I really like the simplicity of *blosxom based weblog systems, but there's one major drawback. Categories are assigned based on which directories an entry lives in. This means that you are limited to a single category. Even worse, if you use the category and filename/entry name as the permalink, you cannot move or recategorize entries. Since my weblog is part of my personal information space, this is a problem for me. Today I posted a bunch of stuff that really belongs in a "microcontent" category. I could make one and shove the new stuff in there, but that leaves a discontinuity with all the other stuff that I've posted that also seems to be about microcontent. The only problem with multiple categorization is that I can't figure out a nice way to do it that doesn't involve a database. And no, hard linking / symlinking the files doesn't count.

7-Zip is an LGPL'ed file archiver that purports to do better than WinZip on regular Zip files. Noteworthy is ts support for RAR, bzip2, rpm's and deb's (among others). It also provides a new compression method, 7z, which is of course, claimed to be tighter than any other. Only problem is it's Windows only.

Via Seb's Open Research: an old post from Norman Walsh on how he uses RSS to manage his calendar:

I have a possibly odd RSS application: I use RSS to keep track of my schedule. I have an "RSS feed" that shows me my todo items, upcoming calendar events, and some other stuff.

I have a feeling that using RSS for this is either a really clever idea or a really stupid one, but I'm not sure which. Anyway, it's working for me. It means that everytime I peek at my RSS viewer, I see my schedule.

Via Nat's dashboard blog: Jim Krehl's descriptionof his text indexer for dashboard.

John Porcaro reports on Microsoft's Global Briefing. It should be obvious that market leaders are not always thought leaders, but sometimes obvious things need pointing out. Interesting to hear what Microsofties are being told.

• RMS's International Lisp Conference 2002 speech in which he recounts the Symblics/LMI wars, and the development of GNU Emacs.
• sfsexp: the small, fast s-expression library. Complete with Ruby (but not Python) bindings.
• Another C s-expression library, this one written by Ron Rivest and Butler Lampson at MIT's LCS.

Chad Dickerson at InfoWorld reported a great success story that they had getting support from an open source project. It happened that in this case the project was the ASF's Apache 2.0. At the end of his post, was something that I don't see that often:

If you're running the Apache web server (or any of the other projects supported by the Apache Software Foundation), you should really contribute. My C skills would be a burden to the Apache Software Foundation, so I'm sending them a check today.

Meanwhile Tim Oren is musing on open source:

How does a commercial interest align itself successfully with the opinion leaders and developers who make open source more than another doomed commercial 'alliance'?

Pointing back to my question about how to promote open source projects, I'd also ask how predictable the process can be made from the point of the view of the customers, given its inherent component of chaos (or emergent order if you prefer.)

These questions are some of the big challenges facing commercial interests and the open source community. What Chad Dickerson did is great -- a thank you check is always appreciated. But we in the open source community need to think about how to answer Tim's questions. Is there a way for commercial interests to deal directly with individuals or groups of individuals in a way that produces predictability / stability, without killing the open source spirit?

Kevin Altis has been persuaded to try OpenOffice because of the Python UNO bridge. Shades of AppleScript, but with a real language...