What a thrill to see NakedJen in the Likes here. 💥#

I just got an email from @baratunde about The Correspondent once again saying I'm part of a movement. No. They haven't done anything to justify that. They are a for-profit company. They make it sound like a charity. Tone it down.#

Response from Baratunde on Twitter.#

The tech industry used to have rollouts like the one The Correspondent is doing. A new company wants to enter a market with a few well-known products. So they claim, on rollout, to have some new feature, usually hard to explain or obscured, that made their product revolutionary. The old products are old. Legacy. Roadkill. Since the press didn't care much for facts, and wanted to report on wars, they would run with the hype. A few years later the new technology is known not to be revolutionary. And the new company either gained entry or didn't. The incumbent products are still there. An example was "object oriented" in the early 90s. We now fully grok what it is, it's another way of factoring. Useful for sure, sometimes. But not game-changing. #

So if Michael Cohen committed crimes that result in a 3 year sentence, I guess Trump should go to jail for 3 years too.#

Trump's hands are truly offensive. I hate the way he puts his hand in the face of people to hold the floor so he can repeat the same horseshit over and over. You could see it as he tried to talk over Nancy Pelosi. He did it with Hillary Clinton. He does it when an interview isn't going the way he likes. It's nasty. Second point. When he threatens a revolt if he's impeached, that itself is cause to be removed from office. The president swears an oath to uphold the Constitution. Impeachment and removal are in the Constitution. Really it has to be the most impeachable offense there is. #

Braintrust query: I keep reading about Kubernetes and how it's taking over the world, but every piece also says it's very complicated. Why? Heroku set the initial prior art in this area. It's easy to get started with. Here we are many years later, it seems we are going the wrong way. Or am I missing the point. Isn't Kubernetes trying to solve the same problem as Heroku? In any case an open source user-deployable Heroku would be very welcome. Update: Digital Ocean introduced a simplified Kubernetes service yesterday. I had no idea. Also, Dokku was recommended. #

I'm making a purchase that requires a credit check, and in the process, the lender said I needed to unfreeze my records at the three credit rating services. At first I didn't remember freezing them, but then on a bit of investigation I recalled that when Experian had their breach they offered to do the freeze and also monitor my credit for free. So now I had to figure out how to unfreeze the accounts. The bank gave me phone numbers. But all they can do is send you a credit report. Some are pretty humiliating about it. After much navigation, searching and puzzling I figured out how to turn off two of the three, but Experian, in trying to validate me, asked "security questions" that I answered correctly but they rejected. In the process I learned that apparently I had taken out an auto loan in 2017, a year that I didn't even own a car and most certainly didn't purchase one. So now I have another problem. But I guess it's their system that's fucked up, because if someone used my credit to buy a car, apparently they are making the payments, so wtf. This system is so broken, it's amazing we haven't yet had a total meltdown. Or maybe we have and we're living in its aftermath. #

I noted early this morning tweets from Phil Windley and Chris Allen about a conference in Switzerland where they have an easy way of explaining a new "self-sovereign" identity system. At some point I want to ask the question about how we can adapt the code we have working with Twitter as an identity system with this new system. It's important that for application developers it be as easy or easier than the currently available systems. #

President Covfefe hits the wall.#

I had a short podcast here earlier, but decided to take it down. I didn't like how it told the story. Not focused enough. Sorry. Will try again. 💥#

Another academic journalist who I respect endorsed The Correspondent this morning, urging others to contribute money to the cause. I don't understand why. I can see studying them, learning from their mistakes, which they are sure to make, but an up front unconditional endorsement? Maybe they know a lot more than the rest of us? I asked a bunch of questions of TheC. To their credit they are trying to answer them. Still I haven't seen any reporting on this effort that isn't a rewrite of their press release. There are serious questions to ask about this. Who else is asking them? #

Civil was a recent example of an effort to launch a new model for journalism that received a lot of hype and unconditional endorsements. But the journalists who were supposed to be paid say they aren't being paid. And the investors who were hoping to support journalism and were motivated by greed (investor greed is perfectly appropriate) aren't happy either. Tech is never a panacea. If people are hyping a technology as one, they're selling snake oil, and you should keep your hand on your wallet.#

As more journalism companies launch tech products, they're starting to behave more like tech companies, and that's not good. The transparency is gone. If you're creating a silo, you have an obligation to say so, esp if your product is primarily journalism. I'm not talking about The Correspondent here, it's too early to say how much lock-in there is in their product. But all of them have the same basic defect imho. The paid professionals are over here and the members of the community are over there. There's a clear line of separation. I understand why this is in the interest of the reporters, but I strongly believe it is against the interest of news. And if the mission of a news org isn't news, what is it?#

I see the danger we're in, politically and physically (climate change) are a result of the corruption of our news system. Really nothing short of corruption. They see fascism as a good business model. Trump is great click-bait. Some of them even have the honesty to say so directly. So if we're going to dig out of the mess, we're going to have to take control of the news. Not simply be bystanders. And any new journalism venture that isn't structured around that idea is not only not the answer, it's in the way of us formulating the answer. That's why I am not an enthusiastic supporter of The Correspondent. If their intentions are good, and I see no reason to assume they're not, they are not moving fast enough to embrace the change we need to happen merely to survive. Good ideas are not what's needed. Change is what's needed. Radical change. #

Just got home. Amazing connections on arriving. New concourse at Penn Station, very confusing. Followed one of the paths, was hoping to get on the 1 train uptown, but the concourse took me right to the platform for the A train. WTF. So I went upstairs, and as I was reaching the platform an uptown A pulls in. I get on. A seat is waiting for me. I get off the train, walk to my building and an elevator opens, I get in and it takes me right up to my apartment. From the Acela to my living room, about 10 minutes. Couldn't possibly have happened any faster. Sometimes, rarely, NYC "just works" as we say in the software biz. #

I saw Can You Ever Forgive Me? last night. It was as reviewed, excellent. Melissa McCarthy is a phenomenal actress, you get total suspension of disbelief, except for a few instants scattered throughout where they remind you she is one of the best comics of our day. The theme is self-knowledge. Running away from yourself until you can't, and that's when life begins. Must-see. #

Following up on yesterday's project. I now have a new app running on each of my servers. Every minute, they find out how much space is free on the system disk, and the result is written to a file on S3. There's a file for each server. A central app, serverMonitor, reads those files and stores the data in a file it generates that's then displayed by a JS app running in the browser. The net result, now I see an up to date report on disk space on all my servers any time I want. So the problem we had with LO2 earlier this week, hopefully should not happen again. In the process I found out that people are using features I had basically forgotten were in the product. Yikes. 💥#

Chris Beard at Mozilla wrote a piece that I totally agree with about the problem of Google dominance of the open web. I could have written that piece myself. In fact in a way I did. But Mozilla hasn't listened any better than Google. Maybe if we want to keep the thread of a free web alive, we should listen better, and help each other. That was the original spirit of the web, not the dominance of big companies who don't feel obligated to listen to and work with individuals. To me, Mozilla looks as big as Google looks to them. #

I think this is the problem everywhere you look, in politics, journalism, tech, education, business -- organizations dominating individuals. That's why AOC is so refreshing. One of us crashed the party. We hope that opens to door for more party-crashing. That, btw, was the great thing about the web when it came along. The tech industry was just as mired in bigco dominance as it is today. But the web paid no respect to their dominance. In come the people. I remember, I was there. I took advantage of the new opportunities.#

BTW, one of the reasons I find it so easy to remember AOC's initials because it is also the name of a nice French restaurant I like to go to in the West Village. #

In the great spaces vs tabs debate, as a programmer for over 40 years, I use neither. I program in an outliner, a kind of editor that understands structure. The display of the structure is something the editor does for me. It doesn't use spaces or tabs.#

You know how Obama says "Don't boo, vote!" Now with what the Repubs are doing in Michigan and Wisconsin, I guess that needs updating. What do we have to do? This requires a new think.#

People are so critical about how Facebook makes them feel. But that's just one part of it. If you work in a place by yourself, having FB or Twitter around is like having a water cooler to go take a break at. You reach a stopping point, you want to clear your head, so you go do something chatty for a bit. They work. If they didn't exist you'd have to invent them (which of course we did).#

BTW, back in the old days we'd need a break (using a BBS or CompuServe, then and later AppleLink) because compilations took so long. It could be as much as ten minutes. Then builds got fast, then instantaneous. And of course now we have Dropbox which is sometimes as slow at syncing servers as the old compilers were at building an executable. Same as it ever was.#

Today I'm going to build a Node app that finds out how much space is available on the system disk and writes the result to a location on S3. This will allow my serverMonitor app to periodically read those files and present them in a tabular form. I have to have an easy way to see if one of my servers has run out of space. Not sure exactly how I'm going to approach it. Update: Here's the code. It only works on Unix. I send a command to the shell asking it to run the DF command, get the result, and write the stats to S3. serverMonitor has been updated to look for the files for the server, and it shows me a table with the percentage free space. Problem solved. #

I hear good things about SRWare Iron.#

It's interesting to me, as an observer, to see Automattic go through the kinds of pains we went through years ago when releasing major versions of Frontier. It happened in 1998 when we released the first version that ran on Windows in addition to the Mac. And again when we shipped Radio UserLand with integrated blogging and RSS. These should have been times of celebration, and in earlier efforts before we did all our work on the net, they would have. I am impressed with the way the users express their concerns, because (I'm guessing) they have businesses with customers who are going to be confused. And the angst is probably amplified because the leader of the WordPress community is so accessible. That was the conclusion I came to about the trouble we got for shipping. There's always a reaction among users and developers on new platform releases. Imagine if Steve Jobs had been as accessible as Matt Mullenweg when Apple shipped a version of Mac OS that breaks apps. But he wasn't. In general the leaders of these efforts are insulated through layers and layers. It takes guts for Matt to put himself out there. And at the same time, the concerns of his users are legit. #

I'm spending the day in Woodstock, NY today. I spent a lot of time in the area when I was young. It's cold, but lovely. #

Unique knife holder/art. 💥#

They were playing Dead music in the local Whole Foods today.#

Netflix should link to the Metacritic page for a show from the show. One click to find out what the reviewers think. Also, Metacritic should have an API that returns the aggregate score for a title.#

Spend $100 million teaching 100K people the basics of journalism.#

This link will take you to the JSON version of the posts for today once the nightly backup is done at 12PM Eastern.#

Reminder to self. I should invest time in keeping Bingeworthy for TV up to date. I'm stuck now looking for something to binge on an upcoming trip. Coming up blank. Might re-watch something I loved. #

In Michigan and Wisconsin, Republican legislatures are voting to disempower the newly elected governors and attorney generals, a repeat of a trick the NC legislature played in 2016. The Repubs are playing tricks to disempower the people of their states who voted for a change of government. They may succeed but the light should shine brightly on them, and people should not be allowed to forget. This is a party you can't elect without them turning on you. They truly are enemies of the people. #

Amidst all the glowing eulogies of Bush41, and he deserves a lot of praise, remember his campaign started the era of deplorable Republican politics. His presidential biography must include that legacy too.#

Week 2. Now at Trump Tower, more self-deprecating jokes, disowns his children, has Al Franken and Doris Kearns Goodwin over for dinner, takes off his fat-suit. "Glad to finally be the real me," he says. Goes out ice skating with son Barron at the Trump rink in Central Park.#

Lots of small changes to the Likes browser API and a new Hello World demo app. More on this tomorrow. Also bought a nice domain for this project. 🚀#

Inventors have to embrace every creative thought that comes our way, because it could be on the path to the really great discovery, the one that makes the world a much happier place.#

Idea for a SNL skit. Trump, played by Alec Baldwin, sits behind the desk in the Oval Office. Aides around him. He cracks self-deprecating jokes. Praises Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Calls Melania and tells her he loves her. Fires his children. Signs resignation letter.#

Looks good with the Dems assuming power in the House, but I can't help wondering if the Repubs have figured out how to screw it up.#

Kevin Tofel reports a problem using Likes on a Chromebook. I'm guessing it has something to do with localStorage. #

I had dinner last night at Han Dynasty on the Upper West Side. It was delicious. The place is huge, you could throw a big party there. I told my young companion that I want my funeral to be held there. The service was great. And every dish was wonderful. So tasty. #

If you have comments or questions about Likes, here's a place to post them. I'm interested in knowing what you think.#

The Democrats have never responded to this statement by Reagan. "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Since then the Repubs have been running the table. Reagan may have been sincere, but his successors have been using this as an excuse to loot the treasury.#

Lakoff: "Previous generations had the benefit of a robust public education system. Education was affordable or free. We invested in the American people, and the result was a powerful and free nation."#

Thejeshgn wrote API docs for his experiments with my Likes API. #

I've finished season 1 of The Sinner on Netflix. Loved it. All the characters are interesting, the story keeps unfolding in interesting ways, the acting is superb, you really get involved in the story. Now starting season 2 on Amazon, for $15. So far it's just as good as the first. 🚀#

I've been fighting a cold this week so haven't been posting much. The cold is receding I hope and I hope to be back up to speed in a day or two. If you want to wish me a speedy recovery you can Like this post. 💥#

This is what the Blogtrottr email looks like, the one I set up yesterday. Compared with the original. I see room for improvement. For example, they could get rid of (Untitled). I didn't title the post, why do they have to make that the most important thing about it? I didn't anticipate they'd put an ad inbetween the title of the blog and the items. Wouldn't it make more aesthetic sense to not break there? And I'm not sure how they would know what order the items appear on my blog but it would be nice if they presented the items in that order instead of what appears to be chronologic order. I edit the order of posts as the day goes by. One more thing, I was expecting the email to be sent at midnight, or sometime during the night, not at 10AM Eastern. I imagine this is configurable. #

Physics is a bitch.#

Scott Mace sent a pointer to Blogtrottr, a service that hooks RSS up to email. I just set it up to send me the posts from Scripting News once daily. This is what I was asking about yesterday. Now let's see how it handles posts without titles. 🚀#

I ❤️ how Likes is working. For example, I noticed that the post above that mentions Scott Mace had one Like. Guess who? Scott Mace. Haha. See how that works. I actually was wondering if he saw it. This is a bit of culture/tech that works. I like where it's going. #

In order to get a bootstrap to work you need a blog that has a certain amount of community. Luckily there is still enough life left in Scripting News to get a bootstrap going. That was the most fun of the salad days of blogging, I had the ability to boot up new protocols and formats. Not all of them worked, but some did. I love making new stuff up and seeing it take root. Maybe we can do it now that social media is morphing into something else. #

Something you don’t hear on the political talk circuit, yet — Trump is much weaker after the election. All Repubs at all levels saw how toxic he is in the midterms. They have a problem coming up in the next election, when the Senate is up for grabs, not just the House.#

BTW, the question of whether anyone is above the law has been answered. The current president has been breaking the law since he took office. He has not been arrested or prosecuted. So by any reasonable definition of the idea, he is above the law.#

I love this song from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. #

A version of Surly Joe where you can hear the words more clearly.#

New header image. A burning log in a fireplace, for the season. Previous image: Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. #

There should be a service that sends you the daily archive of my blog automatically via email the next morning. It should be totally turnkey. I would have nothing to do with it. It's a simple RSS application. Okay stupid question -- does such an application exist? #

The new Narcos season set in Mexico is terrible. Everything about it is awful. I kept watching because I wanted to understand how they could make something so bad. I think what they did is write down the arc of the various threads in the previous two seasons, and they just repeated the story with different characters. They have these idiotic conversations about characters you know nothing about and don't care about. Even the star, the new Pablo Escobar is a flat character. His old fat sidekick is terrible. I understood him in the first few scenes he appeared in, but then he became this crazy guy. The beauty of Narcos in previous seasons is that you could get into the head of Pablo Escobar and it made sense. You felt for him and each of the people around him, even though he was a monster. In the end of Season 3 there is one scene where the two main characters meet each other for the first and last time. That one scene was good. There was some truth in it. But otherwise it was a big fucking meh. So what. Even their stories about how sensimilla works were wrong. Couldn't they read the Wikipedia page and do a little fact checking? It's actually interesting science. #

Had a great phone talk last night with Jon Udell. We've known each other for a long time. We went to the same conferences in the early days of the web. I read everything he wrote in his BYTE and Infoworld columns, which were the best. He's a clear thinker, super smart, and feels the web the same way I do. He's also a prodigous blogger. If you follow me here on Scripting News, you should add Jon's feed to your reader. 💥#

Jon just posted an excellent piece about the Salton Sea, Owens Valley and Mono Lake in California. As a longtime California resident, I've always been interested in how water is managed in the west, whose major cities have no water of their own. That's what happened to the water flowing off the eastern face of the Sierras. #

I recently switched from an iPhone 6S to an iPhone XS Max. Along the way it never occurred to me that I was giving up my headphone jack. The 6S has one the XS does not. I guess it's less of an issue to me now because in 2018 it seems Bluetooth works reliably. Previous iPhones, headphones and speakers would lose their pairing regularly. This got super annoying when I'm out riding my bike, it means stopping and fiddling around with the phone while I really want to be moving. Eventually I gave up on Bluetooth for that application and went to a hard wire connection. The speakers all still have the headphone jack. Now I guess I'm entering a new frontier. But I still have my iPhone 6S in the right top drawer of my desk along with all the other obsolete hardware I couldn't manage to actually throw away. BTW, I love the XS. Not sure exactly why, but I do. ❤️#

New feature. The home page of my Likes server now includes a list of the 10 most-liked posts. Yes, I know titles would be nice to have. Most of my posts don't have titles. Also released a new version of the Likes server with this feature included. #

People who say they know what Facebook should do. How could they. Nothing like it has ever existed. It’s a miracle that it works at all. This is what I think when critics profess to know what’s wrong and how to fix it.#

I waited for a weekend to try this experiment. I wanted to see what would happen if I nuked the data folder on my main River5 installation. So that's what I did today. You'll see the effect anywhere one of my rivers appears. For example, this is what podcatch.com looks like right now. Hopefully that will change when the next podcast shows up, and by Monday there should be a full complement. #

When I use my own apps and Chrome shows NOT SECURE in red, I realize they are warning me, not about my security but their intentions toward the web.#

An idea for a New Year's resolution. At least once a day agree with someone. Not silently. Say "I agree with you." No qualification, not "I agree with you, but.." It's jarring at first, then liberating. And the responses will surprise you. #

Never forget. Last year one person shot over 600 people in Las Vegas. It shouldn't be that easy for one person to shoot so many people.#

There's a new element, source:likes in the source namespace. It appears in the RSS feed for Scripting News. Feed readers can use the server URL to form a Like icon for each item that integrates with other feed readers. Perhaps the beginning of a way to build connections between people who read a blog via various feed readers. Updated the docs for my Likes server to include a third API endpoint. I'm probably going to support this in River5 to complete the circle.#

I fixed Likes for titled items. There are two on this page. The counts show on home page and on the story page. They should agree. 🚀#

I added notes about these changes in the worknotes doc for the Likes server.#

A couple of changes to how Likes work here. 1. On new posts, Likes are on by default. I can still turn them off on each post. 2. Instead of saying "8 Likes" it now just says 8. It's easier on the eyes, and maybe it's just a ping and not necessarily a like. We will still call them likes.#

My next project is to find out how much life is left in XML-RPC.#

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Here's a new version of a client that runs the standard XML-RPC test suite from the late 90s. In theory if an implementation passed the test 18 years ago, it should still pass it today. Consider this a ping asking the question Are You There? If you use or maintain an implementation of XML-RPC, please try the test and report the result in this thread. From this we'll start to rebuilt the XML-RPC clients list, showing only ones that are known to be alive. #

Here's a video demo of the XML-RPC test suite.#

My two Torino friends. The magnificent Anna Masera, and the insurgent Raffaele Angius. #

The Knicks season is now fully underway. We are at the point where when you look at the schedule the thought forms "Who are the Knicks going to lose to tonight?"#

Sports has so many lessons for life. Melo should have accepted, even embraced Linsanity. And the rest of us must stand behind Nancy Pelosi, because we need a winner on top of the Democratic Party during the presidential election year of 2020. We can't fuck around now. Trump must be sent on his way, resoundingly. #

Poll: Can the Republicans take control of the House? #

I need a way to tell my watch that my back hurts and it should stop nagging me. I’ll get back on the program when it’s better.#

Tis the season to binge-watch. I started out with a depressing watch, Making a Murderer, season 2. (Small spoilers ahead.) It was a real slog. I kept watching because I wanted to know what happens, and I didn't want to find out by reading about it on the net. It's very depressing, even more so than season 1. And complicated. After a while I started tuning out the complications, figuring they were telling the truth and that if it became significant, they would explain it all again. And the tedious interviews with the parents of the two prisoners. I thought maybe one of them would die? Spoiler: Not much happened. The best part was Avery's new attorney, Kathleen Zellner. I find her very interesting, smart, and if they did a show just about her I'd probably watch. I think the two families are permanently fucked and my opinion of the State of Wisconsin, which used to be very high (I went to UW-Madison, loved it) is now pretty low. #

So my back hurts, I just slogged through a depressing series. It's cold and dreary in NYC. I hear about the new Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, on Netflix, and it's getting good reviews from AO Scott and a friend who knows me well. So I sit down to watch. It's weird, episodic, but a movie not a series. I had heard the Coens were working on a series. The first segment was funny, I actually lol'd a few times. The second was okay, but the third sent me in a tailspin of depression. Oh no this is not what I had in mind. I was hoping for Fargo or Lebowski, but this makes No Country look like a fun dramedy. A few hours later I picked it up again, and it got better, way better. The segments were very Coen-ish, both funny and tragic. You know. Like the end of even the funniest Coen-y movies. I say go ahead and watch it, but if it's bumming you out, realize that's not all it's doing. The whole thing is a massive joke, on you. 💥#

Next up: The new Narcos series, in Mexico. #

I did some work today on the XML-RPC debugger. Look in the Tests menu. It populates the form with one of the standard tests from the old days. It's also preconfigured to talk to betty.userland.com, the same server we used in the late 90s, with all new code, written in JavaScript running in Node. Should be 100 percent backward compatible. More work to come, but wanted to show this to you all now. Ask questions here. #

July 1998: XML-RPC for Newbies.#

I changed my Twitter name to One more thing. Of course I stole that line from one of the best of all time. #

I have no idea what to do. This is a blog, I'm allowed to say that! 💥#

I can say what happened to Melo. He failed Linsanity. God came to his rescue. Gave him a player who was glad to be in the NBA, who would mold his game to make Melo the star that he was always capable of being. Melo didn't want anyone else in the spotlight. Goodbye Lin. Just imagine what the three guys in this picture could have done. The only thing in the way was Melo's hubris.#

I was searching for a story about friendship, about my friend Bodie who I was mouthing off to about a girlfriend, Kim, who was frustrating to me. I had posted it on a test site I was keeping at Berkman, a site that has since been deleted by them. However I moved it to my own server before they did that. Google indexed it, thankfully, and now I have a record of what I was thinking about that day. The piece was a remembrance of my uncle, Ken Kiesler, aka The Great VaVaVoom, or Uncle Vava. I can go right back there, to a day 15 years ago, the day after he died, suddenly, far away in Negril. That's how long it has been. His memory has faded for me. I haven't talked with him since then, I was beginning to live the part of my life where I never talk to him, but that day in 2003 his memory was still fresh. This is what blogging is for. I want these memories. I want the ability to tell my future self who I am today. #

Little known fact. My uncle was one of the first bloggers. Along with Dan Gillmor at the SJ Mercury-News, they were the first users of Manila. Ken had little idea that he was doing something new. That, to me, was a sign that we had hit the sweet spot. The little programming experience he had was as a college student in the early 60s at Carnegie-Mellon. This of course was very different. He wrote his blog from an internet cafe in Negril. I've kept his blog running all these years. Proud of it. #

I often think the Little Feat song Time Loves a Hero was about my uncle. #

None of the online activities I used to have hope for are working now. That's a fact I have been coming to grips with lately. And they're all going the wrong way. Without exception. Root cause -- silos everywhere. It's totally catching up with us.#