By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: May 7, 2007
Monday, 7 May 2007
- Walt Mossberg Profile in This Week’s New Yorker ★
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5,000-word profile of The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, by Ken Auletta:
Some journalists, such as Thomas L. Friedman, of the Times, earn more if one factors in speeches and books, but when, recently, Mossberg signed a four-year contract, two Journal sources told me, his annual compensation approached a million dollars. Mossberg refuses to discuss his pay; a friend with knowledge of the negotiations says that “pay has always been an issue at the Journal,” and that Mossberg doesn’t want to be viewed as a “prima donna.”
I’m sure this jackass from PC World thinks the headline should have been “Ten Things We Love About Walt Mossberg”.
- New Zune on Monday? ★
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Jeremy Horwitz:
We’re hearing that Microsoft’s holding an event in Redmond on Monday to preview/announce a new Zune — most likely the flash-based one the company’s been hinting at for a while.
- PC World’s ‘Hate’ and ‘Love’ Apple Stories ★
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PC World has published the “10 Things We Hate/Love About Apple Stories” that led to editor Harry McCracken’s resignation last week. They also published a short introduction to the two pieces that mentions the dispute, but explains nothing.
The articles are exactly what you think they are: insipid crap. (E.g. #2 on the hate list is that Apple is too secretive about upcoming plans, and #8 is the 1998 round hockey puck mouse.) I’m more convinced than ever that the dispute between McCracken and Colin Crawford was about editorial authority, not anything specific to these articles.
- Interview With Aaron Swartz ★
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Philipp Lenssen’s thoughtful interview with Aaron Swartz:
Before Y Combinator, I was a student at Stanford. Then I worked at Reddit for a while — the four of us packed into a small 3-bedroom apartment in Somerville, MA (I slept in the cupboard). Then we got bought by Condé Nast (the publishers of Wired, Elle, The New Yorker, Details, GQ, etc.) and they moved us out to San Francisco to work at the Wired offices and then they fired me. On the plus side, I did get this nifty shirt.
- Perl to Slip in Alongside Ruby and Python for Cocoa Scripting Language Development? ★
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Sherm Pendley, creator and maintainer of CamelBones, on why Apple announced support in Leopard for writing Cocoa apps using Ruby and Python but not Perl:
They asked around internally for “sponsor” engineers to accept the job of reviewing a scripting bridge for code quality, running compatibility tests, etc. They found volunteers for Python and Ruby early on — but not for Perl.
The good news is, there’s a volunteer for Perl now too, and the pushed-back release date for Leopard has bought us a little breathing room. So there’s still a chance for Perl to be a first class citizen. The bad news is, we arrived late to the party and there’s a lot of catching up to do.
(By the way, if you’re looking for a freelance programmer, Pendley is looking for work.)
- 37signals’s Redesigned Forums ★
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The “standard” template for web-based forum design is just awful — just dozens and dozens of boxes for something that shouldn’t be boxy at all. 37signals’s new forum design is a good rethinking of the form. It’s just lists: a list of forums, a list of topics within each forum, and a list of posts within each topic.
It’s an apt pairing of form and function. These things are lists, and now that’s what they look like. This simple list-based visual style is the default for Beast, the new Rails-based forum software 37signals started using back in March for Highrise.
It’s a little funny, in that Beast’s own forums look more like 37signals’s signature style.
- WWDC Bash Moved Off-Campus ★
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This year’s Apple-sponsored WWDC Bash isn’t on campus in Cupertino — it’s in San Francisco. Some people treat it as a pilgrimage, but it always struck me as a waste of time to move all those people all the way from Moscone to Cupertino.
- Andy Budd Proposes CSS 2.2 ★
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It’s embarassing how little progress the W3C has made since the CSS 2 spec came out in 1998.
- Interarchy Quicksilver Plugin ★
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Nolobe:
The Interarchy Quicksilver plugin provides access to Interarchy Bookmarks and Net Disks. You can open Bookmarks; upload files and folder to Bookmarks; and mount, unmount, and sync Net Disks.
- Full Metal Jacket for Wii ★
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I really have to get a Wii. (Thanks to David Chartier.)
- SimpleMovieX ★
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$30 alternative to QuickTime Pro for simple video editing and conversion. Its big advantage is direct support for formats like AVI and MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. (Via TUAW.)
- Nina Reiser Couldn’t Win ★
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The Nina Reiser murder case just keeps getting stranger and stranger.