Chris Anderson responds to Wesner Moise’s concerns about Doc/View in Avalon. Chris is right: it’s too early in the Avalon dev cycle for frameworks to be written on top of it (anyone who remembers the genesis of MFC knows this), but this makes it imperative for the architecture group at MSDN to get out and spread the word before v1 ships about architecture patterns that make developing rich Avalon-based document editors easy.

Comments Off

Like Luke Hutteman notes, spam into my Hotmail Inbox is now down to about 1 a day, from the pre-update 10-15 a day. Great!

Comments Off

Captain’s Quarters quotes from the The Voyage of Earendil, which describes the capture of Morgoth, the renegade Valar responsible for much mayhem in the First Age:

… and all of the pits of Morgoth were broken and unroofed, and the might of the Valar descended into the deeps of the earth. There Morgoth stood at last at bay, and yet unvaliant. He fled into the deepest of his mines, and sued for peace and pardon; but his feet were hewn from under him, and he was hurled upon his face. Then he was bound with the chain Angainor which he had worn aforetime, and his iron crown was beaten into a collar for his neck, and his head was bowed upon his knees.

I was reading this not one week ago, and was struck by the anticlimactic similarity of it as well. Captain’s Quarters continues:

Unvaliant, indeed … his sons died fighting, a tactically stupid thing to do but a mistake that only hastened their eventual fate. Saddam, who had vowed never to be taken alive, did not even draw the pistol he carried when he was caught, and instead surrendered meekly. The Valar thrust Morgoth “through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, and into the Timeless Void”; I suspect the Iraqis have something similar in mind, if less literary and more literal.

Indeed.

Comments Off

Incidentally, one of the reasons Dave’s pages have the visual “mix” that he talks about is that his editing environment is a very capable one. Radio/Frontier IMO has probably the best outliner in the world, and Dave is really able to reap the benefits of its rich UI to show off Scripting News to a level of polish mere Radio/Blogger/MT-wielding mortals can never achieve. Even rich clients like w.bloggar IMO constrain you to a per-post view of your data, while Dave’s outliner gives him a page-level view of what he’s writing, giving him a unique ability to create flow as nobody else quite can.

Comments Off

Dave:

What if you just want to link to something, should that require a whole post with all its attributes? It’s a matter of user interface in the end. If MT made it easy to post and update a news item that was link-blog-like, people wouldn’t need to invent a way around it. But that would break the relationship between the feed and posts. Oy what a mess. … they’re working around the model of longish posts with lots of visual overhead (a model also implemented by Blogger, Manila and Radio, so this isn’t a dig on MT).

As Dave says, it is a matter of interface in the end. Smart templates (hide the title when the post has none, tweak spacing for untitled posts, etc) and a bit of CSS can work magic on sites like the Scobleizer, which contain occasional lengthy posts and masses of links.

In Movable Type, for example, I’d love to see:

<$IfNotBlank$><$MTEntryTitle$><$EndIf$>
<$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>

…but MT can probably not grok IfNotBlank yet.

Comments Off

I’ve updated Chaoszone’s RSS feed to use RSS 2. You may see minor breakage, especially if you use a server-side aggregator like Bloglines.

Comments Off

From the world’s-largest-democracy dept: Whistleblower shot dead.

Comments Off

Photos from the Return of the King premiere in Wellington, NZ:

Comments Off

News of the LoTR: Return of the King India release date from theonering.net:

The ROTK release date in India is Feb 2004, as reported by the Times of India. This is earlier than both FoTR and TTT, which is a sign of how popular the trilogy has become… word from one distributor was that ROTK would be released in India even earlier, on January 9th.

Comments Off

Topical quote from Ben Franklin, for all the genial folks in Maharashtra and Assam intent on xenophobic mayhem: We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Comments Off