• hackoff.com – An Historic Murder Mystery Set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble – Free PDF chapters; this is some great DRM.
• Amazon Beats VCs to the Punch.
• RSS Feed of the Day: Ev1 Server Availability – This is a really cool idea. The inventory of servers at EV1 (and at almost every other hosting facility) changes rapidly. Finding the right combination of processor, memory, and disk can be tedious if you have to visit the site and refresh a page on a regular basis. I expect that providing inventory information in near-real-time through a feed will definitely catch on.

*The Dilbert Blog – Scott Adams takes us behind the scenes. What I found interesting is the fact that there’s back and forth negotiation between cartoonist and editor vis-a-vis acceptable content, style of presentation, and so forth.

• Marc Canter: Breaking the Web Wide Open.
• Review of my talk to the Utah PHP User Group.

• Revctrl Wiki – For discussion of revision control systems.
• Experience Redmond – Redmond Washington’s official tourism web site. Includes an event calendar RSS feed.
• Micro Persuasion: Ten RSS Hacks – These are good!
• VTD XML – Open source implementation of a high-performance parsing system for XML; more info here.

• Silly Review of Supreme Court for Dummies.
• Seattle Code Camp – Today and tomorrow in Federal Way Washington. I will be speaking about AWS and about Syndic8. I was at the speaker prep meeting this evening and learned that over 400 people have registered.
• What’s The Best Book – Very slick Ning application from Krazy Dad. Check out the banner at at the top; all of the data is pulled from AWS.
• 1001 Graphic Novels and Comics – Another slick application from Krazy Dad. Once again, all of the data is pulled from Amazon’s database using AWS.

• Affiliate Classroom Magazine – The magazine about building an affiliate business.
• Zend: Application Design and PHP – Three good articles.
• HackMySQL.com -Some very informative articles and tools to help tune MySQL databases and queries.
• Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix – Must be seen to be believed!
• Thursday, November 4th is United PHP Meetup Day.
• NetVibes Personal Home Page.
• Frapper: Put your group on a map.
• Redmond Magazine: The Power Inside – What’s happening at Microsoft Research?
• Markdown Syntax – I enabled the Markdown plugin for WordPress and I am very happy with it. I also hacked the WordPress toolbar to include a prototype “list” item in Markdown syntax to make it even easier to create links. *Don Lancaster’s Guru’s Lair Now has an RSS Feed – Direct link to XML. This is cool, Don’s been one of my heroes since the time that I was a geekly teenager reading his articles in Popular Electronics. I’m still geeky, and he’s still writing.

• IBM DeveloperWorks: Use PHP and XSL to create a DHTML link graph .
• IBM DeveloperWorks: Using Ajax with PHP and Sajax.
• Miko Matsumura: What’s the Big Deal About SOA?
• Today’s cool feed from Syndic8: Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.
• Blogs are too easy to create says Wall Street Journal: Blog spam is the result.
• Play: Berkeley Digital Media Conference.
• Alek Komarnitsky’s Hulk’in Halloween Webcam.
• Syndicate Conference: December in San Francisco.

SOA Note: I am in Chicago today, attending and speaking at the IQPC SOA Conference.

I am obsessed about never getting stuck somewhere with nothing to do. It is partly an obsession with not wasting time and partly because I am unable to sit still and simply exist. I’ve got to be doing something. It has been my experience that short delays often turn in to long ones, and I need to be prepared in case that happens. Returning from a vacation in Peru a few years ago, I was stuck in the Cuzco airport for 7 hours.

I never leave the house without a book, some magazines, and some DRM.

For me, DRM is Discardable Reading Material. Over the years I have made a practice of finding, printing, and then carrying with me interesting articles, papers, and so forth. I read then, rip out a page or two if there’s something I want to keep, and then recycle the rest (perhaps I should call it RRM). If I am traveling by plane I will leave the more interesting items (devoid of any personally identifying information) in the seat-back pocket, in case the next occupant of the seat happens to need something to read.

I have stacks of such material at home and at work. I go for documents that are 5 to 50 pages long, and I try to introduce some randomness into the mix. Depending on where I am going and how long I expect to be gone, I’ll take more or less stuff with me.

Here are some of the things that I have with me right now:

• First issue of Treehouse Web Design Magazine
• Google Query Syntax Reference
• Podcasting EBook
• Symmetry – Dimensions of Particle Physics – I usually pass these along to my 15 year old, but it is small and easy to carry.
• Seth Godin’s KnockKnock ebook

I also look for interesting reports and papers, and I find that the ChangeThis manifestos are perfect DRM, as are the regular Linux Kernel mailing list summaries posted at Kernel Traffic.

Finally, I print out lengthy blog posts and take them with as well. I have found that many blog entries don’t print very well — comments are sometimes indented across the page and end up “walking” to the right of the printable area. If there’s something that I really want, I will fire up Aardvark and snip out the part that I need.

Please note that I am not implying some lack of value when I label these items as discardable. I have found that keeping them around simply doesn’t work for me. I used to put them in binders, index them, and then never refer back to them. I read them, learn something, and move on.

I talked a little bit about this concept at the 106 Miles meeting last week and someone accused me of not being green (I was in California after all). True enough trees are destroyed to make paper, but we can always grow more . Before worrying about this, the tech industry should probably focus on other environmental issues, such as the huge amount of water pollution generated in the course of chip fabrication, or the immense amount of power consumed by the server farms at Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. But I digress.

Does anyone else do this, and do you have suggestions for more interesting DRM?

• Fortune: BitTorrent: The Great Disrupter
• Top 10 Ajax Applications – Most of which are demos or betas. Includes the very cool Zuggest (which is not a beta or a demo).
• Google Updates Some of its Indexes and a lot of folks Complain.
• Excellent Web 2.0 Diagram from Dion Hinchcliffe’s equally excellent Web 2.0 Blog.

• Affiliate Marketing Wiki.
• FullCalendar Event Promotion.