ApacheCon 2004 has released it's Call for Participation. Unfortunately the timing of ApacheCon 2004 is Nov 14-17 which conflicts with XML 2004 which runs from Nov 15-19. I've already gone to ApacheCon once and it was a blast. This year I am taking a decidedely east coast bias in my travel and I'll be attending XML 2004, which is hosted in Washington, DC. It also appears that the 61st IETF meeting is being held in Washington, DC Nov 7-12.

Lambda the Ultimate which used to be hosted at http://lambda.weblogs.com is now alive and kicking at http://www.lambda-the-ultimate.org/. They have also, not surprisingly, moved off their old software and are now running on Drupal. This is the second community site I've come across very recently that is running on Drupal. The other site is Doc Searls' IT Garage.

Shortly after I started my first job they sent me on a trip to Austria. This is my first real international trip, the senior trip to France doesn't really count as international travel. I arrive at the hotel around 4pm very jetlagged and proceed to crash in the hotel room, which is a mistake. I wake up panicked to find my watch says 7. I know my ride to the Salzberg office arrives at 8.

The first non-governmental rocket ship flew to the edge of space today and was piloted to a safe landing on a desert airport runway here. [Space.com] I have been monitoring closely the X prize which is the contest for the first Non-governmental manned flight to space and I'm so thrilled it's finally taking off as it will create big changes in the world of flight. Posted by Richard Diaz on 2004-07-16

Almost two years ago I switched away from Radio to my own home grown tools for blogging. Because the Radio site was statically generated I didn't bother moving all my old content into the new system, instead I just exported the site data as an XML file in case I needed it at a later date. That file has lain dormant all this time. Now I am slowly preparing to move all my content over to pyblosxom and started to work with that large exported blob of data.

Stone Age Developers Wanted I look back at the first web apps I ever put together and feel a deep sense of shame. I knew so little about HTTP and HTML that I made quite a few bad decisions. Luckily these were deployed behind firewalls in the early days of the web when intranets were a buzzword and not standard practice. I've learned a lot since then. Apparently if I wanted to stay in the stone age of web development I should have taken a job at Microsoft.

The first ever comp.dsp conference is being held from July 28th to August 1st. Probably not the first conference to be held around a usenet newsgroup, but still pretty unique. One thing that really stood out is the heavy dose of social and family events. Bonus points to Analog Devices and Arrow for being the first companies to contribute, in this case items for door prizes.

Tim Bray:I just heard that the IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group) has approved the creation of the "AtomPub Working Group" with a charter along the lines that have been posted for months.

John Panzer is a technical manager for web based products at AOL, is active one the atom-syntax mailing list, and now has a blog. John Panzer: The immediate purpose of this blog is to publish thoughts about web technologies, particularly Atom. Of course that suffers from the recursive blogging-about-blogging syndrome, so I'll probably expand it to talk about software in general. Subscribed.

Jeremy Gray on [atom-syntax] People have often argued that Atom should leverage existing web technology wherever possible but threads like this seem to repeatedly steer us towards re-invention, in a sense, of technology by lifting (and sometimes mutating) it into Atom when it could be leveraged more directly. As a few off-the-cuff examples of pseudo-NIH we have: the overlap of numerous Atom elements with those of Dublin Core, recent discussion regarding definition of and reference to elements for purposes of reuse that would be provided for at a specification level by RDF, invention of API/protocol solutions instead of profiling/extension of WebDAV, etc.

The W3C recently sponsored a Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. The outcome, while sad, was also completely predictable. Update: Ian Hickson gives an update on the state of the WHAT Working Group. These were some of the questions that the participants were supposed to address in the workshop: What functionality is needed for Web applications? What should a hosting environment provide? What APIs are needed for Web applications (eg.

61% of the votes are thumbs down for Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.01. I can't see how they could make Acrobat that bad. It takes about a minute or even longer to load a pdf from a website. I have to download the pdf instead before I can see it with acrobat reader. They have to do something about it. Posted by pete on 2004-09-01 Every time I start Acrobat Reader the windows installer starts up.

The grass is no greener over there. It only looks like that from a distance.

So Scoble starts referring to all the negative publicity about Longhorn in general and WinFS specifically as "Myths". This is what we call spin. Or counter-spin. The myths could be spin and Scobles post counter-spin, or maybe Longhorn is spin, the myths are counter-spin and Scobles post is counter-counter-spin. Maybe you could call that a Re-Spin. Anyway. You see there have been some recent articles that claimed that parts of Longhorn were already being dropped or trimmed.

PyBlosxom 1.0 is out. Includes static rendering. I am still working through transitioning my blog from Bulu to PyBlosxom.

While everyone is looking at DomainKeys as a method of controlling spam, I think the implications are much broader. I first saw that DomainKeys could be harnessed to stop comment span on blogs, then my thinking got even wider; here is a piece of infrastructure for enabling 'identity' on the web using public key encryption and tied to the indentity platform that is DNS. Now some may cry foul that DNS is evil because it is a centralized service, but the important point is that it is a centralized service with a system already in place for distributed authorized updates.

We are finding that how we use TiVo is evolving over time. At first it was just for recording shows which we watched when nothing else good was available on live tv. Over time we switched to watching TiVo first and then going back to live tv if we had gone completely though our TiVo backlog. Lynne watches a bit more tv than I do and has taken her TiVo usage to the next level.

What you really want is Google for the desktop. [Me talking about the viability of WinFS last November] Today we learn that Google for the desktop may become a reality. Oh, that sounds so cool. What I'd really like is a search bar that I could setup so it knew who I was. That is, I want to be able to setup the search bar so that if I do a search it considers files on the local file system and all the content at http://bitworking.

BeepLite, a Beep implementation in Java that, among other notables, implements RFC 3288: SOAP over Beep. Go there. Stay there. Make it your happy place. hahahaha! Posted by Robert Sayre on 2004-05-19 I think BEEP is a wonderful specification that I would like to see more internet protocols based upon. It's kind of too late now, as we already have zillion protocols which are widely adopted, but new protocols have nothing to loose by being based on the same building blocks, which is what BEEP is all about.

Kendall weighs in with his reasons why Atom should choose to join the W3C. I haven't been listing everyones opinions as I come across them. If you are interested most people have weighed in the atom-syntax mailing list. Kendall's arguments are a mixed bag in that many on them apply to just joining any standards body, and he also mentions advantages that can only be found in the W3C. As of this point I'm still very much on the fence as to which I prefer.