Agylen

I haven’t been talking about The Open Source Zone for a while. To be honest, I haven’t been doing anything about it for a long while. Too busy with other stuff, but anyway the site is still there, running smoothly, with a slowly rising traffic level and a few occasional contributions.

I’d probably need to suck up to a few A-list bloggers to get noticed. Well, actually I’ve tried to in the past, but I’ve been ignored. Maybe I should try again, following Guy’s advice closely. Who knows?

Anyway, I’ve got at least one mention — more like a rave review actually — in Linux Magazine (registration required). Thanks to Matt Tanase for mentioning The Open Source Zone. Too bad Linux Magazine keeps this content behind a registration-required barrier. New technology, same old media.

Technorati Tags: web-2.0, open source, a-list.

What happens when you put a bunch of geeks on a boat floating on Amsterdam’s canals, in front of lots of wine and beer? Hippo Booze Cruise, that’s what!

Just a test of Performancing for Firefox.

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

Looks cool, but I don’t think I’ll let go of MarsEdit, even though the WYSIWYG editor is nice to have.

Darren Rowse: “YPN has added another 1000 beta testers to their system today and takes another step towards going live. As far as I can see they are still only adding US publishers.”

I received an invitation too. Cool! I thought, I am one of the 1000. Unfortunately my joy turned to dismay as soon as I read about the US-only restriction.

Looks like my plan of swapping YPN ads in place of AdSense ones and reaching $100 a day just like Russ will have to be delayed once again.

Russell is gaining more than $100 a day from ads only. Nice for you, Russ!

I don’t have more than a fraction of his traffic levels, but with the recent surge I experimented (I’ve been doing more than 2000 unique visitors per day in the last three days), I figured I could try to monetize some of this traffic.

So I adopted the same strategy as Russell: put a large, obnoxious ad unit right before the post on each single-post page, but only when people come here from another site (possibly 99% of hits to single posts are from search engines anyway).

This way, I hope not to annoy too much regular readers who come in through the home page. I would also like to suggest my (very few) regular readers to use my RSS feed instead. It’s full-text and without ads.

Minding the Planet: Want a Link to Your Blog from Minding The Planet?: “Hello readers! I am trying a little experiment to see who is reading this blog. Anyone who posts a link in their blog to the permalink of this blog entry will get a reciprocal link back to their blog from within the body of this blog entry. I’ll search periodically for sites that link to this entry, and when I find new ones, I’ll add links back to them from this entry.”

There you go. Nice blog, by the way, but I support Peter’s request: Provide full feeds, please.

… for me would probably be a new iPod, but if you don’t want to spend that much, what about Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run 30th anniversary edition?

I remember when I bought it first, on vinyl of course, many years ago. It was the first time I heard the Boss and it was a shock. After 30 years it’s still one of the greatest albums in the history of rock.

At the time, it was hard to listen to rock’n'roll on the radio and totally impossible to watch it on the TV. I had to wait until 1983, when Bruce did his first Italian tour, to be able to see him live. This edition includes two DVDs, a “making of” documentary and the recording of a 1975 concert in London.

However, since it will be released on November 15, I’m not sure I want to wait until Christmas to put my hands on it.

Dave Winer: “After years of maintaining absolute control over user’s data in Microsoft Office, the new version promises to give total control to the user, and creates a path for developers to siphon users from Microsoft to new or specialized products. One would think that this would spawn an explosion of new products designed to please Office users but that’s not what’s happening. A group of large technology companies is proposing a competing set of formats, and has formed an alliance to confuse the market, and at least double the work of any developer who might want to support their products (with almost no installed base) alongside Microsoft’s (with a monopolistic dominant installed base). “

Yeah, right. Since Microsoft has a dominant installed base (illegally acquired or not), let’s just give up any hope of defining a format that is really open and unencumbered by ambiguous licensing terms and patents. Doing so would just be “confusing the market”. Bah!

According to Wikipedia, however:

All of this is in contrast with the competing “Microsoft Office Open XML” developed by Microsoft. Microsoft has released their format royalty-free, but with additional conditions not imposed by OpenDocument. Independent analysts have stated that Microsoft’s licensing requirements will prevent many competitors from ever implementing Microsoft’s format. The extent of this incompatibility is the source of significant controversy between Microsoft and other parties. The text below attempts to capture these differences, since they are often one of the reasons people consider using OpenDocument.

One is left wondering whether Dave’s opinion isn’t at least a little influenced by his dislike of Tim Bray, who is very supportive of OpenDocument. And of Atom.

New York Times: After Delay, U.S. Faces Line for Flu Drug. As concern about a flu pandemic sweeps official Washington, Congress and the Bush administration are considering spending billions to buy the influenza drug Tamiflu. But after months of delay, the United States will now have to wait in line to get the pills. Had the administration placed a large order just a few months ago, Roche, Tamiflu’s maker, could have delivered much of the supply by next year, according to sources close to the negotiations in both government and industry.

(Via Dan Gillmor)

I guess Bush thinks God will take care of this, somehow.

The Guardian: George Bush: ‘God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq’. George Bush has claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a senior Palestinian politician in an interview to be broadcast by the BBC later this month. One of the delegates, Nabil Shaath, who was Palestinian foreign minister at the time, said: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.” Mr Bush went on: “And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.”

(Via God is for Suckers!)

Be worried. Be very worried. I’d be ashamed too, if I were American. As an Italian, I’ll do my part feeling ashamed for a crook like Berlusconi.

I know I am just the latest one reporting on this, but I will add a small twist. If you are using Gmail as the outgoing mail server in your client configuration, what this means is that Gmail won’t rewrite your From address anymore. As I’m using at least three different accounts when sending out mail, depending on who I’m sending it to, what’s in it for me is that I can now use Gmail as my only outgoing server, not having to fight with corporate SMTP gateways that insist on me having a fixed IP address or such. Even my cellphone is now configured to send mail out via Gmail.

What this also means, however, is that more and more of my life is tied to Google.