On this day in 2004 I was in Boston to blog the Democratic National Convention, esp with my newfangled audio blog post thing. #
Somewhere in this timeframe Adam Curry began Daily Source Code which is still running to this day, almost 20 years later.#
Has anyone ever seen Trump laugh?#
Somehow it's up to the Harris campaign to get the Trumps to have a normal American presidential campaign, not a prelude to a second attempted coup, which is what the Trumps are doing. I can see the op-ed they run in September saying that it's Harris's fault that the Trumps are fascist. #- I reinstated my subscription because I need to actually read their words, not because they cover news, but because they are news. The news is that the fourth estate in the US is gone. They have lost their minds. They aren't even trying. Their op-eds don't reflect facts, such as Trump will never be a serious candidate in the sense that the NYT thinks a candidate should be serious. The Democrats still will. But there's no need as far as I'm concerned, for a legitimate candidate to respond to their taunts. #
- They completely lost many of us in their extended campaign to force Biden to step aside. I knew they wouldn't stop there, because abusers never stop when you give in to them. They are the tragedy of America now, even more than Trump. We must replace them. The real question is who's going to step up to help restore journalism to our country. #
- Thanks for listening.#
- PS: I am not pointing to their piece out of respect for people who have cancelled their subscriptions. #
- I lost my iPhone a few days ago. I think all the data is safe. First time I ever lost a phone. I ordered a new iPhone 15 Pro with 256GB, it will arrive on Monday hopefully. #
- In the meantime I've needed to use my Android phone to record voice memos. Google's product is called Recorder. It's just what I wanted. #
- It has a website, so you don't have to export your recording to get it where you need it to be, and it automatically does a transcript. There's an editor on the website, which again is exactly where I want it. #
- A 2-minute voice memo/podcast I recorded with the app.#
- BTW, I think the files are smaller?#
- Here's a screen shot. #
- I sent a tweet to Eric Raymond today, lightly edited here, following up on a thread that started in 2001. #
- What Raymond said in 2001.#
- XML-RPC, in particular, is very much in the Unix spirit. It's deliberately minimalist but nevertheless quite powerful, offering a way for the vast majority of RPC applications that can get by on passing around boolean/integer/float/string datatypes to do their thing in a way that is lightweight and easy to to understand and monitor. This simple type ontology acts as a valuable check on interface complexity.#
- It's very true, my design goal for my whole 50+ year career has been to factor my code so well so it was as clean as Unix is, from top to bottom#
- The virtue of relentless factoring is you can build higher if each layer of the stack lets through the functionality that's needed, and no more. Ideally there should be one way of doing something. and it should work pretty well. #
- I realized that the web, RSS and podcasting are also a Unix-like things. #
- Because they can be made to do anything, but are simple, not a lot to understand.#
- But -- there's been this huge proliferation of languages and frameworks, and incredibly complex and underspecified formats. #
- Meanwhile core functions like storage combined with identity for end users, has not been implemented, because of course if the users had their own networked data independent of any platform vendor there would be no lockin. that's 2024 version of the cathedral, to follow your analogy.#
- Anyway, seeing you here made me think of this, I've wanted to say this to you for a long to you and now I have. ;-)#
- PS: The 2001 email from Eric Raymond.#