Category: Internet

Dave, meet Blogdex… and MS Research

Dave wants a tool that can show you how connected two weblogs are to each other, and indicates what the traffic looks like between them. I think he’s right that the second is impossible for a centralized search engine… but what about a distributed referral collection app?

As for the first, the Netscan project at Microsoft Research does something similar for newsgroups by tracing cross-postings and provides visualization. Blogdex traces links from blog to blog. It should be possible to apply the visualization and connectability capabilities from Netscan to the data that Blogdex collects.

If someone does this, I want credit on the thesis. 🙂
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Cease-and-desist meets organized resistance

CNET: Site reads Web surfers their rights. This sounds a bit like the “Your Rights On-Line” section of Slashdot writ large:

ChillingEffects.org serves as an educational hub where Internet surfers can learn about their legal rights related to cease-and-desists letters….

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and law school clinics at Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco said they created the Web site as part of a project called Chilling Effects, referring to the way legal threats can freeze out free expression. The coalition said the project aims to provide basic legal information about ongoing issues related to copyright, trademark and domain names, defamation, anonymous speech, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

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BOFH: SQL For Retards

SQL for Retards. Hysterical. You can only imagine how often I dreamed of this conversation:

“But I’m not responsible for the which of the volumes he puts his tablespace on.”

“Uh?” The Boss responds, reverting to subhuman IQ as a defence.

“OK, an analogy. Let’s say I was the building owner and I rent you 30 offices.”

“Right.”

“And you have 30 staff.”

“Yes.”

“And you put them all in one office because then you won’t have to go all around the floor to see what people are up to.”

“Yyyess?”

“And then you complain to me about the air-conditioning because that one office is stinking hot, humid and smelly.”

CSS from both sides of the fence

I’ve tried to stay out of the blogwar over using CSS vs. tables for web site design that has been brewing at Scripting News and other places, but I think it’s time to jump in. I’ll be working on a CSS-based redesign of this site over the next few weeks. I’ve noticed how slowly this page renders in Netscape 4.x (because of all the nested tables), and hopefully moving to CSS will either make things easier or convince the 4.x readers to move to more modern browsers (hi, Dad!).

Two quick resources to get started: Microsoft’s CSS node in the MSDN library, and Apple’s series on CSS in its developers’ site.

“On the Grid” gets a new meaning

CNET: “Grid computing luring mainstream backers.” There’s something appealing about this: if a guy with solar panels in California can put energy back on the grid and get credit for it, why can’t we develop some generic, organized way to share spare CPU cycles? A draft paper by IBM and Globus describes how this may mesh with web services.

Of course, Lisa told me about grid computing in September, but I’m just now picking up on it. <Insert wry joke about husbands not listening to wives here.>
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Tough economic times — except for us, of course

Interesting move on Sam Palmisano’s part: IBM President Palmisano Warns Of Tough Economic Times in 2002 (link to WSJ article, subscription probably required). The headline sounds like he’s warning about IBM’s business, but the article goes on to say “Mr. Palmisano urged resellers of competitors’ products to reconsider their business with those companies in light of upcoming changes that will affect the industry.” Sounds like Palmisano isn’ t above a little FUD.
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That’s what’s up with AOL and Fire

A reader wrote in to point me to this information on the news site for Adium, another AIM client: “It looks like AOL shut down their TOC server at toc.oscar.aol.com.” The author also reports that connecting to java-aim-vip-m.blue.aol.com at port 5190 mostly works.

Actually, I just tried it and it looks like toc.oscar is back up. But it’s good to know about other people who are providing alternatives to the commercial client–especially ones that provide source code.
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Making money from web services and other problems

Web Services: The Next IT Revolution?, which I co-wrote with three other MIT students for a course in eBusiness at Sloan, is now available on-line. We discuss the basic technical architecture of the IBM/Microsoft model of web services (as well as the current implementation practices), privacy and security impacts for individuals and organizations, the effects that web services will have on the software industry and on consumers, and how we think people will make money on web services.

If you aren’t familiar with the technology, you’ll probably be hearing more about it soon–it’s the paradigm behind Microsoft‘s .NET, Passport, and Hailstorm.

If you’re really familiar with the space already, you’ll probably find lots of places where we’ve made mistakes or consciously excluded things. One of the things that we consciously excluded was implementations that don’t follow the Microsoft and IBM model, including XML-RPC. Originally we wanted to include a balanced comparison of the different approaches, but realized we were limited on both time and space. In partial compensation, the website points to a couple of really good discussions of alternatives to the SOAP/UDDI/WSDL implementation approach.

My co-writers, Adam Brady-Myerov, Buddhika Kottahachchi, and Wenona Charles, have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this project and have had some really valuable things to say. It’s been a real pleasure working with them.
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Seven years later, KPMG discovers the Web

This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. [KPMG] I’ll be sure to go out and get a formal Agreement signed next time I link to someone’s site. [KPMG]

> A recent audit of Web sites, to which KPMG is hyperlinked, has revealed that
> www.corporateanthems.raettig.org contains a link to KPMG’s Web site,
> www.kpmg.com. Please be aware such links require that a formal Agreement
> exist between our two parties, as mandated by our organization’s Web Link
> Policy …However, we
> would ask that you please remove the KPMG reference and corresponding link
> from www.corporateanthems.raettig.org in the meantime.

Oh, and just for the record: [KPMG]

Requiem for the CoffeeCam

I spoke too quickly about web cams yesterday. I just saw that the Coffee Pot Web Cam has gone permanently offline (since August, apparently). I’m so sad! Where else can I get free images of coffee over the Internet? How will I know when it’s time to hop a plane to Cambridge to make new coffee?

Seriously, I remember seeing the coffee pot in early 1994 and thinking, that’s seriously cool. It was the first time that I got a real clue about the power of the Web to allow people to share things across wide geographic distances–in a more meaningful way than files on an FTP server, words on Usenet newsgroups, or nodes on a Gopher directory. In some small way, the coffee pot image server is probably responsible for my publishing on the web. I think a small moment of silence is in order.