Happy New Year everybody! 💥#

The picture, to the right, of Jules in Pulp Fiction is from (I think) the first scene of the movie. Here's the actual quote. "Say 'what' again. Say 'what' again, I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more goddamn time!" As Will Campbell says on Quora: "This entire movie is basically one bag of brilliant quotes." True. As I slog my way through the end of the last season of The Newsroom, I realize that some script writing is basically one big bag of terrible quotes. Inserted into actual conversations. And the director makes the characters scream the awful quotes as if they're being tortured. It gets so bad at times I turn the volume off. I dream of the characters killing each other in a Scarface-like ending. I think I have to go back into therapy to find out why I need to see the very end of this terrible show. (BTW one in five scenes is actually pretty good, like every scene with the Assistant Deputy EPA Administrator. And every scene with Olivia Munn is amazing. She's magnetic.)#

Here's a fun end-of-year game. 1. Think of the ending of Scarface. 2. Now think of movies you wish had the same ending. Examples: Forrest Gump. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any movie starring Tom Hanks.#

T-shirt of the decade. #

A list of files from the earlier XML-RPC site that were not ported to the new site. This link will help the search engines find those files at their new location. #

Okay I'm in Season 3 of The Newsroom now, and I bet Sorkin isn't writing it, rather it's someone trying to write like Sorkin. It's awful. Unbearable. What would make sense is a final massacre like the end of Scarface. I'd pay to watch that. Say hello to my little friend. 💥#

This song was in the finale of Mr Robot and now I can't stop listening to it. "I've been in this town so long that back in the city I've been taken for lost and gone and unknown for a long long time."#

The lyrics are interesting too. #

I had a feeling of total weariness this morning so I stayed in bed until 10AM, a very late hour for me, and decided finally I Give Up. I no longer am going to care about whether the world is headed off a cliff. I'm no longer going to care about anything I can't do anything about and guess what I feel great now. What a relief. You know what this feels like. When I got home after life-saving emergency heart surgery in 2002 I felt like I was in a dead relative's house. Something I had experienced a few times by then. This was someone else's house. Less than a year later I sold the place and moved to Cambridge where we started BloggerCon and the podcast movement, and what a great move that was. Giving up is the best thing to do. I mean it. #

I compiled a cheat sheet for myself of Old School blogging attributes. Included here to get into search engines. #

Poll: Is it okay if Apple controls the news you can read?#

News should never be a silo, yet that's where Apple is going. #

Hard to believe the Knicks won again last night. Esp since it was a close game at the end where they blew a big lead in the 4th quarter. This is exactly the kind of game the Knicks generally lose. #

On this day we learned that Apple apparently stopped allowing users to add their own RSS feeds to their News platform. I guess this is inline with the way they vet apps for iPhones. Can't let any random ideas get to iPhone users. Best to be safe. Perhaps to keep China happy? Not kidding. Tech companies ultimately have to yield to authoritarian countries, where they keep strict control on what the people can read. Russia can now disconnect their country's net off the world wide net. Losing a news platform like this is dangerous to freedom, pretty much everywhere. Best not to trust them with our flow of information, so use another news platform on their phones, and use other non-Apple podcatchers.#

100 deranged Trump supporters at a flea market plan a civil war. NYT puts it on page 1. Slow news day?#

BTW, for reference, here's a screen shot of the home page for Radio. See where we put the place to enter a new post? Right in the middle of the top page. The easiest place to get back to. See the menu at the top of the page. It's the same menu on every page. It gets you to the full functionality which included (in 2002) an RSS feed reader. How did we get there? Factoring. Over and over. Until it was logically organized for the person who we were designing it for. Full functionality doesn't have to be a maze for users, if you put the effort in. #

Andrew Sullivan outlines the roadmap for the Democratic candidate in 2020. Make Americans feel great about America again. #

During the 2016 election I watched reruns of The West Wing and found it relaxing, to be able to visualize a government run in a human and intelligent way. Last night, looking for something to watch, I spotted The Newsroom on HBO and thought I would give it a try. Perfect choice. Another Sorkin show, a bit dated, in terms of tech very dated, but who cares. It's a bunch of actors, some good and famous reading Sorkin dialog about how news would work if it worked well. I've just watched the first three episodes, it's an incredible antidote to the way news is these days. Highly recommended, and as I step through it I expect to have more to say. BTW, it's available for streaming on Amazon.#

A bingeing update. I wrote that I really liked The Morning Show on Apple, but when I picked it up again, starting with episode 4, I couldn't stand it. It was like a bad soap opera. One word: Insipid. Too bad because the actors are great and they had lots of money to do it right. The story is childish and the dialog is embarrassing. Those are also some of my criticisms of The Newsroom (see above) but there is substance in that show and the writing is pure Sorkin, so it's funny to think the actors are just saying what Sorkin told them to say. Like Leo and Bartlet, Josh and CJ. Except not them, other people. And lots of lessons about journalism. For example Chuck Todd is lying when he says he didn't get that the Repubs were always lying on his air. How do I know? Because the fourth episode of The Newsroom is all about Repubs openly lying. And that was a non-journalist writing, at least nine years ago. If Sorkin could figure it out, so could Chuck Todd. He's playing us, badly and we'd be foolish to accept him at face value. #

When I see something like the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, I think "carbon party" -- clever ways to add carbon to the atmosphere. Understandable 100 years ago when people were marveling at the things you could do by vaporizing carbon. It's time to start admiring things we can do to sequester carbon.#

I went to New Orleans after Katrina. I knew the city because I went to college there. I think there will be a lot of Katrinas, I don't think anyone who knows disagrees. The city was devastated. It might have been technically possible to do something like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, in New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina, but no one would waste the effort and it would seem tone deaf a term people like these days. We're on the cusp of that. It still seems normal now to burn carbon like that, but in not much more time, we'll wonder how we ever took pleasure in such extremely negative images of how we destroyed our way of life. Another example. I was living in NYC during Sandy. I was 30 blocks north of the blackout line, on the good side. I had electricity, but everything south of 23rd St was blacked out for weeks. After a while I ventured on foot into the blacked out area. On the walk back uptown I went through Times Square. You could see it shining all the way downtown, from the blacked out part. Such extremes, amazing no one thought to turn the lights of Times Square down while the lower part of the city was living in the dark, or trying to.#

We’ve been through this drill before, with the Kavanaugh nomination. The Republicans have this angst filled “debate“ and in the end they do the evil thing. It's a trick. They find they can get credit for being open-minded and fair without actually having to be open-minded and fair. #

I'm continuing to struggle getting the old XML-RPC Manila site to open and render in today's OPML Editor. I really want to get that site fully restored before moving on. I posted a note on the Frontier-user list where in 2015 they were talking about this stuff but never got to the resolution. When this is done I want to have an app you can run that converts a Manila site to a folder of HTML files. So we never forget how to do this again. I feel the weight of all the good work we did, and how embarrassed I am that we tried so hard to preserve things, and so far have utterly failed, at least in this one important example. #

I'm reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K Dick. A small part of the story is the basis for the movie Blade Runner. A bounty hunter and artificial humans. There's a test that determines if someone is human or android, based on the ability to empathize. Androids don't empathize, humans do. It occurs to me that the online world we have created limits ourselves to androidly behavior. Empathy is not very common. #

I ordered a CD-ROM drive from Amazon, and am now reading backups from UserLand from April 2000. Should be interesting. I'm thinking about uploading the full unmodified archives. It includes a snapshot of all the Manila weblogs, from editthispage.com and weblogs.com. Problem is there are passwords in the files, almost 20-year-old passwords, but you know how that goes. What do you all think?#

Hope you're having a happy holiday. Scripting News will resume tomorrow, Murphy-willing. #

One more thing. Another Manila user wants to statically render his sites per my query yesterday. I'm sure we'll figure it out. #

One candidate could change everything by raising money to do good things for Americans right now, not after they get elected. The idea that value was flowing to the people not the owners of the media companies would inspire voters. It would inspire me. This would be bigger imho than Sanders and Warren not taking corporate donations. I think we'd welcome big corporate donations, as long as the money was flowing in a good way.#

What I want most for Christmas is to do a final build of the original XML-RPC site as a static Manila site, so the 1998 version that's about to be retired is safely preserved for the future. The problem is outlined here. I could have answered the question myself, in 2002. Any help from an old school Frontier developer would be much appreciated. 💥#

Speaking of which there should be a place I can download a final release of Frontier from 2004 or so, with Manila baked in, and its full web interface. If I replaced the app, I could probably run it on a Mac running Mojave or a Windows machine (I should get one that can run Frontier before they stop making them).#

The key to good blogging software is that it feels as easy to write a post as it is to write a tweet or a comment in a Facebook thread. #

Braintrust: Building a static Manila site in 2019.#

Last night was the final episode of Mr Robot. One word review -- masterful. Lots to think about. The Vulture synopsis is great, obviously it's entirely spoilers, as is this post. The big question of this episode and the entire series it turns out is Who Is The Real Elliot? For that I got the same answer Time had for their POTY in 2006. We're all Elliot, having constructed more agreeable versions of ourselves to share with the world, hiding who we are many levels deep, like Inception or The Matrix. It's recursive, Mr Robot says. You wake from one dream to find yourself in another and another. I imagine many people will dislike the end, the same way they didn't like the end of Battlestar Galactica. Some of the story is real, some of it matters, but in the end not much actually changed. Mr Robot asks us to look at ourselves and our families and friends, and how much of it is what we wish it were, vs how much is as it actually is. There isn't anything unique in this story, it's really the story of our lives, waking up from the dream we concocted to get through childhood. Endings to stories are hard, the art is in where they leave you and how much they change you, and the ending of Mr Robot scores high on all counts. #

We have to get a message through to the press that the faceoff isn't between the Republicans and Democrats, it's between the Republicans and the Constitution and the people.#

Wouldn't it be great to have a "reality list" like the AP Style Guide. This would be one of the items on the list.#

How to make corned beef hash. It's incredibly simple. Boil some potatoes the night before. Drain the water, add a bit of vinegar, let sit, covered, overnight. In the morning, chop some corned beef, fry it alone (without potatoes). When nice and brown, put the beef on a plate, leaving the pan greased with fat from the beef. Chop an onion, fry it, then add some chopped potatoes. Then mix the two and fry together. You can add garlic if you like. Mix it up, then remove the hash and fry a couple of eggs in the same pan and serve them on top of the mound of CBH. There's really nothing to it but boiling and frying, but it's really tasty. #

It's been cold but today there's been a bit of a thaw and a nearby creek is flowing nicely under an almost solid cover of ice.#

Watchmen is great. It's like Lost meets Westworld meets The Leftovers. Almost done with season one. 💥#

I've noticed recently that expanding an embedded tweet is painfully slow the first time you do it on an item on the blog. I did a bit of debugging and found the bottleneck, and fixed it. So now clicking on a wedge to view a tweet should be instantaneous. 💥#

An example of a post with an embedded tweet.#

I asked my friend Allen Holub what "Agile" means. He had a blog post from 2017 ready to go. Wow. #

An odd thought. The Republicans are trying to eliminate rule of law. At the same time they're rushing to appoint judges. If they're successful, judges are just people, their opinions don't matter. Why do they care so much about judges then. Also, suppose the Supreme Court says his tax returns must be released. What does he do? #

The thing in tech that sucks the most. A product everyone uses won't add a feature that would open it up to new ideas by independent devs. So you have to reimplement the whole thing, and convert their user base, to try out a new idea. Which means the new idea never gets tried out. First experience was MS-DOS and its lack of a clipboard in 1985. The OS had to be scrapped, effectively, because it never adapted to the more-than-one-app-at-a-time model, even though developers were achieving great success with that model.#

I tried watching Sunday morning TV news, in a time when there's lots happening, lots of pieces in motion, and even though the stakes are high, it's really interesting in the way the NBA playoffs can be interesting. In the last week, we finished the first round, and now there are new matchups, and public opinion matters in a whole new way. And guess what, on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC -- they keep saying the same tired and wrong things they were saying last week and the week before. It's just a horse race to them. Nothing matters but the election in November 2020. #

John Dickerson asks a non-horse race question about the trial in the Senate. "If a Senator has said how they will vote publicly on impeachment before the trial, and said evidence doesn’t matter, can the other side ask Chief Justice to strike them from the jury?"#

I loved #impotus so much I bought the domain.#

I don't care what Time magazine says, Speaker Pelosi is POTY. #

I was driving around this afternoon, and there were school buses everywhere. Why are the school buses out on a weekend I wondered. Drove past the school, huge numbers of buses and cars and people. Then it hit me. It's Friday! Oy.#

My priorities for the next government include. 1. Incorporate the Voting Rights Act into the Consitution, including references to specific former-slave states that need to be monitored in perpetuity, it never expires. They've proven that no amount of time is enough, as soon as the Court declared the VRA unnecessary, they reverted to their pre-VRA approach. 2. Prohibit gerrymandering in the Constitution. 3. Prohibit corporate contributions to campaigns and make PACs illegal. Individual citizens can contribute, with limits. Get big money out of our elections. Our elections have to mean something. #

We didn't finish Reconstruction after the Civil War. I think that's the bug that needs to be fixed. Maybe we need to add a dozen more free states, so we can fix the Senate and Electoral College so long-dead slave owners don't run the country. It's really ridiculous. It's kind of loopy that the first impeachment, of Andrew Johnson, was because he undid Reconstruction, allowing the former slave-owning states to bring back "slavery lite" -- aka Jim Crow. #

So much of what's fucked up about the United States can be traced back to slavery.#

Is today's NYT cover meant to conjure Nixon's farewell? #

The Repubs blame the Democrats in the House for their troubles. Mistake. We are the source of their troubles, the people who elected them to impeach the president. As they say, elections have consequences.#

One of the Republican talking points yesterday during the impeachment debate is that the Dems lost the election and want to undo it. This is incorrect. The Democrats won the last election and that's why Trump is impeached. As they say, elections have consequences. #

My prediction for 2020: Everything you care about is dead. Everything I care about rules.#

I think now more than ever that Amy Klobuchar is the right candidate to run against Trump. She's from the midwest, and can relate to people in Wisconsin and Michigan, two crucial Electoral College states. She's a woman, young, smart, moderate and common sense says the president after Trump will be a woman. She's also calm and reasonable, has worked in Congress, stared down Kavanaugh, and after Trump gets through gutting our government and military, we will want an administrator who is not quite so loud. I've said this before, we need a landslide in 2020, not just control of Congress and the presidency. We need a candidate who can soak up as many votes as possible. McConnell has to go. But we can't start putting things back together if there is a McConnell 2.0 to replace him. We also need to pass some constitutional amendments. Otherwise whatever gains we make will be short-lived. Our constitution is getting a stress test now. We will need to start fixing bugs immediately. Voting Rights Act is added to constitution. Gerrymandering is unconstitutional. Impeachment is automatic and begins on Day One. That said, my point of view is switching. If the trial in the Senate leaves Trump in the White House, unconstrained by Congress and knowing it, we're going to need a real campaigner to fight our way out of that hole. We will come to think of this campaign as nothing less than a revolution. #

An idea for a reforming the government. North and South Dakota remain separate states, but only have two senators between them. Probably should dilute the power of other very low population states. And that of course will have a corresponding effect on the Electoral College. The voters of these states have been terrorizing the rest of the country because of quirks in how the country grew. The cleanest fix is to undo some of the messes those compromises made. #

Today's song: Der Kommissar. #

I love a good cup of coffee in the morning. ☕#

Impeachment is not a horse race. It really doesn't matter who is president after the Constitution is gone. It can't be anyone but a Trump. They will rig the election so it always works out that way. As a preview in the last election Putin won in a landslide. 77% of the vote. Putin's opposition was not allowed to run. Welcome to the United States, assuming Trump is not removed from office.#

In June 2005, on the beach in Florida, I did a podcast of a thunderstorm which we were calling godcasts because my partner in the podcast, interrupting at random times that got predictable, was god. #

Today the House falls on the wicked witch with the bad combover. I guess in some ways it was a witch hunt. 💥#

Don Park starts a thread with "Medium is toast if.." #

I should call a meeting with Matt, Jack and Zuck. I want to sit down with you guys and tell you about the web my generation gave you, what you did to it, and how we're going to fix it so it works the way it was supposed to. #

Good morning to the Scripting News braintrust! We're getting close to the darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. So the light has to come from inside of us, to make up for the outside light that isn't here. Spread the love. Give someone a hug. Especially yourself. Dave#

Did some unpacking from the cross-country storage unit move from Berkeley. Today's pictures are product T-shirts from the 80s and 90s: Frontier, Frontier, Frontier, MORE, Ready, ThinkTank.#

I did a little Twitter narrative of the T-shirts in a thread. I love that Twitter lets you upload all the pictures you want. #

What brand has the best advertising? Worst? #

Recently re-watched Can You Ever Forgive Me. Even better the second time. #

Good morning ever buddy! :-)#

Pass this on: Hundreds of pro-impeachment rallies planned for tomorrow. #

Long ago I made a "long bet" and won. The bet was whether or not the NYT would continue to make their product freely available on the web. I figured no matter how much they tried, they would wall it off. They still haven't solved the problem. I think they could adopt the philosophy of open source tech billionaires. Make the product free and provide a supported version (whatever that means in news) for a price. This idea has been the foundation of all businesses ever started around software, because like news, there is no physical manifestation of our work, it's all in the arrangement of bits in computer memory. The biggest fortunes of our lifetimes have been made in commercializing those bits. Both hard to believe and true. 💥#

I generally do not update iTunes, iPhones or iPads unless I've bought a new Apple product that requires I do so. I am never updating Mac OS because I'm running the last version that runs the OPML Editor, which I use for mission-critical work. The only must-have feature Apple has introduced for Mac OS in the last 20 years is Time Machine. Everything else as far as I'm concerned is optional. Of course I will get spattered with email from people who couldn't live without X, Y or Z. I salute you in advance. #

That said I would kill for a Linux version of the OPML Editor. Then I could just use that OS, the same one I run on my servers and that would significantly simplify life. I am willing to kick in money for the port. We've never figured out a way to do that, but I just wanted to put that out there. Ted Howard is managing the releases for the OPML Editor (it's a distro of UserLand Frontier). I am forever grateful for Ted for his work on this. It has made all my work much smoother. #

Advertising can be powerful and not expensive. This ad, from 50 years ago, is still giving goose bumps. #

People are too judgmental, which is a shame because in the end, which is coming soon enough for all of us, your opinion of other people couldn’t matter less. Sorry if I’m telling you something you don’t already know. #

I have a box of backup disks from my career going back to the early 80s. I would like to start backing them up if I can. I think I have a CD drive that can read the backups from the 90s, but the earlier disks which are in various size floppy disks and Iomega disks will be more problematic. Starting to think about how I want to approach this. My goal is to get the content of the disks up to Amazon S3 or something like that. #

I'd prefer OK Hippie to OK you know what.#

We should be holding world wide candlelight vigils as long as the US is still running on the Constitution.#

This is the right question. None of us should just shrug it off and say the impeachment vote will be partisan as usual. They shouldn't get off that easy. They must know that we know that they're voting for the end of the Constitution. We should all write this as fact. Make the record clear.#

Are you kidding? Amazon appropriated the small company's trademark -- Elastic? Please, NYT call at least one developer before you run a story like this, or do a search. This is super embarrassing -- for you. Here's the problem with the premise. Amazon has been calling their services Elastic this and that since inception. The first was EC2. Elastic Compute Cloud. It was started in 2006, six years before the startup was founded. It seems to me, unless I'm missing something, that the startup copied Amazon.#

My favorite SNL star is Kristen Wiig. Funny thing, I wasn't even watching SNL when she was one of the cast members. So many great roles. She's a natural. My favorite right now is her Thanksgiving song.#

Journalism is reporting on the possible end of America as if it were yet another horserace.#

Quote of the year: "All roads lead to Putin."#

What I need for Node.js hosting in a 3.5 minute podcast. A big folder with lots of sub-folders, each of which is an app -- containing a package.json file, a node_modules folder, all code, data. You figure out how to host them on servers, I don't care. It works like Dropbox, keeps the folders in sync with the running apps it's managing. I can write dashboards that run on my desktop that keep track of what's going on in the folders. You figure out how much resources I use and I pay for it. #

Bret Taylor is the new COO of Salesforce. This is notable because Taylor is a real developer. He led the development of Google Maps, then started FriendFeed, which we used. It was acquired by Facebook where he became CTO and FriendFeed became the user interface of Facebook, the one we use today. He's created a lot of products, all excellent, timely and hugely popular. Having him lead a company like Salesforce is unusual, perhaps even unprecedented. A lot of tech CEOs have product backgrounds, but none as deep as Taylor. Salesforce also has Heroku, which is as far as I know unique and under-used. A simple way of hosting Node apps. I used it for a few years myself, until it became uneconomical. If they were aggressive with it and invested, they could challenge Amazon and Google in hosting. Maybe they already do. Taylor has the depth and background to do some very consequential stuff at Salesforce. We'll be watching. 🚀#

I had a random thought yesterday and didn't know where to put it. I wonder if Bill Gates has had a sit-down with Putin yet and tried to work out a deal personally. #

On Facebook, Guy Kawasaki posted a link to a story than asked why Trump is cyberbullying a 16-year-old girl. I wrote: "Putin told him to. Of course I don't mean literally. Remember when you were at Apple and I was a developer. If you and I had lunch and you told me a bunch of stuff, I didn't figure it came from Steve Jobs, but in a sense it did, because you were working for him, and wanted to keep him happy. Trump is part of an organization like that. Possibly Lavrov gave him a briefing, like the CIA tries to give him briefings. In the book was a top ten concern of Putin: climate change activism. Putin's biggest tangible asset is oil. He's a lot like Exxon. He's sending a message to his American team, this was on my list, so now it's on yours."#

One thing Facebook could do is provide a clean URL to point into Facebook, without any spyware, so FB posts can be part of the open web. A link into Facebook should be a safe thing. They're always saying how they want to make the web safer. So this has a double benefit. Help the web, and keep people safe. #

Journalism is reporting the possible end of American democracy as if it were just another horserace.#

Good morning sports fans! 🏀#

Question. I just booted up an old Wii on my modern 4K video setup. It looks very rough. I also have a Switch that I'm going to set up. I love Wii Sports. I don't think they have anything like that for Switch. Plain simple bowling, golf, tennis, baseball, etc?#

Culinary tip. Peanut butter with honey is even more delicious than with jelly. Toast the bread, if possible use Bread Alone nine grain.#

A middle-of-the-night tweet when I heard that BJ was re-elected in the UK: "Brits are idiots. Congrats. We thought we Americans were the stupidest people on the planet, but you all had a chance to throw the asshole with the creative hair under the bus and you said nah give ‘im another chance mate."#

I've had a chance to think more about Twitter's surprising proposal to come up with a web standard that turns Twitter into a protocol. I'm guessing the practical reason for this is so that Twitter can no longer be held responsible for abuse. They could ask Trump, for example, to host his own twitter, and people could subscribe to it anywhere, including Jack's twitter. It's basically a return to the open web after 13 years as silo that's been sucking the life out of the open web. I don't see why anyone but Twitter and its shareholders would go for this. I am still hoping Twitter, for the good of the web and the world, would expand to attach and display data from blogging software, as they attach and display video and images. That way writing beyond 280 chars with titles, links, simple styling can flourish. Same with podcasts. Twitter improves at a glacial pace, and they're hogging the fast lane of web media, of course along wtih the other silos. #

Note: If Twitter really wanted to help they could make it unnecessary to paste images of blog posts in tweets (example). Such an obvious thing. What could possibly stand in the way of doing this, when they do it for images and videos?#

Follow-up: Now that (I think) I understand Twitter's goal, what they really want is a way to have a feed be hooked into a Twitter "location." So one could follow, for example: @whitehouse.gov:donaldtrump, and it would get updates from that server. RSS 2.0 would totally be able to do it. #

I wonder how many people know that Facebook turned off its most basic API after the 2016 election. Got no press, there's no developer memory of it. It's as if all the Hudson crossings to NYC were shut down permanently, only bigger because the population of Facebook is billions not millions. Twitter on the other hand shut down a portion of its APIs in 2012 and it put an indelible mark on the reputation of the company with developers. I personally forgave them because I anticipated it, I've been down this road many times, on both sides. #

I've re-done the PagePark website. Now it gets the docs from the GitHub repository. It gets the markdown text using GitHub's API, a new built-in feature in PagePark. I'm getting ready to work on the XML-RPC website, this is the way I want to do it. #

It pisses me off when Repubs talk about the Dems trying to redo the election they lost. I forgot about the voter suppression, "her emails" and Comey's last minute surprise, and realized no, she won the election, you guys stole it. The gall of Trump to try to make a lie stick, that he was the victim of all that. #

Lots of stuff relating to the question Twitter asked yesterday. To people who are new to my world, this is a big deal. We'll probably be talking about it for years, assuming we make it (not so sure after watching the House hearings). But other stuff is going on, I'll put those links here, thinking of the email going out tonight, which more and more is the pulse of my blogging. If you're not subscribed imho you're missing something. ;-)#

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey outlines a plan to fund a small independent team to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media, a standard that Twitter would support. I advocate something different, Twitter already has the bugs and scaling issues solved for a global notification network. Let's add a few APIs and create a new universe. It'll happen a lot faster with much better results imho. Interestingly I recorded a podcast on just this topic, a week ago today. #

I've been down the road Jack proposes to take Twitter down, it's fraught with problems. Social media has been around a long time and there are plenty of competing standards for integrating platforms. Had they proposed such a standard when they were starting Twitter, no one would have cared, and it would have had a chance of working. Now it's a huge industry with lots at stake and lots of entities that would like to keep it from standardizing. Now maybe Jack knows this, and it's meant as a PR thing, and I'm sure the press will love it. Until they forget about it. It's time for a proprietary approach, one that is open to cloning. That can work because there's a single decision-making entity. If their goal really is to create a standard they can do it, much the way we created standards for content syndication when our product dominated. Waiting for an open development group to synthesize something that can be broadly supported, well I suppose it could happen, but it rarely does. #

2007: Twitter as a coral reef. #

Lindsey Graham is either bipolar or possessed.#

Poll: Will there be more articles of impeachment?#

Suppose you're a retiring Republican congressperson and you're retiring because you don't like where we're going. Why not denounce Trump? You're not seeking re-election. Hard to escape what's obvious. There's more to the story we're not hearing about.#

New top-of-page image and the previous one.#

Eric Swalwell ripped apart the Repub lawyer/witness. #

Creative idea. A dating app to make healthy children.#

Following up on yesterday's piece on restoring MailToTheFuture, I found the data on a backup from 2010, so I should be able to send the remaining emails at the appointed time, in the future. #

Cabbage soup: Boil 1/2 gallon of water in a big pot. Brown onions, garlic, cabbage, add to boiling water. Add carrots, chunks of white or red potatos. Brown some kind of meat, whatever you like, in stew-size chunks. I went with some chuck, not an expensive grade, this is for soup, all the toughness is going to be boiled out. Make sure it has sufficient fat to add richness to the soup. Add seasoning, I like basil, oregano, hot pepper. A can of chopped tomatoes. As much as a cup of wine vinegar, to taste. Cook for a few hours with low heat. Let it sit overnight, then cook another couple of hours. Reheat whenever you want a delicious bowl of hot soup. You don't have to add anything, it's got everything you need. I like a very cold glass of ice water with it. My father used to make this soup. #

We have a two-party system in the US: the constitutional US govt and the Russian-dominated one. #

During the impeachment hearings it would be great if MSNBC or CNN had an hour every night that were just verbatim highlights from the day's hearings, no expert commentary. I can't afford to watch all day, but I do want to know what happens. One hour is about right. Even better, a podcast. #

"He was caught trying to steal the 2020 election." That's what I want the Articles of Impeachment to say. That sends the message through the ages that at least the Democrats thought this was a problem. If the republic survives, of course that's the end of the Republican Party. I don't see how the stakes, for the world (Ukraine isn't part of the US) could be larger. BTW, I highly recommend listening to the Fresh Air hour about the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Very interesting story told by an American reporter who has had access. One thing came out in the Fresh Air story -- in Ukraine, the Trump impeachment of isn't big news. Due to their location at the front between the constitutional US govt and the Russian-dominated one, they couldn't be more a part of the US if they were Hawaii.#

One of life's lessons, if you've loved and lost, or taken risks in business or just had friends. If someone does something nasty and you think aw hell I'll just give them another chance, they'll do it again, and again, until you stop giving them the chance. #

One of the boxes I received the other day from Berkeley contains backups going back to Madison in 1979. All different kinds of media. I'm optimistic that I'll be able to find a CD drive that works with my Mac and (at least) reads the backups I took in the 90s. For the others I might have to visit the Computer History Museum, or possibly an equivalent setup in NYC or Boston.#

You know your heating system works when it's 9 degrees F when you wake up and the house is nice and warm. #

I can't get this song out of my head. #

Trump happens to be right about toilets. I bought a house recently and plan to rip out the toilets and replace them with ones that can handle the load so to speak. But I get to think about this stuff because I'm not president of the United States.#

Something really weird. I watch MSNBC at least one hour every night. The first ads for a presidential candidate I’ve seen are in the last few days and they’re all from Bloomberg. Why didn’t any of the other candidates advertise to me? They advertise to me on the net, mostly to get me to give them money. A TV ad for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 is still a novelty and if the ad is good, it can do more than motivate donations. People want to be inspired. TV advertising done well can do that. Bloomberg's ads check all the boxes. They're winning ads. #

I can't stop watching this ad for Aviation Gin. Three hot and emotive women at a bar, facing the camera. There's a plot, character development, non-verbal communication, lots to watch. The music is kind of funny. Something happened before this meetup and something will happen after. But this moment is very lovely, and that's why I find it so hard to move on. #

The XML-RPC spec looks really good, ported to GitHub and Markdown. A lot of people still use XML-RPC, even though REST was supposed to be so much better. With a JavaScript reference implementation and new debugging tools, we may find there's new life in the community. Or at the very least, it'll be ready for the next 21 years. 💥#

The next president has to be boring.#

If something truly goes without saying you don’t have to say it.#

Braintrust query: I'm writing docs that include an example of an HTTP request, in Markdown. Can't figure out to do it in MD.#

I'm doing a reboot of the XML-RPC website and readying a new JavaScript implementation. I was reminded that the original reference implementation, in 1998, was in UserLand Frontier. The docs are still there. 21 years. Not bad. #

Nancy Pelosi (not a boomer, she was born in 1940) was great yesterday, both in her press conference where she said what is sure to be a famous historic line: "Don't mess with me" all the way to the CNN town hall, which I watched, where she asked not to have to look at things through the prism of the White House, which as long as Trump is there is crazy town. She's the leader we didn't know we had. What I admire most about her is her clarity and her ability to think on her feet. Either that or she really prepared for this moment. No matter, she's just what we need right now. A strong woman to stand up to Trump. That's his Kryptonite. #

McKinsey is a management consulting company. Hiring someone with experience there means they understand how that part of the world works. I don't think it means their soul is dark, as some people seem to assume.#

Important to note the role journalism was ready to play in the Trump plot to throw the 2020 election. Fareed Zakaria of CNN would interview Ukraine president Zelensky, where he would say they were investigating "The Bidens" for corruption. From there, Trump would ask repeatedly, as with Hillary's emails what's the deal, or they're under investigation or his favorite "I don't know but people are saying." That's all that would be needed to keep the "story" alive in American journalism. Biden's rep is already tainted. In software we'd consider this a serious vulnerability, and we'd close it asap before our servers were infected again, but journalism just lumbers along oblivious, happy to be used this way. Fake stories don't just enter through the web, Facebook and Twitter, sometimes they enter through the thought-to-be-pure methods of American journalism. #

BTW, Fareed Zakaria, born in 1964, is a boomer. Joe Biden born in 1942 is not. His son Hunter was born in 1970, not a boomer. #

Had a brief talk with Doc yesterday. He and I of course are boomers. So is Trump and Rudy G. They were both born a decade before me. Their experience and values are vastly different from mine. There aren't many things you can say about boomers that's true of all boomers except for the period in which we were born (1946-1964) and our parents had sex and a few months later we were born (just like you btw). We come in all sizes and shapes. Some have penises, others have vaginas. Some are black others are white, others are Native American, some are children of Holocaust survivors, and others are Nazis. So many things to say about this, but most importantly the only way we get out of this mess is if we work together. The rest of it is stuff your parents should have taught you. If they're boomers, go ahead and blame them, but don't blame me. I'm not your father. 💥#

All of a sudden Alexa says Goodbye when I say "Alexa stop." I wish it wouldn't.#

Wouldn't it be cool if one of the candidates who have so much criticism for Facebook discovered that there is an open news distribution system, widely supported, ready to work for the people? None of the problems of FB. We're natural allies.#

My friend Yvonne was storing a bunch of boxes for me in Berkeley, and now that I have a house again, she shipped eleven boxes to me via Fedex (see below). I started going through them today and I'm so glad we did this. I had no idea what was in the boxes. I had a vague idea that it was junk, but it was not junk. First I found three quilts my mom made for me. Two of them in really good shape. The third had been chewed by my dog, Bon Bon, back when I lived in Woodside, CA in the early 90s. There were tons of pictures, the old kind, made with film cameras. Friends and relatives long gone, or now much older. Memories. Love and regrets, happy times and sadness, stored in boxes on paper. It all comes flooding back. And notebooks from when I was in grade school. Here's a page from one of them, in 1962, where I'm practicing the most basic writing. Funny thing I remember what this felt like as a seven year old. I loved learning then. We're programmed that way I guess. #

I appreciate people pointing to me when quoting something from my blog, but I prefer you point to the blog and not my Twitter account. My home on the web is my blog, scripting.com, my Twitter account is a place to record random ideas before they appear on the blog.#

Vegan.com: "RSS is a crucial technology every activist ought to know about and use."#

Every so often I get tagged in someone's lament about how no one uses RSS. It's not true. It's one of those things you can't use alone, because it depends on your news sources supporting it. I get most of my news via my rivers, which of course are just aggregations of RSS feeds. I imagine the rivers will survive me. At some point it may not be a fire hose, it may be the way the Colorado River flows into the ocean, but I think I will never see the day that RSS is gone. It does its work quietly, unlike Twitter or Facebook. It doesn't steal your personal info. Or support Russian hackers. It's quiet. That's okay with me. 💥#

BTW before Russians hacked our meme ecosystem, Google was doing it, and before them Sun, Microsoft, Apple and IBM. Google always felt threatened by RSS. They encircled it and then cut it off. They quietly got their shills in the tech press to talk about its demise. To slam me personally. It's an insidious thing. They still do it. Usually through cutouts, journalists and consultants, and sometimes Google employees. Big tech companies hate open formats and protocols, because they evolve independently of them. They feel they must control everything. It's not smart, wise or even realisitic, but after decades of existing in the wake of bigco's I know it's as inevitable as the sunset and sunrise cycle. Eventually the lack of flexibility marginalizes the big company, but they don't die, they just keep polluting, they buy politicians and we have to live with the result. #

My four-minute podcast about why removing the president is obviously the thing to do. #

I was driving while listening to the Judiciary Committee testimony. During a break the NPR commentators spoke. Endless Republican spin, even though most of what we had heard at that point was very favorable to impeachment. Eloquent and passionate. A real education. At that point Turley had barely spoken, but all they did was make his points over and over. No question at this point NPR is Republican. Disgusting to me because I am most definitely not Republican. I need another source of news. WNYC which is generally good should consider breaking off from NPR if that's possible.#

This moment is the last gasp of the American Revolution. #

Something bothered me about Brave, and the direction Firefox is going in, and of course Google and Chrome. Finally figured it out. I don't like tech companies imposing rules on writers. I may hate what pubs do with their tracking code and paywalls, but I hate what the tech industry is doing to oppose that, more. Maybe if Brave came out of the University of Illinois I would like it better, but it came from Silicon Valley, from the former CEO of Mozilla. A club of high priests of tech and their bankers who see us as the little people, when we're not ignored, to be treated with disdain and disrespect. They know what's best for us. It's like that old Who song, meet the new boss same as the old boss. The web was about freedom, and that required a weak tech industry. I hope, if they control it as it appears they do, something wonderful and free rises to replace them. #

Maybe if we pool our money and run ads of people laughing at Trump he'll get the clue and leave our country too.#

An open podcast to Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter. It's way too long and rambles too much, but the idea is imho worth 16 minutes. #

Chrome keeps coming up with new things to complain about my sites. I ignore them. I wonder how many web devs pay attention to Google's complaints?#

I had a little health scare a few weeks ago. As you may know, I broke a rib in a bike accident in September. Mostly healed now. I had to go in for an X-ray and my doctor said there was a shadow that she didn't like. I should go for a CT-scan she said, let's find out what's going on. If it's lung cancer, that's good news, she said, we found it early and it's probably treatable. If we wait for symptoms then it's often not treatable. I smoked for 31 years, she reminded me, in case I was feeling sorry for myself. Heh. So I scheduled the test, had a couple of weeks to think about it. I was obsessed. Maybe she knows and isn't saying until she's absolutely sure. I was convinced that was it, and my life was about to change to the life of a cancer patient. I know a little about it because like pretty much everyone I know people who have cancer. My father died from it. Anyway, no cancer. Knock wood. But I had the benefit of thinking I had it. So I got that experience, without the awful chemo and radiation and possible dying. I feel very lucky. I decided to tell this story now to give you an idea why I don't care that Chrome hates my websites. I do what my doctor says, mostly -- I don't give a shit what Google wants me to do. As Logan Roy says, have a nice day. ;-)#

Poll: How many phones do you carry?#

You may not like Bloomberg, but his new ad is the perfect Democratic candidate ad for winning in a landslide.#

Interesting point. Brian Kelly thinks Scripting News should not remember the tab you were at from visit to visit.#

I encourage readers to see this blog as a piece of software. If you get an idea on how to improve it, I'm interested in knowing about it. I wrote all the code for it, so I can relatively easily add or tweak features. #

Vulture has a list of lists of best TV shows of 2019. I find some of their choices hard to fathom. Deadwood Movie was awful, imho -- and it wasn't a TV show, yet it's on a list. Anyway I'd love to have a list of all the shows so I could pick my own top 10. Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Showtime, Hulu and a few others. I'm sure I only watched about a dozen shows total, no more, so while the list of possible shows is huge, the actual top ten lists wouldn't be that hard to come up with. #

We had a good size winter storm at my country house in the last couple of days. It's the kind of storm that's mostly wet in NYC, where I lived previously, but up here it was first heavy snow, then it got lighter. So the first time I shoveled the walkway to the car it was heavy lifting and the second time, light and easy. Perhaps 1.5 feet of snow. I drove down the road before it was plowed, having an AWD is great, and noted that someone had been cross country skiing on my road, I was envious. I took note of where the tracks came from, and went. The air is cold and clear, it feels like one of those mornings in Utah, it's the best first moment of a day anywhere. Later we'll be on top of the mountain looking down at the village, and thinking man this is as good as it gets. I have to figure out how to either ski or ride my bike in this weather. Probably both. I live about 1/2 hour from a ski area. It isn't Utah, or the Alps, but it is mine. 🎿#

Tooting my own horn a bit: John Naughton calls me a genius in this Guardian piece. I'll take it, to balance all the other things people have called me. 💥#

When did it become even thinkable that a president would publicly fake an orgasm to humiliate a woman who works at the FBI, for him. This is the moment for our Republican friends, if we have any left, to wake the fuck up and realize what you're endorsing.#

There comes a point where our minds are closed, we're not interested in considering there might be an innocence for people who stand by Trump. We're over that line now. You're dragging the rest of us to hell and we don't want to go there. Republicans this is on you.#

I live in a Hallmark greeting card. #

Suborning perjury is not just an issue for lawyers, Reporters have an obligation, if they know a subject is going to lie, to not put them on the air. #

I’d like to see a courageous journalist tackle this story. Why do Repub politicians sound like Russians? I’d like to know. Note I use the word courageous sarcastically. There's nothing courageous about investigating an obvious question. It's ridiculous that not one reporter has done this story. It's a scandal happening out in the open. But it doesn't fit a model that reporters know: it's not a horse race, and it's not a replay of Watergate.#

BTW there is precedent for turning off Repubs on CNN and MSNBC. They went through this in Ukraine. They thought they could be fair and balanced, that just let trolls keep an attack vector. Ultimately you have to close it. Journalism will do some growing up before that. #

When I was a kid I participated in several marches on Washington. We took buses from NYC. On one of them, I was part of the organizing committee, I was the political guy on the trip, even though I was just 16. One of the passengers, the mother of a high school friend, said I should get up and give a peptalk and lead a discussion on behalf of the organizers. I gave the talk, it wasn't very good, but I remembered the idea. Any good protest needs organizers. When I turn on MSNBC in the evening I keep hoping they'll cross the line, and start helping us, instead of being with us in desperation waiting for someone to help us. They have the pulput. Putin has Trump. Who does Putin's American opposition have? Someone with courage, a spine, and a sense that it is his or her destiny to lead us out of the wilderness.#

Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."#

For crying out loud it’s what, December already? What the..#

There's no doubt we have crossed the tipping point in the climate crisis. Part of the equation is politics. We're not only not doing anything to halt the crisis, we're accelerating it.#

Oh the weather outside..#

We need a channel for organizing more than we need horse race news and Watergate.#

Watched a bit of the Sunday news, and listened to NPR. Lots of Republican lies. Enough with the news that gives more than half the time to lies to keep less than half the population in line. We're deep in a hole, and need a landslide in next year's election to have any hope of turning things around. The press as usual has a bias toward keeping everything disorganized because that gives them the horse race, one of two stories they know how to cover. (The other is Watergate.)#

I have no interest in the current crop of superhero movies, but I would see a movie starring Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as superheroes with their money. They would have to wear outfits and have interesting names and powers. Bezos would be the guy who can get anything delivered to you when you want it. Not sure what Gates' superpower would be. It would be a lot like Idiocracy. This movie would anticipate the future of the species when the evolution we're currently going through has run its course. #