Month: May 2003

Blogs Opening Iranian Society?

wired.com: “Motallebi is now awaiting trial. According to the Islamic news agency, he has been charged with “undermining national security through cultural activities” for the content of his blog, as well as his other writings and interviews he gave to foreign media outlets.”

OSCOM

We are registered for OSCOM. On a first pass of the Program, I find track two, “CMS contextualized (Law, Biz / Soc, Evaluation)”, most interesting. I like the focus on decision makers, society, users and deployment. Call it a good dose of reality . Here is my rough plan:

Wednesday afternoon: Intellectual Property, User Panel (possibly slipping out to Collaborative Mapping on the Semantic Web)

Thursday morning: Winer Keynote, CMS for Universities: A case study

Thursday afternoon: Integrating Content Management and Semantics, Using Zope to Support Open Course Collaboration? A Case Study, Open Coding Innovation: socially responsible, sustainable economic and technological growth

Friday morning: Udell Keynote, Extending CMS with Web Services, Managing the Semantic Web

Friday afternoon (hopefully): PANEL :: “Content for the Masses”

Sharepoint URLs

We’re starting to look at Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies. As with other well funded technology efforts, there is a sea of documentation to wade through to get to the good stuff. Here are a few of the URLs we think will be relevant to programmers:

Programmability in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services v2.0 Beta 2:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/tsovIntroduction.asp

Windows SharePoint Services Web Service
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/soapnsMicrosoftSharePointSoapServer2.asp

Creating a Basic Web Part
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/CreateABasicWP.asp

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Downloads
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/downloads/list/sharepoint.asp

These get you “into the tree”; the adjacent leaves are useful too.

Three rings

Lately we’ve been letting the phone ring during dinner time, since usually these calls are from telemarketers. We noticed that most of the ignored calls terminate after three rings, even though our machine waits for four or five rings before picking up. Theory: telemarketers hang up after three rings. If true, I’m happy to wait until the fourth to pick up. But why would telemarketers hang up after three? According to this article at http://www.stretcher.com (scroll down to Third Ring Response), the auto-dialers hang up after three rings to avoid paying for a connections to answering machines. Right on!

Permalink free associations

Dave’s new idea: “It uses the fact that URLs in a weblog have structure.”

A permalink is a permanent URL link to an item. A place where you can find it after it has aged and slipped off of the front page. A permalink should be archival.

Manila puts the date directly into the permalink like this:

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/2003/05/20#todaysNewIdea

So from the permalink URL you can deduce the publish date of the item, and sort results in reverse chronological order.

Movable Type puts the post id into the permalink like this:

http://grumet.net/weblog/archives/000051.html

You cannot deduce the publish date from the permalink URL. But you can sort results in reverse chronological order, because the post ids increase with time.

BlogX puts a globally unique identifier (GUID) into the permalink like this:

http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/saraw/PermaLink.aspx/
49899274-4e74-451f-a29c-414c32e39719

You cannot deduce the publish date nor sort the results from the GUID. Note also that the BlogX permalinks enshrine the ASP.NET suffix, .aspx. Cutting edge today perhaps, but five years from now it will be quaint.