Pot...Kettle...Black?

Scoble writes:

It's my perception that John Dvorak, columnist at PC Magazine, loves taking outrageous views on things. Why? Because then people talk about him, and link to him. John seems to think that if everyone talks about his outrageous ideas and links to him, that makes him successful.

Hmm... sound like anyone else we know? ;-) I think Scoble's just upset because Dvorak stole his move.

 11 Apr 03 3:20 PM · Comments (1)

In Defense of "Mort"

My long-time colleague Keith Pleas (remind me to tell you about the trip we took together to South Africa...) has started blogging, and he's off to a good start: I particularly enjoyed this post, defending lowly VB programmers against the condescending attitude of certain self-important semi-colon jockies. ;-)

Go, Keith!

  9 Apr 03 2:28 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: VB

Better Than Reality Television

Ole Eichhorn links to one of the more gripping tales I've read in recent memory: The story of AccordionGuy's new girlfriend, who was not who she claimed to be. This story has it all: romance, suspicion, betrayal, and investigative work worthy of Lieutenant Columbo.

My only question is: Do you think it's true?

  9 Apr 03 2:10 PM · Comments (0)

Newsreader as Aggregator

Like seemingly everyone else in the .NET Weblog universe, I downloaded Luke Hutteman's SharpReader yesterday, and have been using it all day. It's a fine piece of software -- excellent work, Luke! -- but, like everyone else, I have feature requests:

• Ability to select and act on multiple items (delete, mark as read, etc.)
• Ability to "flag" or bookmark items
• Ability to post from within SharpReader (G. Andrew Duthie came up
  with a hack that allows this)
• Deleted Items folder (undelete)
• Open links in user's default browser
• ...etc.

The more I thought about the various feature requests, the more it seemed that people want SharpReader to behave like a newsreader: Outlook Express, Forte Agent, Mozilla, etc. Rather than create Yet Another News Aggregator, why not simply serve RSS feeds via NNTP? Users could then read/manage them in the newsreader of their choice.

A quick Google for "RSS NNTP" uncovered two tools which do precisely that: nntp//rss and Genecast.

Genecast is a hosted, subscription-based service ($18 for 6 months), which might appeal to those who want to access their news from any computer, and who don't have access to a server of their own. nntp//rss, on the other hand, is an open source (GPL) Java-based tool that creates an NNTP server on your local machine, rather like Radio Userland. Simply use its Web-based admin pages to subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds (it can import your existing subscriptions via OPML) and point your newsreader at localhost:119. If you install it on a Web-accessible machine, you can read your news from anywhere.

How does nntp//rss compare to SharpReader? Well, it doesn't allow you to categorize your feeds (you can use a hierarchical naming convention to simulate categories, but you don't get that nice aggregation of all items within a category); it doesn't thread items, nor does it generate automatic comments links. On the other hand, it does allow you to post from your newsreader, and it allows you to use all of your newsreader's selection, marking and filtering capabilities. And since it's open source, we (and by "we," I mean "you") could probably add threading and categorization. Check it out!

  7 Apr 03 7:17 PM · Comments (1)

Born to Boycott

I loved SNL's spot-on parody last night of patriotically-motivated boycotts: "Cuz it ain't whatcha do to show yer love for this country: It's whatcha don't do to show yer hate for those who don't show their love for this country."

  6 Apr 03 2:10 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: Humor

Irony Can Be So Ironic

Scandal Rocks Yoga World: Bikram Choudhury, founder of the fastest-growing style of yoga in America, has copyrighted his poses and is threatening to sue anyone who teaches his "hot" style without permission. My favorite quote:

Choudhury, 56, is a yoga guru so brash that he has been known to compare himself to Superman and Buddha, teach from a throne wearing nothing but a tiny Speedo and a headset mike, and proclaim his style as "the only yoga." When asked how he could make such drastic statements, he told Business 2.0 magazine: "Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody f*&ks with me."

Ah, enlightenment!

  4 Apr 03 5:01 PM · Comments (0)