It's even worse than it appears.
Good morning obstruction of justice fans!I was struck, listening to today's Daily podcast how much yesterday's shooting touched members of Congress. I wonder if they can imagine how an event like Sandy Hook, and the abuse that followed, has affected the families involved. Or the night club in Orlando. #
I'm getting a new release of Electric River ready, one that uses the latest features and fixes from River5.#
A bonus for people who read Scripting News in a feed reader. Here's the new howto for Electric River. I'm getting ready to release the new version. This one explains itself to people who know little or nothing about River5. Progress! 👍 #
My new favorite right-margin graphic is the fatcat. I just love the guy. A perfect symbol for our times. #
Chris Allen, a friend from the early Mac days, wants us to look at IPFS as a way of publishing blogs. Sounds good to me. I like cross-discipline collaborations. We don't do enough of it in tech. Ward Cunningham also talks about using IPFS this way.#
In Bojack Horseman they have a running joke, they changed the name of Hollywood, by dropping the D. It actually is funny and there's a story that goes with it. No spoilers. Well in the last post I accidentally typed Faceboo instead of Facebook. I have to say I laughed out loud. I like it a lot. Sorry. #
Tech people often choose different names for well-understood concepts that already have well-known names. But outside of tech there are concepts that have names, like the characters in the Bible or Quran, where continuity and prior art were so important that they used the same characters and names, "cross-platform," for centuries. #- I was just discussing the California state senate with Bram Cohen on Facebook. (No links to Facebook, sorry.) So in California they call the state senate the senate not some other word like guffmab (made up word). How did they come up with this name? Well most states had two-chamber legislatures, and they were mostly called the senate and assembly. Since California was a relative latecomer to the union, even though it has always been an innovative and different place, they went with the established conventions.#
- And all those previous states were of course copying the US government, which called its upper chamber the senate too. For some reason they didn't all go with the name of the lower chamber, there must be an interesting story to go with that. #
- Anyway, of course the founders of the United States used prior art, copying ancient Rome, which called the upper chamber of their legislature the Senate, going all the way back to 753 BC. Why not. Everyone knew what a senate was, why not leverage that, keep confusion down, help people feel comfortable. In tech we'd call this interop. 🐱#
- Now the American founders could have said hey Rome is defunct, they're all dead, and the United States is going to be much bigger than Rome ever was, so we can come up with a new name and no one will miss the old one. But they didn't think that way. Using the Roman name gave a familiarity and legitimacy to what they were doing that a new name couldn't have. #
Obviously, the president leaked through his surrogate that he was thinking of firing Mueller. We weren't born yesterday. Ruddy meets with the president, and then appears on news shows saying he thinks the president is considering firing Mueller. Haha. Yes. How does he know the president is thinking of this? Well obviously, the president told him. #- So Mueller, who has even more experience with Washington politics than The Orange One taps five of his friends to "leak" to the Washington Post that the president is, after all, sad to say, under investigation for obstruction of justice. Again, we weren't born yesterday. Millions of us witnessed The Pretender In Chief obstructing on NBC, in an interview with Lester Holt on May 11. We didn't need a smoking gun this time, we all saw it being fired.#
- This is amateur hour stuff. #
Here's an item in my river that came from the Scripting News JSON feed. It's fair to say that River5 now supports RSS-in-JSON. #- It was more work than I thought it would be. It's not that the code assumes XML, it just wasn't organized for variable syntax. It is now. So when they invent the thing that comes after JSON, it'll be somewhat easier to adjust. #
- Having spent two full days wrestling with this I have to say I wondered more than once if it was worth it. #
- I haven't got a plan for how to support JSON-based feeds that have different semantics from RSS. Truth be told, their semantics will have to map on to RSS, as Atom semantics do. I don't wonder whether that exercise is worth it, it's total make-work. A lot of work with no gain in features, performance, interop.The kind of firedrill that BigCo's make developers do. #
- My titled posts appear in riverBrowser-rendered rivers as outlines. Which has a problem. Since clicking on the top line expands the post, there was no direct link to the item. Just fixed that by adding a purple link in the right margin. Feels just right. (Probably because they date back to the early blogosphere.)#
- I'm still posting tests.#
- Finding and fixing problems with riverBrowser and titleless posts.#
- Now that I'm making more of them, the problems stand out more.#
- Time to breathe my own fumes! I've been preaching that feed reader devs should support titleless posts, while my own reader wasn't doing a very good job.#
- Feel free to hate me. 😈 #