Shortly after getting home last night I got this threatening email from Google. Most of this email is threatening, blackmail. Very little about any benefit. Also scripting.com is my oldest site. The blog that started blogging. Older than Google itself. I am livid mad with this company that we used to love, that was born of the web. If you're not up on what they're doing, I wrote a FAQ for you. Please read and pass it along. The press isn't covering this for some reason. #
Most of the reviews you read for bingeable TV shows are of the first few episodes because that's all the networks provide reviewers at the beginning of a season. The exceptions of course are Netflix and Amazon. I just finished Season 3 of Mr Robot, and having seen all ten episodes I have to say you would have had no idea what was coming and how good it would get based on the first few episodes. This was the season when Elliot and his sister Darlene become human. Find love. Accept their own flaws and their father's, the titular character. There's one scene in episode 6 when father and son are fighting in a totally Mr Robot way, and I laughed so hard, it was so well done. "I guess he didn't like my note," says Elliot. Episode 8 with the young Iranian kid was so sweet, and it's when we learn Elliot cares about people and loves himself. This is new. Anyway, Season 2 was a disappointment, but Season 3 makes up for it. I may have to watch it again. #BTW, a great thing about Mr Robot is that it's about what I do. I type at a command line as Elliot does. I use the tools he uses. Of course I'm trying to topple the system not by hacking but by publishing. But the ideas are similar. And the next binge, Silicon Valley, is about what I used to do, before I hated that place. š„#
And I will never not be able to think of Rami Malek's acceptance speech at the Emmies. It's funnier when the theme of Mr Robot is fresh in your mind. #
I'm on my way home, waiting for my flight at Milan's airport. I've been through security and passport control, stood in a bunch of lines, and got a good look at the people in line with me, who come from places you don't often see in lines at American airports. Lots of babies, toddlers and children, along with their parents, all with brown skin. I wondered how they would be treated in my country. Not as well as I would like. #
People flying to two countries need to go through special security -- Israel and the US. I don't remember this from the last time I was in this airport a few years ago. #
It's going to be a while before I get home, to midtown Manhattan, a very different place from where I'm at now. #
One thing an American traveling in Europe notices is how everything here is first class compared to how it is at home. The subways are clean. People dress well, and are generally polite. There are exceptions, the man standing behind me in line yelling into my ear and his phone at the same time, I finally let him pass me so I could enjoy my own thoughts. There's a little justice in this because I offended a British gentleman at breakfast this morning by speaking loudly while we were eating breakfast. I wish he had told me in a more considerate way, he left me muttering asshole under my breath. I am an American, and I guess no matter where we go, we speak loudly. #
- I listened to the Daily podcast yesterday and learned that there is actually justification for what the US is doing with the children at the southern border.#
- Previously, an immigrant would cross the border and if caught would declare they're seeking asylum. They would be taken into custody, with any accompanying children, appear before a judge, and would be given a date for a trial to determine if their request is justified. Then they would be released, in the United States. At that time they would be free to get a job, take up residence, and often they would not show up for the trial. So through this large loophole they would effectively become residents of the United States.#
- That's one approach, and it has an obvious problem. As Trump says, it makes our border open to all, as long as they can say they're seeking asylum.#
- The method Trump is using isn't any more of a solution and it's inhumane, creates damaged children and adults, and for people with legitimate claims for asylum, gives thm an impossible choice. It's also part of our law that we welcome immigrants seeking relief from oppression. It's the philosophy of the country, which is a country of immigrants. Every one of us who is not a native American came here from somewhere else, including everyone in the government.#
- It's not a simple problem. There doesn't seem to be a good solution. I can't say lesser of two evils, because letting undeserving immigrants into the country is far from evil, it's pragmatic. We do have jobs for them. They have a place in our society. But many of them are breaking the law by coming in seeking asylum without a valid claim, and no rule-of-law respecting person can say that is totally okay. #
My Italy trip is winding down. Tomorrow I fly back to JFK from Milan. Had a wonderful time, starting at #SoTN18 in Trieste and visiting all kinds of interesting people here in Torino, especially Anna Masera, Raffaele Angius and Alessandro Cappai. #
This is the song we've been singing this week in Torino. It's the song at the end of Killing Them Softly, a movie we believe is profound. #
The Democrats should have a press spokesperson like Sarah Huckabee Sanders to correct the Trump lies. Daily press briefings. Not always in response to Trump. But never let a Trump lie about Democrats go unresponded-to. #
Another idea I learned from Italians at dinner last night about how the press dealt with Berlusconi. Don't carry any news about him until he answers basic questions. With Trump that would start with his tax returns.#
I'm traveling, so updates have been infrequent. #
I watched the whole of the first season of Barry, an HBO series starring Bill Hader. It's billed as a comedy, I guess, but it's not casual. No spoiler to say that Barry is a hitman, you find out in the very first scene. But it is a bit profound, and lots of plot twists, and about as excellent as you would expect given the brilliance of Hader. #
I'm writing this as a speaker from Amazon, a sponsor of the conference I'm at, is giving a commercial. IBM also did one earlier. Otherwise the conference, SOTN18, put on by my longtime friend Paolo Valdemarin, has been excellent. I am being interviewed on-stage by Italian journalist Anna Masera at 9AM Eastern. #
Google should get used to people writing about what's obvious as opposed to what they admit to. They do it too. In the fight for net neutrality, I doubt if the ISPs admitted to adding tariffs for YouTube and Netflix. But Google acted as if it were inevitable. Same thing here.#
- Companies create their own gravity, even small ones.#
- Google is huge. Their gravity is analogous to that of a star. But it diminishes rapidly as you move away from it. Other perspectives take hold. That's something very few people inside or outside appreciate. How different things look to each of us. Point of view is everything.#
- My point of view -- I never signed up to be a Google developer. I wouldn't have if they asked. So I resent having to beg them to keep their hands off the open web. And if they slander my work, or cut off access to it, I will not conform to their demands. I will not be a Google developer, ever.#
- If you're listening to me, and them, all I ask is that you think for yourself. Be true to your own point of view. And try as hard as you can to understand that other people's points of view are valid and try to understand what they're saying and doing. #
- I've noticed that I'm seeing the same stories in my Facebook feed, repeatedly. My friend Amy Bonetti Price wrote, in a comment, that she's seeing it too. #
- Feeds are so messed up. You donāt see your friendās posts, and the posts you see are people way down on the totem pole. Cheap ads. Stories posted and reposted from your āfriendsā that are old posts from 4 days prior. You didnāt like it then, why would you like like it every day for 4 days. Cheap news stories and not from top tier news outlets - even though I constantly unlike and say that i donāt want to see these types of stories. All in all my feed has gotten littered and uninteresting and I have to purposely go to friends timelines to see what theyāre doing. Iām really upset about it, as are so many people I know.#
- My experience is more or less as she describes. I asked my friends and they report the same.#
- BTW, I normally do not point to Facebook, as I explained previously. But since this post is about Facebook, I thought it made sense to point in. No guarantee of course that you'll see anything when you click the links.#
I want people to be able to put up their own web servers. Not companies. Not people with Computer Science degrees. People. Anyone. Everyone. #- I think every journalist should learn how to set up and run a web server. I think any student, no matter how young, should learn, if they want to. The doors to publishing should be open to everyone. It's never been easier, and it could be getting easier all the time. That should be one of the overarching goals of our profession, to make what we do easier and easier, all the time. To make what we did ten years ago something anyone can do. It's the nature of software, that once we know what we can do that we make it easy for everyone to do it.#
- But there's no doubt that the browser vendors want to go the other way, to raise the barriers, to make it harder for newcomers, young or old, to launch their own boats into the mighty ocean of the web. They may be righteous or treacherous, or some of both, but their motives don't matter, what matters is the net-effect, and that is to restrict publishing to the initiated, the priesthood. To keep the rabble from interfering. #
- If they succeed, and at this point I think they will, I have no doubt what will happen next. We'll just invent the web all over again. With a new Mosaic, a new Marc Andreessen, a new Google, etc. It's how tech works. Just when Bill Gates thought he had it all wrapped up, in 1994, that his software was at the base of every stack, along comes the web to knock him off his perch. Google is ripe for this disruption. They don't see it coming, but it's coming all the same. #
- This phenomenon is why I'm seriously thinking of changing the slogan at the top of my blog from #
- It's even worse than it appears to #
- All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.#
- I will try to have a good backup of my websites, so if we need to transition it will be possible to do so.#
Remember how the Obama campaign in 2008 used meetups to get out the vote. Let's do that again. Put the focus on getting people to register and to vote to be sure Congress represents the people's interest starting early next year, and to get Trump out of the White House asap so we can start rebuilding. #
Journalists will only say what's been proven, so they feign not knowing things that every sentient being knows. Which keeps them from going the next step to see theories that might explain why Trump is the way he is. Why does Trump love Putin, Netanyahu, Kim Jong Un? Why does he hate the G7? His algorithm might be just this simple -- he's the inverse image of Obama. Where Obama is light, Trump is dark. And vice versa. He likes what Obama doesn't, and he hates what Obama likes. #How about a Chrome plug-in that redirects from each Google site to a competitive site. So when you go to do a Google search, it takes you to duckduckgo.com for example. Installing it would be like wearing a nicotine patch.#
- My fear is this -- once Google has control of the web, they can turn off huge parts of it for whatever reason, however thoughtless, and without disclosing why. They might say they would never do it, but I've seen them do it with Google Reader. #
- Their intentions might be fine and it might not be on their roadmap, but capturing RSS and then shutting it off probably wasn't on their roadmap either, until they decided to do it. Then it was on their roadmap. š„#
- They talk to me like I have no idea how tech companies work internally, but I do. After the next reorg they won't remember any commitments the previous management made. It's like when we change administrations in Washington. Very chaotic.#
- That's why the wonder of the web is that it is not subject to the whims of chaotic corporate management. Now, I suppose at some point it will be owned, and then after that it will be shut down. That's how we lose huge amounts of IP, open stuff, non-corporate stuff.#
- It's not surprising that a big corporation has little respect for stuff developed outside big corporations, but that was and could continue to be the glory of the web. It was amazing all those years ago, the freedom to do whatever you thought of doing. (It's what made Google itself possible.)#
- I would like future generations to have that ability too. But next year's roadmap from Google will make the web more like AOL and the one after that, more and so on.#
- Earlier: Google and HTTP. Also a few thoughtful comments on Hacker News. #
- Here's a picture of my father, Leon Winer, at 65. #
- When I saw this I said "Lookin good dad." He did. Really fit, and the Frontier t-shirt, that was a plus.#
#- He winced. I asked why. He said that in his head he's still 19. #
- I'm now only 2 years younger than he was then. And I can testify that I am shocked when I see a picture of myself.#
- In my mind, I'm 19, or 22. Not 63. š#
Here's an OPML file of the top US news sites, created by Quod.us. I added it to my River5 installation, so now we're getting updates from all these pubs. You're welcome to bookmark it. #Here's a page, being served over HTTPS, that includes HTTP files. None of the code works. Look in the JS console, you'll see lots of errors. Converting to HTTPS isn't just about servers, you'll have to deal with a lot of old HTML, styles and script files. #
Trump is Obama-inverse. He hates the G7 because they loved Obama. He loves KJU because he and Obama hated each other. He hates Iran because Obama did a deal with them. He loves coal because Obama loves clean energy. Etc etc.#
Kevin Marks suggested looking at json-schema.org for ideas on how to handle date and base64 values in the JSON version of XML-RPC. It gave me an idea for another approach. Basically, when JSON has a syntax for a type, just include the data (int, double, boolean, string, struct, array). When it doesn't, represent it with an object with two properties, #type and #value. The second example illustrates this approach. #
At what point will non-Repubs feel compelled to do more than wait for the Repubs to do something? They obviously are not going to.#
- Craig Newmark gave $20 million to CUNY school of journalism.#
- Unfortunately I don't have that kind of money, but if I did I would endow something different.#
- A program to teach all high school students the basics of journalism.#
- To spread the values through the whole society.#
- If we had done that 30 years ago, we'd be looking at a different situation now. But maybe it's not too late to plant the seeds for a truly democratic and informed society.#
BTW, next year will be the 20th anniversary of RSS.#
I'm traveling later this week, so am trying to wrap up my work on the JavaScript implementation of XML-RPC in the next couple of days. There are issues that will linger, as there always are in projects like this. š„#
- If it doesn't have an RSS feed it isn't a podcast #
- Please if you make a podcast, remember that. It's actually a lot more important than you probably realize.#
- The reason it's important is this. As long as there are RSS feeds for every podcast, no tech company, like Google, Apple, Amazon, etc can own podcasting. It remains an open platform. It and HTML/HTTP are pretty much the last bastions of the open web.#
- A reporter told me the other day that he was doing a podcast in the 1990s. Not possible, I said. RSS didn't exist until 1999, and we didn't define the podcasting features until 2001.#
- I did implement a JSON version of XML-RPC as part of the package, and it works really nicely, but has at least one major undecided feature. I'm asking that people who think about JSON give this some thought, and perhaps suggest prior art to look at. #
- The problem: representing certain types. #
- First the types that work. These XML-RPC types are not a problem because JSON understands them. When it sees one of these in JSON text, the parser will create a property or object with the correct type. #
- However these two types are problematic because there is no way to communicate through JSON that we're looking at a value of this type. #
- What happens in the current implementation? The value is converted to and transmitted as a string. You can test it by running the betty test app locally and calling examples.echoParams using the debugger. Here's a screen shot showing a setup for testing base64 data, and here's one that tests a dateTime.iso8601.#
- As you can see from the screen shots above, dateTime.iso8601 and base64 types are converted to strings. The server toolkit will pass them up the stack as strings, where the XML-based version will pass up Date and Buffer types.#
- I put this out there as a design problem for JSON experts to consider.#
- Update: An egregious hack for adding date and base64 types to JSON.#
- #
One of the things I'm learning is that there is are problems with date-time values in XML-RPC. The question is whether or not the date part of the date-time should have hyphens. The Frontier implementation does not. The XML-RPC spec says not. But ISO 8601 seems to say they must be present. The built-in JavaScript function includes the hyphens. I don't have any other implementations that I can easily check against, so I don't know what offers the most interop with other XML-RPCs. For now I'm documenting the issue, and leaving the JavaScript implementation as it is, for now. This means in this area it does not interop with Frontier, in that Frontier will not understand the JavaScript date-time values. Going in the other direction there is no problem, because I've included a workaround. #directory.xmlrpc.com: The contents of the XML-RPC directory from the early 2000s, served through current software, edited with the newest tools. It's preserved here as a historical document.#
Next up: I'm going to write the validator handlers in JavaScript so I can test my implementation. And perhaps others can test theirs. (It was a good idea. Just found a bug in my implementation. <struct>s can be empty. My server was throwing an error on an empty struct.)#
All this XML-RPC spelunking is like searching through your garage and finding an old car buried amid the junk, and when you put the key in the ignition the engine starts. #
As with earlier versions, there's a demo server called Betty, and it does exactly what the original version did. Same procedure calls implemented. If your client worked with Betty 1 it should work with Betty 2. #
Important: Everywhere XML is supported, so is JSON. Want to know how they compare? I did a cribsheet that shows you. I needed this to keep moderately sane while I added the JSON implementation alongside the XML implementation.#
- Our institutions, government, journalism, even tech, didnāt embrace its power. Obama, for example, used it to organize his campaign in incredible ways, but didn't use it to organize as he governed. Even now the tech giants, Google and Facebook, are turning whatās left of the open web into Disneyland.#
#- PS: See also.#
- Your parents get to give you all your trips when youāre too young to know. They load you up with all their parents' BS, and their parents as it was passed down to them, the good and bad. As powerful as the genes. Maybe more so.#
- But then, when they die, assuming you survive them, the power switches. You get to define who they were. More important, you get to define who you are, to reject the values of previous generations, choose the ones you want to keep and discard the rest.#
I'm surprised there aren't Twitter-based pyramid schemes. Multi-level tweets. You get $1 for RTing, and 5 cents for every follower who RTs, a cent for the next level, and so on. And just about now someone is thinking -- Blockchain! š”#
There ought to be a class in Advanced Computer Literacy for comp sci majors. In this class, you'd download malware, document and debug it, and make mods, use it to attack a real server (one operated by the TA, of course). You will also do tech support. This may sound counter-intuitive, you've just completed eight semesters in OS and compiler design. You've mastered the internals of databases and studied the mathematics of algorithms. What could you possibly learn from tech support and studying malware? Exactly. You have no idea. It's amazing what doors open when you understand what you do from the perspectives that make or break you as a software developer and designer. #
Getting acquired is part of the Silicon Valley experience. It's neither good nor bad, it just is.#- If you're a founder, the silver lining is that you got rich. But there's a shock that comes when you realize that there are not two definitions for the term "sell out." When you sell out someone else owns it. No matter how much they say they understand your values, they don't.#
- The only advice I have to offer is this -- pick your battles. I've seen people make a stand for the values of the acquired company, both in the company I sold and in other companies that were acquired. It never works. If you have a good stock program, keep your head down, let the stock vest, and then move on. Assume they are going to screw up your company. And if they don't you can be happy! š„#
I hit a milestone today. My XML-RPC implementation for JavaScript now also speaks JSON, end-to-end. Here's a screen shot of the updated debugger. A bit of cleanup work remains.#
There's an Acquired By Microsoft ad at the top of all the pages on all my sites on GitHub. Not sure this was an overly bright move. One week I'm on the definitive open source site, and the next week it's Microsoft. That's like switching religions. And no one asked me, and I didn't get anything in return. They must think we're completely spineless idiots. #
New PagePark feature. Now you can redirect from the file that's being redirected. An idea stolen from MacHTTP of the 1990s. #
Journalism nerds: How about a tech-industry-free place to post notes of general interest. When I see it's on Medium, I skim to see if it's absolutely essential that I read it, if not, I quickly hit the Back button. Come on everyone we can do better than this.#
Some days you need a stupid warmup project to get your mind going. For me, today, that was this ridiculous site, which was a bad idea to begin with, and only got worse as it developed. š„#
20-minute podcast on lessons learned from Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. Show notes follow. The Battlestar Galactica quote: "All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again." Douglas Adams wrote The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Microsoft's first CFO was Frank Gaudette. Microsoft's 2017 sales were approx $90 billion. Bottom-line: Advice to MS, add a feature that allows users to redirect from their GitHub repos, and consider a "loyalty dividend" for pre-Microsoft GitHub users, and establish a new tradition in tech acquisitions, a windfall for users. #Government. Journalism. The people. Tech. They are all connected and indistinguishable. You canāt understand one without understanding them all.#
The Node debugger is great. Finally I have a full server-side debugger, and it's making it possible for me to make more complex code. I added a feature to PagePark that allows it to serve from an S3 location. Not just delegate to Amazon's server, which it could do before, you get the full PagePark functionality for S3-stored content. It's done through config.json in the domain's folder. I'm going to use it in conjunction with publicfolder, finally, to get the Dropbox delay out of my writing for the this.how site, which I do with a desktop outliner. #
Apparently a lot of people don't know there's a Starbucks app. There is. And it's great. You can order anything, ahead of your arrival, and it's waiting for you when you get there. Totally takes the hassle out of Starbucks. #
Mindfulness is observing your own behavior.#
Idea for a cable news show. Every night they poll a random group of Americans with questions relating to the news of the day. A cross-section, not just liberals or conservatives, all regions, races, etc. They don't know that it's the show polling them. A real polling organization runs it. Pundits discuss what the people think. Last night they would have asked this question. Do you think the president should be able to pardon him or herself? The choices would be: Yes but only Repubs, Yes but only Dems, Yes, No. #
What inspired the idea. In all the talk on MSNBC last night about the president pardoning himself not once did anyone ask if there was a benefit to American people in the president being able to do so. Seems the journalism, if you can call it that, has lost the tune. The tune is this: A government of the people, by the people and for the people. Part of Gettysburg Address.#
Why Trump lied about the Eagles kneeling. He was embarrassed that most of the players didnāt want to hang out with him, so he made up a story to hide that.#
If we had public storage for end-users there would be no more Facebooks or GitHubs or any other locked up bulksit.#
280-char FAQ. "GitHub is not git. They were losing money and having trouble finding a CEO. They had raised a shitload of money based on ideas that didn't pan out. So it was inevitable that they'd sell, but most developers, including myself, were caught by surprise."#
While watching the Warriors crush the Cavs last night, I thought up a new NBA rule. After you win a championship the team is disbanded. Re-shuffe the deck. It's the only way a New York team will ever make the playoffs. Unless they let us trade a whole team for our miserable Knicks or Nets. Obviously any trade would have to include the owner.#
- The Microsoft-GitHub deal is announced. I wrote about it twice over the weekend. Now we have a lot to think about.#
GitHub was that rare thing, a consensus platform. Everyone used it. If you used some other git server, you'd have to explain why. Now that consensus will very likely break up. Where will people go? Will a new consensus emerge? Seems unlikely, you pretty much need a vacuum for that to happen, though there have been exceptions.#- Microsoft may have better intentions than they used to, but I'm from Missouri. And oftentimes acquistions are ruined because of incompetence, or key people leaving. They don't have to be evil for this to go bad.#
- It'll be interesting to see if any of the mainstream press talks to and understands developers. This acquisition is totally about developers.#
- Who will Microsoft acquire next? Stack Exchange perhaps? Joel originally came from Microsoft. They've been developing new products that would make sense in Microsoft's cloud lineup.#
- Microsoft's competitors will probably stop using GitHub and may launch competitors, esp if GitHub integrates with Microsoft's cloud services. #
- Microsoft could ease a lot of fears by offering to redirect any project to another git server. If anyone from either company is listening, consider that a suggestion. Otherwise we have a problem with all the github.com URLs out there on the web.#
- They chose an interesting day to announce, the first day of Apple's WWDC. This of course is not a coincidence. (See note below. Microsoft says the timing is a coincidence.)#
- What's our exit strategy? The founders and investors have theirs. #
- I ignored their acquisition of LinkedIn, I have an account there, but I hardly use it. But GitHub is different. I use it as a backup of all my development work. I use it as a platform, and I've written tools that only work with GitHub. It's hard to imagine that I would have done that with Microsoft as the owner.#
- Update: Frank X Shaw, top Microsoft PR guy, writes: "Hi Dave, I saw your post just a bit ago. One thing -- it actually is not intentional to announce concurrent w/ WWDC. Mergers/Acquisitions get announced when they are signed, not when we want them to. Thoughtful points on the rest of the post, but wanted to call that one out."#
After self-driving cars comes artificial passengers. Theyāll take the trip for you in the self-driving car. After that the car will do that part too.#
I know this is the new compassionate loving Microsoft, but it's still the tech industry, and Microsoft invented Embrace and Extend. It's hard to imagine that not being in the playbook for the hub of git. š„#
One consequence of this deal, if it's for real, is that Microsoft's competitors will probably stop using GitHub and may launch competitors, esp if GitHub integrates with Microsoft's cloud services. #
I tuned in to Face the Nation in time for the "political" discussion. They must have said five times how the president's lunacy may have worked in getting a better deal from Kim Jong Un. That was just one of the many ridiculous things they said.#
I was looking forward to the first episode of The Break with Michelle Wolf on Netflix, but it was really the shits because of all the body shaming jokes. I'm willing to cut her all kinds of slack for a first episode because I like the way she thinks and I find her comedy funny. But she knows she's doing it, and still does it, and that's not cool.#When a president lies as much and as boldly as Trump does, not only does the press have to call him on it, but new forms of journalism have to develop around this new norm, to report on why he's lying. We can have a robust discussion about that. #
My this.how pages now have the date posted at the top of the page, instead of when they were last updated. The mod date is at the bottom of the page. Example. I edited the default outline template for PagePark to do this, so if you're running PagePark and using it to view OPML files, you'll get this change too. You can override it by providing a custom template. #
- We still need public storage for end-users. I'm assuming the tech industry doesn't want this because it gives users and developers too much power?? With this one feature we would really become independent of the giant companies. #
- Here's the idea:#
- Let's say the service is called the Acme Storage Service or Acme for short.#
- The user creates an account on Acme, providing a credit card, agrees to terms of service, etc.#
- There's a browser-based file system editor, like the one Dropbox provides. #
- The user grants access to folders within the storage to browser-based and desktop apps via OAuth. Apps can read and write, but are restricted, by default, to their own folder. It's important that the user have the flexibility to grant two or more apps access to the same folder, making it possible to use different editors, possibly from different developers, on the same data. #
- The files are accessible over the web. It's public storage. Only the user can write, of course.#
- The user can, for an extra charge, map a domain to any location within their storage, or to the whole thing. #
- Acme sends users a monthly bill that's a function of amount of storage used and how much it is accessed. #
- That's it. It's all mature technology, easy to deploy. As I've written before I wish Amazon would just do this, they're the logical ones. But the need is so great, I'm starting to think of other ways to get this done. I'm sure a vibrant developer community would develop, esp if the APIs were simple. And new media types would develop. Right now this kind of service mainly exists for blogs. WordPress would also be a logical place to put this service. #
- Update: It seems more certain that Microsoft has acquired GitHub as of this Bloomberg report on Sunday afternoon. #
If you're a user, should you care about GitHub possibly being acquired by Microsoft? I imagine most non-developers have no idea such a thing as GitHub exists. #- It's a fairly remarkable thing, kind of invisible, not much talked-about, but vital and appreciated. And well-done. It's what I call a consensus platform. It means that if you're starting an open source project, GitHub is the default place to do it. Most projects are hosted there. All of mine are. And I've been deploying new ones on a regular basis, and updating existing ones. It's important to me that they be preserved. For some reason it feels to me it's more likely they will persist because GitHub is such a consensus. #
- In other words, no one gets fired for using GitHub (to paraphrase an ancient slogan about IBM).#
- It woke me up a bit to consider the possibility that it might be acquired. And then the ramifications of it, and the potential. It could be a good thing. But in tech, even a good thing somehow gets perverted by big companies, has atrocious business models attached to it, ends up being managed by someone more qualified to sell cars than manage a highly technical nuanced development platform. #
- What you want is steadiness. Gradual improvements. No breakage. #
- It could be that Microsoft would run GitHub better somehow than the current management, who I don't now, have never met, etc etc. But it's hard to see how it could be better. GitHub is what we want it to be, quiet, out of the way, taken for granted, there when we need it, a constant and dependable option. #
- I am a longtime user of Disqus and have been aware that it could become a problem at some point in the future. I think we may be at that point now, or close to it, because the ads they're putting on my otherwise ad-free pages are somewhat objectionable. #
- Here's a screen shot of a page on Podcatch.com.#
- They've always reserved the right to put ads there, so I'm not saying they're doing anything wrong. But it's time to start thinking about a comment system that I can include in my site that I can run on one of my servers. #
- It's not a simple job, of course, because of spam. You need a robust set of options for moderation, and it takes a while to iterate to the right set. #
- Right now I've put on my to-do list, ways to disable it on various sites I've created over the years that have Disqus comments. Or at least have the default set to hidden and not visible. #
More work on the XML-RPC debugger. It now looks reasonable on an iPad. Added displays for the XML call and response. Helps to see what's going over the wire. More thinking about a JSON syntax, and what I would do differently a second time around. The original XML-RPC design was rushed, the work of four people with different perspectives and visions for where it would go. Now, 20 years later, what was speculative is now settled. And JSON has built-in syntax for the types that XML-RPC had define. So the resulting packet is smaller. I've kept the names, methodResponse, fault, etc, on the principle that fewer formats is better and perfection is a waste of time.#
Welcome to June 2018. My how time flies. #
- I use GitHub as an integral part of my development environment. More all the time. As such, I don't like to think of GitHub as an owned thing, even though I understand that it is. I never worry about what's going to become of them. I probably should.#
- Would Microsoft stay out of the way of people using it? I have no idea. #
- I bet they would integrate their cloud services with GitHub in some way. A button on your project to instantly deploy it in Microsoft's cloud, turnkey provisioning? Might be attractive. But it would be better for users (such as myself) if that were itself a platform that lots of service providers could plug into.#
- I think this acquisition, if it happens, illustrates why we should have non-profits at the center of the open development world. I can't imagine trusting Microsoft indefinitely. And if Google were to acquire it, that would send me immediately looking for other places to host my projects. #
- Amazon seems like a better match, although I understand Microoft might use GitHub to draw more attention to its cloud hosting services. #
- Update: I was asked why it seems to me that Amazon would be a better match. I have used Amazon's server systems for a long time, and they've never, as far as I know, abused the trust. The products do what they say they'll do, without strategy taxes. Microsoft's record is among the worst in tech. I lived through the 90s when they attacked the web, surrounded it from all sides, and were sued by the government for what they did (rightfully, imho). Yes, I know they have new management, and they are far less powerful now than they were then, which is why I prefer them to Google. #
From the How Far They've Fallen category, if you search for infinity on Google, you get a page of ads for a car named Infiniti. Even more interesting, if you search for define Google on Google, you don't get the mathematical definition either. In this case, they are probably correct, the name of their company has usurped the mathematical definition.#
Script runtimes should have a parameter supplied by the "supervisor" app (the one that's running the code) that says "only accept constant expressions." Anything involving a name that isn't a constant, like NaN or infinity is a fatal error. Having this level of security inside the runtime is essential. #
āThe best platform vendor is no platform vendor.ā Me, on Faceboo.#
For-the-record blogging. For a few years Medium became the place that people would post essays that were meant to be on the public record. This was not a good idea, because Medium is a venture-backed startup, and was likely to pivot. What's on-the-record today must at least have the stated intention of being accessible tomorrow. That was never true of Medium. #Now that I have my XML-RPC server and client for JavaScript, I've started to look for activity if any, in the RPC world, not just in XML but also JSON. Here's a survey written by Bruce Eckel in 2011. I could very easily add JSON support to my XML-RPC package, because it converts the request to JSON before processing it. Thinking about next steps. #
Braintrust query: Developer Tools Access it trying to take control of another process. Does my Mac have a virus? How can I get rid of this menacing dialog? Any help much appreciated. #
- One of the cool things about the advent of Trump and the influence of Russia is that we have a new concept, whataboutism. It's useful because Americans do it too. Here's a conversation that illustrates.#
- Joe: "It hurt when you stepped on my toe. Please don't do it again."#
- Bob: "But you drove my car last week without asking."#
- Whether Joe drove Bob's car last week has nothing to do with the toe stepping. What if instead Bob didn't want to hurt Joe, and appreciates knowing that there's a way to improve their friendship. #
- Bob: "I'm sorry I hurt you. I will try not to do it again."#
My new XML-RPC client and server for Node.js is available. If you run XML-RPC in your world, please help test for interop. Please post notes about your experiment as an issue in the repository. #
The press sighs "Oh my another distraction, keeping us from reporting real news." That's how I (failed to) quit smoking for a couple of decades. I quit for real, in an instant when a doctor said it would kill me in three years if I didn't stop.#
Jim Carrey is a star. He's doing something unusual. Taking a stand in favor of our country. So many people I know, elites (for lack of a better term) are protecting their careers and tempering their criticism. It's not time for temperance, not time to play it safe.#
My test XML-RPC server is up at betty.scripting.com. Same calling conventions as the original betty.userland.com (which is not up at the moment). The idea is to test this server, verify interop, or fix it, iterate, and when it's solid, make this the definitive test server. Here's example code in JavaScript that calls this server, but any of the docs for betty.userland.com should work. More tomorrow.#Joi Ito makes the case for citing blogs in academic writing. It doesnāt seem controversial to me. Blogs are where sources write. Same reason journalists cite blogs (and tweets). The record is where it is. For example, Iāve spent the last week rebuilding XML-RPC in JavaScript. The original work was done in 1998, and the process was started with a blog post. That post is very much part of the record. Conclusion -- as with journalism, it's a case of apples and oranges. I've never written an academic paper, and don't expect to. But if you were doing research on networking protocols, the source material for at least some of your work, would be on blogs. Which of course, makes it clear why we should be doing more to preserve the record. #
Life lesson -- if you're going to say something that you know is going to bring up someone else's pain, be sure there's a good reason.#