Category: Technology

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Just Shelley Technology

My life as a T-shirt

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

One of the boxes I brought back contained my t-shirt collection — a set of t-shirts that I’ve collected from various events over the last several years, but have never worn. If I had to put together a curriculum vitae, I would do so by taking photos of each of my shirts, putting them into a PDF album to be printed or attached to an email.

There’s the t-shirt I received for being one of the top 50 finalists for Microsoft’s Activate the Web contest. This contest, held in 1996, was used to launch Microsoft’s ActiveX web technologies. I and other contestants had to incorporate ActiveX technology into our web sites in some way. Mine was Hot Pink, using an ActiveX control to interactively tell the web page reader what technology was being used in the page. Coincidentally, Hot Pink was my first introduction of the “Flame of Knowledge” motif that I’ve used ever since, including Li’l YASD and eventually Burningbird.

There are t-shirts from several conferences where I gave presentations, including Internet Worlds and XML Dev-Cons, and even one from O’Reilly’s original P2P conference. Now that was a great conference — last of a kind, last of an era.

I have a Mozilla Hack t-shirt that the Mozilla team personally delivered to one hotel room where I was speaking because of my early promotion of Mozilla as a development tool and not just a browser. Back then Mozilla was getting a lot of flack for not delivering a browser right now

I have another t-shirt from Sybase to commemorate creating a sample application using Powerbuilder 5.0 that was included on the disk with the product. That application was a dynamic inventory control system that would allow a person to define their own categories of inventories items.

Groove gave me a t-shirt when I was meeting with the company about writing a possible book on the product. I also have a Microsoft Site Builder’s shirt, an Amazon Associate shirt, several from O’Reilly, and other shirts I’ve picked up for one reason or another.

My life as a t-shirt. Well, it could have been my life as a yo-yo or hacky sack.

tshirtjpg.jpg

Categories
Burningbird Web

Hosting does not matter because the internets is free

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Hosting Matters as a virtual host sucks little wormy, sour green apples. I’ve had nothing but trouble all week with my server (Clio). I keep hearing about slashdot, or this or that, but what it all boils down to, is there are over 500 virtual sites hosted on my machine alone.

This is too damn many.

I know this is a cheap service, but I’ve had inexpensive hosting before without these problems.

I’m paid up until May 1st. At that time, I may not even maintain a web site any more. I’ve had web sites since 1996, 1995 if you count a tilde site (~) I had at a local Portland ISP. I have five domains coming up for renewal this month. Maybe I should just let the whole damn thing go to dark.

Next time I read something like World of Ends, and hear all the glorious extoling of an Internet that isn’t owned, and which anyone can use, I’m going to print the thing out, shred it, and send it to the authors along with interesting and detailed instructions on exactly what they can do with the paper.

Categories
Internet

Think on this

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m about to head out for a new hike in a special place I’ve not been before. During the drive, I’ll wrap my mind around some things I want to write about, not the least of which are another beautiful protest, individualism and community, weblogging and writing, and possibly the World of Ends, though this will most likely get wrapped into individualism and community.

Question to the thousands who saw the World of Ends as a new definitive answer for the foolish masses who don’t ‘know’ the Internet: Exactly what will you do differently, today, after reading this essay, then you did yesterday before reading this essay? Just curious, is all.

I actually have a lot of things I want to write about. This is a very good feeling to have. Back to the burn.

Categories
Technology

Google and Blogger = What?

Combine metablogging and Google and you have a link bomb; such is the case, this weekend, with Google buying Pyra (and Blogger and Blog*Spot).

Putting Blog*Spot on faster, more reliable servers can’t help but be good, and I imagine the Pyra crew is happy about steady paychecks. But darned if I can figure out what Google hopes to get with all of this. Eventually, Google must make some form of profit from this move, or they’ll go out of business. But how?

They’ll obtain Blogger, but Google is more than capable of building a weblogging tool of its own. They are getting the Blogger name, which counts for something, and they’re getting Blog*Spot with a built-in client base. Still, this just means they’re getting pre-existing clients, most of whom aren’t paying a penny. This doesn’t mean they’re getting ‘content’.

First Google buys Deja.com, a source of collected Usenet data. Next, it started Google News, a portal into current news stories. Now it’s purchased a major weblogging tool and host, Blogger, and Blog*Spot. Seems to me that Google is centralizing the data in addition to centralizing the data search; controlling both a source of the data as well as a source of the dissemination of the data. This centralization seems a contradiction to the ‘distributed nature of the online world’ that Dan Gillmor writes about:

More than most Web companies, Google has grasped the distributed nature of the online world, and has seen that the real power of cyberspace is in what we create collectively. We are beginning to see that power brought to bear.

Personally, I’m glad I’m using Movable Type. Now if only I could afford my own server…

Archived with comments at the Wayback Machine

Categories
Technology

How not to create software

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

If you develop open source software, or software that you give to the public out of the kindness of your heart, document it. I know people will say, “But it’s free! How can you add more demands on the caring, giving person who wrote it?”

Easily. Software that requires one to edit C makefiles because this little tweak or that little tweak won’t get picked up by the auto-configuration tools; J2EE applications that require tiny little tweaks in a dozen different text files; software that requires you ‘guess’ exactly what you’re supposed to do on a screen Are Not Helpful.

Undocumented APIs. Errors that provide no messages. No documentation because the developer is too busy building the next version of the software to write a silly thing like documentation. These Are Not Helpful.

I have worked with wonderful commercial and non-commercial, proprietary and open source software in the last several months for Practical RDF. These will all be included in the book, with full attribution for the creators as well as full appreciation for the good work and great software that’s a pleasure to both install and learn to use.

Software that is neither is not included. Simple as that. This evening I reached my Tweak/Fuss/Guess/Muck Overflow Point.