Posts from May 2004

Monday's New York Times article about Microsoft's fight against junk e-mail senders. I receive over 500 spam messages a day and would love to do something to stop the senders. "Microsoft's two-year-old digital integrity unit - which also fights online fraud, identity theft and spyware - employs more than 100 people around the world and has an annual budget of more than $10 million." "In the last 15 months, Microsoft has filed 53 civil cases against spammers."...

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Scoble is organizing a Silicon Valley Geek Lunch today at Buck's of Woodside at noon if you are in the area and would like to attend. There will probably be a small group, and that worked well last time....

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The Canvas Gallery and Cafe, located in San Francisco's Inner Sunset district, no longer offers its patrons free wireless Internet access on Saturday and Sunday. There are now signs throughout the space to inform patrons of free wireless Internet Monday-Friday "with purchase." This change in policy happened within the last week, as I was at the café and online last Sunday. I assume the change allows for greater turnover during weekend hours. I know of other businesses who choose not to offer wireless access because of this same turnover concern. Is wireless Internet access another perk reserved for off-peak hours?...

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Sam Ruby posted a long and interesting writeup on the differences between RSS and Atom, and what tool builders need to worry about. "[I]f you want to support any version of RSS completely, you essentially need to support all of them." "If you can't generate unique ids for entries, then perhaps Atom is not the format for you." "Atom has more required elements than RSS. Atom adds type attributes to titles and links to resolve the ambiguity described above. It has separate elements for summary and content."...

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Annalee Newitz writes about geek approaches to online romance in the June 2004 issue of Wired magazine. The article starts on page 156, and is now online. Christopher Filkins and his FOAF-based Dating Syndicate. Marc Canter's People Aggregator is mentioned as another dating engine built on FOAF. Kevin Burton is named "The Sniffer" for his use of AIM Sniffer to pick up women in wireless Internet enabled San Francisco cafés. Jonathan Moore is profiled as "The Stalker" for his use Unix shell scripts and Netcat to pull e-mail addresses from wireless networks and match the data with a Friendster profile....

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On Sunday afternoon Steve Gibson, Chip Wasson and Jeff Kafka rode their kite-boards from the Farallon Islands to Crissy Field beach. The 28-mile stretch of ocean is known for strong currents, large swells and one of the highest concentration of great white sharks in the world. The trip took 2 hours, and no sharks were harmed....

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Yusuf Mehdi, head of Microsoft's MSN division, spoke yesterday at the Goldman Sachs Internet conference at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. Audio of the speech is available online in Windows Media Audio and RealAudio formats. Some interesting comments on MSN Search throughout the talk. "All of our aspirations...pivot on on Hotmail and Messenger." Why do you download a toolbar when everyone already has one? For integration into all of the MSN services of course. Search is front and center, but not the primary motivator for the install. MSN Search handles 2 billion queries a day. Over 10 million people...

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The Atom entry link structure detailed by Mark Pilgrim has some interesting search applications. What if the rel started to carry more meaning? You could then semantically track trends and soruces with less parsing, enabling new applications....

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Jerry Lerma and Terry Hogan have a map of The Simpsons' hometown of Springfield. (via Slashdot) It even includes the Matlock Expressway!...

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Steven Levy writes about Nick Denton and Gawker Media in Wired magazine. Writers are typically paid $1500 a month (contract, not full time) and build a reputation good enough for a traditional publisher. Levy estimates Gawker Media nets $80,000 per blog per year. "Denton's move to professionalize blogs bestowed instant credibility on an unknown single-writer Web site."...

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