Category: General

TypePad Launching August 4th

Last bit of info released by Six Apart was the launch date and the price.  It's August 4th 11:59pm so if you want your TypePad blog starting date to be August 4th, you will have exactly one minute to do it.  Check it out.  Feature chart showing the three service levels alone is worth some pondering since the missing dots on these types of charts tend to show more than those inkblots psychologists use.

Contratz to Anil, Ben, and Mena.  TypePad looks good.

Update #1: TypePad  beta blogs are using RSS 1.0.

Zen Addicts

I like meditating and reading Zen books, but I am uncomfortable with the formality of Zen monastaries because I can't help feeling that they are making a religion out of Zen.  I suppose I could shift my views into seeing them as a hospital of sort, but I am lazy.  To me, Zen is no different from Cindy Crawford's exercise video.  It is just a way to feel good, or at least, not feel bad.

Certain body positions that are more comfortable than others.  When you sit on the ground, there could also be some pebble under you, forcing you to shift your butt until you find a comfortable position.  This is what Zen is to me except it is about how your mind sits rather than your behind.

Body position also affects how you think or rather the extent of control over mind.  As for me, I don't like the way I have to hold my body and breathing pattern in certain ways just to feel better.  It's like moving and holding TV antenna in a certain position to receive better TV signal.  While I like watching PBS, I don't mind being stuck with watching soap operas.

Zen koans helps you move your mental butt.  It works by being obscure, same mechanism that provokes mammals to tilt their head slightly whenever they see something they don't recognize.  Zen koan makes you tilt your mind to understand words that make no sense otherwise.  In doing so, you change your perspective and you change as well — you are where you sit.

Frequently, I run into people are obsessed with Zen.  Some of them become monks.  Shaving one's head, aside from the symbolism and marketing side of it, is just a way to focus.  Avoiding meat reduces the chance of being swept away in a flood of emotions triggered or aided by certain chemical.  Still, I don't see the point of bleeching all the colors out of your life.  Being addicted to tranquility and illusion of clarity is a real danger for Zen practioners.

Of course, there are a number of wilder strains in Zen as exemplified by famously crazy Zen monks dotting the history of East Asia.  In Korea, there was a monk who practiced calligraphy with a brush attached to his penis.  Amusing and admirable in a way, but still trapped by the desire to be enlightened.  Very few ever experience the enlightenment.  Even more sad, few talk about how fleeting enlightenment might be.

So, I would like offer this piece of advice to those interested in Zen:

Take what you need and no more.

Software Update/Distribution Pipeline

Macromedia has released a public beta of Flash Player 7.  Guess what, Flash 7 adds automatic notification and update.  QuickTime has it, Real Player has it, Java has it, and now Flash has it.

Could we please get together and build a SINGLE public pipeline instead of all these private implementations each of which waste memory and bandwidth unnecessarily and configuration and usability mess?  One pipeline and one UI for everyone is what I want.

We can either arm-wrestle Microsoft into giving us access to its Windows Update facility, or build out own.  Anything but this everybody build their own private pipeline nonsense.

Pie/Echo/Atom (PEA) Dinner

Pie/Echo/Atom (PEA) dinner was held yesterday at Hunan on Sansome just off the seaward side of Broadway.  David Galbraith and I met before the dinner at Bastille.  After tossing a great salad of ideas over beer, we trekked up toward Broadway.  Oy.  I hate walking uphill.  My flatfoot didn't help either.  When we got to Hunan, there were about twenty people already waiting to be seated.  Then the dinner happened.  Here are some pictures I took.

This blog dinner was more technical than usual since because it was centered around PEA topics.  I had some good technical exchange with Sam Ruby, David Sifry, and Mark Pilgrim who were sitting at my table.  At one point, I asked "What happened to the appkey?" to which Mark echoed (sorry) and Sam scratched.  Yes, appkey is not in the Atom API.  So I walked over to Evan Williams and asked the same question and his answer was:

What appkeys?

We all had a good laugh about it but concluded that appkey should be added to the Atom API.  I think appkey is not a viable solution in most commercial applications, but it does the job as an interim solution and should be supported as an optional parameter.

Overall, I had a great time and got some great ideas from the dinner.  It wasn't really anything specific anyone said at the dinner.  It was more like gaining sudden insights in a struggle to make sense of all the opinions, ideas, questions, and answers flying around.  Yes, that's it.  That is where the money is.  Too bad Joi wasn't around when I got to that part.

Dinner rollcall from Christian Crumlish:

Christian Crumlish, Mark Nottingham, John Beatty, Mark Graham, Dan Beldy, Jay Feinberg, Nick Chalko, Marc Canter, Kevin Burton, Sam Ruby, Phil Wolff, Don Park, Greg Reinacker, Simon Fell, Mark Pilgrim, Chris Alden, Joi Ito, Jason Shellen, Evan Williams, David Galbraith, David Sifry, Joe Gregorio

Pictures:

Adam Bosworth

Adam's blog was born on July 24th, 2003 with following lines:

"I've been planning to start a weblog for quite some time but, unsually for me, I've suffered from writers block at the thought that this would be so public. Well it is time to tough it out."

FYI, Adam is BEA Chief Architect and a Big Kahuna on web service technologies.  A big welcome to Adam.  I am hoping for some good meaty discussion going on web services.

XHTML: Technical Masturbation

Emitting XHTML instead of HTML is pretty popular among geeks these days and Pie/Echo/Atom (PEA) crowd is no exception.  I don't blame them because I am drawn to XHTML as well like a moth to the fire.  Unfortunately, it amounts to technical masturbation because there are no real benefits to using XHTML.  Even worse, using XHTML can be down right harmful.

Beside the subtle semantic differences between XHTML and HTML, DOM differences, lack of clients, round-trip problems, parsing problems, editor problems, and proliferation of invalid XHTML problems, the usability issues looms above them all.

You see, many people still write HTML by hand and will continue to do so for at least another ten years.  Same can be said about XHTML.  But XHTML is XML, meaning you can't just put elements anywhere like you used to in HTML.  It seems fine now because browsers think they are looking at HTML.

When and if XHTML browsers become popular, will they be as forgiving as HTML browsers with structural mistakes?  Answer has to be Yes because people want browsers to be a Tool, not a Judge.

Can people learn to write valid XHTML by hand?  My answer is No.  People can easily remember names of often used tags and attributes.  They can also remember certain common structures like <head> and <body> inside <html>.  But they just can't keep the whole XHTML schema in their head nor put up with having to look up all the time or get caught up in a viscious edit and validate cycle.

So, I consider XHTML to be the centerfold geeks are masturbating to.  I am a geek too and find XHTML to be sexy enough to ogle.  But I don't expect it to cook my dinner nor raise my children.  It's just an insert.

Sensitive Types

A cool idea: font that changes shape based on external factors similar to the way water changes shape depending on the temperature.  It is called Twin and was created by a Dutch company named LettError.  They have a live demo showing Twin hooked up to weather conditions in Minneapolis: sharper when cold, rounder when hot.  Thanks to David Sklar.

VSIP SDK is Now Free

VSIP SDK is essential for integrating tools seemlessly with Visual Studio.  Last time I asked about the VSIP program, quoted price was ridiculously high, near five figures I think.  Now it is free after registering and agreeing to terms as a VSIP Affiliate.  Severest clause in the agreement seems to be that you are required to upgrade your tools to be compatiable with new versions of Visual Studio within 180 days of release.

I don't know how much Chris Sells has to do with it being free, but I suspect he had a lot to do with the change.  Thanks, Chris.  Maybe if enough bloggers get a job at Microsoft fulltime, we can drop prices across the board.  Just kidding.