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January 27, 2005

Paging Dave Winer

Dear Dave,

On behalf of the rest of the blogosphere, I would like to congratulate you on your recent award, most arrogant post of 2005. You've done us all proud! It's just a shame you're no more in the running for any of the other awards than, say, I am...

See, you didn't invent podcasting: at the very least, Harry Gilchrist was audioblogging ages before you, and Wikipedia's entry on podcasting, while mentioning you as playing a big part in the automation of the process with enclosures (which, given they're part of your spec, you can take complete credit for) and special aggregators, neither credits you with the first proper implementation, nor with coining the term. I didn't invent podcasting either, but hey, I don't claim to be eligible for any awards.

Regarding best technology — deary me, Dave, you don't even have a comment or trackback implementation! The google-powered citations thing is cool, but, doesn't really offer much over a standard search function to the average user. In fact, I tried to use it to find out when you first mentioned the term "podcasting", but it wouldn't let me page through the results, so I couldn't. Great.

Sorry, but I think there are far, far cooler bits of technology out there. As for Best Weblog and Best Technology Weblog... well, my mummy says my blog is better than yours. Sorry.

All the best, and I hope this blogging thing works out well for you.

Cheers,
James.

[I emailed Dave a link to this article; I'll keep you posted about his response, if any.]

[Update: Dave says "Wow!"]

Posted by James at 14:14 | Comments (1) | TrackBacks
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January 12, 2005

Subscibe!!

Yesterday, Dave Winer pointed out the problem caused by more and more online RSS aggregators advising sites to include "Subscribe with $aggregator!!" icons on their sites (see my "Sub | Bloglines" and "LJ Friend" icons on the right) to get more subscribers — there comes a point when you just can't sensibly include that many buttons.

Luckily, Aquarion (of ESF fame) has first designed and then gone and coded a solution. The result is called SubscribeMe, and this is my SubscribeMe link

Do let me know how it works with your favourite aggregator!

Posted by James at 20:27 | Comments (3)
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Reading

I seem to have finally got back into the habit of reading books, mostly when I go to bed at night. The only downside to this is that I'm getting to sleep ever later, which eats into my morning, eating into revision time. Still, sitting up reading beats sitting up on IRC, right?

The result is that I'm now in a position to highly recommend A Short History Of Nearly Everything to anybody, to vaguely recommend The Blind Watchmaker to people who are interested in that kind of thing (hopefully I'll be lending this to x3ja soon, in exchange for something more controversial), and am now re-reading Jennifer Government before I have to give it back to Carl. I think next up, I'll get back into Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Recommendations for what to read after this (or while waiting for paperback releases) are very welcome!

I've also added my Amazon wishlist to the sidebar, for no good reason except blind optimism.

[Update: Sorry, I seem to be blogging contentless drivel again. I'll try and stop that. In the meantime, go read something interesting, like why you shouldn't listen to Air America Radio]

Posted by James at 17:31 | Comments (0)
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January 06, 2005

Feeding Frenzy

Blog comment threads suck. Mostly, they suck because once you've moved on and are reading other posts, there's no way of knowing if your comment has been responded to, and hence of knowing whether or not you want to go back and continue the discussion. It'd be nice if you could subscribe to the comments on a blog, just as you subscribe to the entries with your favourite RSS aggregator

As an experiment, then, I've set up various XML feeds of the comments on this blog. There's an RSS 1.0 feed of all comments across all entries, and an RSS 2.0 feed of the comments for each individual entry — if you go to the entry page there's a link to the feed above the comments section, and as soon as I frob the templates after posting this, it'll be in a <link /> element, so all those subscribe bookmarklets/widgets should work nicely.

[Update: here's the feed for this entry]

Feedback on their usefulness and their brokenness, and on their lack of these things, is very much appreciated! Also, would people reading this through Planet #nott be interested in comment feeds for the blogs on there being syndicated there, as well as blog entries? I don't expect to use it much either way, so I'm interested in opinions.

Posted by James at 01:30 | Comments (3)
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January 04, 2005

Public Inhalation

On Monday, Toby posted an entry about smoking in public places where he proposed a free-market style alternative to a smoking ban. I fail to see how this proposal is noticeably different from the status quo, which suggests to me that, not only does it not work in theory (as I will demonstrate), but it also doesn't work in practice (as recently demonstrated in East Yorkshire).

The proposal doesn't work in theory because people are not divided neatly into social groupings of smokers and non-smokers. I don't smoke, but one of my housemates smokes regularly, and the others "occasionally". If there were a mixture of smoking and non-smoking pubs here in Beeston, I imagine when we went out we would invariably end up in the former type of pub, so I as a non-smoker would gain nothing at all from the existence of non-smoking pubs. Only pure non-smoking groups would be likely to frequent non-smoking venues, and I would be surprised if these groups are numerous enough to make running a non-smoking venue profitable. I can think of few social groupings I'm in that are exclusively made up of non-smokers, but perhaps I'm atypical — answers on a comment/trackback to that one, please!

So I don't know what to do about the problem of smoking in pubs, and other public places, to be honest. I do know I'm fed up of my clothes stinking of smoke, of my hair stinking of smoke, of coughing up crud after every night out, and of enduring the smell of smoke while I'm out. I also know I'm even sicker of these things happening to me at work1. But while I can't see a solution other than a ban, banning something because some people find it unpleasant doesn't appeal to my fluffy liberal values. Banning something because it's a danger to the health of people nearby seems more justified, but the people in the smoky pub (with the notable possible exception of the staff) are there entirely out of choice, so the number of relevant affected people is relatively low.

So if a ban isn't the right answer, and a purely free market system won't work either, what will work? Anybody?

1 You might choose to argue that I'm entirely free to find a job somewhere else, instead; this isn't entirely accurate, though. When I took on my current job, it was chosen because the hours would fit around my existing schedule, and with no relevant experience any other pub might have been less keen to take me on. I couldn't afford to factor smokiness into the decision as well.

Posted by James at 03:22 | Comments (6)
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January 02, 2005

2005 Resolutions

If I blogged any resolutions this time last year, it was back before I switched to using MT on a hosted machine, and I no longer have any record of it. So, I can't really say whether I've managed to keep them or not. It seems unlikely, though; I couldn't have projected my life would be as it is today, then, I don't think!

So, resolutions. I realise I'm a little late to the party with these, but I think it might be a good idea for me to make some, and then next year I can review them and see how I've done. Some of them are moderate lifestyle changes, some are goals I want to achieve.

  1. Get fitter. At the moment I am unhealthily overweight, and should do something about this. Resolution 2 may help with this, as might taking up cycling to lectures come the warmer months.
  2. Drink less beer. Just because somebody in my house is going to be going out drinking on any given night, this does not mean I need to go with them. It is acceptable to stay in occasionally, or to go out but not drink. Really.
  3. Cook more. Lately, my cooking has been limited to simple pasta/sauce(/meat) combos, things on toast, and ready meals. I could do more, but never get around to it, mostly because it's not often worth cooking for one. Better coordination of eating plans with housemates is called for, I think. This could also mean less takeaway, which could help with resolution #1.
  4. Get involved properly with at least one open source project. This probably means getting back into perl and doing stuff with OpenGuides, fixing problems rather than merely pointing them out; relatedly, I'd also like to crack on with making the Open Guide to Nottingham more useful and used than it is today — 250 pages just aren't enough to get random people hooked.
  5. Clear all my debts other than my overdraft and student loan. Note that it is acceptable to have credit card debt if and only if my overdraft limit would cover paying it off instantly.
  6. Get a life. This time in 2006, I want to know what I'm hoping to do when I finish at uni, or at least have a (reasonably short!) list of ideas, which aren't too vague.
  7. Get a degree. I've been working less hard at uni this semester so far, and this needs to stop right now. I got a good mark in the first year which doesn't count at all towards my degree (except for progression to the second year), and it would be silly to then scrape along and get a rubbish result overall through laziness.
  8. Blog better. I'd like to post more interesting, original content here, instead of these tedious resolutions, or the usual random linkage. I guess I'll have to somehow allow anonymous reader-assessment on this one, huh?

I think all of these are achievable individually; whether I'll achieve them all, of course, remains to be seen. Maybe I'll revisit them at the halfway point and revise my goals, according to my progress, or something.

[Update: it's been pointed out that these resolutions make my priorities look a bit skewed; I should point out that they're in no particular order, and not even close to all being of equal importance...]

Posted by James at 03:34 | Comments (2)
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