Advertising consultant Hugh MacLeod draws one-panel comic strips on the back of business cards. I regard the term "online cartoonist" with dread, but today's strip is inspired, as are a few other digs against blogging.

2005/03/10 · Comment · Link

Microsoft has been experimenting with a server-side news aggregator integrated with MSN Search.

The experiment appears to be offline this morning, but Richard MacManus grabbed a few screenshots.

Rss · 2005/03/10 · Comment · Link

Eric Goldman has expanded his thoughts on whether Google Toolbar violates copyright law:

I'd be delighted to be wrong on the legal question. But we have to answer the positive question based on the law today, not as we wish it were.

Publishing · 2005/03/08 · 1 COMMENT · Link

The Heritage Foundation has declared that I am a tech-elite busybody for criticizing the Google Toolbar:

This week's busybody pushback is the same sort of reaction we've seen in response to every half-innovative feature that Google's offered in recent years, from its Adwords advertising program to advertising-supported Gmail. Oddly enough, the tech elite still seem to respect the company's technological prowess and innovation. They're wary, however, that Google intends to profit from these services, no matter how much upside they offer users in the process.

... isn't it bizarre that so many paranoid souls would campaign for government restrictions on what you can do with data that's on your own computer?

I'm glad that the conservative think tank has found a privacy interest in my computer, even if it remains unable to detect one in a womb or bedroom.

Publishing · Politics · 2005/03/08 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

The First Blogger Died in 1794

The patron saint of weblogging is Harbottle Dorr, a little-known figure from early America who was writing a hyperlinked daily journal on current events two centuries before the technology existed:

On January 7, 1765, in the middle of the Stamp Act controversy, Boston shopkeeper Harbottle Dorr took the current issue of the Boston Evening-Post and commented on its contents in the margins. Every week thereafter, he collected one or both of the Evening-Post or the Boston Gazette, (sometimes adding a Boston Post-Boy & Advertiser) and continued expressing himself in the margins on the events, referring backward and forward in a maze of cross-references to other documents and stories relevant to the events reported in the news.

The final result 12 years later was an astonishing archive -- 3,280 pages of annotated newspapers, plus the appended documents and Dorr's own indexes to the four volumes he compiled. This entire unbroken run of annotated Boston newspapers will not only allow students of American history a unique look at the pre-Revolutionary era in New England, but will also provide insight into the thinking of citizen Dorr on the controversies and topics of the times.

An average citizen marking up the news every day with his own opinions and furiously cross-referencing his work, Dorr was a blogger. Reading about this collection makes me want to park myself at a microfilm reader for a few months to read this hypertext. So many questions: Was he a warblogger? Did he fisk people? Would he have objected to autolinking?

When Dorr died in 1794, his entire estate consisted of the four "newspaper books" that constituted his blog. They sold for 7 pounds and 10 shillings.

Publishing · Journalism · 2005/03/08 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Java Has Me Outnumbered

I spent this afternoon working on several hundred mostly minor edits for the next printing of Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days, Fourth Edition.

There was one major change: The javac compiler defaults to support for new features such as generics, autoboxing, and the data structure-crawling for loop. The default was originally to turn these off unless the -source 1.5 command-line option was employed. It's no longer necessary, though you can use -source 1.4 to turn off the new features and -source 1.3 to ignore assertions.

Sun Microsystems has a lamentable habit of changing the name and version number of Java the morning after my books have gone to press. Over the years, the programming language and its free development kit have had these names:

• Java 1.0; Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.0
• Java 1.1; Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.1
• Java 1.2; Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.2, which was renamed prior to full release as
• Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) version 1.2; Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.2
• Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) version 1.3; Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.3
• Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) version 1.4; Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.4
• Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) version 1.5; Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.5, renamed prior to release as
• Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) version 5; Java Development Kit (JDK) 5.0

As of March 7, 2005, at 9:20 P.M. Eastern, the programming language so good it has two version numbers is called J2SE version 5 and the SDK is back to being called the JDK again. Internally, the JDK tools weren't updated to use the new number:

java -version

java version "1.5.0"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0-b64)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0-b64, mixed mode, sharing)

A story I've told in all of my Java books: In early 1995, former Sun product manager Kim Polese made the brilliant decision to choose the name Java simply because it sounded cool, declining more technical sounding monickers like WebRunner, WebDancer and DNA:

I gathered the team together in a room, wrote up on the whiteboard words like 'dynamic,' 'alive,' 'jolt,' 'impact,' 'revolutionary,' et cetera, and led the group in brainstorming. The name [Java] emerged during that session. Other names included DNA, Silk, Ruby, and WRL, for WebRunner Language -- yuck!

With all due respect to the creators of my favorite programming language, that appears to be the last good naming decision Sun ever made.

Publishing · Java · 2005/03/07 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Because he fought alongside the French resistance during World War II, Captain America is cheesed off about surrender monkeys and other anti-French rhetoric.

From Captain America 3, March 2005:

Why does Captain America hate America?

Politics · 2005/03/07 · 79 COMMENTS · Link

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