Jonas Beckman

This site moved to a new server today. So far it looks good: very good response time both browsing and editing. I will upload some pictures and see if that’s quick too. It was.

Visitors relaxing at The Great Viking

Aila is staying at my place this weekend. Her sister’s family is in Stockholm and stay at her place. Aila haven’t seen them for years, but they have been in touch. Very nice people – we had dinner yesterday.

Today they will take the kids to Gröna lund. Today is also the first day of the season, so it will probably be incredibly crowded.

Here is William’s website. Born in 1998, he got mail last week from a customer who wanted a quote on a small website. Maybe his parents can help him.

The sun is shining. But being a web person, I couldn’t help downloading the IBM implementation of SOAP 1.1 before going outside. I really don’t want to bother with installing any Java stuff – but it will have to do for now. It’s good when the giants come onboard – look for implementations everywhere soon.

Dave Winer said something very simple and true today:

This is why I like the Internet. Read all the press reports, and you never get the truth. Open up a discussion group of developers, read a few messages, and the answer is very clear.

Not much surfing today, mostly meetings and phone calls: supplier, friend, new client, auditor, old client, business partner, legal adviser, supplier… again and again.

There are many short Swedish holidays now, the working weeks have fewer days – but all the above stuff happen anyway.

SOAP 1.1 was released today. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a lightweight protocol for exchanging information over distributed networks.

Lightweight means possible to implement yourself, if you want to – HTTP and XML already exist, SOAP is just a way to use them to transport data.

It’s not too hard to hack your own socket-protocol instead of using DCOM or Corba. I did, about a year ago, and saved lots of development time. Many people have done this, for more or less good reasons. But once there are good implementations of SOAP out there, starting from zero is unnecessary.

Of course, there are very few implementations yet – but they are starting to show up. Some places to look: Developmentor’s newsgroup and James Snell’s Resource Center.

I’m writing this right now – watch it grow! Silent soundtrack in my head… new books by Jeff Noon: Pixel Juice & Needle in the groove. If you missed Vurt back in 1994 – read it now.

Three days of The Swedish Midlands Spa Experience – comtemplating the slow disappearance of the welfare state while having the bath all to ourselves.

Our room – the Royal Suite

Read some good books about bad things: The return of Depression economics, by Paul Krugman & My war gone by, I miss it so, by Anthony Loyd.

Spent time with old friends who live nearby.

My friend Mikael Kindborg outside his house, where he lives with wife and two cats.

Current preoccupations of our friends: finishing dissertation about Concurrent Constraint Programming&cartoons, producing more art.

We had beer at Sing Lee’s – others waited for the end at this boozy straight-out-of-Burroughs nowhere waterhole overlooking railroad tracks. no picture

Later I swam indoors against strong artificial currents, really pushed it in the sauna, went running through the woods and back… then I felt better again.

Now I feel fine, but I’m glad to be back in Stockholm.

Yesterday a very good friend, who is a poet and works for a big publisher, mailed me the hypertext-novel “afternoon, a story”. When I replied to thank him I found I had a lot to say, so I moved most of it here.

OK. First, we are all writing hypertext these days. Some try do it well, and others just don’t care.

But (some of you may remember), before the Web hypertext was just a hot but rather obscure concept in academic circles. Everyone was writing about hypertext-writing – but almost no one did any. Just like programmers ocasionally go astray: writing tools for writing tools for writing tools…

One of the exceptions was Michael Joyce – in 1989 he used his own hypertext-tool to actually write a novel. Is it good? Well, there are good reviews – and bad: “The amazing thing about the dancing bear is not that it dances well, but that it can dance at all”. To each his own.

Today the homepage of Joyce’s company says they are “the primary source of serious hypertext”. This an interesting attempt to define a market, but doomed: today the unwashed masses on the web are the primary source for any kind of hypertext, “serious” or not.

To be fair, the site has lots of useful resources about hypertext and the web. And StorySpace is used for many intesting things, from discussing films to presenting complex documentation.

But I rarely feel good about tools with one-way links to the web. Sure, you can live in your authoring envionment and occasionally export finished things – but that’s just not the way the Web works!

Personally, I have always been a sucker for nice ways to visualize complex writing – but I’ll trade that any day to be part of something bigger than myself.

And some day, I may not have to choose. Meanwhile, I’ll just write and see what happens.

Took a long walk in the warm afternoon sun with an old friend today – she took time off from the play she is directing.

She made me buy a new swedish magazine I hadn’t noticed. Good reporting and a mix of real and made-up ads: very young, very rude and very funny. Now me and Aila are reading and laughing together. Too bad there is nothing on their site yet.

Soon it will be time to leave – I’ll catch a train first thing in the morning and spend the weekend at Badhotellet i Tranås. By the way, Happy Easter!

My site and thousands of others use the same free hosting. Thank you Userland!

Recently all these sites have been hard to reach. Why? Userland’s Dave Winer tracked the problem. Then things turned ugly: Winer discovered that their ISP couldn’t provide as reliable service as they had advertised. He repeatedly said so on his own site – and the ISP decided to shut him down!

Userland’s problems are not unique. IRights lists several cases where ISP:s shut down sites because of their content.
The Userland discussion group has several threads about these problems. And Dan Gillmor is working on an article about ISP’s and their power relative customers.

The freedom of speech that is taken for granted on the Internet is very vulnerable. The First Amendment of the American constitution may not apply – and in Europe the concept doesn’t even exist. Very little stops european politicians from trying to control what can be said on the Internet.

The situation in Sweden (where I live) is not as bad as in Britain yet – but there is a worrying trend towards a more restrictive european praxis.

Here is a swedish site about PUL (a law which restricts what can and cannot be said about individual persons).

Stockholm is slowly finding it’s way into springtime. I walk the same streets, but the light has changed. Same but different.

Nice day to be working today: the sun was shining and everyone seemed relaxed. No big decisions were made, small things fell into place.

I started playing with XMetal 1.2, and to my surprise found I rather liked it.

But their DOM-implementation is read-only! I have a serious need for clean separation between GUI and DOM – and that kind of DOM makes it’s very difficult. Too bad, lots of other things seem right.
Played around some more, found workarounds – but unless they are good enough I’ll have to wait for next version. We’ll see.

Maja Beckman was 7 years old today

Blow out all those candles?

Yes! Maja was having fun…

and me and my brother, too.

My brother has two children: Maja and Martin.

Here is Martin with ActionMan

OK, that’s it. Maja’s mother and grandmother, my parents and my girlfriend were there too. From all of us: Happy birthday, Maja!

Up-and-coming photographers want the last shot!