Out of Cheese

Thanks to Scott Johnson’s Radio FAQ, I finally understand RSS feeds. Nifty. Now I just have to figure out how to keep Cocoon from stealing the MIME type mapping for XML files on rescomp so I can get my feed to work.

It’s rather popular at the moment to discuss whether blogs will eventually take over for standard media. While that seems rather unlikely, there’s an increasing consensus that some bloggers are exerting a larger influence over the rest of the world than life pre-blog.

None of that’s particularly Earth-shattering in and of itself. But the thought comes to mind that the popularity of certain independent blogs is very reminiscent of Orson Scott Card’s description of the experiences of Peter and Valentine Wiggin. I’d always thought of newsgroups when Card described the Wiggin siblings’ experiences on the “nets”, but it seems that blogs are a much better fit. I wonder what Card had in mind.

I just installed OpenBSD 3.1 under Virtual PC. So far, so good. I’m rather surprised that the default .cshrc puts ‘.’ in the path. I didn’t expect any system to do that, let alone the most secure Unix.

Apple just put up a basic guide to CVS. The ssh-agent tip at the end is useful; that’s something I’d never taken the time to figure out on my own.

I finally gave in and bought a PowerBook G4 today, using the MacHack “presenter” discount. I can’t wait to get it — I bought the 800MHz one, and it’ll run circles around my Pismo. I’d been planning to buy an iBook for months, but the discount on the 800MHz G4 was too much to resist. And I do need a G4 to demo my still-unwritten hack at MacHack, so it isn’t completely unjustified.

Jack says that AtAT is coming back soon. Yay!

I don’t know what sort of magic pixie dust the Omni folks put into OmniWeb 4.1sp91, but in my first five minutes of using it it’s much faster than sp89 and seems to fix their notorious table bug once and for all. It still doesn’t work right for Perl Golf, though. Time to send them a note….

Dave Winer notes that Red Hat is patenting its work. It’s a shame that people are up in arms about this. Software patents are a lot like PAC money — they shouldn’t be necessary, but until the rules change, you’re at a serious disadvantage if you don’t play the game. A few people manage to get by without PACs, but Russ Feingold will probably admit that he has to work a lot harder as a result. The same is true for patents — if Red Hat didn’t patent their work, they’d be at a serious disadvantage when negotiating with any company with a strong patent portfolio. As ridiculous as I think most software patents are, I certainly can’t blame Red Hat for playing by the rules as they stand.

Eudora 5.1.1 is finally shipping for Mac OS X. I wonder what they’ve changed since the last beta.

Netscape’s Blake Ross mentioned over the weekend that he enjoys reading random user feedback regarding Netscape’s browser and filing bugs on the problems they report. He also said this:

I can’t really understand how other engineers are content to release a product and just move on without looking back.

I couldn’t agree more. I’m not an engineer solely because I enjoy programming. I like writing code, but what I like even more is the feeling when I can make someone’s computing experience that much better for them. As an engineer, the best way of doing that is to track what real users are saying and to be responsive in solving the problems that they’re having with the software that I work on.

That’s one of the things that I enjoyed most about being at Apple — reading through newsgroups and mailing lists, picking off the random messages about Java applets and applications not working as expected, and either filing bug reports or fixing the problem on my own. I didn’t just do that for developers on Apple’s java-dev mailing list; I also read some of the comp.sys.mac.* newsgroups, where I could help users who don’t know Java from HTML.

I don’t get to interact with users like that today, because I’m at a company that isn’t nearly as open as Apple was and I work on a product that doesn’t really have much of a user community. I miss that experience, since that level of interaction provides a great way to feel like you’re making a difference.