If a Republican senator wanted to do something brave to call a timeout on the Trump presidency until some basic questions were answered, all they would have to do is this. Announce that they were voting against Kavanaugh and make sure everyone understood this is why. Then a few other Republican senators can join in, and then we'd have a bi-partisan discussion of the very minimum loyalty we insist on from a POTUS. #- Congress can act as representatives of the people. Never mind what they say to pollsters' questions. Imagine they knew how disloyal the president is. Act as a way of preventing the First Amendment being a suicide pact. Which is what's actually happening. Fox News has taken control of the political process, more than Trump, imho.#
Good morning sports fans!#
Mid-morning yesterday I realized that what I had been writing on this blog and elsewhere for months, if not years, amounted to one simple idea. Waiting for other people to save us isn't working. What could I do to focus on that idea? I decided to use my blog home page for 24 hours to say it. That is what appeared on the home page of Scripting News yesterday. #
I don't understand why the NYT would employ a tech reporter who isn't immersed in tech. The world is. Walk around any city if you doubt me. I haven't read many of his stories, but I would wonder if he's missing something important since he basically is one big blind spot when it comes to tech. I'm hoping the reporter who reported on the reporter was exaggerating, as they sometimes do. đź’Ą#The Democrats have a new campaign slogan "For the people." It's close. But it betrays an attitude that separates you from us. Better to get down in there. Luckily there is a very American idea that fits. "We the people..." I'd leave the elipses in the expression to let memory remind us that we remember who we are. #
BTW, I hope no networks are planning to televise Trump's military parade, but I suspect it's a lost cause. More free campaign coverage for Republicans. #
A Congressperson’s job isn’t to get re-elected, it’s to run the US government.#
Re exaggeration to feed our rage addiction -- a classic example. The president is considering whether to accept Putin's proposal to give Mueller access to the twelve GRU hackers in exchange for being given access to Ambassador McFaul and Bill Browder and a few others. #- This was a cause to set our hair on fire? It's a fantasy. It might happen in a few years if Trump is able to establish a dictatorship with no rule of law. No doubt he fantasizes about that, but it isn't happening now. #
- Yet Maddow and McFaul and a hundred reporters we'd like to respect pretend that Trump could do this! Hah. He's having a meeting about it, says Maddow. The mood is somber. This is gross malpractice. She must know it's no threat, that someone in the meeting would ask Hey boss, how exactly do you plan to get McFaul to show up for this interrogation? That would be the end of the discussion. No judge would sign a subpoena. No cop would arrest him. What would the charge be? We have the rule of law in the US, and thank goodness it's holding. #
- There is plenty to be upset about, but this is a cheap thrill. The liberal media is being every bit as bad as Fox News. Cut it out. We have minds, we're educated and we know when you're bullshitting. This is bullshit.#
Look at how awful this thing is, and that. And we exaggerate to make things look worse than it is (more on that in a bit). In the meantime, what we were told would happen is happening. We're losing our will to act. We had great demonstrations around the inauguration. But that wasn't enough. Isn't enough. We have to be smart. Learn from the experience of Russia and Ukraine. What would the resistance there do differently if they had a do-over? We have a chance to look at our own future, and change direction. We keep missing chances. We have all the tools we need to make it work. But we have to risk, we have to be willing to sacrifice. Before it's too late. Because every day it's too late for what we could have done yesterday. #
I know this is like pissing in the wind, but here's an idea for a demonstration that might impress the Repubs in Congress. In every one of their home districts, people march to their polling place, next Saturday or the Saturday after that. Carrying signs that say We Know How To Vote, with the name of their congressperson on it. Go out of the way to recruit Republican-looking voters. Make sure the TV cameras are there. #
Imagine a guy floating down the Niagara River just before he goes over the falls, thinking "It's probably not too late. There are a bunch of Republicans in the observation area, all they have to do is reach out and grab me and I'll be OK."#
Occam's News says the reason Trump is so deferential to Putin is that he is deeply in debt to Russian oligarchs. His problem isn't a pee tape, it's that Trump's wealth is Russian wealth. That fact is about to come out publicly, and Trump was afraid it would come out at the press conference, with the whole world watching with the cameras on his face. That's what they talked about privately, and that's why Putin had such a big grin. He has Trump's balls in a jar on his desk back in Moscow. #How to put this -- it's nice when a journalist or political figure correctly explains out how technology works. For example, Noah Smith, an opinion writer for Bloomberg, advises a columnist for the Washington Post that muting on Twitter is not a good idea, that blocking works better. I saw his post because it was RT'd by Brad DeLong, an economic historian at UC-Berkeley. I chimed in -- "You are right. They are trolling you, [and when you mute them] you just don't know it." And even if you block them, they can and do still go one-on-one with people who engage with you, and there are no tools on Twitter to stop that. But at least when you block them you keep them from broadcasting to everyone who follows you. Bottom-line: Block trolls, don't mute.#
Earlier this month I wrote a piece about how Americans are like people who worked at Microsoft in the 90s. You can't separate the people from the group. In that sense, no matter whether you voted for Hillary or Jill or Bernie, or whether you marched with a pussy hat, or write angry tweets, if you're an American, you're complicit. Eventually you will be blamed for what America is doing, and that's fair and just. #- Truth is, Americans are lazy. How did we get this way? We let two wars be fought in the 2000s, with no draft, not only no wartime tax increase, but a tax cut. And we let the government get away with not showing the returning flag-draped coffins. We fought two wars in Asia (still are, btw) and you'd never know it at home. That imho is a crime. You shouldn't be able to fight a war without feeling a lot of pain.#
- With that in mind, maybe we should be doing more than being outraged at why the Republicans don't act. Remember Gandhi said "Be the change that you wish to see in the world." In other words, in more American terms, stop waiting for other people to save your ass, risk some of your security for the greater good. #
- Off the top of my head I thought of something we can do right now. Stop. Don't go to work for the rest of the week. Don't buy anything. Stay home, or go out and march. Stop the US economy. Make it clear what we want. Trump either resigns or the House impeaches him. There's plenty of time between now and Friday to do that. #
- If we ground the economy to a stop that would make the world take note. Very likely the big companies would join the protest, and people around the world would join too. We fancy the US is the leader of the free world (obviously our president no longer is). How about a little of that famous leadership, from the people of the United States?#
There's a new Uber commercial playing on TV in NYC. First they take you to various neighborhoods, esp Hispanic, black or Asian neighborhoods. Outlying neighborhoods. This is the real NY, they say, or imply (I don't remember which). Try to get a fucking cab to take you to one of these places. Or pick you up. At Uber, we love your stupid neighborhood. So fuck DiBlasio, the fucker, and the cab companies. They're just out to fuck you. But Uber loves you. Uber. Of course they don't say all that, but the message is unmistakable. #Happy to report that an SQLite test app took about ten minutes to write and install. They make it sound like installing the native portion is some huge deal. It's not. I would share what I have so far, but I just followed the instructions on this page. They work, and the demo app works. I have an interesting project in mind, but first I have to learn more about SQLite to see if it's feasible. Still diggin. 🚀#
If you’re a developer who works inside a news org, here’s a plan for how to create a great set of whitelists of news that’s trying to get it right. This is based on what I learned bootstrapping blogging and podcasting. The same ideas should work for journalism, at least as starting points. We have to work together, and not wait for the tech industry to do it, imho. We can do it. Programmers can save the world. (Not really exaggerating.)#Buster Keaton's philosophy: "I always want the audience to out-guess me, and then I double-cross them."#
New personal description on Twitter profile page. "American software developer, blogger, inventor of new media types." #
Have you ever had a thought "Geez this person just needs to read the article," so you say so, and they reply with something like "Thanks. I did need to read it." đź’Ą#
Braintrust query: I'm thinking about using an SQL database in an Electron app. I want to bake the database software into the app. Looks like SQLite is the best option. Any other ideas?#
It seems to me AWS, with the combination of S3, Route 53 and the fact they have your credit card and shipping address, could turn HTTPS support into a checkbox. #
- As I wrote earlier this week, listening is hard. It's even more difficult when someone wants to report a problem. This comes up in all kinds of relationships, it even models software bug reporting.#
- Here's a scenario. A person with a missing leg says "When you push me, I fall over and that hurts." Here's a list of possible responses, from best to worst.#
- If you understand what they're saying, just say that, literally: "I understand what you're saying." If you don't understand, then say that, but only if you really don't understand.#
- Don't defend yourself. For example "I didn't know you only had one leg," or "I didn't know if I push you you'll fall over." The person just wants to know you heard them. You're changing the topic to something about yourself. This leaves the question of whether you understood out there, unanswered.#
- Don't argue. "The leg you say is missing is really just shorter than the other one, it's not actually missing." We're getting very far away from "I understand what you're saying."#
- Even worse. "It never happened" or "I didn't push you over." #
- Worst. "What about the time you said I was stupid." #
- I'm sure you see the analogy to software bug reporting. We want to know that something went wrong, so we can fix it, and make the product work properly. Same thing in personal relationships. If you care about the other person, you want to know that something you're doing is trouble for them, so you can stop doing it. There really is no better way to show that you care for them than listening when it's especially hard to. #
- Finally, why keep the response focused on the problem?#
The hideous entity that walks among us as “Paul Manafort” slips on its human skin-suit for a quick mugshot.#
Follow-up to yesterday's addition. Here's why it's interesting to put the RSS in the GitHub repo. You can see what changed. Of course that's what River5 is for. But it's interesting to see it in GitHub. Like many things on the net, both GitHub and RSS are about "what changed."#
- Here's a timeline. #
- Each news org should produce a list of news orgs they feel produce news that's not fake. Each should use whatever criteria they feel is right. Publish the list.#
- Evolve the lists over time. This problem is not going to be solved overnight. The process will take years to sort out. In the process we will learn a lot. If it works, it will transform news to make it much more useful because it's online and not print. #
- Techies, both companies and individuals, will build news products based on the feeds. For example, Facebook might offer a choice of news selected by different news orgs. An open source group could create software that flows Twitter-like news feeds from the lists. #
- This will become competitive. Some pubs' lists will fall out, others will rise to the top. There will be surprises. #
- Include blogs in the list, blogs that cover territory that you cover. For example, the NYT would include bloggers who cover neighborhoods. Tech pubs would include tech bloggers.#
- Include your entire news flow in your list. Amazingly some news orgs do not have a comprehensive list of every news article they publish in reverse-chronologic order. #
- You may choose to make your list a feature of your news site. You may also use other organizations lists as a feature on your news site. #
- Let's discuss our experiences at a future-of-news conference. After a few months' experience we should be ready to learn from each other. #
- This is not something tech companies can do for you. People whose work is producing news should come up with ideas for figuring out what is and isn't reliable news.#
- The canonical "fake news" site, Infowars, will of course produce their own list of reliable feeds. Totally valid. People who want to be informed by them may choose to do so. #
- One year ago today I introduced a feature that allowed me to include a post from Scripting News within another post. Here's the example, and the video demo. I wondered if I would use the feature. I haven't. But I forgot it was there, and forgot how it works. There's a CSS problem that's shown up, when I increased the size of the titles on the story pages. I'll fix that now.#
- This is a test. Breakage fixed. I changed the way permalinks to stories work. If an item has subs it's rendered on its own page. The URL will be different, so it has to be parsed differently when setting up the xref node. So this points to a story on its own page, and I'm going to work on the code to detect this and properly compute the location of its corresponding JSON file. #
- For the test above, the xref value is http://scripting.com/2018/07/09/143533.html#
- The JSON derived from that URL should be http://scripting.com/items/2018/07/09/a143533.json#
- This node is an xref. That means that in the OPML, it has an xref attribute, which is a link to a story on this blog. It's converted to the URL of a JSON file, which is then read, and included under this headline when it's expanded. #
After forcing a change to HTTPS, there are going to be other requirements. They'll try to eliminate fake news from the web as Facebook is trying (and failing) to eliminate it from their silo. That's the slippery slope they are starting down. They may not feel they have a lot to lose, but we do. Last year I wrote a piece about why I like to develop on the open web. If I get an idea for a feature, I can just do it. I could wait forever for Facebook, they don't listen to me (neither does Google) but I listen to me. I can do it without getting the approval of a big company -- that's the magic of an open platform. I will never give that up. I'd rather retire to Italy and make pottery and drink espresso and bubbly water. Grazie! #
Silent Movie GIFs is great. They show you tiny scenes from a silent movie, and then another and another, spaced out over hours. Here's a scene from the Buster Keaton movie One Week.#
I did a bit more development work today on a project that stores stuff on GitHub as if it were a long-term place, a place to create a historic record. Of course I question that, I did when they were an independent company. Now that GitHub is owned by Microsoft, I still question it. Not sure if it's more or less likely to survive as-is for the indefinite future. Made me wonder what Microsoft could do to reassure developers, so we'd feel comfortable treating it as a permanent resource. Clearly that's in their interest. Microsoft has embraced open source, now I wonder if they have what it takes to be a leader. #I wonder why more American congresspeople don’t have blogs and podcasts. It seems they would want to communicate regularly with their constituents. Twitter has severe limits, as everyone knows.#
I'm now archiving the RSS file for Scripting News in the GitHub repo, every night, along with the content of the blog for the day (in JSON, OPML and HTML). It'll be interesting to be able to track the changes to the file over (knock wood) long periods of time. Here's the source of the app that does the uploading. It's proven to be very reliable. đź’Ą#
- Most of the time I spend watching MSNBC is a waste, but yesterday there were two items that were important. #
- On MTP Daily, an interview with Senator Mike Rounds, R-SD, carefully explaining how Trump still has the support of his constituents, but they don't like what he's doing with tariffs. I think this is a must-listen, a real milestone, imho.#
On The Beat, author Tony Schwartz, interviewed about the angry Trump baby blimp in London, said it's funny (it is!) but is far from where we should be focused. He says getting non-voters to vote is where our attention should be. Couldn't agree more. I want a system, where voters have buddies, like sponsors in a 12-step program, who they commit to voting, and they engage on Election Day and make sure they do. They escort them to the poll if necessary. We should have drills. What an incredible demonstration that would be. Far more powerful than a march. Think about it.#
- A Twitter account called Black and Proud addresses white people: #
- Please stop saying 'I don't see color.' Instead -- I see you and your struggle, because of your skin color. I will stand with you to end racism. #
- I agree. Race is visible, and the statement that you don't see it is ludicrous. We see it. To say otherwise is to push it aside. I've written about this a few times before, once in an explainer about Black Lives Matter, and what it means, from a white person's perspective. #
- I want to do more. I feel compelled, not just to make life safer and simpler for people of color, but also to put up a roadblock to racism, to let it know that it will encounter resistance. Some things are better kept under cover. Racism for sure is one of them. #
In the past I've proposed that we all wear Martin Luther King buttons. I felt his image was perfect because he's a black man, he preached non-violence, and was active, not passive, in his quest for equality and fairness. A white person wearing a MLK button makes a statement of equivalence. Treat me as you would treat a black person. If a majority of whites wore these buttons it would make a promise to our fellow citizens, that if there's trouble, we're standing with you. When there's trouble. #- It would be like Article 5 in NATO. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. As a white person I can't become black. But I can make a statement that I stand with people of color. #
Development of the RSS format didn’t peter out, it was frozen, so there could be as much interop as possible.#
The problem for Jim Jordan, as far as I'm concerned, is I saw him cross-examine Rod Rosenstein. Just a couple of weeks ago. I know how corrupt his mind is. So matter how sincere he sounds I know his word means nothing. There is no honor in that man.#
Trump is appalling. On behalf of my country, apologies to Canada, China, Germany and whoever he attacks next. Spread the word.#
The other day I was looking for the canonical states.opml file, the one that I use to test structures of outlines with. I found what appears to be the original copy, dated 12/2/2000. It's now accessible through this.how, which is served by PagePark, using its built-in ability to render OPML files. I'm rebooting the worldoutline capabilities but with an open source scalable stack. 🚀#
Re winning in November. In 2008, Obama had a social network of voters who met, knocked on doors, arranged a buddy system for people to vote. We should reboot that, only do it better. It's 2018, and the technology and our know-how have improved a lot. #
As we get accustomed to a Putin-run American government, where are our Russian counterparts -- the protestors, the democracy advocates, to school us on how to really resist the dawning nightmare. It seems there are voices missing from our conversation#
- I haven't heard this mentioned elsewhere, but there are parallels to where we're at now and at the beginning of World War II. #
- Russia, like Germany had been defeated and humiliated. Out of that rose a strongman, who has territorial ambitions in Europe. #
- As in the 1930s, the US is isolationist. This time we have a defense pact, but it seems like we're going to withdraw from that. #
- What it means for Europe is that they're heading for government like that in Russia, and without a strong adversary, an unchecked Russia won't stop before it runs over all of Europe. #
- Here are the relevant dates. #
- The Treaty of Versailles was in 1919 and the first territory grab by Germany was the annexation of Austria in 1938. 19 years.#
- The collapse of the Soviet Union was in 1991, and the annexation of Crimea was in 2014. 23 years.#
One of the things we learned in massage school, many years ago, was how to listen. There was an exercise I always try to remember when it's time to listen. #- The group separates into pairs. Seated on mats on the floor. Spines straight, head straight, not tilted in or out or to a side. One person speaks and the other listens. The speaker just talks, no rules there. Share whatever you want. Anything. The listener says nothing. Your body doesn't move in or out. No hugging, touching, no words. Your eyes stay neutral. No facial expressions. No empathy, no approval or disapproval, just hear what the other person is saying. Understand that they are this person's words. No response is allowed. #
- These days, when it's time to listen, I allow myself to put a hand across my mouth as a signal to my subconscious that it's time to listen. #
- What made me think of this today? I listened to the latest This American Life podcast, the second segment was a couple's therapy session. One was speaking, the other wasn't listening. If you're in a troubled relationship, I highly recommend the podcast. And if you can find someone who will pair with you on the listening exercise, above, I recommend that as well. You may be surprised how hard it is to stay centered, neutral, just listen, not go in or out.#
- Listening is hard. If more people learned how to do it, we'd be better off. There would more love. People would understand that their friends and partners are real people, not just screens for projecting their movies on. #
It might just be dawning on Steven Miller that his life will suck after Trump fires him.#
We need a political party that spans international boundaries. I want to read a blog written by a Brit that explains what's going on. Who is their Lindsey Graham? Nancy Pelosi? Al Sharpton? I want to know who I should be reading from Canada, Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, etc.#
For years I was really confused about what blogging is, after Twitter and Facebook. In May last year I decided I wanted my old blog back, the one I started in 1997. Now, a year later, I realize it really works. The 280 char limit in Twitter helps because I can cross-post shorter posts there. Here's a screen shot.#
Just did a little shopping. Went to Whole Foods to pick up fruit, bread, Italian sparkling water (a habit I developed on my recent trip). I used the newly installed Whole Foods app using my Amazon ID to get a discount. I used Apple Pay to pay for it. On my way out the store I used the Starbuck's app to buy an iced coffee and breakfast sandwich, which was there when I arrived two minutes later. I remarked to the checkout guy at Whole Foods that this is the future. He asked if I was a robot. I thought a bit, smiled, and said yeah almost. đź’Ą#
- I tried an experiment to see how Twitter displays thread structures. #
- I entered a subset of the standard states outline. United States is at the root. It has one sub, Far West. And from there I list the six states, and provide detail under Nevada. #
- I'm wondering what the algorithm is. Because sometimes it shows nodes at multiple levels, and how they choose them isn't clear.#
If JavaScript had the equivalent of WaitNextEvent from the original Mac OS, you could turn it into a decent scripting language. And btw, I love callback hell. I really do. But sometimes you just need to be synchronous, for everything. Including network requests.#
One of the things I liked about Fleabag, which I just finished, is that all the characters are trying so hard, but the punchline of the six-part series, which I won't spoil, is given to a middle-aged man. So often men are portrayed as childish, clueless and mean. It's nice to see a story, one that centers on women, but lets men have dignity and wisdom while being vulnerable and wanting to be happy. 🚀#
Back in the 90s, when Microsoft was doing horrible things to the web and hoping to get away with it, I had friends who worked there. I often wondered how they explained it to themselves. They must know that what Microsoft is doing is wrong, and those of us outside of the company don't make a distinction they would probably like us to make. I didn't see a difference between the company and the people who worked there. It was hard to reconcile the affection I felt for them personally with the actions of the company. #- I mention this now, long after the events are past, because of an image and a tweet that showed that thousands of people in Brussels are marching against our president. I thought, that's cool, but soon they will be marching against the United States. They won't and shouldn't make a distinction between the country and our president, for the same reason we didn't make a distinction between Bill Gates and the people who worked at Microsoft. #
- When you go to Europe, there isn't a change in attitude that you can perceive. I went there when we invaded Iraq, creating the refugee crisis that is now causing so many problems there. No one seemed to blame me for what our government was doing. Same thing in June when I visited Italy. People seem to understand that Americans who travel outside the United States aren't to blame for Trump. But in fact, we are.#
- We could do more to stop Trump. We're all hoping to continue with our lives and careers, that somehow we'll get through this without having to give up anything as individuals. That someone else will make the sacrifice. I don't think that's how it works. We're missing chance after chance to stop this. We all have to work for each other, not just for ourselves. This is a change that Americans are not yet ready to make. I hope when and if it happens it isn't too late. #
- Here's a list of all the deliverables for the restoration.#
- A list of all the stories, on scripting.com. Hopefully this will get the search engines to index the stories in their new locations.#
- An OPML file containing the newly restored stories. There are a bunch more that weren't restored because they're already present, but we didn't have the OPML for them before. Note, it takes a long time to load, the file is quite large.#
- I also uploaded the OPML file to the GitHub repository. It also has trouble with the size of the file. #
- I uploaded the folder containing the newly restored pages in HTML.#
- I'm going to take notes here as I do this work. #
- Finding the OPML source for the stories#
- In doing the restoration of threads2 yesterday I got distracted, because the stories were in a special place not in scripting.com, which is a bucket on Amazon S3.#
- I used a special dynamic server then. Now I want to archive them like all the other posts. Some features are not preserved, such as comments and paragraph-level permalinks. However it is an improvement over what was here previously, i.e. nothing. #
- First, I wanted to see if I could find the OPML for each of the stories. That took a bit of detective work, because they were in a worldoutline structure, but they were safe, in another S3 bucket, fargo.io. Long story how they came to be there. But I had left a crumb trail, deliberately, so that if someone wanted to find the source, not only would it likely still be there, but it would be relatively easy to find. #
- Next step is to generate pages for each of the stories in preparation for putting them in a logical place, as HTML and OPML, in the scripting.com bucket.#
- Working on a template and build script#
- I have one working locally, now have to set it up so it iterates over all the stories. Taking a break for a bit. Back soon.#
- Should finish tomorrow#
- It was too nice a day in NYC to spend the day indoors. I did do a bit more work, and here's the outline for what I have left to do, tomorrow.#
- At about 8PM I have all the pages building and have a script that uploads them. Tomorrow I want to generate the redirects from the old threads website, and do some testing. I'll also release the OPML source code through the Scripting-News repository. This post will be linked to from every page that was part of the restoration. #
Something changed somewhere and the blogging I was doing in 2012 and 2013 stopped working. Turns out that files without extensions were previously interpreted as text/html even if the returned Content-Type was text/plain. So I added a feature to PagePark that lets you set the default type for a site. That was what was needed. Here's a list of the posts from March 2013 that now should work properly, again. When you have as much web history as I do, keeping things running is a lot of work.#I'm reading some of the pieces that have just come back online. For example this one -- good software design is ageless. It talks about removing features from software, and how that breaks users. I think I understood why that happens when I wrote the piece, but disclaimed it. It's because the people who do the breaking weren't the ones who fought for the users, who made the product successful. They don't have a feel for how much they had to do to get them to commit. We're having the same argument over and over, when a new generation comes of age and wants to throw out the accomplishments previous generations made. I don't know why software is particularly afflicted by this. I read an article today about a pair of 100-plus-year-old tunnels under the Hudson River, and now if they fail it will do severe damage to the country's economy. We have similar technology in software. But we wreck the tunnels, willfully, every generation. This is why progress is so elusive, and also imho why people don't trust tech.#
William Gibson: The GOP senators in Moscow, promised a briefing video, are all shown the pee tape, while being taped watching it, together. Their subsequent silence about this constitutes brutally powerful group kompromat leverage.#
Sad day. Twitter suspended the NYT account. I've been running that since long before they were on Twitter. They knew about it. I offered to let them have it, but they said no. I guess someone there must have complained? Who knows. It's a corporate world. #
BTW, I forgot to mention that the exact same links are available at nytimesriver.com -- which is on the open web, so there is (for now at least) no company (like Twitter) that can turn it off. The NYT has to talk to me before it comes down. #
How different things would be if Apple had partnered with Be instead of Next. I would have liked it because the CEO of Be was an outliner guy. Blogging would have found a natural home there. They probably wouldn't have resisted the web as the Jobs version of Apple did.#
I love it when I find a bug in four-year-old code. Today, the culprit was a routine called decodeXml in daveutils. It was decoding four special strings, < >How different things would be if Apple had partnered with Be instead of Next. I would have liked it because the CEO of Be was an outliner guy. Blogging would have found a natural home there. They probably wouldn't have resisted the web as the Jobs Apple did. & and ". But there's a fifth string it wasn't decoding -- '. This showed in an app called riverToTweets, which routes tweets from rivers to Twitter accounts, such as nyt and nbariver. It would show up with undecoded ' strings in tweets. For example. I had seen this for a long time and assumed the problem was deeply buried in a utility I didn't care a lot about, but it turns out it was in code that's included in almost every project I do, including sites such as Scripting News. It's now fixed and deployed. Not every app has been updated yet to include the fix. These are the best bugs to fix. Ones that have been sitting there for years waiting to cause problems. đź’Ą#And this is the song we sing on this day, every year. Red and white blue suede shoes. I'm Uncle Sam, how do you do?#
You know how developers say don't develop for Twitter because you'll be sorry. Well someday soon you'll be saying that about the open web. And the company? That will be Google. Then you may ask Why didn't anyone warn me? But dear friends, you were warned. #In the United States, today is Independence Day. In tech the open web is the key to our independence. Don't sell out Thank the open web by supporting it.#
Yesterday's thread about converting WordPress sites has a lot of good practice in it. It's so complete that I'd say that wp.com sets the standard today for blog portability and limited lock-in. If someday you need to leave WordPress, you should be able to do it. Now someone needs to put a Medium-like UI on WordPress and we'll have an answer for people who insist on using for on-the-record writing. WordPress is a much better place to do that, imho.#
I love the NBA, and this is by far the best part of the season which is an interesting statement, because the NBA isn't playing basketball right now. They're playing power and money. The money is huge and the power is shifting. The Lakers get LeBron because of Magic, Kobe, Shaq, Kareem, Wilt, Jerry, Phil and Pat et al. And Golden State gets Cousins because they can. So many interesting conversations to be had. I've heard it said that the East is now a backwater, but wait until a western star realizes they can play a completely different game in the East. Free agency isn't over yet for 2018. And I can't wait to see Philadelphia and Boston compete, and somehow hope the Knicks get into it, but so far, not. #Tech, journalism, politics and the people. They are everything, and the same thing.#
I asked a couple of questions on Twitter about wordpress.com and Tumblr, two blog hosting sites that seem like they might allow authors freedom to move. What you want is the same freedom you get from an email service -- when its time to move, you can forward all requests to the new service. I've posted the same questions in the issues section of the repo for this blog. Turns out it isn't that simple, and while WordPress claims to do it, at least one of their users says they don't. This is worth exploring. #Did you know you can download the source for Scripting News in OPML? Every month I refresh the archive in my GitHub repository. I started doing this when I switched to the new blogging software in May 2017. Here's the OPML for last month. #
A spontaneous Twitter thread, late at night, Eastern time in North America. They're just waking up now in Europe. I'm tweeting and reading, watching Rachel on the second monitor, also watching Art Show.#
I read the recent piece about TBL and posted it to my linkblog. I appreciate the invention of the web. It came at just the right time. I had been knocked out of the software game by Apple. The software I made threatened them, so they launched a competitor. I was looking for a platform without a platform vendor, and had no hope of ever finding one, when just the right thing showed up -- the web. You can see my excitement in the early posts to DaveNet, my early weblog and email newsletter, in 1994. But where is Tim now that Google is attempting to corporatize the web platform? He's still talking about writing software that will fix the problem. At this point software won't do it, imho. Way too late for that. #- We need him, and we need everyone else who profited from the open web. Why am I the only one protesting? Could it be that everyone else hopes to get a job from Google? Or a grant? Aren't you aware of how much we depend on the open ecosystem? And how fragile it is? Could it be they don't remember that Google loses interest in projects that we depend on and dumps them? It's one thing when they created the thing they dump, but quite another when it's something that was once a public resource that they took over. #
- We will be fighting for our freedom for the rest of our lives. But this is an easy battle to win. If enough thought leaders speak out in favor of the open web now, I think Google will back down. Let's get them to the table where we can talk creatively about the problem they see, and find a way to solve it wtihout them taking over the web. #
- We're all guests here, and guests don't make the rules. #
- The thing to do is to write a blog post in support of the open web. Send me a link if you like. I will read it. Let's start small and build it up. I shouldn't be the only one speaking out. #
Have you been following Jim Carrey on Twitter? If not, please do. Turns out he's an incredible political cartoonist, and it goes beyond cartooning, it's art, it's very dark and irreverent. Wonderful stuff. I see a connection between this and Art Show, perhaps. #
Five years ago Google Reader shut down. What went wrong? We centralized a decentralizing technology, and of course that eventually broke. Google had no incentive to keep RSS afloat because it couldn't be turned into a silo. It's like politics and journalism. We all have to do it if we want it to work. Independent developers should have worked together better. And users could have chosen independent developers over the single big company, which turned out to be the point of failure. If we want the world to work -- journalism, tech and politics, the people have to consider the big picture in our small picture choices. #The best defense against Putin and Trump is to teach every student the basics of journalism. Not just how to detect fake news, but how to write a news story. If we do it now, we'll be glad we did in a few years.#
- Dear blog friends -- #
- Here's an art show in your web browser.#
- http://artshow.scripting.com/#
- Leave it open for a bit, every ten seconds there's a new work of art. #
- I'm grabbing the art from the @artpicschannel Twitter feed. I loved having it on Twitter, I wondered what it would be like on its own. I love it even more. #
- I have an app running on my server that generates a static JSON file that the browser-based app reads. So you're not calling Twitter from the Art Show page, that's why you don't have to log on. It's more efficient this way. #
- Dave#
- PS: Here's the Art Show Howto.#
Aral Balkan wrote recently about reclaiming RSS. He talks about rebooting feed discovery, as the browsers are abandoning it. There is a simple discovery mechanism for RSS feeds, a meta tag you can put into the HTML head section that tells anyone who cares where your feed is.#- My site has one of these, of course -- this is what it looks like:#
- <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://scripting.com/rss.xml">#
- Balkan says (and I agree) it can't hurt to also link in the visible part of your page to your RSS feed, as I do here. I am thinking about doing that for my blog. There are links to my feeds in the About tab, but maybe I should make it more visible. #
- Actually there is a link to the RSS feed for this blog at the bottom of every page, along with a link to my Twitter, Facebook, GitHub and LinkedIn accounts. #
I wish Jim Carrey would do a regular TV show. We don’t have an outrageous fearless superstar comedian to school Trump Country on the hell they are creating.#
If Jeff Bezos wanted to help he'd open the second Amazon headquarters in a small population red state.#
I think we all know a police state is coming, and I bet a lot of us are being careful in what we say now, so it won’t be used against us later.#
If you want a reason to be optimistic, check out yesterday's Daily podcast. A new Supreme Court decision said membership was no longer mandatory in government employee unions. This was thought to be a blow to unions. Turns out it may revitalize them, as the membership, newly empowered, drives the unions, instead of being taken for granted. See how #4 kicks in to change #1. And you can be sure conservatives are taking note.#
- When they asked for a topic for my interview with Anna Masera at #sotn18, I did some quick thinking and this is what I came up with.#
- There are four entities that were separated by corporations and the major political parties in the 20th century. We're evolving in the 21st to them all being the same thing, with no meaningful separation. #
- If we manage to pull this off, and it's a tall order, we will be able to tackle the biggest challenge our species has faced, climate change.#
- Here are the four entities:#
- Trump Country, or Evil Corp, whatever you call them, is the catalyst. #
- Working Together, a concept more important than any technology ever invented, is the hoop we, as a society, have to jump through. To choose to work with someone else even if it means less glory for you. That's evolution. It's what we're being forced to do. It's a good thing to do.#
- If you feel you aren't being effective as a person, find someone who will work with you, and then find another and another. I think you will start feeling effective almost immediately. It means compromise. But that's the core power of humanity. The ability to see things from others' point of view, and then act on it.#
Poll: Rumor has it that James Dolan is getting ready to sell the Knicks. Incredible news. Now who should buy the team?#
Sometimes I invest in companies I dislike. If they win, at least I made some money. If they lose, well that's its own reward.#
I love the @ArtPicsChannel feed on Twitter, and wondered what it would be like to see the art outside of the chaos of Twitter. The result is an app, and here's a demo. Haven't released the app yet, but plan to. #
Jon Stewart appeared on Colbert. It seemed for a moment he was going to go all the way, to go back to the old Stewart, but he backed off. I don't think it matters whether we agree with Trump or not. We have to join together and share the same fate. As long as our most visible leaders try to hold on to what they have, we will keep losing. #Idea: 100K people move to Maine and Alaska, and start working for Democrats to replace Collins and Murkowski, but promise to switch if they take a hard line in support of Roe v Wade. Maine has a population of 1.4 million, Alaska has 739K. This is the weakness of the Republican Party in the Senate and the Electoral College. Move a few million people around the country and the advantage switches to the Democrats. #
Trump is much older than Hitler was when he assumed power in Germany. Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 at 44. Trump became president of the United States in 2016 at 70. There are of course other differences. In order to have a global empire Hitler had to go to war, which he ultimately lost. Trump was elected president of a country that already dominated, economically and militarily, and had by far the largest military and nuclear weapons. #I want to fight against the Trump Administration. It sounds like the Democrats are going to lead. Even if they don't, it's time to stop being doormats for the Republicans. A term Maddow introduced last night, a good one.#
- This could be the headline of so many stories. Here's another one. #
- The NYT is narcissistic, says the former editor of the NYT. Journalist speaks. Journalists listen. #
- This is big news? Seriously? Because any fool watching this who isn't a journalist would get that it's one big fume factory. Out one end comes fumes, which go into the other end, and are recycled over and over. #
- Of course what's so ironic about this particular story is how recursive it is. A journalist noticing that journalists are narcissists is itself of course narcissism. #
- Suggestion: Report more stories that aren't sourced through other journalists.#
I made a few small improvements to the modal image dialog on this blog. Now if the anchor tag linking to the image has a title attribute, that is displayed in the lower left corner of the dialog. At first I thought it should be at the top, but that's not the role that titles play in anchors. It's a parenthetical comment. #
Suppose a major news org were to launch a Twitter-like service. Somehow the reporters would use the platform to create a new kind of news. A tight relationship with the software designers. Journalists excited about changing how reporting works. Sources empowered in new ways.#
I am so encouraged that a clear-thinking, principled and courageous young person has emerged from my home town, from Queens and the Bronx, where I am from and is going to Congress. Just 28 years old, what an optimistic sign for our future. #
Yesterday I suggested it's time for a general strike in the US. But why just the US? Let's shut down the world economy for a few days to register our total rejection of the path the US govt is on. A good time: When Trump meets with Putin.#Previous header graphic was a picture of a white plant, and the new picture is Sheep Meadow in Central Park, with a view of buildings on Central Park West on a sunny summer day (today). The white plant is called Dusty Miller, btw. Here's the full-size Sheep Meadow picture. #
Are any Republicans who were at the RNC in 2016 who would now like to apologize for what they said should be done to the Democratic candidate? Now would be a good time to stand up.#
When I went to the DNC in Denver in 2008, every time we entered or left the facility we had to walk a gauntlet of abortion protestors. Graphic images, and loud obnoxious people. I guessed at the time this was a compromise, that the protestors wanted to do more, but were restrained by courts and police. #
Dems should make a deal with the Repubs. Every Repub who chanted Lock Her Up apologizes, and then we'll ask Maxine Waters to chill.#
You do know we're living in a parody, a dark comedy in which a mob boss with fascist leanings accidentally gets elected president. As they say, hilarity ensues. Sort of like Hogan's Heroes meets The Sopranos. #I'm not usually up this early so I tuned in to Morning Joe. Interestingly I had seen the SNL parody of it, it's been many years since I've seen the original, and OMG the show is a great parody of the parody. It's so good. Here's the original SNL parody. #
I'm fascinated by the plump Nazi women who show up as memes, esp the ones with phones. The latest calls the cops on an 8-year-old girl selling water in front of her house. Her name is Boo. (Update: She was forced to resign from the cannabis business she founded.) But the most interesting of all is the original, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In there beats the heart of a human being, I'm sure, but it's so well hidden by the venemous bile. Basically I have a thing for largeish authoritarian women who lie. #
- One of the things that came up in Trieste is the question of the decline of the blogosphere. Here's what I said. #
- I doubt if the blogosphere of 2018 is smaller in absolute terms than the blogosphere of the early 2000s. In fact I'm pretty sure it's orders of magnitude larger, if you consider the size of just two hosting services -- Wordpress.com and Tumblr. #
- Most of the people who use social media, Twitter, Facebook etc are not NBBs. They were never going to become bloggers. We learned this in the early days of the evangelism of blogs. Most people don't have the impulse.#
- What changed is we lost the center. I know something about this because I created and operated weblogs.com. It worked at first, but then the blogosphere grew and grew, and weblogs.com didn't or couldn't scale to meet it. Eventually I sold it because it was such a personal burden for me. #
- The blogosphere is made of people, but the people treated the center like a corporation, and it wasn't. If we ever want to reboot the center, there has to be a cooperative spirit, and a limit to its scope to avoid the scaling problems. You can't put a big corp at the center of something so independent, or it ceases to be independent. #
- We're paying a price now for the lack of a center as Google and others move to control the open web that made blogging possible. Bloggers need the low barrier to entry to hosting our own blogs, even if we never use it. It's our escape plan. With no way out, the hosting companies will turn into AOL. #
- There used to be a communication network among bloggers, but that's gone now. #