Scripting News

Why can't we all just get along?

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:27:35 GMT

It was a friendly meeting today, but not without the usual competitive spirit between the Mozilla camp and the Microsoft camp.

Mozilla engineering VP, Mike Schroepfer explained that Microsoft tends to implement technology already approved by the standards working groups, in a different way, and then says their implementation is the standard. Sounds like something Hillary Clinton would do, until you realize that the Mozilla guys do it too. Basically everyone does it, when they feel the competitive technology is implemented by someone smaller or less significant than themselves. And since this is a very immature business, everyone feels that way about everyone else, so it's something of a miracle when interop happens.

It has always been thus.

When Netscape, the company that spawned Mozilla, wanted to implement a format for content syndication in 1999, they did it outside of the W3C because they were sick of the dirty politics bigger companies that felt more significant had been using against them. There was prior art, but they trampled it, because (you guessed) they felt more significant than those that came before.

The trick is to get over that feeling, and to adopt something specifically because it comes from someone you feel superior to.

Be the change you seek.

I pointed out to Mike that three real religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, religious causes that great wars have been fought over, for 2000-plus years, are just forks of the same religion and bible with emphasis placed on different characters, they are basically compatible. Isn't that amazing?

In tech, where wars are between nerds who drink Jolt and read Microserfs, and couldn't fight a real war if our lives depended on it, why can't we at least agree to use the same names for elements of our XML that do the same damned thing?

Something to think about!

End of editorial.

Almost 11 years old

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 03:03:17 GMT

Here's how old Scripting News is, in years.

double (clock.now () - date ("4/1/97")) / (60*60*24*365.25)

10.98654578

Pretty close to 11!

Hot dam.

Block-with-Timeout for Twitter

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:11:49 GMT

I need a new command in Twitter -- a temporary unfollow, or viewed another way, a block-with-timeout. Same idea.

I need it when someone is at a conference I don't care about, live-blogging every detail. After 30 or 40 updates, I gotta stop it, it's interfering with other posts. But I don't want to complain. I just want to go silently. But tomorrow when the event is over, I want to (silently) resume the follow.

Problem with normal unfollow, is that: 1. I have to remember to re-follow and 2. When I do, they'll get an email. This is confusing and can cause hurt feelings. Not my intention. I just don't want all the details of this conference (or someone live-blogging an event I'm watching live or on TV).

Live-blogging from Mozillla press meeting

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:27:35 GMT

If you have questions for the people at Mozilla, post a comment and I'll try to ask it.

About 1/2 hour into the meeting I don't really have any overall idea of what they're doing with Firefox 3. I know other people are using it, I'm still using v2. I tried v3 beta but found that it was too awkward a transition. (Wish I remember what it was that was so awkward.)

"Better faster safer" -- the slogan for Firefox 3.

They put up some screen shots and I recalled clearly what the problem was -- they moved the Home button.

They call the new address bar The Awesome Bar, which is very Steve Jobs-like in my humble opinion. Boom!

http://www.google.com/search?q=awesome+bar+mozilla

They're talking about Weave...

http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/

I believe this is Asa Dotzler world-famous Mozilla blogger.

Why Clinton supporters might flock to McCain

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:50:34 GMT

According to a Gallup poll, 28 percent of Democrats who support Hillary Clinton say they will vote for McCain if Obama is the Democratic nominee.

Two reasons this might be so..

1. Clinton has been campaigning against Obama, and for McCain. It's working with some of her supporters.

2. So far no Democrats have been running against McCain, exploring his weakness. He still looks relatively good. That'll probably change.

FriendFeed API announced

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:07:42 GMT

I've been talking with the folks at FriendFeed about APIs and such, and boy do they move fast. I got the first draft of the API spec on Friday, and today it's out there.

http://code.google.com/p/friendfeed-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation

Here's the blog post announcing the API.

Glue for the OPML Editor will ship soon, delayed a bit by tomorrow's press event at Mozilla in Mountain View.

FriendFeed will be supported in my software in all the places Pownce is.

There's a lot of movement in the TwitterSphere these days. I was hoping that the FriendFeed API would be a clone of the Twitter API. It's not. But it is workable and exposes features, including Payloads that are not implemented by Twitter.

Next question is how scalable FriendFeed is.

I'm going to visit with them in Mountain View tomorrow.

Exciting times!

Can't you see?

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:28:07 GMT

iPhone maintenence time

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:28:02 GMT

Let's see -- I've had my iPhone since June 29, so that's...

number (clock.now () - date ("6/29/2007")) / (60*60*24)

270 days. In that time apparently it's been downloading all my non-spam mail from Gmail, and now periodically interrupts me to say my mailbox is 92 percent full, would I please delete some of my mail.

I finally had a minute, on the BART the other day, to look into deleting mail, and it appears to be an onerous process to do for thousands of messages. First you tap the mail message, then tap the red minus sign, then tap the Delete button. They want to be sure you're sure (no Undo).

Problem is -- I only use the Mail app to send pictures to Flickr. On the rare occasion that I want to check email on my iPhone, I just use the excellent mobile version of Gmail. So I never want the email from the Mail app.

So I guess I have two questions:

1. How to mass-delete all the mail that's filling up 92 percent of the allocated space.

2. How to tell the mail app that I don't want it to fetch mail. (This is probably something I'm paying a fair amount for, btw.)

Any suggestions would be most welcome. (And I suspect the iPhone Nazis out there will use this as an example of my ineptitude for years to come. Have fun!)

Bonus: The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.

PS: I've tried deleting the account and adding it back. No luck. The mail is still there.

PPS: Apparently mass-delete is new with iPhone 2.0.

FriendFeed moves into TwitterSpace

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:38:47 GMT

We said a couple of weeks ago that FriendFeed is gaining a lot of traction. Since then we've started a background conversation and have been giving them a bit of friendly advice (heh, sorry). Today they added a feature that brings it closer to Twitter, and in some ways takes it to a place Twitter hasn't reached yet.

FriendFeed, in addition to being an aggregator also allows you to post directly to other FriendFeed users who are following you, and it has a threaded comment system that allows you to post a response to anything that FF has discovered. But how do you read those responses elsewhere, and how do you know to go see if FF has anything you might be interested in? They have ways to deal with this, but none are as neat as the one they introduced today, if you use Twitter.

The feature: You can optionally route comments from FriendFeed to Twitter (if the original message came from Twitter) as a reply.

Nothing more to say than yes, this is the right thing to do, and yes it is neat, and also it's nice to see Twitter get some competition. We know that products that have competition get better, and ones that don't generally have no incentive to. Considering that it would be good, imho, if Twitter were a little more active in adding features (I know others feel differently) it's good that FF is applying a little friendly (arrrgh) pressure.

And to people who thought Scripting News had become 100 percent politics all the time, here's proof that it's not. '

PS: Just tested the new feature. It works.

TwitterGram functionality baked into FlickrFan

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:18:31 GMT

I've been meaning to do this for some time...

Just released a new feature in FlickrFan that allows it to do for pictures what TwitterGram does.

You can set it up to check for new pics in your Flickr account and when it spots one, automatically post it to Twitter.

You can set the interval, so it can check every minute if you like, for virtually instant publishing. I like to use this to take pics on my walks and share them with my Twitter friends while I'm still out and about. GIves me a sense that the Twittersphere is on the walk with me.

Yes, I know I need to make this work with Pownce too. And other instant social networks like Jaiku and others.

If you want to try it out and have FlickrFan running, follow the instructions here. There's also a place to comment and ask questions.

Status on campaign conference call MP3s

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:49:45 GMT

We begin this week where we began the last. Thanks to McClatchy, we're getting almost half of the conference call MP3s. But that's not half as good as getting them all, not close.

Imagine getting a trial transcript with more than 1/2 the testimony missing. Some days you get the words used by the defense, other days, the prosecution. Never both.

Our pleas openly stated in public and expressed privately, have gone mostly for naught. Occasionally there's a nibble, but never any followup.

I have excellent contacts in the Internet parts of the Obama campaign, but emails on this subject have gone unanswered. The Clinton campaign was worse, they thought I was signing up to support the candidate and suggested I give money, stuff envelopes, etc.

I've been in touch with numerous professional news organizations, with reporters, editors, and technical people. I don't want to say who because I don't want to embarass anyone.

Dan Gillmor, in a private exchange, a former tech journalist at the SJ Merc-News, volunteered a perspective that's common-sense and refreshing. This is their job, at the news organizations, to provide readers with information, not to control the flow of news and spin it for us, rather pass it through transparently, so we can make up our own minds.

I consume lots of professional journalism, and it's sad and angering that so much of what they report as the mood of the people is really their mood, based on no actual information. Because no one can expose them, they get sloppy, it builds over the years.

It's outrageous to me, listening to them talk about the Wright tapes, they're getting it wrong. I have actually watched the videos. Have they? Either they have or they haven't. If not, it's grossly irresponsible. If they have, it's criminal, the way they deliver incorrect conclusions and show misleading evidence. When all the networks do the same thing, it's collusion, anti-trust, conspiracy.

Sometimes, rarely, a little truth leaks out.

So no, I don't trust them, and as journalists like to say, if your mother says she loves you, check it out. They need fact-checking to keep them honest, that's why we need the source material.

I had the image yesterday, listening to the Meet The Press podcast, of irresponsible children throwing around lit sticks of dynamite in the middle of a sacred library. Our democracy is at its most vulnerable right now, and they're behaving as if it was a sporting event. Because I listen to the actual words the candidates and their representatives use, I know when they're lying. Of course this is the real reason they don't want to help us get the MP3s. They may not be conscious of it, but it's the reason.

However, I'm sure that eventually we'll get them.

Now that you mention it...

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:32:40 GMT

I was reading Newsweek's story on why Barack Obama asked people to stop calling him Barry and use his more formal name, and I remembered that I had a grandmother who was different in the same way Obama did.

My mixed heritage isn't so obvious as his because all my grandparents are white, but the difference may be even more dramatic than his because of the time I grew up.

My maternal grandmother was pure German, blonde hair, blue eyes. She married a Jew, my grandfather, in Europe, before the war. I loved my grandmother, but she could say the most hurtful things, even as a child I knew there was a good chance she knew what she was doing. I never fully understood the issues of Jews and Germans, but they were all right there in her house in Rockaway Beach.

So when I wrote the story on Saturday wondering what it would be like now if I had grown up in Germany instead of the U.S., I was unconsciously writing a story that actually happened.

I have to think about this.

One thing's for sure, the last week has been an incredible week of growth for me, largely due to the conversation we're having here at a national, even international level (a lot of the response to the piece was from Europeans).

Also, the quality of the discourse, as always, is very high. Keep up the good work everybody!

Sunday Gang #4 podcast

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 17:28:46 GMT

Today's guest is Matt Stoller.

http://sundaygang.com/004.mp3

"I'm a DC-based political activist and consultant, and I blog at the new strategy site OpenLeft.com. I work on telecom politics, progressive movement building, Democratic primary challengers, and analyzing internet-enabled coalition politics. I'm the President of Blogpac, a political action committee that funds progressive blogs and candidates."

Links mentioned in today's show:

http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/

http://www.mysociety.org/projects

http://responsibleplan.com/

What if I lived in Germany

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:41:52 GMT

Michael Markman sent a pointer to another Wright sermon video, which I watched. The one that ends with God Damn America.

I was born here, I love this country, it gave sanctuary to my parents and grandparents. I am a product of Jewish Europe, transplanted in, welcomed by, the United States of America. I owe my existence to this country, and never forget it.

So God Damn America, to me, is bad. What a thing for a man of religion to say. A man who believes in god, to whom damnation is real.

On the other hand...

The rest of the sermon, the part leading up to that conclusion, is reasonable, and makes the ending understandable, even if I don't support it.

Then I wondered, what if I had been born in Germany instead of the U.S. The country that treated my ancestors the same way Wright's ancestors were treated by the U.S.

How would I have made the adjustment?

What if my country's flag had a swastika on it?

What if my country hadn't fully expressed its shame over burning my ancestors in ovens. Treating them like animals. Implementing a "final solution" on my race that somehow left me living. What if they expected me to love that country the same way the ancestors of the people who destroyed my ancestors do?

In the privacy of a cultural gathering of Jews living in a German city under a Nazi government in the 21st Century, might we say God Damn Germany for what it did to my people?

I don't know. Probably. It's something to think about.

PS: How long before an idiot invokes Godwin's Law.

What's wrong with Wikipedia, day 2

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:12:46 GMT

Anonymous people writing with supposed authority about living people. Too easily (and often) gamed.

I was at Dean HQ, the night they did him in

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:29:44 GMT

I was in Burlington, VT at the headquarters of Dean For America, the night of The Scream Speech. I knew, therefore, that the campaign had video that showed clearly that the press was actively trying to kill his candidacy. They had a website, and they had enough money to pay for the bandwidth to run it. They knew what the press was trying to do. They could have fought it. But they didn't.

If it happened today would a campaign fight it? And if the campaign wouldn't, or felt it couldn't, or felt it wasn't wise, would we have the will to fight it? Or are we still just the audience. Is it our place to expose the corruption of the press, when we've caught them, or leave it to the press to do it? (If Dean is a guide, they will, half-heartedly, when it's too late, after the candidacy is dead.)

We have a library of video of Wright sermons. We could divide them up, watch them, look for evidence that the press was right to make fear of Wright the topic for a week's worth of news cycles. If it turns out they were right, and the Reverend is someone whose ideas are dangerous to the U.S., we don't have to do anything more, because the concerns have already been raised. But if it turns out otherwise, that we were manipulated, don't you think we should know for sure?

BTW, in 2004, I was not a Dean supporter. I had not chosen a candidate, as I had not chosen a candidate at the time of the Iowa caucus this year.

Give Rev Wright a chance to convince you

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:00:11 GMT

Melroy Hodge, from Queens, NY, a contact on Twitter, sent a pointer to a YouTube video of a longer excerpt of Jeremiah Wright's post-911 sermon, one of the speeches that soundbites were shown repeatedly on cable news this week. I guess it's not surprising that the cable news excerpts gave a very misleading impression. (Next time this happens we must do an immediate fact-check.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOdlnzkeoyQ

This is a must-watch video. Stop what you're doing, right now, and watch it.

I found myself captivated by Wright's ideas and the way he expresses them.

I agree with everything he said.

I would have been willing to cut him some slack, because this was less than a week after the attack, and those were crazy days, who knew what was coming next. But he was right, we have done what they did to us, and we're doing it again in Iraq.

The US was led by despotic people and we followed; we wanted to punish someone, anyone, and it didn't matter if they had anything to do with what happened to us. And we did.

Lots of people don't want to acknowledge this, esp the cable news networks who led the charge to war, but if you compare what Wright said to what they were saying, and why shouldn't we, I think we'll find that Wright was a rational and calming alternative to the lunacy that was dominating discourse in the US in the years following 911. And this video was taken mere days after the attacks.

The news networks don't have standing to criticize Wright for his post-911 speech. Let's dig up some of their oratory from that timeframe and see if we want them involved in our political process in the future.

As Wright says, the chickens. Have come. Home. To roost.

Richardson endorsement MP3

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:17:13 GMT

New Mexico governor Bill RIchardson endorsed Barack Obama in a rally today in Portland, OR. Here's an approx 15 minute MP3 of his speech.

richardsonEndorsement.mp3

Video of the Richardson speech.

Today's Clinton conf call MP3

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:56:05 GMT

I've only listened to the first few minutes but it begins with some really provocative statements about Obama's campaign. Can't wait to hear the rest.

"It is no secret that the Obama campaign is in political hot water... and is basically desperate to change the subject."

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/03/21/call1.mp3

I also here there was a pretty sizzling Obama conf call, don't have the MP3 of that. Yet.

Richardson to Endorse Obama

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:00:22 GMT

NY Times: "Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who sought to become the nation's first Hispanic president this year, plans to endorse Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination on Friday at a campaign event in Oregon."