So, Peter Seibel interviewed me for his book. Then Joel Spolsky wrote this weird article about me based on that interview where he called me a "Duct Tape programmer". Peter asked me what I thought about it. I responded:

It's such a strange article, in that it's mostly favorable to my point of view but with such a breathless amazement to it, like he's just discovered an actual unicorn or something. "Look, everybody! Here's a hacker who actually accomplished things and yet he doesn't fetishize the latest fads that I and all of my friends make our living writing about!" There's this tone to the thing like he just can't imagine that someone like me can exist. He's impressed but he doesn't really believe in it, this mythological creature he's discovered. And of course the whole "duct tape" thing is vaguely insulting, and a perfect example of what we call "damning with faint praise".

So I guess to the extent that he puts me up on a pedestal for merely being practical, that's a pretty sad indictment of the state of the industry.

In a lot of the commentary surrounding his article elsewhere, I saw all the usual chestnuts being trotted out by people misunderstanding the context of our discussions: A) the incredible time pressure we were under and B) that it was 1994. People always want to get in fights over the specifics like "what's wrong with templates?" without realizing the historical context. Guess what, you young punks, templates didn't work in 1994. They also like to throw stones at Mozilla, and how much 4.0 sucked and how mozilla.org decided they needed to rewrite it all in 1999, so that jwz code must not have been any good, right? The peanut gallery always fails to understand that I was talking about an entirely different code base that pretty much ceased to exist by early 1996, thanks to the (at the time completely unwarranted) Collabra rewrite, and that has never been seen by the outside world.

Around 1998 I pushed for Netscape to open source both the 3.0 and 4.0 code bases, since the 3.0 code base was the one that included a mail reader that actually worked, but they wouldn't let me do it.

Peter wrote his own response to Joel's article that goes into more detail with some more excerpts from the book.

I really enjoyed reading Peter's book, by the way. (The parts that I'm not in, I mean.) You should buy it.

The problem with having switched to NetNewsWire is that suddenly my feeds were all white-on-black instead of green-on-black as they were supposed to be. So I fixed that. Unzip jwz.nnwstyle and double-click it.

Clean-ups to my kludgy CSS would be appreciated. Making the header names and values line up in two columns was hard, given that the subject is a different font size. The "left:4.5em" versus "6em" is clearly wrong, and I couldn't figure out how to make it work using just H1 in template.html instead of <span class="newsItemH1">.

Last year Peter Seibel spent a couple of days interviewing me about the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and this turned into a chapter in his new book, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. It was a fun interview, since we talked about a bunch of non-Netscape-related hacking, and nobody ever asks about that any more.

I haven't read the rest of the book yet, but it's a safe bet that the other folks were more coherent than I was. The other interviewees are Brad Fitzpatrick, Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich, Joshua Bloch, Joe Armstrong, Simon Peyton Jones, Peter Norvig, Guy Steele, Dan Ingalls, L Peter Deutsch, Ken Thompson, Fran Allen, Bernie Cosell, and Donald Knuth.

(If you're wondering what I'm doing in the same book as Knuth, try thinking of me as the comic relief.)

Apparently this is video of a demo running on an 8mHz Mac Classic. It is 414 KB and written in assembly. Which is awesome.

I downloaded it and tried to get it running in Mini vMac, but after spending some time down the surprisingly-familiar rathole of trying to figure out how in the world I transfer a runnable version of StuffIt into the emulated world, I gave up. If anyone manages to produce a .dsk image that has the executable demo on it, I'd love to see it.

symbolics.com, the first domain name ever registered, has been bought by a "real estate and domain investment company."

Sometimes you learn really despicable things by subscribing to wikipedia changelogs.

Sweet.

Just last year, New York City signed a $982,269 contract with Swintec for the purchase of thousands of new manual and electric typewriters over the next three years -- some of which retail for as much as $649 apiece. And last month, the city signed a $99,570 deal with Afax Business Machines for the maintenance of its existing typewriters.

The department is working on software to eliminate the old machines, a rep said.

Spanish police thwart jail break using remote-controlled Zeppelin

Three people have been arrested after their plan to aid the escape of an inmate from prison in Las Palmas on the Canary Islands was discovered by police. They planned to use a 13 foot long remote-controlled airship to deliver night vision goggles, climbing gear and camouflage paint to the Italian convict who would then use the equipment to escape from prison.

It is thought the inmate, identified by police as 52 year-old Giulio B, would use the gear to scale down a prison wall at night where a car would be waiting to take him into hiding.

"He would be transported to a foreign country where he would hide out while he waited for false identity documents and would continue to oversee the shipment of drugs to our country," a statement released by Spanish police said.

The three people arrested by police had sent up camp in a camouflaged tent on a hill some 600 metres away from the jail where they spent weeks observing security measures at the prison through powerful binoculars and telephoto lenses. The team of two Spaniards and a Urugauan had set up motion detection sensors around their camp to warn of anyone approaching their stake-out site.

Authorities said they learnt of the plan and intercepted the package containing the inflatable zeppelin when it arrived in the Canary Islands from Bergamo.

Brand-new cable car will soon hit the streets

Cable car No. 15 is no off-the-shelf vehicle.

For more than five years, nearly 30 Municipal Transportation Agency crafts workers - carpenters, a patternmaker, metal workers, transit mechanics, welders and painters - labored on and off to build the cable car from scratch, working off blueprints more than a century old.

"It's a work of art," Christopher Hill, Muni's manager of cable car maintenance, said of the new 8-ton rolling monument.

Made of bronze, steel, red oak, white oak, knot-free fir, Alaskan yellow cedar, canvas and glass, No. 15 cost $823,000 to build. Just about the only materials not specially fabricated for the cable car were the lightbulbs, hinges, rope and screws.

No. 15 is the 12th cable car produced from the bottom up by Muni in the past two decades. It will be used on the Powell Street lines that run from Market Street downtown to Fisherman's Wharf.

The new cable cars ensure that the 136-year-old system - a designated National Historic Landmark and the only one remaining in the world that operates on public streets - will carry on. The average lifespan of a cable car is about 100 years.

Previously.

Somehow, after all these years, I had never managed to make it to the Cable Car Museum until a few days ago.

It is full of gigantic loud spinny things. It is amazing. You must go.

The museum is small, but it's also the actual head-end of the cable car system. The museum part is a mezzanine overlooking the workshop floor and the giant wheels that run the four remaining cable car lines. The current plant was built in the early 80s, but earlier in the century there had been dozens of plants around town to run the various lines, each powered by steam engines. Steam engines!

It's also a great place to get your apocalyptic car-hate on, once you read about how the majority of the cable car lines were dismantled due to lobbying from the then-powerful internal-combustion bus lobby, despite the fact that cable cars were cheaper and more reliable. The busses mostly won, obviously, but there was a public outcry that saved a few of the cable car lines. San Francisco has been the only place in the world with an operating cable car system since 1957.

Previously, previously.

It's a rotary phone that dials pulse, and has a 12-hole rotor that includes * and #. I haven't had a land line in years and I'm still fighting hard to resist the acquisitive impulse here.

Of course there's the older SparkFun rotary cellphone, which wins due to wirelessness, but the fact that this one has the custom rotor really... turns my crank, if you know what I mean.

I used to have the ThinkGeek retro handset (wired version) but it was teh fail because of Treo wiring vagueries (speaker worked, microphone didn't). I also tried the bluetooth version, but that was teh fail because fail is that of which bluetooth is entirely composed.

Also.