I Was a Teen-Age Dungeon Master

A 1983 Dungeons & Dragons commercial has found its way to YouTube.

Back then, I couldn't watch that commercial without rousing my D&D jones, though it was false advertising to suggest that Jami Gertz might join your gaming group.

But watching it again, I'm reminded of what huge geeks those players were.

A lightning bolt cast by a magic user is five feet wide and 80 feet long in a straight line. Though it does 1d6 of damage per spellcaster level to the red dragon, half if a saving throw vs. spells is made, it also does the same damage to anyone else within the area of effect and can destroy their equipment. The only advantage to such a reckless tactic is that it can reduce your encumbrance.

Gaming · 2006/12/16 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

When Tech Bloggers Attack

Dave Winer's last blog entry ever ever ever has been postponed from the end of the year to April 2007.

In the movie SoapDish, Sally Field plays a soap opera diva in New York who has a surefire method of cheering herself up when her esteem tank is running on fumes. She goes to a mall in Paramus, N.J., and basks in fan adoration. "Give my best to Paramus!" another actor sneers.

Blogging is Winer's Paramus. If you're a person who needs to be reminded occasionally that you're the smartest kid in the class, a high-traffic blog is a big red you like me, you really like me button.

When Winer said he'd quit last March, he raised the possibility of selling his site to admirer Mike Arrington:

Mike Arrington says I can't quit blogging. ... Mike it'll be good for you. Maybe I'll write for TechCrunch. Maybe I should sell Scripting News to you. Maybe I'll do other things (I will). When a big tree falls, even a small big tree, it creates room for other things to grow.

When Winer unquit this week, one of his reasons was harsh criticism from Mike Arrington:

... there's some other stuff I can't write about at this time, but I'll want to have a platform and a pulpit. Someone is picking a pretty ridiculous fight with a guy who buys his ink by the barrel, and I want to be sure I got all the tools I need to fight back.

Arrington, whose rage against the New York Times now extends to Winer and any other blogger who likes the paper, is enjoying Winer's hollow promise to quit more than I did. Winer commented yesterday on Arrington's blog that they "used to be friends."

I haven't had this much trouble picking sides in a fight since the Iran-Iraq War.

2006/12/14 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

Remembering Leslie Harpold

As I write this, Leslie Harpold has passed Britney Spears and Christmas to become the third-most searched term on Technorati. That should give you a pretty strong indication of what the 40-year-old web designer and online essayist, who died unexpectedly Dec. 8 with her well-bookmarked advent calendar halted in its count, meant to a lot of people on the web.

Her close friend Lance Arthur offers one remembrance among dozens on the web tonight, linking to her essay Possible Scenarios for Heaven, a 2003 rumination on the perfect afterlife.

As someone who sort-of knew Leslie for years in the way you sort-of know a lot of people online, I didn't know she'd been touched by so many personal tragedies -- such as the death of her fiancé at age 29 and some medical malpractice that left her seriously injured -- or just how far her network of admirers extended. I just knew she was an incisive writer who was cool in a way you don't see often in web writers. Lauren Bacall lighting a cigarette in a black-and-white movie before the surgeon general warned anybody cool.

Harpold followed the sweet sentimentality of Possible Scenarios for Heaven with a raw letter to her late fiancé, written on his birthday:

As far as I know you never lied to me, except for one thing you said the morning after we met. I thought you were a dork, albeit a charming one, when you asked me if I liked you. I said "Of course," more to be polite than anything else. I mean, you seemed nice enough at the time. Then you said "Good, because I like you, and I'm never leaving."

But you did.

An anecdote from Mike Monteiro is a nice point of entry to Harpold for people just getting to know her through these lavish memorials:

I met Leslie Harpold six years ago when a large cardboard box showed up unexpectedly at my door. Inside was a large 32 gallon stainless steel trash can that I'd added to my Amazon wish list a few weeks before on a whim.

The gift note inside said (... and I'm paraphrasing) "I wanted to meet the sort of freak who'd put a 32 gallon stainless steel trash can on his wish list. —- Leslie Harpold"

· 2006/12/13 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Bloglines Fixes Atom 1.0 Display Bug

Bloglines has fixed the glitch that was causing Workbench's Atom 1.0 feed to display incorrectly, as a feed preview demonstrates.

I reported the bug to them in e-mail last week and was told they forwarded it to the "appropriate technical department." I never figured out any possible cause of the error, but the fix is another sign that Bloglines is a lot more actively maintained today than it was a year ago.

Atom · Rss · 2006/12/13 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Proposing a New Name for RSS 1.0

Whenever you talk about syndication, you have to deal with confusion regarding the multiple meanings of the term RSS.

RSS refers to the format Really Simple Syndication, also known as RSS 2.0.

RSS refers to the format RDF Site Summary, also known as RSS 1.0.

RSS refers collectively to all syndication feeds, whether they're in RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or Atom format.

I floated a proposal to the RSS-DEV Working Group last night to rename RSS 1.0 as RSS-RDF (RSS for the Resource Description Framework).

I'm asking for trouble by suggesting the idea, but as syndication has grown, RSS 2.0 appears to be eating RSS 1.0's lunch. According to the feed stats published on the syndication directory Syndic8, 76.3 percent of its RSS feeds are RSS 2.0 and 11.3 percent are RSS 1.0.

Here's their past Syndic8 percentages, using pages archived by the Internet Archive:

• February 2006: RSS 2.0 68.3%, RSS 1.0 17.6%
• March 2005: RSS 2.0 62.1%, RSS 1.0 16.5%
• December 2004: RSS 2.0 49.2%, RSS 1.0 20.6%
• April 2004: RSS 2.0 24.6%, RSS 1.0 47.3%

Those dates aren't necessarily correct, since they depend on how often Syndic8 runs statistics reports. But the trend is pretty clear.

We can debate the reasons why, but my guess is that RSS 2.0's higher version number is as much a factor as anything else. I expect that RSS 2.0 will continue to grow relative to RSS 1.0 because of Microsoft's choice to normalize to RSS 2.0 in Windows Vista and MSIE.

Each of the popular syndication formats has a strong selling point:

• Atom is an Internet standard that's more adaptable to uses outside site syndication
• RSS 1.0 builds on RDF
• RSS 2.0 is simple, loose and popular

Giving RSS 1.0 the name RSS-RDF makes its status as an RDF format more prominent and allows some elbow room to open up between two similarly named formats with a common origin.

Rss · Atom · 2006/12/12 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

RSS Graphic Under Creative Commons License

In March, when I wanted to illustrate why web publishers should support the common feed icon, I put together a graphic showing the ways RSS and Atom feeds have been identified on the web.

I just received another media request to use this graphic in a publication, so I'm releasing it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. For publications that can't use a Creative Commons license, send requests in email.

Rss · Creative Commons · Atom · 2006/12/11 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Sun Sees the Light on Java Applets

I'm working on the next edition of Sams Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days, an 800-page monster that will cover Java 6 so thoroughly that all the other Java authors will stop writing their books and pursue retraining for a non-technical profession. (Computer book authors should talk smack like rappers. One of these days I'm going to start an East Coast/West Coast feud with Seattle's Glenn "PC-Diddy" Fleischman.)

Ten years ago, the original edition of Java in 21 Days made a big deal out of Java applets, web-based programs that were the world's first exposure to the language. The first Java boom was sparked by then-Netscape executive Marc Andreesen's decision to add a Java interpreter to the Navigator browser.

As the years passed, the world realized that an applet is a terrible thing to do to a web browser. Even today, with five iterations of Java to improve performance, you can tell when a page contains an applet: Your hard drive starts spinning furiously as the Java Plug-in loads and there's an interminably long pause before the page displays. Fortunately for authors like me, Java found a better niche in servlets, mobile devices and enterprise applications.

The next edition of my book relegates browser applets to an appendix. By the time Java 7 rolls around, I may dump the subject entirely.

Need more proof that applets are dead? If you go to Sun's Java.Com homepage, you may see a cool demo of a Fast and the Furious: Tokyo cell phone game that's written in Java.

The demo loads quickly and incorporates fast-moving graphics synchronized perfectly with sound. When I saw it, I was so impressed that I dug into the page's source code, wanting to find out how Sun accomplished such great effects using an applet.

The answer: They wrote it in Flash.

Programming · Java · 2006/12/11 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

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