TOM Online to Report Second Quarter 2004
Results on July 27, 2004

V2N29 July 19, 2004 Current Awareness
Happenings on the Internet: eCurrent
Awareness Resources 2004-05

July 25, 2004

I know that Rome empties out in August, but if any Joel on Software readers plan to be there on Monday, August 16th, it would be nice to get together for dinner. So far, we've done these dinners in Berkeley, Oslo, and Montréal, with great success. We'll take over a room in a restaurant, eat, drink, be merry, and talk about software development. If you can attend, or would like to suggest a good place to meet, post a message here.

Marshall T. Rose, in RFC 3117: “Counter-intuitively, Postel's robustness principle (‘be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept’) often leads to deployment problems. Why? When a new implementation is initially fielded, it is likely that it will encounter only a subset of existing implementations. If those implementations follow the robustness principle, then errors in the new implementation will likely go undetected. The new implementation then sees some, but not widespread deployment. This process repeats for several new implementations. Eventually, the not-quite-correct implementations run into other implementations that are less liberal than the initial set of implementations. The reader should be able to figure out what happens next.”

July 23, 2004

July 16, 2004

Ah, finally, my second book is on its way to the printer.

Yes, it's mostly reprints of articles which you've already read on this site over the last four years. But there are three huge advantages to the book version. 1) It has been professionally edited. I have finally learned to use semicolons instead of commas to separate complete sentences, and somebody smarter than me has sorted out all the "whiches" and the "thats." 2) You don't have to read it on a computer. 3) You can hurl it at your boss or coworkers to make a point, and the impact will be much more powerful than emailing a URL.

I'm hoping it will be out in a month or so.

July 19, 2004

One of the biggest weaknesses of Microsoft Outlook has been the search feature. It takes so long for Outlook to search that the feature is almost useless.

Searching is not a hard problem, and a lot of plug-ins sprang up to solve this problem. Lookout was one of the best. It just works. Searching five years of accumulated email takes less than a second. Indexing is done quietly in the background and never slows down your system. Suddenly email is useful again.

So what happens? Microsoft buys Lookout. That's nice, good for them.

But look more closely at the Q&A:

Q: Why can't I download Lookout anymore?

We will be focusing our efforts on integrating our expertise and working on next-generation technologies.

Huh? What's going on?

Q: What is Microsoft going to do with Lookout? ...

The existing Lookout product will no longer be available, but its technology will be part of an exciting vision that MSN has for delivering new and innovative search services.

MSN?! Lookout is going to be part of MSN? What about Outlook?

Our vision is to take search beyond today’s basic Internet search services to deliver direct answers to people’s questions, and help them find information from a broad range of sources.

What? What the hell does this have to do with searching email? Could Microsoft have possibly bought Lookout just to shut them down? Even at my most paranoid, I can't for the life of me figure out why Microsoft wants searching in Outlook to be worthless. Maybe just Hanlon's Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

July 4, 2004

Scot's Newsletter - July 2004

OpenChange 15-July-2004 (Documentation)

Microsoft Office 2004 due by mid-July

Flashforward 2004 coming in July

Dexter Cartoon for July 30, 2004

I had some nice feedback following last week's "Dexter" cartoon, so I've decided to make my old cartoons a regular Friday feature. I don't have many cartoons to choose from, but I should be able to keep this going for a few months. I actually drew "Dexter" five days a week for a couple of years so you'd think I'd have hundreds to pick from, but I have just a handful scanned in, many of which are too dated to reprint (they were all drawn between 1989 and 1991).

The ones I have scanned are my "safe" cartoons which I sent to syndicates. See, the majority of my Dexter comics talked about race, religion, politics and sex, and they used language that would make Garfield and Beetle Bailey run screaming into the hills. I knew I'd never get into the newspapers with that stuff, so I created a number of strips which tackled less sensitive subjects, hoping to use them to sneak into the papers. I figured once I was syndicated I could push the boundaries. Sounded like a great plan to me, but it hit a rather large roadblock: no syndicate was interested in distributing my work.

I spent a year or two slumming around trying to get my comics published, but had little luck. Then in 1995 I discovered the Web and realized I could do my own publishing - cheap. So, off I went to build my first Web site. At that time the tools for building sites were really bad, so I decided to build my own. On my Dexter site a few months later, I announced my new HTML editor - which, of course, was HomeSite 1.0. The end of the story is that HomeSite turned out be far more successful than my comics, and I followed HomeSite into a career as a computer programmer.

Anyway...that's the background story. Now here's this week's Dexter cartoon:

Apple Q3 2004 earnings due July 14

"Nationwide Day of Action July 13, 2004"

AIS SIGSEMIS Bulletin 1(2) July 2004

PHP Magazine: July 2004 Issue Available