There's a
new UI for tweets.opml.org.
#Here's the
actual TreeChart app. It's set up to display my example file, with two charts, one with some countries and the other, operating systems and their products.
#The thing that
RSS and
OPML have in common is that they're simple formats designed to be put in public places, where all different kinds of apps can get at them.
#
Who will be the first trillionaire? When will it happen?
#Why don't the Democrats have a vote in Congress on making abortion legal in the entire US. Get the Repubs on the record as voting against women's rights.
#
As you know, I agree 100%
with: "Journalists, stop calling the failure to pass the voting rights bill a 'major setback' for Democrats. It is a major setback for
democracy. The right to vote is not a partisan issue. Stop framing it as such and legitimizing anti-voter efforts."
#It's not a horse race, we're fighting for the survival of the
human race. We'd better get started before it's too late.
#
OPML is a better format than RSS for publishing tweets. OPML handles items without titles, and beautifully models threads, something RSS doesn't do.
#Why can't doctors use email? Okay I get that they don't think it's secure. My doctor has a portal. Why can't they use the damned portal. Everything has to be on the phone. I almost never answer my phone these days. It's not something many of us do. There was a time when we did.
#What becomes of an artist like Meat Loaf after they die? Obviously his art continues to be art. And since most of us have never met him, it's hard to say much has changed.
#
- When people say we're "fighting for democracy" even that isn't strong enough.#
- We must fight so we don't become a fascist country with slavery for Blacks, ovens for Jews and women turned into baby-producing handmaidens. And for a human-habitable planet. #
- If you think that isn't what's happening, well it is. #
- This country has never actually revoked slavery. A lot of people are still bitter about the outcome of the Civil War. Blacks are not, according to many Americans, entitled to the full rights of Americans.#
- Anti-semitism is also a foundation, not just of America, but most of the world. We heard Trump say that American Jews are really citizens of Israel, which emphatically is not true.#
- And the last one, women as baby-producing handmaidens, that's what overturning Roe v Wade is for.#
- And of course it's not just Blacks, Jews and women, there's a hellish place for every non-white non-male non-Christian American. #
- And who knows why they don't want to keep the planet habitable for humans. Maybe they think God meant for them (and not us of course) to migrate to other planets. Whatever it is, it's another form of hell. #
- Yet journalism still mostly sees it as a partisan horse-race and every step we take into the abyss is bad news for one or two people like Biden or Schumer. Their delusion by now is really a form of insanity. Forget about waking them up, we have to move past them. #
- The thing that unites us is the hell the Trumpists have in mind for all of us. #
A new
feature in Drummer with news of features and connections.
#
- Way back in 1986, my then-company Living Videotext shipped a product called MORE. #
- We called it that because there was so much more in it than the earlier outliner, ThinkTank 512, we didn't have any idea which new feature, if any, would be the one that turned people on. #
- We didn't have the luxury of picking among them because our company was on the verge of going out of business. We needed help from Apple to make it to shipping. They gave us a loan of $400K, and we put our source code in escrow in case the company failed, which looked like a real possibility. #
- Well the product was an instant hit. And now, so many years later, I can tell you for sure which features made the difference -- tree charts and bullet charts. #
- Here's what a MORE tree chart looked like:#
- You'd edit an outline, click a button and boom a colorful tree chart would appear. Go back to the outline and make a change, view it again, and boom, the tree chart changed. Up till then color graphics, which were still very new to computers, was something for a priesthood. This was color graphics for thinkers. #
- We sold a huge number of MOREs that year and in 1987 sold the company for a lot of money and I was able to go back to making software and stop being a CEO which was a good thing for me to do! :-)#
- It's 2022 Dave#
- OK so here we are, it's 2022, an unthinkable number of years later (36) and here we are again. We have a nice powerful outliner. Like MORE it can print (these days that means render as a blog), but where are the beautiful graphics? #
- Here they are. A new Tree Chart viewer that hooks into Drummer very neatly. #
- If you're a Drummer user, go have fun. I'm sure you'll love it. And if you use another kind of outliner, either give Drummer a try, or ask the people who make your outliner to have a look at Tree Chart (it's open source) and either adapt their outliner to work with Tree Chart (the better idea) or adapt Tree Chart to work with their outliner. #
- As I said before, these days my product is interop. I made my fortune in the 80s, and I've invested well enough so that I don't need a hit product now. What I want to do is re-kindle the interest in computers used as thinking tools around common formats and protocols so it can grow like the open web, not so much like a silo. We've been down both roads and open is better for the users. And also for the vendors imho. #
- The press is stuck in a rut. Everything is about Biden and the various horse races. But that isn't what matters. What matters is that we don't become a fascist country with slavery for Blacks, ovens for Jews and women turned into baby-producing handmaidens. Also a human-habitable planet would be nice. Focus on these things. This is what matters, not that random journalists earn a salary for flushing America down the toilet. #
- I was watching Ari Melber last night. The only reason I didn't turn it off is because he had James Carville on. Melber is entertaining and sometimes interesting, but usually just repeats the same bullshit night after night all the while claiming to be a journalist. He's an entertainer. But Carville, while also very entertaining, actually has ideas that you don't hear all the time on cable and in the NYT etc. More Carville please. #
- Here's what Carville says. #
- The Dems are actually doing okay. #
- They would do better if there were a few more Dems in the Senate, and also in the House. #
- So the campaign, he says, should be about what they can do for us, workers, families. And they have quite a few things they want to do for us, so sell those things! Man, sometimes it's so simple when you get a clear thinker who doesn't have anything in particular to sell and doesn't give a shit if you like him (and we do like him, he's a coonass after all). #
- Four more Senators and hold the House, and you can have it all. So we can do some very specific things for you.#
- It's so logical. Get actors, great ones, who look like Democratic voters, and run ads that say what Carville says they should say, and let's have the slogan be something like this. You have the power, for real. Just vote, and we all win. Yeah it could be shorter. Use the last three words. We All Win. Come on, that's what it's about. I would give the max to fund such a campaign and so would a lot of people. The ads sell more ads. And the call to action is: Make a difference and vote. #
- Run the same ad with different faces. Surprise us, have one with Stacey Abrams or Val Demings. Run it over and over. We all win. We all win. Over and over. Buttons, bumper stickers, flags, lawn signs. We all win everywhere all the time. Basketball games. Hockey games. Football, baseball. County fairs. #
- Because we all want to feel we can do good. Maybe not all of us, but I suspect a lot of Trump voters while they may be racist (face it, we're a racist country, so you have to work really hard to not be racist) what they really want is this: To make a difference. Trump filled a vacuum, the Democrats while they care about us in the aggregate, never get that we are individuals and we want to make a difference. We all want to know there's something we can do to help us all win. If you want to win, Mr or Ms Democrat, you have to bring the people into your marketing. And then, if you want to keep governing and not be completely obstructed, you have to bring us into governing too. The mistake that Obama made was not bringing the people into his administration. McConnell and his fascist Federalists wouldn't have been able to stand up to him if he had us behind him. No Democrat should ever try to do that again (though Biden is doing it too). #
- We all win. Tatoo that on your forehead.#
I'm bingeing
Better Call Saul, on the
episode where
Jimmy runs an ad to recruit old folks for his class action suit against Sandpiper. His ads are sooo good. The ads of course were written by the BCS writers. We need those kinds of ads to save America.
#If the Repubs turn America fascist, that’s the end of journalism among other things.
#You know if we start raising hell about how we don't want Trump and his Nazis and KKKers running everything, I mean really make some noise, the chickenshit reporters and Democrats might get some courage.
#Companies should stop calling us "coders." That leaves no one responsible for what the code does. We are developers.
#
If journalism wanted to help, they would always stay in the present, talk about what Repubs are doing now to undermine democracy, and explain carefully and often what the impact of those actions will have in the future. #- The election for governor in Virginia was an excellent example. Journalism could have said that despite what the candidate is saying this is what Repubs do when they gain control of a state government, esp one in the South. So when you vote for the Republican, no matter how you feel about Critical Race Theory, he's doing to do X, Y and Z which are things that most Americans find hideous. And btw, the Democrats could do that too. They are awfully nice to their Republican friends. And the result is we're doomed. #
- When Trump was first running in 2016, only one reporter wrote a story explaining what a Trump presidency would be like. They should have all been doing it. All the time. Saving ourselves begins with telling ourselves the truth, and realizing that journalism and the Democrats are not doing that. #
- Summary of the above. Journalism should always clearly answer the question: What This Means To You. Don't run the piece until you can answer it. And maybe consider getting some new reporters who can. #
- I don't care how it became 6-3 in favor of the fascists, that's where it is now, that's not the United States, and that's not the Constitution. #
- It's bullshit. I don't care if the Dems don't have the votes to fix it. It's still bullshit.#
- Bullshit is bullshit. Pretty simple folks. #
I
hear that Karabiner-Elements will help me swap the Ctrl and Cmd keys on my Logitech MX keyboard.
#
- As we're starting to test the Linux and Windows versions of Electric Drummer there have been some basic questions. I thought I should respond publicly so people understand what we're doing. #
- Electric Drummer or E/D for short, is an app that runs on the desktop, hosted by its operating system. Like a word processor or a graphics program. It's most like Slack or the Atom editor, but it's Drummer, a multi-tab outliner for note-taking, organizing and publishing.#
- It runs in Electron, a beautiful environment that makes cross-platform apps easier to create and manage. #
- E/D saves files on your local file system as any desktop app does. #
- It can also hook up to your web Drummer account for outlines that you want to make public. It's how I do Scripting News. The outline that I edit is on my local system,. It's also a public file, so it can be accessed by the CMS when I ask it to render my blog from the outline. The public file is stored in my web Drummer account. It's a nice combination.#
- E/D is a scripting system, like web Drummer is. It will be able to access the local file system, and also will be able to run a server, none of which are possible from the web app. #
- There is already a Mac version of E/D that has been available since October 10, when Drummer shipped. #
- It's the same as web Drummer, a few commands work differently because it runs in a different place, but it's the same code, same outliner, same UI, same bugs (!), etc. #
- Congress isn’t going to save us. #
- Journalism isn’t.#
- Not the president, Supreme Court, billionaires, rock stars, influencers, professors, Lebron, Jayz or CEOs.#
- Not Robert Mueller or Merrick Garland. #
- We have to organize, in great numbers and scare the shit out of the enemy.#
- it’s not yet too late for that. #
One year ago today.
#
Looking for a LogSeq plugin developer: As you may know, I've written a
Node app that flows LogSeq journal writing to a Drummer blog. Here's an
example. It does the whole thing, except it should be baked into LogSeq. Setting up a Node app and running it externally is both too difficult for an average user and too many steps. We already have a
great techie user who I worked with me to get the Node app working, who is up to speed on using the software. He can guide the process, we just need a dev to work with him. I'm available to help too, to the extent that I can. If you are a LogSeq plugin dev, please post a note in
this thread, and we can hopefully get started right away.
Thanks!#The
keyboard saga continues. I've decided to make the Mac work like Windows and Ubuntu, swapping the Ctrl and Cmd keys, but for some reason my Bluetooth keyboard is not showing up in the
list of keyboards whose modifier keys you can change. The list is empty. I tried disconnecting the keyboard and reconnecting, no luck. I guess I should try rebooting the machine. If you have an idea, reply to
this tweet.
Thanks!#I can tell today is going to be
one of those days. My power went out overnight, but luckily I have a generator this winter (newly installed in the summer) and it automatically kicked in. But there are no outages listed on the Central Hudson outage map. Oy. I'll make the best of it.
#
Video demo: A new demo app called
TreeChart interactively displays beautiful SVG trees as you edit them in the Drummer outliner. This is a seat-of-the-pants preview. I hope to release the app tomorrow so people can see how it works for themselves and hopefully it'll give developers and users some ideas.
#
I'll post links to the tech as I document it tomorrow in
this thread.
#I’m famous for RSS, podcasting, blogging, but my life’s work has been outlining software, idea organizers, tools for thought and publishing systems based on outliners. The other stuff was either in support of idea processing, or an outgrowth of it.
#
- Do I have anyone following me who is a political marketer? Is there such a thing. We need them now. The way you fight this, and it's getting late, is by demonstrating the opposite. Famous people of different races visibly doing things to help each other. [link]#
- There's more to do. We should be wearing buttons, small ones, with MLK's image on it. People of all colors. Americans. Showing support for all of us, esp people whose ancestors were slaves. We have to urgently heal this huge wound.#
- Another thing to do, we need to show each other that we are here, in great numbers. I don't like huge national marches, what I'd love more than anything is people showing their passion for voting. Not just in November, but every Sunday.#
- Let's meet up at our polling places for coffee and a sandwich and good old political talk. Talk about what we want. Yes there will be trolls there. But let's hope we outnumber them. I think we will always outnumber them, but can we get out there and show it.#
- And we need to use online advertising. Campaigns should NEVER GO OFF THE AIR. This a vestige of TV-based media, last generation. And they should raise money and pay for themselves. And speak with power, not powerlessness.#
- We've lost the marketing war, with a Baby Huey type character as the other side's spokesperson. We have much better people, but we lack the political organization and understanding of how little time is left.#
I've been doing crosswords for many years, but I'm still not great at them. They start out easy at the beginning of each week, and get harder progressively until the Sunday puzzle which only great crossword solvers can do, like my mom. It was one of the things we could do together. I'd fill in a few of the answers and come back later to find the whole puzzle solved. She said she didn't mind that I did the easy ones.#- The Washington Post recently started publishing free crosswords. Even though I'm a paying NYT subscriber, their crosswords cost more, even for me. I find the Post crosswords are just as satisfying and clever as the NYT ones, and the price is great. #
- As far as I know I have never been the answer to a clue in a NYT puzzle, or for that matter on Jeopardy. And I've never written a NYT guest column. I will be able to die a happy man when I've checked all these boxes. 💥#
- Now we turn to Wordle. At first I looked at it and thought it was too much trouble, but then I read a piece by my friend Ken Smith, the English professor from Indiana, who explained how to approach it mathematically. The idea is that your first word should have as many of the most likely characters as possible, which are the vowels and N, R, S, T etc. Then I don't know the best approach for the second word or third. What I've been doing is taking the matches from the first word, and there are bound to be one or two, and use them in the second word. If the position is correct, use that letter in that position, to make it a bit like a crossword, except there is no clue. Repeat in the third, fourth, etc.#
- I've played Wordle twice and both times got extremely lucky and solved the puzzle in the third word. #
- BTW, I hate Scrabble. No patience for it. #
Listening to NPR earlier, talking about what the looming civil war is about. It's slavery. We never purged it from the American character. We never had truth and reconciliation. Slaveholders never paid for slavery. And their descendants are still among us, passing down the legend of slavery as an honorable institution, through the generations. We haven't dealt with it yet. And until we do, it will be the undercurrent of everything. It's just coming back to the surface now. It's always been there.
#I ordered a bread from a local baker and when I got it it was fresh out of the oven but not sliced. It was then, for the first time in my life I realized the truth that there is nothing like sliced bread.
#This is like a mobster telling his people, in a (public!) video message, that it would be ok to hit the other mob boss.
#
Mac users who also use Ubuntu: Do you force the Mac to be like Unix, by mapping the Ctrl key to the Cmd key and vice versa? Or do you put up with the difference, and remember which machine you're using as you type? I'm hitting as I start using Ubuntu as my writing machine. Yesterday I
tweeted: "I wish there were an easy way to exchange the Control and Alt keys on Ubuntu 20 so it works like a Mac." I failed to mention that I'm using VMWare Fusion to run Ubuntu, and it looks like there is a way to do it there.
#
- Excerpt from Que Sera Sera, October 1996.#
- To anyone who wants to lead -- show us software that's fun and empowering, get us interested and excited. Gates, McNealy, Ellison et al never do that. We've tried it their way before, look at the stagnation that resulted. We're at a crossroads now, do we go back to the mess of the past or do we learn to enjoy the que sera of it all, and stop seeing threats everywhere we look?#
- So much of the energy is about defeating and destroying, so little is about creating. People believe in others, not themselves, and are disappointed when they are left out of the big plans. They forget that no matter how rich and intimidating each leader of our industry is, or would-be leader, none of them predicted the world we live in now, and by extrapolation they are powerless to control the world we will live in in 1997 and beyond.#
- I'll do my part: here's an invitation to truly embrace the creativity of others. Instead of beating your breast about how great you are, try saying how great someone else is. Look for win-wins, make that your new religion. Establish a policy that nothing will be announced unless it can be shown that someone else will win because of what you're doing. How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity.#
I finally am able to use Linux as a GUI machine, not just a command line thing. But it's burning my brain cells that the Cmd and Ctrl keys are in the opposite places as on my Mac (and in my brain). It's easy to change key mapping on the Mac, but on Ubuntu, you have to do some pretty horrible stuff.
#With yesterday's
Supreme Court decision about Covid and OSHA, I think we're firmly in illegitimacy territory. I'm not sure if I were president I would obey this edict. This is a crisis. Maybe not treated as such by journalism, but what else can we expect from this court.
#
- tl;dr -- it might work. #
- Yesterday I ran a poll asking people to identify Sinema as:#
- bribed#
- blackmailed#
- held hostage#
- insane#
- I had not considered another possibility -- she wants to be president! This came up in a tweet forwarded by the innovative Democratic campaigner Joe Trippi. #
- My first thought: no way, maybe option #4 is correct after all, but then on reflection, it would increase interest in the primary and that's a good thing. Nothing is worse than a primary with candidates who all appear to be losers or bore you to death in their speeches, or worse make you feel uncomfortable (Biden, Hillary Clinton). And I don't want another Obama, I feel wounded by his presidency. Left us in a bad place. #
- And then I realize, Sinema is a good speaker, based on video of her back when she gave speeches. This crazy personal insurrection of hers has done one thing, it has made her much more famous. #
- People vote for candidates who are confident and make them feel good about themselves, like they matter. That's pretty much it. I wish it were otherwise, but there's a lot to be said requiring a leader to be able to lead. Yes it matters where they lead us, but to a lot of voters, their thoughts don't go that far. #
- PS: I've beem thinking about who I want to run in 2024. My two main interests are Jay Inslee and Gavin Newsom. Both are confident, good speakers, and their politics are straight Democrat. I think they are our best shot at winning, and yes that's the primary concern. We simply can't have another Republican president and not go completely to hell. Please don't ever overlook that. #
Here's
the software I've been working on, it builds a Drummer blog from a LogSeq journals folder. Interop. Golden spike. We win.
#There's a
new version of the
myLogseqBlog tool fixing a couple of bugs reported on day one. There's also a note there on how this will evolve. Right now all the loose-ends are showing, that's because I know almost nothing about LogSeq. As the people from LogSeq-land get familiar with this, they will no doubt have ideas about how to better integrate this software so it's super easy. This is how
bootstraps start.
#The finale of
Station Eleven was very nice. And if you aren't weeping like a baby, well you will be. It's a sweet story of human dignity, trust and cooperation.
#At some point Sinema and Manchin will have a press conference with McConnell where he's wearing a Majority Leader badge.
#
This is a blog that I am writing in
LogSeq, using their outliner, and publishing through Drummer's CMS. This is, my friends, is interop.
#
I changed the
header graphic on Scripting News to an artist's rendering of the completion of the
Transcontinental Railroad at
Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869 and the ceremonial driving of the
Golden Spike. I always loved the imagery of this event. A cooperative venture, one team building from east to the west, and the other from west to east, meeting at a middle point, and thereby creating one great thing. Working together. Built during the Civil War.
#At some point, people we think of as independent software developers today will be thought of by Apple and Google as terrorists. The people won't know what to believe. In the future, even saying what I said here will be seen as terrorism.
#
I wonder if there's a Howto document for LogSeq outlines, like the
Outliner howto I did for Drummer (and all my outliners going back to ThinkTank on the Apple II). I find I can't do the most basic things in
LogSeq. I know there must be keystrokes for basic actions like creating a new subhead or moving a sub around structurally. The menus don't have anything for outlining (that I can find). I was able to get by because I can now edit LogSeq documents in Drummer (!) -- it took me about 1/2 hour to realize I could do this. Oh the wonders of interop. I'm on Day 2 of my quest to hook up LogSeq to Drummer blogging. The first product of this work will be a JavaScript app that converts a LogSeq journal folder into a calendar-structured outline in OPML. We're creating a new idea universe here, and it's coming together quickly. I love being in the middle of these projects.
#Another thing I have to figure out is -- having indented, how do I outdent so the next line I type is at the parent's level. When I outdent the list I indented moves out. Not the intended effect.
#I'm watching
Queen's Gambit again. It's so refreshing. The lead character, Beth Harmon, is so attractive, appealing, I want to see everything she says and does. She totally commands attention. And admiration. I once had a girlfriend who was as beautiful and brilliant like the character, smart and clever and ambitious. The show is such a fantasy, and very motivating. It makes me want to do brilliant work just to get her approval. I know it's just a story but it's also real in a sense, as my inner life. If you haven't seen the show, I highly recommend it. And it's good as a re-binge as well.
#
On this day in 2018: I have a new motto -- if the world is going to end, I might as well have some nice headphones.
#NPM Is a mess that could be cleaned up if we had the will to do it. There's no reason we use so many different packages. Node should have an extensive library of built-ins. And there should be a professional review process in place before key components are updated.
#
Update on the
No Cell Coverage issue. I got a note that said to: 1. Turn on Airplane Mode. 2. Turn on Wifi. The thought is that should be enough to get the iPhone to stop trying to find a cell connection and thus stop draining my battery. If this works, all I'll have to do is remember to turn off Airplane Mode when I return to civilization.
#
As you may know we're very close to having interop between Drummer and LogSeq. Just starting to think about what this opens up. Here's an example. We could set it up so a LogSeq user could edit and publish a Drummer blog from within LogSeq. The wiring would be easy (and fun).
#It would be interesting if one of the paywall'd pubs also offered a
tollbooth or pay-as-you-go option. It's possible I could end up paying more per month that way, but as a reader I'd feel better about it. I have too many subscriptions for things I never use. That really tarnishes the brand in my mind, esp after I unsub, which I inevitably do.
#
- I'm sure some Drummer users are puzzled that the change notes outline all of a sudden has a bunch of stuff about LogSeq in it.#
- To a web outliner user who might not have heard of the product, or of the nascent Tools For Thought category, it could seem odd. My interest comes from the growth of the TFT category, and its close proximity to my products, and the potential for interop.#
- I have put out a format for interop -- OPML, but I've decided I don't want to wait for its broad adoption in the category to get interop. It's similar to when RSS 0.90 came out when I already had scriptingNews format. You have a choice at that point, you can have interop right now, or you can wait for a consensus that may never come. In the first case you have the chance to create the consensus, in the latter, you have to wait for others to agree. It's why I've noted in the past that the person who goes second has all the power. So I chose in this case to go second. #
- So if I want to interop with TFT products, why LogSeq?#
- First, when I approached them, they responded, and listened, and followed up. #
- Second, they have an open product, you can interop with it without getting in a locked trunk. What you look for in interop is a level playing field, that it be a peering arrangement, and that your interop partner can't shut off the connection without losing their users. LogSeq meets all those requirements. They are committed to being open. It's not just a thing they say, it's how they've built their product.#
- Third, the format is simple. I am familiar with it, having created a similar format for my outliners in the 80s called .HEAD. I know what it can and can't do. There's enough that we can do with the LogSeq format that makes for interesting projects built on the interop. #
- Fourth, I like the team! They have a fresh can-do go-get-em attitude that is very refreshing. You don't see this very often in the US (they are in China). One thing that makes interop work better is if there's compatibility between the people. #
- Now I have to make a disclosure that I wish I had been able to make in November. I have made a small investment in the company. They have not announced this yet, and they asked me to wait until they do, but I feel I've already waited too long. I need people to know that I have a financial interest in the success of the company. But I also wanted to send a signal to them, to the users of our products, to the Tools For Thought category, to developers and others -- that we can compete and still see our success as beneficial to each other. This space is so large and under-developed that we can work for many years building on each others' strengths. #
- I think what we're doing is substantially different. The focus of my projects tends to be in publishing and tools for development. I see their product as being useful in that context, but I don't think there's a big conflict. If we are able to co-exist with products that support OPML, surely we can do the same with Markdown.#
- PS: Here's a progress report on the interop work. #
I'm having a lot of trouble getting into the
final season of The Expanse. It seems really dry compared to what I've been tuning into lately. I will of course watch the whole thing, probably when it's done. Next Friday is the last episode.
#If I made
You're No Good the song of the day, about
100 250 people would think it was about them. It's not about you. You're great. I just like the song.
#
I did a lot of personal development work over the years, mid-life crisis and stuff like that. I wanted to understand why I felt the way I did about things. One of my teachers told me a story about holding a baby and the baby smiled, and the person thought that the baby was saying something to them. But the truth is the baby might have just farted and thought it was cool. Whatever it is you're angsting over might not have anything to do with you. Most of the people on the planet are living their lives not thinking about you at all. Maybe they
should be thinking about you, but they aren't. Sorry.
#I love getting emails from PR people who offer to send me products based on what I write here. Not sarcastic. I got an message from a publicist at the
Pantheon, which publishes the
book that the Station Eleven HBO series is based on. I thanked her for the offer. I read the book when it came out, still have it, and realize I may want to re-read it after seeing the series. But at first I was confused, I thought she was offering to send me the graphic novel (ie comic book) that's at the center of the story, Dr. Eleven, but that doesn't exist. I think it would be immensely popular if it did, that is of course if it was good.
💥#
- I love this part of Respect Yourself by the Staple Singers. #
- If you're walking 'round think'n that the world owes you something 'cause you're here#
- You goin' out the world backwards like you did when you first come here yeah#
- Keep talkin' bout the president, won't stop air pollution #
- Put your hand on your mouth when you cough, that'll help the solution#
- Oh, you cuss around women and you don't even know their names, no#
- Then you're dumb enough to think that'll make you a big ol' man#
I like the
Microsoft Mouse with the scroll wheel, having adopted it in the last month. But it has a cheap feel, and mouse pointer freezes a lot. If I'm going to use a scroll wheel mouse eight hours a day every day, I am willing to buy a
better product.
#About
open storage systems, there are lots of them out there. I
wrote one myself, the one that's in use in Drummer, built on Twitter identity. But it's not enough to have the functionality, it has to be an obvious choice for users. That's why Amazon is perfect, so many people have accounts there and are comfortable using it, and they have a great
storage system already, it's just a matter of linking the two. There must be a reason they don't do it, it's so obvious. Maybe they don't want all the hassle YouTube has to go through with copyright.
#
- If you want help, you have to put the effort in, first. You can't expect people to help you if haven't checked your work. First you have to carefully read the docs. Not just once, but two or three times. Then stare at the problem. Try changing something and see what happens. Maybe the docs say one thing but you're observing something else. What did I do wrong? You have to ask that question first. We all make mistakes, there's no shame in it, but it's not good to show no effort before sounding an alarm. Esp when the person you're asking for help from is doing it as a volunteer. #
- One thing I've learned from far too many years using computers, I'm usually the one who made the mistake, though it's tempting to assume the software is wrong. When I say "usually" --- I mean once in a thousand times the software was wrong. #
- There was a situation the other day when the user appeared to be reporting that the software had completely failed. We're now months into the shipment of the software, and I was pretty sure this part worked. I depended on it myself. The user gave me no information other than he thought the software was broken. I closed the issue and moved on. I can't work with people who aren't at least a little humble. And nothing is so urgent that I should stop everything I'm doing and help a panicked user who won't even do a little work to try to figure out whether they misunderstood or made a mistake. #
- The problems I like helping people with are ones that are dished up in clear terms -- this is what I saw, I expected something else to happen (please explain), I read the docs (be sure you actually have) and tried a few things (explain) but I can't figure it out. When the explanation is so clear I recognize the issue and am able to quickly help. I like helping people. I don't like doing other people's work for them. #
A complete list of all the Drummer scripting verbs and the docs, as Markdown files. Lots of other good stuff on the new
DocServer site on GitHub. Another great OPML application, this time one that allows you to author man pages in an outline. Very easy to work on and publish.
#
Ken Smith, our English professor advisor on outliners, sees how the new DocServer can be used to present any kind of writing, not just "man pages." He's absolutely right. There's nothing in there that limits its uses to only tech stuff. Intentional. In fact I
wrote a post about this on 9/28 of last year.
#
I
still wish Amazon would sell app-accessible storage to users. It would be as big a breakthrough as S3 was in 2006. Actually it'd be more like the introduction of the floppy disk to the Apple II in 1978 or so. Really it's amazing how long this niche has been left unfilled. User-owned storage that their apps can use, provided by Amazon please. It has to be Amazon. I understand finally that's what all the
web3 michegas is about. The Blockchain vendors insist they have the solution to this festering sore of a problem. Of course tehcnologically -- far from it. But for some reason Amazon has been unwilling to fill the need. I think rushing to one form of storage rather than providing a cloneable API is foolish. We can have it all, and we should insist on it.
#If it were called something other than
web3 more people would listen imho.
#Have you ever had a doctor willing to work with you on an appointment so you don't have to waste a half a day because they weren't willing to spend a few minutes scheduling a meeting. So many services value your time at zero. How refreshing it would be if just one respected the value of your time.
#If Dems were any good at marketing we'd be turning a corner now, given what the Repubs have been doing the last few decades.
#
- The rule: One way of doing something is better than two. #
- So when the language gets a new way of doing something that is only slightly better than the previous version, or not better at all, I always stick with the way I was doing it before. That way when reading the code I never have to wonder why did the author choose this way in one place and another way elsewhere.#
- Coding tricks is not why we program -- we program to create new utility, and to create something that is easy not to break when it needs maintenence. #
- It's very common and imho totally wrong to not adopt the conventions of code you're contributing to. #
- Another way of emphasizing prior art. #
- If you can get to zero ways of doing something that's way better than one, and way-way better than two or more. #
- There are exceptions. Sometimes they add a feature to a language that is so sensible you have to use it. For example, initial values for parameters to functions in JavaScript. Or not having to say name: name in an object definititon, just name will do. Another one, the forEach function in JavaScript is more sensible than the equalent for version.#
- See the rule in the standards-makers howto. It's the same idea.#
- Sometimes I don't have time to write a full prose version of a post, I think it's better to write the skeletal version rather than publish nothing at all.#
A big mea culpa. Yesterday I released a version of the
OPML package that didn't work. There's a new version, that includes new
example code illustrating how to use the new Markdown variant format for outline-based interop.
#What OS made you think computers were really cool inside. For me it was
Unix in the late 70s. That's what really opened my eyes to how things could be both very powerful and very simple.
#
I rarely listen to the Daily podcast but today I listened to one
about the Omicron variant of Covid, and I don't think the person they interviewed really understood the science, or they were dumbing it down. How I miss
Donald McNeil who used to tell it like it is. Too bad he said the n-word when talking about the n-word instead of saying literally n-word he said the word the n-word is standing in for. How tired is that. Think of all the things we have to fight for to just get back to where we were and this wasn't one of them. Such fools at the NY Times.
#Harry Truman: "I don't give them Hell. I just tell the truth about them, and they think it's Hell."
#
The cable industry is just as responsible as Facebook for the garbage information people are getting. Both Facebook and Twitter remove the bad actors, why can't cable do the same. Even worse, we have to pay Fox money, even though we abhor what they do.
#
- It's interesting. #
- People from the blogging world didn't necessarily pay attention to the podcasting world as it grew out of it. #
- Same with the outlining world, even though outlines play a big role in blogs and podcasts. #
- Podcasters mostly were not bloggers, or outliners. #
- And most of the people who know me from outlining (all boomers and graybeards btw) had no idea that I went on to develop blogging and podcasting, even though they were natural outgrowths of outlining.#
- All these things are connected. They really are.#
- And no one seems to understand that there is a format that ties all this stuff together. And it's not RSS, although that's important too.#
- There is a master plan! I kid you not. #
We now have a
plan for the next steps in
interop between Drummer and Logseq.
#The first part of the plan is done,
v0.4.12 of the OPML package, it now reads and writes the extended Markdown used by Tools For Thought products such as LogSeq. Here's
the code, as you can see it's not very complicated. Discuss
here.
#I would never use a publishing tool that required me to use their editor to publish. Because, as a writer for many years, I already ahve a great writing environment that's perfectly tuned for me, or (more likely) I've learned to ignore its flaws. It's very forgiving of my foibles. Your editor doesn't know me at all. And btw, I might want to publish this stuff somewhere else at some time, which is probably the real reason they don't let you choose your editor.
#
- My longtime friend Robert Scoble has owned a Tesla Model 3 for years, and always touts the over-the-air software updates, so he can wake up one morning and find his car has a bunch of new features. Yeah but what if they break users, I kept wondering. How well do they test these instant universal updates before uploading? Well, of course -- they don't test them. Duh. It's a Silicon Valley company and their fear of breaking users isn't the most important factor in their engineering effort, and that of course is an understatement. #
- I found out in the latest update. I had the temperature in the car set to 65 degrees, the same temperature I have my house thermostat set to. When I got into my updated car, the temperature was 72. It said so very clearly on the big display in the middle of the dash. So I did what I did before, touched the temperature, up pops the environment panel, but I couldn't find any way to change the temp back to 65. I know how to scan a UI from left to right and top to bottom to find the thing that should be big, in the middle the display. A slider that sets the temperature. It wasn't there. I sat in the car in my garage for a few minutes before I had a brilliant idea. Try doing it on the phone where the UI didn't change. Voila. Back to comfort. I'm in good shape until they auto-update the phone UI. 😄#
- A bunch of other things were moved around. Why? Developers have their own insights into what users need, and they're always wrong. What users want first and foremost is the UI of the fucking cars to not fucking change! I put the f-word in there twice to emphasize the importance of this idea. #
- I still have my 2020 Subaru Forester, which I drive at least once a week to take out the garbage (I have a long driveway) and to keep the battery charged and to evict any mouse families that might be nesting in the heating system. In all this time, the heating controls, which are just a few knobs on the dashboard, obviously haven't moved or changed. They aren't made of software and therefore can be trusted to stay where they are and continue to work the way they used to work when I first learned how to use them. #
- If the Tesla developers had access to user testing or if they gave a shit about users, they would not have moved the temperature control, and their software certainly wouldn't have changed my temperature setting. #
- Another longtime friend, Dave Carlick, also drives a Tesla. This is what he wrote about the recent UI changes, on Facebook.#
- Seat position selector? Ha ha ha! Hid it! Swipe on tire pressure? Mwaa ha ha. Hid that too! Cell phone music selector? You'll never find it! Song that is playing? Ha ha ha ha. Keep guessing. Temperature controls? Stop driving right now and hunt around!#
- Now meanwhile, let me say that I love driving my Tesla more every week. I sometimes look for excuses to drive somewhere just so I can take my muscle car that looks like a Toyota Camry for a spin. The way it hugs the corners on mountain roads, and accelerates in an instant to pass cars running on gasoline. I love the car. But I wish it behaved more like an old style car in viewing the user interface as immutable. #
- Marc Andreessen famously said software is eating the world. Maybe that wasn't the best idea ever? Heh. 💥#
The web needs a simple API for storage and identity that users pay for and apps are given permission to hook into. Not a freebie from a huge tech monopoly. Blockchain an option, but not the only one.
#Why outsiders see things insiders miss. Watch
The Fog of War. An incredible documentary about how we fight wars with almost no idea of what's going on. If you're outside
the fog, it stands to reason you see things insiders can't see.
#There are two fundamental approaches to
outliners, and until now I've never felt the need to find a simple explanation of the difference. And I don't yet have a concise explanation. The difference goes back to ThinkTank vs Microsoft Word in the 80s. In ThinkTank when you moved an object out one level by pressing shift-tab, the node only took with it its own subs. In Word -- it could take some of its siblings with it. It depends on whether it views the document as a hierarchy or as a word processing document. The difference is also present between Drummer and LogSeq (and I imagine it comes from earlier products such as Org Mode). I'll keep coming back to this discussion, and I welcome input on what's the best way to understand the differences. I imagine in the end the difference will be similar to the difference between paint programs and draw programs, the former that deals with pixels, and the latter with objects. I've opened a
thread for discussion.
#If you've never used one of my outliners, starting with ThinkTank in the 80s, through
Drummer, first introduced last year,
this howto explains how they work.
#Outlining is different from word processing in terms of
wysiwyg. So many renderings can come from outlines. It would be great to edit in wizzy mode for every possible rendering. But it's almost as good to have a flip-switch.
#
- I've been feeling a little under the weather the last few days so I decided it was time for a binge-watch of something familiar, The Leftovers on HBO. I had watched it when it came out, one episode at a time, over three seasons. #
- I think this is a series that was never meant to be binged, because it became harsh and ridiculous, but I remembered it had a great ending. It was one of those science fiction plots that actually makes sense. Unlike Lost, for example, that sputtered out at the end and never explained the mystery -- Leftovers very much does explain itself. And the crazy thing is that I didn't remember the plot until I watched the whole thing and it was explained in the last scene of the last episode of the final season. #
- So if you want to watch the show, here's what I recommend. Watch the first season in its entirety. Then watch the last episode of the last season. You might not understand some of the setup, but you'll totally get the punchline, and it's a good one and worth it. The rest of it is crap imho, and I'm surprised the show has held on to its high rating. I think maybe we need to re-review these shows after they've been out there for a few years to see if they hang together as rapid-watches. #
- One thing about the show, not sure if it's the cause, but my dreams have been a lot more vivid and annoying the last few nights while I've been doing the binge. #
Podcast: Thoughts on interop in outline-land based on Markdown.
#
Yesterday, the last day of the year, totally by coincidence, I did my 50th Peloton ride. It's had a mostly positive effect, but my 66-year-old knees really feel it. Thing about these bodies they don't tell you, joints actually wear out like parts on a car, for example.
#
- Today, the first of the month, is rollover day in my blog. I do it on the first of the month.#
- I have done the usual ritual: #
- Put my December sub-outline it its own file in the GitHub repo.#
- Emptied out my main blog.opml file. #
- Ran a one-line script to remove all references to blog.opml in the index. (See below.) #
- Pinged Daytona to index the archived outline. Now Daytona has been rolled over.#
- Drummer bloggers, you should do something similar when you roll over your blog.opml file. #
- I added a couple of posts to the empty blog.opml outline, which triggered triggered an indexing of blog.opml by Daytona. #
- Verified that both the old and new stuff is in the index. #
- Continue blogging until February 1.#
- Here's the code I ran in Drummer to do the rollover in Daytona.#
- daytona.removeOutlineRefs ("http://drummer.scripting.com/davewiner/blog.opml")#
- daytona.ping ("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scripting/Scripting-News/master/blog/opml/2021/12.opml")#
- PS: More rollover. I had to add rollover to the code in tweets.opml.org. And verify that the GitHub archive of our tweets rolled over at the beginning of the year. For example, here's the folder that holds the archive of my tweets. You can see there's now a sub-folder for 2022, alongside the one from 2021. #
If I ran MSNBC we'd be asking at the top of every show -- When will Merrick Garland indict someone in charge of the Jan 6 coup, or when will he resign to make room for the person who will. And Biden will you fire Garland if he refuses? We've waited too long. Out of patience.
#A demo of
two-way interop between Drummer and
LogSeq. I've read in an outline from LogSeq. Edited it. It autosaves, the change is immediately reflected in LogSeq. Open formats for the win. (This functionality is in development, not shipping yet.)
#
Two favorite books of 2021:
The Color Purple and
Klara and the Sun. For the first, I highly recommend the
audiobook which is narrated by the author. Want to understand how slavery works in the United States? How the culture it spawned is American culture? This is your book. Beautifully written story, a real page-turner, and a total eye-opener. Klara and the Sun is near-future science fiction, about artificial friends. It's interesting in a meta-way because the artificial friend in the book, Klara, becomes
our artificial friend. Also beautifully written.
#I didn't watch a lot of movies this year, but my favorite, hands-down, was (of course)
Don't Look Up. It's more than a movie, it's an anthem, identifying the conclusion of our civilization one way or the other. We either overcome our need to be told simple bedtime stories and thus transform into something else, or we self-destruct. Either way, the past is not a template for the future. And they deliver the message in such an entertaining way! Maybe it's the last fun movie our species will ever create? People who judge the movie on its ability to entertain alone are totally missing the point. We have not only hit the wall, but it destroyed us. Now it's time to pick up the pieces, the best we can. As Dr Mindy
says at the end, "We really did have everything." Note the past tense, and it's very true, in the movie and in our lives. The times of having everything is over. Now what can we salvage from the wreckage of our civilization?
#
Jeff Jarvis hit a nerve with a post about how journalism covers science, which is a process -- and rarely produces a final answer. Same is true of software of course, and law, and pretty much everything that humans learn about. So what to do? Well, that's where blogging comes in. We need a combination of expertise and understanding of the scientific process, and the ability to communicate in a way that non-scientists can understand. So you can either teach journalists to be better at science, or give scientists the tools and training to be more effective communicators. There is a compromise possible -- merge the two. Bring expertise into the journalistic process, don't force science through the minds of journalists who dumb it down, or misrepresent it. This was the initial idea of blogging, it's why I went into academia in 2003. And why a person like Jarvis, who is a professor at CUNY and a pioneering blogger, is in an ideal position to start bringing about the needed change.
#
- Sometimes I wonder if dying is like waking from from a dream, hopefully with friends and loved ones waiting for you, like going to a diner after seeing a movie together and you all talk about how you liked it, and if you want to see it again.#
I was going to choose
Heather Cox Richardson as my
Blogger of the Year. She didn't start blogging this year, but this is the year I started
reading her daily posts, and I found them valuable and quite bloggy. I also loved her weekly
podcast. But in one of the latest nightly posts she writes about
smoking guns as if we don't already know the extent of Trump's involvement in the January 6 coup. This general lack of courage on the part of the establishment press and politics is putting our future at great risk. The question isn't whether there's enough evidence to indict every member of the Trump Administration at the end of 2020 and early 2021, but rather why isn't the DoJ led by the supposedly courageous
Merrick Garland doing anything to save the republic! When is it going to happen? And what are they afraid of. I think at the end of 2021 a blogger of the year should be grounded in reality. Our patience is long exhausted. Maybe a Civil War is inevitable. Maybe the original Civil War never ended. But I know this, I'd rather have the war while Abraham Lincoln (as played by Joe Biden) is president than
Jefferson Davis (Donald Trump). So let's say, for now, there is no Blogger of the Year for 2021. It should have been Heather Cox Richardson, and maybe if she stands up for the republic we can amend the record in 2022.
#In the last decade or so I modified my art from making software for everyone to making software mostly for myself. Some projects take years to complete, and some remain on the shelf waiting for their turn to be rolled out. But the best product I've ever made I think is
Daytona. A project that I was thinking about for a few years, but when it finally came time to write the code, took about
two weeks. Of course I spent a fair amount of time in advance of those two weeks creating packages and techniques that made it possible. But it is right now by far my favorite writing tool. I have most of my writing for the last 20+ years available to me through search, with full text, and a usable UI, unlike the increasingly sparse and unusable commercial search utilities. This proves one thing, there's still a fair amount of unexplored territory in the web.
#My favorite community project of 2021 are the art curators on Twitter. There's a group of Twitter users who, on behalf of great painters throughout history, are posting their works to Twitter. I follow many of them, and have written an
open source app that reads their feeds and stores the art in a
GitHub-hosted database. Current count: 31,867. It's downloadable and ready to be used in a Mac screen saver. It's a wonderful thing. Sometimes as I'm browsing Twitter one of the works shows up and I stare at it and experience the art, and how observe contrary it is to the rep of Twitter as being a place for loudmouths, psychos, narcissists and insurrectionists. This is pure art and art about art. You can't hold art down, pave it over, commercialize it. Art has a way of popping up through the cracks and sprouting whole new experiences.
#
- I was listening to a podcast yesterday about "comfort tv" -- binges that bring you a sense of well-being. That is imho what binges are about.#
- First basic ingredient, suspension of disbelief. While watching the show, from the beginning of the first episode, you must be in the story, not watching tv, but relating to the characters in the same way you relate to real people.#
- From that comes a sense of community, this is your tribe, you think about them the same way as if you were a wild pre-tech human, feeling attached to the other citizens of your village.#
- The feeling of comfort is the feeling of being home, hanging out with your tribe. A feeling the real world no longer gives us, so we create it artificially.#
Why
Don't Look Up is so useful. To our friends in media and politics and the billionaires who own them -- they keep our focus regulated and narrow so they can keep their jobs and keep selling their stuff, we can show them this movie and say the reason we find it funny and you don't is that you're in the way. The bullshit isn't sticking anymore. At some point, dear friend something is going to give where you won't be able to continue being in the way, let's hope the ending in our lives isn't the one in the movie.
#
- So interesting -- people who write for major media can't see the humor in Don't Look Up. It would require them to see their own filters, which are impossibly hard to see. #
- But here's a fact: Major media can't report bad news.#
- Case in point: I saw a bit that maybe we've found the smoking gun for Jan 6. They've been speculating for months.#
- But we saw the smoking gun on Jan 6, on C-SPAN. If they could remember we saw the gun, they could make the story about what it should be -- why hasn't the DoJ indicted him yet? What's the hold up. That should be the top story on political news every night. Not where's the smoking gun. Trump is, if anything, a walking talking smoking gun. #
The smoking gun.
#- PS: If you don't like the Jan 6 invitation to the MAGA mob to burn down the house, how about the recording of him trying to fix the Georgia election. That's looks like pretty good evidence to this non-lawyer.#
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