Status-Q

A year ago today: "Yes, XML can be used to represent web pages, but assuming that it's limited to that is like assuming that ASCII is limited to email." (Expanded this later in The Importance of XML). Sorry - today's entries are a bit self-referential. If there's one thing worse than a blog which only talks about other blogs, it's a blog which talks about itself. Forgive me - I've been waiting eagerly for the site to be old enough to have a 'one year ago today' link so I'm posting it anyway!

Just under a year ago, my name was on the front pages of both the London Times and the Washington Post within a week, when it was announced that the Trojan Room Coffepot was being closed down. If you're anything like me, when you read newspaper articles, the names quoted in passing go in one eye and out of the other, but it's sad to think that I'm unlikely to be involved in anything which gets such media coverage again.

Still, having my blog mentioned on Dave Winer's Scripting News three times in quick succession must come a close second :-) The first thing you notice is the number of hits that your website gets. The next is that a little army of search engine robots follow closely behind. John Hiler is quite right.

Dave has always been influential because of his writing, but that may be secondary compared to his power to influence weblogs. Many people would pay a lot of money for that. Will this power eventually corrupt? We're watching you carefully, Dave... (and, by the way, what's your favourite bottle of wine?)

For Radio hackers: Mmm. My cunning scheme which showed the number of comments attached to each posting here was causing a few complications in my Radio setup. The PHP/MySQL back end ran perfectly and was a fun experiment but as I had suspected, nobody, including me, really wanted to leave comments here, so I've decided to discard the facility for now in the interests of simplicity. You can always email me...

John Naughton's column in the Observer is particularly good this week. "How is it possible to make money from the internet?'. It's the wrong question, because it's based on a fundamental misconception."

Expensive Bytes. There's a new marketplace in cyberspace. Virtual Game Weapons Bought With Real Money (NY Times)

osOpinion: "Bluetooth has been touted as 'the next big thing' for three years now and has consistently failed to live up to its hype. More accurately, it has consistently failed to live, period. ...802.11b wireless networking... has already taken any corporate role Bluetooth aimed at, relegating it to road warriors and tech-toy junkies. "

John Naughton - "Why shouldn't ministers change their minds? ...The really stupid people are those who refuse to countenance changing their minds, no matter what happens. " Agreed. My father says he'll vote for the first politician who says, "I'm sorry - we made a mistake. We'll try and get it right next time."

jEdit is becoming really rather a good text editor. It's a while since I've looked at it, but it now has a lot of nice features, and a large number of plugins with which you can extend it. Being Java-based, you can use it on a wide variety of platforms.

It takes some time to get into, customize, etc but I can see it might be worth persevering. Nothing worthwhile, as they say, was ever achieved without hard work. (Who said that, besides my mother? Albert Schweitzer? It's his sort of thing, but it probably predates him)

Good quote from Jamie Zawinski - "Linux is only free if your time has no value" - He's quite right. That doesn't denigrate it, but for most situations, cost is not the best reason for choosing Linux.

Apple releases a new iPod with twice the storage space, and software to allow iPods to store contact lists. I predict the next step will be calendars, and this thing will gradually evolve into a PDA. No easy route for text entry on the device, though. They'll just have to build in a microphone and use speeach recognition...