If you want to be up on the latest developments emanating from this blog, be sure to watch the Scripting-News repository. We're using that space more and more. #
Warren Buffet bet on an index fund over a managed fund, and he was right, he's winning the bet. I even understand why, as I've bet the same way more or less. Governments are judged by two prices: gas and stock. If gas is down and stock is up, the president wins re-election. So guess what. Gas stays low and stock goes up. It's like free money, basically. Until there's a war or a bubble burst. But most of the time you just make money with an index fund. Now you have the secret too. 🍎#
If Kim Jong Un is Rocket Man, who's the Madman Across the Water?#
I wondered why people cared about Sean Spicer having his "brand" redeemed by being allowed to make an appearance at the beginning of the Emmy award ceremony on Sunday. I don't think his brand was helped or hurt. I think it's all mixed up with Melissa McCarthy's parody. Spicer will forever be a punchline. Some things probably will never matter. This imho is one of them. #If you think making others feel your pain is going to ease your pain, you're mistaken, and wasting effort. It just makes them tune you out. #
I listened to five minutes of the president's UN speech, expecting to be horrified, but I thought it was good. But only five minutes.#
- During the campaign last year, I pleaded with the press to listen about at least two things. #
- Email is inherently insecure. You're spreading your ideas all over the place when you send an email. Just because the person-to-person channel is guarded, it doesn't prevent the email from being forwarded, saved to disk and transmitted other ways, or through phishing, being stolen as part of a whole mailbox. When you secure email transmission, you're locking a window but all the doors are wide open. It's really just security theater. In other words, someone is taking advantage of your ignorance, and there's one way to fix that -- to stop being ignorant. #
- Trolls. We're being trolled. There's nothing new or novel about this. I know it's hard to not be fascinated, I could tell you stories of years I wasted dealing with trolls, thinking I could win by engaging. You can't. The only way to win is to just turn your back. #
- But we get the big things wrong. The frustration I feel about us always being late at figuring this stuff out, and digging the hole deeper and deeper, is one that other people who care about science and technology share. #
- Meanwhile Google is wiping out the history of the web, the few sites that remain from the early days, by doing it in a slow almost invisible way. I guess I have to give up on trying to stop this. I'm going to let them delete my sites over the coming years. I have done make-work for BigCo's in the past, countless times, thinking if I just do what the big company is forcing me to do, it'll all work out. Now I know that isn't true. It doesn't work that way. #
- We get the big things wrong. Accept it. We take the low road every chance we get. Assume it's being fucked up and be surprised when it's not. #
This is where I'm working on the docs for the Public Folder desktop app. It's not going to be an easy thing to set up. But it works. It's a beachhead.#
Speaking of Citibike, they sent an email asking if I'd like to be part of their Bike Angels program. Yes, of course I would. You're basically part a human load-balancer for bike stations. There's an app that shows you which stations need bikes and which have too many. If you move a bike for them, you get reward points. With enough points you can give friends (visiting from out of town for example) free days of Citibike. I'm exactly the kind of person to pitch this to. I'll do anything to get more people on the bike paths in NYC. #Checking to see if Fargo still works, and it does. I just see a lot of hits on Little Outliner and that gets me thinking. Did something change??#
I wonder if there's a class in high school or college that teaches how to have a respectful conversation. You learn to ask questions and listen instead of assuming you know what the other person is thinking. I say that because I'm pretty sure some people never, in their whole lives, understand why every conversation they have ends up in frustration and anger. Not only would it make the world work better, but I think there would be more happiness.#
I knew this was coming. I believe Repubs are splitting up now. Maybe one part will be very small, the part that goes with Trump. I think maybe the number of diehard Trump supporters is very small. Where were they all when called to the Mother Of All Rallies this weekend? It was pathetic. Not even a thousand people showed up.#- A new middle ground is forming with moderate Repubs and the Democratic voters who don't cast protest votes or stay home on Election Day, who understand that our system depends on compromise, on not getting everything you want because the other guy has to get some too. Obama would fit into this middle party.#
- Radical change like the failure of the USSR or Trump as POTUS have a way of shaking the order of things. It's like having a death in the family, or some kind of windfall of opportunity. It's a time for change. The assumption that we would change to fascism isn't the only way it can go. It could also turn out that the shakeup breaks the destructive partisanship in DC. Which is why, we as citizens of the US, who have an interest in support from government, also have an interest in bipartisanship.#
- I also hope it breaks the logjam of the journalism elite, who only listen to each other -- and it shows in their inbred thinking. #
An idea for Citibike. When you return the bike you get an email. If the bike needs repair, there should be a place on the confirming email where you can report the problem. (Especially if you return the bike one minute after checking it out at the same station.)#
- I can't point to Joan Walsh's rant about Facebook, because she posted it on Facebook, but here's my comment. #
- I'm no fan of Facebook, and I am a fan of Joan, but this is crazy talk. "Allowed" is Repub-like misdirection. Your phone allows you to say and do all kinds of nasty stuff. If you want your platforms to take an interest in the words we use, more than they already do, you're just inviting fascism in here.#
- I'd add, there are ways to prevent foreign nationals from breaking US laws using Facebook without condemning Facebook's past actions. #
- PS: Here's a screen shot of her post.#
- Here's the screen shot. #
- Let me explain what's going on there...#
- That's an Electron shell. The publicFolder package is running inside it. There's a web interface that shows you what's going on. #
- It's configured to have three concurrent processes, i.e. three simultaneous file uploads or deletions. All other operations are queued up, when a slot becomes available, the first in the queue is removed and processed. First in first out.#
- At least once a minute publicFolder gathers stats about the local folder and the S3 image. You can see how many files are in each and how much space they use. Obviously the numbers should be identical. #
- You can see how many uploads and deletions have been done since the app first launched, and how many GB of uploads. #
- Finally, there's a log of the last 500 operations. So you can scroll through them. The file name is linked to the public version, so you can see what's there (read a page, listen to a song, watch a movie, etc) by clicking the link. #
- If you want to review the source, here it is. #
- And here's a place for questions about publicFolder.#
Look at what's happening at the University of Wisconsin. A good school. I got my Computer Science education there. Professors without tenure who answer to politicians. #
A couple of small improvements to Instant Dave. 1. We now only show notifications for posts you are able to see in the timeline. 2. And we strip the HTML from the notifications, since they aren't correctly interpreted by the Notification Manager on the Mac. The new version, v0.5.4, is now available for download. #
On today's Daily podcast, an interview with Bernie Sanders about his bill to provide Medicare for everyone. The host asks why introduce the bill if it has no chance of passing. "You have to start somewhere." I agree. Obama always prenegotiated. Instead of saying what he really wanted, he proposed a compromise. The Repubs took advantage. Bernie says go for what you want. Accept less if you have to, but that's where the negotiating starts. Also gives Dems something to campaign on in 2018 and 2020. Good move. #
Morning Coffee Notes was the name of my early podcast, but before that it was a recurring title here on Scripting News. I created a MCN headline when I wanted to start over a new day. When the good morning message needed to be encapsulated so a new top item could appear. Today was one of those days, the first in a long time. #Re Apple's Face ID: "Who—for the price of a thousand bucks—owns whom?" Good question. We loved personal computers in the beginning because they were off the grid, out of the reach of the priesthood and the military industrial state. One of the companies that made these liberating products was Apple Computer, Inc. Woz's Apple, not the Apple of 2017.#
- At first I was ambivalent about Chelsea Manning as a fellow at HKS. But seeing all that it has stirred up, I think she would be good. You want lightning rods to help identify issues and boundaries. I understand the objections, let's get those people at HKS too, and discuss the issues, like scholars. That's what universities are for. #
- I know so many influential people in academia, many who were early participants in the web and blogosphere. We were there in the early days when online discourse held great promise for bringing the differences of the world together, to be accepted, de-weaponized. It turned out the opposite. We brought the differences together and enhanced them, and the rage spilled out into the real world. #
- Firing Chelsea Manning was a mistake, but an understandable one. Let's get the guy who quit to come back and spend more time at HKS, and get more people on either side of this divide, study it, civil discourse it to death, and see what we're left with.#
- I think the university is our way out of the intelletual logjam we're in. We have to use all the tools at our disposal, including academic discourse. #
Good morning everyone. Nothing special on the calendar for today. Apple's products are announced. publicFolder package is released. I'm thinking about new projects for the fall and beyond. Hope everyone is healthy and happy. #- Wouldn't it be nice to have a random emoji? An emoji that when viewed generates a random choice every time? I'm going to simulate it now by closing my eyes and randomly clicking on a short code on this page. 📌 #
- JavaScript is getting too big. I wish that the Ecmascript working group, instead of adding more obscure features that people will use (and therefore I have to understand to be able to follow their code), would work on a profile (or subset) of the language, that includes a single construct to do each thing, and no more. One way to write a function, for example. No conditional assignment (even though I use it, and think it's clearer in some cases). Languages that get too big become dinosaurs more quickly. What was the name of that language that was supposed to replace C and Pascal because it had everything everyone could ever want? #
- Sometimes I do picture searches to find things for the right margin. I stumbled across this picture of my friend Betsy Devine, long before I knew her. People who are beautiful, like Betsy, are beautiful their whole lives. #
Here's the first release of publicFolder. It's a Node app that runs on your desktop and keeps a folder in sync with a location on Amazon S3. We will have a simple-to-use shell soon, but for now, this is for experienced developers. I'm looking for help validating the software, to be sure it works, before building too much on top of it. I see this as essential system software, something we have to be confident in. If you have questions or comments, please post an issue on the repo. Here we go! 💥#The first question is (of course): "Why isn't it just like everything else ever?" BTW, no criticism intended. Positioning is important. It's the first thing I think of too when looking at something new. 👌 #
Something weird happened on my blog today, an S3 outage of some kind, 503 (slow down) when it tried to read the CSS file. I wrote it up in case it happens again, I'll find it when I search for it, hopefully.#
About funny wifi router names. I had a router ten or so years ago called Google Public Wifi. It was rumored that Google was going to deploy a huge free public wifi network in the Bay Area. I lived in an apartment in downtown Berkeley. I was hoping to start a rumor, maybe get it into Gizmodo or something, but it didn't happen. ;-)#
SparkyT found a problem with the new arrangement on Scripting News, which I was able to quickly fix. If you spot any further problems, please report. Thanks! 🍀 #
Late in the day I realized that Twitter truncated my video about the tab-clicking problem, so I uploaded it to YouTube where they show the whole thing. This video is more like a podcast than a concise demo. There's a little bit of philosophy in there. Hope you enjoy.#
I'm halfway through the second episode of Ozark. It's very weird, for sure. But it's very much a network type TV show, even though there is nudity, strong language, violence. I don't know if they can keep up the pace. My experience with shows that start really fast is that they run out of gas around the middle of the season. I'll keep you posted.#Thanks once again to the great Jonathan Chait at NY Mag for explaining why Bernie Sanders is still selling unicorns. Uncle Bernie is the worst hand-waver anywhere. #
Why I hate the press. They say oh Hillary why don't you shut up. Just go away. No one wants to hear what you have to say. But, hey Steve Bannon, that was great, can we have more. Haha you wear two shirts. We're smart, we saw that. We're funny, we have a great sense of humor. Never mind you've heard us say shit about Hillary for years, and we're kind of fascinated with Steve Bannon. #
How shocked the press are that Russians could plan events on Facebook for Americans in Idaho. What could possibly have stopped them? To stop that from happening, FB would also have to stop regular people from organizing using FB. You can see the problem with that hopefully.#
One thing I don't understand wrt North Korea. What if the US said to China and Russia and everyone else, fuck you, you guys deal with them. We're standing down. If North Korea wants to blow us up, go for it. But as soon as they launch their missiles at us, we will launch ours at Moscow and Beijing. Deal with it. And btw, fuck you.#
Work on Scripting News for some reason always gets dicey. That's why I've been shy of working on it for all the years. But I have to keep coming back to it. It's by far the most popular thing I have going on the net. Investment here is more productive than elsewhere. In any case, the problems are solved for now. We have tabs. The sidebar is gone, so we have scrolling with arrow keys again. Now I'm going to work on something else for a while!! Happy. ☀️#
What if Trump were to pardon white police officers of a crime, but not black officers? Would the pardon stand? What if he pardoned a police officer who had been found in contempt of a court order requiring him to stop violating people's rights? Which is more important -- the pardon or the rights that are being violated? And what happens to the court's power to protect us if the president can pardon people to circumvent legal court orders? Turns out there is a case for vacating Trump's pardon of Joe Arpaio. And this practice is even being given a name: TrumpLaw. #
- I just spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why the tabs on the new home page don't work on an iPhone. I decided to ask you all if you had any ideas, so I recorded a video to demo the problem, and outline my theory. Also took out the sidebar, and replaced it with a directory in the About outline. It was responsible for flakiness elsewhere. I'll probably add it back in a year after I've forgotten the problems it caused. (It's even worse than it appears.) Here's a place to discuss. #
- #
- Update: Sahil Khan figured it out. The element #idPageTopText is in front of the tabs, invisibly. It's not a problem on the desktop because there's more space. The fix was easy. Thanks to Mr Khan. (More proof that you often can't see what's right in front of you. In this case literally.)#
Serious fake news. You hear this idea all over the place. The Russians couldn't have known to target Facebook users without help from Americans. This is a crazy idea. Russia is on the Internet. Data moves around the net very easily. Someone in Moscow could have just as much info about America as someone in Boston. Crazy. #Melo, if you want respect, take a chance. No glory for you available on the Knicks. Find a cause worth fighting for. #
Got a report that clicking on tabs on mobile devices does not work. I am able to reproduce it here. I will look into that first thing tomorrow, with a fresh start. It's been a long (successful) day! #
Update at 12:40PM Eastern: I replaced the old JS and CSS files with the new ones that support the tabbed home page. Here's an example of a month archive page, and a day archive page. They seem to work. I see a few CSS glitches. (The color of the wedges on the Twitter inclusions are wrong.) I still have to add the fix for arrow keys and Page Up and Down. #
The corner is turned. There are tabs on the home page. Still loose ends to tie up. I have to edit the links in the sidebar and on the About tab. Re-integrate the new JS file with the one used prior to this turn. Same with CSS. But the heavy lifting appears to be done as of 11:52AM Eastern. Knock wood. Praise Murphy. I am not a lawyer. It's even worse than it appears. 💥#
I tried watching the Apple keynote. I closed the window when he started talking about the new visitor center. I'm sorry, I don't care. #- Briefly, I don't expect to want any of them. #
- I have a watch, an iPhone 6, two iPads (one mini, one medium), an Apple TV, a PowerBook, two iMacs. #
- Apple has made some compelling and useful products, but for now I'm happy with what I have. Let's see if anything announced changes that. I love computer lust. It's been a while. #
I'm working on a new version of the Scripting News home page. It has three tabs, Blog, Links and About. I was able to bring the tabs back without making too much mess. I really want a clean reading experience. The other big change is that it will now require JavaScript be turned on. I can't keep two versions going and do all the other stuff I have to do. Pretty much everything on the web requires JS nowadays, and there is the RSS feed that has full text of everything, so you will be able to read the blog if you really want to. #It's a good day to think about web history. There was a lot of news on this day 16 years ago. My archive for that day is still here, but many of the sites I linked to that day are gone. "I've tried to sound the alarms. Every day we lose more of the history of the web. Every day is an opportunity to act to make sure we don't lose more of it. And we should be putting systems into place to be more sure we don't lose future history." I wrote that two years ago. We're not doing better, we're doing worse. This is the web equivalent of climate change. Every non-backward-compatible "improvement" to the web kills more archives. #
When I hear about seven people killed at a Dallas Cowboys watch party I think of this speech by Milwaukee police chief Ed Flynn on how loose gun laws ruin lives. "Stupid disputes that would have been fist fights are now shootings." What are the chances that that's what happened in Plano last night?#
Davis asks good questions. Like this. "Are journalists more likely to view Amazon in positive light now that Bezos owns the Post? Perhaps even subconsciously?" Yes, of course. Because journalists love to get paid. (As we all do.) It's the ultimate form of recognition. Now Bezos is not only in a position to reward journalists, he is able to endow a journalist with enough money so you can do things that have nothing to do with making money. He can put you on the Woodward-Bernstein platform. Bezos is A-number-one-journalism-sugardaddy right now. The previous #1 was Pierre Omidyar, but now not so much because his once-promising journalism venture didn't turn out to be all that great. #I have another story to tell about influencing journalists. In the 80s I ran a commercial software company, we advertised in most of the industry weeklies. I noticed that the adjectives we used to describe our product were turning up in stories the journalists wrote about us. Journalists read the ads in their own pubs. Not surprising, nor wrong. But I doubt most journalists would admit it. #
Om asks if the top US startups are really startups. If they are, we need a new word for what we used to call startups. #
- Yesterday on the UX thread, kwebble says:#
- After opening scripting.com it's not possible to navigate up/down with the keyboard using the up/down or pageup/pagedown cursor keys. I guess focus is not on the content are, but somewhere else.#
- He's right. This is reproducible. Now, how to fix it?#
- I tried setting the focus to the divPagebody element on startup, but that didn't do it. This is a hard problem to search for, but other people must have encountered it. I don't think I ever have. #
- If you have ideas or pointers, please post a comment on the GitHub issue thread. Thanks!#
This is a good time to comment on user-experience issues with the Scripting News website, because I'm actively working on little cleanups and additions. One question came up, could we have a link from every archive page back to the home page? It turns out there is a link, it's at the top of the page. If you click on the name SCRIPTING NEWS it will take you to the home page. Here's a screen shot. Some things are so "in your face" you can't see them. Happens to me all the time. #
The thing people don't realize about storm surge, and they don't really explain it on TV, is this. If the ocean surges 1 mile inland, and you were on the beach before the surge, now you're 1 mile out to sea. In normal times you'd be pretty fucked if someone dropped you in the ocean a mile from shore. But you're in a hurricane. Huge waves. There's no one to rescue you. And (this is the part that will kill you) there are deadly objects in the water like buildings and trees and power lines, even a rope can entangle you and make it impossible for you to swim. And if you can't swim and you're a mile from shore, that's the end of you.#
Assuming the republic survives Trump, the next president we elect will likely be the opposite of Trump, that is -- not a celebrity, not flamboyant, an insider, someone who will shut up and do the job. So when you hear the Dems should nominate someone like George Clooney or even Al Franken, remember next time around we'll more likely want a bureaucrat, someone like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Let the government govern. Let's get the EPA back on track. Health care for everyone. Rejoin the Paris climate change accord. Etc etc.#People say it's going to be hard to run against Trump. Maybe I'm missing something. Suppose the leading car company produced a car that exploded when you turned the ignition. Or an airline that crashed every flight. A bank that lost all your money. It would be easy to launch a competitor to those companies, why is it any more complicated to run against an incompetent president? You just have to say it clearly. That seems to be the hard part, which is weird because that's what politicians are supposed to be good at. #
After Katrina I visited Biloxi/Gulfport to see results of 25 foot storm surge. I took a lot of photos.#
Yes, Twitter and Facebook are infested with fake people. Journalism can create new aggregations of news that aren't. Start with your bookmarks and River5. Let's go!#
To Scott Pruitt, if you don't like to talk about climate change you should get another job. Your current job is all about climate change. 24-by-7, 52 weeks a year, rain or shine. #
The security breach at Equifax is much more than a security breach. You could say it's 1/2 of a meltdown of the economic system in the US. #- I haven't heard anyone say exactly what information has escaped, let's assume it's the worst, it's all the info needed to identify a person. Maybe their credit history, although with this information you could access anyone's history. So why would you bother locking your account so lenders know not to give you any loans? Is anyone going to trust that info in the future? I can't see why they would. #
- I haven't seen anyone suggest you change your password this time. It's usually pointless advice, but this time it would be especially idiotic. You can't change your birthdate, social security number or mother's maiden name. #
- I say this is only 1/2 because the other half would be a meltdown of the money system. Suppose you went to the ATM to get some cash and found you didn't have an account. Or your brokerage account was cleaned out. Or you learn that your mortgage payments have been going to Russia and you no longer have a place to live. #
- When that happens, and I can't imagine it won't, it will be a civilization-level meltdown. If you think the US govt is doing anything to prevent it, well I'm not very confident about that. #
Happy to report that more people are tuning in to Instant Dave. Now we can start learning and developing. It will be an interactive experience. I want to create a new kind of environment, to stimulate thinking and to get ideas for new features, shaping what I hope will become a new medium.#- Naturally people ask how can they get their own? And that's something I don't know how to answer, at least not yet. But the name suggests that in addition to Instant Dave there will be other Instants. #
- I'd say the first step is to blog, and then start a linkblog (like this) and use a photo service like Flickr that has RSS support. The idea is to aggregate them all into one easy to follow stream. #
- What software to use? For blogging, obviously there are lots of choices and they all support RSS which of course is the basic technology behind the Instant movement. Your podcasts will have an RSS feed (or else they are not podcasts and shouldn't be calling themselves that). For linkblogging I recommend my own Radio3. And to aggregate them all into one stream, try River5 or Electric River. #
- And of course use Instant Dave. If you're going to be an actor you want to soak up as much other people's acting as possible, so you can steal ideas from them. Blogging is no different. 💥#
I did a video demo of Electric Pork, on Twitter. When you post a video direct to Twitter it works better than linking to a YouTube video. I had never tried it, never even thought to do it before.#
Really good piece on Gizmodo about why RSS is the best way to get news. Basically you see what the news orgs publish, not what's popular or what Facebook wants you to see (for whatever reason). Gizmodo lists popular RSS readers. Let me put in a plug for my own Electric River, which brings the power of River5 (a server app) to the desktop. You get even more control when you run the aggregator. #I'm looking at bringing back the tabs on Scripting News. Technically it's straightforward, however on a blog, it raises a question. What about people who browse with JavaScript turned off? Tabs are implemented with JavaScript. I can make the page work as it does now for people without JavaScript, but that means it will be ugly for people with JavaScript turned on. Since I'm one of them, I resist doing that. I'd like to get an idea of what you all think, so I started an issue for this on GitHub. #
Davis Shaver is getting started with PagePark and wonders how to make SSL work in PagePark. I would like to know if there's anything I need to change to make it work. While I am opposed to the dance Google is trying to make us all do, I want my product to work for everyone it can work for. In other words I don't like to do strategy taxes if possible. #
Interesting piece this morning by Jonathan Chait at NY Mag about why there might be a Dream Act that becomes law now, even though they've been trying in Congress for 16 years. One item he didn't mention -- as Nixon was able to open American relations with China because he was such an outspoken anti-communist, Trump might be able to get Congress to do this because of his rep as anti-immigrant. The reasoning goes "If it's ok with Trump it must be ok."#One more thing. When Chait took a vacation in August his presence was missed. He's such a lucid thinker and writer. He explains things so well, and finds connections everyone else misses. #
Sometimes when people misunderstand a product or feature they give you ideas for how it might work. Creativity sometimes comes just from not knowing something. Another reason it's important to listen, you never know how new ideas will arrive. #
A magnificent thread on how JavaScript got its name. Gets me thinking about paths not-taken. Frontier is of course built around a language and a database. I wanted to call the language Juicy, because it was like C, and Doug and I are Jewish. I was voted down. Too colorful I guess. But I like color in my product names. ThinkTank was probably my best name, and I didn't even come up with it. Mike Conner, a guy from Apple, in 1982, came up with it. Those were the days. I think Public Folder might be a pretty good name. Although I really love Small Picture. I still have the domain of course. #
A funny thing happens when I criticize the Ari Melber show on Twitter, I sometimes get a response from Ari Melber. I wonder if it's Melber Actual typing. Yesterday he had a bit about an important Trump appointee and the guests were smart and had a lot to say, but they cut that short to do segment on dating in the Age of Trump which I think is ridiculous. BTW, it appears Trump has appointed someone to run Civil Rights at DOJ who is like his appointment to run the EPA, someone opposed to the idea of civil rights. If there's more to know about this, I want to know it. #
According to this blog, the word podcast was added to the OED in August 2005. So if you think the idea of podcasting arrived fully developed in 2015, well the process took a bit longer. 🎈#
Reminder to self: Small fixes on Instant Dave. Strip markup from desktop notifications. Do something to gracefully handle changes to a user's Twitter icon. #
BTW, Instant Dave is two-way. If you log in, you can post messages to the flow. At this time only I will see your message. Everyone sees my replies. I know it's awkward. But we're just getting started. As I've said before I'd love to see other sites take a similar approach: Instant Axios, or Instant Daring Fireball, as examples. Some blogs and news sites form communities. We all have multiple flows now. This project's goal is to learn about joining the flows and having a platform for communities to grow, outside the silos. So we are not limited by their vision of who we are. 💸 #
- Rotten Tomatoes is a brilliant name because you expect nasty reviews. People are attracted to flames. So if you advertise with a flamey title like Rotten Tomatoes, that automatically makes you want to go there. #
- The best YouTube channel would be person-on-the-street interviews with people who tell you about companies that screwed them. Set up a camera in Times Square or in front of Trump Tower and start recording. Instant hit.#
Instead of watching Hardball on MSNBC I watched the last hour of Frost/Nixon, time well spent. Great movie. And Trump totally rehabs Nixon.#
Working my way through Narcos, season 3. At first it didn't hold my interest, but four episodes in, I'm getting hooked. Also looking forward to the next season of Bojack Horseman, on Netflix, on Friday. #
Trump tweets as if he were a spectator not the president. The most shocking realization when I did jury duty was that I was the jury. I had spent so much time reading and watching courtroom dramas that it snuck up on me that the body of the trial was in my own body. After years of tweeting at and about presidents, I don't think El Orange has yet realized he's the guy in the hot seat. #Ken Smith reported a problem with Instant Dave that I was able to easily reproduce and the problem appears to be fixed in v0.5.3, which is now available for download. Thanks Ken! 🎈#
For JavaScript nerds, the problem was this. Whenever a new item came in or was updated, I ran a bit of magic jQuery code that caused all links to open in an external window, outside the Electron context. If you let the app run for a while, one click would open five tabs (same link five times). Eventually one click would open 1000 tabs. The problem was fixed by adding a single line of code, to unregister the click handler before re-registering it, assuring that there's only one handler for each link. Here's the new code. #
One year ago today, a bit of news about Facebook that made me realize once and for all that they don't care about the world outside of Facebook. Maybe they don't know that about themselves, it's possible they're not paying attention, but the net-effect is the same.#
Last night I got a very NakedJen-like text from NakedJen, an effervescent effluvience of love and Jen-ness. She has emerged from Burning Man, so my work appears to be finished with the Burner News page. A bunch of stuff happened while the Burners were offline: Trump's transgender ban, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, Hurricane Harvey destroyed Houston, the fourth-largest American city, North Korea launched an ICBM-like missile over Japan, Mattis decided for now transgender troops will stay, a Utah nurse is arrested for preventing police from taking blood from an unconscious patient (an important story, more so since Jen is from Utah), Walter Becker of Steely Dan died, North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb, Trump rescinds DACA, Hurricane Irma is heading towards Miami, Hurricane Jose is right behind it.#
I'm getting close with the Public Folder project. Here's the concept. If you can get it running on your desktop, you can have any number of simple-to-write publishing systems running there too. It takes care of exactly what's needed for a person to publish without any opinion about the software you use to do the writing or rendering. #Dropbox was quite close to the idea of Public Folder, but once it became popular they pulled back from it. As I understand it, if you created your account after 2012, you didn't have a public folder. I did, because I was an early adopter. It was good, but had missing features, which I lamented here on this blog many-a-time. If only they had seen Dropbox as a publishing platform, but they didn't. They finally turned the feature off on Sept 1, four days ago.#
Another precursor of Public Folder was upstreaming in Radio UserLand, released in 2002. PF should be a lot more efficient and powerful, but that said, upstreaming was pretty good, and Radio -- through upstreaming -- was one of the pillars of the early blogosphere, and an interesting web product as well. Radio had a CMS built in. This time around I have created that as a separate module. I'm pretty sure any static site generator that runs where Node runs will be compatible with Public Folder. #
One more thing. There's a placeholder site for the project, and there will also be a public GitHub repo, and more. ;-)#
I put flowers on my blog today to honor the life of Ted Rheingold, who died yesterday. Cancer. He wrote about it on the web, of course. A natural-born blogger. Apparently Ted asked for a new laptop sticker, and it's a good one. Looks like a clematis flower with a simple message -- Enjoy Every Day. #What we used to call tweetstorms are now call threads, and they're huge. There is no better way to post a thread than Electric Pork, a Mac app that chops a blog-post-length tweet into a beautiful thread, written by yours truly, the author of this humble blog. 💥 #
Another huge hurricane is bearing down on the US, and the best our president can think to do is deport decent young Americans.#
Quickly turned on @msnbc. They're in heavy-war-selling mode. Crisis. Repubs out of patience. Turned it off.#
Hey instead of "taking back" this or that, how about we get good people in the important jobs and work on making things better.#
I stumbled across this gorgeous picture I took 14 years ago at the beach in Florida. That's one of the reasons I have a blog. So I can leave a memory of this on the web. #
Politico: "The U.S. needs hundreds of millions of dollars to protect future elections from hackers — but neither the states nor Congress is rushing to fill the gap." Our president wants to build a physical wall though. #
I really went to town on the s3BigUpload demo app. Not sure why. Hope someone finds it useful. Post an issue if you have feedback. #
I worry what will happen when and if NPM or GitHub add business models to the services they provide. I pay GitHub a monthly fee, to help be somewhat sure my repos are not filled with ads or made to comply with some rule I don't support. It's so funny to see the press just begin to tune into the power tech companies have to interfere with our creative work. I've been ringing this bell for a very long time. #
If you want an idea of what can go wrong, read this Ars Technica piece on the downfall of SourceForge, which was GitHub's predecessor. #
Here's something I learned the other day. I have this awful pain in both my feet in the heel that happens whenever I walk. That's right when I walk. I thought oh shit this is going to mean surgery for sure. I looked it up on the net. Turns out lots of people get this.#- They recommend special shoes or orthotics, which means a trip to a bunch of special doctors which is something I totally hate, because they all get their money, and that means tests and all kinds of shit that you know is going to come out false.#
- Anyway, I thought it might have something to do with the way I sat, so I tried to adjust the chair I sit in when I work, and realized as I bent down that I was getting this nice good feeling from the part of my heels that hurt. And the rest of the day, no pain! Turns out I needed to stretch the muscles.#
Steely Dan was a favorite of mine in a wonderful and uplifting period of my life, when I was a grad student in Madison in the mid-late 70s. I was finally an adult, in love, lots of friends and accomplishments everywhere. Firing on all cylinders. One of the most prime periods of my life. I guess I'm going to listen to a lot of Steely Dan in the next few weeks. Kind of the way we listened to a lot of Prince last year. Donald Fagen wrote about his friendship with Walter Becker. We all were friends with him through their creativity. #Not focusing on Trump so much these days. I think he's a known entity. More of a void than an presence. For now, we're careening on the brink of nuclear, economic and environmental disaster. I'll let you know if that changes. #
It was driving me crazy. I had used a picture of a frog in a suit in the right margin of yesterday's edition, and I didn't know what book it came from. I got the image from the archive of Scripting News. Sometimes I just look through images I've used before based on concept, and see what pops up. On Twitter, Debra Scherer suggests the character might be from Wind in the Willows, a book I must have read as a child. He could be Mr Toad. Regardless there are some outstanding images from the book, and I hope to use many of them as decorations here. #You should try Instant Dave. Launch it and leave it in the background. If I'm working I'll be there with you. I love getting comments and likes there.#
If you were using Dropbox's public folder feature, it stopped working earlier today, about five hours ago. The change was announced long in advance, but today was the day it actually stopped working. I was using the public folder of my Dropbox in a few of my apps. It was a great feature, a kind of interprocess communication for Everyman. I wish they had gone the other way and enhanced it, but I understand that it wasn't in their longterm direction. However it is important in my longterm direction. I'm working on a desktop product called Public Folder that does more or less what it used to do. I plan to share the product. #Fresh papaya and lime is the best.#
I've written about Sources Go Direct so many times, thanks to Ken Smith for digging up this one. I think it's the most concise explainer. #
What if we formed a human chain to let people know it's time to re-enroll for their Obamacare? That would be some serious and easily doable activism. If we can't organize ourselves to use the health care system we have, then we don't deserve a health care system, imho.#
All of a sudden reporters realize that Google pushes people around and suppresses ideas they find threatening. As I like to say "it's even worse than it appears." I've been reporting this here since the inception of this blog in 1994. Google continues a long tradition of tech companies holding back progress to maintain their dominance. The web and blogging and have allowed us to circumvent this, to some extent. BTW, of course it's not just Google. There's a continuous chain of bullshit tech companies going back to the beginning. They all do it. #It's hard to believe that IBM is proud of Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. It was their patent on mediocrity. How many IBM people hid behind that excuse for not doing something they could do, that the market wanted but they could obstruct because they were seen as the safe non-controversial choice. Of course eventually this ran out, I was happy to be there when it happened. They tried to FUD Windows and Compaq and guess what, it didn't work. 💥#
- I've reconnected with Chris Allen, a friend from the Old Mac Days, the mid-late 80s. We used to hang out at the WWDC back when it wasn't such a juggernaut and pretty much anyone could buy a ticket. Chris went on to develop SSL with Netscape, and has become a guru in blockchain technologies. Yesterday on Facebook I asked him what an ICO is:#
- I want to know what an ICO is. I saw you write about it earlier today. The amounts of money are astounding. Are they real? Can you turn the coins you get into US dollars that you can use to hire people and buy office furniture? Or does the value only exist in a theoretical sense? Or something else entirely?#
- And Chris had an answer, and it was as I expected, direct and honest.#
- To avoid securities regulations, an Initial Coin Offering is a cryptographic asset that can be used to purchase access to a network or a service. The computer equivalent of buying a token at the entrance of an arcade that can be used to play arcade and video games.#
- The big change lately is that due to standardization you can easily issue these tokens in exchange for Ethereum or Bitcoin. Once purchased, they can easily be traded back using a cooperative currency exchange. You can then trade these back out for fiat.#
- There are many regulatory questions: many may fail the Howey Test thus are actually securities after all and thus issuers, exchanges and sellers may be subject to fines and jail time. Others claim to not be subject to US law as they prohibit sales to US citizens.#
- I think there are valid uses for cryptographic tokens, but am quite concerned that many of these are little more than scams. Others are well intentioned but not well thought out.#
- I personally want more tools to support shared commons, and current ICOs are about halfway there. Thus my focus more on TokenEthics.#
Welcome to the last day of August 2017. #
New Orleans existence was based on the assumption that the levees wouldn't break. They broke. What assumption is your existence based on?#
Quartz asked for ideas about how to cover the hurricane and its impact on Houston. Set up newsrooms in places where the victims are and let them write the news. Make sure their story gets through directly to people outside Houston. Their thoughts are potentially very interesting. I sometimes have to turn off the sound on TV accounts because the words are so insipid. Usually from paid reporters. But I watch because the images are so astonishing. #
Interesting column in USA Today. The voter suppression guys figured out if they act nice to the people they're suppressing the press wouldn't spin it as racism and white supremacy. Trump, by being so overtly racist, could spoil it for them. #
I am a man of many mottos. Like "Don't slam the door on your way out" or "It's even worse than it appears." The new one is about parties. I don't care how someone got to the party, as long as you're here, I'm your fellow party-goer. (Too long to be a motto, I know.) The net culture really needs to absorb this one. The punishment should fit the crime. Joel Osteen didn't open his Houston church to people made homeless by Hurricane Harvey. Twitter and Facebook exploded in rage. He relented. Now it's time to stop complaining. He came to the party. He's helping. If you're still giving him shit, you have become the problem. #It's getting close to the Emmies. How do I know? I'm seeing pitches for the nominees. Shows I love like Fargo and Game of Thrones. And Saturday Night Live. Of all the SNL nominees my two favorites by far are Kate McKinnon and Tom Hanks. McKinnon did so many great skits, as did Hanks (as a guest host) but the one I liked the best, the one I totally adored, was Tom Hanks as the redneck on Black Jeopardy. Not just because it was funny but also because it was generous at a time when generosity is in short supply. #
- This a really nerdy post. #
- ES6 is the newest version of JavaScript, and it's gradually making its way into online docs and browser runtimes everywhere. #
- I'm starting to use one of its features, and am reluctantly having to use others, and looking forward to one being more broadly deployed. #
- The feature I am using is let. It should have been the way declarations worked everywhere. You should be able to very precisely determine the scope of a variable by its placement. The crazyass way var worked in JavaScript was one of its worst features. let fixes that. I can't see why you would ever not use let. Except of course if you're using const. Another feature, borrowed from Pascal (and #define in C) that's very useful. It's already caught a bug for me. When something really can't change you should use const.#
- Even though names don't matter, I think let should have been called local. It's not clear from the names why let is local and var is more global. What's really going on is you're declaring a local, so it should have been called that. Regardless I'm happy to have what I regard as a bug fix. (The bugs caused by the way var is specified combined with the way asynch works can be truly spectacular.)#
- The arrow notation for callbacks was uncalled for (heh awkward wording). What's the savings? Not having to include the word function? Really. We had a standard way to document callbacks. Now we have two ways. That's going in the wrong direction. (And we have two more ways, see the next section.)#
- I don't like the new async version of promises which was a flawed improvement on callbacks. I think I don't mind callback hell so much because I edit in an outliner. If I wrote in a flat editor I can imagine I'd be desperate for something to unwind the indentation. As an outliner user, it's kind of cool in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way. The problem is that people are going to ship sample code using all the fanciest new contraptions, making things that you want to be easy more complex. It's like using CoffeeScript for sample code. Please, just stick to basic common JavaScript (an idea that might be worth exploring).#
- And the feature I'm anxiously awaiting are modules in the browser. I wish there were exactly Node packages. They seem to be inspired by them instead. In any case modules will improve my client coding enormously. They take me back to my UCSD Pascal days in the late 70s which had units, which were even nicer (if I recall correctly) than today's modules. Nonetheless the ability to create your own APIs as a routine matter is essential for good development. #
- So much of the evolution of JavaScript has been an attempt to humanize the wrong way it does async. All that bullshit should have been buried in the runtime. That would be orders of magnitude faster and less error-prone for the human beings writing the software, and I bet you can even do optimizations in the runtime that make it faster. JavaScript will never be as easy as other Algol-like languages, and none of the patches and weird constructs will fix that, they only succeed in making it even more complex. That said, you can pry the JavaScript from my dead cold hands. This is the language I'm using, and that's that. #
- No doubt my friend Allen Wirfs-Brock who was the editor of the ES6 spec will have explanations for all this or at least stories to go with why they did what they did. ;-)#
- Update: As predicted Allen Wirfs-Brock had some great stories to tell about the development of ES6. #
I understand why people like Trump. When I was a teen and into my early 20s I used to love Imus in the Morning on WNBC in NY. He was incredibly rude. That's what I liked about him. The creativity of his rudeness. I outgrew it. #
I think of the Daily podcast as the NYT podcast. It's really good enough to be thought of that way. And you can tell that the people he interviews, who are all NYT reporters, feel that way too. It wasn't like that at first. I don't think they knew why they were doing it. Now I think the Daily must be catching on inside the NYT. The reporters are all very different people. Yesterday's was especially illuminating. I love seeing a venerable old newspaper transition to another great new medium. To help define that medium. It continues to be a great podcast. Mazel tov.#
Listening to the interview with Joe Arpaio yesterday on the NYT podcast, I realized very clearly why Trump likes him. They come from the same place, as do I. I went to school with kids who were like Trump, kids who had KKK/Nazi parents, who felt they were of superior stock. In fact, Trump sometimes reminds me of people in my own family. #
- Spoiler alert, don't read the rest of this item. {#
I re-watched the season finale. #- I couldn't remember why they needed to convince Cersei of anything. Someone should have said to her that the dragons could wipe out the Lannisters and all of Kings Landing in a few minutes so she should just STFU. #
- I guess they wanted to get the big scene with Cersei and the Mother of Dragons in the same place so Cersei could spit and sneer. #
- Seriously, no one was impressed. #
- That said, the part with Arya and Sansa was just beautiful. I get goosebumps as I write this. Both the characters and the actors have become amazing at the same time. #
- I also had the thought that I would like Donald Trump to have a trial like the one Littlefinger had. #
- }#
- End of spoilers.#
- Something that would be cool is a group of people who transplant items from inside silos like Facebook and make them accessible from the rest of the web.#
- I just asked Lisa Williams to post one of her items on a blog, usually I don't, because it gets people upset. I was going to ask Enoch Choi also because I know he believes in the web, but he's busy, and the web stuff is probably very tangential to what he's doing right now.#
- Think of it as a Web Corps. Very simple, transplant stuff outside Facebook so it can be accessed everywhere.#
- Update: Lisa posted her item on her blog (she was already working on it when I asked) and I transplanted Enoch's post on this.how. So we're up and running. There's no "official" place to transplant to, as long as it has a URL that's publicly accessible. ;-) #
- This is for my lovely friend nakedjen when she returns from Burning Man.#
- http://this.how/burnerNews/#
- It's a log of only the most important events that have happened while she is on the playa.#
- It's been a very interesting exercise for me, the idea of recording only the most important news, the stuff a person at Burning Man needs to know about when they return.#
- I did not include, for example, the end of Season 7 of Game of Thrones, even though it's very consequential for some. It's not urgent. Hurricane Harvey and the pardon of Joe Arpaio are essential news. And North Korea launching a missile over Japan.#
Sarah Larson's recaps of Game of Thrones episodes are the best. The one for the season finale is no exception. "At this moment, my neighbors learned what it sounds like in my apartment when they are watching the Super Bowl: loud, delirious bellowing and overjoyed profanity." Indeed. My neighbors as well. There is that one delicious moment in this episode that makes all the suffering if not worthwhile at least understandable. #Two compelling lifestyle fantasies. An Italian ghost town you can buy for €250K, or a Joshua Tree art house for $3 million. I used to have fantasies of living in places like these. To the person who lives in the town by themself or in the beautiful desert house far away from everything, show them a picture of an apartment building in NYC and point to one window and say "you could live here" and they'd get all excited about all the people they would see every day just by walking around. The grass is always greener on the other side, happiness is always just around the corner.#
- See Krugman's bit: Fascism, American-style. I reject that. Fascism is fascism, whether it's in the US or Germany. Same thing. Adding an American-style softens it. Makes it seem more acceptable. Oh it's like baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. That must be better. #
- I also don't get when they call them neo-Nazis. What does the "neo" part mean? Something innovative and new? It's just Nazi. They wear 88 pins, they chant German Nazi slogans. If it sounds and looks like a Nazi, assume it's a Nazi. #
- One more thing -- they call Trump a Nazi-sympathizer. Why be so generous. What distinguishes a sympathizer from an actual Nazi? We've been doing this with Trump at every stage, pretending he's not as bad as he clearly is.#
Survey: Does President Trump represent American values?#
- Chris Wallace at Fox, interviewing Secretary of State Tillerson, stumbled across a truth. Our current president speaks only for himself. The people and government of the United States have different values, says Tillerson. #
- #
Alt-right is a bullshit name. They wear Trump shirts and hats. These are Republicans. Don't like it? Take your party back.#
"Hold the line until our country gets back to respecting each other."#
So, Arizona is becoming a battleground in the newly rebooted American civil war. Phoenix New Times has a chance to increase its profile. But the site is unusable without an ad blocker. Please clean it up, take the lead. #
Trump has zeroed in on Arizona. Look where he held his first post-Charlottesville rally. He's resurrecting Joe Arpeio. McCain killed the repeal of ObamaCare. Jeff Flake wrote a book condemning Trump. Arizona is going to be a different kind of battleground. The election there is many months away. In the meantime, watch out. He's investing in the alt-Republicans. #
Two fascinating stories this morning, one about how Charlottesville looks from Berlin and how it looks from Israel. Israel sees Trump as a gift, and they want to hold on to him, even if he is a Nazi. Germans are determined to never forget the Holocaust. Israel looks the other way.#A couple of days ago I tried using Paypal to send money to a friend via her email account. She never got the notification, however I did get a confirmation via email. According to their website, the money has been paid. To who? I tried to use their system to ask what happened to my money. But they keep rejecting the message without explanation. I checked my bank account, and the money has been withdrawn. I tried posting a query to Twitter, it was responded to by @AskPayPal, a verified account. They asked me to send a DM. I did. I have heard nothing back from them. This is unacceptable. Paypal depends on users trusting them. I used their service to send money, it appears to have never gotten there and they won't respond to a query. I could write it off, I could -- but then I also could never use their service again. #
A general note about transmitting money via the net. None of the services I've tried give you any idea up front how the process will work. How will the person be notified? What are the requirements on their end? In one case the person had to have an account at the same bank I was using. That was not said before I sent the money. I once tried sending money via Facebook, figuring they would have worked to get the glitches out. Nope. It took days for the money to clear at the other end, which wasn't overseas, it was California for crying out loud. Sending a gift certificate through Amazon to a relative in the UK was also a bad experience. She had to spend the money at Amazon in the US, which meant shipping costs to the UK would have been huge. They didn't say this up front, or I would have used Amazon UK to give the gift. We've been using the web for commerce for 20 years. These glitches should have been worked out long ago.#
My father wrote a book, his father wrote a manifesto. My maternal grandfather created a company. My uncle designed a new kind of windmill. My great uncle was a novelist, his stories are still read, mostly in German. A cousin on the other side was a great inventor, her legacy died but was resurrected and she's now a hero, famous for her technical creativity. Of course I try to do the same thing, and I'm realizing more and more that it's futile and mostly unnecessary. This is a difference between boys and men. We hope to achieve some kind of immortality through our work. The reality is that after we're done creating, it's all largely useless. The legacy we try to create is never what we actually create. Our ambition is much greater than the accomplishment.#