I love Node.js, but it's a lot of work to put together a script to run as a service in Node. I kept wondering if it could be made easier. I found a little time in early April to give it a try, and it worked really well. Today I released the result as Fargo Publisher 0.95.#

Basically, there's a new scripts sub-folder of the data folder, which is part of the Amazon S3 hierarchy that Publisher runs from. Any file in that folder that ends with ".js" can be called through the server app. If the script is in count.js and the server is running at pub.fargo.io, you'd access it through this URL: http://pub.fargo.io/count. You can try it, click the link. Reload the page. Every time you load it, the count should increment.#

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globals is a global object that you can hang persistent values on. They persist for the life of the server, when it's rebooted it's reset. You can think of it as a scratchpad. #

This is a very simple system. That's about all there is to it. #

News organizations can and should take an active interest in the development of the communities they serve. Interest doesn't just mean "reporting on" -- when they see an opportunity for new development that isn't already happening, why not point it out? Help direct attention where it's needed.#

Here's a fantastic example. We get a pitch for a new streetcar line along the waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens, connecting Ikea in Red Hook with a great swimming pool at the end of the Triboro Bridge in Astoria. And along the way connecting lots of diverse neighborhoods, all in various stages of rebirth. It's an idea very much in tune with the times. And presented so that you also get a visual tour of the neighborhoods. It's appealing, interesting, and exciting! I love this kind of journalsim #

I like everything about this word.#

It's nice to spell, and nice to say. #

It must be good, because we do so much of it.#

Only smart people use it! #

It's kind of hidden in his usually impersonal blog, PressThink, but there's a great story buried in there, about the family he grew up in. Well worth reading, esp because it explains the mindset of a natural-born blogger. We're the people who witness insanity, and wish to advise people on how not to be that way. It's a pointless job, and Jay explains why, but I won't spoil it. #

Guardian: The Truman Show, the 1998 film about a man who unwittingly has his entire life filmed for a TV show, could itself become a TV series.#

NYU Local: Meta television gives writers, producers and showrunners something completely new to work with.#

Oy. The Nets are in the playoffs. Everyone who cares about basketball in NYC knows it. And we're all Knicks fans. I have never met a Nets fan. That said, I'm sure most NY basketball fans were planning on rooting for the Nets, as the hometown team that made the playoffs this year. Then they ran this ad:#

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Now really, guys, let's not overplay it. There are lots of tickets available for the Nets playoff games. I go to Nets games when the Knicks are out of town. I was thinking of possibly maybe going to a Nets playoff game. But if they think they're going to score points with Knicks fans by trashing them. Well they don't understand their home market.#

A much better approach. "We know you don't care about us. But we're going to play our hearts out in the post-season, knowing full well you'd much rather be watching the Knicks. We hope to win you over. Not this year, not next, but maybe in a few years, we'll have earned your loyalty. A little of it. In the meantime we know we're barely on the radar. We had a good year. We have a long way to go and we know it. Love, The Nets."#

Now if by some miracle they were to actually win something in the post-season, then a little gloating might be in order. A little. Not too much. Keep it polite. #

Van Gundy: Nets sandbagged to avoid drawing Bulls.#

Given the amount of investment money flowing to companies like Dropbox, you could start a company with the goal of hiring enough engineers to create a target to be bought by one of them. Programmers, it seems, are the tulips of this bubble. Create a cushy environment, and make one of the benefits a payout when the company is bought. Obviously you want to hire programmers who are good at taking the tests the big companies have for new hires. And it pays to develop their skills using the technology of the company that you want to be bought by.#

I'm working on a utility in JavaScript that converts an entire WordPress blog to OPML so you can use Fargo as a blog editor. It's more than an export for WordPress, because Fargo can edit the documents and save them back to WordPress,#

It's kind of nice to be able to edit a whole website in an outline. Soon you'll be able to do that for WordPress, and not just new sites, also for existing ones. Like this. #

As part of the development process, I converted the old Rebooting the News site to OPML. You can open the file in Fargo, by copying the URL to the clipboard, then switch into Fargo, choose Open By Url from the File menu and paste the URL. Of course you can't edit it, it's not your blog, but if it were you would be able to. #

Making progress! #

Along the way today I used a picture I had been holding on to. I thought it was interesting that you can now read Ted Nelson's seminal Dream Machines and Computer Lib on an iPhone. Carl Sagan said: "We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness." On a smaller, humbler, human scale, the iPhone is an imperfect representation of the visions documented in Nelson's books. That it can present the work that led to itself is amazing evidence of how much we've gotten done in our generation. It's all there and it fits in the palm of your hand! #

The full Sagan quote#

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Daddy does love brunch!#

Talk and listen instead of arguing. #

Great piece and here's a wonderful insight: "There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued." Even people who communicate well, fall apart when they're scared. So when it gets intense, you have to try to listen even better than you normally would. Which is tough, because you're scared too (when arguing).#

On Twitter, Rob Tweed mentions an interview I did with InternetWorld in 2001 about SOAP and XML-RPC.#

It's interesting timing because I'm working on a project that uses XML-RPC in node.js. So I'm actively coding in the framework we designed in 1998, and also get to read about what I was thinking at the time. It's preserved on archive.org. Haven't worked at this level in a decade or more. #

What's really cool is to see the support was already there in node.js, and it works really well. That's excellent. People working together over large blocks of time. Probably not because it's good or idealistic, rather because it's useful and fits into what we're doing. #

It totally validates what I was saying in the interview. #

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I signed up for the EmpireJS conference in May here in NYC. At the time there were no speakers announced. They promised to announce one every day until the roster filled out. And of course, no surprise really -- they're all very young. I'm sure they know a lot about JavaScript, but surely there are some more experienced older people who also know about this great language? I'm not volunteering to speak, this is not a pitch to invite me to present. But now I have a better idea how women and non-whites feel going to tech conferences. I wonder how people will react to me, with my gray beard, and knowledge of things other than JavaScript! #

Now I have two examples of young tech entrepreneurs who are experiencing serious age disconnectedness. #

First there was Zuck, who hired an 85-year-old architect to design Facebook's new campus. Would he consider giving such responsibility to an 85-year-old software engineer? How about a 45-year-old one? Zuck is smart but very young, and one of the things you learn with age is about age itself. It's totally impossible for a 29-year-old, genius or not, to have any idea what his or her capabilities will be as he or she grows older. #

I don't usually like to flaunt what I've learned in life, but on this issue, it's required. I was very scared of aging when I was 29. The fear grew as I turned 40. By 50 I was numb to it. Now as I approach 60 the only thing I fear are the disabilities that come with age. Age itself isn't a problem. #

Then Drew Houston hires Condoleezza Rice as a board member. I didn't object although others did. They didn't have a problem with her age (59), it was her politics they didn't like. But if you will rely on such an obsolete person to be part of the governance of your company, why not as part of its leadership? #

The disconnect: If Frank Gehry can be creative and break new ground at 85, which he certainly is doing, why the fuck can't I, according to the young people who now run our industry? Can't you find some competitive advantage from using the unique abilities that come with experience? Why didn't Dropbox hire a 25-year-old version of Ms Rice for their board? In the answer is a big aha moment, if you answer truthfully.#

BTW, this motto is one of the reasons I don't bother offering an opinion about who a company chooses as a board member. It's powerless to threaten to stop using a product. It's also presumptuous. I don't think any company really cares whether one or two people stop using their product. Of course they do care if a substantial portion of their users do, but you are powerless to cause that. So if you really care, just do it.#

I said on Twitter last night that Heartbleed is bigger than Watergate or the war in Iraq. I got a little pushback on that. Of course the numbers don't match up yet, but long before there were hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq, we were on an inexorable path to that. Iraq is a relatively small and contained geography, and the war started before the explosion of networking. Today, the scope of the net, things we use it for, reach into every corner of civilization. Even a slight collapse at the core of the net could disrupt things, and not in the nice way that creates 20-something billionaires. #

Look, sooner or later there will be a meltdown of the net. We were headed for that long before Heartbleed. I never said what I believed because I didn't want to be the first to say it. But we have been building more complex systems and more life-sustaining dependencies on a fragile and insecure system. The ability to do harm increases with every new dependency. When the network equivalent of Katrina happens, it will be felt everywhere. #

Imho the owners of tech are soon going to wish they didn't own it. So far it's been a very profitable thing. It's been changing for a long time, but till now the changes haven't been visible. It's hard to understand, but when we all feel it, we won't need analogies to explain it. #

Facebook is run by someone who is comfortable with the way the pieces fit together in software, where Twitter can't manage what seems a fairly simple corner-turn. Twitter needs to evolve a new higher-level product, where the current Twitter is the machine room, the newsroom, the table in the conference room off to the side of the newsroom. They have the news system of the future, all they have to do it experiment with a variety of different styles of presentation. They would have gotten there a lot sooner with less risk if they had left the developer community alone, but they could still do it if they had a flexible, gutsy sort of Zuck or Gates at the helm. That was the power of Gates, he didn't mind shipping a shitty product, and then completely changing the way it worked based on what they learned in the market. Twitter needs to do some of that. Zuck, with a lot more to lose, seems willing to roll the dice. This seems like a replay of Microsoft versus Lotus in the early 90s. Anyway, I'm rambling (no 140-character limit here). Go read Ryan's piece. It's really worth it. #

It would be so easy to pop open a window, let you write a few paragraphs, and then post a link to your tweet stream. With the new profile layout, they could even provide a list of your most recent posts. I've been wondering about this for a while. Esp now that people are basically writing blog posts in their tweet stream (e.g. Marc Andreessen, but there are others). #

It's hard to imagine something worse happening. #

And I think we're late responding to it. If this were a single system so compromised, the right technique would be to go offline and not come back until all connection points were patched or verified to not need patching. #

It's risky that we all keep using the net.#

My longtime friend Jodi Mardesich has a new job reporting for ReadWrite. #

Years ago, I used to work with a lot of reporters, largely on background, because I enjoyed being part of the news process. When I worked with Jodi, she was at the SJ Merc. Early days of the web. I had some excellent sources, and I gave her one really great story. #

I also played a small role in getting ReadWrite started. When Richard MacManus started the site, it was a Radio blog, among the first. I always feel pride at having helped them when they were getting started. #

Since I am a regular in Central Park, I see a skyline that many people don't, the one at the southern end of the park. #

It's interesting because it's rapidly developing. #

I wrote a blog post after a snowstorm in January that showed the shadow effect of the first new building to pop up.#

You can see the next huge building to go up, popping up over the GM building. It's at Park Ave and 56th St. It's going to be the tallest residential building in North America at almost 1400 feet. Super-luxury apartments. Check out the site, esp the page where you can sample the view from various levels. The one from 1271 feet is absolutely stunning.#

Software is built in layers. First programmers get something simple working, test it, then build on top of it. More testing, then more building. Build, test, build, test, over and over. This process has been going on for a long time. #

The "stack" that we use today was started in the late 1960s. We're still running software, deep in the heart of the computers we use, that was written forty years ago. #

The deeper in the stack you go, the more systems are affected, and the harder it is to fix any problems you come across. #

OpenSSL is not the deepest technology we have, but it's close. It's built into a lot of things we use all the time. The most serious problems, the hardest ones to address, will be the places where it's built-in where updates are either hard or impossible. But first we have to locate and patch all the easy places. That process began just yesterday, we hope! We don't know much about what the companies that run our services are doing. #

The worst case scenario, the one we all have to plan for, is that the management of affected companies aren't responding to the problem. This will certainly happen in some cases. If it happens at a bank, the results could be very bad. #

That's why the best thing you can do is to let the companies know that a quick competent response is necessary. This is a time when we find out which vendors are prepared for the world we live in today, or whether they have to catch up, in real-time, while their systems are vulnerable.#

Most news reports say you should change passwords on all your Internet accounts. This is not good advice, and it might even be bad advice. It certainly doesn't help if a service is vulnerable. It's like changing the lock on a door that's open. Only it's worse -- because the key to the new lock is inside the door, unprotected, available for a hacker to take. There is no physical world analogy that explains how serious this problem is. #

What you can do to help is to ask the companies whose services you use what their status is re Heartbleed. Have they discovered vulnerabilities, and if so have they been patched? Do they have any recommendations for users? Are they taking this seriously?#

I have asked the companies whose services I depend on for updates. You can and should do the same. #

For example, I asked the CTO of AWS, a service I use, "where would we look for news of Amazon's status re Heartbleed?" As a customer, you are totally entitled to know this. #

I'd especially recommend checking with your online bank, and the company that makes your desktop or mobile operating system. Have we heard anything from Apple or Microsoft about their systems, for example.#

Every company should have a web page like this one from Twilio, explaining in clear terms, what they discovered when they did an audit of their systems, and systems they rely on (because vulnerabilities can be inherited from others), and what they've done or are doing to fix any problems. This is a time for companies to be communicative with their customers and users. You are totally within your rights, and are acting responsibly if you ask respectfully what is their plan for responding to Heartbleed. #

Duh. Log on and see if there are updates available, and if so, install them. #

And pray they aren't "updates" from the People's Republic of China or the NSA. #

J&R Electronics, down by City Hall in NY, is closed. An apartment building will go up in its place.#

Daily News: J&R shutting down New York City electronics store.#

Jamaica: Ganja growers association officially launched.#