I was excited when my e-mail reported a comment from Dave Winer. My excitement quickly turned to horror when I saw the content of the comment:

I bookmarked this post because I thought this was the cruelest of all the comments I saw, because I know you to be a thoughtful person, with an interesting weblog. Do you want to talk about technology, or what? Do you realize that you're part of a lynch mob? Maybe you can write about that.

I used to read your weblog and I am subscribed to your RSS feed. But if your idea of blogging includes this kind of mob behavior, well, I don't know what to do -- maybe nothing -- but I find it very upsetting.

I hope you come down from this, and decide to get serious about technology again. I am very involved in RSS, OPML, XML-RPC and SOAP, and I promise you I will not be run out of town by this stuff. Interested in hearing what you have to say.

It was never my intention to be cruel or anything like that. So before any explanation of what I was thinking, let me say "Dave, I apologize". I regarded the whole Winer number thing as a tongue in cheek kind of honor, much like the "Big Screw" competition that we used to have when I was an undergrad at MIT. I have and have had a lot of respect for Dave and the contributions that he's made to the industry. I also know that people in our business have strong convictions that they hold tightly too. When that happens people disagree, and often times violently. I wish that wasn't the case, but it always seems to happen. I also know that some of those who have contributed the most have not always been the most popular or welcomed. So again, Dave, please accept my apology. I'm going to write about what interests me, not just technology. I'm not interested in being cruel, mean, or anything like that.

I do believe that I'm entitled to my opinion on how RSS needs to evolve. I believe that RSS has been very successful -- already I cannot imagine a world without it. However, I don't believe that RSS and RSS using tools are on the radar of most people using the internet. But I believe that they are going to get there. So if there are any issues (even small ones) that we have with RSS, we ought to try to fix them now before all the rest of those people join in the fun. I know this will break software, which costs people time and money. But I think it will cost more time, money, and aggravation if we do it later rather than sooner.

A recent survey shows that 80% of people surveyed believe that e-mail is more business critical than the telephone. Nice to know I'm not the only on who thinks so. Actually, for me IM is also ahead of the telephone. I think that the only way that the telephone could catch back up was if it was a videophone.

Some of Ralph Johnson's former students have written #Smalltalk, which runs on .NET (but not Mono due to a bug)

Jonas shows how to do transparent persistence as an Aspect in AspectWerkz.

Cedric reports on Gregor Kiczales' entrance to the XML vs Java AOP syntax debate. This reminds me of the early days of C++: should we implement C++ as a preprocessor that generates C (like CFront) or should the compiler understand the language directly? Cedric's point about language independent aspects is interesting, but I think it really only makes sense in an environment like the CLR, and even then I'm not sure it will work.

James is suggesting an AOP JSR. I don't like this idea. I don't think that we understand the AOP space well enough to go standardizing it yet. And even if we did, I think it is better to allow competition among the AOP implementers. Look at what happend with XML. There was a big push to standardize XML APIs for Java -- the reasons were mostly political, and now we're stuck with SAX and DOM revisions which can only update when the JDK updates. Pull parsing? Have to start a separate JSR that may ore may not get done in time for JDK 1.5. Meanwhile people on .NET have XMLReader/Writer API's and lots of other nice stuff that can't possibly arrive before JDK 1.5 in 2004. Tossing stuff into the JCP means tying stuff to the Sun JDK release schedule, which is a bad thing. The more that I see of the .NET API's the more (grudingly) respect I have for many of them. Before I used to think that Microsoft won on tools and lost on APIs. Post .NET it seems like the reverse. Java is winning on tools (IntelliJ and Eclipse) but losing on APIs. It's much harder to fix broken APIs than bad tools. Java tools are great now, but the APIs are "standardized" and some just suck.

AOPI is YAOPP (Yet another Aspect Oriented Programming Project).

I awoke to a kind note from Gordon Weakliem telling me about Joel's article comparing Information Week and Baseline. The topic of the articles that Joel compared was Delta Airline's new IT initiatives, including the plasma display panels that I mentioned last week. The Baseline article is very detailed -- the sort of article that has been missing from the mainstream tech press for a while (blogs are providing most of this kind of information for me now).

There was a brief blurb on JetBlue's IT situation on News.com today as well. Compared to the Baseline article, it was lame.