Microsoft has announced a draft proposal for SSE today. I actually like the proposal a lot. It seems to accomplish some very sophisticated means of aggragating information and syncing schedules and anything that you need to share. Something really needs to be done, as the current crop of tools that are scratching this itch are woefully inadequate and require too much intervention. I think that SSE is a step in the right direction. I sent the following email to their mailing list (which appears to be a fairly moderated system even if you’ve subscribed).

It seems that in a star topology, SSE would somewhat approximate what Exchange and Lotus Notes seem to accomplish as pertains to scheduling. If you used SSE in a mesh configuration, it would seem to require a peer-to-peer protocol to negotiate communication between links that use network address translation. Would Avalanche technology or another companion technology be used to negotiate mesh networked nodes? If so, why would you need to poll in the sense that Outlook and Lotus polls a server for mail and schedule updates? If SSE requires a protocol with this additional sophistication, why not use one that would allow broadcasting update metadata to all the nodes that are active on the mesh at the instant of a subcribed feed update from a publisher? It would seem that standard would even allow for this as it is not specified that you must poll outside of the FAQ. If you sent an XMLRPC or SOAP broadcast over Avalanche wouldn’t this eliminate lots of unnecessary poll packets if you scale SSE to a distributed mesh topology? Or am I missing something here?

Also, it would seem that non-endpoint feed nodes that are sending SSE feed data to or from a node other than itself could be fairly insecure when not transmitted using a secure application protocol. If such a protocol were used, it could be fairly wide security hole. Effectively, this would open up an ad-hoc mesh network where my node would be unaware of what data it is sending if it were protected via key pairs and unencrypted at the end points. This seems to be kind of a Catch 22 situation. If you don’t encrypt it, I can put my ethernet card into promiscuous mode, and gather all the packets from the phy and gain access to unencrypted xml data. If you do encrypt it, such a network would be an anonymized bittorrent and nearly like what Freenet attempts to do by distributing and anonymizing all data. I guess I’m not seeing how SSE can be implemented securely and reliably using an existing protocol. It wouldn’t take much to uuencode binary data and transmit it over a protocol intended for text-only similar to what has happened to nntp.

I think what is missing in the SSE is allowing for some type of relevance metadata. Google seems to have implemented an interesting XML Sitemap Protocol. Within Sitemap, there is a field for priority. I feel that this is a much overlooked notion in RSS Aggregators on the whole. Abandoning the schedule syncing example, say you’re syncing news feeds between SSE clients. This is almost like bloxor with automatic syncing of your opml blogroll directly or via a mesh network ala Bittorrent. Within Sitemap, the site publisher can specify what is the most important data that it serves via the priority field. If SSE were to include some type of optional relevance or priority information, then it would be possible for the users to specify what data is relevant to them to meet their own needs. This data could then be harvested, and used to benefit everyone using the network. Consider recent startups like Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Bloglines. These social bookmarking sites are a powerful way to find out the goodness metadata of news and articles based on how many people like or dislike the information. So, if you’re syncing lots of SSE feeds back-and-forth, each node effectively would have access to this information about the information. The existence of a link in an RSS feed would roughly be equivalent to what Google refers to as Pagerank. This type of information processing would be better suited in a star topology, but could be extended to a mesh if all priorities were made visible to non-endpoints and thereby eliminate server-side processing. Using priorities would also enable the implementation of automatic server-side priority calculation software (I’m currently implementing this in Ruby). This would enable each web server to automatically use popularity as a way to help the clients adjust the ordering of the RSS feed data that is being offered. In a mesh network, you could essentially farm out the server side processing that’s used to calculate whether or not something is of interest to a particular node.

You may be wondering, “WHY DO YOU CARE ABOUT THIS!!!?”. The only way that I can explain it is that I want to control the way that I consume information. It’s some sick twisted plan that I’m cooking up to automatically ignore irrelevance (mitya000 not included, because that’s some good irrelevance), and pay attention to important events, automatically.

Microsoft have officially named their new OS “Vista”. I think they “stoled” the name from the Bad Plus’s breakout 2003 jazz CD, “These are the Vistas”. Already people are calling the OS, “Hasta La Vista”. I throw rocks at MS, but I have XP on my Thinkpad, and 2000 on a big mofo box at home that I use for recording music.

In other news, bartonbowers managed to just get a 17-inch Powerbook. So, I’m suffering another serious Mac-envy attack right now, especially since my Windows machine at home is on the fritz. That means I’m on the precipice of Windows 2000 installation v15.3, and that makes the Mac-envy pains hurt even more inside my head. Steve, make the pain go away, I don’t want to sign over my 401k for brushed aluminum computing nirvana!

Microsoft Windows XP has the worst Wireless Ethernet selector ever. I can sit my laptop within 1 foot of my access point in my apartment, and it still insists on connecting to a distant neighbor’s open access point that has very little signal. Another thing that annoys me is that I have to disable the Wireless card at work because I get an intermittent signal in my office, and every time that I do, it breaks the VPN connection. That’s annoying enough, but here’s what network properties looks like when the wireless is

Disabled:

and Enabled:

No, that’s not a typo. Enabled (but not connected) displays a red “X” over the connection. Disabled has no “X”. Bizarro.

Back before I knew better, I used Outlook for my email needs. I had about three years worth of the Outlook dbx files sitting around on a long forgotten backup mountpoint. I managed to find a wonderful tool called oe2mbx that converted those propreitary dbx files back into Berkeley Mailbox files. You can download the source code here:

• http://ftp.sslug.dk/oe2mbx-1.21.tar.gz

I had previously used a tool called out2unix which only ran Windows and relied on the full version of Outlook being installed from the Microsoft Office CD. Oe2mbx runs with no dependencies on RHEL4 just fine despite the fact that it hasn’t been updated since 2000.

Hmmmm, I tried to force IE to use Google as the default search engine this morning by importing google.reg into muh registry. IE kept trying to save the file as a binary. I used wget to retrieve the file, imported the file into the registry, and it worked just fine. Is IE not playing nice with teh Google?

Hmmmm, now Yahoo! has released a desktop search tool to compete with Google’s desktop search tool. Red Hat Linux has had the “locate” tool for some time now, and it works well enough. I guess it could be made easier, but I don’t understand what the big deal is here. Convergence between intraweb and local machine search? I guess anything is better than that silly searchin’ cat that Microvole shipped with XP. Imma keep using locate and find, you kids go on now with your desktop search agents and search kitties.

Micros~1 has come up with a handy-dandy guide on how to remove Linux from your hard drive and install a “real” operating system. All the details are spelled out in this Knowledge Base article which is suprisingly agnostic. I don’t in any way condone following this guide unless you are on heavy medication though. I just post it here to fuel my dreams of having involution.com become a low rent version of Slashdot.