I was writing about this on Facebook, explaining to NakedJen how, while I am usually punctual and keep my commitments, sometimes I miss wildly.

That reminded me of the time, recently, that I was more than 20 minutes late for a breakfast meeting in the West Village.

How could this be, you might ask, when it takes about 20 minutes to get from my Hell's Kitchen apartment to the Village via subway. Well, I didn't take the subway.

I like to, in the summer, if I have the time, ride a CitiBike, if I'm going downtown. Can't use it for uptown trips because there is no CitiBike north of 60th St, yet. Someday soon I hope I'll be able to use it to go to meetings at Columbia or to shop at Zabar's. But not yet.

So I go to my usual CitiBike station, and oops, they're closed for maintenance. I look at my watch, thinking I might just make it if I go down and catch the A, B, C or D train at Columbus Circle to West 4th. But I decide to chance it, so I walk downtown to the next CitiBike station on Broadway, and they're closed too. Now I'm really fucked, I'm on 53rd and Broadway, and there's no subway nearby that gets me close to the restaurant I'm going to. So I continue down Broadway, and that station is open but it doesn't have any bikes (no surprise, given that so many stations in the area are closed). So I go west, there's a CitiBike station on 54th and 9th, and it has bikes. I get one, ride downtown, and that's why I was so late.

The meeting was with people from Apple to discuss their celebration of ten years of podcasting (according to Apple of course, podcasting existed for a few years before Apple got into it). I must have pissed them off, and rightly so -- I hate it when people are late like that. I have a 20-minute rule myself. If they had been so late, I would have left. And as a result, I guess, their celebration of ten years of podcasting actually had none of the history of podcasting in it. It was just a list of all the current hits, Fresh Air, This American Life, Serial, etc. Oh well. Hopefully no one thinks that's all there was to podcasting.

07/31/15; 07:04:20 AM

Disclaimer: It could be that I'm missing something, or everything, and if that's the case I apologize in advance.

I'm working slowly in the background on the new EC2 for Poets, and have come across some missing pieces in the Node and Unix worlds, that I just can't believe are still there. Here are a couple.

  1. There doesn't appear to be a way to save a Node app as an executable. I understand this might end up being a big thing, but disks are huge these days and the net is super fast. My Android phone today downloaded Angry Birds 2. Sixty megabytes. In a few seconds. And even if a Node "applet" required that Node be installed, so what? Just make it so that when I type its name on the command line, something happens. Without the "node" part and without the ",js" part. (Double-clickable scripts is something we had working on the Mac in 1992, btw.)

  2. There is the equivalent of the "Startup Items" folder on Unix, but I took one look at the docs and realized that I won't know how to use that for six months. It will take that long for all the odd concepts to settle in. Meanwhile on the Mac (or Windows for that matter) just drag anything that the OS can run into the Startup folder and it figures out what to do with it.

Also I'm taking a look at forever-service for running Node code at startup. I haven't gotten it to actually do anything yet, but it looks simple enough. And I love forever, I use it on all my servers to keep stuff running.

07/30/15; 05:20:08 PM

People post big ideas to Medium. It's nice that they have the ideas, and that they share them on the web, but how long will these ideas be there?

I can still point to articles I wrote 20 years ago, in 1995.

Will the Big Think piece you just posted to Medium be there in 2035? That may sound like it's very far off in the future, and who could possibly care, but if there's any value to your writing, you should care. Having good records is how knowledge builds. If we're constantly starting over how can we pretend to be accomplishing anything other than self-promotion? Is that enough? Don't we need more value in our thinking?

When we look back at today from the future I expect we will see a big black hole. This period will not look like the renaissance it could be, rather it will be a void, nothing. What were people thinking in 2025? It will be impossible to know. Or it will be too dangerous to try to find out (read on).

A lot of what we say is controlled by large corporations, or by small ones that will be owned by large corporations. There isn't much interest, among the owners of Medium, for example, in owning something small and boutique-y 20 years from now. Either it will be huge, or it will be gone. And they may well have pivoted a dozen times before arriving at their eventual success. It's quite possible that the stories you write today will not be part of that future. Or worse.

Read this article about Sourceforge and what they're doing with open source projects that were entrusted to them. They're adding malware to the downloads. Had I asked you to think about this five years ago, how many people would have considered this possibility?

Do you still trust GitHub? Have they given you any assurances that they won't modify your projects in the future? Some developers think they're already doing it. We need to keep a careful eye on this. I'm trusting GitHub as if they are a neutral service for my shared source. If they're not, we need to know exactly what they think they're entitled to do with our projects and then decide whether we want to continue to trust them.

Right now there isn't a good answer. But there are some very bad answers. The current crop of VC-backed repositories, from Medium to GitHub, have big question marks on them. If you value speech, in all forms, safe from future interference, you should be helping get the answers yourself.

More on this to come subject.

07/30/15; 08:12:05 AM

Jeff Jarvis wrote a book called What Would Google Do, as if there were great wisdom in Google, and I suppose there was. You have to have captured some basic truth to grow from zero to Google-size in such a short time. Something that others missed, or couldn't execute on.

Twitter deserves a similar treatment. Blogging was sputtering along when Twitter came out, and while it did its share of sputtering, it also was roughly a straight line pointed to the right and up.

So What Would Twitter Do?

That's what I cover in this 30-minute podcast.

07/29/15; 01:48:08 PM

I have a little story I want to tell.

Five years ago, when I was a visiting person at NYU J-school, I organized an afternoon seminar, a discussion between three leaders in the local Internet business community, about a topic very dear to me -- Sources Go Direct.

The three panelists: Rachel Haot, Fred Wilson and Nick Denton.

The discussion was to have been about the way news was organizing itself on the net, with the sources of the news going direct to the people who were interested in the news, without control of intermediaries.

My theory was that there would be a role for journalism in this new world, but it would be different from the role it played in the past. Now that the sources can go straight to the readers, the reporters would stop being sources themselves, and return to a more pure form of quote and fact gathering and presenting.

I still think that's the way it's going, but my panelists didn't agree! Especially Denton, who told a story about how when he was a budding software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, he visited with me as a gatekeeper (a key idea for Denton) to get his ideas distributed. At that time, according to Denton, I was the equivalent of what Gawker was, then, in 2010.

I was shocked into silence. Denton wanted me to argue with him, but I wasn't prepared for that, being so sure that this was incorrect. I never wanted to be a gatekeeper, quite the opposite. I was trying to be a lead-by-example proponent of the Sources Go Direct philosophy, before it had that name. When Denton visited me in in February 2000 for Spicy Noodles at Jing Jing in Palo Alto, I wasn't a journalist gatekeeper, I was the CEO of a tech company, just like Denton, who was going direct. In my case it was out of necessity, the gatekeepers (who certainly existed!) weren't carrying the story I wanted them to. They were imho stuck, and as a result so was I, and I desperately wanted to get unstuck. So I skipped the intermediaries and went direct, using something that would later come to be known as a blog.

I wrote about Denton and our dinner because it was something I did that was interesting to me. Not because I felt I was in control of his destiny, and if I had thought that was the case, I would do whatever I could to get rid of that power.

In fact something like that happened, after I gave a talk to a group of bloggers on Prince Edward Island in October 2003. They felt I was in the way of their growth. I was surprised to hear it, so I took steps to get out of their way. I guess it's hard for some people to understand that I really believe the hype. The world isn't the same after the net as it was before. It was Denton's belief then that nothing had changed. The people who were gatekeepers were different, but there were still gatekeepers. I thought that gatekeepers were, like the rest of the elite, becoming less powerful because the nature of world-wide communication was changing.

But it's funny that Denton, with his investment in editorial tools for his readers, actually made the bet on Sources Go Direct. So while his publication was focused on the rear-ends of the elite, he was empowering his readers to write without going through the people he paid to manage the gates. I just don't think the anuses of the rich and famous are all that interesting. I wonder if there are others who feel the same.

I also wonder if Denton eventually got tired of being a gatekeeper. It must be exhausting!

07/28/15; 09:12:00 AM

One of my favorite Dead songs is U.S. Blues.

Not only is it a catchy tune with eye-moistening patriotic lyrics, it was written at a time when reactionaries in the US were trying to take ownership of patriotism.

Wave that flag, wave it high and wide!

Did the hippies say OK you can have the country oh hard hat war lovers?

I'm Uncle Sam that's who I am, been hidin out, in a rock and roll band!

Hah of course, that's exactly where Uncle Sam would be.

So when you see something you love, something important to you, get usurped by forces of hate and war, what you do is you love it right back into your arms.

Summertime done come and gone...

My oh my!

07/27/15; 03:49:06 PM

I haven't been paying much attention, I had little hope of understanding what's happening there. But it sounds, from afar, as if something is changing.

I think Gawker could use some change. The way they cover tech is fairly disgusting, imho. I don't pay attention to the rest of it. I've known Denton for a long time. I think he's a smart guy, and the conversations we've had have been interesting. But every time I give Gawker a chance, they do something crazy and disgusting, and I just look the other way for a while. Then the cycle repeats.

It's too bad, because their software for user participation seems pretty good. It looked like perhaps they were trying to evolve into something like Reddit or Wikipedia even. That might have been interesting.

Are they becoming the next CNET?

If you have light to shed, please post a brief comment below. Thanks.

07/27/15; 01:14:58 PM
07/27/15; 11:23:49 AM

A post by Melody Kramer on Facebook got me thinking now might be the time to take another look at the Hulu For News idea. 9-minute podcast.

See also, the future of news through Ezra Klein.

07/27/15; 10:34:01 AM

Ben Parr writing in TechCrunch does a great job of explaining exactly what Twitter doesn't need in its next CEO. However it's probably how Twitter's board is trying to fill the job. I have a quote for that from one of the best movies of all time, As Good As It Gets. At the top of the stairs in the climax scene of the movie, Carol the waitress screams in despair: "Why can't I just have a normal boyfriend! A regular boyfriend who doesn't go nuts on me." The camera moves to her mother, in the shadows, who says: "Everybody wants that dear. It doesn't exist."

I might be getting the quotes somewhat off, but that's the spirit.

What Twitter "needs" according to Wall Street they can't have, because it doesn't exist.

What Twitter really needs, is to go back to before the IPO and chart a different course. And to do that they need a CEO with chutzpah, who will tell Wall Street to dump their shares if they want, because the company is not being run for them. They have a vision that goes way out into the future, and fuck you if you think we're going to screw that up for a few quarters of modest stock appreciation. That will just get us back where we are now. There might be a bit of money left on the table in the current model, and a great Wall Street-approved CEO might be able to pick up some of it, but the honeymoon will be over in a year, and you'll be looking for a new CEO again, and coming up with lists of three things the CEO must be. And it won't work then either.

Think different!

Who said that? That's who they need as a CEO.

Or someone with a loud cackle-y laugh who, when he tells you what he's doing, is totally unbelievable, except his stock is now worth more than Walmart's.

Tech management for high fliers like Twitter is not something you go to Harvard Business School to learn how to do. You don't pick up your bedside manner at an investment banking or PR firm. You run the company the way you see fit, and you tell Wall Street to buy steady investments from blue chips like Ford or General Electric, but companies like Twitter will be volatile and unpredictable, and are equally likely to skid into the gutter as reach the stars. No risk, no reward.

Maybe the problem was that Dick Costolo was too nice a guy without any great ideas about what Twitter could be beyond what it already was. If they want a CEO that the company deserves, they need to pick someone who has really different exciting ideas about the future of media.

07/26/15; 07:37:24 AM

Remember MyWord Editor, the silo-free text editing program in JavaScript?

Last time I wrote about it, it was only 1/2 Medium. It could store stuff using your Twitter identity, and publish beautiful documents, but the editor was just plain old HTML forms. Not very beautiful to anyone but its creator.

Then in May I tripped over a project on GitHub, called medium-editor, that promised to take care of the beauty part of it. I just had to figure out how to replace the plain Jane editor with the nice one. It took a couple of approaches to figure it out, and now it's working. Couldn't be happier.

We're much closer now to having a fully open source silo-free way to publish single-page documents to the web in a way that's reasonably future-safe.

It's quite a stack

  1. The editor is a JavaScript app running in the browser. Open source, MIT license.

  2. It talks to a nodeStorage server, which implements storage and identity.

  3. Which in turn talks to Twitter API to handle identity.

  4. Storage is on Amazon S3.

  5. The API is documented in source, hopefully soon a wiki.

Welcome

The medium-editor guys are great. And they've got quite a nice bit of uptake. They were very helpful when I had questions, even though they didn't know what I was working on.

We're ready to take more leaps. We just need help from users. How? Use the stuff. It's pretty easy now, and getting easier all the time.

07/24/15; 11:42:14 AM

On Wednesday I wrote about a problem I've been seeing with GMail, or so I thought. Messages that I knew I must be getting were not showing up in any of my mailboxes in GMail. But when I searched for them, they would show up.

I heard from other people who had seen the same behavior.

And I heard from two people from Google who work on GMail, who asked all the right questions. And gave me really detailed instructions on how to help them debug this.

What they turned up is that the message I gave them the ID of had been classified as spam by Apple software running on one of my machines. I thought this couldn't be, I never use the Apple mail client. I only access my email from the web interface.

But then I realized that's not true. I've given Apple all the info it needs to log onto my mail account from all of my iOS devices. Yet the Google people say the connection came from a Mac. They see it in their logs (which is amazing given how much email they must process).

Anyway, I accept what they say and wanted to pass it on. Our email systems are more complex than we realize. They were certainly more complex than I was thinking.

At this point the problem isn't solved, but I'm not sure what to look at next. Thinking about it.

But wait, there's more!

I got a fairly detailed howto from one of the Google guys, Brad Town.

He says: If you haven't given any Macs access to your Gmail account, then I think one of the following is true:

  1. You've given access to a Mac but didn't realize that it'd also access Gmail. (For example, if you linked Gmail's Calendar or Contacts in OS X, it may also enable Gmail access.)

  2. Our identification of the issue (OS and client version, etc.) is wrong.

  3. Someone else is accessing your account.

And then goes on to recommend, in great (useful!) detail how to proceed.

The best advice he offered is to assume #3 is true, and proceed from there. I don't actually think it's true, but it seems to have had good results.

What I did

I went through Google's suggested security process. They showed me a list of machines that had been either accessing my account, or had tried to, but were deemed not secure enough by Google, and denied. I had seen reports of the denials before. They usually happen when I'm watching Jeopardy, or Law & Order, my two prime goof-off shows. The requests come from my IP address, so I don't think it's a hacker trying to get in, it's got to be one of my menagerie of computers.

I changed my password

Then I sucked in my breath, and

  1. Changed my password.

  2. Deleted all the access to services and machines that weren't from Google. That meant telling LinkedIn they couldn't check my contacts (why had I ever given them permission to do that, weird) and shutting off my two iPads and my iPhone. Apple was no longer a possible source of the missing messages.

One quick result is that things quieted down around here. When a mail message would come in, each of my devices would take turns singing, including my Apple Watch which informed me haptically and audibly of the new message. It's nice that this change got them to STFU. And I still have an Android device for portable access to my Google accounts.

Then I sat down at the desktop machine, a big screen iMac, and don't you know, there's a notice in the upper right corner from Apple about my password, here have a look.

Well well well, that's a smoking gun. The Mac OS wants to know why it can't read my email. And I thought no way any of my Macs were getting access to my mail. Clearly they had access, and they want it back.

Now I'm going to click on the Continue button and see where it takes me.

To System Preferences, Internet Accounts, Google.

I have no recollection of ever telling my Mac about this account, nor did I have or any reason to. I don't use their desktop apps for these functions. I'm strictly a web guy. My guess is that when I set up my iPhone to access the account, it shared the information with my Mac without telling me. And further, the Mac has a spam filter (this is just a theory) and this is where the mail deletions were happening.

Caught in the act

I actually saw an email get deleted this afternoon. It was an offer to let me test a product. The message showed up in the Notifications on both my iPhone and Android phone. When I picked up one of them, I literally saw the notification disappear. When I went to the mail app on the Android phone, the message was not there. Nor was it in the GMail web interface.

I searched for it in GMail, as I did with the earlier lost message, and it was there.

This happened before I changed my password. Hasn't happened since.

BTW, this message was borderline spam. GMail didn't think it was. I often get messages like this, and I don't complain. I like to know what free hardware I can have. I almost never ask for a test unit though.

Visions of the TSR wars

This whole thing is freaking me out. I thought my Mac was sacred space, not touched by all the control freakery of the iPhone. But I shouldn't have been so naive. Apple has been pushing their cloud services on the Mac for a long time, and I think I relented last time I set up a Mac, or maybe the defaults were different, or the messages better phrased to make me go ahead and try it. They were never very clear about what these services do. I bet this is one of the things they did.

Could it possibly be that Apple doesn't like the fact that I use GMail? Could this be marketing? A feature, not a bug? How did I get sucked into this! I'm a web mail user, very deliberately. I wanted to stay out of this mess.

You're almost certainly too young to remember the TSR Wars of 1986 and 1987. I was a participant. Our competitor would see that we had installed interrupt handlers to catch our magic key, and they would de-install them, basically killing our app. So we had to learn to watch for this, and put ourselves back. This mail situation feels a bit like that. We absolutely need to control email. It shouldn't be up for grabs. This is not user generated content. And by the way -- I pay for my Mac hardware. This is not a case where if you don't pay for it you are the product. I pay.

PS: I tried looking up TSR Wars on Google. They're convinced I meant Star Wars.

PPS: TSR is an acronym for Terminate and Stay Resident.

PPPS: A Hacker News thread on this post.

07/24/15; 11:33:13 AM

First, please read this piece by Ezra Klein about the future of news.

What he describes is a part of the news system of the future.

  1. News orgs like Vox, which Klein writes for, will continue to post to their own sites. Search engines index the main site and are, and will continue to be an important source of flow. It also serves as a reliable archive of past work.

  2. They will have RSS feeds that point back to their sites.

  3. Some of the people who directly read the feeds are linkbloggers. They pass on links to people they follow, generating flow. I am myself a linkblogger.

  4. New news reading apps will build on the feeds. As Facebook and Twitter become more slow-moving big companies, the opportunities to create new news systems will be limited to their employees if the news only flows to their systems. Luckily, there's no need for that to happen, since almost all web CMS's support RSS. Next steps for all of them is to provide parallel interfaces to Facebook and Twitter.

  5. The stories appear in full text on Facebook. People who read on Facebook are much more likely to read the stories in place than to click on a link. If you want to reach Facebook readers, you must put the full text there. Facebook is of course making this easy.

  6. To compete, Twitter will have to allow full text of articles to appear on Twitter.

It happens with sources too

All that is on the distribution side. The disaggregation happens on the source side as well.

  1. A news article contains facts, quotes, illustrations and photos.

  2. Reporters used to call sources on the phone for quotes. Today and in the future, the quotes come in the form of speech, by the sources, on networks.

  3. The process of assembling the bits into a story is quicker, easier and more automatable. The tools will keep getting better.

  4. There's an opportunity for new quote-gathering sites. Twitter is far from the best way to do this.

Summary

  1. Bits flow out to the open web and to silos.

  2. Quotes come in from the network, and the open web through feeds.

  3. New ideas for reading systems are tried out on the open web.

07/23/15; 06:27:55 AM

Some really important messages are not showing up in my GMail inbox.

I've found out about them when I go look for them, when I expected an answer from someone and it didn't come. When I search, I find the message. However it's not in the Spam folder. And it's not in the inbox. I can't tell where it got routed to. Just that I had to search to find it.

This is really scaring me. What is going on with GMail?

Also, is there any way to tell how they routed a message? Where it ended up?

PS: Apparently Linus Torvalds has noticed the same thing.

07/22/15; 05:10:03 PM

In the end, after all the reporting about the user uprising at Reddit, do we have much of a clue about what actually happened?

What we know

  1. Victoria Taylor was fired.

  2. Ellen Pao resigned.

  3. The founder, Alexis Ohanian actually fired Taylor, not Pao.

  4. It had something to do with the Ask-Me-Anything function on Reddit.

That's what we know. But what was it about the AMAs that caused the firing?

Guesswork

My guess: The Reddit board, representing investors who recently put $50 million into the company, wanted to sell the AMA function to advertisers. Taylor objected, and was fired.

If so, it represents a much bigger story than what the press reported. This is the fundamental clash between the users of social media and the people who theorize that services like Reddit are worth investing $50 million in.

The real story, imho

I suspect they're going to find out that they lost the $50 million.

That if they sell out the AMA function, all that was appealing about Reddit to the current Reddit users will be gone, and as the users of Digg proved, they are mobile. They can take their act elsewhere.

Reddit is providing a commodity service. They are easily replaced by the users.

And you have to wonder what other services are vulnerable?

If the users have a voice that can easily be focused, something that distinguishes Reddit from services like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all the various chat services, where the users don't come together in a single online place, then you probably can't monetize it.

However if your users are disorganized, you can probably make some mistakes and learn from them, and still hold on to most of your users.

Users threaten to quit Facebook and Twitter all the time, and some do, but the majority stay put.

PS: Here's an example of a service that concentrates all its users more than probably is safe.

07/22/15; 07:49:03 AM

I've been getting emails from one of my hosting providers, Linode, saying that my server there was exceeding its CPU allotment. I checked it out. It was Dropbox. As usual.

Dropbox is a total hog running on Linux. Maybe it is on the Mac and Windows too, but we just don't feel it so much. Not sure.

But I've been using it on all my servers for a very long time, years, and I can tell you -- it's wrong. It was a good first effort. But we really need the equivalent of Dropbox for servers. It would be organized differently, and it would be tuned up for the reality of servers.

I was hoping BT Sync was going to do it, but it got so convoluted in its various releases. I no longer know how to use it. And it's crashed my main machine the two times I tried to install it over an old version. I had to restore from a TimeMachine backup both times. One time it took out my fusion drive.

I was hoping that Amazon supporting filesystems (they call them elastic filesystems of course) would be the answer. But I finally got access to the service, and I can't figure out for the life of me what it actually does. As with almost all of Amazon's services, based on their docs and marketing materials.

What would a Dropbox for servers do?

  1. I don't need to share everything with every server. For example, each server does a backup at night, to a Dropbox folder. That does not need to be shared with all the other servers, just one other place, where all the backups appear.

  2. Some folders don't need to be sync'd all the time. Folders that store log files that can get huge and are updated every time something happens, if they sync'd once every hour or every day that would be enough. Or even never. Never would be often enough.

  3. It should be possible to put a cap on CPU utilization. If you're using more than say 30 percent of the CPU for file sync, something Dropbox does routinely (it goes up 90 plus percent) then just slow, the, fuck, down and relax a bit about sync. The job the server is doing is more important than keeping in sync with the other machines.

  4. However one thing must remain from Dropbox, it has to be easy to set up. None of the alternatives I've looked at are. They're all very very Unixy, and require fairly deep understanding of how the OS works. I don't have the time. The most appealing thing about Dropbox is that setup takes a couple of minutes. Sure it's a CPU hog after that, but if you can't get something going, it doesn't matter how efficient it is.

That's just a start. I'm sure other things will reveal themselves, if we ever get a new product in this area.

07/21/15; 10:35:12 AM

In 2001, I took a static snapshot of the UserLand discussion group, and turned the dynamic site off. Ever since, the URLs that pointed into the site were broken. Shit happens.

Well, PagePark makes scripted redirection so easy, I decided to make the URLs work again. Here's an example.

http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$18647

Now it works again.

Fixin the Internets one bits at a time.

PS: This is what the config.json file for the discuss.userland.com folder looks like. Nerd-brag!

07/19/15; 07:12:25 AM

I'm thinking about doing a new version of EC2 for Poets. The old version is hopelessly out of date. I'm not even going to point to it, I don't want people to attempt to do what it says.

Linux, Node.js, River4

  1. As before it will be in the form of an EC2 machine image.

  2. Instead of Windows (the last version) it will be Linux. Probably Ubuntu. Why Linux? Well it's free, stable, and I now know how to set one up on EC2, so why not?

  3. Main app: River4. Most important. It's a river-of-news aggregator in a box. I want to make it easier for smart ambitious journalists of the future to get started in their new geek life. Having your own river is like having an aquarium. It gives you something to watch, it makes your server immediately useful, it makes The Internet into Your Internet.

  4. Supporting apps: PagePark, Noderunner, forever, and obviously Node.js.

Questions I have

  1. How will the user get files onto the server? I like using Dropbox. But it's a little tricky to set up. This is really something Amazon should have in its toolbox. An easy way to connect the filesystems of an EC2 instance and a user's desktop. I'm interested in knowing what other people think. Maybe I should just use plain old NFS? (Note: In my first pass, I spent an hour trying to get NFS properly set up and failed. Dropbox is a dream in comparison.)

  2. I'm going to have a script that runs at startup that launches all the things it needs to launch (see above). Any advice for this?

  3. I know people are going to say "Use Docker." Yes, of course, but first I want to do an AMI. I have experience doing these. And it's just one command in the AWS dashboard to turn an instance into an image. Docker will require a lot of decisions, and I am in the best position to make those decisions, because I'm most familiar with River4 and its needs. Key point -- they're the same decisions that need to be made to set up an AMI. So this is a necessary precursor to doing a container with all this stuff in it.

  4. I could make it so that the instance has a fixed password when it starts up, but would only do it if I could require the user to create a new password at launch or shortly after. The other choice is to use a "key-pair." It's another thing to set up, another delay in the user's gratification? On the other hand it could be too loose? Not sure.

How to help

Post any ideas you have in a comment below. I'm posting links to this doc on the server-snacks and river4 lists. But just use the comments here, rather than use the lists. Let them stay relatively quiet and used for support questions, as they come up. Thanks.

07/18/15; 07:28:42 AM

Spoiler alert: If you haven't seen The Matrix, don't read this.

You know how when Neo takes the red pill he sees what the world actually looks like vs what the program that is the Matrix makes it appear to be? Well, the Internet actually is a program, not that the real world isn't, but there's no speculation about the Internet. It is one huge collaboratively written piece of software, created by the human hive mind. I promise you, this is the reality of it.

None of us actually know what the world under the projection looks like. If you have a server at Amazon, what is its physical manifestation? If you were in a room with all the servers what would it look like? But then is that what the real Internet actually looks like in any real sense? Is the reality the projection or the means of creating the projection?

What got me thinking about this was a Facebook post by Jason Pontin with a picture of a cat riding a unicorn, and I had a feeling almost like deja vu, as if the projection was flickering in and out and I could see the reality behind the effect. "That's it!" I shrieked. "That's what the Internet actually looks like."

I thought you would like to know.

07/17/15; 09:04:26 AM

There really are only two kinds of software.

  1. Software you can use while not paying attention, multitasking, in a haze.

  2. Software that you have to pay attention to. Requires you to learn how to use it, setup. If you use it without paying attention you will lose work, or money, or give up secrets.

Examples of the first kind of software -- chat programs, Instagram, Facebook, news sites. Amazon when you're browsing around..

The second kind: running a server, programming, bank, much email, Amazon when you're making a purchase. Anything that involves giving up a password that controls money is something you should be paying attention to while using it. Programming is probably the most intense software activity in the second category.

I mention this because a lot of people seem to think all software is in category 1.

Totally not true.

07/16/15; 03:21:59 PM

If he's not careful Josh Bernoff is going to win BOTY.

This is a great blog. And a great memorable title. And it lives up to its rep.

A meta-comment

This is the kind of stuff I did in the early days of DaveNet. I had a lot of accumulated knowledge about tech, the kind of stuff that was usually only said in the lobbies at tech conferences. I just started writing about it publicly. People ate it up.

07/15/15; 09:19:19 AM

When I was a kid I used to dream of all the cool stuff I could buy if I only had the money. Then, as I became an adult, money stopped being the obstacle, the problem was finding stuff that fit, or that was really good. You had to work to find the good stuff.

Then comes Amazon. I remember when a friend said to me, about ten years ago, that he tried to buy everything on Amazon. It was a game. Until that time I had never bought anything from Amazon, but I decided to play the game too. And it worked. For a while I was getting off on having all my desires fulfilled, quickly and effortlessly. I bought a big house in Berkeley and filled it with stuff from Amazon. A living room, a den, two bedrooms, an office, a kitchen, a garage, tons of closets. All that space to fill, and I came close to filling it! There was a mountain of empty Amazon boxes in the basement when I left the house and moved to NY. A one-bedroom apartment. A lifestyle that couldn't overdose on Amazon, there just wasn't the space to fill.

A picture named glove.pngToday, in the middle of summer, when the humidity is 100 percent and it's hot and sticky in the city, the opposite weather of the normal post-Thanksgiving binge, we're encouraged to indulge in a frenzy of materialism. I went to the site, clicked around, but it made me feel sad for the little boy who lusted after all the good stuff. Now, if they were selling what I had when I was that kid, hanging out with friends at the playground, throwing a football in the street, swimming in a lake, baseball, flirting with girls, plotting and scheming adventures. It's all about the friends I had when I was a kid. I wish for one more week as a kid, just one more. I would pay a lot of money for that.

To come so far, when all my material dreams of childhood could be realized with a single click, to realize that what I had then is what I most desire now.

07/15/15; 07:19:49 AM

This is like a super-cut Scripting News post. Lots of stuff in here, Melody Kramer asked really challenging questions. But luckily there were answers, for most of them.

Poynter: What if journalists weren’t controlled by tech?

Hope you enjoy!

07/14/15; 07:30:19 AM

A 14-minute podcast about the relationship between the public and public media.

As Melody Kramer says, in a report on Nieman today, the opportunity is to go beyond tote bags and pledge drives.

We're all creating media these days. Let's find better ways to organize our work.

07/13/15; 09:53:42 AM

A 12-minute podcast about different types of online communities and how they scale.

This is on-topic because of the problems at Reddit.

07/12/15; 12:00:42 PM

Last built: Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 8:30 AM

By Dave Winer, Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 10:54 AM.