Jonas Beckman

Dave Winer is thinking about how much money we really need. He says: “transcendental money is the amount of money required to transcend time. It makes just enough money to satisfy all your reasonable needs, wants and desires, but no more.”

To me, the term “transcending time” implies moments of ecstasy: actually going beyond time, if only temporarily. There are many ways to do that (religious, political, pharmacological, sexual etc) - but a solid bank account is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Dave is rather trying to define “having just enough to feel comfortable and live a good life”. And he makes this very solid observation: if you think you need more money to feel secure, you might never feel secure.

There is a lower limit: if you sell your time to survive, less money can make you feel less secure. But there is no upper limit - more money does not make death less certain.

There is no interest on your time. The going rate is exactly one second per second - to be spent until it’s all finished.

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QubeCorner is a nice weblog which I drop by from time to time. Today I found a possible solution to difficult domain name transfers - Luke recommends EasyDNS.

There was also these ten concise rules for XML-writers - and a simple but thorough XSLT-tutorial, which goes beyond the basics and talks about how to structure bigger stylesheets.

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Now online: Ambrose Biece, The devil’s dictionary.

via Booknotes

I wrote my first Radio Userland outline for a client today: we used it to discuss a product evaluation over the phone. The whole thing was rather recursive: the subject was tools for producing and rendering structured documents.

They wanted me to send the outline as a mail-attachments, but of course it worked better to just render it as HTML, tell them the URL and keep working.

BTW - I rendered the outline with Andy Fragen’s PrintOutline tool (which uses Tom Clifton’s code for Serving Objects). Thanks Andy, Tom - and the others in the Radio Userland discussion group!

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Dave Winer links to Bill Humphrie’s XSLT-stylesheet for OPML. I was just debugging my own - but maybe I should switch to this one?

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I just installed Suse Linux 7.0 (running as a guest OS under VMWare). No big deal. Here’s the cool part: Manila works with KDE 2.0 and the new Konqueror browser - that’s how I wrote this!

IT giants who don’t pay tax part 1: how Cisco does it
IT giants who don’t pay tax part 2: how Microsoft does it

Via The Register, which is a good and irreverent source for daily computer industry news.

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Jon Udell is writing about electronic payment schemes. As always he is listening a little harder, so he caught on to the fact that most of these schemes may be unnecessary - unless you are stuck with an american bank. For instance, my Swedish bank already makes it very easy to transfer money via Internet - and it’s not the only one.

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I now have a free site at Zopesite. I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but I will.

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What is the The iceberg analogy of usability?

Usability is more than good look&feel - the user must be able to think right. What does the user’s mental model look like? Find out first and then support it with software.

Skotos Storybuilder is an XML-based environment for creating multiplayer online games.

Links via Scripting News.

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Noah Mendelsohn from Lotus Development has posted a recent presentation of SOAP and XML Schemas to the xml-dist-app mailing list. A simple and useful presentation. Thank you!

Yesterday, I was discussing the import/export needs of a fairly large application. Soap came up - and we all said: yes, this could be a useful generic serialization. For machine-to-machine, why not? But what about the guys who just need to add another stylesheet, and maybe hack a small script?

We clearly see lots of future maintenance in that direction - so how can we make things simple enough for users and less advanced developers? How big is the difference between a generic transport protocol and what developers really need to do with application-specific schemas? We are not sure. Yet.

I recalled Dave Winer’s recent fight to keep RSS really simple - he was doing something important. Namespaces may be a good thing, for all I know. But there really is a huge gap between guys who drool over adding knowledge representation to RDF and everyone else.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m drooling too. But simplicity usually pays off big-time - both for anarchistic hackers and corporate beancounters eying the bottom line. On some days, I feel distinctly less idealistic about the semantic web: sure… but can I hack it?

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Happy birthday, Garret!

Word’s outliner used to be the one feature I couldn’t live without. But today I used Radio Userland when I planned some future projects - which I always do with outlines. I’m still unsure of the best way to present those outlines to others, though.

First attempt: I changed the extension to “.xml” and attached a simple XSL-stylesheet. The outline-nodes don’t know, but the stylesheet can figure out outline-levels and set the style accordingly. Then IE5 does the display.

Second attempt: I told myself to RTFM (short for: Read The Fucking Manual). Of course the Radio Userland discussion group was already thinking about this. Here is Dave Winer playing around with web display of outlines. But he doesn’t know the best way yet, either. Lots of digging to do!

Nodetypes might be the keys to the kingdom. Every node in an outline could know a lot more about itself. Here is a nice tutorial.
Unlike Dave’s example above, this is unformatted xml - unless your browser is IE5, you may not see it.

But using nodes is tricky - putting too many weird presentation attributes in your data is the cardinal web sin: mixing structure and presentation. And yet there are so many reasons to include just a little presentation when you actually have to implement something. Ideally, you only add things that are possible to ignore for other clients.

OPML is XML and follows a minimal DTD - so in theory it’s possible to stay pretty clean. Of course, this kind of spec always causes lively discussions.

Also, while the server part of Radio Userland can do sophisticated rendering, I’m not sure that’s a wise way to go. For people who run their own Frontier servers it makes sense - but what about the average outliner-user? I’d rather work with outlines in a very basic XML-format and let IE5 (or any other reasonable browser) apply stylesheets.

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Several great links about Flatland in today’s BookNotes. There is also a pointer to Skeptic’s dictionary.
I definitely agree with Craig about the dictionary: “a great resource and an endless source of entertainment.”

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Here is Rutger Hauer’s official web site. Though most known for Bladerunner, Hauer has so far made more than 50 movies of all kinds (including lots of B-movie action). The phrase “an acquired taste” comes to mind.

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State of being: still very tired. Every morning there is white stuff all over my tongue and breathing is difficult. It seems to get better, though.

We need more tech writers like Steven Feuerstein:

I believe that just about every technical book comes with a body of politics, an ideology that governs and usually restricts its example set. Many, many examples promote the perspective that the only reason we exist in this world is to buy things.

For an American he is unusually unafraid of politics. Via Hack The Planet.

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Digging deep into human evil: Data mining mutilations, beatings, murders

Via Rebecca’s pocket

Greg Franklin found an interview with journalist John Sawatsky: The Question man.
It seems getting good answers is a craft that can be learned.

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I recently re-read The tao of programming. I still love it - and it’s very funny how it has aged since it was written: the computer part is now ancient for real.

When to take a break from online-journals is a long, rambling thread with real people and real concerns… not an academic discussion about identity online. I found it curiously ordinary.

Via Medley

There is a bug in Radio Userland that makes is almost impossible to work with if you use large system fonts. That has kept me from using RU, even though I’ve wanted this kind of outliner for a long time.

But when Dave Winer announced Manila editorial outlines, I finally bit the bullet and changed my system fonts to regular size. How could I pass over editing my entire site in a good outliner?

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Array has retired - but don’t worry, Garret has a new site: Dangerousmeta.
Just as good links as always. And for those of us who care about such things: Garret is getting into Zope. A site to watch!

Rain, rain, rain… the Swedish weather is awful, but I feel better. Looks like it’s not the flu (thank God!) but some slightly kinder virus. My throat is sore and I’m still very tired, though.

Today I had no meetings, so I spent most of the day at home. But in the evening I did some quick geek-shopping: Suse Linux 7.0 Pro , the very latest beard trimmer from Braun, a portable MP3-player - and some kind of electric footbath/massage contraption I just couldn’t resist (The manual said: do not use in the bathroom or with wet hands. Well… I guess everything that feels good is dangerous in some way).

My new Swedish MP3-player has 128 MB of memory and no copy-protection: lots of music AND I can use it to transfer any kind of data. I would never buy something like Sony’s so-called MP3-player - buying something completely different felt really good. And yesterday Salon had a story about how SDMI may already be cracked.

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Dave Winer reports a coming collaboration with SoftQuad: XMetal and Radio Userland might begin talking XML-RPC to each other. I’ll follow this carefully, since I’m evaluating XMetal for a customer right now.

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James Vornov asks himself: what does Jacques Derrida have to do with his weblog? And comes up with some interesting answers.

Meanwhile, Greg Franklin is bravely messing with tech world’s toughest gang - but wishes Tish Williams was around. I miss her, too. But there are signs of life!

Der Schockwellenreiter: he’s the Mac Man and a Python Fan!

I’m back home just past eleven. No research today, just coding. We normally don’t add previously unspecified functionality this late into a release - but this was behind-the-scenes stuff another programmer needed badly.

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Hal is taking a break from Blivet.

Hal, your way of weblogging is a great inspiration to me and many others - so we’ll miss you. But it sounds like you have made a very wise decision right now. Lots of luck with the master thesis and welcome back when it’s time!

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I finally read two of the books I bought Friday.

First out was Walter Gratzler’s The undergrowth of science, a fascinating collection of stories about really bad theories that became extremely popular. The serious point Gratzler makes is that even for good scientists there are plenty of ways to get carried away.

Casti & de Pauli’s Kurt Gödel, a life of Logic is not really a biography. It’s a short, clear description of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, with the added background of Gödel’s life and intellectual environment. Towards the end of the book there are short overviews of the current relevance of Gödel’s work. The last part of the book talks a lot about Gregory Chaitin, an IBM researcher with an information-theoretic approach to Gödel.

Gregory Chaitin’s homepage has lots of material, including the full text of several books. Here is a juicy quote from the preface of his book The unknowable:

In a nutshell, Gödel discovered incompleteness, Turing discovered uncomputability, and I discovered randomness—that’s the amazing fact that some mathematical statements are true for no reason, they’re true by accident. There can be no “theory of everything,” at least not in mathematics.

Science writer John Horgan has a good interview with Chaitin in The end of science, which Chaitin concludes by saying: mathematics is dead. Or maybe I’ve just eaten too many bagels. While I certainly don’t agree with everything Horgan says, he is extremely readable.

On a personal but somewhat related note: I spent part of the Eighties riding high on AI-hype and learned the hard way that some things just weren’t true. So Jaron Lanier’s one half of a manifesto (and also his recent interview, which I read yesterday) felt like a breath of fresh air. Thanks for the links to Lanier, Greg!