Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

- Attended the Peter Gabriel show in San Jose. High points: a subdued version of Mercy Street (from So) that began with a startling bit of acapella chorus, followed by Growing Up (from Up) during which Gabriel chased guitarist David Rhodes around the stage while inside a huge, bouncing hamster ball. And man, that Tony Levin. He’s my hero.

- Had a late dinner with some of the mod_pubsub organizers in Sunnyvale last week (we decided to call it the first “mod_pubsub Users Group” meeting). I’m considering writing up a “busy developer’s guide” to mod_pubsub, similar in format to Eric Kidd’s XML-RPC how-to. Applications are already starting to sprout, like Mike Dierkin’s AmazonPop, which displays the top salesranked Amazon items as a list that updates in realtime — watch for a few minutes and you’ll see items climb and fall. I’m conceiving a browser-based outliner tool for workflow that, instead of polling a file every few seconds, instead pushes node-level update notifications to the client. The developer list is growing, and includes some fairly notable members.

- Braved the nasty weather to attend the Creative Commons launch party at SOMArts in San Francisco. I’m licensing the Walkingbirds’ MP3 files under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which permits file sharing and allows derivative works (such as the one I did with Shannon) with attribution and for non-commercial purposes. Essentially, it’s a KaZaa-friendly copyright. CC has a great short movie (1.5 Mb, Flash) that explains how their licenses complement traditional copyright.

…and thanks to everyone who wrote in about my problem with Microsoft’s XMLHTTP object. Apparently, it’s a semi-documented bug. A lot of good workaround suggestions, but unfortunately none of them worked.