Messaging & Collaboration IM Interoperability: It's the Business Model, Stupid. Stowe Boyd makes the argument that companies don't care about the fact that XMPP is an open protocol. Companies should care, but they're stupid, and so they don't.

The same is true for Linux. Companies aren't using Linux because its open source. Companies are using it because Oracle, IBM, etc are putting their applications on Linux, it's cheaper than Microsoft's alternative, and they don't like Microsoft. If you think they're doing it for any other reason you've got to be kidding yourself.

However, XMPP's openess does give it an edge over it's competitors. It's easy to build services on top of XMPP. XMPP enabled applications will be the reason for XMPP winning over proprietary protocols. XMPP being an open protocol isn't good enough for companies to use XMPP, but rather building applications on top of an open protocol will be cheaper. That's the kind of logic any MBA hotshot can understand.

The trick is to make building XMPP enabled applications as sexy as using Linux or building web-based applications. There are things on the horizon so just give it time.

You think the carpet pissers did this? You're Entering a World of Lebowski is a well written New York Times article by David Edelstein who "gets it" because he obviously listened to the Dude's story. The article gets bonus points for the following paragraph:

The Coens turned down requests to be interviewed about the cult of "The Big Lebowski," which is frankly infuriating: I did not watch my buddies die facedown in the muck to be blown off by too-cool, insular, press-shunning elitists.

(via Andy)

Build your own Feedbruner Leslie Orchard over at 0xDECAFBAD is busy building an Atom/RSS client/server aggregator on top of Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser. From the system diagram, it looks like the scanned feeds are dumped into your choice of relational database. From there you can construct queries for feed items, and then the query result set is automatically turned into an Atom feed. It goes one step further by providing an XSLT processor to transform the resulting Atom feed into XHTML for viewing inside of the browser. This is hardly revolutionary, but if done right it could become very useful. With some slight modifications, you could pretty much duplicate a lot of the functionality offered by .

Out with the managers, in with the wranglers. Ned explains his new class naming convention where he uses Wrangler instead of Manager. I never really thought about it, but I like it. I've got a lot of "manager" classes, but that's going to change -- it's time for some corporate down sizing. Yeeha!

Inside Jack Inside Jack is an animation about what some cartoon developer thinks Sun should do with the 2 billion dollars of hush money from Microsoft. It's entertaining. Note it was done with Flash, not Java. (via Aces Full of Links)

Lane 6

TiVo v. NFL / MPAA The fat cats at the NFL and the MPAA have filed complaints to the FCC about TiVo's service that will allow people to move recorded content onto their PCs. My favorite part of the MSNBC's TiVo's plans lead to copyright fight article:

The NFL, meanwhile, is concerned that a user could send a copy of a game to someone in another time zone, where the game is blacked out. Burger responded that at current bandwidth, such a transfer would take 144 hours.

The NFL to sports fans: "Sit. Lie down. Roll over."

More coverage on the latest TiVo news from the PVRblog: TiVo: you can only innovate if the NFL and MPAA say so

Shinbashi The Shinbashi / Ginza area used to be one of my favorite areas to wonder around on the weekends. I basically ended up visiting the same stores and restaurants over and over again. Once in a while I'd lugged the camera around for kicks.

Mark Shuttle and Tuttle SVC Our fellow Rhode Islander, Tom Hoffman, landed himself a gig working as the project lead for the SchoolTool project. From what Tom has told me in the past, SchoolTool is a pretty ambitious effort sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth to develop an Open Source administration system that could be used by schools around the world. Congratulations to Tom, and to SchoolTool for bringing him on board.

Jun 5th Morning

Pretty, pretty good

HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm is easily one of the funniest shows on TV. Just looking at Larry David's face is enough to induce a fit of laughter. Well, it seems that Larry & Co. have also managed get a man, convicted of murder, out of jail and cleared of the charges. Now that's good TV. Read the whole CNN story.

(from Andy)

Bravo, Sony. I take back most of the bad things I said about Sony in my last Sony post. Clearly they have their heads screwed on right when they came up with the VGF-AP1. Finally, people will be able to carry around something other than an iPod without holding their heads in shame. Now, all I have to figure out is what I'll have to pawn in order to pay for this new, pricey gadget. Read more about it at The Register.

Beta 2 Managed to squeeze out yet another beta for Gush 1.1. It'll probably be the last beta before finalizing 1.1 The beta has taken a bit longer than most betas partly because we continued to add new features after the first beta. As a rule of thumb, this is generally not a good idea, but we wanted to get the 1.1 to the stage where Gush is stable and most of the smaller requested features were added.

With this out of the way, we can finally move onto more exciting things like file transfer, file sharing, group discussions (Multi User Chat), and much more.

Gush is finally Atom Enabled. I've been meaning to add Atom support for a long time now, but other things kept cropping up. As expected, adding Atom support was trivial since I've are developed all the bag of tricks to deal with all the variations of RSS, and not to mention all the crap feeds out there.

As of right now, we haven't finished the OS X version. The OS X version has been quite troublesome. Most of the problems are related to using WebKit to house the Flash SWF. WebKit/Safari interaction with Flash SWFs is not nearly as good as Firefox's interaction with SWFs under OS X. First, the cursor doesn't reliably change into the cursor hand over links in Flash HTML textfields. Second, when Gush is minimized to the Dockbar, WebKit seems to pause Flash. This behavior may be fine for most web-based SWF files, but it's not the expected behavior for an application.

We've been trying on and off to compile Mozilla's CHBrowserView so that we may embedded that instead of WebKit. Hopefully, over the next couple of days I can get that compiled and integrated followed by the OS X release.

An author's dream come true Actionscript.com is now opening it's doors to contributors, and the best part is, you can earn some extra cash. They are using Google's Adsense, which can now track individual pages. So the more popular or more often you write, the more you can earn. Details here if you're interested.

inter'mission
Some people live and breathe code, but Wes and I take it like medicine. So, we decided that the beta is out and we could take a slight break. We headed down to Cable Car to catch a showing of inter'mission. Wow, talk about finally seeing a good movie after just loads of Hollywood crap. After spending the first 5 minutes, deciphering the dialog of what barely seems English, we enjoyed the story of mixed up lives in Ireland. Heck, we even forgot about the dude playing his guitar at the beginning of the show (not half bad), and the old, beat-up coach seating (pretty comfy, actually).

Free Culture Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, is now available on the web under a Creative Commons license no less. You better get your copy while the downloads are still hot.

VMWare The fine folks at VMware spammed me today with the news of their VMWare GSX Server 3 release. I'm too poor to afford this beast, but to others with deeper pocket books, GSX server has the following to offer:

• 3.6GB memory per VM to support larger server applications
• Teamed network adapter support, SCSI backup devices for enterprise-class hardware
• 10-20% improvement in disk and networking performance Seamless migration to datacenter-class virtualization
• Migrate virtual machines from GSX Server to datacenter-class VMware ESX Server Cross-platform server consolidation
• VMware GSX Server 3 supports the latest Windows, Linux, and NetWare OSes giving you the flexibility to choose your platform to match business needs
• Runs on a wider variety of Windows and Linux OSes than any server virtualization product on the market

It's hard these days to live without some sort of VMware installation for development and testing.

As Mendel Rosenblum likes to say, "consider yourself notified."

(via my junk folder)

It's not your CD Just say no to circumventing copy protection shows you how to avoid accidentally doing something to your CDs that could land you in trouble with the law.

By the way, I would fully support an amendment to either the DMCA or the Constitution that would make listening to Celine Dion's music illegal.

Flash7 meets Linux Mike Chambers just announced that beta testing for the Flash7 Player for linux is starting soon, with a public release not too far behind. First Macromedia announced plans to make the Flash IDE work comfortably with Wine, and now this, I must say, I'm quite pleased.