseable OPML files. Boy, for a hack written in one morning, that’s expecting a lot. 🙂
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