Rael Dornfest

Lurking just beneath a thin candy-coated shell of the Yahoo Traffic Conditions Dashboard widget is an RSS feed suitable for subscribing to in your favorite RSS reader. Simply specify your parameters on the URL-line, like so: http://maps.yahoo.com/traffic.rss?csz=95472&mag=5&minsev=1 (that's all traffic incidents, level 1 or greater in severity, within 40 miles–level 5 magnification–of Sebastopol, CA)….

If you don't like the weather… go out and make some of your own. Or was that news? Apropos of Tim's pointer to an alarming thread on Dave Farber's IP list regarding a pending bill to pull National Weather Service data from the Web in the name of capitalism, O'Reilly's Terrie Miller is making her own — data, that…

Could we be any more explicit about our appreciation for and expectations of Ruby on Rails? Aside from writing about it left, right, and center; including it in our publishing plans; and packing more Rails goodness into our Open Source Convention than you can shake a stick at, that is. (Not to mention Rails hacking in any spare waking moments.)…

Watching 37Signals building out their Backpack app-to-be and Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann organizing up a storm for their rumored ;-) Productivity Hacks book for O'Reilly, I'm continually struck by the similarity of approach….

At O'Reilly we're very interested, as you've no doubt noticed, in the Web 2.0 application. We tend to focus primarily on the development and data side. There are also countless "less interesting" apps to which we trust much of our business and personal process and workflow orchestration that we don't think to mention. Evan Williams's post of a few…

Processing (nee proce55ing) — a Java-based open source programming language "created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool" — put me in mind of Paul Graham's wonderful essay Hackers and Painters….

The Annotated New York Times organizes distributed threads of blogged discussion around the front page of the New York Times…. There’s a role here for traditional content providers, relied upon for their organizing principles (whether those be around people, things, current events, locale, interests, or what-have-you), to As a NYT reader, I can take in the morning news and then stroll the ripples these stories made in the blogosphere.

Music group Nine Inch Nails have released their latest single, “The Hand That Feeds,” as a multi-track Garageband file.

Tim will be doing the closing keynote on Thursday, April 21, 2005 at the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, CA….