Dave

2014
  January 2014
    January 7
      Greenwald clarifies, I screwed up
        First, I am sorry for posting this tweet. I screwed up. In the tweet, I said that the only thing transparent about Glenn Greenwald is his stonewalling. The article which I was linking to, on the New York Magazine website, provided quotes from a Greenwald piece, without reporting the substance. In the piece they were citing, Greenwald answered the most important question I had been calling on him to answer. I had not read the Greenwald piece when I wrote that tweet. That was a mistake.
        In his post, he said, unequivocally, that he owns no stock in either of the Omidyar ventures, one which is a non-profit for journalism and the other a for-profit tech company. Not that there would be anything wrong with owning stock, but it is something that needed disclosure, something that I have explained over and over in a series of posts late last year, none of which got this response from Greenwald or any of the other principals in the new company.
        There are still other issues. Why the delay in saying he had no stock? And by item #4 in the Greenwald post, we're back to the normal Greenwald approach, over-stating his critics' concerns. At best, this is his lawyerly alter-ego popping up. At worst it makes me think he's still hiding important stuff. Not everyone is out to get him. I was a Greenwald defender and fan until I was introduced to Greenwald the Stone Wall.
        An important point, the Snowden documents don't belong to him or the Omidyar ventures. They don't belong to Snowden. They belong to the people of the United States. We have a huge stake in what's done with them. In normal times we'd trust the government to look out for the people's interest, but this is about the government abusing that trust. Greenwald is dancing with high charge explosives. We deserve his full devotion to this story. Why is now a good time for him to be involved in a startup? Why not wait until the Snowden disclosures are complete? Or if he must be involved in a startup, which I know from experience is a hugely time-consuming thing, why not pass the torch to another reporter, or group of reporters? Greenwald's newest head-fake is that we're asking for a complete and immediate dump of the documents. I'm not asking for that! I don't know anyone else who is. What I do want to see is an honest, fair, complete, expedient and urgent disclosure of that information, with the minimum of bullshit. Perhaps he should start a new venture just to disclose the information in those documents. These are the questions behind the questions about Greenwald's ownership position in the Omidyar companies.
        Transparency is not easy, but when you are occupying a seat of historic importance, with our future at stake, we insist that you take that responsibility seriously. And saying you are, when your actions don't indicate that you are, is not a good answer.
    January 6
      If you say it in public, it's quotable
        If I tweet that my butt hurts, and some company thinks that helps them sell their product, they can say "Dave Winer says his butt hurts," and on what grounds could I object?
        If someone says something, and someone else says they said it, I'm sorry but you don't have any recourse, if you're the Pope, the President or nobody in particular.
        I think we cross a line on Facebook however, when they imply that someone likes a product because they clicked on Like in relation to it. We all know, including the people at Facebook, that there are many other reasons to click Like even if "Like!" isn't what you had in mind. They're being hypocritical and expedient by equating the two, and earning negative goodwill, that may well haunt Mr. Zuckerberg in the afterlife. :-)
        And, if a NY Times movie critic says he likes the music of Llewyn Davis on Twitter, the movie company can say he said so.
        And it's ridiculous to think that Twitter, a company, for crying out loud, has any standing here! They can put whatever they want in their Terms of Service, this is speech. They don't get to make rules about speech that happens outside their network.
        I don't think I'm out on a limb here at all. I'm not a lawyer, but I think I understand the basic rules about speech.
    January 4
      Burning brain cells
        Software burns brain cells when it does something different from what you expected, and before you realize your thoughts are going the wrong way, you go too far, and going back hurts your head.
        The pain comes from brain cells that are committing suicide because they're so frustrated, all they can think to do is end it all.
        It's like lurching at the end of a rope when it breaks while you're playing tug of war, except it turns out it wasn't a rope at all, it was a bar fight.
        Using a computer always puts you at the edge of a haze, managing more complexity than your poor brain can handle. An overload caused by a misdirection == burning brain cells.
        Nothing new. Software has been doing it since Day One, I'm sure. I mention it because it happens all the time on Facebook. You're reading a message from a friend and then your brain slams shut because it realizes it's actually an ad!
        It's good I suppose for the advertiser and Facebook, but it's not good for my poor brain. Or yours either. And maybe ultimately it'll be bad for Zuck when we all get to the afterlife and get to tell him what we think about it. ;-)
        Thanks for listening.
      The shadow of 157 W 57th St
        I went for a walk, of course, in the fantastic cold and brilliantly clear post-snow Central Park today. Here's a picture that gives you an idea of the glory of the day.
        Now here's a contrasting picture, of a popular sledding hill, in the shadow of 157 W 57th St, the first of the new skyscrapers to go up on the south end of the park.
        You can see how dramatic the difference is on a sunny day.
        This shadow is emerging as a political issue in NYC.
      "Content" is here to stay
        I read Tim Bray's piece about the word content, and I agree. It betrays a point of view. If you're a writer, and someone refers to your work as "content" -- well that's like telling a painter his work is wall-covering. Yes technically, it's accurate -- your painting does cover the wall, Mr Rembrandt and Ms O'Keeffe. But there's also the inspiration. The joy. The dread, the lessons learned, the life lived, the gains and losses. The feeling. All that can be used to cover a wall, or provide a surface for ads to run. But calling it wall-covering doesn't capture its fullness.
        Yet there are times when you have to think of a painting as wall-covering -- if you're implementing a wall management system, and you need to account for people hanging all kinds of content on it, paintings, frescoes, posters, quilts, light -- incandescent and candles. Even chairs are wall-covering of a sort. Chandeliers, while they don't hang on a wall do provide light. Viewed that way all art is a wall-covering. It's the engineering view, while it does subtract the art from the art, it's a valid and useful point of view too.
        I've spent a good part of my career working on Content Management software, and I'm also a writer, so I see it from both sides. Should I say the C in CMS stands for Creativity? Does that help you understand what it does, or make writers feel better for producing fungible slurry of ad-supporting letters, numbers and punctuation? It doesn't mean a thing to this writer.
        There is lots of duality in human language. There's the mother who is also a sister and a daughter. A car that is both a method of transportation and a source of revenue for mechanics and car dealers.
        So in some contexts, my writing is art. And in others, it's content.
    January 2
      Twitter as a public notepad, day 3
        One of the commenters on yesterday's piece asked if Storify would be up to helping Twitter be a "public notepad." At first I thought no -- it's not about curating your own posts, but then I took another look and the answer is -- yes, you can use it to gather and publish your own ideas, you just have to be determined to find the way to do it.
        How to
          Go to storify.com and log in using your Twitter account.
          Click on the big green Create Story button.
          Click on the Twitter icon at the top of the right panel.
          Click on User.
          Enter your Twitter handle.
          Now your tweets are in the right panel. Screen shot.
          You can drag your "notepad" posts from the right panel into the left.
          You can even change the order (you'll likely have to if you want them to be in chronological order).
          Give it a title, and publish and you're ready to go.
        It's a lot of steps
          Here's the "story" I created.
          http://storify.com/davewiner/my-morning-tweets
          But -- it's easier than doing it manually, which makes it worth doing.
          However -- I would prefer if it were more compact, if it didn't make such a big deal of wrapping my words in the Twitter-approved envelope. It makes it even harder to follow the flow than it is in my timeline, which is hard to do because it's in the wrong order in the timeline!
          This is not Storify's fault. Twitter's terms of use force them to do it. Not optimal for the writer, however.
    January 1
      What would a "public notepad" do?
        First question of the new year.
        Yesterday I wrote about using Twitter as a "public notepad."
        Sure, the note-putting part of it was great. One item after another in rapid-fire, with the ability of people to add or comment. Most of it was pretty civil because.. Well I don't know why.
        But when it came time to gather it all up and present it as a matter of record, that was a lot of hard work, and the result wasn't very satisfying.
        So how would it work?
2013
  December 2013
    December 31
      Twitter as a public notepad
        I don't know what came over me this morning, but I got an idea after watching a speech by Elizabeth Warren on YouTube. I was in tears, the ideas were so simple and compelling, and so rarely talked about. We are a country of people, not corporations -- but we've lost track of that, and we're stacking the deck against the people. But then I remembered, she hasn't said anything about the NSA spying on the American people. One idea led to another, and people responded, and I kept going. I wanted to get all of it down here in one place, before moving on into 2014.
        The tweets
          Watching Elizabeth Warren's speech at the DNC, literally in tears she's so great, except -- what has she said about NSA spying on Americans?
          Same thing with Ezra Klein. What an up-and-comer. So smart. Always has the right answer. Except on NSA spying on Americans. Crickets.
          I live a few blocks from Times Square. It's already crazy here. Why do people stand in the street? Most don't get to see the ball drop.
          My opinion about the NSA. Politics in the US stops until it's over. Nothing. It's unacceptable. Outrageous. Fascist. Un-American.
          The @paulg story is opportunism by Gawker and this new publication. Headline should read: Graham is not a politician. That's the real story.
          Truth: @paulg has a narrow view of who can make a contribution in tech. However: That's his right as an investor and human being.
          For example, I'd like @paulg to tell the students who come to Startup School that being an entrepreneur isn't the only way to contribute.
          I was forced to be an entrepreneur when I was young because there was no other way to be creative. Wasn't a good fit. Yet I did contribute.
          It's always been a struggle. To this day people describe me as an entrepreneur. I am not an entrepreneur.
          People say I'm a lousy entrepreneur. True! I'm also a lousy polo player.
          If I were in my teens today, Zuck would not be my role model.
          You know who would be my role model? Banksy! :-)
          Evan Williams is an entrepreneur. Aaron Levie is an entrepreneur. James Hong. Nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur.
          But -- don't expect entrepreneurs to love your creativity. It's not what they do.
          One of the good things about the Gawker-created mess is that we can talk about @paulg. In other times, VCs are very much a forbidden topic.
          Online discourse would work better if it was always understood that there's a difference between The Truth and Your Opinion.
          It's time for the Knicks to call Phil Jackson.
    December 30
      Blogging matters
        I read a long post this morning about what it's like to be a nurse, and found it incredibly interesting. It filled in a perspective that I had not heard. And yet I spent lots of time talking with nurses during my father's long hospital stay in 2002, and my own -- the same year.
        Back then, I had an epiphany about people who work in hospitals, who work in conditions most of us find incomprehensible, helping people in unimaginable pain, unimaginable until it's time for you to deal with it. The epiphany is that it must be wonderful to see the good you do, so clearly. In my own field, software development, it can be hard to feel how you're helping. In fact you get a lot of people sharing pain with you they can't find other outlets for. I learned in reading the post that it's the same in nursing.
        While their work is gratifying and grounding, it's also grueling and abusive. She told the story so well, so personally. Yet in the comments people found many things to complain about. She just shared her point of view, wrote a blog post, and it was good, and of course the trolls gave her hell for it.
        It's important to feel free to tell your story even if it cues up other people's permission to be jerks. Oh this person is showing vulnerability. Let's make her pay! I get it all the time. I've been getting it since I started blogging in 1994. I still do it, because it's what I do. I couldn't stop, even though I've tried, any more than I could stop breathing.
        I don't have a solution, other than to say it helps to stand beside people who put themselves out there. The world is rough. That doesn't mean you can't share what you see. It just means it's important to feel the support. I want to provide what little of that I can, through this post.
        What bloggers are guilty of -- always -- is telling their story imperfectly. It's the imperfections that make it interesting, and human -- and worth it.
        Keep on truckin!
        It's not like anyone gets out of this alive. ;-)
        "cheesecake"
    December 29
      Tech products of the year
        This year's BOTY choice was such a big hit, the idea crossed my mind that I have a couple of products that distinguished themselves in my life in 2013, and what the heck, why not have a POTY to go with the BOTY! :-)
        The thought came to me while I was on a walk today in Central Park, listening to Grateful Dead music through one of the products, and played by the other one.
        I said man, I finally have this figured out after many years of walking and listening, I have a rig that's worth talking about it's so good.
        First the headphones. I like to say I buy headphones the way some women I've known buy shoes. I have a closet shelf full of them. Most of them I tried out for a few days or maybe a week or two and put them away, still in search of the ideal set.
        But after I bought the Velodyne vFree headphones I not only stopped buying new phones, I starting giving the old ones away to friends. And these were some great listening devices. But none of them put it all together like the Velodyne.
        First, they are wireless Bluetooth headphones. You wouldn't believe how much of a mess those wires are for me. Always getting tangled and knotted. Limiting movement. Pulling on my ears and the device. Now I look at people listening on their iPods on the subway and think that in two years the wires will all be gone. Once you try it this way there's no going back.
        Also, they're loud enough, and the sound quality is great. A lot of good headphones need an amplifier when used with a mobile device. Not sure why, but it's observable. I guess these headphones, because they have their own power source, have their own amp. Regardless, you don't miss anything with these guys, and music has the feel it's supposed to. And it's a clean sound, maybe a little heavy on the bass, but I like that way. But not so much as some others. ;-)
        Another thing that's great about wireless is you can wear them around the house without carrying the player with you.
        Now there are problems with wireless. You have to remember to keep it charged. But that's a discipline we've all learned by now. It's just one more device. It takes the same kind of USB cable that Kindles and Google phones do. You probably already have a few. And the Bluetooth connection sometimes drops, but for some reason for me now not so much as it did in the beginning. It feels like my devices have learned to find each other. I know that can't be true, but...
        Product #2
        Now the other device is the new iPad Mini. I got one with 64GB and LTE. I used Verizon because I already have a T-Mobile device (my Nexus 5), and this gives me a bit of redundancy that may come in handy. Both devices tether. Glad we got over that argument! ;-)
        I bought an iPad Air when it came out and loved it, but that got handed down, because I very much wanted to try an iPad that fits in my jacket pocket, which the Mini most definitely does. I miss the larger screen sometimes, but I love the portability. With a few tweaks, I can see not carrying a phone. But remember, it's winter and cold, so I'm pretty much always wearing a jacket. We'll see how it works in summer, when I'm back doing daily bike rides in summer clothes.
        But the iPad Air is as rational and lovely a product as the Velodyne, and of course the two go together perfectly, and connect over an open standard, so it's a religion-conformant combination. At the end of the year, it's clear that these two products made the most difference to me, and appeal to my tastes and lifestyle almost perfectly.
        It might get better in 2014, I hope so, but it was worth noting that near-perfection has been achieved this year.
        BTW, when I bought the Velodyne in April I paid $299. They're selling on Amazon now for $119. Wow.
        PS: As I am working on the transition to a new CMS, I'm producing some blog posts in both environments, to get experience, and get a sense of what features are needed. Here's the new version of this post, in case you're interested in such things. ;-)
    December 28
      GitHub Pages
        GitHub's Pages service seems ready-made for Fargo, so we're hooking them up. Here's how and why. In November I asked for a simple web server connected to Dropbox. I needed this for the upcoming version of Fargo. Until a couple of days ago we didn't have an answer.
        The Pages service works does what we need. It means that users will have to learn how to use GitHub. Yes, it's technical, and will be hard for some users. But it's a beginning. We'll make it easier.
        It's good. A place to start building.
        PS: Just for fun I put a version of this announcement on my GitHub-hosted site.
      Microsoft and netbooks
        Just read a piece in ComputerWorld about the success of Google's Chromebooks and how that's bad news for Microsoft. This is where I say "I told you so."
        Microsoft had this market zipped up, with the netbooks, tiny inexpensive notebooks that ran Windows XP, had lots of USB ports, wifi, a camera, long battery life. These were incredible computers. I bought three of them over the course of the craze, bought one for my mom, and urged everyone else to get one. Meanwhile, Microsoft was making noises that they didn't approve. I couldn't believe it. Here they were getting lifted up by a gift from god, and they were saying it wasn't good enough. This is a company that had killed its own laptop business by not caring about malware.
        When Vista came out, an awful operating system, they forced the netbooks to use it, when they should have dropped the price on XP to $0 to own the whole market instead of sharing it with Linux. They should have ran a victory lap. Fixed the bugs in XP, downsized their OS development group, and paid a huge dividend to shareholders.
        Netbooks were wonderful, but they weren't good enough for Microsoft. Now the Google Chromebook is cleaning up the market that Microsoft should own.
        We all lost here. Because the new netbooks, from Google and Apple, are closed systems, where the netbooks were wide open. I could access my file server from my netbook. I could put any software on it, or take it off, same with music and movies. Apple and Google are running gulags, the netbooks were Woodstock. That probably was the back-channel reason why Microsoft struggled so mightily to kill them. They were more interested in pleasing the entertainment industry than users.
        PS: I have two iPads, and buy them for my friends and family. I gave a friend a Chromebook because I thought it was perfect for what she was doing, reading books and watching Netflix. I just wish netbooks hadn't been so badly treated by the tech industry, because they were great promising products.
    December 27
      My blogging story
        Justin Hall of links.net asked me to do an audio recording about blogging.
        I answered some of his questions, but as usual, talked mostly about what I wanted to. ;-)
        Which is a big part of the blogging story imho.
        Here's the audio, 24 minutes, hope you enjoy.
        PS: This also adds to the thread started by Walter Isaacson about the origins of the Internet.
    December 26
      Blogger of the Year
        I spend the last month of each year thinking about who I want to honor as the person who best embodies the spirit of blogging. I always want to do something unusual, something that makes you think, that stretches the boundaries of blogging, but illustrates something about blogging that's essential, and perhaps not fully appreciated. And -- this year -- celebrates success! :-)
        This year's Blogger of the Year writes for the NY Times. In the past I would not have so easily thought you could both be a blogger and work at a mainstream publication. But this year our guy did something remarkable. He used his platform, his pulpit, to change the world in a measurable, significant way.
        Nick Bilton decided that it was time to ask a question that the FAA didn't want to deal with, or had no way to deal with, or couldn't deal with for some reason. Political organizations often get stuck. The individuals inside may know it's time to act, but they can't pull it together.
        Bilton asked a simple question that all of us who fly have asked. Would the plane crash if I kept reading a book on my iPad while the plane takes off? If not, why do I have to turn it off?
        He asked this question for the first time in a post in November 2011, and the decision was made late this year, and now we're all flying with this one inconvenience removed. Sure, it's not like solving global warming, or avoiding the next banking crisis, or even getting good connectivity in Manhattan, but it's progress! And it shows the power of an individual and of a news organization to create change, to act as instigator, a provocateur, a problem-solver.
        Thank you Nick Bilton for making our lives a little better, and using your blogging voice to accomplish it.
    December 25
      We could douse Internet mobs
        Don't kick a man when he's down.
        If that were the rule. If kicking a person when they're down was considered as awful as the things you knock people down for, that would end it.
        Make the punishment fit the crime, and stop there. And maybe if we wanted to be fair, adopt a rule like innocent until proven guilty, or try to see it from their side, or we understand that sometimes people tweet when they're: 1. Drunk. 2. Tired. 3. Lonely. 4. Feeling unloved. 5. Or neurotic. 6. Being human.
        I once saw a pundit with hundreds of thousands of followers call a mob victim an asshole and people who I thought well of (before this) praised him as being a saint.
        As Worf might say, sir you have no honor.
        There must be a New Year's resolution in here somewhere.
        Happy Holidays!
    December 24
      Be a man
        "Be a man" are the three most destructive words you can say to a boy or a man.
        Because it really means: Die inside. Betray yourself. Fuck off.
        Men Stay Silent in 1998 was all about this idea. It has been a consistent theme of my blogging going all the way back to the beginning.
        Please watch this video. It's important.
      The next Scripting News CMS
        I'm working on the next CMS for Scripting News and then for Fargo.
        Here's a blog post created using the new system, it'll give you an idea what's coming.
        Happy holidays everyone! :-)
        Dave
    December 22
      No company is going to stand up to a mob
        Impossible scenario: The Twitter mob chooses someone to make an example of. They go after that person's job. The company says "We're standing behind our employee." It'll never happen. Companies have to make the right business decision. And that means firing the radioactive person and replacing them with someone who is not radioactive.
          Standing behind the employee would just fuel the rage, and cause the company itself to become the target of the mob, probably even more than the employee. Boycott. The management would be fired, and replaced by people who will do the right thing for the business. Which is why no company will stand up to the mob.
        A few weeks ago one of the maintainers of node.js was fired because he didn't accept a check-in that would have made language in the code be gender neutral (at least that was my read of it as an outside observer). There was some question whether he understood what was being asked of him because English wasn't his native language. What an ugly scene, for so little, from someone who was so generous!
        I have been surrounded like this myself, many times, over the years. Believe me, the mob has tried to get me fired. If I had had a real job I'm sure they would have. When I was the CEO of a company, the mob went after our families. These are not principled acts. Don't kid yourself. If they think they can get you fired for having the wrong political opinion, they will.
        I've been told that "Free speech has consequences." Everything has consequences, like hounding people for practicing free speech. The consequence is that people won't speak. Great. What a cruel joke if the greatest communication medium ever invented was used to stifle communication.
      With much love!
      About the tech backlash
        I don't know anything for sure, and maybe the people who live in working class neighborhoods in San Francisco and the East Bay are the only ones who have a gripe with the people of tech, but my gut says this is just the start.
        I think the busses are incredibly good symbols of the problem with tech. They have these big windows, that you can see out of, but I don't think the people inside spend much time thinking about what's on the other side of them. The people of tech have an abstract and incorrect idea of what it's like to be outside their bubble.
        I first encountered this in a town hall meeting I went to at Apple in the late 80s. I was one of several speakers, and I went last. I had been asked to tell what it was like to be a developer for Apple's products. I had been an Apple developer for a long time, then. I worked with their first developer relations guy in 1980.
        I had very much idealized what it must be like to work at Apple. I imagined it was great! And I knew that my life sucked. Now here was the surprise, they felt the same way. Being a developer must be wonderful! Everything is taken care of for you. All you have to do is put up some dialogs, use our code, and in a few weeks you get rich! And you don't have to deal with the asshole execs. And whatever other grief comes from working in a large organization (which I now understand much better, but still from a distance). Of course none of this has anything to do with what it's like to be a developer. Our paychecks are iffy. We don't have health insurance. You always break our stuff because you don't care or understand. Most of us go out of business leaving the founders unemployed and broken. Etc etc.
        Now tech is much bigger today than it was then, and much more pervasive -- and it affects far more people's lives. And people read the news, and they know that the companies are helping the government spy on us. Those busses are such excellent symbols. When are they going to come out of the busses and find out what it's like for the rest of us. Not their idealized view of who we are, but who we really are.
        Sadly, all that's really needed here is some public relations pablum. Some feel-good ads on the Superbowl that glorify the users, not the products. Have your employees show up at charity events, and make sure there are reporters there too. With a little time and money, the problem could be "solved" in a superficial way.
        I don't know what the real answer is. It's impossible for everyone to understand everyone else's perspective. But the people who live in SF and Oakland who are being driven out of their homes have a real gripe. They probably like to live where they live, like you they have friends and family nearby, a job perhaps, and moving to Walnut Creek or Petaluma isn't what they want to do. And the rest of us who use your stuff, and don't like to be pushed around either, are feeling a little sympathy for the protesters.
      What's the best messaging software to install on an iPad?
        I want to get my iPad connected up to SMS and Google's chat system (I use an Android phone, at least for now), and whatever else people are likely to want to use. I've always found this horribly confusing. I want to get it right.
        I have a Google Voice account, btw -- and I use it.
        Should I install Google's chat app on the iPad (it's now called Hangouts, I wonder what it will be called next year, and what scams it will drag me into).
        I want something that's easy to set up, that I can recommend to friends and most important family members.
    December 21
      Questions for reporters to ponder
        Is a reporter still a reporter if he or she owns stock in company he or she works for?
        Does it matter how much stock the reporter has?
        When reporting, how does the reporter keep his or her ownership from influencing the journalistic work?
        Should they recuse themselves from writing stories that might increase or reduce the value of their stock?
        When a publisher says dealing with sources is entirely up to the reporters, does that still work if the reporter is a co-owner of the publication?
        Can you wear the hats of reporter and owner at the same time and still think of yourself as a reporter?
        Are the legal protections for owners different from those of a reporter?
        When you get a subpoena, can an owner protect sources?
        Will an owner aggressively pursue the truth? Or profits? What if there's a conflict?
    December 19
      What if the Knicks had kept Jeremy Lin?
        It's so funny, here we are almost two years since Linsanity, and the Knicks are a complete disaster. So what if the Knicks had kept Lin? It's a trick question, because it wouldn't have saved the Knicks, it wouldn't have even helped, but it probably would have destroyed Lin. He'd be where Raymond Felton or J.R. Smith are today. Wasted in body and spirit.
        I saw a picture yesterday in an article about how to cope if you're the fan of an NBA team that sucks. There are so many of them. Not many as bad as the Knicks, but this is a year of extremes. Either you suck terribly, or you're great. And the distribution is mostly East vs West. Western teams are kicking ass. And for the most part the ass they're kicking is Eastern ass.
        Anyway, back to the picture. It was a really sweet photoshop of LeBron James in a Knicks uniform. I had to look three times before my brain could parse it. What if LeBron had chosen the Knicks instead of Miami? Another trick question. He wouldn't be LeBron, the smartest and most driven player in the NBA (in addition to being the strongest athlete) today. LeBron wouldn't choose the Knicks because he had a choice. He went with the team with Pat Riley as CEO. And the owner, whoever he is, either just as smart as Riley and James, or he's smart enough to let them run the show.
        Were it only so in NYC. We are stuck as a basketball town because one of the owners is absent, and the other is vain, over-confident, and as the Oracle says of Neo in the Matrix, "not too bright." It really is a toxic combination.
        NYC, the richest city in still the richest country in the world. We have all the nicest things you can imagine, but we can't have a great NBA team because the guy who owns it thinks like a small-town boy. Could we trade teams with, say, Houston -- a town that has no appreciation for basketball? Or Indianapolis? They could probably use the money. What could we give almost any city in the US to take Dolan off our hands so we can engineer a good team, if not in 2013, or even 2017, maybe in say -- 10 years?
        Because we're never going to get there with Dolan.
        BTW, Carmelo Anthony is a wonderful player, and he's smart and he really cares. This is what's so great about basketball, it's an intimate sport. The players don't wear masks. And there are only five playing at a time. You get to study them. The Knicks are stuck in hell, and it's really no player's fault. A team is not the sum of the parts. You can't do math on the players on a team. The Knicks are proof of that. What the Knicks are missing is drive. You have to have talent, think as a unit, be smart, that's enough to get you on the court. Now what's your ambition? It's not what you say your ambition is, because Melo says his is to win a championship. But it's laughable when he says it. I'm sure he wants to be on a team that wins a championship. That means he has to hook up with a guy like LeBron. Years ago he was too young and lacked the confidence to let a stronger person boss him around. I think that's what the Knicks struggle is really about. The wearing-down of Carmelo's pride, and the circus sideshow, the comic relief, provided by Dolan.
        Anyway it's fun to think about basketball, and more fun to write about it because none of it matters one bit. ;-)
      Jeru's tapes relocated
        I did several workshops with Jeru Kabbal in the mid-late 90s.
        I did a website for him, and archived his tapes when he died in 2000.
        Also a transcript of one of his talks.
        When I was preserving his site, I saw that the links to his tapes were broken. I had let a domain lapse. Then the other day I came across them in an archive, and put them in a safe place in a folder on scripting.com. I figure if any of my sites survive over time, it's this one.
        Here are pointers to the tapes, in MP3 format.
          Sunrise of the Soul.
          Relationships, a tool for clarity.
          Quantum Light Breath.
          Manifesting.
          Deciding to Wake Up.
        Jeru's teachings helped put things in better perspective for me, maybe his wisdom can help other people too, over time. :-)
        "cheesecake"
      HTTPS exploration continues
        On Tuesday I posted a question -- how to serve HTTPS from an S3 bucket?
        Several people suggested using CloudFront or CloudFlare. So yesterday I tried both.
        These are not reviews. I'm just briefly reporting the results. I'm an HTTPS newbie. I'm looking for more info, and other options.
        CloudFront
          CloudFront is an Amazon service. Setup takes about five minutes, then about 20 minutes for them to provision it.
          First, I set up a new bucket called tmp.scripting.com. I put a single file in it, hello.html, which contains a single line of JS, alert ("Hello World").
          Then I went to the CloudFront panel in AWS, and created a new distribution. There's a big dialog with lots of options, but most of the defaults are fine. Choose one of your buckets, it assigns a domain name for you to use to access your distribution. You can provide a CNAME -- I did -- testsecure.scripting.com, pointing to the domain they provided. You can choose HTTPS, which I did (the point of the experiment). I don't have a certificate, and I am new to HTTPS.
          I was able to access hello.html via ordinary HTTP, and over HTTPS using Amazon's domain, but not using my domain. This method will not work for hosting Fargo in a bucket that can be accessed over HTTPS without (as I understand it) spending $600 a month.
          Sticker shock. I wish the big companies had left OAuth as-is, complicated for sure, but widely deployed. An individual developer can't spend that much money to jump through a hoop for large platform companies.
          Hope we can do something to lower the barrier for independent developers. Amazon or Dropbox could do something here. My opinion: removing barriers to deploying static JavaScript apps is good for business.
        CloudFlare
          This service may be closer to doing what I need, but to find out I have to give them my credit card info, and I wish I didn't have to do that just to find out if it would work.
          CloudFlare wants a whole domain to play with, which isn't a problem -- I have many that I'm not doing anything with. I gave them one and created a sub-domain, put an index file in it, a static HTML page that says hello.
          To set it up, you go through a series of steps where you turn over DNS to them.
          Now, it's not clear that they actually did anything -- because when I access the page I get the same headers that I got before I CloudFlare'd it.
          Regardless, to get HTTPS you have to give them $20 a month. And it's not clear if that's on top of the $600 per month you have to pay for the certificate. (My guess that it is.)
    December 18
      Facebook's problematic ads
        Facebook's inline ads look too much like posts.
        They start with names of people you know and like.
        For example, here's a screen shot.
        Can you easily tell which one is the ad?
        This is a problem.
      Reporters threatened by bloggers, version 2013
        This argument has been going on ever since a blogger crawled up on land and said Hello World. Reporters project the qualities of reporting on blogging, and find it fails. Sigh. Because blogging !== reporting. Not the same thing. Not used the same way. Different qualities.
        I'm participating in a thread on Facebook on this subject, and just posted this bit, trying to put the matter to rest, for the 18th time in 19 years. Here goes.
          I don't like blanket statements about bloggers, just as [pros] probably don't like blanket statements about book writers, or essayists, interviewers, op-ed writers, radio personalities. There are all kinds. But each medium has its strengths. When you project the qualities of another medium on blogging, you'll find it wanting. That's not much of a revelation. But if we tried to judge NPR reporting, for example, on the standards of blogging, it would be found lacking as well.
          Blogging was never able to do what a reporter does. It's not what it's about. It's about empowering the people you cite as sources to go directly to each other. That creates a flow that reporters can use. They are using it now, but didn't get that at the beginning. That, to me, means that blogging has totally achieved its purpose.
        I really think that's all there is to it. NBA players gossip openly with each other, providing fodder for sports reporters. Same with Angela Merkel, the President of the United States, would-be Presidents, the Pope. They all communicate publicly with each other, openly -- and reporters do better work because of it. That's the story. Wrap it up and ship it. ;-)
        "cheesecake"
    December 17
      Why I believe in academia
        An off-list conversation with Ann Greenberg.
        Ann: In reply to Restarting Kleiner, I mostly hated college, I found there was so much self congratulatory indulgence, brown-nosing and rigid hierarchy. Let's face it, the rich and powerful in any institution try to leverage the creativity and upward desires of the poor and weak. All the while calling it nurturance. But because of the strings, great art cannot be cultivated that way because it can never be self-critical.
        Dave: Me too. But I loved grad school because I picked the right subject, and I went to a school that focused on doing, not writing or pontificating. Then, after a career as an entrepreneur I went back to university and was able to create a revolution using the resources of the campus and other faculty. So I have had very positive experiences, even though as an undergrad I was not part of the club, as you experienced.
      Why Microsoft's tablets didn't work
        There are ads all over Manhattan for Microsoft's tablets.
        They have to position against the iPad because that's the first thing anyone thinks of when they think about a Microsoft tablet. How is it different from an iPad?
        Microsoft's answer is that it's serious and for business.
        Not very compelling, because I don't understand how a tablet could be for one or the other. Microsoft's tablets have less software than Apple's. In order for it to be more serious it would have to have software that Apple doesn't. I believe it's the other way around.
        But there are applications that Apple's tablet should be doing well that it isn't. It's really shitty for watching TV. If you want to watch a live program on an iPad, like a sporting event, if you want to use the tablet as a second screen, you need to have a second tablet! Because switching to a different app puts the TV app to sleep. So you can't look something up on the web while watching a game.
        Now I know it's technically possible for a tablet to allow you to access one app while another app continues to run. I used to be able to do this on netbooks. I was also able to access a file server, so I didn't have to have a copy of a video to be able to watch it. Hey even today there are plenty of things worth watching that aren't on Netflix. And Netflix works just like TV on an iPad. You have to switch in to watch it, so you need a second iPad to get a second screen.
        Why doesn't Microsoft make their tablet really good at this, and position accordingly. Assuming Apple doesn't fix the problem too soon for that. ;-)
      How to serve HTTPS from an S3 bucket?
        I've been transitioning all my content to static hosting on Amazon S3. It's the perfect way for me to store stuff for serving. Very low cost, and much more reliable and hassle-free than running my own servers, which I have been doing (and continue to) since the beginning of the web, 1994 or so.
        I'd love to completely get out of the business of running servers, but that's not likely to ever happen. But the last thing I want to do is move content that's in S3 into a space where I have to run the server to keep it on the air. I refuse to do that!
        So I want to figure out how to serve HTTPS on S3.
        PS: I see that it is possible if I use Amazon's name as the host. Really, this is not an option for apps like Fargo. I need to maintain the branding. If you redirect to amazon.com when you use Fargo, well that just doesn't work
      Yes Dave, I remember when JFK died
        Intro: Reporters should be working tirelessly to get an outcome like Watergate's. Both were about the government spying in the United States, but the latest scandal is much larger. I really don't see how the NSA survives this. We need massive government reformation. Yet the press is complicit. And this reporter wants to blame the generations that lived through Vietnam and Watergate for their complicity! What?
        Dave Weigel has the most ridiculous theory about why 60 Minutes has turned into a PR mouthpiece for the NSA. It goes like this. People who remember where they were when JFK died use Viagra and watch 60 Minutes.
        That's where he leaves it blank for us to fill in ourselves with various unspecified ageist theories. Presumably, I guess, people who are my age or older (I was 8 years old when the tragic event happened) are so scared of everything that we need to be reassured that the government is really okay and looking out for us after all.
        Now Dave, sit on my knee while explain to you, s l o w l y, how this really works.
        People a little older than me were drafted and sent to Vietnam. I missed the draft by a year. Many of them came back from the war with a very bad feeling about the American government. More than a few of the rest of us marched on Washington to try to end the lunacy. A few years later, President Nixon was caught wiretapping the Democratic National Headquarters in DC. You're probably too young to remember this too. Look it up. After an attempt to cover it up, making it much worse, he was the first and only US President to resign in disgrace. If you think that people who lived through all that have a lot of faith in the government, well you should go back to school because you got nothing from your expensive education.
        PS: People much older than me are still making a contribution. So fuck your ageism.
      It works: Hello World for Dropbox
        Thanks to Steve Marx who is a developer advocate at Dropbox, we have a very nice and simple Hello World app for Dropbox.
        As promised, I've packaged it up so people who come along later have it easier than I did. ;-)
        0. Before starting, think of a name for your app, and find a server with https where you can store an HTML file. I used the public folder of my Dropbox account, but I started my account a long time ago when you could access these files directly over the web. If you started your account more recently, you won't be able to use that feature.
        1. Visit the Dropbox app setup page. Click the big Create app button in the upper right corner. Screen shot.
        2. Click on the Dropbox API app option, Files and datastores, Yes, your app can be limited to its own, private folder, and enter the name of the app you decided on in step #0. Here's a screen shot with the options chosen correctly. When you're ready, take a deep breath and click the Create app button.
          Make sure your app doesn't have the word Dropbox in its name, as illustrated in my screen shot. That doesn't fit their branding guidelines and they'll refuse to create it.
        3. Copy your App key, you'll need it later, and enter the OAuth redirect URIs. This part is a little tricky. You need to enter the exact address of the web page containing your app, which you haven't created yet. It must begin with https://, as indicated in the prompt. Here's a screen shot with the two parts highlighted.
          Also click the Enable additional users button, if you anticipate that other people will use this app.
        4. Here's my Hello World app. Do a View-Source in your browser. Copy the text and paste it into an editor. Replace my app key with yours. Screen shot. Save. Do whatever you need to get it into your https server folder.
        5. Pray.
        6. Access your copy of the app over the web. With any luck you'll be redirected to the Dropbox site to have your app authorized. When you do so, the page reloads, and a dialog appears saying the file was written.
        7. Look in your Dropbox/apps folder. You should see a new sub-folder, with one file in it, hello.txt. That's it! When this works you can pat yourself on the back, because you've written a Dropbox app! :-)
    December 16
      Restarting Kleiner
        I read a piece in Pando about the restart at Kleiner Perkins, which was, when I was an active entrepreneur, the leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Now John Doerr, who was the leader of KP back in the day, at age 62, is coming back to lead the restart.
        What I would I do if I were JD? I love puzzles like this. How would I zig to the zag of Andreessen or Union Square or Spark, the new premier brands in tech VC?
        I may come up with other ideas, and I'd be interested in hearing what you guys think (other than negativism, which is totally uninteresting to me).
        Go back to universities
          If you're doing a restart, go back to the roots, where VC got started in the first place.
          It grew out of the boiling cauldron of post-war tech, Stanford University. This was the original keiretsu. And it happened again in the boom of the late 90s, though not so much in the current boom.
          Tech needs a farm system. Teachers who guide young minds in thinking creatively about the raw materials of progress.
        And open source
          Remember where Bill Joy came from, and the legacy he took with him. Three letters: B, S and D. This process works. So why did we stop?
          A university should be home to at least one special open source project that goes on for years, decades, generations. Every class adds something to the project. One year it's documentation. Next year it's test suites. Evangelism. Porting to new platforms. Developing a new format or protocol.
          Software is a process. Let the structure of the project reflect that.
          Software is also art. It's not first and foremost about returns for VC. But that comes soon, when the first class graduates. Some of them will have ideas about commercializing the project. That's when we turn to the investors who generously funded the project initially. And of course the companies they start contribute back into the process that they were founded in. Five companies, then fifty, all feeding off the same flow of innovation.
          The role of the VC is to be the opportunists, and feed back proceeds into the the project, and to tithe a certain portion of their profits back into refreshing the portfolio of new tech to be opportunized. (A new word, one a VC would like!)
        Do it differently
          You wouldn't not leave a tip for good service when you go out to eat at a fine restaurant. Now why wouldn't you do the same for great open source projects that make your ventures fly? Of course you would! This is the brilliant idea, imho, that has escaped all previous generations of investors. You want to buy a presence with the next generation of up-and-comers. This is your goodwill. Where your great PE ratio comes from. Who will they want to finance their startup? The one that's famous for funding the leading new open source platforms of the day. That means planting lots of seeds over long periods of time.
        That's where I would start
          Look for successful entrepreneurs who are ready to start their academic careers and teach what they know to bright-eyed, young, eager, optimistic genius students, with their whole lives ahead of them and everything to prove.
          Silicon Valley seems to think that academia is obsolete. They're wrong. Bet contrarian.
        The farm system
          VCs like to eat the seed corn. That's where I'd zig to the zag of VC. Where others eat, you invest. And reap the profits with the generations to come of great tech leaders.
    December 15
      We've just begun to explore rivers
        Alexis Madrigal has a widely-cited piece suggesting that we may have seen "peak rivers" in 2013. (He calls them streams, but streams and rivers are the same thing.)
        I think we're just getting started. We've created just a few big flows, commercialized them, and they're somewhat clogged, but that doesn't mean that river transport is done for. We may find the leading flows, Facebook and Twitter, to be too sensational, commercial, or superficial. Perhaps not enough to sink our minds into, but that doesn't mean some information isn't best presented as a flow.
        Consider news about the NBA. Every night there are scores, reports of injuries, rumors. The next morning, gossip, analysis, stats, trivia, more rumors. There's a very predictable beat to sports news. Lends itself to a river. Yet, I just got my river going last week! I've barely begun to understand the new experience.
        I think we'll discover many more uses for reverse-chronologic flows in 2014, 2015 and so on. It's a very basic format. The teletype was a river. Stock tickers are rivers. That doesn't mean there aren't databases, and books, think pieces, taxonomies. A river is just one structure, but it's a good one, and we don't throw good structures out.
        PS: Interesting his piece appears on The Atlantic, another body of water.
        PPS: Think of a river as a format, like "romantic comedy" or "spy thriller." They keep making them, generation after generation. They change with the times and technology, but the formats are in our brains, not in any one medium.
        PPPS: Check out nbariver.com and it's accompanying Twitter feed, @nbariver.
      Hello World for Dropbox apps?
        I want a very simple testbed for Dropbox apps written in straight JavaScript. Nothing extra. Just: 1. Get authorized. 2. Write a file. 3. Nothing more! ;-)
        Using exactly the best practices that Dropbox wants us to use. I should be able to have something running in ten minutes, or less. Nothing but JavaScript and HTML. No pre-processors. No complicated builds. Let's drop the learning curve.
        For the record, these are the docs I've been puzzling over:
          Getting Started Guide for dropbox.js.
          Built-in OAuth Drivers.
          Checkbox.js, a sample app.
        This is just a first step. Then we'll take another, and another. :-)
        "cheesecake"
        PS: Thanks to Steve Marx, I have a Hello World app for Dropbox and wrote a blog post explaining how to do it yourself.
    December 14
      mysilo.com?
        Yesterday's Joy of Tech sounds familiar.
        I wrote about this in October. In item #2: "I'm getting to know someone new and I can tell she's going to be a good friend. So after our meeting a couple of weeks ago, the question is -- how are we going to communicate. I see her on Facebook. But that isn't my preferred way to communicate, for a variety of reasons. Only after a few days of negotiating, in a total fog, we decide to use email. It seems that could have happened much more quickly."
        Communication is getting more difficult. Every time we invent a new variant of email, IM, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Skype, etc -- we're never going to stop inventing them -- the problem gets worse. At some point this is going to be bad for business. Maybe it already has.
        It seems obvious that at some point there will be a way to cross boundaries between silos more easily. Maybe we'll have personal silos?
      Using GitHub to share Frontier code
        When Brent Simmons was talking about storing object databases in the file system on the Frontier-user list, I had a nagging feeling I had done something in this area. I had. Not even that long ago.
        Here's the story.
        I have a tool called gitHub.root that periodically checks the contents of a set of odb's you specify and exports any changed scripts to a folder structure, designed to by shared on GitHub.
        I'm not releasing that tool at this time, because I want to do another review. But I am USING it, to release the code for another tool, this one is current, and you can download it from the Tools Catalog page in the OPML Editor website (choose Tools Catalog from the Misc menu). It works. I'm using it all the time. It's called superSync. It really is super and it does a nice job of syncing local folders to locations on Amazon S3. I have some software in the pipe that needs this functionality.
        Anyway, it's both a Tool and a GitHub repo.
        https://github.com/scripting/superSync/tree/master
        The docs are right there, in the Readme.md file.
        I'm not taking pull requests, this is just for sharing, and you're welcome to fork it and do with it as you please. MIT License.
      WordPress supports rss.js
        WordPress now supports rss.js.
        What this means is that you can access the flow of new posts from a JavaScript app running in the browser without any special server software. It makes it more efficient while preserving know-how already in developers' brains. Why have a new way of doing something we already know how to do? Exactly! ;-)
        This also means interop will be easy, and makes it possible to have new blogging tools that are compatible with WordPress in new interesting ways.
        May not mean much to end-users. By the time developers deliver features based on this stuff it'll be baked into the platform ten levels below the user interface. But that doesn't mean it's not important.
        It's like having a new subway tunnel in NYC. Eventually we'll be able to use it, and when we do it won't look like this. But we'll be able to get places we weren't able to get to, so easily, before.
        It's a good thing. ;-)
        "cheesecake"
        PS: I don't think this is available (yet) on wordpress.com.
    December 13
      Twitter: Blocking is too crude
        Yesterday Twitter changed the way the Block command works, only to change it back in a couple of hours after an outcry from people who liked it the way it was.
        I welcomed the change, because it weakened the Block command, which was and now is again the only way to delete a tweet that you find offensive.
        In 2011, I wrote: "Blocking has the side-effect of making me invisible to the person I'm blocking. This is totally unnecessary."
        I would prefer if Twitter would give me the ability to remove specific tweets from my Replies tab. That's it. Why, after all these years, does Twitter not have this feature? I can't imagine it's that hard to implement? Maybe it is.
        A couple of other ideas:
          1. I'd like the option of muting someone, and leave Block as it is.
          2. It would be nice to be able to mute someone for a day, week or month.
          3. Same with Block.
    December 12
      A legitimate use for "with" statement
        Non-programmers: This is esoteric. You can safely skip this post. :-)
        Now, as a programmer, I hate the with statement. I never use them. Back when I did they were the source of many ridiculous bugs. Saving a few characters in the source while obscuring the meaning of the code. Not a good tradeoff.
        However, there is a legitimate use for a with statement, and it's disturbing to see that it's been deprecated in JavaScript. I hope this does not mean that there will ever be a version of JavaScript that doesn't have it.
        Here's when you need it: When you're implementing a macro language.
          with (context) {eval (macro)}
        It's the same use-case as the much-maligned eval function.
          eval used to have a second param, btw, that allowed the caller to provide a context that the code runs in. They took this off, but I wish they hadn't. (Scroll to the bottom of this Mozilla tech note for the historical note.)
          We added these to Frontier, and were able to do wonderful stuff, like XML-RPC for example.
        Imho, eval and with should only be used by people implementing macro environments.
        But they are useful. And both with and eval should exist.
      This new Google mail feature is interesting and/or disturbing in many ways
        I was getting ready to post an email to a group I'm part of, and was sidetracked by a popup that said I could send $20 to "Mary Green."
        Here's why it's interesting and/or disturbing
          Google has become a bank. The transition is complete.
          Isn't this something like BitCoin?
          They're putting ads in my own email before I write it? How is that not spam?
          Get me the fuck out of here.
        Here's why I'm freaking out
          Lately Google has been taking liberties with my email far more than I ever gave them permission to. Yeah, I'm sure legally I did -- or I'm sure they think I did.
          They make messages disappear as I click on them in the iPad version of GMail. They filter important messages to new tabs they invented, without asking me. Now they're invading a writing space with ads? What??
          I like that they add features to GMail, but they're really pushing us around, and it's not cool.
      How Facebook can diversify
        I've been using Facebook for a few months, and I'm sorry I ever stopped using it. It's an important product to understand because so many people use it. If I want to participate in the evolution of post-Facebook technology, I have to have a good idea of what Facebook is. I made Mistake #1 that technologists make. I ain't perfect. :-)
          I also thought the iPad was a dud, to show how wrong I can be.
        Now I think I understand what Facebook is and isn't. It is a place to post pictures of family and friends, to keep people posted on what's up with you. People who you have personal relationships with. It's different from Twitter and LinkedIn, the former is for news, and the latter is for professional relationships. There probably isn't anything unique to each technology that makes it better or worse suited to one of these applications, rather it's the users who have decided how to position them.
        Position. That's a very important word, and an idea that all technologists should study and understand. I first focused on it in a great book by Al Ries and Jack Trout called Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind. An even better place to start is the more refined Marketing Warfare, which explores the same ideas as Positioning, viewed as warfare, with the principles of Clausewitz, the great Polish general and writer, as the structure to hang the story off.
        What Ries and Trout would tell Mark Zuckerberg, who wants Facebook to be doing what Twitter is doing, is that it can't and it won't. But there is a way to compete with Twitter -- start a new product, with a different name, and position it clearly in the users' minds as a new better Twitter. With some feature Twitter doesn't have, or better, one that Twitter can't have -- that has high value for users.
        The classic example in the world of Ries and Trout are the Cola Wars. At the beginning, Coke was #1 and there really was no #2. Until Pepsi discovered that people, if given a choice, would buy as much cola as they could. If the competition sold a tasty cola beverage in a 6.5-ounce bottle, touting it as the perfect size for all, offer a 12-ounce bottle at the same price. And voila, a strong #2 is born. People really did want more. And get this -- Coke had a huge installed base of vending machines that could only serve the smaller bottles. Ooops. ;-)
        So if I were advising Zuck, I'd say this. Quietly off on the side have a few of your best developers do a total clone of Twitter, but instead of a 140-character limit, make it 240 characters. Add a few nice features beyond that, like the ability to delete a message in your inbox, to get rid of turds without having to block the sender, and offer it up as your answer to Twitter. Leave Facebook right where it is, as the family-friendly networking environment. The DisneyLand of the online world. The next Arab Spring can happen on your Twitter clone.
      NSA chooses the wrong question
        Important piece in ComputerWorld quoting General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA.
          The NSA's bulk collection of U.S. telephone records is the "least intrusive" way to track suspected terrorists' communications with people in the U.S., General Keith Alexander said, defending the NSA's mass data collection and surveillance programs to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
          "If we can come up with a better way, we ought to put it on the table and argue our way through it," Alexander said. "There is no other way that we know of to connect the dots."
        Clever technique to direct the questioning where he wants it to go. But...
        That isn't where I'd begin the questioning. And I don't have any questions for a specific US general, rather for the US in general.
        Do we want to trade off freedom for security? Because that's what we're giving up. Then, if we decide we'd forgo the freedom, and that has to be more than a majority that chooses it, then we can talk about what the best methods are to gather data.
        We never had the first discussion. We never decided to take the kinds of risks the NSA is taking, in secret, on our behalf (supposedly) with our freedom.
        BTW, I'm no expert, but I don't think the Constitution gives us the option to forego freedom. Which is wise, because how could we decide to do it? Certainly someone would object.
    December 11
      Five Word Tech Horrors
        One more post then I have to go.
        Last night there was a tweet-fest with this tag: #fiveWordTechHorrors.
        I kept thinking of new ones. I wanted to remember all of them here.
        So here they are...
          It works on my machine.
          One hundred forty character limit.
          I read it on Valleywag.
          Can my mother use it?
          Robert Scoble thinks it's cool.
          Jeff Bezos buys Washington Post.
        And I retweeted these:
          Just learn how to code! -- Alexia Tsotsis.
          Does it work in IE? -- Jeremy Spitzberg.
      Yes, servers can be end-user
        These days there's an unfortunate assumption that servers have to be for programmers only. They do not.
        On the Mac in the 1990s, we had HTTP, FTP, email servers that were totally end-user. Launch the app, fill in a few blanks in a dialog, or just accept the defaults, and you've got a server.
        What happened was tragic. On his return, Steve Jobs wiped the whole market out with one move, by bundling Unix servers with the OS. The message was clear. Servers are not for users.
        In their defense, they might not have even known there was an ecosystem. Those were days of wiping the slate clean. Apple never really noticed the developers they had attracted. We left, shaking our heads about what could have been.
        Well the art isn't lost. We still know how to do it.
      Would you tweet for hot cocoa?
        A niche in net marketing that hasn't yet been filled.
        I'm hanging out at the skating rink in Central Park, watching the skaters.
        Take a picture, post it to Twitter. "Enjoying the view at the skating rink."
        Or, if I see a sign, tweet with #wollman and get a free hot cocoa.
        My location has to be attached, so they know which table to bring the cocoa to.
        Easy way to encourage first-person tweeting.
        This has got to be the next step, imho.
        Sorry to have mentioned it. ;-)
        "cheesecake"
      A missing net construct
        I want to be able to pay a price to reserve a domain for perpetuity.
        That way we'd be able to build structures that had more longevity.
        Right now everything is relatively ephemeral.
        This is the kind of thing a service bureau could do.
        Don't need to wait for ICANN to do it.
        Or an "Internet Banker" would do (another missing construct).
    December 10
      Learning to code will not make you rich (or particularly powerful)
        I used to evangelize blogging the way people now promote the idea that everyone should "learn to code." I never said learning to blog would mean people would listen to you -- they're separate things. Blogging, imho, is good to do even if no one but you reads what you write. You formulate your thoughts in a different, more complete way, when you write as if someone else could understand them. But people didn't hear that. They thought if they blogged they would become influential. That people would read them. And when they realized this wasn't so, there was a backlash.
        I think when people hear "Learn To Code" they think "Get rich like Zuck or Steve Jobs." When they learn to code their next question likely will be: "Where do I collect my millions of dollars?" Of course most people who code, if they make any money at all, make a modest living. When you reach a certain age, you're put out to pasture to fend for yourself. People seem to think "coding" is a young person's activity (even though it isn't), and if you're lucky enough to get a job doing it, you'll have to find something else to do when you're 35 or so, and that's not going to be so easy.
        Learning to code is good if you have a calling, if you feel it's what you must do to express yourself. If you have ideas that you can implement in code that no one else is doing. Or if you just love the puzzles that programming is constantly presenting you with. You have to have a certain amount of self-hatred to love programming, btw, because it's a grind. And to do it well you have to have a lot of all of these things.
        You might think that by learning to code you get to be the Man Behind the Curtain, the all-powerful person who makes the digital world work. But that's not what coding is about. If you want power, and I've said this many times -- rather than learn to code -- first learn to run a server. That's real power. And it's far easier than programming. You can learn to run a server in a few days or weeks. There's not much to it. Servers are just computers, like a laptop, that are always on and have a net connection that never goes away. They run software that's a little different from the stuff you run, but if you can install a word processor or a graphics program, you can learn how to run a web server. And you will be able to publish whatever you want. But then you kind of have to be a blogger to appreciate that, so we're back to the beginning.
        Also, running a server is a good gateway to becoming a programmer. Sooner or later you'll want to customize your server and that's done (drumroll please) with programming! ;-)
      New podcast
        Yesterday I did a 1-hour podcast interview with Megan Murray and Euan Semple.
        I really like the way it came out. We hit on a lot of important points. And I got to pontificate a bit on art, education, and media hacking. And punch cards.
        I'm subscribing to their podcast. ;-)
    December 9
      Journalism and rich people: "We move in their world, but it is their world."
        A great story from The Paper, a 1994 movie starring Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Randy Quaid and Robert Duvall.
        The characters played by Duvall and Close are in this scene.
        Bernie: In '68, a bunch of us went to cover the Olympics in Grenoble. Decided to go to the best restaurant in town. Now, the menu didn't have any prices, but we were all on expense accounts so we figured, fuck it, got drunk. Well, somehow there ended up being, I don't know, fifteen or sixteen of us at the table, and when the check came - ooooo, it was nine thousand dollars.
        Alicia: Whoa.
        Bernie: Yeah. [chuckles] So, now we're all starting to point fingers, we're trying to figure out who invited who. And just when it was starting to get really embarrassing, this funny-lookin' old guy at the next table calls the maitre-d over. [mimics writing] Ehhhh, he did a couple of squiggly lines on a napkin, signed his name, winked at us - that was it. The old guy was Pablo Picasso, and that napkin paid our bill.
        Alicia: Did I miss the segue here, Bernie? What's the point?
        Bernie: Well, the people we cover - we move in their world but it is their world. You can't live like them, Alicia. You'll never keep up. Now, if you try and make this job about the money, you'll be nothing but miserable, 'cause we don't get the money - never have, never will.
    December 8
      Looking for great NBA feeds
        Last week I started an NBA River.
        I'm loving it. It's already improved my appreciation for the sport.
        To build the river, I visited the newspaper sites of the home cities of all the major teams and found their feeds, and thankfully -- most of the have feeds for their team.
        I added national pubs like USA Today and Sports Illustrated. And I asked a friend who works at the NBA for pointers to his favorite blogs. Now I want to open the appeal up more broadly.
        If you have a favorite NBA blog or journo, please send me a pointer, either by posting a comment here or by email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com.
        I'm looking for great commentary and observations, whether from fans or reporters. Biased is definitely okay.
        Thanks!
      Pando is doing journalism
        This piece on Pando is an example of real journalism that is so rare in tech. A vendor makes an assertion that doesn't sound right to a reporter. So he gets the story on his own. It isn't a story created by a vendor. It isn't a subject that the vendor wants to discuss. It informs the reader how the market is developing, despite what the vendor wants us to think. And it says, in the headline, that the vendor is doing what all vendors do, leading reporters astray. And why shouldn't they? The tech press generally lets them get away with it.
        The Pando piece taught me something, painted a picture I didn't have before. And most important, it makes their case. I'm left wanting to know more, for sure, but all details. I got the kind of overview a good journalistic effort should provide.
        Add to this that Pando, alone among tech pubs, has been willing to ask challenging questions about the new Omidyar news company. That's the state of tech journalism in 2013. Now where are the other tech pubs on the Omidyar story?
        I said to Paul Carr, a reporter at Pando, that I was surprised, and he asked why. I thought Pando was the worst of the insider tech news sites. I saw them as a PR mouthpiece for the Silicon Valley investor community. That they've been willing to challenge Omidyar, a tech multi-billionaire, and AirBNB, another huge Silicon Valley success, says that they're wanting to do journalism, not just get rich. Which, by the way, is probably why you read so little about Omidyar's company in other tech pubs.
        Update: Maybe Pando is hedging a bit. ;-)
      To Feedly readers
        Apparently Feedly is changing links to content on blogs and news sources to point at their own pages. I want Scripting News readers to know, if they use Feedly, they will be missing all kinds of good stuff we're doing here.
        If that's what they (people reading my site through Feedly) want, then it's okay with me. What's not okay is if Feedly somehow represents their pages as mine. If that's what they're doing, or planning on doing, then I ask you to find another way of reading my site.
        There's no excuse for representing links to other people's writing as your own. It's one of the ugliest sides of the web. That Feedly, which has up to now been a fairly classy company, would contemplate this, makes me think they must not understand.
      The Indiana Jones Programming Method
        There's a bug in my outliner.
        It's an encoding bug. I write something, save it -- everything's cool. But if I reload the app, thus forcing the file to reload, what I get back isn't what I put in. It shows up when I'm writing complex code that does stuff with string constants. It has to reach a certain level of complexity and use single and double quotes, left angle brackets and equal signs. I have been unable to trap it. Probably because my focus is elsewhere. When it comes to encoding issues, the mind always is elsewhere if you know what I mean. ;-)
        Anyway, I decided I would work around the problem instead of trying to find and fix it. Even this was problematic. Every approach I came up with fell into the same trap. Until I thought of another approach entirely -- if this editor is screwing with the text, I'll use another one that doesn't have the problem. I saved that file in a folder and now load the code in via a script element in the head of the document. Hey it's a better solution anyway, reusable code! At least I tell myself that. But it works. So there's that. ;-)
        I call it the Indiana Jones Method, after that famous scene in the first Indiana Jones movie, where Indiana comes face to face with a sword-wielding giant in the bazaar. The giant is twice his size. And he's got a huge sword. And he's good with it. There's a crowd. Foreboding music plays. How the hell will Indiana get out of this one!
        I don't want to spoil it in case you haven't seen the movie. But it's clever. He does it much the way I solved this programming problem.
        "cheesecake"
    December 7
      What got into the Knicks?
        The Knicks were tied for the worst record in the NBA going into the Thursday night game with the Nets. But now they've won the last two games both by blowout scores.
        What happened? I think you have to take it at face value. Carmelo Anthony figured something out that has up to now eluded him -- that he plays on a team. I know that sounds flip or sarcastic, but it's actually the most direct way to say it. I'm sure he's a very smart guy (again, no sarcasm) because to perform at the level he does requires not just great physical ability, he's got to have a great computer upstairs. But things elude even very smart people. I speak from experience, with all possible humility. Sometimes the truth is hiding in plain sight.
        It is very easy to defend against the Knicks if there is only one strong shooter on the team. So when Melo is the only one connecting, the Knicks lose. Over time, they start losing a lot. That's what happened in the first sixteen games in this season. What happened in the Nets game, and it worked, is that other guys got hot, and Melo let them have the ball.
        If the Knicks want to try a really radical approach now, they might cast Melo not as a forward, rather as the point guard. It's his job to bring the ball back on the offense. Then he calls the play and gets the ball to the open man. He's watching the defense as much as the offense. Who have they left open. Bing. That's the guy. That's a good next approach, imho in redesigning the Knicks with the current roster. Don't trade anyone.
        The last two games have been fun to watch. That's all I ask for as a fan. Sure it would be nice if the Knicks were to go deep into the playoffs. But I know I'm going to see good basketball in the last couple of rounds no matter who makes it. In the meantime, they're my neighborhood team. They play just down the street. It would be nice if their games were fun and interesting to watch.
        In any case nice job! :-)
        PS: Now that I have an NBA river, I'm getting more of the good gossip. I realized I needed it when my building super knew more about the Knicks than I did because he reads the NY Post. Even though their politics are offensive, their Knicks reporting is good. Anyway, they say that Melo is trying to recruit Rajon Rondo from the Celtics to play on the Knicks. That actually would be a good move, imho. A strong fast even explosive point guard to go with Melo would probably work really well. Like OKC with Westbrook and Durant. You need both to make it work. I think oddly, the Knicks would be much better off if they had kept Jeremy Lin, and if Melo had been willing to work with him (he was clearly offended by his presence). But Rondo, Melo and Chandler (if he gets healthy) would be a pretty awesome combination.
    December 6
      Wish: A JavaScript shell that talks to Evernote
        I could put some really nice software in it.
        Two-way communication in and out. I send a structure across to Evernote representing a notebook, get one back. I give the user a nice browser-based notebook editor. Totally ready to do this.
        Help me.
      You want power? Run a server
        Lots of people want to learn to code these days, and that's great.
        However, as a 40-year programmer, I think it would be even more useful if people learned how to run a server first.
        That's real power, because with a server you can communicate without going through Facebook's filter.
        It's really not that hard to do, or expensive.
        Run your own server. That's power.
        PS: Or use Evernote. They don't publish a feed at all. It's a good platform to build on, imho.
      Inside Llewyn Davis
        A new Coen Brothers movie!
        Luckily I had hit a milestone on my latest development project, and it opened today in NYC, in two theaters, so I took off and walked downtown to see Inside Llewyn Davis on Broadway and 14th St. It was the right place to see this movie because that's the neighborhood where it largely takes place, fifty years ago.
        What to say? It's not like any other Coen Brothers movie. It's not a slapstick comedy like Raising Phoenix or Fargo or Burn After Reading. It's not as dark as No Country for Old Men, but it is a dark movie.
        Is it worth seeing? Of course. It's beautifully made, with lots of music, and small roles for big stars like Justin Timberlake, John Goodman and F Murray Abraham. Goodman's role was especially good, so depraved. Deeply depraved.
        There's a lot of symbolism in this movie that I'm going to have to think about.
        A nice touch, they gave us a CD with the soundtrack. We've been saying this for a long time, movie producers ought to upgrade the experience with something you can only get if you go to the movie. However, a memory stick would have worked better for me.
        Go to this movie if: 1. You are a devoted Coen Brothers fan as I am or 2. You love folk music or 3. You love NY. I was living in the East Village when the movie was made, so the locations are mostly quite familiar to me. I went for a walk in the Village after seeing the movie, to complete the experience.
        And here's the NY Times review, which I can now read. ;-)
      The NSA on a helicopter
        I've now had two back-and-forths with Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, and I gotta say this guy stonewalls like Nixon. Like a politician who's hiding something and who is trying to confuse matters so that you don't know which end is up.
        He asks what's the difference between the Washington Post getting a copy of the Snowden Docs and his startup getting one? Well, we know something about the Washington Post, and we don't know very much about his new venture. To a man as smart as Greenwald this must be obvious. I've seen him dodge a barrage of hard-ass questions on TV shows. His brain functions at a high-enough level that he certainly knows it's a bullshit question. And he must know what the issue is, but he'd dodging it.
          BTW, I didn't know the Washington Post and the NY Times had complete copies of the Snowden Docs.
        He says they haven't started yet, why can't we leave them alone until they do. Well, it's not so much about his company, which I said would be interesting but not questionable if it weren't for the Snowden Docs. He says there are fourteen hires at NewCo and only two have anything to do with Snowden. But the Snowden Docs are their biggest "hire." The elephant in the room. Why doesn't Greenwald see it? (I'm sure he does.)
        Finally Omidyar weighs in, saying "reporters manage and control their relationships with sensitive sources, not owners." But I don't think Greenwald is just a reporter at NewCo. My primary question has been this -- is he a principal or a mere employee. Different rules apply in either case. His role at the company is a basic question that they won't answer.
        Last night I read a series of posts on an anonymous bloggers' site named Tarzie, and saw that this is an ongoing story that I'm coming to late. I never wanted to dig in this deeply. I thought of myself as a sort-of friend and ally of Greenwald and Omidyar (I am an actual friend of one of their hires, Jay Rosen). I just wanted answers to basic questions about the way the Snowden Docs are being handled, and deal with questions that would inevitably come up, from less friendly sources. At this point I'm no friend of this venture's. I think it's ill-conceived at best, and at worst, a way of Greenwald et al sacrificing the truth behind the Snowden Docs to help build their personal wealth and influence.
        This is a very important point. There's a scandal revealed by the Snowden Docs. It should result in reform in the US government, really the world government, because the disease seems to infect all of them. If it doesn't happen, because the custodians of the docs were more focused on getting rich (or richer), then that's a terrible outcome and one that's as corrupt as the corruption that Snowden exposed.
        They are often compared to Woodward and Bernstein, but remember what the outcome was there. Nixon resigned. A new President. A country shamed, and a long period of healing, that may not even be over yet. At least we addressed the problem. I was alive then, and was old enough to understand what was going on. The situation was untenable. Had Nixon stayed, the result would have been worse. He had to go.
        In a parallel sense, if the Constitution is to mean anything as we go forward, the NSA has to get on a helicopter like Nixon did, and ride off into the sunset. And it looks less likely, and it also looks like Greenwald et al are complicit. This is not good.
        I don't care one bit about their company. I care about the truth coming out and correcting the situation. If they aren't going to do it, they must get out of the way, without further delay.
    December 4
      1963: No-deference reporting
        One of the things I enjoyed the most about the CBS re-run of the coverage of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy was how little deference there was to news sources by the reporters. They asked the questions I would have had asked, as the story developed. Nothing about how people feel or what the "optics" are.
        In a follow-up int erview with Walter Cronkite with Terry Gross in 1993, he explains how hard it was for him to put aside his own feelings to do his job, but he was satisfied that he had. This was 24 years before the famous scene in Broadcast News (1987) where William Hurt airs emotions that he doesn't have.
      The Snowden leaks and the billionaire
        A quick follow-up to Sunday's post.
        There's still a question that's unresolved, and it wouldn't be important, or anyone's business really, if it weren't for the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, that were and presumably still are part of this new venture. If it was just Greenwald, Omidyar & Co -- it would certainly be interesting, but it wouldn't be so questionable (I use that term literally, no implication of wrong-doing, just saying that it's something that we have real questions about).
        The main question is this: What happened?
        The NSA documents still seem to reside at the Guardian. Are there now two copies, one with Greenwald and one with his (former) employer? Does he still write for the Guardian? I'm not clear about that either. What's his status at the Omidyar company? Is he a journalist-only, or is he also a principal of the company? When he speaks, is he a company spokesperson or a journalist discussing his journalistic work? Will we know when he's wearing which of these hats, if he actually has two?
        Again, this wouldn't be important if he were writing about the Knicks or the weather, but he's reporting on issues of importance to people all over the world. How this is handled, the custody of the Snowden documents, and what's to become of them, is the matter of importance. It's not just important to the government and Greenwald, it's important to everyone. And it's not okay to just brush the questions aside, as they have, so far.
        I can't imagine Greenwald accepting the answers his company gave to the questions we asked here. Regardless, I don't accept them. They're valid questions, and deserve a thoughtful response.
    December 3
      To rebuild or add another boolean?
        I just added this to my non-existent coding diary, and the specifics won't make much sense to anyone but me. But the experience would be immediately recognizable to anyone who has worked on a complex project for any length of time. As usual, ignore what you don't understand. ;-)
        I recognized the pattern, there was spaghetti starting to envelop my new CMS code. This happens when you add special cases by adding boolean parameters to routines. That happens because when you wrote the high level code initially you didn't fully understand the problem.
        The question is did you leave yourself the room in the schedule and with regard to potential breakage to actually rebuild the code so it correctly achieves its purpose? So when you read the code it looks like the pseudocode you'd write when conceiving it? If it's complicated enough and important enough -- it's worth the time to factor and re-factor until it reads like documentation of its functionality.
        Too often you can't go back and re-engineer it, and you live with the bad construction. Then the code is fragile its whole life, so you don't build new layers on top of it, or if you do they're either inefficient or missing obviously valuable features.
        I decided to rebuild this time. The problem was confusion over how and when index files would be built. What I realized was the code was optimized for minimizing the amount of stack building. When I got to that point in the rebuild, I added a cache, so the upper level code could be totally simple and natural. It worked!
        Now the question is can I use the software for its intended purpose? I was able to do that before. Can I still do that?
        See also: We Make Shitty Software.
    December 2
      New York should revoke Dolan's license
        I know the Dolan family owns the Knicks, but they don't own New York.
        They can keep playing here if they want, but if they want to call the team the New York Knicks, they have to sell the team to someone who will build something New York-like, something that works, and isn't built around one very inadequate person's ego.
        If anything about New York has been constant for all its history is scale, longevity, audacity, philosophy and sheer excellence when compared to the rest of the country. The Knicks make more sense in a city that's famous for humiliating itself. I'll leave that to your imagination. But they've had their chance. It's time for the Dolans and New York to take leave of each other.
        Maybe Staten Island wants them?
      How do they make coconut oil?
        I've started to eat coconut oil on the recommendation of a friend. I'm on my third jar of the stuff, each from a different manufacturer. I was reading the label on the most recent purchase, they told a nice story of how they make the stuff. You can see little bits of coconut in the oil, which is solid at room temperature and doesn't require refrigeration. Then I wondered what the factory looks like and and the process of making it. Then I realized in the times we live in, it would be totally reasonable to be able to go to their website and watch a video, perhaps taken by an objective third party, that shows the factory is like, and how they make it. I would find that interesting. It seems totally possible, and if companies start doing it, it could be a reason to buy their product.
    December 1
      Greenwald, Pando, the hero and the billionaire
        A quick note about the Pando piece and Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and the new journalism startup founded by Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar.
        1. Is Greenwald a principal in the new journalism company, or an employee?
        2. Of course it would have been impossible for Snowden to profit from the leaks, or even be compensated for them.
        3. So while, of course, it's not wrong for Greenwald to be paid for his journalism work, it does seem wrong for him to get rich off it, in this case.
        4. Would Omidyar have rushed to start a business with Greenwald if he didn't have the scoop on the Snowden leaks? No one knows for sure, but in journalism appearances are important.
        5. I am a longtime fan of Greenwald's and honestly I've never liked Pando -- but I did not like the way Greenwald dismissed their criticism. I thought they asked important questions. It didn't seem likely other journalists would, given their conflict of interest. As Greenwald himself said, reporters would likely be interested in working for a fresh startup founded by an Internet billionaire. I don't think people take this into account, but reporters tend to go easy on rich tech people because they're potential employers. Reporters are human beings too.
        6. How news organizations deal with criticism is crucial. This is not a good start!
archive
  #text "Monthly archive"
      true
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  2014
    January
  2013
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    October
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  2012
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    September
    Threads site
      In March, I started a new blog, but I was still posting using the previous version of the software through September, so there are two different archives for the period of overlap.
      March (new site)
      April (new site)
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  DaveNet (1994-2004)
about
  #text "About Scripting News"
  Bootstrapping the blog revolutions
    We're in the business of bootstrapping new forms of social behavior.
    Scripting News was started in 1997, by me, Dave Winer.
      Or 1994 or 1996 or whenever you think it actually started.
      I wrote my first blog posts in 1994, that's for sure.
    It's the longest continuously running blog on the Internet.
  Natural-born blogger
    Some people were born to play country music, or baseball. I was born to blog.
    At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don't have the impulse to say what they think.
    So when you meet one, you'll know it -- if they write letters to the editor, or if they voluteered to go to the blackboard when they were students. In my day, we were the kinds of people who started underground newspapers, or who volunteered for the student radio station at college.
  About about pages
    I've had an About page for many years. Here's the one before this.
    I always like to say what my mottos are on this page. So you know when I use them in a post it's not something casual. I'll try to list them all eventually. I know -- good luck with that! :-)
  My favorite mottos, slogans and ideas
    We make shitty software, with bugs!
    People return to places that send them away.
    It's even worse than it appears.
    Still diggin.
    Let's have fun!
    Only steal from the best.
    Narrate your work.
    Sources go direct.
  Other people's mottos
    Ted Turner: Great wealth isn't nearly as good as average sex
  Thanks to
    Tim Berners-Lee for HTML and HTTP.
    Chuck Shotton for teaching me how to write an HTTP server.
    Adam Curry for giving me the basic idea of podcasting.
    Jean-Louis Gassee for all his wisdom and slogans.
    Marc Canter for being the Father of Multimedia.
    John Palfrey for giving RSS 2.0 a good home at Berkman Center.
    Martin Nisenholtz for letting me have the NY Times feeds.
    Jay Rosen for teaching us about the Voice from Nowhere. (And authority.)
    Doc Searls for being an outliner extraordinaire.
    John Doerr and Gordon Eubanks for buying my first company and freeing me up to make software. (I was never meant to be a company exec.)
    Guy Kawasaki for seeing Bullet Charts in my humble outliner.
    Steve Jobs for "insanely great" shit like the Apple II, AppleTalk, Mac, iEverything.
    Woz for the Apple II programming model, his humor, and love of freedom. It's important for techies to get that we make tools for free expression.
    John Lennon for imagining peace and love and Paul McCartney for great music. This duality keeps showing up in the creative world. A person with something to prove and a partner who writes great songs.
    NakedJen for being a paradox and bundle of joy in a small package with a huge spirit.
    Doug Engelbart for envisioning almost everything I've spent my life creating.
    Ted Nelson for writing the anthem for my generation of developers.
    Coach Walsh for applying the scientific method to football.
    Richard Stallman for telling it like it is.
    My father for loving outlines. "Every day is father's day," he would say.
    My mother for being a natural-born blogger.
    The second OPML Editor community, and all previous instances of Frontier and ThinkTank communities (so many of them). This project has been going for a very long time.
    Still diggin!
#blogHomeTitle "Scripting News"