One compound bow, two arrows, six boys between the ages of six and sixteen, shooting for over two hours. And the safest place to be in the backyard? In the yellow dot.

Zimran Ahmed has responded to my question about categorizing the type of monopoly Microsoft has with IE and their ability to use it to their advantage.

Wow, I'm impressed. First I sent a Fax off to my representative David Price regarding H.R. 1157, the Freedom to Read Protection Act of 2003. I first received a positive response from him via e-mail, then received this follow-up e-mail: Dear Mr. Gregorio: Knowing of your interest in H.R. 1157, the Freedom to Read Protection Act of 2003, I am writing to let you know that I recently became a cosponsor of this legislation.

Many things in life are cyclical, and one them is the recurring debates about RDF and the Semantic Web. I don't think the Semantic Web will ever work. Am I trying to discourage people from working on it? No. Keep working away, who knows, I could be wrong and something worthwhile may come of it, but I doubt it. This essay is about hightlighting that doubt. First, the XML serialization of RDf is cryptic.

From Larry Lessig: We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don't, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would suggest 98% of works would pass into the pubilc domain after 50 years. The Act would do a great deal to reclaim a public domain.

In my piece on Microsoft and IE I point out that I am still running Windows 98 on my primary machine at home. Ziv responded and has made me an offer I can't refuse.

Microsoft, trying to squeeze more revenue from operating system sales, looks to leverage it's monopoly in the browser market to force people to upgrade to the latest version of Windows. Dealing with groups that refuse to upgrade to the latest and greatest OS from Redmond are a perennial source of irritation for Microsoft. They even have a name for them: Implementation Blockers. Now that was back when Windows 2000 was being rolled out, so I don't know if the nomenclature has changed since then.

Microsoft settles browser suit with AOL. Actually the title would better read, "Microsoft pays AOL $750,000,000 to shut down Mozilla". Which is quite an endorsement from Microsoft if they're willing to pay that much money. I wonder if the ploy will actually backfire on Microsoft, the worst case scenario I could see is Mozilla, after being jettisoned by AOL, is picked up by Apache. While I don't normally endorse slimey marketing tactics, "

At my Washington office a few weeks ago, I met with a visiting Japanese parliamentarian who specializes in science and technology issues. I related to him my belief that the Chinese would be on the moon within a decade with a declaration of permanent occupation. He disagreed. He smiled and said my conclusion was accurate but my timing was off. In his view, the Chinese would be on the moon within three to four years.

Browser requests for BitWorking in the last week. BrowserPercentage of Requests MSIE 44% Moz/Netscape 54% Opera 2% YMMV. Update: Well, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics. Based on feedback from Fabrice I went back and filtered the last six days of logs and took only hits that accessed the root of BitWorking, and then manually stripped out all the robots, spiders, scrapers, aggregators and other non-desktop browser agents.

Matt Griffith came up with the idea for RSS auto-discovery. Happy birthday, Joe! ;-) Posted by Ziv Caspi on 2003-05-30

Over the past week or two there has been a lot to chew on in the realm of standards. One of the big items was Tim Bray's post on RDF, which is interesting for a couple of reasons, the first being a great quote: It's the Syntax, Stupid! It is also nice for me to see other people question RDF. As Ziv points out, we spent a lot of time last September questioning the utility of RDF, specifically the utility of RDF in RSS 1.

I think a new name is in order, "Internet Services" to distinguish them from "Web Services". First let's discuss Web Services. The first person who comes to mind for this definition is Jon Udell, who has been covering the idea of hooking up various services on the web for a long time, most recently covering how to transform an RSS feed into HTML fit for a Nokia which was done by Robert Ivanc, and how his bank could have used Web Services to fix his online account.

I have been having a lot of fun tweaking Firebird, and two things have been particularly fun to play with, the CSS controlling the Firebird user interface, and the Optimoz Mouse Gestures. The file userChrome.css, which, because Firebird is done in XUL, is a CSS file that you can use to control the look and feel of the application. After having been away from UI design for a while, but having spent more than a good bit of time doing web design using CSS this is real comfortable.

Tim Bray weighs in on the current Google/NYTimes flap by pointing out that he thinks the reason the publishers haven't put their archives on the web is because they are getting a good revenue stream from selling them to Dialog. But bear in mind that these are businesses. They'll make the move when, and only when, the money says to. Abstractions like Web Citizenship are not part of the equation.

Looks like Zeldman is tying the knot. Do you think he'll wear the hat? Best wishes to him and his bride-to-be, Carrie Bickner.

Dave has been covering the whining, by the NY Times and the Register, about blogs biasing Google. This is familiar stuff, and I might point out, I covered almost a year ago in Google and Heisenberg. It looks like their robots.txt file hasn't changed in that time either. Their robots.txt file is hilarious. Posted by RE: NY Times, Google And Blogs on 2003-05-22

We'll it's a rainy Monday, and a good day to be at work, as the siren call of sunny weather isn't distracting me. I unfortunately don't have any pictures of Mark and Dora's wedding to add to the pile, as our digital camera broke while we were on vacation in Disney. There were plenty of photos taken though, here is one of Lynne and I tearing up the dance floor.

The wedding of Mark and Dora Pilgrim took place at 11:30 on May 17, 2003 in the Garden of the Fearington Inn. They were married by the Reverend Robert Webber. There were readings from Mark's Mother and Dora's sister. The ceremony music was provided by "The Tuba Quartet". The wedding party consisted of Elaine Woo as the Maid of honor, Lara Cohen the Bridesmaid, Sarah Stried the Flower Girl, Michael Stried as the Best Man and Clinton Fongas the Groomsman.

Aaron Swartz xmltramp is a very cool native interface for Python for manipulating XML. I'm definitely going to be playing with this, and checking on how it handles namespaces. Bit Twiddling Hacks [via 0xdecafbad] xmltramp doesn't handle namespaces. :-( Posted by Sam Ruby on 2003-05-15 Test. Please ignore this CommentsAPI post from Aggie. Posted by anonymous on 2003-05-16 A namespaces patch is on its way to Aaron. Email me if anyone wants a Cc of the patch.