Justplain

In case you’ve missed it, the opml auto-discovery bookmarklet i posted about a few days ago, has an improved succesor: a OPML Auto-discovery Extension for Firefox (download).

Read all about in cleverclogs.

Anyone else experiencing difficulties accessing bloglines, or is it just me?

John Tropea has some wishes on the opml-front:

• A search tool for searching a specific opm-file: I like the idea, but there is a risk when such a tool also searches in the opml-files that it finds within the opml (inclusion). Searching full-text across a massive directory sounds great but it is like asking a search-engine to search on a specific page and also search on all the pages it finds links of on the first page, and so on… What if opml-file #1 links to opml-file #2 and #2 links to #1. How do we get out of the loop?
• Subscribe to an OPML or get services to subscribe to your OPML: I agree, if you are developing a service that can handle opml, make it handle it dynamically and not just import the feeds!
• OPML archive or latest posts for your blog: In my opinion oplm is not such a great format for storing posts. From a developers perspective storing html in an attribute instead of between tags where you can escape the html with [CDATA[]], is a bad idea. Al the angled brackets have to be replaced by < and > and some more. And why would we do this anyway when we have a fantastic format that was designed for storing posts: RSS. Grazr and bitty will handle this very well!

Starring Wozz, Captain Crunch and K. Mitnick

Added to my toWatchList! I should have watched it right away. Looks like it was taken of

Marjolein Hoekstra and James Corbett hacked together something quite interesting!

I’ve not dived into it to deeply but this is how it basically works: You can add a link-tag to the header of your page with the url of an opml-file (<link rel=”alternate” type=”text/xml+opml” text=”Opmlmanager userlist” xhref=”http://www.opmlmanager.com/userlist/userlist.opml” mce_href=”http://www.opmlmanager.com/userlist/userlist.opml” / >). A visitor which uses a tool for autodiscovering, which for now is a bookmarked page that wil make a little div popup at the page your watching that will you show a link that will take you to a grazr-page that will display the opml, will directly detect the opml-file. Just like autodetecting rss.

Now all we need is a add-on for firefox, so you don’t have to go the bookmarket to discover opml-feeds, but that will show an opml-icon (is there a final design yet?) on every page containing an opml-link in the header. And of course you should be able to configure what should happen once you click that opml-icon.

What would one do without the Dutch and the Irish

Serial entrepenuer: Kazaa, Skype, and Venice is next. And a blogger.

About Venice:

“It’s simple, really — we are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass medias of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes…) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on… TV is 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that!”

Looking at where he’s coming from, this might be a project to keep your eye on!

And Wally Wallington shows you how it was done.

“Anybody that wants to make a revolution shouldn’t grab a gun. Lets go and start working, like we do, to chang the world by using science and technology.” - Mr. Stanford R. Ovshinsky

If you want to know what happened to the electrical vehical introduced in the 90’s and how the car and oil companies and governments made it dissapear and now try to sell us the future with hydrogen fueled cars, a future that is at least 2 decades away, watch this movie!

Microsoft plans to provide Windows Vista to volume license business customers next month, in November, and then provide it on a worldwide basis for general availability in January. And worldwide includes Europe

I’ve started reading The mythical man-month, a book on software project management written by Frederick P. Brooks jr. in 1975. I have a copy of the 20th aniversary edition (1995) which has some extra’s. It is considered a must read for software engineers and is still relevant because the focus of the book is not on the technology but on people working with technology.

If only read the first essay, the tar pit, so far. Brooks makes a great analyses why programming is fun:

1. The sheer joy of making things, children (lego) and adults (programs) like creating things.
2. The pleasure of making things that are useful to other people
3. The fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning.
4. The joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task.
5. The delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.

So, thats why we are such a happy bunch Brooks also describes a few woes, but i won’t spoil the mood right now. If you haven’t got a clue what i’m talking about, you should watch the interview Robert Scoble did with Dori Smith, a javascript programmer and writer of several books, and of course a blogger, on this subject. She’s the proof for Brooks analyses!