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. #
If Trump were an actual reality show instead of a fake one, a group of expat neo-Nazi Danes would form a government-in-exile (offices in Trump Tower in NYC) and would do a deal with the US to sell Greenland for very little money. Remember, they are the reality show version, so they need the exposure. Win-win. Their Instagram influencer channel goes crazy, orders for Danish jack boots goes asymptotic (the next higher version of viral).#- Trump declares war on the fake (in reality TV world, but actual in real world) government of Denmark. US war ships blockade Copenhagen's port. There is a crisis in the UN Security Council (the reality TV version). Interesting confluence, at the exact same moment the real UN Security Council is meeting about how to re-exert its dominance. Meanwhile reality TV governments-in-exile form on Instagram for the UK, China, Russia and the Philippines. Ratings soar. #
- Trump announces his Christmas Special will take place at the Tivoli Gardens amusement park in Copenhagen. #
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. #
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. #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.#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.#
On Facebook my friend Scott Knaster, who I've known since early Mac days, wrote a comment about judging things and people. "A few years ago I decided to be really careful about using the word hate when I speak or write. E.g. I don't hate liver, or the Dodgers. It's a little thing, somewhat silly, but I like doing it." #- This is why it's easy to be friends with Scott. ⭐️#
- My reply, also on Facebook: "It's good Scott because you hear yourself say these things and deep down inside it creates dissonance. You're human. Judgement of others is way way above your pay grade. It's god's job, whatever that means, certainly not a mortal's job. #
- "I really began to understand this when people in my family started dying. Opinionated and judgemental people. Okay what of their judgement now? Who the fuck cares. And all that angst. They could have saved themselves the pain. Because what they thought re good or bad meant not a thing in the end. Which means to me that it didn't mean a thing when they were alive either."#
- PS: There are some topics where judgement is fun. Such as the baseball teams we love and our hate for their enemies. You can see that in Scott's comment about the Dodgers (he's a diehard Giants fan). I would forgive him for hating the Dodgers, because it's basically self-mockery. And I hate do the Yankees. But when you break it down, what is it exactly that I hate? The Bronx? Certainly not. The stadium? Well it is an inferior stadium, no one can argue otherwise. But hate? I'm a barking farting chihuahua, looking for a little love and understanding in my short life on planet Earth. My hate wouldn't mean very much. But when it comes to baseball and the Yankees, it's mine. It migh† be all I have, so I try to hold on to it.
#
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. #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. #
I've been on a private email thread among tech experts discussing how to preserve the Linux Journal site. It's mostly general ideas because none of us has the power to move the domain or the content.#- The site is still accessible through the original URLs, but there's a big question about whether it will remain there much longer. Here's the background via Doc Searls. #
- There's a consensus that porting the sit to archive.org is the answer. Jon Udell, a highly respected developer says on Twitter that redirecting to archive.org, as Doug Kaye does, is the "gold standard" for preserving sites. #
- I've always resisted this, instead preferring that we take steps to make the web itself more permanent. An analogy. Recently I visited the Vanderbilt Mansion on the Hudson River. I didn't visit an archive.org snapshot of it in 1940 when it was given to the government by the Vanderbilt family. There was value to me that it was in the original location, with the same view of the river and the mountains off in the distance. That it wasn't air conditioned. That the same roads that went there when the Vanderbilts were in residence still go there today. It was the same place the elite played on Saturday nights in spring and fall during the Gilded Age. #
- I feel the same about the web. But people seem to feel that an archive.org snapshot and redirected URLs is the best we can do. Maybe we should change our idea of what the web is. Maybe archive.org is the permanent version of the web. And then of course the next question is why not just publish originally to archive.org? I'm sure they've thought of this at the Internet Archive. #
- True story, Word of Honor:#
- Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.#
- I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch-22 has earned in its entire history?”#
- And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”#
- And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”#
- And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”#
- Not bad! Rest in peace!#
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. #
AWS is a gift. Somehow one of the big tech companies decided that the PC era was worth continuing, and instead of locking up all the useful stuff inside their corporate wall, they went into business providing those tools to any developer who wants to use them. #- They aren't the only ones, Digital Ocean is very good too, but AWS does more. Another difference is that Digital Ocean's docs are the best, and AWS's doc are in some ways the worst. #
- First, I have to say AWS docs appear to have all the information about their services. So I can't say their docs are the worst in all ways, they aren't. The problem is the way the docs are written and organized makes it too hard for a newcomer, or someone who only wants to use the most basic functions, slightly beyond Hello World, to find the information they need. First you have to understand everything about the toolkit, and it's presented in a disjointed fashion where the docs assume you already know everything, which makes it virtually impossible for you to get the data you want. Every time I master another AWS toolkit it seems I write one of these pieces to commemorate the experience and hope somehow to encourage Amazon to make it easier for me next time. 💥#
- Anyway, last year I finally got their email-sending functionality to work. The only problem was that every email I sent via their service arrived in Gmail with a huge warning that it could be from a hacker (I knew it wasn't, it came from me). It wasn't until a couple of days ago that I learned what was happening and what I had to do to prevent it. #
- First what was happening: I was sending an email from dave.winer@gmail.com through amazonses.com. Gmail said we got the mail, but noticed you didn't send it through gmail.com. Therefore the the big colorful warning. #
- What I had to do to prevent it: Send the email from another domain and convince Amazon that I was authorized to use that domain. #
- This is the place to note that nowhere in the Amazon docs do they say it this clearly. They try to tell you what to do on this page with lots of links that center around a protocol called SPF. It turns out that SPF simply requires you to create a TXT record on the domain with a string that says what mail servers are allowed to use it to send mail, and that would be enough to convince AWS that you're cool. It makes sense, it connects the domain with a mail server. The person who set up the TXT record obviously is a god of that domain. But when I set this up per their instructions AWS still called the sender address invalid. #
- Then it turns out that I have to use a command line tool to give me a special domain name, and an encrypted value. This contradicts the earlier docs. And I had no idea how to get the command line tool to do this (it seems this would have been a good place for their docs to tell you or link to a place that tells you, but they don't). #
- It was at this point that I put the project down for a bit, went on Twitter, checked email, went for a walk, did something to cleanse the mental palate, came back to the problem and found docs that provided yet another option for convincing AWS that I was authorized to use an email address. #
- There is an interactive way to do it through the control panel for SES. This method worked, and in a familiar way. You tell it what email address you want to use and it sends a message to that address with a link. When you click the link AWS authenticates the address. Everyone who uses the web in 2019 knows how to do this. Why didn't their docs say up front, hey there's a very very very easy way to do this. #
- So now I can send email through SES and the receiver won't get a warning because I'm playing by the 2019 rules for email sending and using AWS to send the email. I'm a happy camper except for the fact that all this michegas took two days to sort out. #
- Final note: When we were working on SOAP many years ago, we were dealing with a similar problem. Our colleagues at large tech companies were adding an alphabet soup of protocols on top of it, and just when you thought you understood what they were doing they added another few, and you were back where you started. I got fed up with this because I just wanted to deploy applications and didn't care about all this extra stuff, so Jake Savin and I wrote what we called A Busy Developer's Guide to SOAP. It defined a subset of SOAP that we had verified that works, and provided examples for developers of SOAP implementations to test with to be sure they worked with this subset. We published it, and then logged off the mail lists and got to work writing our blogging and RSS software. It worked. We got what we wanted and the big companies got to add all kinds of extra stuff. It seems to me that AWS is in a similar place. Developers like me who want to build apps, and systems people who want to cover all the bases. #
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. #
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 got yesterday's Scripting News looking pretty good in email. Learned a lot. Most of the problems were with how HTML email works these days, not Mailchimp. I needed to factor it out to see that. On the other hand they do some stuff that I can't abide, so this is a necessary exercise. :-)#
- Caveat: I only tested in Gmail running in Chrome on a Mac. I'm sure other browsers on other machines and other email clients will raise their own kind of hell. 💥#
- Some of what I learned:#
- You can only use standard web fonts. I'm using Arial for everything. #
- You can't include CSS files, all CSS has to be in-line in a <style> element in the <head> section.#
- Styles for <body> are ignored.#
- Don't use lists unless you want their indentation. There appears to be no way to override it. I was using lists, per standard best practices, for stories. I did a hack and replaced all <ul>s and <li>s with divs, and styled them the way I wanted them to look. (This will fuck up deeply nested lists in my stories. Thinking about how to avoid that. Come to think of it, it will probably fuck up this very list. Heh.)#
- I'm using AWS to send the mail, and I'm going to have to do some kind of dance to configure it to let me send email from an address I never use. I can't use my gmail address, because I am not sending the email from gmail. That is a new architecture of the net created by who-the-hell-knows since I last did any programming with email. Not saying it's bad, it was something I had to learn about. I suspect that it will be a rejiggering of the dance you have to go to get an HTTPS server, why not use the same dance? I will be learning more about this for sure. #
- PS: Here's the followup.#
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.#
Today comes news that Linux Journal is shutting down. They say they'll be able to keep the archive online for a couple of weeks.#- Now here's an opportunity to do the wind-down the right way. Linux Journal isn't the ordinary publication that lets the domain registration lapse and stops paying the storage bills for the archive. And then next year it's a porn site or a phishing destination. I'm assuming the last people at Linux Journal care about the accumulated know-how and history at the site. And this event raises the question of how to do such a wind-down best. #
- Ideally, the archive remains online and accessible at linuxjournal.com for the foreseeable future so all pointers into the site continue to work. This might not cost a lot of money especially if the site is largely static content. So the first question is this -- is it? And if so, how much is there? With that data we can estimate what the annual cost will be and then set about raising the money. I would be happy to kick in some myself. #
- If not, then perhaps we can find a way to enumerate the URLs and then set up a service that redirects them to the archive.org version of the content? #
- Or perhaps we could write a scraper that visits the pages, downloads a snapshot and stores them in static files. #
- According to the site we have a couple of weeks to do the research and moving. #
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.)#
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.#
On October 7, this blog will have existed and been continually updated for 25 years.#- There were times I took as much as a couple of weeks off, but I usually blogged when I was traveling. I have observations, things I want to write down, basically all the time. I don't see the blog as work, to me it's more like a part of living.#
- It may be hard to remember this, but in the early days net connections away from home were exceptional. You didn't get internet connectivity in hotels, there were no cell phones. I once went for a two-week massage course without being able to check my email once. Even listening to voicemail required a drive into town! #
- A lot of other things happened while this blog was running. Needless to say there were no blogs when it started. There was only email, no instant messaging. No RSS or podcasting, no Twitter, Facebook, Google. Amazon and Netscape were less than a year old. Microsoft tried to take over the web and failed. Steve Jobs came back to Apple and brought us the iPhone. And much more.#
- Anyway, I'm thinking about how I want to celebrate this. It'll be the first time I put any forethought into such a thing. We went through 5, 10, 15 and 20 years with very little in the way of observation. Not sure why this one is special, but it seems that it is.#
- One thing I'd like to know, are there any of the original email subscribers from 1994 around still reading the blog or on the net even? Does anyone have any of the original "Amusing rants from Dave Winer's desktop" emails? I'd actually like to know the exact time on 10/7/94 that the first email went out. #
- I'd also like to hear from people who read this stuff as it was booting up, as it started from a way to promote a friend's event, to a report on the event, to observations on tech products, to gestalts about holy shit this is an incredible medium posts. It didn't take long for it to become clear that something interesting was happening here. I wonder what it looked like from the other side of the net connection. #
- Some people said for sure what Dave is doing is preparing to compete with Stewart and Esther, charging $495 per year for a newsletter, and $2000 a year for an industry conference. I was never thinking about that, this blog has never had a business model. I never wanted it to, and I've written about why. I'm sure I could find it if anyone is interested. #
- Anyway if you have a story to tell about this, email me at dave.winer@gmail.com. What did it feel like to receive the emails. What did you think was happening? When did it occur to you that you could write like I was or did it? Anything that you want to say I'm interested in hearing as long as it isn't flamey. 💥#
- Ben Thompson tweeted: "The new Twitter for web is hilariously better than the old Twitter. It is amazing the degree to which people hate change."#
- I responded: "There’s a reason. We incorporate the mechanics of software at a subconscious level after repeated use. It’s not amazing that we hate change, it’s rational. Something that used to 'just work' now takes effort to control. Until we incorporate the new UI at a subconscious level."#
I continued: "I'm typing this on a QWERTY keyboard." Some standard UIs are so strong that they can never be changed. The original QWERTY design was optimized to prevent a mechanical typewriter from jamming. The keyboard on the iPad I typed that tweet on was completely implemented in software. Nothing that can ever get jammed. But the original reason it was designed that way is long forgotten. It's just the way keyboards are done. There have been attempts to change the design, but they proved too unpopular. #- Another example. I can drive any car because there are invariant UI standards for basic controls. I might not be able to control air conditioning or the radio, but I can steer, accelerate, brake, indicate a turn, the same way on every car. It would be chaos if every time you rented a car you'd have to re-learn how to drive. That said, try renting a car in the UK, Jamaica or Japan where everything is on the other side. It takes a long time to get used to it, even though at a conscious level the difference is simple to understand. #
- Yet another example, one I like to cite a lot -- imagine if they remapped the streets of a city. "Broadway will run east-west instead of the old inefficient north-south route. Now it will connect the Hudson and East rivers! You'll be able to use Broadway to get to Brooklyn or New Jersey. We encourage developers to build new tunnels that cross these two wonderful third-party opportunities." It doesn't work that way in real cities, but software platforms, managed by Google, Apple or Facebook (examples) often do. Nowadays even open platforms do. Ugh. #
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.#
- TL;DR -- everyone in tech could benefit from a semester of Computer Science, to help them understand how the products are created. Just like someone in the auto industry should know a bit about how cars work, or in the wine industry how grapes are farmed and turned into wine. #
I was just telling a story to Kevin Tofel over on Facebook about my first experiences dealing with analysts in the tech industry in the 80s. Kevin is a journalist and a consultant for tech companies. He plays a similar role to the early analysts, in today's context. He's taking Computer Science classes. I've been following along, remembering when the concepts he's learning now were fresh for me. It was a great time of discovery, I love how computers work, then and now -- and it's gratifying, in a way, that they still teach the same basic data structures. I guess they never change? I like that. Linked lists, balanced trees, hash tables and the like. I hope they have him build a compiler, that was the last mystery for me. Once I understood that there's no magic to it, I was ready to learn everything about computers. #- Anyway, it amazed me when I was starting out in tech that the expensive analysts had never taken a class in computer science. Didn't understand the basic components of a computer. I wasn't sure how to talk to them. I wanted someone to understand how our outliners worked, and how we had tried two internal models before finding a third that had the good qualities of both and none of the bad. I thought one of the analysts should understand how the increasing capabilities of PCs made these decisions easier, and how we were planning future products based on further expected improvements. When you come down to it, the algorithms Kevin is learning now were important performance considerations for the software we were making, especially in the 80s when computers weren't as capable as they are today. #
- Then I sold out to a medium-size tech company and they did their strategic planning by inviting one of the analysts in, asking what they should do, and then doing what they said. It was as if you ran a $100 million software company by asking Norm what products you should make. (Norm is Kevin's dog, cute and opinionated, but not too knowledgable about the economics of software.)#
- What I learned is this -- you have to relate to the analysts based on feelings. They have to feel as if you know what you're doing and then they'll echo what you say in your press releases to reporters looking for a quote. Another way to get them on your side was to pay them, by subscribing to the newsletters ($495 per year) and going to their conferences (another $2K per), and if you really were rich you could buy their consulting services (I suppose that the company I sold out to did). #
- What was interesting/funny is that they sometimes found the trends that mattered even though there's no earthly reason they should have. Maybe they tapped into some thread of knowledge that I didn't. 💥#
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.#
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.#
- Larry Yudelson, a longtime reader of this blog has a commercial Mailchimp account and offered to let me use it to test nightly emails for the blog. #
- I get one test per day. Reminds me of the punched cards days of mainframes, only worse. Turnaround generally was less than an hour back then. It's okay though, I find it somewhat relaxing to consider Mailchimp only once per day. #
- Here's a link to the email for yesterday's blog posts. I'm not sure how long that link will work, so here's an archived copy and a couple of screen shots. #
- A few notes follow.#
- I have been able to fix a bunch of the problems using CSS. But some I can't fix because they put the styles inline. No way to override those as far as I know. #
- If I could I'd get rid of the top two items. They repeat info included elsewhere. They're the kind of noise people rightly skip over. I like to take that kind of noise out. #
- They chose a really ugly color for links, and hard-code the font for headlines.#
- It's funny however that some of my overrides work when I view the email in the browser, vs in GMail. In GMail their styles dominate. In the browser, mine do. #
- The way my email address appears in the By line abuses the <author> element in RSS. If I wanted it to link to an HTML page about me, instead of providing my email address (a real mistake), I would have to break the <author> element. That's fucked up. They should have a namespace that calls for exactly what they want and not force people to break RSS to get a good result. Interop isn't any use if people don't respect it. #
- Anyway, I can't make it perfect, but I can make it okay. I'm thinking of trying another service that has an API and see if I can make it perform better. They do call this blog Scripting News after all. 💥#
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 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.)#
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.#
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. #
- A convention I've been following, might as well write it down. When I create a feed, its name is always something.xml, where something is usually rss.#
- Sometimes if it's a special version of the feed, the name might indicate that, for example nightlyRss.xml, which says something about the content (one item per day) and the format (RSS, in my case always 2.0).#
- And since it's become more common to have a JSON version too, if present its name differs from the XML-based feed only by the suffix. It has the same name except it ends with .json instead of .xml. So the JSON version of the example would be nightlyRss.json.#
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. #
- Someone reacts to something you said as if you said something trivial. Here are a couple of examples that counter what you said. You say but that isn't what I was saying. What were you saying? At this point, if you go any further, you're just going to have to repeat what you said, which is there at the top of the thread. So you say I just wanted to put that idea out there, not engage in a deep exploration of everything. Now some amount of abuse will come at you. Better just to say nothing, and probably best to unfollow the person or unfriend them. Delete all evidence that they exist.#
Finished this book today. Lessons learned, the Dutch started the bootstrap of American culture by colonizing Manhattan, and aren't given enough credit for it. Peter Stuyvesant was not much loved in the colony for good reason. Adrian Vanderdonk was the visionary. We tend to think of colonization of the US as starting with the British, but our legacy also comes from the Netherlands. Growing up in Flushing I was aware of the Dutch presence. They had farms, houses and civic buildings dating back to the 1600s all around our neighborhood. The Flushing Remonstrance was prior art for the Bill of Rights. #