Why is our software so bloated? The problem is that when we get a consensus platform, so we can all focus our energies on optimizing, instead another platform gets invented, so we have to spread our resources paddling hard just to stay in place. It takes years and years to go from prototype to a well-oiled machine. In cars, how many years were there between Ford's Model A and Model T? What were they doing? Gratuitously changing indenting styles? Creating more hacks to try to solve callback hell by introducing fresh new hells? Or writing your docs in some arcane syntax built on top of the language everyone uses? We have 10000 times too many programmers for what we're getting done. Create limits. There are only so many MLB or NBA players. If there were fewer programmers we'd have to stop reinventing and try to be efficient. There's a math to this I'm sure of it.#It's not well known that Aaron Swartz made a contribution to RSS 2.0, wrt the <cloud> element. We were initially only supporting XML-RPC and SOAP protocols, but Aaron suggested also supporting HTTP-POST. It was a good idea, and it came during the comment period for RSS 2.0, so it was possible to add it, so I did. #
My own opinion. Kavanaugh will not be confirmed. I expect Christine Ford to be a compelling witness. Reporters will interview classmates of hers and of Kavanaugh's. Some Repubs on the Judiciary Committee understand enough about the issue to be far more sensitive than they were with Anita Hill. But some will not, and this will spark rage at Republicans including from within their own base. A lot of women vote Republican. There's a decent chance a handful of Repub senators will quit the party, or even become Democrats. As I said yesterday, governing has become a burden for the Repubs. They know how to bully, they know how to obstruct, but this is far more complex. They won't be able to hold their coalition together. Think of it as an intra-party wedge issue for the Repubs.#
It's been a long time since the Repubs were playing something other than the bully or obstructionist. Now the politics gets more complicated. This might be the moment when Repubs switch parties. The stars are lining up for that.#RSS was successful not because of the efforts of people on mail lists debating the merits of various formats. It happened because Netscape seeded the market with a few popular feeds. Blogging software supported the format, so all blogs had feeds. Then software developed that made it easy to use the feeds, and finally the mother of all news pubs, the NYT, jumped in and everyone else followed. With the benefit of hindsight, the mail list people thought was so important, wasn't. #
There's a reality distortion field around mail lists. You feel you have arrived at The Place where all decisions are made. Yet when you decide something then what next? Who wants to tell the subjects they have to change? ;-)#
- I wonder if anyone's thought about a way to add file-level metadata to a Markdown document. This just came up in a project I'm working on, but it's not the first time I've encountered it. #
- In Frontier's website framework, we used a # to delimit a value, something like: #
- #title "My Test Page" #
- We borrowed the idea from C on Unix in the 70s:#
- #include "mymacros.h"#
- We have the same thing in HTML and OPML, in the <head> section:#
- <title>My Test Page</title>#
- The directives are not part of the rendering. You don't see them when you read the document. But the values are available to software processing the document.#
- It seems since we're in The Age of JSON, something in JSON, delimited by a # might be appropriate? #
- I started a thread on this on the Scripting News repo.#
Main thing wrong with journalism: too scared of pissing off Repubs.#
If Trump can't deliver a Supreme Court confirmation, what good is he to the Repubs?#
We're a few weeks into the new version of Chrome with its NOT SECURE label for sites such as Scripting News. As I've said many times in this discussion, I'm just one person here, I like to tinker, but I'm doing other things in my life these days that right now are taking more of my attention. #- With limited time for playing with my web stuff, I can't consider using that time to jump through the hoops of random huge companies. They'll keep coming up with more and bigger hoops. Even if I do what they want now, at some point I won't be able to keep up. Ultimately, I'm just a statistic, some percentage of web traffic, a very small percentage. Net-net: I don't care about them, and they don't care about me. Cool. #
- It's pretty clear they're going to whittle away at the web. AMP and Let's Encrypt, next up they're going after URLs. It doesn't make sense. Why not just jump straight ahead to the simple safe thing they have in mind. When they're done, it won't be the web. Certainly in their internal debates someone must be saying this. If you don't like the person you're married to, instead of trying to change them, marry someone you like better. #
- Another idea, Google could buy AOL from Verizon. I bet they'd sell it cheap! 💥#
- PS: Something like this happened with Apple and podcasting. They offered to promote my product, but I'd have to convert it to iOS first. I thought it works perfectly well as a web app. So I said no. I'm sure it would have been fun to be featured by Apple, but I've been on that trip before, and I don't like how it ends. #
- PPS: A quote from 2005: "BTW, the bigco's will whisper sweet nothings into the ears of their 'third parties' but as they're doing it, you're being guided into the trunk of the car, while they ride up front. The clicking sound you hear is the lock engaging. The whooshing sound is the air supply being cut off." #
Statement by Manafort's lawyer: It's a tough day for Mr Manafort but he's accepted responsibility and he wanted to make sure that his family was able to remain safe and live a good life. He's accepted responsibility and this is for conduct that dates back many years, and everybody should remember that. #
The conversion of Manafort from enemy agent to FBI asset makes me proud to be American. We have a Russian tool as president, his party is thoroughly infested and in control of Congress. It feels like America might still win this one, and if so it'll be because of that corny stuff Superman used to talk about, Truth, Justice and the American Way. Ingenuity and persistence and the conviction that we're right. If we emerge with our pride intact, we better work on rules that keep enemy agents from occupying our government. BTW, if you haven't watched Active Measures, please do. It's like three months of Maddow in one sitting. #Do any pubs, such as plan on a status center to track hacking leading up to the November election? Someone should own this reporting. Let's not wake up in mid-October having not prepared at least somewhat for this.#
I voted for the establishment Democrats in Thursday's primary in NY. It's time to close ranks and present strong opposition to the Republicans. I expect to do the same in the November election. As Obama says "Better is good."#
More restoration work on userland.com websites. Came across this post from 6/15/99 about ScriptingNews 2.0b1 format that predates RSS.#
I injured my right shoulder 25 years ago in a skiing accident, it was worth it, I was in top shape and showing off, and crashed spectacularly. I could have had it fixed with arthroscopic surgery, but opted not to. The cost, every so often my shoulder goes lame and is extremely painful. It's always (so far) been solved with rest and patience. I think I must have hurt it when I took the fall a couple of weeks ago, which otherwise appears to be healed. So it's been hard to sleep. Luckily there's a new season of Bojack Horseman to feast on. It's made the pain of my shoulder disability a lot easier to bear.#Hot tub spas should be as prevalent as Starbucks. Three to choose from any block in Manhattan. The idea that humans can't immerse their bodies in warm water as readily as they can buy stimulant is barbaric. How much happier the world would be if soaks were commonplace.#
I'm doing restoration work on a bunch of old UserLand websites. I just came across this screen shot of the weblog editor that was built into our first RSS aggregator, my.userland.com, in July 1999. I sort of remember it. It was super lightweight. It shipped, but we never really promoted it. It was way simpler than Manila. Things would have come out differently if we bet on this one instead. I often wait and do more powerful software when simpler stuff might work better. #Manafort flipped. Occam's News says we will soon know all about the conduit between the political operations of the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. That's obviously the role Manafort played. #
On Tuesday I posted a braintrust query re how to get a list of all the files in a repo using GitHub's tree API. Last night I got some useful answers, and I can pick up the project. Will report back. #
Not sincere: Writing about decentralizing the web in a Medium post.#
This morning everyone on Twitter is talking about Trump. Nothing unusual about that. As they say it's a day whose name ends in Y.#- I'm reminded that in the movie Sleeper we learn that the US was destroyed when a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead. People my age from NYC know who he is. Amazingly, the movie was almost right. Trump and Shanker are historically similar NYC-famous characters. #
- I met Shanker once, when I was a high school student leading anti-war protests in the Bronx. He said nothing. We were so impressed we decided to join up with them. Later they threw our naïve young asses under the bus. Lesson learned about power. #
Short Twitter thread. 1. Saving the web and saving democracy are related projects. 2. I guess why save democracy has a simpler explanation than why save the web. 3. The founders would have understood it. Every colonial town had a commons. The web is that for us in 2018.#
One idea pundits and politicos have trouble with is the difference between voters and parties. When Susan Collins blames Democrats for the campaign against her, she's missing that it's voters doing it, not the other party. A big difference. It's like fighting the Viet Cong when you think you're fighting the army of North Vietnam. It's what they call an asymmetric war. The people can probably bring down one senator if we really focus on it. We should do just that to open the eyes of the press and the politicos.#- I just gave $100 to the Democratic nominee for Susan Collins' senate seat in 2020. No strings attached. The money goes to the candidate whether or not Collins votes for Kavanaugh. That's the topline message. Here are the bullet points. #
I think Collins has a point that giving conditionally based on her Kavanaugh vote amounts to bribery. But she shouldn't campaign against that, because this is a grass roots effort, not a Democratic Party effort. They're people who feel so strongly about the Kavanaugh nomination that they're willing to put down money for her opponent, sight unseen. That should tell her something.#- Collins is playing an awful game. If she's going to vote against Kavanaugh it's way past time to say so. By dangling this out there, she's getting more attention. I don't know why she wants that. It's not a good kind of attention, imho.#
- I am not a Democrat, in fact until 2004 I voted Republican. I switched when our response to the 9/11 attack was basically to sacrifice huge numbers of Iraqi, Afghani and American lives in order to transfer huge wealth from the US Treasury to Dick Cheney and his friends in the defense industry. I'm sick and tired of the country being run for the benefit of a few very very rich Republicans. #
- Susan Collins could be really smart, and switch parties, vote against Kavanaugh, claim all the money in the jackpot, and cruise to re-election in 2020. Or she could remain a Republican, choose not to run in 2020, and do the right thing for the country and for Maine and vote against Kavanaugh. Send the nomination back to the president on the same basis that the Senate rejected Merrick Garland in 2016. Let the new Senate ratify, this already is a lame duck Senate. #
- To everyone else, give unconditionally. No matter what Collins does, it's time for a Democrat in her seat starting in 2020. Give to the Democratic candidate for the Collins seat in the 2020 election. #
- I've been messaging with Dave Gandy, the founder of Font Awesome, a product that I love in so many ways. It's such a nice and useful piece of software. Seriously.#
- Anyway, they just came out with version 5. I know this because I went to look up some icons, and do it the way I always do it:#
- Go to Google.#
- Type font awesome icons return.#
- First item in the list points to the icons.#
- Click the link.#
- This gets me to the page for the previous version. Not version 5, version 4. I know there's a version 5 because a popup informs me of this. Confusion. Which version do I want. I just want to look at the icons.#
- Obviously it takes a while for the search crawler to discover the new version. #
- In the meantime, confusion.#
- I suggest having a canonical page that always shows the latest icons. Maintain the previous pages as archives as the new versions roll through. But the versionless page always has the current stuff. #
Scripting News archive for 9/11/2001. Start at the bottom and scroll up. It began as a normal day, and then... BTW, this is one of a few thousand days I've been blogging at this location. We still have no plan for how this archive will persist, nor the archive for your blog. Think about that when you click on all the broken links from that day. #
Braintrust query: GitHub API questions. How to find the root of a repo for the tree api, and are the content and tree APIs deprecated as of Oct 1? #
Minor epiphany. A GitHub repository is very much like a Frontier object database. Makes me think #variables might make sense here, esp if you're using the repo to store a website. The Website Framework comes to the Unix world in a surprising way? Hmm.#
For a while I was thinking riding season was over in NYC, but then the weather got a bit warmer, and I couldn't resist. It had been a few days. I wanted to get back on my wheels. I got rained on, but no problem, I was dressed for it. And nothing beats the feeling after a good bike workout. The endorphins are singing their feel-good reward. Lal la la Dave did good, they seem to be saying. And in my mind I think there must be a way to get this feeling in the winter too. #Should j-schools have a course in civic writing for non-journalism majors? Kind of like basic writing taught in English departments, but for public writing? I bet Thomas Jefferson would’ve gone for it.#
A question all tech companies should be prepared to answer and users should be asking. What's the plan for when your company goes away. What will become of what I created here? I am sure none of the companies we pour our lives into have any kind of plan.#
Our number one post 9/11 failure — selfishness. A failure of ours to see how interdependent we are. We don’t live on a frontier. Without each other we would all perish.#
Crowdpac is running a compelling campaign to convince Senator Collins to do the right thing re Kavanaugh, and I would donate if I had more of an idea about who Crowdpac is and if they can be trusted. Also we need two Republican votes, and all the Democratic votes to send Kavanaugh back to the appellate court. Where is the campaign for the second Repub, and the campaign to be sure no Dems defect?#
Now that Twitter is somewhat algorithmic, it's got the same problem as Facebook. I see the same tweet every time I visit. 19 hours after posting. I must have seen it a dozen times. It wasn't funny the first time. #
Oy. When I wasn't paying attention it seems that possibly GitHub deprecated the API I'm using. I'm really not sure. The calls I make are all in the Contents part of the REST API. Maybe these are not the ones that are deprecated. I sure hope not. #
The seasons are changing, so it was time for a new header image. The old one was of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park and the skyline of CPW taken on a super hot June day. The new image is of Naomi Osaka, a sports hero with a story. #Big idea from Obama's speech. Better is good. This could be the US motto, as much as E Pluribus Unum, which is a similar idea. In a country that is the amalgamation of free people, no one ever achieves everything they want. But better is good.#
I find these animated GIF shots of NYC intersections captivating. #
Journalism is eventually going to form something like the NBA or StubHub, a central organization that manages the aggregate of all their businesses, yet allows each to pursue independent strategies. The analogy. I can watch the Mets play in San Francisco. The Mets are paid, as are the Giants paid when they play in New York. I want to read a story on the New Yorker website today. Tomorrow I'll want to read something on Mother Jones or NY Mag. I can't possibly, as a reader, have a separate business relationship with each. I pay the NY Times because I live in New York. But that should get me access to reporting by their competitors. #
- Yesterday I wrote about for-the-record blogging and did a 6-minute podcast on why that's important, and how we haven't done much if anything to address the problem.#
- One of the big concerns is where to store the pre-rendered version of your writing. At this point that pretty much means using a commercial service, something owned by a big company, which has problems of its own. For example, where Facebook can change their API overnight, it's hard to imagine Amazon doing the same with S3. Their API is their business model. For Facebook, the API is just nice-to-have. #
- BTW, Facebook did throw out, quickly, a big part of their API, because it was an attack vector used by Russian spammers. I don't blame them. I went in with my eyes open. #
- That's why I think, on reflection, that GitHub, especially since it has been acquired by Microsoft, represents a pretty good option, one of the best we have, maybe even better than S3. Why? Again, the API -- GIT -- is the product. GitHub without GIT is a vastly different product. Microsoft could evolve it, say in 10 years, to the point where GIT is as important as SMS is for Twitter, an ancient legacy, supported half-heartedly (I was never a fan of SMS in Twitter, btw). It could happen. But in this world, ten years is a long time. It shouldn't be, but it is.#
- Another fact in its favor is that Microsoft has an excellent reputation for continuity over the years by not deprecating past APIs, preserving software and data compatibility. I haven't been following closely in recent years, but in the 90s and through the 00s I marveled that new Microsoft OSes could still run software I shipped for MS-DOS in the early 80s. Somewhere deep in Microsoft's DNA, we hope, still lurks a reverence for how we got where are. #
- GitHub was sure to get acquired by someone. Microsoft was probably as good as they could have done. #
- Another thing about GitHub is that they, prior to the Microsoft acquisition at least, encouraged us to think of it as a backend for a website. #
- And even better, all of this is free. #
- So I think it's a pretty good place to start for a future-safe for-the-record blogging back-end. #
- PS: I have a couple of projects I started in the last couple of years that relate to this. English, a wizzy editor for GitHub docs and readme's, uses GitHub's OAuth-based API. And a Node app, GitHubPub, that serves via templates from GitHub repos, with custom domain names. Between the two, you could get to a very low cost Medium clone, the ideal of the for-the-record blogging concept, with hosting done for free by Microsoft. It's scary in a way how high you can build without paying a bill or even a strategy tax. #
- I binged two series over the last couple of weeks -- Man in the High Castle and The Deuce. Just a few comments on each.#
- The Man#
- I had read Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick, and remember it being quite different from the series on Amazon. I had started to watch the first season when it first came out but gave up in boredom and confusion and lack of caring. I decided to give it another try when a friend said she loved it. I accidentally started in the middle of episode 2 of season 2 (thinking it was episode 2 of season 1). It took a while to realize my mistake, but I decided to keep going because I was interested in the characters. Something that had not happened when I started with season 1. #
- Anyway, it's a pretty mediocre story with the same characters meeting each other over and over, trying to get somewhere with each other, that they never seem to get. But it is beautifully shot, and a bit entertaining, so I got all the way to the end. And then I decided to watch the first two episodes of season 2, and then what the hell I watched the first season from the beginning. #
- It is science fiction, an alternate history that plays with the idea of alternate history. That much of Dick's story they kept, and that was fascinating. #
- The Deuce#
- I had a similar experience with The Deuce, the first time I tried to watch it. Made it through the first episode. I really don't like the star, James Franco. But also the first time I watched it I wasn't in binge-watching mode, as I guess I am now. This time I started where I left off last time, and cruised through the eight episodes of season 1. #
- I am one of many people who think The Wire is the best thing ever on TV. I've watched it from beginning to end so many times I've lost count. All I have to do is start with the incredible opening scene of season 1, episode 1, and I'm committed to going all the way. I may watch it again now that I've learned that everything that streams has closed captions. It would be helpful sometimes to know the actual words Wire characters are saying.#
- Okay, The Deuce, run by the same guy who did The Wire, follows the same formula and has many of the same actors cast in different roles of course. Levy the lawyer is now the sargent of the 14th precinct in Manhattan. The beat cop hero, kind of the equivalent of McNulty in The Wire is played by D'Angelo Barksdale (took me a while to figure it out, he's wearing a wig, and of course has aged quite a bit). Cool Lester Smooth even makes an appearance at the end of the last episode, making you wonder if he's coming back for season 2 (it started last night, btw). The star of season 2 of The Wire, Frank Sobotka, has a big part in this show too. #
- And the structure of the cast is the same as The Wire. There's the journalist, there's a union, and the pimps are like the dueling gang bosses. And the cops of course. #
- But the scale of this show is nothing like The Wire. It follows the formula, for sure, but it's a shadow of a shadow of the original. When you realize how closely they're following the formula it's a disappointment because it's so pale in comparison. #
- No matter, I'm going to watch the next seasons of both shows. Because no matter how bad they are compared to the original, they're top notch compared to most of the schlock on Netflix and Amazon. Which is a subject for another post. #
Podcast: For the record blogging. This is why I'm interested in creating something that functions like Medium, but has as its stated goal to be long-lived. #If you find yourself having a strong emotional response to something you see on the net, take a step back and remember there's a good chance you're being programmed. You don't have to take the bait. And you shouldn't accept emotional appeals at face value.#
- Yesterday I posted a poll on Twitter basically asking if there were a rational not-for-profit place-of-record essay site, would people use it. This is intended as an alternative to Medium, which has received $132 million in investment, and therefore must at some point find a business model, leaving the for-the-recordness of it in question. #
- In order to be a Medium replacement, it must be possible to do this:#
- The amazing thing about Ghost, while it might be a very nice piece of software, is this -- they hide it. It's one of the hardest pieces of open software to actually get to try. Maybe Asana is worse (there you have to have a corporation to get a look). I've never actually been able to use it, though it sounds like something I'd find interesting. I did get a trial Ghost account when they were in beta, but it expired in a few weeks. #
- Ghost is about the furthest thing from Medium imaginable because they have hidden it so well. Yet people persist in saying Oh you mean Ghost, when what I mean is Medium. Somehow they have confused the software's UI with its function. #
- Also micro.blog, another piece of software with a vocal community that thinks it's everything to everyone. It also is hard to get started with. I did figure it out once, but I haven't been able to do it again. I actually have a micro.blog site. How to post to it? I don't know. #
- The great thing about Medium, the thing people like about it, is that they have crafted its design so that getting started isn't even three steps. That's hard to do. If one wants to replicate its functionality start there.#
- So if you think Ghost is the answer, tell me (or anyone else) where they go to get a free site that doesn't expire after a few weeks. If it doesn't exist, you haven't solved the problem. #
- PS: I have written about Ghost in the past, and have gotten blasted personally by the founder, publicly. Maybe that's how they keep people from writing negatively about it. No I don't have anything against it. I've tried to write about my experience accurately. If I made a mistake I am happy to correct it.#
- PPS: A 6-minute podcast explaining why I'm interested in creating something that functions like Medium, but has as its stated goal to be long-lived. #
- Three pleas...#
- A plea to journalism copy editors. Strike the "neo" in neo-Nazi. There is nothing new about being a Nazi. They don't get to try again.#
- A plea to everyone on behalf of everyone. I'm soooo tired of people telling me who I am. This never lets up. It's a constant. Live and let live. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You don't know what's inside another human body. Let them be themselves.#
- A plea to corporate copy editors. Replace "We apologize for any inconvenience..." with "We apologize." It could be that the customer feels more than inconvenienced. And then you would have something else to apologize for.#
The way to think of Kavanaugh is that he would be a high level White House staffer with a vote on the Supreme Court. The ultimate political operator.#
Radical idea -- Nike runs ads praising people for burning their Nikes in protest. "That's what we were talking about," they might say. Of course they can't, because the only thing Nike ever says is "Just do it." It's up to their spokespeople to say things other than that. #
I liked Obama's speech. He talks about voting the way I talk about the open web. People think it's my fight. They're wrong. It's our fight. If you don't help, it won't happen. And so far it seems to me we're headed for a Trump-like loss on the web. You'll miss it when it's gone. I was sure that Google's trying to own the open web wouldn't stop with attacking HTTP. They didn't even wait a month before launching the next attack on web addresses. There was no resistance, why should they wait?#Honestly, I don't think I've ever smoked a joint while doing a podcast.#
Note to Elon Musk as TSLA continues to decline, and who smoked weed on a podcast last night, from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers from the 60s. “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.”#
- An analogy for what the NYT did by publishing the anonymous op-ed.#
- Suppose I run an airline.#
- Some guy shows up at the gate with a package, asks if we'll put it on the plane for him and transport it to the plane's destination.#
- I open it, look inside, see a couple of soaked rags, and say OK.#
- I ask for ID because I want to know who is sending the package.#
- When the plane gets to its destination, they open the package. It contains a deadly toxin, it poisons everyone within 100 miles, they all die.#
There should be an inverted real estate market where buyers could list their requirements. Sellers could peruse, the way buyers scan Zillow now. Who knows if I'm looking in the right geography? There could be lots of places that match my desires. #
Poll: Did the anonymous op-ed writer confess to a crime? I should have added "not sure" as a choice. I actually think that's the correct answer. Presumably the person took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Seems to me this is extra-constitutional at least, and it may be a violation.#
- I was in a real estate office in Woodstock, NY when news of the anonymous op-ed came out. We all discussed it. I didn't get to read it until about 9PM. Here was my takeaway. #
- We did not elect the anonymous columnist.#
- We've had a coup, #
- And we don't even know who the new dictator is.#
- The NYT did not do us a service. They just supported an illegal government. #
- If we don't stop this now, we will never put it back together.#
- I listened to the Daily podcast on the subject on the drive back to the city. You should listen to it too. It makes my blood boil. Trump is president, for better or worse. The president runs the executive branch, not the people he hires, and certainly not anonymous people. This is no longer recognizable as our form of government. #
- One of the theories they cite is that the piece may be intended to soothe Republican voters before the midterm elections. We, the American people, have an interest in Trump running the government he wants to run. For his supporters, they didn't elect these people to countermand his orders. And for those of us who desperately want him out of office, we want the real Trump to be visible, the one who was at the podium with Putin in Helsinki. So we can clearly see what we're voting for or against.#
- Same with the papers for Kavanaugh. It might not make a difference to how the Dems or Repubs vote, but it makes a difference to the voters. We want to know who just made it to the Supreme Court, while we still have a chance to vote out the people who put him there. They are hiding material facts, that's for sure. This is not acceptable. #
- This has all gone way too far. I am angry at the Republicans, and at the NY Times. How presumptuous of them to let whoever this is rock our form of government without even attaching a name to it. I have not seriously considered cancelling my subscription to the Times before this, but now I don't know. This is fucking outrageous. #
- "I'm in control here," said Secretary of State Alexander Haig in 1981 after President Reagan had been shot in an assassination attempt. This was a huge deal at the time. We knew his name, and he had been confirmed by the Senate.#
John Gruber says what we're thinking. Why, if you can't map a domain to your site on Medium, would you use it to host a blog. Rafat Ali, another longtime blogger, says once Medium shuts down there should be an ethical replacement. I wonder why they can't co-exist, and then answer my own question. The problem isn't cost, or the tech -- it's users. Medium has momentum, still, as the place-of-record for web writing, much as YouTube is it for video. It's a shaky foundation. No business model, huge money already invested. Not a good situation.#Here's a conundrum. This appeared in my Twitter timeline. It's from @potus. I must have followed that account when Obama was president. Now Trump is using it. 24 million followers. Do I have to block it? What about the next president? For now I'll just unfollow, but it might have to be blocked, if he uses it in a more troll-like fashion. #
I think there's a place for a simple RSS-based Instagram clone. Subscribe as in an RSS reader, with the URL of a feed. It displays items with <enclosure>s that are images. Wouldn't have as many users as IG, but IG was fun before it had so many users.#
opmlToGitHub is a new demo app that reads an OPML file, converts it to Markdown and uploads it to GitHub. I think outliners are a great way to write readme files, that's how I've always done it. I just added this feature to my nightly archive app, and created this little demo app as a byproduct. It contains a fair amount of code that might prove useful in other apps. MIT license. ✓#I'm using GitHub more and more as a platform. Part of the reason is that it was on my path. My GitHub code has been maturing, and my project to get more future-safe is progressing. But I am aware that it's now owned by Microsoft. I wonder if they see GitHub in a compatible way to how I'm using it? That's something you have to worry about when building on a corporate platform. #
Continuing to scrub my Twitter feed of troll RTers. A few every day. When will people figure out that RTing a troll just gives them power.#
Updated: How I archive Scripting News. I’ve been backing up my blog to a GitHub repository for the last year. The idea is that the content of my blog should exist even if scripting.com were to disappear. The process is now documented, hoping to leave clues for future historians.#
If Evernote had built on open formats and protocols, now, as the company is failing, the users’ data would remain usable.#
I like what Nike did by using Colin Kaepernick as a model. I think this is possibly a cleansing process. It'll force people to look at what exactly it is they're against. Whether Kaepernick might be a patriot and not a pariah.#
I unfollow people who RT the troll. That includes people who paste screen shots on Facebook. Remember trolls die in darkness. #
Facebook broke the API that allowed me to cross-post there. Now I'm getting regular reminders from them about how I should be posting more stuff to Facebook, my readers are bored, they say.#
- Campaign season starts today. Here are the priorities as I see it.#
- Campaign on oversight. The reason the Dems must take back at least one chamber of Congress is then they can do oversight of the Trump Administration. Subpoenas and hearings to investigate how the cash flows between Trump and foreign entities, not just Russia. #
- Concerts/rallies. The Dems have completely ceded the ongoing entertainment campaign to Trump. His rallies are more like concerts, with a single comedian. He's a cross between Rodney Dangerfield, Joan RIvers and Don Rickles. He's good but he's not that good. The Dems have the best comedians and musicians. They even have politicians who can burn down the house. Every Trump rally should be programmed against, provided for free to all the networks. Gradually push him off the air.#
- Starve the troll. He gets around the media and goes direct. This of course imho is a good trend long-term because it forces the media to become part of the people and vice versa. But in the immediate term, he controls discourse, he keeps the focus on himself, exclusively. Block the troll. And unfollow people who RT him, no matter how much you value their other contributions. Remember trolls die in darkness, and that's a good thing. #
- Impeachment is an issue for the voters, not the Democratic Party.#
- Impeachment as a goal is like starting a football game saying your strategy is to score a touchdown. We must focus on rebooting our democracy. We not only have to think about the danger of Trump in the White House, we have to set our country back on its previous course. It was flawed, but at least we had a semblance of the rule of law. Impeachment isn't itself an answer. When the time is right, when there's overwhelming support for impeachment and removal among the people, then and only then will it be the next thing to do. #
A new FAQ explains how I archive my blog to GitHub. If you're a tech blogger, please consider archiving your blog in a similar way. I provide the source to the Node app I use to do the backups. #
Avenatti works because while he cares how he's covered by the press, he doesn't follow their rules. The other Dems follow the rules. Hillary was the worst. So they could get her on her emails, not because there was any substance, rather because she was "defensive." They criticized her for following their rules. Heh. Break out, there's no penalty for doing so. #Yes. Always program a concert/rally opposite Trump's. Better comedy, more irreverent political ranting. Position Trump as the ridiculous imitation tinfoil-hat-wearing make-believe despot that he is.#
I'm finally watching Man in the High Castle. I had read the book, long ago, and found the first couple of episodes too dark. Just starting episode 4. No spoilers please.#
With all the Kavanaugh mischief, seems like Tuesday would be the PERFECT day for Mueller to drop indictments on Don Jr and Kush.#
One of my basic rules of discourse is to never tell another person to shut up as long as I can easily stop listening. And the converse, if someone tells me to shut up, or implies it, they're wrong, and I don't argue with them. But I have an exception to the rule. If a troll is destroying a community and people engage with the troll, I will tell them to stop, and explain, as lovingly as I can, that they're as much a part of the problem as the troll is. There is no excuse for engaging with a troll. # When people say "no pun intended," what they really mean is "pay attention to my pun, very much intended."#
That was quite a speech by Obama. It's the kind of speech McCain might have made, but it says more that Obama said it at McCain's request. The very last thing said about McCain before being buried.#
I've started backing up my linkblog RSS feed to the GitHub repository. It will be backed up every night along with all the other content on Scripting News. #
Emails like this from Google about "violations" on my website are really disturbing, esp since I don't run any Google ads on my site. I wish they'd STFU about violations, or say what the violations are. I always can use a good laugh. Their email is a violation of my independence. Fuck off. #
Respect really gets to my core. People working together, listening, finding the connection. That’s humanity at its best.#
The big boom in tech is never what the pundits say it will be. They generally go for the wizzy demo, but what wins is usually more cerebral and prosaic, has more to do with human potential than domination.#- Like the cameras in phones. Few pundits called that. It wasn’t spacy and hard to understand. Instead cameras got smaller, better, and key thing — could communicate without tethering.#
- Few predicted that radio was ripe to be democratized, but that’s what we did. Not VR or AR. Imagine how much money has poured into those. New media types are the simple obvious ones.#
Yesterday we heard that the Village Voice is ending, but they are sticking around long enough to be sure their archive is accessible for historic purposes. This is much appreciated by all who value the Voice, its history, and the human knowledge it represents. As far as I know, it's the first time a news organization, or a blog, when shutting down, has put effort into assuring the archive remains accessible. (If there are other examples, I'd like to hear about them.) #- So then the question is, what kind of archive? I'll try to explain.#
- Imagine the difference between the ruins of ancient Rome, and a museum filled with artifacts from that time. In the actual ruin, you're standing where the great figures of Roman history stood. There's more data available to you, things a museum curator might not think to preserve. It also invokes the imagination and inspires in ways a museum can't. #
- And there's also great value in museums and libraries! Sometimes the things that were created are more important. So you can visit the US Capitol (a place) in Washington DC, or see the Declaration of Independence (a document) at the National Archives.#
- You can see the handwritten lyrics of Eleanor Rigby by Lennon and McCartney at the British Museum, but the Beatles are no longer performing the song. When the thing itself no longer exists, it's good to have the artifacts.#
- You want it all if you really care about the history.#
- As it is with the web. Most of the content of the Village Voice is probably already safely stored at archive.org. But what about the villagevoice.com domain? Don't we also want to preserve the links into the site, for ongoing web sites that point to the Voice? Or when someone reads the preserved Scripting News, if I'm able to get that done, be able to click a link to a great Voice article and not get a 404? That's analogous to preserving ancient Rome in addition to remembering its history. (BTW, some of it's already gone. Here's a post on this blog from 2004 that links to a VV article. Not found. Ouch.)#
- With the web we have the technical means to create a perfect archive, but without planning ahead, all we will have are the museums. And we are not doing the planning. The web, as a historic medium is far less than imperfect, it's temporary. Only present as long as someone keeps paying the bills. And there's no way to pay the bills far in advance, so the historic record has a literally no chance of surviving, given the current state of things. #
- The Village Voice offers a chance for us to learn how to do this right. So we can do it again, and again, until we've got a method that has a reasonable chance of working.#
The smell of The Village Voice is shutting down. A New York institution, it was born the same year I was. One nice thing is that they are keeping half the staff, 15 to 20 people, to figure out how to archive the site. Any time a publication does this, we should offer to help, to learn from the experience, and develop a base of knowledge and best practices. I need to figure out how to do that for my blog. I want to do that sooner than later. Tick tock, the runway isn't getting any longer. ✓#
Journalists can't say that Google doesn't skew search results for political effect. In fact, we're pretty sure they do (consider what they'll have to do to get back into China). So the best you can say is that the company claims they don't do it. Journalism is doing this wrong.#
This is not the kind of thing I usually write about, but things change, and I think it's okay to change what I blog about. A couple of days ago I was walking down a car ramp into a garage, here in Manhattan, unsure of where I was going so I was looking down at my iPhone studying the map. I also had a 30-pound pack on my back which made me more top-heavy than usual. I tripped over a speed bump, at first I thought I would be able to recover, but because of the weight of the pack and the downwards slope of the driveway, I was going down. I hit on both hands, my knee, somehow my side got involved and I hit my head. My hands took the worst of it. A little blood, mostly road-rash. Three strangers came to my aid, very nice people, and I was up and dusted off in a matter of seconds, horribly embarrassed, and in pain. It wasn't until hours later that I realized that if this happened a few years from now it could have been a lot worse. For now my whole body is sore. Reminds me of how I felt after a bike accident in NYC a few years back. This was nowhere near as bad. I told a friend I feel fragile. To look at me you might think that's ridiculous. But it's true. 63 ain't 23 or even 43. And I'm sure 73 will also be different. 💥#
I did a lot of driving in the last 48 hours, and that means I listened to lots of podcasts. And a lot of them were about John McCain. Surprising to me that I wanted to hear more about him, even though in life, I felt I knew all I wanted. I had mixed feelings about him. I remember when he ran against Bush and first did great and then got whipped. He does do a good New Hampshire town hall. He likes to say how honest he is, but I heard him do a lot of lying, esp about the Iraq War. That's the worst. To let people call you honest, to call yourself honest, while you're lying. That's worse than just being a liar. Anyway, he was an interesting person. One thing he said in an interview in the mid-2000s is that we should repeal Roe v Wade and then have a great debate about it. I wanted the interviewer to ask him why we can't have the debate before repealing it? I can't imagine there's anything more to say that hasn't already been said a billion times. It's a morally ambiguous situation. No amount of debating will change that. Some things just are. We will never come to agreement. Accept it. Now tell me again why appealing Roe v Wade is the right thing to do? Of course he's dead now, so we'll never know. ✓#I also thought he was a spitballer. The kind of kid who sat in the back of the classroom and made wisecracks about the other kids and the teacher. But he never went to the board. He did a lot of shooting from the hip. Choosing Sarah Palin was a great example. A brainstorming session, do something bold, and oops a tragic mistake. He did it again when he suspended his campaign because of the financial crisis, called a big meeting in DC to brainstorm ideas. He had no ideas, couldn't even lead the meeting. Obama did. He would have been a terrible president. We might have done a few bold and disastrous things, and I'm sure the important stuff would have fallen through the cracks. We were right not to elect him president in 2008.#
I just want to add, it's sad that he's gone. I felt this more deeply than other celebrity deaths. I guess we really get to know politicians. For a musician their music doesn't die with them. Same with writers. But it's different with parents and one-time presidential candidates. #
- One word: Oversight. #
- Details#
- The courts are doing their job, as are the juries (so far).#
- The DOJ is doing their job.#
- Journalism is doing the best they can, given that Mueller doesn't leak and Congress doesn't do oversight. #
- There are lots of questions about the president's behavior. Perhaps his most vocal supporters won't agree, but most Americans support the Mueller investigation, and that includes Republicans. #
- Every branch of government is working, except one. Congress. #
- No Congressional oversight. #
- There's a way to fix that. #
- Elect Democrats to Congress.#
- Impeachment is a distraction#
- All that impeachment means is the president is indicted. Then he has to be tried and convicted before he is removed. Impeachment is easy, and relatively meaningless.#
- Unless the Senate votes by a 2/3 majority to convict, nothing happens. It won't matter to Trump. It'll just give him a way of dominating discourse for another six months, and in the end he will still be president. #
- Unless the people overwhelmingly want him removed, then he will be removed. And we aren't there now, so there's no point impeaching. So take it off the table. We have more important work to do. #
- If you look at how things are set up in the Constitution, and our experience with removing a president from office, you must have overwhelming support from the people in order for it to happen. Impeachment wihtout removal is only symbolic. Republicans have to fear they will not get re-elected with Trump as president. 2/3 of the Senate has to vote to remove. That will include a lot of senators from Republican states. So at this point, removal is an impossible dream. It can't happen until thej people want it to happen.#
- The Democratic platform#
- Elect a majority in either house and the Democrats will provide the missing oversight.#
What can you do to help? Unfollow people who RT the troll. Trolls feed on flow. Deprive them of flow, they shrivel up and die. People who RT him are undermining our future. Unfollow without a second thought. Eventually they'll get the message that RTing him has a cost.#
- There’s a big disconnect about what the First Amendment is. #
- As a law it applies to the relationship between the govt and citizens. But it’s more than a law, it represents a basic American value. We believe that speech is a right and must be protected.#
- So when in doubt a company should protect the speech of its employees and customers. Not must but should. Esp if it wants us to see it as American. I should be able to keep my job even if I have opinions that are different from my employer, if it doesn’t affect my ability to do my job.#
- If you try to get someone fired because you don’t like their opinion, you may be entitled to do that, but you are being intolerant and un-American. You should support everyone’s right to express their ideas. You don’t have to, but you should, if you want to be an American.#
- On the Frontier-User list, Frank Meeuwsen reports a problem using the DMG that installs the OPML Editor.#
- He downloads the DMG, extracts the OPML folder, runs the app, and gets a dialog asking where the root is. You're not supposed to get this dialog. OPML.app is supposed to look for and automatically open opml.root in the same folder as the app. This isn't happening.#
- I have been able to reproduce it here. To try to narrow down the problem, I created a virgin OPML folder, zipped it, copied it to another folder, unzipped it, ran the app and it worked as it's supposed to. I then uploaded the zipped file, downloaded it, unzipped as before, ran the app, and got the behavior Frank describes. If you want to try it, you can download the zip file from my Dropbox.#
- I wrote a script to compare the original zip file with the downloaded file. They are identical. Something is happening when the zip file is uncompressed? Not sure. I don't have the ability to look inside the OPML app to see what's tripping it up. This is new behavior. I am having trouble coming up with theories to try. #
- I've started a thread for this issue. #
- Update: Ted Howard solved this problem in April. Issue closed. #
nytimesriver.com began in 2006 as an experiment to see how news reading on a Blackberry might work. I kept it running for twelve years, hoping the NYT would get the idea, and do it for itself, or even better, let me do it for them. Earlier today I got a letter from an in-house lawyer at the Times. It's a nice letter, given that a lawyer wrote it. But after all these years of being ignored, the first response is from a lawyer? That's not only rude, it's sad. So I decided the best thing to do is turn the site off. I don't feel like paying a lawyer to represent me when I'm just doing this project because I want the NYT to do better by its readers. If they decide to say thanks, or even maybe buy me lunch, I'll consider turning it back on. ✓#John McCain's farewell statement. This is probably why Trump doesn't want the flag flying at half staff over the White House. BTW, I couldn't find a canonical copy of McCain's statement. So I thought where should I put a copy to point to where it might have a chance of surviving for a while. I chose GitHub. But we still don't have a good "for-the-record" place on the web, imho.#
David Johnson on Twitter wonders what's the diff betw LO2 and OPML Editor. That's an interesting question that never occurred to me, because they are so disjoint in time. The OPML Editor is derived from Frontier, which is an outliner among many other things. But the OPML Editor does present as an outliner. One that lives inside a very powerful scripting environment, server and object database, all integrated, and evolved over a couple of decades. It's like the cellphone on the dashboard of a 747. However at this time, the power of the scripting environment would be wasted on an outliner user, most of the additions have fallen into disuse. That said, LO2 is a clone of the outliner inside OPML Editor, which was a clone of MORE, Ready and going way back to ThinkTank which first shipped in 1983. The long and winding road of Dave's outliners. #I have never seen an Alex Jones tweet, believe it or not.#
More on inclusivity, which I wrote about yesterday. I wrote a piece in 2016 about how boys interpret the demonizing of men. It's very much related to the idea of being inclusive. If we're fighting for respect and justice there can't be any limits on who is entitled to it. #
Another thing about Instagram. When you paste a link into a comment it doesn't hot it up. So they are even less a part of the web than Twitter and Facebook are. #
I went to Bronx Science, one of two special high schools in NYC that you have to take a test to get into. I took the test when I was in 9th grade, in the late 60s. The NYT recently published five questions from the test. I got four of five right. The one I got wrong was controversial. They have a discussion in the Times article why no one agrees on the correct answer. I was befuddled by it too, it was the one I got wrong. I was especially pleased to have gotten the geometry question right, because I haven't thought about geometry once since I left high school. Not a whole lot of geometry in software development work, or even in a math degree.#
The OPML Editor is my fork of the Frontier code base, started in 2004. It runs on today's Macs. In the flurry of activity in April, I broke the Mac part of the download page. I have now fixed it. 💥#
I've decided to get involved on Instagram. My name is davew there. It's weird they don't let you post pictures from the desktop web browser. You have to go into the JS debugger and tell it to emulate a phone browser. Then you can upload an image.#
I'm also going to start using Mastodon. I see they call their posts toots. I'm sorry but that makes me think of farts. If they'd have asked me I'd have said to call them grunts or snorts. After all I can't imagine a mastodon tooting. That's the kind of thing a monkey might do. BTW, little known fact, my handle on CompuServe back in the 80s was Mastodon. PS: I absolutely despise dark backgrounds. Hurts my eyes. I can only read dark text on light backgrounds. #Ever since Facebook turned off the API, doing something new with Little Card Editor has been on my todo list. One thing I wanted to be able to do is include a card in my blog, the same way I include a tweet. I thought I'd have to factor out the card renderer in the app, so I could call it from my blog renderer, but there's a much dumber and simpler approach, just include the image of the card as it appears in Twitter. It works. As you can see in this post. So I am able to do that now. Bingo. ✓#
- What it means to be inclusive#
- I don’t care how you got to the party. Whether you took the subway, walked, came by spaceship or were driven by your chauffeur. What’s important is you’re here.#
- Non-inclusive vs inclusive#
- You can advocate for your cause by pushing away people who you don't identify with, or you can be inclusive, and take support where you get it. Most of the great causes we remember are the inclusive kind. The ones that demonize or ridicule "others" tend to result in war.#
- Two views of America#
- The Constitution is inclusive. It started out with some huge holes. Over the generations we've been closing them. That's been the clear trend.#
- The Trump movement is non-inclusive. It says there are real Americans, white, rural, Christian, male-dominated. They say these are traditional American values. This isn't new, this thread has been a constant since the beginning. It's the regulator on change happening too fast.#
- One of the reasons the Trump style America is ascendant is that the inclusive America has been moving forward at a rapid pace in the last few generations, post-World War II. Recently, we had an African-American president, the ultimate in other-ness, and we have removed gender from the concept of marriage. That's a lot of change happening very quickly, within ten years. #
- To heal we have to come out the other side with our inclusive principles intact.#
ObamaCare is still the law. McCain's vote was instrumental in keeping it from being gutted. McCain died earlier today. #
I want a bank/brokerage website that has an easy UI. I don't care about commissions. My auto insurance company website is fast and easy. This builds trust, believe it or not. Nothing is worse than a bank that can't run a proper website. It's 2018, some bank should excel by now.#
What I hate most about Chrome's NOT SECURE message is that this is all they could think of to say about my wonderful blog. A blog that predates Google itself by four years. It's got humor and sadness, fun and tech tips. Yet all they can say is yuck we don't like this site. We welcomed Google. Even loved them. And this is what's become of them. Heartless and soulless. Bullies. No love. #
There's a new brand of bike sharing in NYC now. Yesterday I saw two bright red bikes, shaped like a Lime bike or CitiBike, with a plastic basket up front. Didn't have time to read the logo/branding. Both in Manhattan. Andy DeSoto says they're Jump bikes. And guess what, they say on their site they're available now in NYC. (But only in Staten Island and Westchester.)#I've been saying this for decades. Every brand should have an iconic image that bloggers can crib. What that means is this -- a product shot on a white or transparent background. Large enough for large product shots, and for right margin images, we can make them smaller. I wanted to put a Jump bike in the right margin, but when I do an image search, all I see are bikes being ridden or parked with lots of not-easily cropped backgrounds. No free advertising for Jump. #
I have a friend who's an accomplished computer scientist, really smart and creative in that area. Also a good teacher. But in politics he's a snotty bastard, he uses logic that could never work in debugging code. I wonder how such contradictions happen? Really puzzling.#
I like inclusive movements. I don’t care how you got to the party. Whether you took the subway, walked, came by spaceship or were driven by your chauffeur. What’s important is you’re here. That's also the philosophy of America, btw.#
- Every time I visit the site, I get the same top message. #
- If I go to the popup menu to say "Don't show me this again" they start me down the abusive-user path. Why do I want to block this user. I don't. What did they do? Nothing, you fucked up FB. So I skip it, and every time I come here I see the same damn image, a movie about cilantro.#
- I like cilantro, but it isn't the center of my existence. Facebook, we can move on from this. You have a bug. Give me a way to say stop showing me this message and the user is doing nothing wrong.#
- By lacking a way to tell you this, you're compounding the insult of the bug. Your bug. ;-)#
- Love,#
- Dave#