b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
Recently
Opera strikes accord with Macromedia
The Buffy Syndrome is Real
Master of Library Media
How to Load a Script
Andy Fragen just sent me his untitledPost script.
Apple and the Media
Just Say No To Dot Doc
Building Radio Templates with HTML
Brent Ashley Tests Amphetadesk
K-Logging vs the Seven Deadly Sins of KM
K-Log 101 Presentation
Intro to K-Logging
Paschal's Kit Rocks Radio with Aggregator on Steroids
Enabling Category-specific Stories in Radio
Automatic RSS Titles and Links
Show Category Listing for Each Post
No Joke
Shortening RSS Descriptions
wipeCloud and Other Tools
Links to Categories Macro
The Right DMCA Move -- EFF and 2600 Drop Suit
On-line Print Services and Print Patents
Blogrolling
Aggregator Redux
In Line for Outlines
Deep-seated Insecurities
WiFi at Little Airports
Blogging from the Road
Friday, July 5, 2002
Open Access for NAB, Not for Users
So the NAB thinks cable companies and telcos should be forced to allow anyone to do aything they want on their networks -- no discrimination allowed. Funny, I don't see any sentiment like that in the CBDTPA.
"One nation, under broadcasters..."
NAB Joins Open-Access Forces. TVinsite Jul 5 2002 9:03PM ET[Moreover - Broadcasting industry news]
Opera strikes accord with Macromedia
Opera is my favorite web browser. I use MS when I have no alternative (occassionally), or where their product is hands-down the best (rarely). But when I can find other software that works I like to tell people about it.I used MSIE exclusively for over a year in 2000-2001 becasue it was just the best available browser. But Opera went to version 5.x in 2001 and got good enough. I switched. It's now version 6.0 and much better than good enough. It's my primary browser.
Some people still write pages with BS, MSIE-proprietary JavaScript stuff and I keep an old version of MSIE (v5 I think) installed just for dire emergencies. But if I find a site that forces me to use MSIE I just usually don't go there.
Try Opera. It works.
Macromedia to Embed the Opera Browser in Web Authoring ProductsOslo, Norway -- July 2, 2002 Today, Opera Software announced an agreement with Macromedia, whereby the two companies will work together to integrate their products for the Mac platform. Opera will deliver a full-featured, embeddable version of its desktop browser to be integrated into a wide range of Macromedia Web development products.
Opera and Macromedia will work together to develop and maintain an application programming interface (API) for an embedded browser on the Mac platform, enabling further technical collaboration between the two companies in the future. Opera's core technology will be used as default browsing technology in a number of Macromedia products on the Mac platform and will give users the opportunity to test their Web pages with the world's most standards-compliant browser. [Opera]
The Buffy Syndrome is Real
As one Buffy fan to another, who says it's not real...
posted by nicwolff » July 5 5:26 PM | 2 comments. Buffy the Terrorism Slayer(PDF link) The Center For Strategic & International Studies, which appears to be, like, a bunch of grown-up ex-senators and accused war criminals and former top spooks and such, released this white paper late last September.
Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation and planning for it is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or "chaos" theory. I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the "Buffy Paradigm," and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the "Buffy Syndrome."I am one vindicated overgrown Buffy fan. (Via Need To Know.) [MetaFilter]
Master of Library Media
During my conversation with Scott Walker on information stewardship, we hit upon the idea of having someone with a strong library science background as part of our intranet design team.
Scott suggested I hit the Georgia State web site and take a look at their Master of Library Media program.
Sorry, but I couldn't care less if my librarian has ever studied Critical Pedagogy. I admit I have little background in library science, but half our educational problems are based in the silly idea that we need democratic schooling and teaching for social action. What tripe.
I suppose the Multicultural Education course will be helpful for those of us who want to imitate the productivity rates of Africa, the social norms of the UAE, or the labor practices of the Asia/Pacific regions. Just when Jenny Levine at TSL had me thinking so fondly of librarians...
But I digress.
Still seems like a good idea to have a librarian on board. I just wonder if I'll be able to find one that understands free market culture and wants to participate.
How to Load a Script
This is an obvious question, but one no one answers it in the docs, as far as I can tell. When you read tips about scripts and such there is an assumption that you know what to do with them.I didn't.
I do now. Thanks to Andy Fragen's e-mailed instructions with his untitledPost script, I know all you need to do is save the script to a local folder and open it from the Radio App. Once the script is loaded hit the Complile button. You should be ready to go.
Andy Fragen just sent me his untitledPost script.
Andy Fragen just sent me his untitledPost script. I couldn't make it work, so Andy sent me a new version. The script is supposed to pick up the first sentence of a post and use it as the Title.If this post appears with a title -- it works.
It works! Thanks Andy.
Apple and the Media
Apple has pulled MacWorld press passes for publications that have not sufficiently kissed butt. Jerry Pournelle says he quit covering Apple just because of this kind of stupid behavior.
[from MAIL] They don't send me anything to review now. When they used to, I never heard from them unless I said something they didn't like. By anything they didn't like I include even minor criticisms: anything but fulsome praise was met with a barrage of emails and letters and other forms of harassment, some organized by Apple's marketing people.It was painful enough that I, like a lot of journalists, decided that it just wasn't worth it. Most people in my business either became Apple specialists or gave up on Apple altogether.
Does Jobs really believe that, with 2 percent market share, he can dictate media policy? The good ones -- the ones people listen to -- just quit covering his products and his company.
Just Say No To Dot Doc
This week I was talking with Joe Steinbach in Lincoln about the TCPA/MS-Palladium scenario. Joe was wondering aloud how businesses could communicate if they tried to stop using the ubiquitous MS-Office apps as a protest against Palladium.Scott Johnson at fuzzygroup devised the Just Say No To Dot Doc (or JSNTD) campaign.
Scott's article has instructions for setting MSWord to save out as RTF by default (in case you don't already know.) He also has an idea for a web service that would help businesses migrate away from MSWord dependence.
It sounds good to me, but then I'm your basic contrarian and don't give a rat's ass about total compatibility. I don't know what you do if you're stuck using MSProject or (God forbid) PowerPoint all the time. Are there viable alternatives to those? Anyway, something fun to think about while you're chewing on the latest Bush Administration/BigBusiness conspiracy theory.
Building Radio Templates with HTML
Working with Radio Userland Templates can be confusing, since the simple Radio interface isn't really suited for page design. RemoteEdit is a Radio Tool that extracts a Radio template to an external HTML page, allows you to work on the page with the HTML editor of your choice, and imports the finsihed page back into Radio.Dixie Vogul provides a brief tutorial on ReRu because the documentation is sparse.
Brent Ashley Tests Amphetadesk
Ashley found some functionality in the Amphetadesk skins that I didn't see. And he notes how Morbus Iff responded almost immediately to his queries. Same here. Morbus is intent on making the product rock.
Amphetatesting. I've been having a look at Amphetadesk today. In conjunction with Les Orchard's collapsable-channels-and-items skin, I like it quite a...[brentashley]
K-Logging vs the Seven Deadly Sins of KM
One final link to Phil Wolff's essay on how klogs quash the 11 deadly sins of Knowledge Management. I've only browsed this one but it looks interesting.Thanks to [a klog apart]
K-Log 101 Presentation
Caught sight of this klog gem via McGee's Musings as well.
Klogging 101: What, Why, and How.. Explaining klogging to the gang at the office? To your user group?Here's a little slide show you can use.
Klogging 101: What, Why, and How.Talking points for 15-20 minutes.
Not included, but may be useful: a demo session.
[a klog apart]
- Bring your favorite blogging tools (some of the slides mention UserLand products).
- Write to the web
- Open an edit page.
- Write a post.
- Publish it.
- See the results on the web.
- Comment on incoming news and data
- Look at the news aggregator.
- Comment on one.
- Publish your comment and see the results.
Intro to K-Logging
A quick intro to k-logging and a brief summary of the benefits. The open narrative style of weblogs lends itself to having people expose what they are thinking in a non-intrusive way -- a contributor-friendly way. K-logs are likely to be a major part of any future intranet/collaboration efforts I undertake.Thanks to Jim McGee for pointing my to a klog apart.
Get up to speed on K-Logging.. brent ashley:[McGee's Musings]
[a klog apart]The thinking-out-loud style of writing a K-log journal of project activities allows every part of the process to remain available during and after the project. This allows detailed review and enables latecomers to the project to get up to speed. The dead-end attempts that provide the best opportunity for learning are documented and kept for others to learn from.
Thursday, July 4, 2002
Paschal's Kit Rocks Radio with Aggregator on Steroids
Mark Paschal's Kit Radio Tool really rocks! It replaces the standard Radio News Aggregator with one that has filters (text, time, span), grouping, date stamping, and color coding. Using the Kit Aggregator it is now possible to subscribe to dozens of feeds, group them by interest category, filter the category by time or key words, and get only a small subset of the thousands of possible articles. This is very nice.I believe such filtering is critical to effective use of RSS and Aggregators in K-Log environments, where you may need to filter down to key articles that pertain to project- or time-specific topics. Oddly, a search for Paschal's name on the K-Logs Yahoo! Group yields zero results. I would think the other K-Loggers would have discussed this improvement.
Installation is a snap, directions are clear, and after a little experimentation use seems pretty intuitive. Oh yeah, Kit does all sorts of other things like run scripts, search weblogs, change time/date stamps on posts, edit outlines, and probably other things I don't understand. But if it didn't do anything more than give me control over the aggregator it would be a winner.
Paschal also makes Stapler, an RSS generator you can use to create feeds for sites that do't have them. Once you create the feeds Stapler will store them locally, update them, and even aggregate them into combined feeds. Pretty cool.
Another gem found courtesy of [Russ Lipton Documents Radio].
Enabling Category-specific Stories in Radio
Some months back Mark Woods at On the Mark published this article on Enabling Category-specific Stories in Radio. While not as easy as having Radio support category-specific stories directly, this function is one of the few remainining holes in using Radio for K-Log (knowledge logging) applications.Thanks to [Russ Lipton Documents Radio].
Automatic RSS Titles and Links
Andy Fragen got tired of having blank lines above his posts when he forgot to add a Title. He wrote a callback. Andy Fragen doesn't have blank lines anymore. Andy's cool.I can't make it work (I'm a Frontier idiot) but I will get it figured out. This will be a great way to have my Mail-to-Weblog posts formatted to match my active posts.
Untitled post callback.. OK, I fiddled with the untitled post macro to make it use the first sentence as the title of the post. If anyone wants the callback let me know. Actually here it is.
on untitledPost (adrpost) {
if not defined (adrpost^.title) {
adrpost^.title = string(string.firstSentence (adrpost^.text))}}Simple changes. Callbacks are great! [Surgical Diversions]
Show Category Listing for Each Post
Rick Klau points us to yet another nice K-Log feature addition to Radio -- listing the categories for each posting. I like this one. A category listing on each post makes it obvious to new readers there is a classification system here, and help them quickly visualize the structure and where to look for things of interest. Thanks for the pointer, Rick.
Many thanks to Roland Tanglao who pointed me to the comments at Jake's site that explain how to do it. It's simple - just drop a file into your Macros directory, then add one line to your item template. Took less than five minutes. (Roland's site is worth visiting for KM issues, by the way, and Jake's a developer at Userland who's got a number of good things to share re: Radio and blogs in general.)[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
No Joke
This is supposed to be a joke. It's funny, but no joke.
Honest lawyers!?
[Memepool]
Shortening RSS Descriptions
This thread in the Userland DG is about creating a callback to truncate the default RSS descritpions in Radio. By default, Radio puts an entire post into the RSS. I wanted to send out only the first sentence. This helped. Thanks to Rick Klau for guidance.wipeCloud and Other Tools
A collection of Radio scripts and tools for more advanced users from Andy Fragen.
Links to Categories Macro
A DG thread that covers two things -- scripts from both Paschal and Phil Wolff for rendering a link-list of categories in a side bar, and Paschal's script for posting the relevant categories as a part of each post.The Right DMCA Move -- EFF and 2600 Drop Suit
The DMCA is an overwrought, overly burdensome, ill-conceived piece of protectionist legislation -- one that suffers the fundamental flaw of attempting to regulate specific technologies rather than behaviors. But this is the right move. 2600's reputation and public persona would have doomed the case.
Mainstream America and organizations need to vote with their pocketbooks, and need to inform their legislators that the Internet is not about business opportunities for Hollywood. 2600 and EFF have fired the first shots, but they can't win the war. It's time for the rest of us to step up.
Hacker Mag 2600 Drops DMCA Fight. SiliconValley.Internet.com Jul 4 2002 1:27AM ET [Moreover - IP and patents news]
On-line Print Services and Print Patents
Cafepress.com lets you design and sell swag for your company, your blog, or your company blog. Upload your graphics, pick the product mix, set the price, link back. They appear to produce and sell ad specialities on demand. High margin stuff for them. I don't know about quality. Maybe I'll buy something and see.
VistaPrint of Waltham, MA has a lot of online print goods. Price grid is confusing but looks like 250 4/1 cards for under $30. What is the difference between the different business card levels? And why does the site only support MSIE. Bad.
Frank found a patent they list -- No. 6,247,011 -- and they claim over 1 million customers. Looks like another silly printing process patent.
Update: I found this on while searching for info on the patent Digital-Net and Insty-Prints.
Blogrolling
blogrolling.com, a web service for managing blogroll lists. I don't think this is any easier than Radio's outliner function -- since that lets you edit a text file -- but it looks like a good solution for other blog software that lacks a good blogroll feature.Aggregator Redux
I've been using AmphetaDesk while on the road. I think it has some configuration options I haven't quite grasped yet. I know Morbus Iff is going to add grouping in the next release. Some aging and auto-delete control would be nice, too.Nothing beats being able to post directly to the weblog, though. I miss that. It's a pain to have to do the cut-and-paste routine 2-3 times to get the URL, the title, the copy, etc. How do other weblogs do that? Do blogger and such have aggregator facilities or some interface element that lets users post from third-party aggregators?
In Line for Outlines
I'm starting to wonder if I could use the Outliner in Radio as a text editor -- I really like the blogroll trick. I'm wondering if there is a stand-alone version of it that would run on my laptop. I'm wondering if I could understand enough about OPML files to use it as a source for editing my weblog entries when I'm away from Radio. I saw a couple of docs in the DL on how to use renderers to read OPML files into HTML pages. I'm wondering if I really need to learn still another format. I'm wondering if my energy isn't better spent figuring out what to write instead of worrying about how to write it.
Deep-seated Insecurities
I like the idea of remote access. I'm gonna do it. Soon. I don't like the security issues. I think I'll have to setup a special machine that runs only the apps I want to access remotely, and has no access to other network resources. I'll have to figure out the stupid Windoze Users and Groups permissions so the machine runs in something less than Administrator mode. Lots of programs don't seem to run well like that. I don't know if that's my fault or the programmer's.If I do this I guess I'll be a "remote" user all the time, huh? Even from my primary machine I'll be accessing Radio over the network. Wonder if there are any performance issues. I'll have to experiment.
What about a software VPN? Doesn't Windoze have something built-in? It would be nice to have access to my files -- at least a subset of files. Ugh. Document management. Versions. Keeping track. Argh-h-h-h. Must be a better way. Anyone have a suggestion for accessible doc storage? I know X-Drive and all those silly "hard drive in the sky" operations have shut down, and I don't know that I trusted them anyway. I guess putting them in a pwd-protected subdirectory on my web host is about as good as it gets. But then there's uploading, file management, versions, keeping track. Ugh.
Maybe I just share out the D: drive on the host machine, mount that across the network and store my project docs and stuff there. Wouldn't be too hard to have a projects or work folder. Since my other machines wouldn't be on when I was gone there would be no chance of getting to them.
WiFi at Little Airports
I'm in the Lincoln, NE airport. Why can't they put WiFi (who calls it "wiffy"?) in little airports? Can't be that hard. All the business-user bandwidth hogs would clog it up in a big airpot, but there are only two gates in LNK (can you geuss what they're called?) and only a handful of people sitting here with laptops. We could easily share a DSL or cable line. What about some warchalking at regional airports? Does the FAA really think 802.11 will bring down the flight line? It can't be any worse than cell phones.Tuesday, July 2, 2002
Blogging from the Road
Things are moving along in sunny Lincoln. They need rain here, though. Getting my transition plan in place. Finally nailed down a schedule for final site visits with vendors and have a schedule for sending all the pertinent contracts, audits, and miscellany to the new team.
Didn't get to review Manila. Bummer. The Manila guy here took off for vacation. I was really looking forward to getting a peek under the hood and asking some questions from someone who has been a Manila site admin. Found a few blogs that look interesting this week. Dan Rosenbaum at Over the Edge has made a couple of recommendations, as well. I haven't had time to check them out but will do so later and post accordingly.
Found BookNotes for fans of traditionally produced books. Craig has a background in library book binding -- an area that I really enjoy and don't know nearly enough about. Bindery is still plagued by quality problems in the demand-driven production world. Craig's from my home state -- Texas. Maybe I should give him a call sometime.
Also found this site by Mark Bernstein, Chief Scientist at Eastgate Systems and creator of a Macintosh hypertext tool, TinderBox. Weblog is mostly personal stuff, but has a separate blog for TinderBox. Mark has an amusing quote on his site:
"You'd think the purpose of a roof is to keep rain off the television." -- Bob Frankston, on the net industry's fixation on entertainment.
I need to look up Bob Frankston. Mark's site pointed me to elegant hack, a site on information architecture run by Christina Wodtke. Seems pretty good. She reviewed 3,600 sites for a C/Net award panel, and seems to have done lots of web design for a variety of art nouveau dot.com design firms.
Another privacy blog -- Privacy Parts. Haven't spent much time viewing it. No insight into how useful it is. Just listed it so I wouldn't forget. We'll see.
Picked this up from Steve Pilgrim:
SHOWING MY IGNORANCE
What's the difference between a VPN and an Intranet?Paolo is covering Intranets. What are the big picture differences between intranets and VPN's?
I'm writing something about how Intranets are developing, and I made a few drawings to better illustrate the concept. Maybe somebody is interested... [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Has a nice group of set theory-style pics showing how Intranets sprout KLogs. And Paolo's site points to RadioTools, a site that has some interesting tools; RSSDistiller will let you create RSS fees from web sites (like WhatTheyThink.com) and RemoteEdit will do an out-and-back conversion of Radio Templates to HTML pages so you can edit in standard editors. Doesn't look like either program has been updated in a while. I'll test next week. Hope I don't blow anything up.
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