It looks like president is trying to rename the "war on terror" to "a global struggle against violent extremism". And here I though they were gonna use "Police action on terror". I think we can all agree that 'war on terror' wasn't a great catchphrase. World War 3.0, now that will make everyone happy. Posted by Kenny Gatdula on 2005-08-12

Thanks to a patch from Aaron Swartz, the Sparklines Generator should now work in Safari. sparklines

There is an ongoing discussion on the validity of the "Web 2.0" moniker, started by Tim Bray, rejoined by Tim O'Reilly, and refined by Sam Ruby and many others. The whole discussion is fascinating not only for technical points, but for the psychological aspects. There is no hard and fast definition of "Web 2.0" and the nature of that nebulous concept allows it act like a technologist's roschach test. It's like a rorschach test It's like a rorschach test, which let's everyone pour their own thoughts and ideas into it, forming it to how they see the world.

It's not like Lynne and I were sitting around, raising four kids, keeping a full time job, a part-time job, another part-time job, and saying to ourselves, "What are we going to do will all our free time?". What we were thinking is that remodeling is something that we both enjoy and honestly playing stock option bingo isn't going to be our path to riches. Lynne did a lot of legwork and found this great little lake front property.

$ cat /usr/local/bin/fol #/usr/bin/bash cmd /c "start ." Because, occasionally, you just have to go there. An alternative: alias fol="explorer ." Posted by Anon on 2005-08-02 Another alternative is: $ cygstart . Posted by Mike Williams on 2005-08-07

Have I mentioned that syndicating microformats is hot. That it's important? That it's possibly one of the most important things in syndication? Ever? Well, I have now. Avoiding plain XML and presentational markup from Tantek Çelik is a collection of links and observations. The takeaway for me is that if given the choice between enhancing an already semantically rich format like XHTML to carry the data you want or creating new elements in new namespaces, choose the former rather than the latter.

My Secure Syndication article and greasemonkey script has now been up for a week. It's received a lot of attention and I'd like to clear up some of the misunderstandings I've seen. This is just for RSS. Not true. While I concentrated on RSS in the article this will work just fine for Atom, or for that matter, as I point out in the article, any old web page.

Andy Smith has a great rant Why Frameworks Suck. [via lesscode.org] Frameworks hurt sharing. I'd really like to give you this fork Jimmy, but you're gonna need a knife and plate to use it. The framework checks out all your girlfriends for you, the framework won't let anyone dirty get through, the framework will wait up until you get in, the framework will always find out were you've been, the framework keeps you healthy and clean.

My latest article Secure RSS Syndication, is up on XML.com. In this article I present a Greasemonkey script to make FireFox decrypt a Blowfish-encrypted feed shown in Bloglines on the fly. And the encrypted data, it's held in a microformat. We're playing buzzword bingo. I win. Source code and test feed are available. Update: This project explains my interest in which web-based aggregators preserve microformats. Tags: greasemonkey microformats blowfish firefox I have a Greasemonkey script that adds a Textile parser to textareas using a XML HTTP Request to a Python CGI script.

So apparently some of the blogosphere is aghast that Technorati might try to make a profit. Please, get over it already, Dave and company didn't put up all those servers and services just because they didn't have anything better to do with their time and money. On balance I've got say there's a wide opening for competitors to Technorati on the customer service and QOS fronts. How do I get my site indexed by Technorati and have my posts appear under the right tags?

Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat has an editorial, The End of the Rainbow in which he reports that Ireland is the second richest country in the EU, right after Luxembourg. Yes, the country that for hundreds of years was best known for emigration, tragic poets, famines, civil wars and leprechauns today has a per capita gross domestic product higher than that of Germany, France and Britain.

Tim O'Reilly has posted Stewart Brand's talk on urbanization which which talks about how more and more of the population is living in cities. If you are worried that all that density has to be bleak and sterile, have a look at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's Visualizing Density [via WorldChanging].

Marc Hedlund on the O'Reilly Radar points out the Behaviour JavaScript Library. The idea behind this Javascript library is great -- it's similar to what I argued for in Why JSP Sucks So Hard. As I mentioned in my post on Ruby on Rails, I still find it grating when I see so much non-HTML code in an HTML page; and the CSS marker system seems like a great way to hook code and markup together.

My latest article, A Bright, Shiny Service: Sparklines, is now available on XML.com. It's about the BitWorking Sparkline Generator, which is a web service, a web application, and source code, all for generating sparklines. Tags: sparklines rest Update: First public sighting of the sparklines service being used: Where Left Is Right. Update 2: First port of the web service, this one being to .NET, by Eric Bachtal.

Kevin Marks, among others, has announced the launch of microformats.org. One question this raises is how does this markup survive a trip through an aggregator? I have done a little testing and found that Bloglines keeps class attributes intact. Are there exceptions? Do 'rel's pass through unmolested? What do other aggregators do? You might claim that it doesn't matter since all this stuff is just supposed to be in a web page, but I disagree.

The first time I saw the new Chrylser 300 I hated it. The next time I saw it I was intrigued. The third time I saw it the Dick-Tracy-Muscle-Car-Terra-Plane shape had firmly wrapped it's tentacles around my lizard brain. I don't own one. Yet. I use a car service for some of my business trips (travel to the airport). The service I like best uses the 300 and it is a spectacular car for this purpose.

My latest column, Just Use Media Types?, has just been published on XML.com. Wow. Great article Joe. The code and narrative are both very useful. Here it is on del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/url/0114dfaa42976518caf83dc614d3f8a1 I would have posted this on the XML.com page itself but they make you sign up. Another point: it's a good thing that you link to your xml.com articles from your blog, because I check your blog's feed more often than I do the xml.

We recently bought a Roomba. Here is Lynne's review of the little robotic floor cleaner: After changing all of our carpet over to gorgeous Bamboo Flooring I went to Target to get some type of convenient sweeper to use upstairs. I considered a broom; I looked at electric brooms; I looked at a carpet/floor sweeper type broom until Roombacaught my eye. Once upon a time I think I saw an ad for one of these things and I thought it was neat but I assumed it was too expensive.

Huge thanks to Karl Dubost, who has translated all my Restful Web articles on XML.com into French. I don't have words in either language to express how very cool that is.

I just finished reading Freakonomicsby Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The book is excellent not only for Levitt's intriguing analysis, and subsequent decimation, of many bits of "conventional wisdom", but also for Dubner's prose. The book covers topics as far ranging as cheating in Sumo wrestling to determining which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool. The book is easy to read and really makes you start thinking about peoples motivations in all sorts of everyday contexts.