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that's right, frassle will get CVS, and I will once again be able to face my fellow programmers without shame…

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Dave, thanks for this excellent frassle design mockup.

My favorite things in this design are the line-art icons for the different views and actions. They will help the viewer (especially the first-time viewer) get a feeling for what these other views are useful for quickly.

One thing I'd like to give higher billing in frassle is the aggregator. It is an important feature of frassle that you can look at someone else's aggregator. Of course, right now the aggregator is so hard to use that almost nobody actually uses it for reading. I am working on this.

Another confusing aspect of this design is that the current category appears above the weblog title. Since you're browsing categories within a weblog, this seems counterintuitive; at first glance one might think the weblog itself belongs in the category. Additionally, the editing actions appear above the category bar. Since these are special actions that you can only do to your own weblog, I think it makes sense to differentiate them somehow, but I'm not sure how. Perhaps they could show up listed vertically in the right column, in a subtly highlighted box with a title like "editing actions". Note that because there are lots of ways to introduce these functions on an as-needed basis—for example, you can add categories on the fly when you're categorizing a post—these editing actions are rarely used from this interface anyway.

By the way, I like the right column, and would like to put a blogroll there. However, this particular question brings to the forefront another issue: the distinction between frassle as backend and the frassle publisher. Currently, there is one interface that serves both the authors and the readers. The upcoming publisher forks off one of these audiences, allowing any frassle user to construct a view of any information in frassle.

To support this distinction, I am inclined not to make the "recent posts" page more personalized. The frassle-as-a-user-facing-application stuff should be there and should be optimized for people with frassle accounts. The publisher should help these users publish material in a format optimized for a particular reading audience. I don't want to tread further into the territory of one frassle application straddling the needs of these different audiences.

A few more nits to pick: I'm not a fan of the subdued orangish-greenish-and-blue color scheme. I think it's weird the way the orange category bar cuts off above the rightmost column. The use of different fonts for your weblog | aggregrator | publisher links and home | status is odd.

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Here's some crazy news. This blog is now the second result for shimon in Google. That places me one Google-rung above Shimon Peres, former prime minister of Israel and accomplished statesman. If you ever wanted proof that Google rank is a stupid way to compare the cumulative lifetime achievements of people, here it is!

If I ever beat out experimental psychology researcher Shimon Edelman for the #1 spot, I'm having a party and you're all invited. In fact, I am having a brunch at my place on Saturday, July 10 and you're all invited. Except all you weirdos searching for shimon on google — you can just get your own brunch.

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It looks like I am experiencing this login bug too. The good news is I can replicate the problem. The bad news is I have no friggin clue how to fix it. Time will tell…

I'm writing this from my friend Cathy's house in Clinton, New York (near Syracuse). Cathy invited me up this weekend and the timing was just right. I've had a couple of fairly tough weeks—it seems like bad things have been happening to my friends—and also have a weekend without choir rehearsal thanks to our recent concert. I left my apartment at 5:30 and arrived here at 10pm, exactly as planned thanks to a lucky blend of speeding like crazy on I-90 and stopping at a couple of rest areas.

Cathy has a beatiful old place with excellent guest quarters and a happy orange cat named Norman. It's almost culture shock to be in a place where space and silence is so abundant. Fortunately there is a cable modem. I hope to get some work done on frassle from my laptop.

I forgot two things: my cell phone charger and contact lens solution. The latter has been procured but my extra rest stop didn't yield a charger. Therefore, I'm in communicado on the phone for a little while.

Oh, and if you're reading this and near Hamilton College, send me an email.

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Joe Beda, Microsoft's development lead for Avalon, has a response to the discussion around essays such as Joel Spolsky's How Microsoft lost the API war.

Why do people write web based client/server apps over writing rich client apps for Windows?

1. Frictionless deployment story
2. Cross platform interoperability
3. More fun to code — you can set up your own API system and abstract HTML to a large extent
4. Built in network/server awareness

You put all of these together and you have a pretty darn compelling story for many scenarios. How can the Windows client compete with this? The key is to take the good things of the web that we can (1, 3 and 4) and combine that with all of the goodness from having stuff run on the client. Don't get me wrong — I still believe in the web as a way to interoperate and exchange content and as a lowest common denominator for UI interaction. But we can do so much better than HTML with the horsepower that is sitting on our desk when it makes sense to do so.

The problem for Microsoft is that there is no compelling reason to remove #2 from this list. If you are making something that runs in a sandbox, does not depend on legacy windows APIs, is network-transparent, and uses high-level languages, you don't have to compile those languages into Win32 binaries. You might even be tempted to compile them to, say, Microsoft's .NET CLR, which is practically cross platform today.

If Microsoft figures out what features belong in Avalon and then makes it Windows-only, their features will quickly be cloned by cross-platform systems. Java will grow into this space quickly, and Novell will have plenty of time to develop a business here before Longhorn ever ships. These cross-platform clients will either support Avalon directly or provide a more appealing alternative (cross platform + free would beat Windows-only + expensive + bundled in Longhorn and thus taking 2 years to reach critical mass). The end result either way is that Microsoft will abstract away its most profitable market, the desktop OS.

So what's Microsoft to do? Go with the flow. The world is going to be deploying a lot more applications. They are going to have rich interfaces. They are going to be bought on-demand. They are going to evolve quickly. And there will be so many of them that consumers are going to need some way to shop around and take delivery from trusted sources.

To date, Microsoft has made one major step forward in improving the maintainability of their software. They created Windows Update. Windows update isn't novel; in fact, it's pretty primitive and limited to a single (though large) software product. But it is a huge win for both Microsoft and its customers: faster patch application means better security—good for customers and good for MS's reputation; a prolonged relationship with customers; more control of software even after it's shipped.

Windows Update could be even more useful if it applied to other products. Making Windows Update handle SQL Server service packs would certainly be considered an illegal anticompetitive practice, but it would be helpful to many. But opening Windows Update to other software vendors would be huge. Then, expanding Windows Update to support purchases of software—not unlike how Apple's iTunes supports purchases of music—would only be logical.

Like Apple with iTunes, Microsoft could take a cut of each sale; they could also charge for hosting patches. But also like Apple, they'd make their biggest cut selling more iPods Windows machines.

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A good series of questions to test whether a nascent business or business idea is viable.

The choir I sing in, New Century Voices (our website has been updated!) has a concert coming up. It's going to be great. You should come. Let me know if you want to carpool or anything.

New Century Voices

performs music by local and well-known composers:
Stravinsky, Aguiar, Veloso, Tuggle, Hill, and others

Wednesday, June 23
8pm

Church of the Holy Name
1689 Centre St.
West Roxbury, MA

Admission is free, $5 suggested donation

My favorite pieces we'll be performing are a series called Rumors of an Aeolian Harp by local composer Elizabeth Knight, fellow chorister Scott Hill's Gloria, Stravinsky's Ave Maria, and local composer David Little's jazzy Jukebox Love Song.

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OK, if you think frassle's current WYSIWYG editor is too heavy, you might like this rich text editor. Perhaps someday I'll add the ability for a frassle user to set a preferred editor: HTMLArea, this RTE, or a vanilla textarea.

Also interesting: a couple of highly interactive image and file managers.

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The fact that dealing marijuana and controlled substances is illegal does not exempt it from taxation. Therefore drug dealers are required by law to purchase drug tax stamps.

Now here's a state that's really thought its tax code through. To outrageous consequences!