Photomatt @ CNET

WordPress Ãœbermensch Matt Mullenweg has accepted a job at CNET Networks. Getting a job with a big-time tech media company would be cool enough on its own. But part of Matt’s paid duties will be to continue working on WordPress. I had the honor of being one of Matt’s references while he was in talks with CNET, so I got to talk to one of the folks there for a while about Matt, his work, and about WordPress in general. I definitely came away with the impression that CNET groks the value of open source projects that are actively maintained.

Matt has now taken another step in his quest for world domination. Congrats!

Fight for Your Right to Copy

The November 2004 issue of WIRED magazine comes with a CD of music by major artists. All of the songs are available under a Creative Commons license, and are freely distributable. I downloaded a BitTorrent copy the other day from LegalTorrents, and I finally got around to listening to it this morning. (I use BitTornado as my BT client, BTW)

I’m really digging it. There’s some great tunes in there. Some of the artists featured on the CD: David Byrne, Beastie Boys, Spoon, Danger Mouse, and
Chuck D. Those are just the performers I had heard of before. But some of my favorite tunes are from the other acts. The even niftier bit for other musicians, is that most of the songs are available under a particular CC license that allows you to use samples of the songs in remixes.

Get yourself a BitTorrent client and download this CD. I’m pretty sure that you’ll find something in there that you like. Unless all you like is country-western and bluegrass music. In which case, you should break out the fiddles and remix the music into a new country-trance-rap mashup that’s sure to sweep the charts!

TarPit update

I’ve had a minor modification to my Spammer TarPit plugin in place here for a couple of weeks, but I’m just now getting around to updating it for public consumption. New in version 1.3: the plugin will now emit an HTTP 403 “Forbidden” status code, and the content-type is set to “text/plain”. There’s little hope that a spammer bot will actually recognize and respect the 403 status code, but at least it’s proper semantics on the part of the plugin.

Weight Goal

My weight on the scale today was 255 pounds, which is only 1 pound less than last Monday. But a few days ago, I was down at 252.5. My trend weight is 254.2, which is about 2 pounds lower than a week ago. I think I’ve said this before, but I really should have made Friday my weekly weight tracking day instead of Monday. My weight almost always spikes over the weekend.

Putting the “Simple” back in SOAP

I’ve never been too big on SOAP. It’s nice that there are lots of toolkit implementations out there, but for most of my projects, it just seems like overkill. Many developers joke about the acronym being an oxymoron, because SOAP can quickly lose its simplicity. XML-RPC has its faults, but it’s easier to test and debug, in my experience. But Sam Ruby‘s posting on WS-HTTP has some suggestions that could change that.

Now, Imagine a SOAP 1.3 specification which is identical to SOAP
1.2 with exactly two changes:

  • If a

    soap:Envelope is present, then

    soap:Header     is required.

  • If you ever want to send a message with zero headers, then you
    are required to omit the soap:Envelope and soap:Header
    elements.

In such a world, people who use SOAP 1.3 enabled toolkits would
be able to construct messages to be sent to eBay.  If they are
so inclined, they could write schemas for such messages (in the
schema language of their choice).  They could even wrap this
schema in WSDL, and share it amongst themselves.

All of a sudden, a class of developers would find eBay to be
“Web Service enabled”.  Without requiring any coordination or
changes with eBay.

Sam also cites BlogLines as another use-case. These services both support XML-based APIs that are not based on SOAP or XML-RPC. Currently, you’d have to find or create a toolkit that is written specifically for each of these services. But imagine if these APIs were suddenly available to a large number of existing SOAP client implementations!

Does anybody know what the chances are of such a change being accepted by the XML Protocol Working Group? This kind of stripped-down structure could put the “Simple” back into SOAP.

Toys (not for my kids)

Motorola i860

Gimme, gimme, gimme! Via one of my new favoritest sites, Gizmodo, comes word of the new Motorola i860 phone. This is the first cameraphone for Nextel, which is the provider that my family uses (love that PTT). The i860 review at CNET is short, but sweet. I’m not concerned about the low resolution or sending pictures from phone-to-phone. But I’d finally get a chance to do some moblogging.

Maybe if the job deal that I’ve got in the works pans out (more on that later, when it’s official), I can upgrade from my i730 phone.

An Open Letter To Amazon.com

This is some feedback that I just sent to Amazon. I thought I’d share it.

I’m sure you must get this question a lot, but do you have any plans to support PayPal in the future?

Call me lazy, but sometimes I’d rather just not order something, than to have to transfer funds from my PayPal account back to my regular account just to spend it (despite their recent problems).

Like just now. I wanted to purchase High Performance MySQL, figuring I’d pay using some funds that I have sitting in PayPal at the moment. But Amazon doesn’t accept it. My regular account is awaiting my next paycheck before I make any unnecessary purchases. And it would take several days to transfer money from PayPal back to my regular accounts, so all semblance of convenience is lost.

Please, please, please add PayPal support.

Please?

Need a use-case? PayPal is one of the few ways I can purchase a gift for my wife without her seeing the bill. [Ed note: pretend you didn’t read that, sweetheart 😉] But the main use-case is just that it’s awfully darned convenient to use PayPal when you already have funds sitting in the account. It’s a source of funds that are already outside my primary budget management, so it’s almost like “free money” that I don’t feel guilty about spending (because as far as my budget calculations are concerned, it’s already “spent”).

C’mon, Amazon… MAKE MONEY NOW!!!!1!1!

Sorry, I don’t know what came over me.

Don’t I at least deserve a $20 gift certificate for making my message entertaining (as well as informative)?

No?

…darn…

$10?

Alright, I’ll stop now.

Seriously, though.

PayPal.

Your customers want it.

Do you agree? Why not let Amazon know?