Python is absurd. Here’s a script that notifies weblogs.com and blo.gs that my site has changed:

import xmlrpclib
proxy = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2')
results = proxy.weblogUpdates.ping('rc3.org Daily',
'http://rc3.org/')
print results.get('message')
proxy = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('http://ping.blo.gs/')
results = proxy.weblogUpdates.ping('rc3.org Daily',
'http://rc3.org/')
print results.get('message')

That’s sick.

Who says Microsoft isn’t innovative? They’re changing their compensation so that employees are rewarded with actual shares of stock rather than stock options. I don’t know enough finance to know what the greater implications of this are, but it feels very important to me, especially in light of the ongoing debate over how stock options are expensed by companies.

Here’s an article that discusses some of the ramifications. I’m still waiting for a detailed breakdown from a financial publication. Maybe the Economist will come through in the next week or two.

I only today learned of the Edsger Dijkstra archive, maintained by the University of Texas computer science department. I haven’t plunged into it, but it looks utterly fascinating. For more, see this Salon article. (Link via <a href=http://www.paradox1x.org/weblog/kmartino/archives/003051.shtml”>paradox1x.)

John Gruber has posted perhaps the longest explanation imaginable for running AdSense ads on his site. The cool thing is that it’s worth reading. To be frank, it made me wonder whether it wouldn’t be worth at least considering signing up for AdSense here. I doubt that I will, but the fact that me made me think about it speaks well for his column (as I now know he’d prefer it be called).

Much as I want to give my unreserved support to Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination, John Edwards’ campaign message (as described by William Saletan) is really very appealing to me. I’ve always told people that I opposed cutting capital gains taxes because I feel like people who work for their money should not be taxed at a higher rate than those who invest for their money, and Edwards is taking that idea and really turning it into something powerful. I also think that the fact that Edwards was a trial lawyer is incredible bait that could drag Bush into a real quagmire during the campaign.

Daniel Gross has a Slate story comparing QVC and Amazon.com. The comparison seems unfair to me somehow, but I can’t put my figure on it.

Let’s say you were going to purchase a mobile phone. Let’s say that you had perhaps foolishly decided that the only phone you are interested in purchasing is a Nokia 3650. If you lived in the United States, that would mean that your two choices for carriers are AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile. Both offer nationwide plans that are roughly the same — $39.99 per month for around 600 minutes. But for the cool extras, it seems like the prices diverge radically.

If I understand T-Mobile properly, they offer their “t-zones” service on an unlimited basis for $9.99 a month. That gives you web, email, and AIM access as well as the ability to send your digital photos around without worrying about megabytes and things like that.

Looking at AT&T Wireless, it seems like “mMode” plans cost between $2.99 and $19.99, and the $19.99 plan only gives you 8MB per month. To add insult to injury, multimedia messages are an additional 40 cents per message.

Can the prices really be that different? If you have knowledge of the thicket of cellular pricing schemes, please send email. Also, if you have a T-Mobile horror story, please let me know. It seems to me that only a fool would go with AT&T Wireless given the price discrepancy.

Bruce Eckel has posted a little evangelistic Q & A about Python. His word carries a lot of weight with me because he wrote the book that I used to learn Java. (I’ve gone back and reread parts of it as well, which is not something I normally do with technical books.) I’m becoming more and more excited about Python even though I’ve only written one small script on my own. The amazing thing is that the small script actually does a heck of a lot in only a few lines. Anyway, when talking about large projects built using Python, he misses Chandler, which is in large part being written in Python.

For the past week or two, I’ve been using the FeedDemon beta as my RSS reader. There are some things that I wish were different about it, but overall it’s quite nice and is extremely polished for a pre-release product. (I suppose at some point I should head over to the public news groups and talk about what I’d like to see change.) Anyway, FeedDemon comes with a bunch of subscribed feeds by default (alas, rc3.org is not one of them). Rather than purging them all, I left them all in at first and am removing them as they become annoying.

Anyway, one of the feeds is Adam Curry’s Weblog. In his feed this morning, I found the post taking a stand on rss, which is wrong in so many ways that it hurts. Curry put up ten grand to get included automatically in the list of subscribed feeds that ship with Radio UserLand. (Maybe he paid to be included in FeedDemon as well, who knows?) Now he’s mad because some people are working on a new replacement for RSS.

Speaking personally, while I haven’t been able to escape the ongoing discussion of RSS, Echo, not-Echo, and other related matters for weeks, I really haven’t been too interested in it one way or another. Once the discussion is over, if popular RSS tools start supporting the new format, then I’ll create a new feed for this site. If they don’t, then I won’t.

So Curry is mad because he invested his ten grand not just in getting his RSS feed in front of a bunch of new people, but “in a format.” I’m not sure what that means. I’m not even sure why he cares. He claims that the exposure he bought is somehow diluted by the new format. How can that possibly be? If the new format falls flat on its face, then he’s fine. If it succeeds wildly, then UserLand will be compelled to support it, and he’ll be fine. It’s just a data format. If you’re not going to be the one generating it or parsing it, who cares?

He concludes by saying that he’s going to spend $10,000 more this year buying exposure in various aggregators, but he’s only giving his money to people who don’t support the new format. How much sense does that make? RSS is entrenched. Nobody who makes an RSS reader in the foreseeable future is going to drop support for it. If feeds using the new format start appearing, then smart authors of RSS readers will support it as well. We’re supposed to be liberal in what we accept, remember? I’m not sure why an esoteric debate about a data format is arousing this kind of misplaced anger, but I’d like to learn more.

Brian Behlendorf has a short and eloquent defense of overseas outsourcing at Salon. As I’ve said here many times, outsourcing is inevitable, and is a net good for the world overall. The challenge is adapting your career to survive it.