I moved this to Scripting News. #

A reminder that I have to merge the two feeds. That will happen sometime soon. Feed readers that can't handle title-less items will do weird things with my feed. C'est la vie! #

When you watch NBA games on an iPad with League Pass they play the same insipid ads over and over. #

The Amex ad asks us to hear Paul Pierce to tell a story how a semi-pro bowler came to his house (presumably) where he has a private bowling alley. He bowled a 230, and apparently this upset Pierce, because (as he reminds us, again and again) he never invited him back again. Great. I wonder why I ever needed to know this. But I've seen this commercial at least 100 times. Always when I'm on the road, because I watch Knicks games on MSG at home. #

Audio of Paul Pierce's commercial. Enjoy!#

Paul Pierce -- do you know this is what you're saying to the most ardent NBA fans?#

1. Twitter's product is news.#

2. View the current Twitter as the editorial system. .#

3. Don't remove power-user features, for crying out loud -- add more!#

4. Create an entry-level system that just delivers the hot stuff.#

5. Use the checkbox news structure.#

6. Add video. Become the new TV.#

7. Have a revenue model for news orgs and independents.#

8. And create an irrevocably open API. #

I watched the movie Nebraska.#

It wasn't what I thought it would be. The acting -- so superb. Gorgeously filmed in black and white. It starts with a caricature of old age, but then fills in the details that most of us younger people overlook. Behind the cranky facade is a generous man, who always was willing to share what he had with his friends. Who wants some life in the life he has left. Who suffers the tolerance of those around him. And who is lucky to have a son who wants to know him.#

The doddering Bruce Dern who we knew as a young actor in westerns and scifi movies, reminds me of my father in his final years. They both had dreams, neither accomplished them, but they moved the marker a little further along its path. #

Remarkably parallel to another Oscar-nominated movie, Philomena, about an old woman's searching road trip. Very different stories, with different outcomes, but remarkably similar setups, and both were acting and story-telling masterpieces. #

In Seattle today. Rainy and gray. Typical spring weather. Went for a walk yesterday, the same walk I took regularly when I lived here in 2004. This was during the bootstrap of podcasting. Every day I'd take a podcast with me on the walk. Daily Source Code, Dawn & Drew, a few others (my memory is so bad these days, sorry for omissions). They were good days, full of promise. The memories remind that I want to do more of that kind of work.#

I heard from a bunch of people yesterday who said they didn't like the new Cosmos series. I might know what they mean. The writing is not first-rate, and it has continuity problems. But it has the right spirit. When he teaches about evolution, and it's a great story -- my visceral instinct is "That's what I want to do!" And he tells the story of great people who had the creative impulse, and made a valuable contribution. Again -- that's what I want to do! I think we're born with a feeling about evolution, that that itself must be part of evolving. It might be something that makes humans unique. #

Another reason it's an important program is that there isn't much on the airwaves that appeals to the intellect. If for no other reason the show deserves our support, as people who think, and who value thinking. #

I just watched the first three episodes of the new Cosmos series, with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and it's very good. He's not Carl Sagan, but that's okay -- the show is updated, with really great visuals, and tells stories in a highly accessible way, yet gives you a feel for how different the universe is from the way it seems living our normal head-down lives here on Planet Earth. Tyson has the same passion that Sagan had. It's important to spread the news, encourage everyone to watch the show. #

I loved the story about how Isaac Newton invented modern mathematics, and how he was hassled by the trolls of the day, but science won out in the end and we got differential and integral calculus and we understood how suns, planets, comets and galaxies influence each other with gravity. #

Marco Arment says you should run your own servers, or at least give it a try, and Brent Simmons says "not for me, now."#

I recently had to make that decision. My first move was to set up a Linux server, install Node on it, and it worked fine. But then I talked with an old friend, Eric Kidd, who has been doing this for years, and he urged me to try Heroku. I did, and no regrets -- the servers work so well and scale so easily that I eventually turned off the Linux server I already had deployed. I just wasn't using it.#

I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong here, but for me, now -- this is the right choice. #

NYT: "The rapidly escalating cost of doing business is driving out bookstores, threatening the city’s sense of self as the center of the literary universe, the home of the publishing industry and a place that lures and nurtures authors and avid readers."#

Why? #

Mike Arrington says he's pretty sure Google read an email to discover who his source was on a leak from within Google. #

Google denies it, but the denial is weak. "While our terms of service might legally permit such access, we have never done this and it’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where we would investigate a leak in that way."#

So what have we learned?#

1. Their terms of service allow them to read your email.#

2. This specific lawyer lacks imagination.#

3. What is it they have never done? If they didn't do exactly what Arrington alleges, he's not lying.#

Now consider how little regard Google had for its own employees in this classic exchange between then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. If they have such disdain for their own employees, how much regard do you think they have for users? My guess is, if they want to read your email, they're reading your email, and that's that. Every time you write something in GMail, pretend that Larry and Sergey are discussing it with their lawyers at their next staff meeting.#

Someday Google is going to realize this kind of disdain hurts them financially. Their product is trust. They're throwing it away, almost deliberately, as if to make a point, it seems.#

They'd do well to study the Johnson & Johnson example for how they managed a crisis with Tylenol. In that case, of course -- J&J had nothing to do with the underlying problem. But they embraced it, fully adopted the user's point of view, and kept their product alive. #

1. It's really cool technology.#

2. If it works, it will be a space that humans occupy, like hard drives on Macs and PCs, and Facebook profiles on cell phones. This purchase is not specifically related to the product we think of as Facebook today. Today's Facebook is like search is to Google, or MS-DOS was to Microsoft. Facebook is so big, its ambition has to be big to match it.#

3. Zuck wants to bring the Internet to the next billion people -- why? Because everyone in the first billion is already a user of his network. My guess is that the next group will neither be easy to convert or as lucrative. If they want growth it'll have to come from elsewhere.#

4. Oculus is Google Glass that's fun and works. And not as creepy. #

5. Oculus is the X-box of the future. #

6. It's 3D that really works. #

7. It's the movie theater of the future.#

8. Zuck is of the generation that grew up with game consoles. He wants to be the first user of Oculus the same way people of my generation would have wanted to be the first user of Marantz. (Look it up.)#

9. If you can't buy the coolest game platform for $2 billion, what's the point of having all that money. #

In the past if I wanted to link to an image, I'd put the link in the HTML. Click the link, see the image, hit the Back button. Now I can put the image in a popup dialog, click OK to dismiss it. Same interaction, this way is a little faster and less disruptive to your flow. Less jarring. I hope. Examples follow...#

I tried using this great New Yorker cartoon as a Scripting News background image, but it clashed too much.#

#

Later, by coincidence, I listened to a Fresh Air interview with Bob Mankoff, who did that cartoon, who has a book out. He's the New Yorker cartoon editor. #

First Look says Omidyar to stay out of newsroom.#

Swiss Watchmakers Skeptical of Digital Revolution.#

Video: The final images from every Best Picture winner. #

Google Announces Price Drops For Its Cloud Computing Services.#

Million Dollar Homepage still exists, but 22% of it has rotted. #

Harvard: Closing the gender gap in computer science.#

Gay Firefox developers boycott Mozilla to protest CEO hire.#

Sometimes platforms are defined first around users -- Mac, Android, iOS come to mind. And sometimes platforms are defined first by developers. Examples include Unix, the web, JavaScript. #

But eventually every successful platform ends up viewed both ways. If there are apps written in JavaScript, it is relevant to users. I make apps for users -- and they have to know they're using a new platform because it works differently from any other platform.#

JavaScript is a very cool developer platform. That's why I'm interested in it, but I wouldn't be making software for it if it also wasn't an excellent user platform too, potentially. #

I'll be at EmpireJS, May 5-6, NYC. #

If you look in the Links menu at the top of each page, you'll see a new item there, Open comments window. #

Choose the command if you want to comment. A familiar Disqus comments interface appears.#

That's about it. You have to remember where to look, but this seems like a good thing, keeping the hit-and-run type comments to a minimum. #

Yes, I know it looks a little funky. If you have suggestions, please post a comment. #

I did a Google image search for the term screen shot on scripting.com to see what it would find.#

One of the first images was a Windows screen shot from the late-90s UserLand CMS.#

We were really proud to have successfully gotten off the Mac web platform, which had been completely rebooted by Apple overnight around Unix, shortly after Jobs returned. By getting onto Windows, we got onto a platform that we felt was more stable and had a better future. (Didn't turn out exactly as we thought, but none of these kinds of navigations ever do.)#

Today's Fargo users will see a lot of familiar features in this screen shot.#

I go for continuity. If I labor over an idea until I find the right answer, that pretty much settles it, and I move onward. And it has a nice side-effect that old users can become new users more easily.#

Note to self: Screen shots make lousy blog background images. #

#

Thanks to Chuck for the link.#

When I throw Hail Mary passes, they work.#

I'm staring at the docs, and the elements in the DOM structure, and I'm trying to puzzle out how to get from this to the span just before it, and then find the wedge icon, and flip it from pointing right to down. I type some shit in, "This can't possibly work" I say to myself, and shrug -- what the fuck -- can't hurt to try. Then I run it and it fucking works. I don't trust it. So I'm going to put the code right here in this mini-post, just so I can come back and look at it in a while, after this stuff makes more sense and have another look.#

What's really funny is that when you're looking at this in my blog, this bit of code will have just run. #

A product like Secret should go public right now.#

Offer stock, at a good price, to people who are active users of the site.#

Use algorithms to find the behavior you want to enhance. Give users equity. Not fake equity, not feel-good equity -- the same stock you give key engineers.#

Because you need us, and we know it. I'm doing a lot to help you get off the ground, and I've been down this road many times, and we know how this goes. If you're successful the users get your gratitude and if you fail, we lose our data (not that that means a whole lot in this case).#

How about another outcome. We get rich because we bet on you early-on and won.#

I don't know why but I've always loved maps. As a kid I would stare at them for hours. Practice drawing them. I liked the idea of maps, and that they represented places I could think about and maybe visit one day. Maybe the visiting wasn't even the big deal. I wanted to know about them.#

So for me, being able to put a map behind a day's worth of blogging is as interesting as putting an image. A way to focus attention on a place, a logical view of that place, without the reality of trees, cars, people, waterways, buildings, armies, etc. Just graphs in a graphic view.#

What's cool about this is that it's not a hack. The fact that it's a map is just an attribute on the outline heading for the day. I can also specify the latitude and longitude, what style map it is and the level of zooming. #

Here's a screen shot of the attributes dialog for the map behind today's posts. The center is in the heart of Fargo, North Dakota. What does it mean? Not much other than it's a really cool place to name a product after. #

The feature is not yet released. I just started work on it this morning.#

Goal#

Plan#

#

This is how you win. Stay respectful at all times. No sarcasm. Give your opponent all the respect they don't give you. People notice this, although you don't think they do.#

Force your adversary to take yes for an answer. You find out quickly who's wed to conflict and disagreement when one side surrenders.#

Another example. I was watching the gubernatorial debate betw Schwarzenegger and whoever his opponent was. At the end of the debate the candidates could ask each other questions. So the first guy goes and asks a "question" that's actually an attack. "Why are you such a jerk?" Arnold says a bunch of nonsense that he's been saying the whole night. Good-natured nonsense. Then it's his turn to ask. "What's the most interesting thing you've learned on the campaign?" A total softball question. The guy just fell over. He had been prepared for anything but that. It totally worked. He had no idea what to say.#

#

I wrote this in a tweet: "I think you have to deliberately temper your ambition to keep it at a human scale. Otherwise there's no integrity. You are just human."#

I thought deserved an explanation and to be saved outside of Twitter.#

My idea of integrity is this: If there's a difference between what you seem to be and what you are, then you have an integrity issue. For example, a boat with a hole in its bottom has an integrity issue if it's in water, because pretty soon it's not going to be a boat. One of the key things about boats are that they float. However if it's a beached boat, it can have a hole in its bottom and still be a boat. I'm sure you understand why. #

So having too much money is a problem because to manage a lot of money you need to be more than a human at some point because it gets complicated as anyone with a lot of money can tell you. You have to hire all kinds of people to help you, the more you have. #

There's the problem. You can't be a person and have above a certain amount of money because you have to become more than one person and you just can't do that. It's not something we can do. #

Maybe this is too subtle. But I think it explains the unhappy part of getting rich, and very few rich people are happy. I think a lot more poor people are. Because they are living at a human scale. #

Microsoft: "We undertook a limited review of this third party's Microsoft operated accounts." (Translated: We read his mail.)#

When a tech company refers to you as a "third party" you know you're in trouble.#

Mike Arrington: About That Time Google Spied On My Gmail.#

#

Create an open source development environment where there is no info about a person's gender, age, race, etc.#

It would also be good for free speech, because you wouldn't be able to get someone fired for expressing an opinion you don't like -- because you wouldn't know where the person worked!#

Disconnect work from the other parts of identity.#

PDF of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines.#

When I first read Ted Nelson in the 70s, his books gave me ideas I've used when I dream about software, ever since. #

Unlike other hippie tech visionaries, Ted's writing was accessible, he explained his ideas very well! #

And the value of the ideas endure. Although I'm sure Ted would disagree, vehemently, the tools and services we're using today were imagined by him, very long ago.#

Moral of the story: Things don't always come out the way you think they will, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't dream. #

Ted's work is incredible, still to this day.#

When we were kids, adults loved us. Hugs and kisses all day. #

When we grew up, you all became scared of us. It's a big thing to try to understand when you're still just a kid inside.#

The kids we once were are still very much alive. They're looking for all the things kids feel the world owes us. And not finding enough of it.#

#

Matt Terenzio suggests reminding the user that the name of the linkblog outline has to end with .opml. I thought I could do even better, making it work even if you forgot to include the .opml.#

I implemented the feature, and it works. While watching the Knicks beating the Pacers! #

if (!string.endsWith (fname, ".opml", true)) { #

#

#

#

This group proposes to make a historical social network of people in Wikipedia. I really like the idea. Find out which historical figures were contemporaries, and knew each other#

Very creative.#

Melo?#

Contract#

Is Dolan ceding authority?#

I hate prevarication#

How long will it take?#

Dolan, Jackson and Mills#

Red Holzman#

There is no I in team#

Phil Jackson#

Jackson is moving to NY#

Who is Irving Azar?#

James Dolan#

13-time NBA champion, twice with Knicks#

It's great listening to Walt Frazier talk about it.#

#

Thanks to Rex for the link! #

You know how guitarists have licks?#

Well programmers have them too. #

Here's one..#

When you click the permalink next to an item with subs.#

When we show you the item.#

It's expanded.#

So logical, how could it work any other way?#

Exactly! #

PS: Thanks to Dan MacTough for his help with a gritty programming problem related to this feature. #

The good news is that now that there is no dominant feed reader, many of the popular products read the title-less feeds just fine.#

That's the miracle of a competitive market. Once a big company comes to dominate, esp in a market they don't love, stagnation strangles it.#

When Google pulled out, contrary to what the RSS bashers say, the lights started coming back on, almost immediately.#

After the transition, I have a lot more space for linkage.#

I want to help people who are doing good things for the open web.#

So if you're making or using tools in innovative ways, and don't depend on Facebook or Twitter or the like to spread the word, or are working on other ways, or even just thinking about them -- write a blog post and send me a link.#

I want to help good ideas get attention! #

You hear this these days -- that mobile is so compelling, so pervasive, that we'll stop using desktops and laptops. I don't think so. And I've always been among the first to get and use the newest and most expensive devices. I'm not anything remotely like a Luddite.#

But you can swing too far in your enthusiasm. Saying there's no use for desktop computers is just wrong. I drive a 4-door sedan. At one time I had a Mazda Miata. I've also had a pickup truck, and a huge van. And a bunch of shitty little cars that served as basic transport. There are semi trucks on the highway. And the kind of truck used to move mining equipment and missiles. And tanks and buses. There isn't one single form factor for cars, why should there be one form factor for computers?#

I have yet to see a tablet that's as easy to type on as a desktop. That can have so much material on screen at once. I am a professional computer user. Sure most people don't need all the hardware tools I have. But I'm damn glad I have them.#

I worry about this trend. I see it as the equivalent of saying we can only have receivers and not transmitters. I am a publisher and I need my tools.#

I'll tell you about them tomorrow.#

For now, the main Scripting News feed stays as it was. #

#

NBA Rumors: Rockets Eye Sign-And-Trade For Knicks Carmelo Anthony? Jeremy Lin Back To New York?#

Wow, that would be some kind of blockbuster deal. #

The author speculates that the Knicks are bringing on Phil Jackson to help persuade Melo to stay, but my guess is that it's the other way around. Bringing Jackson on is a way to give the fans hope for the future, a future without Melo.#

I, for one, would love to see Jeremy Lin as the Knicks starting point guard. I don't care if the Knicks make the playoffs, I want to see great basketball in NYC. #

The last couple of weeks have been great, btw. No complaints! #

Chris Dixon: Full stack startups.#

Charlie Porter, an Adventurer Who Reshaped Climbing, Is Dead at 63.#

Slate: The 634 runways where Malaysia Airlines flight could have landed.#

Jeff Wise: Why I think the missing airliner could be in Central Asia.#

#

The Surprising Law of Upskirting.#

About compilers compling themselves. #

Kottke is 16 years old today. One of the great blogging champions. #

I wrote this on Quora, a while back: We expect too much of geeks.#

Joey deVilla: Toronto-to-Tampa Road Trip, Day 1.#

FP: For Illegal Migrants, Southeast Asia is the Means, not the End.#

RIAA Wants Google to End Piracy "Whack-A-Mole".#

Fast Company: Need A Little Serenity In The Workplace? Try These 7 Simple Steps.#

Ron Chester reviewed the archive from Sept 2001.#

I have the synchronization scripts written.#

The essays from the old scripting site are copied into the new one.#

The overall site structure comes from publicnotepad.#

Still need to write code that produces the essay list in reverse chronological order.#

The Eye icon has to work when you point at an idea. #

getFeedItems call for Fargo Publisher.#

Look into report on Autosave pref not being respected.#

Maybe it's time to start publishing on Scripting News in a stream?#

Stream looks good on iPad.#

Finish bookmarklet#

Stream looks good on iPad.#

getFeedItems call for Fargo Publisher.#

Look into report on Autosave pref not being respected.#

Done#

Tabled#

#

To use streams, at the top level of your outline, add a #type "stream" directive.#

In the outline settings dialog for the outline, in the Overrides panel, set the type to idea. #

Now when you click the + icon in this outline, you will create a calendar structure of nodes of type idea. Each one of these items appears in your RSS feed because it has an isFeedItem attribute, which is put there when you hit the + icon.#

However these nodes are treated differently when we create the RSS guid for it. We don't generate a path to the node, we generate a path to the headline 2 levels in from the summit that contains it, a node that represents a day in the calendar. Then we add a #name value at the end of the URL to construct a guid which is both a permalink and unique. The guid is based on the created att on the headline, so unless you create two headlines in the same second, each will have a unique address. So be careful when creating these items not to create a bunch of them by wailing on the + icon. Do it more slowly. #

If you have it set so that new items are comments, that will be respected as before, so until you uncomment the node it won't appear in the feed. This option is set in the Insert tab in the global settings dialog. #

#

1. With an image is in the background, when viewed on the iPhone, the margins are wrong. Done.#

2. The guids for the items are wrong. Done.#

3. Need an icon for idea type. Done. #

4. Clean up pointer to RSS feed, don't use Dropbox's url. Done.#

5. Other templates need to be mobile-ized.#

6. If a permalink points inside something collapsed, expand it. Done.#

Today's going to be a lite day. I feel groggy and a bit hung over.#

And while I'm typing this, iTunes came to the front twice, for no good reason. It's updating my iPad to iOS 7.1. Why iTunes needed to come to the front? Some lazy programmer somewhere couldn't fix a bug, I guess.#

Time for coffee! #

I stopped watching True Detective after episode 4. It got really boring for me. Nothing was happening. I loved the first episodes, because they were so different from any TV I had seen. But either they got too violent for my liking, or I stopped being interested in the characters. A show has to strike a balance. I don't get off on gore and blood just for the shock value. Uck.#

When I start in the morning, I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and fix a few bugs, document a few things, tie off some loose-ends from my last programming session. Then I add a new headline at the top, entitled Morning coffee notes, press Cmd-] to demote, and marvel at how easy it was to put all the details of the beginning of a day neatly under a single headline. #

The generalizations are made by the young who have no idea what's ahead of them. The only way you stay sane is to think that it truly is unknowable. But as you get older you learn that there's so much we all do -- exactly the same as everyone else, it's really depressing, but there's no way to avoid it.#

Good morning everyone!#

Fixed problem with date at top of each day. Under some circumstances it would show Sunday when it really should show Monday. This is because I had a "-5" param on cmsFormatDate. Should have been "0".#

We now have background images working. If you put a backgroundImage att on the day headline, with its value as the URL of an image, it will show that image as the background for the day, with an opacity of 30 percent. Not sure this is the right value, also not sure how to let the user set the opacity. For example, the March 4 background image is a great Linsanity picture of Melo and Lin, the two Knicks who loved each other, with Coach D'Antoni in the background, scowling. #

Thanks to the excellent CSS Mentor Nicolas Gallagher for helping me figure this out.#

As I look at this page, I'm not exactly laughing out loud. More like a combination of snickering and cackling. #

#

Beautiful play! #

I haven't thought about what to call them. Mostly they are ideas that are too big to fit into a tweet, and that I want to be able to refer to in the future. #

I think of the whole thing as a "noteblog" and even reserved noteblog.org if the idea catches on and other people want to keep public notes in this fashion.#

To which I reply: It is. #

I switched off that format in 2006 because:#

Now Google Reader is gone, and Twitter doesn't look like the future anymore. Most of my ideas don't fit into 140 chars, and although I tried writing two sentence blog posts, I was starting to post some of them on Facebook, which is not a good place for stuff that's meant to persist. The rest I would just lose. That's not cool!#

Now that Fargo 2 is maturing, I decided to try to solve the problem for real.#

For writing that's not full enough to be a blog post, but too full to fit into 140.#

I would call them medium posts, but someone else already thought of that. #

He must talk with the public, unlike Dolan and the other execs.#

He should make the decision, on behalf of the Knicks and Melo, about what's to become of Melo. #

Bring back exciting basketball to New York. For crying out loud keep Hardaway and Shumpert. We need some young promising dudes who are cheap to root for. Let's hold on to some of these guys. And keep Chandler and Stat too. What the fuck they are Knicks.#

Dolan doesn't have the gravitas to do it. And what's his name, the coach, he's got to be gone.#

The Knicks need some kind of shake-up. Having Phil Jackson come back in an executive role could be just the thing. #

99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer. Take one down. Pass it around. 98 bottles of beer on the wall. #

#

Glad you could make it! #

This is a prototype of the next version of Scripting News.#

It's also going to be a built-in capability for Fargo.#

These items exist as part of my blog, but they will also exist as part of yours, if you want. #

I want to build a new kind of linking, where the content is included in the destination, as a supporting fact. #

The same way I included a picture of a NYC snowbank in the previous item.#

#

Trying to show a friend how to write a blog post. #

I said "Now click on the eye icon." He clicked. Nothing happened. Click again. Nothing. Click click click. Nothing. #

Turns out he was clicking on the icon that makes things italic. It of course is also the "eye" icon. #

I'm glad I worked on this so much.#

It's very sexy. I love the way it looks and feels.#

#

I can write as many of these.#

I will use these when what I have to say is more than two or three sentences.#

It's a mini-blog post. Not as big as something more formal. But longer than a tweet or a mini-mini-blog post.#

#

I had a chance to see Little Feat in 77 and passed on it. I was in Madison and didn't feel like schlepping down to Chicago. And then of course Lowell George died. Learned an important lesson then, when you get a chance to see Little Feat live, you should go.#

Now I want to play around a little with what happens when there's text indented under an item.#

I want a little wedge next to the headline, and when you click it, it expands and collapses. #

A little outlining for people reading. This is a good thing. #

1. I don't have a 140 character limit.#

2. I can have as many links as I want in an item. #

3. I use HTML hyperlinks.#

4. I don't use a URL-shortener.#

This is going to work differently from Scripting News, yet when it's ready for public viewing, the contents of this outline will be displayed on the scripting.com home page.#

The first thing I'm aiming to do with this is to create a linkblog and note-taking environment like scripting.com was before 2006. Here's an example of a month of posts, for July 2006. #