SatireWire: 2001 Strictly Spam Winner. “Enlarge Your Boss.” Brilliant. Offensive. Linkable. What else could you ask for in a satire?
The Register: Shockwave virus. Proof of concept only at this point. Just like that Concept virus that “only” infected Word documents. No point worrying about that, when everyone knows the really important viruses are combination boot sector/COM/EXE infectors. Yeah. Good luck putting this genie back in the bottle.
Orangutan popcorn fishwife [via Fark]. More Google games. You gotta love a search engine that is so good, so reliable, so comprehensive, it’s actually spawning an entire new generation of parlor games. I’ve always wondered about running contests for the most interesting phrases that yielded exactly one page in a Google search. Of course, if you found one and posted it on your weblog, Google would pick it up within days and invalidate the result. Which may be why nobody plays it, or at least doesn’t play it publicly.
XML.com: Anti-Awards 2001. [via Kuchling.com] Most Egregiously Oversubscribed Industry Bandwagon: a clear and outright
winner in this category: the much-hyped world of Web
Services. Congratulations go in equal measure (like some
conference keynotes) to Microsoft, IBM, and Sun.
Watson. Real live web services, with a pretty GUI. TV listings, package tracking, auction tracking, movie tickets, stock portfolios, image search, flight tracking, recipe lookup, phone number lookup, zip code lookup. Mac OS X only. If Microsoft would stop trying to offer user authentication services (which nobody wants except Microsoft) and start offering useful web services, maybe more people would Get It.
Other crap from the XML Anti-Awards: HyTime Award for Specifications with Secret Hidden
Powers: Brave runners
up, with powers so secret nobody’s quite figured them out yet, include
Dave Winer’s OPML (following on the success of XML-RPC, OPML is
going to be Winer’s Big Thing for 2002).
Well, some of us like XML-RPC. Normal programmers use it to solve problems. SOAP only makes high-flying consultants rich. Say what you want about Winer, but he Gets It. Web services is about unlocking, not locking. Anything other use is doomed.
Haven’t played with OPML yet. Can only do 10 things at a time.
Washington Post: Deadly Collection of Information [via Peter Suber] Even if the sale of Social Security numbers were blocked, as Gregg had proposed, a network of information services, using deception and their telephones, could still easily obtain information about almost anyone.
Charles Miller disagrees with my assessment of the Mac OS X dock.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here - if you click on an icon in the Dock, the application is required to either bring all its windows forward, or if there are no windows, to open a new window or untitled document.
Not all applications do this properly. I’m out of town at the moment so I can’t tell you definitely which ones didn’t that confused her.
Other rebuttals, in no particular order:
2 (ZoneAlarm, YIM) got it right, 3 got it wrong in a variety of ways, 1 (Linksys) was so horribly wrong as to deserve special mention. 5 are running applications with no windows open, but the one that isn’t was put there by Windows itself!
I survived, and am happily entrenched in our DC office with wireless Internet access.
Travel day again. With any luck, I’ll be back online tonight from the (relative) comfort of our main office in DC. Of course, last time, Amtrak was 7 hours late (on a 6 hour trip), so I’m not holding my breath. But I can rest assured that I’m perfectly safe, because they required me to show up at the station in person three days in advance to show my ID (”papers please”) in order to pick up my ticket. As everyone knows, imposters are the greatest threat to national security.
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