WebServicesSummit.com has posted an excerpt of the Encryption and XML Security chapter from my book.

is that you aren't in a continuously air-conditioned building like many workplaces. Ordinarily I consider this a plus, but for the last few weeks my allergies have been killing me, to the point where I can't manage to wear my contacts for a full work day. My nose is being crushed by the weight of my heavy glasses. Airconditioning is one of the few things that seems to be effective at keeping the allergies at bay.

An audio version of Julie's Gnomedex presentation is now available. It's like getting half the story because the presentation is highly dependent on her slide/photograph deck, and the synchronization of the audio and visuals. We think that some video is going to go up, but don't know when.

[via Tracking GnomeDex ]:

In the age of ever more blogged conferences, it has become somewhat of a pain to find all the coverage for a particular event. Fortunately, Kris Krug's EventBlogging.com is a solution to this problem. For Gnomedex, EventBlogging provided a SuperFeed for the event, incorporating content from many of the usual suspects, including Flickr, del.icio.us, Feedster, Technorati, and PubSub. I love this one stop shopping idea, and I hope it catches on.

Incidentally, the source that appeared to do the best job of collecting Gnomedex information that was relevant to me was Feedster. Make of that what you will.

Technorati Tags: eventblogging, gnomedex, kriskrug, rss, superfeed

I'm disgusted with how this came out. Reading the EFF commentary on the ruling hasn't done much to make me feel better about it. As far as I'm concerned, the Supreme Court has declared that the future of the US economy is in entertainment and lawsuits, not technology.

We're back from Gnomedex and settling down after all the excitement. Here are some of the things that stuck out at me.

I really liked the presentation on MindManager. Was it a product pitch? Absolutely. But it was a really good demonstration of a mind-mapping tool. I really want one of these, and when I was using Windows, I was seriously eyeing MindManger. But then I made the leap to OS X and that went down the drain. So not only was it cool to see the demo (on a TabletPC), but it seems that an OS X version is in development, which is excellent news.

The panel on Today's Digital Legalities had lots of interesting examples, and Jason Calcanis talked about his principles for dealing with demand letters from attorneys. It was nice that he was sanity checking himself with Denise Howell. Legal stuff always gives me the willies, even though I got a crash course in some legal stuff during the boom. Thankfully, Denise (on behalf of the panel) has been aggregating useful resources. The EFF's Legal Guide for Bloggers got the mention that it richly deserves.

These were the sessions that I actually managed to devote my full attention to. Julie's presentation was really well received, and after that she had a lot of people coming to talk to her, so I tried to help as much as possible (with the kids) so that she could spend time talking. It was really gratifying for me, because she has been working super hard on the talk for a number of weeks.

There's going to be an audio and (I think) video stream of the conference presentations, and Julie will post those when they are available. In the meantime, I've collected some posts about the talk:

Kitten Fluff
Just a Gwai Lo
MasterMaq
Tris Hussey
BloggingGnomedex
Darren Barefoot
Blogaholics
Seattleduck
Derek Miller
The Scobelizer Bunny

I'm obviously biased, but I am really proud (as if I had much to do with it) of her.

Some thoughts on Microsoft's RSS announcements today:

The pieces being announced are a feed parsing library, a common (OS wide) subscriptions list, and a Creative Commons licensed spec for RSS extensions that let an application treat an RSS feed as an ordered list. None of these are rocket science, but on the whole, if you are a platform vendor, this is exactly the kind of stuff that you'd expect to see. In my mind, the most important aspect of the announcement is that it lends credibility to the notion of using RSS to deliver data to applications, which is an idea that I've been fond of for some time.

I think that the Creative Commons licensing of a spec is a big step for Microsoft. It remains to be seen if there will actually be give and take with the rest of the world or not, but at least it is a first step.

Initial impressions of Gnomedex:

I like the small feel. I'm ambivalent about the single track format -- not having to run around to sessions is good, but running around to sessions also leads to running into interesting people. It's also a different experience to be at a conference where product announcements are being made in the presentations. This isn't really something that happens at my other favorite small conferences, PyCon and ApacheCon. Not a plus or minus, just different. At one point in my career was going to conferences with announcements. I've just been living in a different world for a while, I guess.

I've met a number of people that I wanted to meet in person, as well as some of the folks reading this blog. Special mention to Mike of HackingNetflix - we don't subscribe to netflix yet, but Mike has been able to influence Netflix to add RSS feeds, and has generally been doing a great job of covering Netflix. If we do end up subscribing to Netflix (it's "in the plan"), it will be due in some degree to Mike. Via their interaction with Mike, Netflix has shown that it's a company that wants to have a conversation with its customers, and those are the kinds of companies that I prefer to do business with (and yes, I'm willing to pay a premium for that).

[via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life ]:

The fun with Greasemonkey has only begun. Dare reports on changes to Gmail that broke Stephen O'Grady's Greasemonkey scripts. Dare's response is:

I find this hilarious. Greasemonkey scripts work by effectively screen scrapping the website and inserting changes into the HTML. Stephen and others who are upset by Google's change are basically saying that Google should never change the HTML or URL structure of the website ever again because it breaks their scripts. Yeah, right.

Repeat after me, a web page is not an API or a platform.

I pointed out the same in the comments to this post.

[via O'Reilly Radar ]:

Nat Torkington posted a great set of notes on Linda Stone's talk at SuperNova. A while back I was fortunate enough to spend some time talking with Linda about the ideas in Nat's notes. If you are interested in attention, you really need to look over the notes. A lot of the current discussion about attention (at least related to RSS) has focused on the technology aspects -- how to collect attention data, how to mark it up, and how to mix up the data to do triage. Linda's stuff looks at the human impact of the attention problem, and that's not just limited to RSS. Here's her take on where it's all going:

The next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus. In this new area, experiencing this engaged attention is to feel alive. Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back.

As additional food for thought: some of these ideas are similar to themes in "The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and The Next Episode of Capitalism" (Shoshana Zuboff, James Maxmin).

A new build of Monad is up. I'm glad that someone is trying to push the command line interface forward. I don't boot up a Windows box often enough to download it (at least not until we have Macs that run Windows or a Monad that can run on Mono), but I'm keeping an eye on what's happening with Monad.

Morgen Kaufmann has recently published a book on open source:

Innovation Happens Elsewhere : Open Source as Business Strategy

I was one of the external reviewers for the book, and it's a solid effort. Over the years I've talked to lots of people about open source and answered a lot of questions. Many of those questions are addressed in the book. There are chapters that cover the reasons why you might get involved in open source, and there are several practical chapters that discuss the nuts and bolts of setting and participating in open source projects.

The authors, Dick Gabriel and Ron Goldman, are old time Lisp hackers -- I've followed Gabriel's work for years, so it was a treat to be a reviewer. Both have been involved in open source software since before it was called open source, and they've had a lot of experience working with some of Sun's open source communities

If you have questions about open source, or want to read a good treatment, you should pick up this book (the content will be online at some point). I know that I am going to be directing people to the book when they want to know more about open source.

I have a long history with UNIX. My first exposure was to 2BSD on the VAX. The shell on that system was the C-Shell. When I got to MIT and started working at Athena, I was using tcsh. During my years at Brown, I discovered zsh, which I am using to this very day.

Most of the time I picked up what I needed to know by reading the man pages for the various shells, and it's been a very long time since I read a book on a shell. I think that the only shell books that I own are The UNIX Programming Environment and The KornShell command and programming language. Recently, I've wanted to do more stuff with zsh, particularly around command completions. zsh is on it's second completion system, and I found the manual pages pretty tough going. So I finally broke down and got a copy of "From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line". Two of the authors are zsh developers, which made me very hopeful about the book.

I was not disappointed. Maybe it's just that I needed a shell refresher in general, but I got a lot out of the book. Here are a few of the things that jumped out from my notes:

• redirecting the output of a for loop
• the CDPATH variable (cd searches this path)
• accept-line-and-down-history [Ctrl-o] (make it easy to execute sequence of lines from the history)
• push-line-or-edit and the zsh buffer stack (push fragments of a command line onto a stack)
• The !? history command (search history for nearest match)
• The two argument form of the cd command (replace arg1 in $cwd w/ arg2 and cd there)
• Matching numeric ranges (understands numbers)
• bashcompinit (emulate bash completions commands - allows use of bash_completion project)
• Partial completion (cd /u/lo/b <tab> to cd to /usr/local/bin)
• Process substitution ( emacs =(indent -st < file) - sends output of indent to emacs)
• zsh associative arrays (very useful)

The chapters on zsh completion alone were worth the price for me.

For those new to zsh, Yammer has some other zsh examples.

Ian Holsman describes a CSS based trick for blocking some ads in NetNewsWire's browser. It definitely cut a bunch of ads in pages that I was looking at...

I've been trying to catch up on ITConversations recordings. Here's a great quote from Irving Wladawsky-Berger's OSBC 2005 presentation.

I know that there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time worrying about that they key to open source is to look at the source code of software. Trust me, that is really boring. If I tell you that you can now spend your Saturday night looking at the source code of AIX, boy I hope you don't get excited, because then we have a real problem. The real value of open source software is that allows communities to work together and solve problems

Today is Obsolete Software T-Shirt Day in the OSAF Offices. Those of us who work remotely are posting photographs (although I'm breaking the rules by not posing in my shirt(s). The advantage is that you get to see three T-Shirts instead of one.

First up: The T-Shirt Commemorating the closure of Apple's Cambridge Research Lab, and the termination of the Dylan project. Dylan is one of the promising languages that Java killed.

"The power to cancel your very best"

"Are you sure you want to cancel the entire Cambridge lab?"

The next T-shirt commemorates the occasion of Apple and HP bailing out of Taligent, leaving IBM with all the goodies.

The Taligent logo

"Top Ten Reasons I Stayed at Taligent"

The last T-Shirt celebrated the spin off of Apple's Newton Systems Group into a separate company. The celebration was short lived, as Steve Jobs yanked us right back into Apple and then killed us. But at least Powerbooks are now fast at going to sleep and waking up...

"Newton, Inc."

(My apologies for the poor photography)

Bryan Cantrill has done the needful and provided an overview of the flood of OpenSolaris posts:

In our excitement, we may have overwhelmed a tad: there was so much content yesterday, that it would have been impossible for anyone to keep up -- we blogged over 200,000 words (over 800 pages!) yesterday alone. So over the next few days, I want to highlight some entries that you might have missed, broken down by subject area.

OSAF is starting a group blog for all of our projects, including the Chandler Personal Information Manager, the Cosmo sharing/calendaring server, and the Scooby calendaring web application.

I hope that this will be a way for those of you who are interested in Chandler, Cosmo, and Scooby to keep up with what is happening with each of the projects.

I was playing around with the new Technorati Beta, so it was inevitable that I would do a search to see the statistics on this blog. Imagine my surprise to be granted a rank around 3090 or so. That's very flattering, but it just seems nuts to me. This is a very geeky blog (I've had friends of mine who are geeks write and tell me they have no idea what I'm rambling about), and I'm sure that there must be way more than 3100 blogs out there that cover much more generally interesting topics. (I bet they are well written too).

Or is the blogosphere much smaller than I believe, and mostly an echo chamber for computer people?

For those who care, here are the conferences that I'll be at this Summer:

Gnomedex 2005 - Julie is giving a tightened up version of her Northern Voice presentation, and I will be there to cheer her on. The main room for Gnomedex is now sold out, but by popular request, Chris and Ponzi have opened up an overflow room, so hurry if you still want to come.

OSCON 2005 - I will be giving a presentation on how to build parcels (extensions) for Chandler. My plan is to be around for the entire conference (including tutorials).

I hope that I'll meet some of you in person this summer!

Branden Robinson posted a handy tip that uses wait shell builtin to add sound / speech notifications to long running tasks after you've kicked off the task.