Solipsism Gradient

Well, I’ve somewhat belatedly found out about RSS. This stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you’re asking). This is a XML-based file format that is becoming popular for automatically distributing news or weblog posts. As with nearly everything on the Internet, there are two sides to RSS: server (generator) or client (reader).

Let’s look at the RSS reader side first. I’m using NetNewsWire Lite for Mac OS X, written by Brent Simmons at Ranchero Software. This sort of software is also known as a “news aggregator”.

Basically, you go to a news site or weblog you’d like to read daily (or even hourly). If you’re lucky, you’ll see a red tag, just like the one at the top of this page; some pages have a simple “Syndicate” link instead. Copy the tag or link’s URL from your browser, switch to NetNewsWire, use the “Subscribe” command, and paste the URL into the subscription dialog. From now on, NetNewsWire will check that site (and all others you’ve subscribed to) every hour or so, and if it finds new news items or weblog entries it shows you a list. You can read summaries right there or have the full items opened in your browser.

To make a long story short, I’m now subscribed to over 60 news sites and about the same number of weblogs, and save at least an hour every day! No more sitting at the browser and selecting dozens of bookmarks, one after the other… or at least, the number of sites I do this for has shrunk considerably. I find myself forgetting to check sites which don’t have a aRSS feed.

Now let’s jump to the generator side of RSS. In my case, I’m interested in making it easier for people to read my weblog. Many important bloggers don’t have time to read non-RSS sites, so generating RSS is a big step in getting to play with the big boys.

Ready-made blogging software which runs on your own server, like Movable Type, Radio Userland and Blosxom (to name a few), usually have RSS generation capability built right in. Centralized systems like Blogger usually don’t, although I hear Blogger Pro has an experimental RSS generator.

In my case, I’m using phpBB which is more bulletin-board-oriented; I’ve hacked it to use it as a weblog generator, too. So now I’ve spent a week or so putting in RSS generation capability (and updating to 2.0.4 while I was at it). There still are some nits to pick, but it works now. At least NetNewsWire reads my feed with no problems, and the RSS Validator says I’m generating valid RSS/XML.

Just found out that Neil Gaiman, the author of “American Gods”, also has a weblog (or rather, a journal) up on his site.

His review of Terry Pratchett‘s “Night Watch” is excellent. As you may (not?) know, Neil and Terry have co-authored a great book called “Good Omens”. All are highly recommended.

RAILhead Design has a great tutorial about making “favicons” – those little 16×16 icons which Safari may show next to the URL. (Yes, I know my own isn’t all that great… I’ll be changing it, but it’s not a priority.)

There’s also an entire website devoted to the subject. This article talks about best practices.

In my own experience, making a single 16×16 icon in 256 colors will cover 99% of the cases where the icons appear… the 32×32 size is apparently only used when dragging an URL to the desktop. The articles recommend also making 16-color versions, which usually suck.

And of course, other browsers like Mozilla and Opera (not sure about Chimera) also show favicons.

Thanks to Bryan Pietrzak and Jack Small, who posted these links on the Carbon Developer’s List.

The photos from Milho Verde, where we spent a week over the New Year, are up. Enjoy.

(Photo pages may take some time to load!)

A week ago, in a comment on the Eldred v. Ashcroft decision, I pointed at Spider Robinson‘s short story, “Melancholy Elephants”, where he argues against perpetual copyrights.

Dori Smith & Tom Negrino’s Backup Brain today points at an editorial called “The Mouse’s pro Bono project”, also written by Spider Robinson, about the decision.

First of all, it seems that “Melancholy Elephants” won the 1983 Hugo Award for best short story. My apologies for overlooking that fact in my first comment.

In the editorial, Spider writes:

Prof. Lessig argues that Congress only has the right to permit copyright within limits: Apparently, in his view, 50 years is a limit but 70 somehow is not. To explore this, let’s shift perspective 180 degrees from Disney, and focus on the exact opposite end of the financial spectrum: me.

…I’ve written 32 books so far. I believe I’ve earned what money they’ve brought me (and then some!), and I hope they’ll stay in print awhile after I’m gone.

So when I do snuff it, I’d like to leave them, and any money they may fetch (the wee percentage the publishers, producers and taxmen won’t keep) to my daughter Terri — just like any other craftsman would. I don’t think that’s an outrageous, capitalist-pig desire: It’s a large part of why the stories exist in the first place.

…I wish we were done with irony now. “Melancholy Elephants” was originally dedicated to the remarkable Virginia Heinlein, Robert Heinlein’s widow. On Jan. 18, Ginny passed away in her sleep in Florida, surrounded by family and friends. She leaves several descendants – one 3 years old – and I don’t see why they should get ripped off because “information wants to be free.”

Well, I sympathize with Spider’s point… up to a point. Certainly individual author’s surviving spouses and children should be entitled to continue holding the copyright for a reasonable time – perhaps for the lifetime of the spouse and until the children reach majority or a certain age. I’m not sure I agree about grandchildren or great-grandchildren…

I certainly don’t think that corporations should be similarly entitled, or for the same time span as individuals; the humanitarian argument certainly is inappropriate here. 95 years, as currently established, is clearly aimed solely at protecting the interests of a very small minority of powerful corporations.

Lawrence Lessig has published a very interesting proposal:

…I describe a proposal that would move more work into the public domain than a total victory in the Supreme Court would have. The basic idea is this: 50 years after a work has been “published,” a copyright owner would be required to pay a copyright tax. That tax should be extremely low – this proposal says $50, but it could be $1. If the copyright holder does not pay the tax for 3 years, then the work is forfeit to the public domain. If the copyright holder does pay the tax, then its contacting agent would be made a matter of public record. Very quickly we would have a cheap, searchable record, of what work is controlled and what work is free.

This sounds both effective (at least in its intent to revive the public domain) and doable, although it fails to distinguish between individual and corporate copyright owners. Raising the value – say, to $50,000 – would only give the Disneys another unfair advantage, as this would still be insignificant to them. Hm…

Joel on Software writes about the options for talking about future products:

When Apple releases a new product, they tend to surprise the heck out of people, even the devoted Apple-watchers who have spent the last few months riffling through garbage dumpsters at One Infinite Loop.

Microsoft, on the other hand, can’t stop talking about products that are mere glimmers in someone’s eye. Testers outside the company were using .NET for years before it finally shipped.

So, which is right? Should you talk endlessly about your products under development, in hopes of building buzz, or should you hold off until you’ve got something ready to go?

…I have a policy lifted from Marlon Brando, playing a mob boss in The Freshman: “Every word I say, by definition, is a promise.” The best way to avoid breaking promises is not to make any, and that’s as good a reason as I need not to talk about future versions of our products.

I find myself mostly agreeing with Joel here. While I see no harm in collecting user suggestions, and saying “this (or that) is on my list for the next product release” at reasonable places, it’s rarely good policy to preannounce major stuff. Unless (or perhaps even if) you’re Microsoft.

That said, how does this apply to XRay? While I have a quite reasonable list of features “for the next release”, some of the things on that list – like batch processing – entail a complete revision of fundamental components, such as the plug-in interfaces. I’m confident that it can be done, and it will be done in version 1.1, but I still may release another 1.0.x version before 1.1 comes out.

For several reasons, new XRay versions have been delayed. While I still spend about an hour a day with user support, time to do concentrated work on the next version hasn’t been available… until now. This weekend I’ll be restarting full-time work on XRay.

Sorry, can’t say yet when the next version will come out, or what number it’ll be…

Maddog ran into a classic example of good user interface design at the Schipol airport in Holland.

Hmm… I wonder if this can be retrofitted…

Update: I was looking around Maddog’s weblog a little more after posting this, and there are many interesting posts; I liked the ones about micropayments. He went to Brazil for Christmas 2001 and wrote several articles about it (he’s from Toronto).

I’ve been to Toronto several times, but had no weblog then . Perhaps that’s an idea: tourists exchanging weblogs?

James Lileks has a very interesting section on his site where he comments on several currencies. Worth a look.