In the next few days I'll open up a free, experimental service to find out if Twitter can peer with feed reader software like
NetNewsWire and
Feedly. After you log in, our server will periodically read your new tweets and update a public RSS feed, on our server, that mirrors your tweets, so you and others can follow them in any feed reader. One thing that's different from earlier approaches is that tweets can have titles, something that most feed readers like/insist on. And the feeds will be 2022-compliant, using modern techniques for the world we live in today, not the world of twenty years ago. People keep looking for software to replace Twitter. I don't like that approach because systems with tens of millions of happy users don't get replaced, but they can foster new developments built on their strength and ubiquity. I respect and love Twitter. My software does too.
#Come to think of it, Twitter and RSS have a lot in common. Both are roughly contemporary pioneering efforts on which today's social media and news worlds are built. Both are a bit worse for wear and tear, to
quote the
Rolling Stones. But they're still here! We'll make love. Twitter and RSS all the way.
#You decide: Erectile dysfunction medicine should be illegal in states that ban abortion.
#
Consider: Which is more space-efficient, XML or JSON?
#
I believe we can make it so Twitter
peers with feed readers like
NetNewsWire and
Feedly. And that it will be a good, even exciting thing.
#I don't see how
Better Call Saul can have a happy ending for anyone. Almost everyone is already dead, so that rules them out. Is anything remotely like a happy ending available to
Jimmy or
Kim? But it has to be one of the most creative endings ever considering how crazy creative the show has been up to now.
#The Dems should campaign on the idea the shit has
hit the fan and it’s time to fight back. Use the words. Stop pretending everything is great. Everyone knows it’s not. You look like idiots if you try to sidestep reality.
#I'm concerned the Mets might be taking themselves a bit too seriously, unless
this is parody in which case -- it's great. This team is
rooted in failure. Whose
manager asked "Can't anybody here play this game?" Which was actually a fair question.
💥#
- My mother died in February 2018. My father had died in October 2009. So she lived there alone for nine years. I came and went, it was nice to have a place to stay in NYC. I just took a trip to NY for the first time to stay overnight since I moved to the mouintains in 2019. And for the first time I didn't have a place to stay in NY. #
It was the hottest night of the year. I ate a fishy dinner in Flushing at Maxi's Noodle, one of many Chinese and Korean restaurants in the place where I grew up, only when I lived there it was a sleepy midwestern-type place you traveled through but never stopped at. I would take the Q16 bus to Main St and from there got on the 7 train, never stopping for more than the time it took for the train to leave. But it's now a destination. It felt like a foreign country. What a thing to return to where you grew up, to experience it as a white American man would in a foreign country, Hong Kong or Seoul. What was odd though, was when the locals talked the young ones talked like me. Makes sense, but strange. #- When my mother died, shortly after we had the house cleaned out to get ready to sell, I realized I should have made a movie of the inside of the house. The scene of most of my childhood memories, good and bad. Now they only reside in my head. If only I had thought to make a video. That's what's funny about big transitions. When you look at the place so familiar so lived-in, why would you take a video, it never crossed my mind. Until the instant you realize, after the fact, that it's gone forever. #
- In the morning after staying in a weird hotel that smelled funny, in the stinky heat of an August morning, plotting my trip to Utopia Bagels, I found a Starbucks (on the app) on my path at the intersection of 32nd Ave and Francis Lewis Blvd. I tried to imagine which corner it was on, what it had replaced. Turns out it was the Reliance Federal Savings Bank, where I, as a 5th-grade boy had my first bankbook, a hand-written thing, maintained by someone behind a counter who carefully stamped the date, and wrote the amount and balance in the account for every transaction. I don't remember what I was saving for, possibly a new baseball bat or glove, or later sound equipment. And of course all that remains of that little person, the former future Dave, are little vague bits of memory. How unlikely all this was I imagine that boy would think. #
It would be great if Merrick Garland got the same media team that did the Jan 6 hearings to work on making the case of Trump's criminality to the public. That's really where the trial will take place, where the future of the country will be decided.
#
The idea of putting
RSS into the world of the browser was a mistake. The world of news is another world altogether. The web tried, in every way to turn RSS into the web. And it was very unsatisfying for a reason, the web was designed for documents. Things that have lasting value. The news is different. It's ephemeral. You want to keep a record of it for sure, but yesterday's news has no value as news, because it's not new. It's like the difference between music and podcasts. Music you may want to listen to many times, to cherish, to attach memories to, if it's good enough, over your whole life. A podcast is one and done. Pfffft. Off to the bit bucket. It's value is over as soon as the next episode is out.
#
Trump is going to jail. Get used to the idea.
#
- Listen up schmucks.#
- See this picture of Trump and his buddies from Russia.#
- That's who he is. #
- You sure you want him to have American secrets in his hotel safe?#
In the Oval Office. How sad for America.
#- Before you feel any sympathy for the schmuck in the middle, he's the one that appointed the Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v Wade. #
- So if you like him, you're supporting the enslavement of human broodmares aka women.#
- BTW, in case you forgot -- over 1 million Americans are dead because he botched the response to Covid.#
On this day in 1974.
#
All articles about
Doug Engelbart talk about the mouse, and mention "augmenting human intellect" in a vague way, not explaining what it means, and that he actually developed real software people could use for that. Engelbart thought augmenting human intellect was his real life's work. I know because 1. he told me and 2. same with me. Augmenting human intellect sounds spacy, something only a genius could understand, which is why it's not a good term for something that's pretty simple. Using an outliner to take notes and manage a project is an example of the computer augmenting your intellect. Doing something for you that you are not as good at as a computer is. Using a spreadsheet to augment human intellect could mean doing what-if analysis on a projected balance sheet. Sharing a recipe on Facebook with a group of friends is another example. Remember, Engelbart was talking about this long before there were computers outside of research labs. What seems kind of obvious today was anything but obvious then.
#I watched
Breaking Away over the weekend. First time. The idealistic teen bike rider who worshipped Italian cyclists learns that
everyone cheats. A hard lesson, one that I never learned, and keep bumping up against. Maybe bumping is too mild a word.
😄#Did the NYT run
similar stories about Trump being a weird and possibly ineffective advocate for enslaving women to carry unwanted or medically dangerous pregnancies?
#
Reviewing the agenda for an upcoming Future of Thinking conference I realize -- if this really is the future -- we lost. Yet another promising tech that is going to be fought over like social media before it, and web browsers before that and PC operating systems before that. Winner take all and users be damned. It's not too late to make
Tools For Thought a rare exception, where no company can lock their users in, and keep them from switching, where every product has to do everything and therefore does nothing well, and no one has the incentive to make their products better and their users more powerful thinkers. As an elder of this industry, I can't stand by and say nothing, not that I could when I was just a young whippersnapper. For whatever reason I insist on my products being open to competition, and that makes it harder to win, and so be it. That's the way it should be! ;-)
#
It seems
Marco Rubio is beatable. Wouldn't it be something if the listenters to Keith Olbermann's fantastic podcast could make it happen? I think it's possible.
#But what do I know. Heh. Every
poll has Rubio far ahead of Demings.
#I usually exercise in the afternoon, but it's been so hot, so I did my Peloton ride first thing this morning. Then swimming, a nice breakfast with a tall glass of delicious ice coffee. The sense of well-being is overwhelming. I used to have this feeling all the time after working out when I was younger. Now it's harder to get there. It's nice to see if I do everything well, I can still do it.
#
- We should write a book on bug reports. There's so much to say. A case study. #
- A user is testing a fresh new feature. Released seconds before. He tries it out on his iPad and gets a blank screen. Tries it on his desktop machine, it works. He concludes there's an incompatibility with iPads and reports it as such, in great detail with screen shots. He follows the 1. 2. 3. format. #
- But as the developer reads the report, right from the start, he's pretty sure that the user's theory is incorrect, that it has nothing to do with an incompatibility with iPads. He has strong reasons to believe this, because: #
- The new feature reuses already tested display code, there was nothing new there in this release. Almost all browser incompatibilities are display problems. #
- He had just seen the same behavior on his own machine, and the problem was that he hadn't done a hard reload, so some code files updated, others didn't. #
- The developer would like to know if there are any error messagess in the JavaScript console, being 99 percent sure there are. The user's report didn't include any info on this. They error messages are in the software for a reason, to help figure out what went wrong, to take the load off the user and the developer. To make these puzzles resolve faster.#
- They're not in a good place, because the developer is going to have to first convince the user to look elsewhere first, and users like everyone else, don't like to be told they're wrong. That's why we have to slow down. Don't rush to write a bug report. At least try it again, to be sure it reproduces. Think about what else can go wrong.Like it or not, the user has to participate in the debugging process, if they want the problem resolved reasonably efficiently in time, for everyone.#
- The best bug reports are short. A bug report and lab notes are different things. By digesting your report into simple statements of fact, you get to challenge your own assumptions and might cause you to change your thinking. #
- You have to think about it as likely your problem, not the software's because in my experience that's what's usually going on. In almost 50 years of being a programmer only once did I find a bug in a compiler, yet in my early years, I often stopped looking because I thought I had, only to find the bug later, in my own code. #
When I wrote about Utopia Bagels
yesterday, I forgot to mention that Whitestone is part of Queens. It's a weird thing, of the five boroughs of NYC, the oddball is Queens, where each neighborhood was once a town, and they kept it that way even when they all became part of Queens. So my parents' address was in
Flushing, NY -- not Queens, NY as it would have been if we were in Brooklyn, The Bronx or Staten Island (actually not sure about Staten Island, it's the forgotten borough, more part of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy than the greatest city in the world). Manhattan is the other weird case for a different reason. You send your mail to Manhattanites to New York, NY -- in other words fuck the other boroughs, Manhattan is the
real New York. In a city that's known for its self-centered arrogance, Manhattanites take it to the next level. Not only don't they acknowledge that the rest of the country exists, they don't even credit their fellow NYers. Gotta love it.
😄#Wow I miss
Summer Streets. On three Saturdays in August,
in NYC, they close Park Avenue and 4th Avenue below it, all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge -- and it's just for bikes and pedestrians. It's what NYC would be like if there were no cars.
#A reader thanked me for the
tip about Olbermann. "With Maddow only one day a week, it's nice to know there is still a good, daily source of my kind of Snark and News available." My response: You're very welcome. But I think when you listen to Olbermann you'll realize as I did that Maddow wasn't cutting it. She stepped back because she lost her edge, she must've known it. I also think the MSNBC management must have been forcing her to not say the whole truth. Olbermann for now at least is unchained. But his show is owned by a
big corporation so he'll probably eventually go stale too. But for now -- he's got it.
#
You don't have to be Jewish.
#
Everyone who reads my blog must listen to
Keith Olbermann's new podcast. Start with the first
episode. There's more to the history of the Civil War as he tells it. What the Confederacy did by seceding from the Union was quite similar to the January 6 attempted coup, but after the Civil War, we (ie the United States) made the same mistake the Bidens are making. They wanted to bring the Confederates themselves back into the country. So really it was no surprise that slavery continued, it was just a bit more complicated. When we prevail this time, when Trump is dead and gone, and his successors are a bit easier to shame, we must have a purging. With force. No more trying to love the rebels back into the country. Deport them any place that will have them. Offer them to Russia or Hungary. You want em? We don't. If not, build huge prison camps in remote parts of America. Life sentences with no parole. These people should not feel after all is said and done that they are part of America. They didn't love it, they left it, tried to destroy it, they do not get to come back and enjoy the benefits of living in a free society. It's their turn to really feel the pain.
#What made me think of this was a random experience while waiting for my order this morning at
Utopia Bagels in Whitestone, NY. It's in the
neighborhood I grew up in. The people behind the counter looked nothing like the people I grew up with, coming from the current working population of Queens, one of the most diverse places in the world. The night before I had gone to see the
Mets beat the Atlanta Braves. This year's Mets are unusually competent. Anyway there was a man there, in the crowded bagel store, probably in his early 80s, wearing a rent-a-cop uniform. I thought he was one of the few people remaining from my time there. He looked like a drinker and smoker. He could have been one of my childhood friends' fathers. He picked me out and asked if I knew what he thought. I said nothing. He said "America matters, that's all." I mumbled quietly well we can agree to disagree. After that I avoided him, looked around, he and I were among the oldest people there. This, I thought, is the new Queens, we are part of the old (and I am long-gone, just back for the Mets game and the bagels). On the way out, on an impulse, I tapped his shoulder and said in a voice that I was sure he could hear, but not too loudly -- Black lives matter. I don't know why I said it, it probably only meant pain for this man. He is a human vestige. So old and obviously tired, but he still had to do a job probably no one else wanted. I think what he was really saying to me was hey brother, you look a bit like me, maybe we agree us white people matter. But he couldn't say it that plainly.
#I snapped this
picture of the scene at Utopia Bagels at 6:30AM this morning.
#I got a Lox and cream cheese on an everything bagel at Utopia Bagels and ate it on the drive home. It was heaven. I will remember that bagel as long as I live. Also the store gets its name from the street it's on,
Utopia Parkway. It's just an avenue, not a major thoroughfare, not what in NY you'd call a
parkway. It winds north-south through this part of Queens. I always felt privileged to live near Utopia.
Wikipedia says where the name came from, an attempt to create a utopian community in Queens. There's no mention of Utopia Bagels in the Wikipedia article, but there should be.
😄#I think Twitter, with Musk largely history, can become a stronger company than they've ever been. The way forward imho is to focus on the platform, so lots of apps can be made to run on it, not just one way to use its capabilities. Lots of user experiences. That's something none of the other social media platforms have let happen. Amazingly in 2022, while there are standards for images, movies -- everything but simple documents, with titles, unlimited length, simple styling, links and enclosures. That's where I'd like to see Twitter be the leader. Be the world-scale distribution system for simple text documents. Lead by filling the void. No standards bodies. PS: I bought a small amount of TWTR stock a few years back and continue to hold it. PPS: I basically wrote this
business plan for the Apple of 1996.
#
- Today was the first time I went to a Tesla supercharger.#
- I thought I could make it home with 6% to spare, but my Tesla insisted that I should play it safe and get a charge at the charger in New Paltz, NY. Turns out it was at a place I knew well, the Plaza Diner. When I was 17 I hitchhiked up to New Paltz every Friday that summer and often would end up there on my way. #
The Plaza Diner, New Paltz, NY.
#- I was amazed at how fast their charger runs. It almost felt like filling up a gas-powered car. I was also impressed that there was nowhere to piss. How can you have a place like this with no way for a human to evacuate while the car fills up. I was tempted to just do it, but I held on and waited till I got home.#
BTW, here's a
screen shot of what Google Trends returns for alitoist today. Let's see if anything happens here.
😄 #I am generally critical of the substance and format of cable news, but — the
opening segment on Joy Reid’s show last night about women and abortion after Kansas was outstanding, deep, emotionally evocative, inspiring. The
Dobbs decision, however awful, enslaving and life-endangering of American citizens, has a silver lining. It can stir us to act in care of each other, across all supposed divisions, find the American within each of us. We are still unitable if you push us hard enough.
#Today I coined a new term -- News Product. A product made out of news. I keep looking for something better, but in this case needed a descriptive term.
#This is funny. I've been programming
almost 50 years if you can believe that. I do all my programming in an
outliner so I can put as much text as I want into the code and it's still as simple as it was at the beginning.
#
If the Democrats enjoyed politics even a
little, we would be experiencing a huge wave of euphoria right now. We'd all be standing up in praise of Kansas, making the next state want to be next for
FOMO. We'd be talking about what we can do next to make the US
come together.
#
The other day I read that
Scoble thinks Tesla's way of playing music from an iPhone is as good as CarPlay or Android Auto. At first I couldn't think why that was wrong, but I just went down to the car (a Model Y) to set it up to work with the new Pixel 6 Pro I got yesterday, and remembered. When you're playing music on a phone in a Tesla, you have to use the UI of the phone to control the music. With CarPlay it's integrated with the display of the car, and it's simplified to be like a car control. And it's easy to switch apps, again using the UI of the CarPlay software, integrated into the car. It's so dangerous to do the same with the Tesla system that
I never do it unless the car is stopped. The difference is integration. I
wrote about this when I was first transitioning from CarPlay to Telsa, and it's a serious problem for Tesla that they don't have an app
ecosystem, and unless they do a deal with Apple and Google, they probably aren't going to have one. It's no small thing to build one of those, they might have done it when they had the electric car business to themselves, but that's already past.
#The news people report decidedly that American is totally
fucked, and we think they have some way of measuring fucked-ness, but yesterday the
people of Kansas proved that we're not quite as fucked as they say. Another observation. If the Supreme Court is now made up of unelected politicians (it is), they are really shitty politicians. If they were smart they would have done the Dobbs thing after the midterms.
#
I have a new
Android phone this morning. One of the first things I did was transfer some music to the phone. I have to say it worked much better than transferring to my iPhone. From a Mac, which didn't work at all. I even bought a new Mac just for that purpose. Still couldn't get it to work. What's wrong with this picture? On the other hand, how do you play music on this Android wonder? All the apps begin with Google followed by three dots. Hmm. Which one plays music? I can't tell. Didn't they user-test this stuff at all?? I found an app that opens data files and when I opened one of the MP3's it figured it out and launched something that would play it. Now I wonder how that's going to work on my Tesla? We'll find out!
#
Jon Stewart: "Only monsters would insist that doctors wait until women are so sick that they might die before they can receive appropriate medical treatment, which includes abortions.”
#
I've been working outside an office for over 30 years, except for a brief period when I had an office at
Berkman. Because I had the office, I was able to get an experienced radio team (
Lydon and McGrath) to work with me on this idea I had for audio blogging (which became podcasting) and one of my colleagues suggested that blogging would work well with politics, which got the bootstrap of political blogging going just in time for the 2004 presidential election. So -- having an office and using it is good. In my experience, things get created that way that otherwise wouldn't.
#I mostly watch, read and listen to news to keep track of how they're screwing us.
#
- I listened to Keith Olbermann's podcast today.#
- Wow. It's a reboot of his old MSNBC show. I missed this so much. #
- MSNBC is so much lamer without him.#
- I rate it must-listen.#
- I live in an area with no cell service.#
- It takes about ten minutes to drive to where there is service.#
- I'd like to have my queue not run out for ten minutes. #
- Could it learn?#
- PS: My phone has lots of memory.#
By far the best thing on Facebook are the "On this day" memories. I guess that means Facebook is winding down?
#Trump is old news, really tired and troubled. The enthusiasm is gone, they would vote for him if he was nominated, but they'd rather have a fresh Trump -- Desantis. Not good news for Trump-the-person, but nothing's changed for MAGA.
#
- I spent ten years living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in that time, five huge skyscrapers went up within a few blocks of where I lived. All of them residential, all of them of record-breaking height for residential buildings in North America. #
- They started as huge holes in the ground, then pilings were driven deep into the earth, and concrete poured to form a foundation. Then the steel frame was attached to the pilings and it started to rise, and floor after floor of steel were built on top of the previous floors. As the building rose, crews came in to put up the inner walls of the building, water pipes, electric lines, sewer, the elevators, phone lines, internet, the inner walls, and then they put up an exterior, and glass in the windows, and while they were adding new steel beams on the (say) 50th floor, you could actually see people in the lobby of the building. It was a holy mess, with construction crews everywhere, just a complete mess, even so you could see clearly the outlines of something familiar coming together. #
- But they kept building until the building was topped off, and all the various crews kept doing their jobs. There were no elevators above the 10th floor, everything still had to get to the top with a huge crane that was itself an engineering marvel. While all this was going on there were some demo units on the 5th floor and a rental office, all furnished, and one working elevator that was beautifully clean and functional, giving the impression that the building was ready to be occupied, but the truth was that it was still a long way from being done. But it could be used, in a way, for its intended purpose, people could imagine using it to sleep, eat, work, play -- all the things an apartment building could be used for, but it's not yet an apartment building, it's a construction site. #
- Building a big piece of software is a lot like this, The construction company wants to know if you were killed by a random piece of metal being hauled up in a crane, but if you say that the buttons on one of the floors in the elevator actually closed the door when they were meant to open the door, they thank you for the report, but they weren't listening. They have a big job still ahead of them. #
I heard yet another piece on NPR this morning wondering why Biden's approval rating is so low. First question, who has ever shown that this number means anything? Esp at the end of July, the middle of the summer two years before he's up for re-election. Second, the reason his approval rating is so low is that he's old and frail. On the other hand, I know he's in great shape. But when he's giving a prepared speech, the makeup is bad, or the lighting, but his eyes have the beady look of a very old person. And he is terrible at reading speeches. The intonation is all wrong. There's nothing human about it. I imagine they've hired coaches to try to improve this, but he hasn't gotten better. Funny thing is, when he's doing a press conference, which is very rare, he's great! His mind is sharp, he's an excellent communicator. You quickly forget how old he is. My guess is that his handlers think the
famous Biden gaffes are too expensive, so they play it safe with the prepared remarks approach. I don't think it's working. It's the source of "he's too old." And ultimately who cares what NPR thinks anyway. Stop worrying. Let Biden be Biden.
#As I work on my software, when I get something cool working I reward myself by playing
Squeezebox on my
Echo Studio.
#No wonder
rss.land is such a mess. No one has been caring for it, for 20 years. People try to own it, exploit it, and when they fail, dump it. In that way it's amazing how strong it is. Even though we haven't been caring for RSS, it keeps going.
#Why isn't there a Reproductive Rights Pac like the NRA. One that rates candidates on their support for women. One that we can give money to that they in turn give to candidates that campaign on Reproductive Rights. It's not enough to be for it, you have to campaign for it. Of course people will say it's Planned Parenthood, but they do more than that. I'm talking about a PAC that's focused on making abortion rights a major issue in all elections until the Dobbs decision is reversed.
#August is the best month. Everyone is nice and relaxed. Nothing to do. No major holidays. Swimming. BBQs. Book reading. Hanging around doing nothing. Everyone is somewhere else. Baseball. Warm. Shorts. Hikes. Bikes. Beach. Fresh fruit and veggies.
#
A rare day with nothing to blog. See you tomorrow!
😄#
Poll: Which do you watch most? Netflix, Amazon, HBO or Apple.
#
Yesterday I wrote about Peloton's classes that take you places and how they don't work because the perspective is always shifting. Much better to have a constant first-person view, allowing your mind to zone out while your body works. An improvement beyond that -- have the speed correlate with how fast you're pushing the bike. And give me a boost, so if I'm going 10 mph, make it feel like I'm going 30. As if a strong wind was at my back. Often when you have the first person point of view in these classes it feels as if you're walking not riding, there's no feeling of speed. And you pedal harder and there's no change. I know that this would be hard to do and expensive, but (ahem) the bike and the classes are pretty freaking expensive too. Or better yet, let Nintendo write the software.
😄 #I'm not apologizing anymore because I don't develop as part of a big company or write for a famous pub.
#"America First" means "White Christian fascists are in charge."
#
- Going to NYC next week, via Tesla, first trip since Covid. #
- I'm always getting on about how to do a great bug report, I thought I should show you a perfect one.#
- A small UI thing I noticed was I clicked the X in the News Box to dismiss the box and then opened the settings again and the "Show news items in a small box at the top of the screen." was already checked when I expected it to be unchecked. Clicking the Ok button returned the News Box.#
- It has all the required elements.#
- What they did.#
- What they expected to happen.#
- What actually happened.#
- It doesn't have to be a formal process, or particularly long. Just the facts, as Jack Webb never said. The facts the developer needs to find and fix the problem. #
- I also like the part up front where they say "A small UI thing..." #
Peloton has a series of
training sessions where they go some place interesting and record one of the teachers riding there for 20 minutes or 30 or more. You're supposed get the feeling that you're riding there, I guess, but it's terrible. I tried it a few times, but yesterday I figured out why it's so bad. They keep changing the perspective. First you're seeing what the teacher sees. Then the camera goes off to the side, you're watching the rider. Then you're in a drone 200 feet above the rider, then the drone is looking down on the mountains or seascape or whatever. Then it goes back to the first-person perspective. I guess whoever designed these classes has no idea what it's like to ride? You only have one perspective and you get into the zone on it. But switching like that makes me feel sick! Literally makes me feel nauseous. I have to put my eyes somewhere else until the ride is over, but every so often I forget and there's that awful feeling again. Exercise is a meditation. Your mind does its own thing while your subconscious relaxes, just exerting and getting the body chemistry going to a nice place. And just when you're starting to zone out -- boom -- reality changes drastically. Again and again and again ad nauseum. Nothing in the real world works that way. Some free advice for Peloton.
#I ordered a
Pixel 6 Pro. I've been enjoying my
iPhone 13 Pro, but I've been wanting to try the pro version of the Pixel. I've been carrying two phones -- the other a Pixel 4a. Looking forward to trying the same thing without limits. I got the one with 512GB.
#I want an EZ-Pass for news. If I can drive the same car in Ohio or New Jersey and fly through the toll booths, why can't I do the same on the web with news.
#
Is there doubt that at least some of the insurrectionists would have killed congresspeople if they had the chance? Maybe it was all bluster, but imho probably not. And if it's true, then the
police at the Capitol, by holding back the mob, very much saved our country.
#Poll: Which company will buy Netflix?
#
Jeff Jarvis: "The hippies ended a presidency, ended a war, made really good music, held historic festivals, got high, and got laid."
#
2000: "After RSS 0.91, we breathed a sigh of relief that lasted almost a year. Glad that's over! In the meantime, repeated attempts to find anyone who cares about RSS at Netscape have turned up nothing. The people we worked with at Netscape left shortly after 0.91 was finalized."
#This year's RSS project is much like the project I did writing
the 0.91 spec, the one based on actual practice, not a spec-writer's idea of how the base of feeds should evolve. I'm a big believer in following the spec, but if the spec is wrong -- that seemed to be what the devs were saying you have to do some more thinking. "See what's out there" is my motto, before making any assumptions. One of the reasons the only method for reading feeds in my project is the
mailbox-style reader. I want to focus on what works and doesn't, before adding any alternative ways of viewing news. The mailbox style is what's out there in rss.land. That's where you start in 2022, because 2022 is not 2002.
#An unsolved problem as far as I know -- how to tell that two different URLs are actually the same feed? I know the
Atom rel="self" element is an attempt to solve that problem, and it is fairly widely supported because the
default feed validator, written by one of the Atom guys kind of
requires it (if you look closely it doesn't, but people miss that).
#BTW, the validator situation is pretty bad. Apparently the original feed validator isn't working, and the W3C put up a fork of it a while back, but it seems to be giving different advice now. I think perhaps one of our projects should be to write an apolitical feed validator. One written from the point of view of apps that have to understand feeds. Basically saying -- if you do it this way it'll work better for your users, and forget about the various different standards groups who wanted to replace it. RSS got badly spammed that way.
#Yesterday on my linkblog I included a link to the NYT obituary for
Tony Dow, who played the older brother on
Leave It To Beaver, a
show people of my generation grew up with. This morning I got an email from
Steve Garfield, a longtime reader of this blog with a note that the NY Times had
retracted the obit, because Mr Dow is still alive. I always try to check these things out but until now thought the NYT was authoritative.
#
For the record we started testing the new product, with a small number of users. So far it's going well.#- It's an unusual project, a bit like traveling back to 2002, and then considering the RSS world as it exists now, and try to do something with the incredible amount of data flowing by, but with limited tools to actually see what's available. That, of course is exactly the challenge. To create tools that suit each type of data people push through feeds and make it visible and useful to people who want it. There's a wide variety from linkblogs like Hacker News, to description-only feeds from the NYT to full text from WordPress sites. And podcasts. And the totally possible Twitter feeds. And who know what else will be possible. We haven't been creative here for many, many, many years. #
- I remember a long time ago when I worked at a timesharing company. We had a big computer facility in New Jersey and I worked in Manhattan. We leased our customers teletypes where they would type queries and we're send back data. They could also program in BASIC. My job was to write tools for them so they would run them and use them for hours and of course very hour was money to my company, so I was incentivized to come up with things they'd use a lot.#
- Anyway the most fun I had was writing a scroller of headlines from an AP wire we had hooked up to the system. You'd just leave the app running and it would show you the news as it happened. People got addicted to it. Really simple. No one says it has to be complex to work.#
A reporter asks if Jan 6 is a "bridge too far" for Trump as an at-large criminal (they didn't put it that way). If it isn't what would be? If he nuked a major American city? Would that be enough to put him in jail. Do people listen to their own words?
#
- Scott Knaster who was a doc writer at Apple in the heyday of the Mac, and who went to General Magic and then Google, has been going through his various closets and digging out things from the ancient software past. He dug up original Frontier disks from 1992 or so and posted a picture to Facebook. Here's what he wrote:#
- Hey Dave, I was watching the Cooperstown inductions today including Gil Hodges, and I thought of you. I was a big fan of the 1969 Mets. Then later I was cleaning up old stuff and found these discs, thought of you again. I hope you’re doing well!#
- These disks brought up a story, which I shared there, and now here. #
- Frontier on the Mac was about 30 years ago believe it or not. People born in that year, cute little babies in cribs, are now 30 years old.#
- That experience completely wrung out my last hope for corporate platform vendors. Not only did I get a close-up look at Apple, but I also got to know the platform people at Microsoft and Aldus. Corporations have too many conflicts to pull it off. #
- A wise Apple would have let us run scripting on the Mac, and let us put it where ever we wanted. What they ended up with was a pure corporate creation, runs only on one OS, and has its utility crippled by an idea that top execs understood -- "Programming in English."#
- Aldus had a deal with developers, they'd wait two releases before crushing them (ie pulling the features of their plugin into the main product). At least they were up front about it. #
- Microsoft people were mostly nerds and they gave their programmers a lot of freedom. I hooked up with one of the devs on Microsoft Word, Dave Luebbert, and we had a scripting party, and Word was the most scriptable app out there, even though no one knew. #
- After that experience, I left software. I realized there wasn't going to be anything left for me, because no matter what I did, i'd either have to work inside one of these beasts, and I didn't see that working out too well, or they'd just anihilate us if we achieved any success, even if we did it on their terms.#
- A year later -- I got a demo of HTTP and I saw the answer. It's like being a devotee of the Lord of Light in Game of Thrones. Oh there's the answer -- Unix! (I programmed in C on Unix before going to the Apple II.)#
- I'm doing one more push folks, no one has been doing anything with RSS for many years, even though it's very much still out there. I've had a productive year. Really good software almost ready. We'll see if there's any hope for independent developers in 2022.#
Poll: Which borough has the best bagel?
#
I updated the
outlinerBrowser code, which is used in various places. I've seen other devs using it, which is good. It now supports
image and
inlineImage attributes, as they are used in
Old School.
#An
example of a site that uses the outlineBrowser code.
#
I was never that into Van Morrison, but his music fits perfectly with the
Echo Studio speaker. I just say
Alexa play Van Morrison and get to writing.
#
- I hate Hawley but he's onto something. #
- The Dems probably unintentionally do things to push male voters away. He, and the Repubs are milking that for all it's worth. #
- You can argue the righteousness of it, but it's bad politics to alienate a whole gender. Bad for winning elections, assuming that's what the Dems want to do. #
- Also by making him famous you're helping him, even if you say nasty shit about him. #
- Ask George Lakoff. People don't care whether you like him or not, but when you push him, you're creating a bigger space in their minds labeled X where X is the name of the asshole you're writing about. #
- I'm doing it right now, I know it -- can't think of a way of avoiding it and still make the point.#
- I bet the Dems could pick up 10% more male voters just by doing a little marketing saying the Dems care. #
- I fixed a bug in this blog's RSS feed. #
- Previously if an item had an inline image, like the one below, it would not appear in the feed, if it appeared in a titled item. Now it should. #
An example of an inline image.
#- So if you're reading this through the feed, check it out. #
I'm trying to see how long I can wait before turning on the air conditioning.
#
Michelle Goldberg regrets calling on Al Franken to resign. But she misses an important point. Men saw what happened too. And while we were effectively silenced in the public debate, men do vote and that's a private thing. I don't doubt that #metoo contributed to more men voting for Trump. So there's another reason to regret forcing Franken to quit without any process, it was stupid politics. I think something similar contributed to Elizabeth Warren's failure as a presidential candidate in 2020. I enthusiastically supported her at first, but then I guess trying to get stronger women's support, she said some awful things about men. It didn't get any press, but I, as a man heard it, and as far as I was concerned it disqualified her. A president has to be for every American, regardless of gender. A woman president is also a president for men. And we can vote. We will I hope have a woman president someday, and when we do, she will appeal to all genders. Men can be feminists, but if you think that equates to attacking men for being men, you won't win. Men still have a lot of votes.
#
Short podcast. Mostly about how exciting it is to work with people on RSS again, but at the end I talk about a misbelief that I advocate that people should run their own webservers. Even in my most positive days about making the web easy I didn't think that. But I do think we need alternatives to the VC-backed "free" web hosting companies like Medium and Substack. We keep learning this lesson, and at some point we should get it together to provide really free hosting for writing,
with no business model attached, supported by foundations and contributions. It just doesn't cost that much to do the hosting of text files. A Twitter
thread expands on this idea.
#The
Secret Service must have known Trump was trying to overthrow the government. Assuming they swore an oath to defend the Constitution what’s their excuse for not stopping it?
#
- Joseph Zitt: "It's very cool that you're supporting Markdown -- but which Markdown are you using?"#
- This of course is a great question. I answered it, the way all Markdown questions are answered. #
- Of course as you know there is no One True Markdown.#
- The approach we all take with Markdown text is to stay within a reasonable subset of the syntax, and hope for the best. ;-)#
- I go by this cheat sheet, which I keep in an icon in the chrome of my browser, easy to reach for. And it seems to work.#
- Re the Markdown processors I use --#
- On the client side -- I use something called MarkdownCoverter, which I downloaded many years ago. I seem to recall it's the one that StackExchange uses, so I figured it's got to be pretty good. In all the years I've been using it there haven't been any complaints as far as I know.#
- On the server side -- I use markd. I don't recall how I decided to use this one, but it has also served me well.#
- As I understand it Gruber likes the way it has evolved. #
- The shit does kind of hit the fan when it comes to using Markdown in something like RSS where interop is the primary thing. #
- But this was one of the first enhancements I wanted to get out there in 2022, the 20th year of RSS 2.0.#
- PS: See the previous two day's posts about Markdown in RSS feeds. #
