New feature. Now you can receive Scripting News every night via email. It's still in testing and there's a little more development work to do, but it's ready for people to try it out. I created my own system because I wanted more control over how it works. #

Evgeny Morozov re John Brockman and Jeffrey Epstein. #

It’s time for a news channel that only reports on how we’re getting rid of Trump and Repubs. If there’s nothing to report they play old MTV videos from the 80s.#

I don't know maybe it's just me, but I think "proclaims himself the second coming of God" might be grounds for impeachment. #

Reading this story for me is what it must have felt like to be a dinosaur having its bones discovered by a curious archaeologist, before there was archeology. #

Last night I read on Twitter that Ethan Zuckerman had resigned as part of a developing scandal with the MIT Media Lab and the notorious child molester Jeffrey Epstein. My first reaction was this is a mistake. Wait until more is known about what happened. I think it would be more courageous to stay in his position, and help the organization deal with the crisis. And he is staying through the academic year, according to his post. So I guess he's there for another year? A lot will change in that year. It was a very dramatic few hours last night. Twitter feasts on those moments. But there are people's lives, education and careers involved. Slow down and figure out what happened. #

Background: Zuckerman is a former colleague at Berkman Center in the early 2000s. His work and mine were related to blogging as a civic act, both our projects were very successful. I also know Joi Ito from Silicon Valley and he was a frequent contributor at BloggerCon. I visited both of them at the Media Lab in 2016. I wrote up my thoughts from that visit (of course) in a blog post. #

An update to the software that runs scripting.com. Sometimes when you'd click on the Sign on button in the upper left corner of the home page you'd get taken to a bogus page. Then you'd try it again and it'd work. Well I think I've got it now so that it always takes you to the right place. #

Braintrust query: Is there a way in the Chrome debugger to set a breakpoint when the value of a global changes? myGlobals.val is initialized when the app starts, but when it's used it has a different value. I want to break at the line that changes its value.#

GEICO has an incredible spot running now. A group of office workers gather around a mobile phone playing a GEICO app with a virtual version of the gecko, on the backdrop of the actual desk. Then the real gecko shows up, waving his hand and saying in his British accent "Hey I'm real." The humans in the office laugh. "He thinks he's real." It's funny on three levels which makes it even funnier. #

I've heard said that Reagan introduced the trickle-down theory of economics, but apparently that's wrong -- it was an issue in the election of 1896, which McKinley, the Repub, won. #

Why would anyone get excited about what Susan Sarandon thinks? Her candidate Bernie is lookin good, but will anyone at all be persuaded by Susan Sarandon? She's had an incredible career for sure, but there are lots of stars at her level. Let's find out what Geena Davis thinks, or Brad Pitt or Kevin Costner.#

Getting pretty close with the nightly-email version of Scripting News. Lots of moving interconnected parts. #

All there is to read about Quentin Taratino's new movie. #

Ted Howard found the problem with my NPM module that didn't work. Braintrust to the rescue! #

JavaScript drives program writers to outliners, because outliners are adept with dealing with nested callbacks, as opposed to the way most (all?) other languages do program flow through a flat list. In a normal language, the runtime proceeds from statement 1 to 2 and so on. I guess most JS programmers don't know about outliners, or devtools developers don't or whatever -- so instead of letting the "problem" be solved by editors, the language designers try to hack the language to make it better fit the editors we already use, but it just creates a hierarchic chaos that's meant not to look hierarchic. It's a total mess. So now JS is evolving to be Perl whose motto is "There's more than one way to do it." It's far better for the ecosystem if there was only one way to do everything, but something as fundamental as program flow, I doubt if even Perl has more than one way to do that. So Brendan Eich is not an outliner person, and neither are the people who work on the design of the language. You pretty much have to program JS in an outliner (as I do) to see this, imho. But before they hack the language again, see if the problem isn't the dev tools, not the language. Nothing wrong with callback hell imho if you have the right editor. #

BTW, here's a demo I did of an outliner in a scripting context. #

How about a working group chartered to find the elegant and simple language hiding in the mess that JavaScript has become? It's there, I can feel it. First you'd have to get rid of the runtime assumption that functions return before they're finished. It should be possible for a function to explicitly fork off a new process, but it shouldn't do it just because the function made an I/O call. In practice 99.9999 percent of those simply want to wait for the I/O to be done. In all my years programming before JS, I never wanted a language to do flow the way JS does. That in itself is important data, imho. I've implemented a lot of different kinds of software. #

I think private Facebook groups are filling in the gaps more than most professional news people are aware.#

As a commercial software developer I had heard about InfoWorld's review guidelines, written in 1994, but had not seen them until yesterday when Harry McCracken, a former member of their review board, posted an excerpt to Twitter. I asked if I could have a copy of the full manual so I could get them into the archive of my blog, and he kindly provided them. If anyone wants to reboot software reviews this would be a good place to start. In any case it's good to have this archived for future reference. #

I read this VC appraisal of Dropbox vs Slack, which service was going to be the foundation for groupware in the enterprise world. I was unaware of this perspective and it was enlightening. I have studied both. Slack has the API, Dropbox went it alone. I think if Dropbox had fully embraced the idea that it was a developer's platform, there were a few small doors they had to open, they would have become the storage for networked apps. Same with Amazon S3. Each had the opportunity to bridge into the others' space, but neither has. I think the assumption at Dropbox was they knew everyone who was capable of making great groupware apps. That was their mistake. It's still not too late, they are dominant and totally baked in. They should be killing instead they are flailing. One of the biggest wasted opportunities I've seen in my career. #

I'm getting ready for my next binge -- Big Little Lies season 2. I'm looking over the review summaries on Metacritic, and see they're all based on the first three episodes only. This was the same problem with software reviews, back when they did reviews of software (too bad they stopped). They would review the software based on a day's worth of use, if that much. But we design software so that it gets better the more you use it. We balance the tradeoffs. Of course we want the product to be easy to learn, but we also want it to be something you use all the time. It's as ridiculous to judge a serial show based on a third of a season. If I make it through the whole season, which seems likely based on the first season, I'll review the whole thing here on my blog. And I still have to relaunch bingeworthy so we accumulate judgements of Scripting News readers on these shows. I have an idea how to do it. 💥#

I don't know if anyone else finds NPM to be unreliable, as I do, over many years. Here's a scenario. I have to make a minor change to a package. So I increment the version in package.json, and npm publish it. Then in the app that's using it, I do an npm update. The update happens. But the app doesn't get the latest version. Something is cached somewhere, because if I look in the node_modules folder, the new version is there. I've resorted to using a lib folder and keeping a copy of the package updated there. But of course I'm reinventing npm in scripts by doing this. Sometimes NPM works as I understand it should, but every so often it goes crazy like this.#

The NYT needs a real public editor, a member of the public who is not a journalist, and has unfettered access to the op-ed page, and can provide perspective for other readers and for the writers and editors.#

I groan when passwords are required to have at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase, a number and/or a special character. I know as a matter of math that these requirements doesn't make passwords better. Does it help people who type asdf as their password come up with more random strings? Also I hate sites that make me create a new password every so often. I can manage that myself. I suppose maybe they're saying hey we were hacked recently and are requiring everyone to change their passwords instead of making a public statement.#

The problem isn't Trump, it's the news system that got him elected. #

Help I am so addicted to What Up With That?#

Anything that gets us to hate each other based on race, age, gender is a wedge, and it's designed to keep us from unifying, which allows the assholes to keep control.#

My grandfather warned me about this. I didn't believe him at the time, when I was a child. He used words I thought were old-fashioned, but now we use them all the time. I represent him the best I can in the world he predicted so well.#

Apparently the question of an Edit button came up in Twitter corporate presser yesterday. They said it isn't a high priority. I've often wondered about this. Facebook lets you edit everything you write, and it hasn't seemed to affect the community in any way I can perceive. I use it all the time. Maybe the question is a technical one for Twitter. Perhaps they built their internal server network around the assumption that content can't be modified. Then it might cost a lot of money they don't have to rebuild their server setup. If this were the case I could see why they wouldn't want to disucss it publicly given how little most reporters and users are aware of how the tech works behind the curtain. #

Good morning sports fans! #

2016: "There's truth and journalism truth."#

I saw Quentin Taratino's latest (no spoilers). If you love his movies as I do, you can see how an artist can play with our perceptions of the past, and how important it is to see directly what happened. #

The are having a great August. #

Best political cartoon I've seen in a while.#

I try to have an expansive view of the talent of my friends.#

Poll: Twitter should report number of people who have blocked each account along with the number of people who follow. Agree?#

BTW, one of the side-effects of getting the email working with AWS is that dave@scripting.com works again. #

We need political stories like this to believe in. #

I got an email from a long-time reader saying the thing that shocked him about my early web writing was that I told the truth. I wasn't trying to sell you anything. I just wrote what occurred to me. He was a mainframe programmer. I've thought about that, and I'd love to understand how one can be a programmer and not always be searching for the truth. Unlike just about any other profession I can think of, ours depends on telling the truth.You can't lie to a compiler is one of my programming mottos. Garbage in garbage out. I write blog posts the same way a tester writes reviews of software. You have to be ready to hear the unvarnished truth. That's the ethos of blogging as far as I'm concerned. And it's why tech bloggers can do it better than most. Not saying they do of course. There was some real shabby blogging around HTTPS and Google, I kept wanting to ask if they debug their software with that kind of logic? (The equiv of asking a troll if they kiss their mother with that mouth.) #

New feature. Now in the footer of the home page, you can see a realtime readout of how long this blog has been running in preparation for the big 25th anniversary celebration, whatever it may turn out to be. Of course you have to have JS turned on to see it. #

And here's a video demo of the feature because why not. #

I had been looking for the animation of Darwin as a kung fu fighter, and finally found it. I don't want to lose it again.#

Here's what a reader wrote in 1995 about my earliest blogging efforts. It means so much more now. The loop has closed on all of it, esp the last couple of paragraphs.#

Those were incredible times, we had tons of what I called blue sky, probably more possibility for technology and humanity since the 1920s (the advent of electricity and cars). I was in perfect position to explore all that blue sky. A confluence like that is rare. Right place, right time, right friends. 💥#

Biden's latest gaffe is about as important as Orrin Hatch removing glasses that weren't there. Everyone made such huge deal about it, but if they had to admit the truth, they'd have to say they do shit like that too. It's human.#

Adams is a small chain of grocery stores in the Hudson Valley. There's one near where I live, in Kingston. They buy from local farms. And they make a lot of their own products, like spaghetti sauce and cookies, and it's all realllly good.#

I recommend Eighth Grade, playing on Amazon. Good movie. You see inside a young girl's life, her self-doubt, relationships with friends, the evolving meaning of cool, trying out the idea of sex, sizing up her own future and past. Cringeworthy in places. I keep thinking about it, a sign of something worthwhile. #

I would of course like to tell you about my own eighth grade here, except I skipped that grade. I went to junior high between elementary and high school, and they had the option for students who passed a test to skip the grade. I opted-in. My sixth grade teacher, I found out much later, was opposed to this, she felt I was too immature and needed the grade to help get ready for high school. Considering what I did in high school, she might have had a point. Or it could be that she mistook creativity for immaturity. She was a good teacher, one of the best I ever had. I once raised my hand enthusiastically and burst out "Mom mom call on me!" -- to my great embarrassment. She said that was high praise. It was. That's how relaxed I was with her. #

I’m going to write my own Mailchimp for RSS to distribute this blog via email. The one they made adds CSS that can’t be overridden, even with !important. It renders the text with ugly color, inconsistent style and indentation, lots of irrelevant text, and they hack your urls, while they charge $ for the service.#

“Trump made me do it,” the defense of deplorable miscreants everywhere.#

Another previously unpublished podcast I sent to Ken Smith for approval. He seems to approve. So here it is. #

I updated the system software on my Apple Watch and it can no longer be used to log on to my Mac. It all worked before the update. #

New slogan: You can't fight not-normal with normal.#

Just for fun, I did a countdown page showing how long Scripting News has been running, assuming it started at noon Pacific on October 7, 1994. I don't know the actual time, so I took a guess. 💥#

I have become addicted to What Up With That. The song is playing in my head all the time. When I see something puzzling, the drum starts beating, my eyes widen and look to the left, the bass starts bassing I get up and dance and.. #

I feel like the Mets are where they were in 2015. You tune in the game, it's the 8th inning, the Mets are down 9-3, and you sit down for the rest of the game to see how they win. And they do. #

Two Democratic presidential candidates said historic things in the last week, but they have mostly gone unnoticed or misunderstood. Pete Buttigieg said if we want change we're going to have to amend the Constitution. He's absolutely right. Changing the president, even taking the majority in the Senate won't accomplish much if a minority can overturn the whole thing any time they get it together. That's in the Constitution, that's what has to change. Another thing that has to change is journalism. They can't incorporate new realities into their view of the world. They ask questions about Trump as if he were a normal president, one who had divested and disclosed before taking office. Trump is a Russian oligarch. He takes his orders from Putin. Any question about the president that doesn't accept this context is a question from Dreamland. Beto O'Rourke busted through this crazy wall in the aftermath of the El Paso massacre. It's why we need to depose the people who run journalism, asap. Why shouldn't the Democratic candidates help us transform politics and journalism? If they don't do that, why are they running? (To paraphrase Elizabeth Warren, who has done her part to transform how our politics and journalism work.)#

Welcome to NYC. Walk faster.#

Dear future-of-news people. Please pay attention to what Beto did with the journalists. That's what a real public editor would do. It would be great. We could possibly get our world back on track. Knight Foundation — want to make a real investment in news? Real public editors.#

I read a story about the survivors of the Las Vegas massacre and it opened my eyes. We don't even help them out with their medical bills. So the travesty of gun violence is multiplied by the inhumanity of our health care system.#

My dear departed hippie uncle started a bums union. They would revoke your union card if you were caught working. He gave it a name. The Amalgamated Bums and Drifters of America. It was a joke of course. He loved to work.#

In October it’ll be 25 years since I started blogging.#

The Russians/Republicans must want Americans killing each other in mass murders. The NRA can't be the only reason, in fact, it's hard to see how they're a reason at all at this point.#

Two years ago today, I observed this about our president.#

I'm no artist but I'd love to see Moscow Mitch as a babushka.#

I tried something interesting, an audio response to a tweet. Enclosed here as a podcast. It's so twisted. But listen to it, I think you'll find there's a loop in how news deals with tech. It would be better if we could break out of the loop of course.#

Pleased the Moscow Mitch meme is going mainstream. 💥#

If your ice coffee isn't exciting you, try this. Before adding ice or coffee pour a bit of chocolate syrup at the bottom of the glass, then add the ice, then coffee, #

Scoble says I was right about Facebook in 2010, I don't know if I was, but the archives are here. But now we're in a different reality. Facebook is filling an important role that I had hoped the open web would. Having just moved to a small town in upstate NY, I get the utility of private groups on FB to tie a local community together. More about this in a thread on Twitter. #

A guest on Ari Melber last night (I think it was Jamal Simmons) said what I've been saying about the 2020 election. It'll probably be a Russian style election where the incumbent gets 98% of the vote. We can't afford to wait for that. Think about all the other crazy stuff the incumbent is doing, that we can see, and then the stuff that is being covered up. Depending on the election only makes sense as a distant Plan B. I think even most Republicans would see that at this time. #

If the Democrats played hardball, they’d have a series of votes that force Republicans in Congress to choose between dumping Trump, and decloaking as Nazis.#

The only way to find out what your users want is to let them speak in a fashion that you have to listen to them.#

I'd like to see Melo and Jeremy Lin join up and become friends, work out, and reinvent basketball, and then approach the right team. They're smart, still-talented players. I think the stink on both of the comes from the crazy missed opportunity of the Linsanity period.#

I recorded a podcast yesterday about journalism and listening to users, based on a ridiculous Twitter thread about journalism and listening in which of course the journalists didn't listen. Imho that's why our political system is so out of whack. The public is never heard, their perspective is never represented, and we are never allowed to interject our two cents. I only shared it with Ken Smith, a professor friend from Indiana. He says he was nodding in agreement through the whole thing. Okay, considering that, I decided I should publish it. Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't. If you're a journalist you probably won't but you should listen anyway. No pain no gain, as they say. #

I just gave $25 to Amy Klobuchar.#

I don't think the NBA works like this, though emotionally I would hate to see Melo's career end now. Same with Jeremy Lin. I think Melo being a stinker put Lin and D'Antonio on the road. I'd like to see Melo apologize to Lin, and make a condition of his restitution that his buddy JL has to be included in the deal. Both role players. Melo a bench forward, Lin a bench guard. They work out together and make something new out of their respective talents. #

It'd be interesting to have a BloggerCon-style mini-conference on grounds for impeaching Trump, with a note-taker, organizing the ideas into an outline in real-time. I see so many ideas, ones that would force Repubs in the House and Senate to vote against Mom and apple pie. One random idea you never hear in the news -- how about impeaching him for hate crimes, inciting violence against blacks, to begin with. Never mind that it would be a great GOTV tactic, and also for fund-raising, it would force Repubs to admit they are Nazis. The sooner they decloak, imho, the better. (BTW, I don't think Moscow Mitch can table impeachment. The Senate has to actually vote. Key point people overlook.)#

Here's the OPML source for Scripting News for July.#

BTW, socialized medicine isn't something to worry about because health care is socialist. Here's the explainer. #

Technically speaking this is a reporter being an enemy of the people. Sorry, but it's true.#

This may have finally decided me to support Warren. I've saying this about software and communication forever. Why would you get into this field if you didn't want to do outlandishly new and interesting stuff. There were no boundaries when I was getting started in the 70s. Yet so many people saw them. "People will always do X," they would say, where X was something everyone was about to stop doing, forever. #

A question. When Repubs do their gerrymandering, do they take voter suppression into account in their algorithm? Because if they do, they can be thwarted by new GOTV technology.#

2016: Peer-to-peer get-out-the-vote. Still a good idea. #

Elizabeth Warren is not afraid. #

I've been listening to audiobooks on my bike rides this summer. The next one is going to be a Vonnegut book. Should it be Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle or Breakfast of Champions. I've read Sirens of Titan so many times, I have it practically memorized. I'm thinking Breakfast because the narrator is John Malkovich. Slaughterhouse-Five is a great book, but I really dislike James Franco. #

I tried following the instructions for an automated campaign with Mailchimp but they never asked me whether it should be automated, that's where they lost me. I have an RSS feed to test with. I just want to try it out, if it works I'll pay $14 a month, but I need to add CSS. I'm not willing to create a paying account until I know it'll work. It's often difficult by design to get out of those deals. #

If you're more likely to work with someone because the connection has prestige that boosts your career, now is the time to stop doing that. Instead ask if working together helps preserve our freedoms and the lives of victims of our govt. That's the criteria that matters.#

Years and Years, a six-part miniseries on HBO starring Emma Thompson, is short-term science fiction, starting from today and going forward about twenty years. Centers on a complicated British family. It'll probably look very dated in five years. They don't imagine much that isn't already well underway. It's well-done enough that it pulled me through all six episodes, the first five I binged, in time to watch the finale last night. The message, you're really rich if you have a loving family, and everything else is bollocks. #

I've been using a private Facebook group to keep in touch with friends around the world on the new place I got in the country. It's not something I want to share publicly because I've learned that the personal stuff you share publicly is no longer personal. It's almost mathematical. But there are friends who I'd like to keep in the loop that don't/won't use Facebook. I sort of support them, but then again, I'm sure I pump Exxon gasoline into my car, even though the station has another brand name on it. Being alive in 2019 involves being on Facebook's human network, because it is the greatest single common denominator. But I do need a good way to communicate with those who aren't on it. I'm reminded of that every day. #

One of the reasons I'm going to have an email version of this blog is so I can encourage personal friends to read what I write here. Very few of them have a routine that involves reading blogs regularly. That's always been true. About the only relative or friend who regularly read my blog was my mother, and she's gone. #

Here's a custom search engine feature I'd like to have. Select a bunch of text in my editor. Choose a command that launches an image search on my blog for those words. I'm going to try it manually on this post to see what happens. #

If I were on the editorial board of Time, I'd choose The Troll as POTY for 2019. And probably for every year after that too. It's not that the top troll didn't take full charge three years ago, he did. But this is the year for a critical mass of people aware of the way trolls work. Maybe there is some hope for us? #

New header image from Doc Searls, of Niagara Falls. It looks like a scene from a 1930s color movie. Previous image was of the US women's soccer team in celebration. #

Dan Conover is one of the best observers of current events. I've urged him to publish on a blog with an RSS feed, and now he has. Please subscribe, read him, and encourage him. #

When you debunk the troll you might as well change your handle to Radio Trump because you're one of his broadcasters. #