Conversation one-two punches Are you the kind of person who likes hitting below the belt? Need some pointers about walking away from a conversation victorious at all costs? Then look no further than Conversation Terrorism. The site is there as a reminder of what not to do during a conversation, but really let's just hope that the sap that you're going to take on sticks to those rules. [ via Stupid Evil Bastard ]

RSSCalendar I saw a new service called RSSCalendar off of HotLinks today. It's a really cool idea. You administer your calendar via a web interface, and then you can send people links to the RSS feeds for either daily, weekly, and monthly events. So all updates made to the calendar will propagate to people subscribed to your feeds.

Sync It Baby!

I wonder what time this commercial airs. If you're actually interested in getting one of these, check out syncitbaby.com

The Enterprise IM Game A couple of weeks ago and then AOL announced that they're stopping their enterprise IM offerings because the they didn't know what to do with all the money they were getting from corporations. Of course, they couldn't just leave the enterprise market all together because that violates Rule III and Rule IX of big business:

• III. Don't every admit defeat -- it's bad for your share price.
• XI.  You've got to be in every possible market.

Soon there after, AOL and Yahoo! announced they would be colluding...er...interopting with Microsoft in the enterprise IM market.

So what about XMPP/Jabber? Joe Hildebrand goes into some detail about some of the questions that have come up since the announcement. Microsoft LCS interoptability with AOL and Yahoo.

It's interesting to note that Apple will be making its way into this market with the release of Tiger and the iChat server which happens to support XMPP. Imagine that, giving away an IM server with the operating system so that people can just IM. That sounds like something corporations are willing to buy.

It's wet out there

Powell Blog Michael Powell, when he's not giving out great deals on the radio spectrum, is now blogging. Like any good blog, the Powell blog has comments. Unfortunately, Michael isn't participating in the comment discussions. I guess that's just too much work, huh?

Well, I hate to brake it to you, Mr. Powell, but just because your ad littered page resembles a blog in terms of format, it doesn't mean it's a blog when your just using it as personal propaganda dispenser. (By the way, I really dig all the little corporate logos that you amassed at the bottom of your page.)

Here are a couple of things things that Michael could do to convince the rest of us that he's really serious about blogging.

• Put up your blogroll so that we can remotely believe that you're actually reading other blogs and trying to participate in the discussion.
• You turned on comments, you better start answering those people.
• Figure out how to use Technorati, or turn on trackback on your "blog."
• Take some tips from Mark Cuban's blog -- don't make your posts sound like a PR release.

To me, it sounds like someone told Michael that he needs to open a blog so that people could believe that he really has our best interest at heart even when he's kicking back at a power lunch with his buddies at Time Warner.

Like Wes said before:

If you're blogging between 9 and 5, it's not a blog, unless your boss doesn't want you to do it.

RSS Advertisements RSS advertisements are on the horizon, and there's no stopping it. The people in Weblogs Inc. are very excited at the prospect of including ads in their feeds because it's the easy way out for generating revenue ( ). They claim it won't affect the over all experience, but let's be honest, when your only revenue model is advertising, it pits you against your readers/ users / people who give you the time of day.

Basically, if you don't know how to make money off of your product or just feeling lazy, then make whatever you offer a vehicle for advertisements.

I'm not saying that all advertising is bad, but too much advertising dilutes the overall effectiveness of advertising in general. For example, I get up in the morning and I open up my email, there's the spam. I browse the web for several hours reading around ad after ad. I turn on the radio and the DJ is trying to sell me something, and then plays the latest boy band song over and over again. I watch some TV and it's convinced that I need to buy maxi-pads, viagra, or heart-burn medication even though I'm a healthy young male. As soon as I sit down to program some telemarketer calls offering yet another sales pitch for refinancing (I don't own a home). The end result is that I'd rather eat strange Japanese ice cream than listen to yet another ad trying to part me and my money. I think Dick Cheney had some choice words that I could share with these people.

Engadget et. al are already advertising on their website, but the thought of some of their loyal readers not being inundated with ads is just too much too handle. Companies are very much like governments -- governments operate under the assumption that if there's something out there that can be taxed then it ought to be taxed. Likewise, companies feel that if they have the captive attention of people then they better put some ads in front of those eyeballs.

So what could Engadget do so that it doesn't have to resort to advertising as the only model for revenue? Well, how about providing additional features for paying subscribers? Paying subscribers could get feeds with additional analysis, tips, comments, or whatever. Including high quality images or extra images related to the story is another option. Paying subscribers could be allowed to update their feeds as often as every 5 minutes, or have access to feeds that don't have news items that are slightly time delayed. The list goes on and on.

By the way, I'm still working on a scheme so that I can figure out a way to make money off of Engadget / Weblogs Inc. every time I refer to them. That's free publicity for them, and I'll be damned if I can't squeeze everyone under the sun for some money.

4th of July This evening my dad and I headed first to Prospect Park which over looks downtown Providence to check out the fireworks. Didn't see any activity in downtown Providence, but on the horizon we saw fireworks displays in 9 different locations. Eventually we walked to downtown lugging the tripod along since I was told it's essential for taking good photos of fireworks. There were no fireworks in Providence on the 4th of July. I saw other people wondering around downtown Providence who looked equally confused by the lack of fireworks. Apparently, there were fireworks last night. I really need to suffer through the local news once in a while.

Morning Raindrops

Japanese ice cream Andy pointed me to the Mainichi Daily News' Photo Special about The Wacky World of Japanese Ice Cream and The WACKIER World of Japanese Ice Cream. I've seen some strange things in Japan, but this has got to take the cake. Yummy flavors include octopus, ox tongue, goat's milk, shark fin noodle, oyster, seaweed, deep sea water, wasabi, spinach, garlic, tomato, lettuce and potato, wheat, curdled bean, silk, tulip, cherry blossom, chicken, and many more. The worst of the worst has to be the Basashi Aisu which is raw horseflesh ice cream. The whale blubber-chunks ice cream comes in at a close second place.

Mark it zero
RIAA Claims Music On Car Radios Meant Only For Original Vehicle Owner!!!!

In other news, the RIAA is in merger talks with SCO. In a recent discussion, the head of the RIAA commented to Darl McBride, "I like your style, dude."

Jabber Client Certification
Rachel Blackman raised the issue of client certification on the Jabber Development mailing list. On the surface it sounds like a really good idea, but then Justin Karneges pointed out some problems with the proposed solution. (I'd point to the actual conversation but the Jabber Dev archive isn't up to date, and gmane isn't responsive.)

The problem is that the certified clients proposal would be slam dunk if it weren't for the state of some of the JEPs that are considered essential for a standard Jabber client. Since we're working on a Jabber client full-time, having a certification would be a great badge to set easily set our client apart from the hordes of other clients that haven't been maintained in quite some time. It's also a good way for people to gage the reliability and compatibility with Jabber/XMPP.

My personal gut feeling is that the timing isn't right for certification. Getting to the point of certifying clients is a process not a decision. The first step would be to invest in tools so that clients developers can verify their compliance -- it shouldn't be left to some board member to eyeball compliance. The second step is for everyone to knuckle down and spend some effort getting the essential JEPs standardized before moving on. With those two things out of the way, the Jabber community could easily setup a process for certification.

Movies and the FCC CNET is running an article about getting rid of the FCC. After reading Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas, I'm inclined to agree. Of course, I'm not aware what positive things the FCC is doing for both me and Clear Channel, but I think they've screwed up enough times for there to be some serious revamping. Go, go smaller government! That's my constrained Republican outburst for the day.

My flaming liberal plug for the day has to be for the movie, The Corporation (trailer). It looks awesome. Anything that makes the white collar scumbags sleep a little less at night brings a smile to my face. Well, only temporarily until I realize that they all sleep very well on their mattresses made of cash. (via JWZ)


On a completely non-partisan note, the movie Napoleon Dynamite (trailer) looks very promising. I'm not holding my breath, but it would be nice to have another classic movie that can share the self with The Big Lebowski and Office Space.

By the way, is it possible in this day and age to dislike large corporations and big government while at the same time not be one of those militia people in Ohio that talk day and night about "those anti-gun nuts"? I think it's time to form my political party of one for one.

Cowboy I saw the NYTimes article, For 28 Cows and Precious Water, a Man's Got to Sit in Jail. It reminds me a lot of the movie, Open Range. Open Range is really a great western in my mind although a little slow for some. The scenery is great and the ass-kicking is convincing.

Unlike Open Range, it's doubtful that Wayne Klump will be able to march in town and settle his business with all the slick suits. 10 years in Federal court is probably counts as a hell of a fight.

That reminds me, I hope TiVo is catching Deadwood right now. I started watching Deadwood about 5 weeks ago. It's really an amazing show. It's the quality programming I expect for paying extra money for another channel.

The thing about Deadwood that I like the most is the Wild West that it portrays. It's the same rough and tumble West that's depicted in Open Range, but it focuses more on the unscrupulous. Deadwood has its protagonists, but from all counts they're fighting a losing battle. Deadwood in a sense is like good reality-TV, you just don't know what's going to happen.

Deadwood, I think, is probably a lot closer to reality than Open Range. I guess that's why there's a lot more swearing in Deadwood.

Lies, damn lies, and screenshots
Scoble is under the impression that I have some huge, piece of junk CRT on my desk, and so I can't tell the difference between the anti-aliasing on XP and OS X. Well, good Sir, I'll have you know that I have a rather nice Eizo L675 as my primary monitor for both boxes. If using an LCD is the baseline in our unscientific comparison, then I think I'm in a position to give my completely unauthoritative opinion.

Scoble also says that he pulled up the yesterday's screenshots on his TabletPC, and that the anti-aliasing looks far better for the Windows fonts. I have no way of confirming or denying this point. However, I'm a little skeptical since the TabletPC isn't doing any anti-aliasing of the fonts in the screenshots. I guess I may have to go to my local Microsoft Store and see for myself.

However, I think my initial objection to Scoble's claim about ClearType still stands. Using my XP Box and OS X Panther install, I can't see such a remarkable difference in anti-aliasing to say that ClearType is "FAR, FAR" better. That's just FUD.

The "what were you thinking" version of Gush. Wes and I recently spoke at the Northeastern chapter of the ACM about developing Gush. We managed to find and show the original version of Gush that we demo'ed at the very first JabberCon in Colorado nearly 3 years ago. Wesley managed to sneak into this picture, but of course was left out of the description (Wes is the guy on the very right).

Every time we pull up this version of Gush, we have to hold our heads in shame. However, it's worth noting that Wes was slugging away with Flash 5 at that stage. I was also at the early stages of my Python programming career. The worst part of the whole thing is that we created a custom, ad-hoc protocol for messaging between the Python service and the Flash front-end.

Below is the login screen. No SSL, no SASL, no proxy support, and no inline registration.

Here's a message window. Looks pretty, doesn't it? Well, you couldn't resize it. Heck couldn't resize any of it. We kind of glossed over that detail at the time.

Wes and I had this great idea that the away message for a person would be on the "back" of the window. So, if you click on the window, it would flip the textarea over and you'd see your away message and the other person's away message.


In many ways, that version of Gush was similar to our 1989 Corolla that barely made it up to Keystone, CO where the conference was held.

RSS Reader Improvement
Joe Hildebrand, the big thinker over at Jabber.com, made a great suggestion about Gush's news reader. In the next release, you'll be able to open a feed and start pressing the space bar to auto-scroll to the next item. This works wonders if you're moving through a feed. For now we have this new gem all to ourselves, but we promise not to be selfish.