Listened to the Daily podcast interview a sheriff from an Arizona border county. The border wall story was used to stoke hatred of non-white, non-Christian Americans during the campaign. That's what it means. The "humanitarian crisis" the president calls for is a fig leaf for people like the sheriff. It's a loud obvious dog whistle. Can't budge an inch or we're supporting hate. #Michael Cohen's open, under-oath testimony before Congress will be important because it's probably going to be the first truthful and somewhat complete testimony the public has seen. Impeachment is driven by public sentiment. It can't and shouldn't happen until a substantial majority of the people demand it, not just favor it. You don't casually impeach and remove a president, you can't do it only on principle. It has to be driven by the public determination. #
More on the dual-major journalism and computer science program. Yesterday I wrote how that could be great for journalism, now I want to talk about the flip side, how it's great for the software journalists use, i.e. publishing software. In my experience the best software is that which is designed by people who use the product. They bump against the limits as users do, think of shortcuts and simplifications (called factoring in software). If you don't use the software your ideas about how it should work are theoretical. The closer you are to the user experience, the better you understand the tradeoffs from the user's perspective. And that ultimately is the most important one. So applied to this dual-major concept when the students learn their comp sci, it can be in the context of how journalists use computer systems. And with better understanding of users on the part of the students, after all they are users, the better the publishing software can be. #
HBO has been playing all the Sopranos episodes back to back for a few days. Yesterday by luck I hit on the very last episode. Earlier in the day I read a debate on what happened at the end. I am of the school that yeah of course he died, but the person who took the opposite position was convincing. We don't know what happened at the end so leave it there. But I got to see all the scenes that were discussed, the same day. Intense, and fun. #
First, I am not a Democrat. I'm an independent but these days I vote straight Democrat because what the Republicans have become is so abhorrent to me. We're at the very baseline of governance in the US. Do you or do you not stand for the Constitution? Today only the Dems do. The Repubs do not. #- Anyway, if Pelosi and Schumer give the president "the wall" which I put in quotes because we have no clue what it means, we are giving into the idea that a majority of the American electorate have no say in how the country is run. #
- We've been pushed to the limit by the Repubs. They wouldn't confirm Merrick Garland. They have installed a majority on the court even though they don't represent a majority in the country. The latest appointee slandered the court during his confirmation hearings. It's going to get worse. They gerrymandered Congressional districts so that in order to control the House the Dems have to win a landslide, which they did, in 2018, and even so, according to the Repubs, have no say in governance.#
- Enough. We have a system of government. Respect it. Trump's "wall" is an imaginary thing. It's an example of the emperor with no clothes. If we can't stand against this and say no, and have it stick, then we have given up any hope of ever having self-government in the US. #
- I requested to download all the info Flickr has about me on Tuesday, got the data on Wednesday, and yesterday I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what I got. #
- There were 14 zip files, each containing one folder. #
- Total of 6.59GB. 12,729 files#
- 13 of the folders contain JPG images. #
- One folder, named 72157704082859561_da410b4a23fb_part1, contained only JSON files, 36.8MB, 6366 files. The vast majority of the JSON files have names like photo_6594805.json. I've uploaded one of the files to the Scripting News repo, so you can see what kind of data you get about each image. #
- Each of the 13 folders contains files with names like dsc02455jpg_76330356_o.jpg. The dates on the files unfortunately are all the same, they don't say when the photos were taken. This would be helpful in piecing things together. It appears the first part of the name, before the underscore, is derived from the name of the file. Then following the first underscore and before the second is a number, which appears to be the identifier of the picture. This I believe is the connection between the image and the JSON file, above.#
- I loaded the JSON files into a section of a Frontier object database, and the names of the JPG files into another section. I wrote a script that looped over all the data from the JSON files, got the ID and then checked if there were images to go with that ID. 5816 image files existed and 533 didn't. Not bad, but far from perfect. Here's a list of IDs for which there were no images. #
- I haven't tried to generate a static site using this info, but it seems you could. It would be missing some images, about 9 percent. Even so, it would have been really nice if Flickr delivered it in that format. It's nice to have the JSON files, but most users won't be able to use them unless software is written, and they find it. #