Not this time

Tom Coates pointedly asks:

Will the API for radiocomments be public and clonable?

Well, let’s ask Phil Pearson, who as I remember it had it cloned in Python about twenty seconds after RCS was released.

Sorry, I love catching Dave with his pants down as much as the next person (um, not literally: whose idea was that phrase?), but this time, he’s pure as the driven snow. “Radio, Manila, or Frontier ever move to a non-proprietary scripting language?” Isn’t there an older version of Frontier that’s open source? Or for roughly the same functionality as Radio, there’s PyDS (and, as of the last time I installed it, you couldn’t ask for a better example of the relative weight that proprietary shops versus open source shops place on ease of installation – I still hope to figure out how to make it work, one day).

15 Comments

Comment by Dave Winer #
2004-03-22 14:47:18

Can’t figure out what you’re saying here.

No matter what, UserLand is very good at doing open formats and protocols.

And I’m not throwing rocks at Six Apart.

Why is it that when I ask questions I’m throwing rocks and when you’re doing it, it’s just Phil asking questions.

Outside your circle of friends I’m considered one of the good guys. I wish you guys would be a bit more careful with the mud slinging, you too Phil, you’ve been doing a lot of it lately.

The mud and rocks are all ways of holding us back.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-03-22 15:23:31

Um, I think what I was saying was that Tom chose a poor set of things to try to make you look like you were expecting more of others than of yourself. You know, like the sort of thing someone would say if they were on your side.

And no, it’s not always just Phil asking questions: quite often it’s Phil throwing rocks: when I called Steve Jenson a frickin’ moron for claiming that plain text with significant whitespace was XHTML, I wasn’t asking a question, I was saying ”lousy idea, you’re breaking my world, fix it!”

And I don’t even always open the windows of my glass house before I throw rocks: I think that SixApart is very close to jumping the shark thanks to their incredibly un-Cluetrainish corporate communications of late, and I don’t care whether or not I’m incapable of posting for months at a time. That still doesn’t get them a free pass to take an entire month off from posting on the MT news blog, nor does it get them a free pass for leaving their archives broken all that time.

(By the way, for those of you baffled by the rock throwing: the excerpt for this post, which is all Radio’s aggregator apparently shows these days, was ”Dave Winer may be throwing rocks at SixApart, but this time he’s got all the windows in his house wide open.”, which means ”’Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ doesn’t apply when they opened the windows of their house long ago.” I enjoy playful language, and I have no interest in switching to five-to-seven word declarative sentences for anyone’s sake. See Chmee speaking about the King of the Grass Giants.)

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-03-22 15:26:52

Oops, Chmee speaking of Nessus. Sheesh.

 
Comment by Dave Winer #
2004-03-22 16:20:58

All right since you’re being so nice I forgive you. ;->

 
 
Comment by Mark #
2004-03-22 19:26:33

The only true thing you said was ”Can’t figure out what you’re saying here”. You should have stopped there.

 
 
Comment by Dave Winer #
2004-03-22 14:48:14

And by the way, your comments are still ungodly slow. When are you going to fix that.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-03-22 15:10:13

Dunno, probably about the time I stop beating my wife.

 
Comment by Mark #
2004-03-22 19:28:46

And by the way, your comprehension of constructive criticism is still ungodly slow. When are you going to fix that.

 
 
Comment by Dave Winer #
2004-03-22 15:21:26

Stop beating your wife.

Comment by Mark #
2004-03-22 19:29:53

Stop being a passive-aggressive megalomaniac.

 
 
Comment by Georg Bauer #
2004-03-23 00:01:49

PyDS is quite easy to install if you use either Debian GNU/Linux, Mandrake Linux, Mac OS X (although only rather old packages are avilable :-/ – it seems I really have to do those myself if I want them current) or Windows. All those systems have prebuilt installers for PyDS. Debian makes it as easy as ”apt-get install pyds” after adding my package repository to your sources.list. I still remember from my days with Radio that it was a bit more complicated to install. But only a very little bit, I agree on that ;-)

Installation from Source _is_ complicated. But then – you don’t get ”install-from-source” instructions for that much proprietary shop software.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-03-23 00:43:00