Scripting News

Is my candidate too elite?

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:20:15 GMT

I winced when I heard the quote that's making the rounds this week in the political blogosphere. I didn't like it because unlike the Rev Wright controversy, I doubt if much good can come from it, and because my guy, Obama, was, imho, wrong. By his own standards, the comment was wrong, and I hope he gets why.

To equate geography with intellect is as wrong as to equate it with race, ethnicity, gender or age.

It may be true that there are some people who live in small towns in rural America who are bitter and closed-minded, who have bad lives and blame the badness on illegal immigrants, gay people who want to get married, or conspiracies to separate them from their guns. (I've deliberately overstated Obama's quote, to be in line with what people who don't like him react to.) But it certainly isn't true of all of them, and as long as there's one good person living there, it's unfair, it's wrong to make general statements about the class.

This came home when, on Twitter, I said I thought he was wrong, and a correspondent from Texas suggested it may be because I come from Berkeley and people from Berkeley are more "insulated" from some reality they aren't insulated from in Texas. I could have responded by saying something generally negative about people from Texas, and that would be on par with the kind of discourse we've been having in the US for the last few decades. I didn't. We have spirited political discussions in Berkeley, which disproves the idea that you can predict the way someone thinks by knowing they come from here.

Now I like Obama because he rejects this kind of thinking. He wants us to look at black people, and consider the possibility that they're smart, caring people who value the good things we believe in, education, good health, being kind to others, etc. He wants blacks to look at whites and not see superficial good-weather friends, people you can count on, brothers and sisters even. I could go on. This is my philosophy too. And after the election of 2004, I wrote that this time the middle of the country was insisting, over the objections of the two coasts, that we have to work with them before we can go where we think we need to go (i.e. get out of the Iraq misadventure). A high price to pay to get us to listen. And did we listen? Well, in his awful quote, Obama said no -- we aren't. Because when you reject people as a class, that's what ignorance is built out of, literally, it's how you ignore what's real, and respond to your beliefs, which are usually fairly negative. It's the opposite of respect, and it's wrong.

Now I believe that Obama is a good man, and really believes the things he says, but he's tired, even exhausted from the campaign and he slipped and made a mistake. If we believe our Presidents don't make mistakes, surely the last 15 years, two terms of Clinton and Bush, convinced us that our Presidents are very human and they make lots of mistakes, some very big ones. So, making a mistake certainly does not disqualify Obama.

The other two remaining candidates, Clinton and McCain have made far worse blunders, and have retracted them, and we've let them off the hook. I wonder if it's possible for Clinton to get up and say, okay, can we call it even. I did something dumb with the Bosnia story, and Obama did something dumb with this story about rural people clinging to superstition. I know I'd respect HRC about a billion percent more if she could do that. And it certainly seems within the realm of possibility that McCain might. Check out this ad he did about discourse in the United States and see if it doesn't put a lump in your throat. It's worth playing every time it seems the Republicans are about to sling some mud.

Yeah I'm optimistic. I think some good can and will come out of this.

My two cents on this week's Bitchmeme

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:55:39 GMT

A Bitchmeme is something that happens on weekends when new stories are in short supply so ideas that otherwise would be buried on Techmeme rise to the top. Usually they're people complaining about something or other which is why they're called Bitchmemes and not Happymemes or Sarcasticmemes.

This week's Bitchmeme is about comments on blogs and where they belong, on the blog, or on an aggregator. For example, when this item is viewed through FriendFeed they will allow comments on it over there and I'll probably miss them unless I go look for them. I will certainly miss the comments on Shyftr which I have never heard of until today and have never used, but from what I hear it does the same thing. Is this a good or bad thing? Well if you like to know what people think it's bad. If you ask a question in a post, as I often do, you might miss some good info.

But what we cast to the wind, someone will eventually gather for us. Before Technorati, all we had were referrer logs to find out who was talking about us. Technorati is a bit better. There will of course eventually be the equivalent of Technorati, which assembles in one place, all the comments about each blog post. Wouldn't be too hard to do.

But RSS 2.0, believe it or not, has a solution built-in, the <comments> element. If more blog publishing tools supported it, then FriendFeed et al could use it.

Let me walk through how it works.

1. Here's my RSS feed, and here's a screen shot showing the comments element on this post.

2. Here's an example of an aggregator that supports the comments element. If an item has comments, theres a little pencil icon next to it. Just click the pencil to go to the comments. Pretty simple, or so it seems.

Nothing more to it.

Those are my two cents.

PS: An example of a post of mine that ironically became a Bitchmeme. I say ironically because it was a bitch about how crap (e.g. that post) ends up on Techmeme cause of the cesspool nature of the so-called tech blogosphere. If you don't get the joke, don't bother, it's not actually that funny.

From Hello World to Guestbook

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:13:49 GMT

The prototype app for any development environment is Hello World, a program that starts up, displays the text Hello World and then exits. That's the first thing they show you how to do in any development environment, and it's often the hardest step because to get it running you have to get over all the things that make your computer different from the one the tutorial was written on.

Yesterday I got the Hello World app for Google's appengine running on my system. The hurdles were: 1. My text editor attaches an invisible ".txt" extension to the filenames of all files it creates and 2. Unix files have the newline character as the line delimiter not carriage return. Once these were fixed, the Hello World app ran.

Then it was a short sprint through all the features in the Google tutorial that led to a Guestbook app, which is now deployed and running on Google's "appspot" server.

http://dwtestbed.appspot.com/

You can try it out. Scroll to the bottom and enter some text. Then log in, and do it again.

They provide a very nice dashboard for me to monitor the Guestbook app. Here's a screen shot. It shows you how much of the resources allocated to my app are being used: CPU, network bandwidth, server storage, number of emails sent.

I wanted to give it a scripting.com domain, but the process for doing so is way too complex and (not sure) I think it might cost money. Amazon has this down to its bare simplicity, just point a domain at their server, and name the top-level bucket the same as the domain and it just figures it out.

Anyway, on the whole the process with Google's AppEngine was mostly painless and quite rewarding. Next steps will reveal how flexible it is, how easily I can turn my simple guestbook into something more useful.

BTW, I recall that Python has excellent XML-RPC support. I wonder if that's enabled in Google's environment?

Getting started with dev_appserver.py on a Mac

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:32:34 GMT

I want to work my way through the AppEngine tutorial on google.com. I've got a sub-folder set up in my Documents folder that contains the Helloworld app, per the instructions. But I get an error from dev_appserver.py that indicates (I think) that it's not finding the folder. I've tried every variation of changing directories and specifying paths, and keep getting the same error.

Update #1: Kevin Marks figured out the problem. Textedit was adding an invisible .txt extension on the file. I wrote a script to remove the extension and got past that problem. Now I'm getting a syntax error on the Python file.

Update #2: It's Unix, the line-end char has to be \\n.

Update #3: http://dwtestbed.appspot.com/

Update #4: Screen shot of the app dashboard.

Doc's brush with mortality

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:13:35 GMT

A couple of evenings ago I got a call from Nicco Mele, who now lives in Boston with his lovely wife Morra Aarons, and is my partner on the Sunday Gang podcast (we're planning another this week). Nicco had just come from visiting with Doc Searls in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA, where Doc was having a blood clot in his lung examined and treated.

I spoke with Doc the next morning, to listen him tell the story and to provide whatever inspiration I could. Doc's illness, while not requiring the surgery that mine required almost six years ago, was just as serious. I didn't say anything to anyone, but now Doc is writing about it, and he's doing a great job of explaining the process.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/04/10/walking-vs-working/

I'm glad he's getting out and moving around. He's picked a fantastic time of year to do it, spring is just starting up in the Boston area. Working can wait. Get that blood flowing Doc. I hope to take a walk with you soon.

Why I didn't delete my Twitter account

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:51:02 GMT

Hugh MacLeod is a great idea provocateur.

Today he explains why he deleted his Twitter account.

I love social experiments, and this one is a doozy. There were certain things I found unappealing about Twitter. I didn't like the way a few people were using it. Rather than nuke the whole garden, I just got out the shovel and shears and did some digging and pruning. Cut back a limb here and there, and all of a sudden Twitter works a lot better. For me.

I didn't delete my Twitter account and I don't plan to because Twitter is a lab where we're creating the next network. As long as I'm still diggin I'm going to want to keep creating.

But I respect Hugh, and he is part of Twitter even as he withdraws from Twitter.

Early notes on GoogleApps

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:56:16 GMT

The last few years when something new hits the tech blogosphere, I usually kick back and think while so many others scramble for position on Techmeme. I find that by doing this I can usually find the nugget that they're all missing, assuming it's an area I'm interested in, of course, and know something about.

So I'm still hanging back, but wanted to post a couple of thoughts about Google's AppEngine announcement last night.

1. Amazon has a huge lead, and that lead is worth a lot. But Google's presence is going to change how Amazon thinks about the market, and it's good news for developers that they have competition. That means better deals for us. It already does, because as I predicted, and rationalized, Google's offering is free, although the limits are pretty serious. (500MB of storage means you could do a calendar or a spreadsheet, but not an email app with enclosures, or an RSS storage app with enclosures. Data is big these days. How many megabytes is a code update from Apple?)

2. I'm really pissed at Microsoft. Why? They wasted billions on Vista when they should have been virtualizing Windows and making their developers' investments apply to the net. I know it sounds outlandish, but it really isn't. Amazon doesn't offer EC2 for Windows, just Linux. And I'm stuck with two Windows boxes at my hosting company, hosting a dead fucking end. My bet on Microsoft in the late 90s just ran out of gas.

3. Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer. Now Google is taking the black magic out of operating a scalable web app. Python is the new BASIC.

I mentioned #3 on 1/28 in this piece.

Man I love that li'l old pig

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:58:06 GMT

He sure knew what he was talking about!

Hope he didn't get into too much trouble.

Why the Bear Sterns bailout was a good thing for small investors

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:43:07 GMT

First, a caveat, I am far from a financial expert, so I may have some of this wrong, if so, please set me straight.

The cable news shows didn't do a good job of covering the Fed's bailout of Bear Stearns, and as a result there's a misunderstanding about whether it's good or bad. It is, imho, an unqualified good thing because it saved us from a run on the banks, something we haven't seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

First to be clear, a run had already started. That's what was going on with Bear Stearns.

A run is a form of panic. You hear a rumor that your bank is in trouble, so you go down to the bank to withdraw all your savings. You tell a few of your friends, and they tell a few, and all of a sudden the bank's reserve is gone (banks don't keep all your money, they lend most of it out, that's how they make money). Meanwhile one of your neighbors who keeps her savings at a different bank gets the idea that her money might not be safe, so she goes to withdraw all her money, tells her friends and so on, and eventually their reserve is depleted and they have to refuse requests for withdrawals.

A bank run a viral thing, and once one gets going, there's no way to stop it. But the US govt did do something to prevent runs, with the FDIC, a government entity that insures deposits. This really did prevent runs, we haven't had one since.

Now here comes a new form of bank, offering better returns than the insured bank accounts, people feel safe putting their money there, but they are not insured. Like Bear Stearns, where a run started on March 11 of this year, putting the Fed in a difficult position, stop it, by backing the accounts, or let it run. Thankfully they did the right thing, and stopped it. Why? Because if they hadn't, every one with a savings account at any brokerage firm might have lost his or her savings! We came perilously close to a complete meltdown, and most people don't even know it.

I have a theory why they aren't explaining this on CNN, Fox and MSNBC -- and they may be doing the right thing -- that by explaining how close we came to an across-the-board run they might precipitate one. Now the government is acting, we hope quickly, to get FDIC-like insurance in place for brokerage accounts, and charging the companies appropriately for it, so they pay in advance (unlike Bear Stearns), so the general taxpayers of the US don't end up footing the bill, and hope that while this system is being put in place, everyone who has their savings in a brokerage feels comfortable leaving them there, at least for the time-being.

But note that Bear Stearns didn't get the bailout, the people with deposits there got it. True, the rest of the brokerage industry got a reprieve, but that didn't cost us anything, at least not yet.

PS: It's a Wonderful Life features a bank run.

Burnout in the blogosphere

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:30:59 GMT

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselved to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost did kill me.

In the process I learned a lot about heart disease. It seems the Times didn't take the time to check with a doctor to see if the premise of the article was reasonable or even possible. Could you work yourself into a heart attack? Perhaps. But not in a year or two, it takes decades for heart disease to become symptomatic. They did autopsies of soldiers killed in the Korean War and found that many of them already had heart disease, some of them in their teens and early twenties. They wouldn't have known until they were in their forties, fifties or sixties, maybe even later.

There were other reasons to hate the Times piece, but those were amply covered elsewhere.

Wish I had something to write about

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:54:37 GMT

I had a really bad cold all last week and through the weekend, but it's better this morning, I believe the sickness is gone, but the symptoms linger. It would be great if I had fiery blog post in me -- some newly apparent truth to expose, an insight into an opportunity, but I don't have one. But I wanted to post anyway, to say hi, and hope all is well.

In any case...

I'll leave you with one good thought.

On the news this morning, a profile of the guy in the General Accounting Office who's in charge of the transition that will start later this year, as we swap the government we have for a new one. He's renting huge amounts of office space, buying computers, networking equipment, Blackberries, everything you need to instantly bootstrap a new government running in parallel with the old one. What an interesting job!

And it put me in a good mood that, even though the process drags on, eventually it will conclude, and by the end of this year (it's already April) we'll be starting the transition to a new government.

So I guess I had something to write about after all.

Why this is the end for the Clintons

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:04:51 GMT

Yesterday we got our first look at the Clinton's tax returns, and the top line is a stunner. $109 million over the last seven years. Before that I found Obama's income from his book, about $1 million, a bit hard to deal with. But the Clintons blow that away.

Here it is in black and white, the books of an ex-President, opened up. Finally, we the people, get an idea of what this job is worth. A lot.

I suspect we'll never see the tax returns of the current President, seven years after he leaves office, but I supect he'll be adding another zero or two, as he calls in the chits from his buddies in the oil and defense industries who profited so much from his Presidency. He'll give speeches too, the fees will be even more obscene than Clinton's.

I'd love to see a breakdown of the speeches. Who pays $1 million for an after-dinner speaker and why? Maybe I'm missing something, but something doesn't sound right here.

Anyway, back to the Clintons.

In tech entrepreneurship, repeat success is rare. Not saying it doesn't happen, it does, but often, the second time an entrepreneur gives it a go, the venture flops. It's happened to me, and I've seen it happen to a number of others, and I understand the reason.

The first time you ran, you had to sacrifice everything to win. Failure was something you visualized around every corner, but something you could never deal with, so you made sure you didn't have to. You did whatever it took to make it work.

The second time is different. Now you expect success not failure. You've mostly forgotten the sacrificing you did the first time, but you remember some of it, the long hours, the lack of sunshine and exercise or a personal life. This time, you want success on your terms. It's not enough to win, you have to win the way you (feel you) should have the first time.

Problem is, that's not how success works. If what you seek is worth something, and as we can see from the Clinton returns, this job certainly is worth something, there will be competitors, and if they don't bring the same conditions you do, if they're willing to sacrifice the way you once were but aren't any longer, well, you'll lose. As the Clintons are losing.

I watched Primary Colors the other night, it served as a reminder of the cult around the Clintons in the early 90s. I didn't like them, but enough people did, so he won. He cut corners, lied into the camera, but exuded a charm that was compelling. This time, sad to say, the lies and cut corners are still there, but the charm isn't. And to see where that went, look at the tax returns. The Clintons don't live on the same plane as you and I. The air they breathe is richer. Their friends are powerful. Once she's elected that'll be the last we hear from her till she wants to be re-elected, just like the current president.

She doesn't offer hope (as Bill did in 1992, and Barack does today). She laughs at the idea of hope. As if you poor wretches are entitled to any of that!

Remember this when you're plotting a comeback, you're going to have to deal with this too, everyone does, or so it seems.

Why did Seesmic buy Twhirl?

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:16:48 GMT

Yesterday Seesmic announced that they're buying Twhirl, the AIR-based Twitter client.

I usually don't comment on acquisitions, but this one is right up my alley and I can offer some insight without breaking any confidences. I've been spending a lot of time over the last year trying to understand Twitter, and it's not an easy thing to figure out, so I welcome the chance to discuss it again from another point of view.

First, a disclaimer, I considered investing in Seesmic, even announced that I was doing so, then changed my mind. If the stock market hadn't tanked I almost certainly would have gone ahead with the investment.

Second, I think buying Twhirl is probably a brilliant move for Seesmic. I can't tell for sure because we don't know how much they paid for it, but assuming it was a reasonable amount (low six figures) what Seesmic gets, as Om wisely says, is the only thing that matters -- users.

That's the first epiphany that's available from using Twitter. It's all about the users. It's the second epiphany and the 208th. Nothing else matters, not even the reliability of the system (though that's much better these days) -- even on its most flaky days, there was never an exodus to any of the alternative systems that exist. However, fortunately for Twitter, none of the alternative systems have tried to clone Twitter, and that may be in Seesmic's future, but I get ahead of myself.

Another reason it's potentially a brilliant move is that it keeps Seesmic in the conversation. After an initial rollout that made Seesmic the talk of the town for a couple of months, now the cursor has moved on (not sure where), and Seesmic isn't that much the topic du jour. With a Twitter client with say 10K or 20K users (they've had 100K downloads) now there are all those people that Loic can pitch daily in hopefully a tasteful not too intrusive way.

Another key thing -- now you don't have to "go" somewhere else to see a Seesmic video. If you live in Twhirl (they should change the name, please, it's so hard to type) one suspects that Seesmic videos will not come to you through the normal Twitter mechanism with a bit of text and a URL. They can make it much more seamless, and I bet they do. And in doing so they will be creating a very nice demo of payloads, something I've been saying Twitter themselves should be doing. But, no problem, now Seesmic can, at least for video (which is a very large piece of the problem).

No matter if any of this speculation is correct, if the price was right, Seesmic bought access to some very good users and they have the ability to converse with them through the very personable Loic at the helm.

Update: Compete.com comparison between Seesmic and Twhirl. Tells an interesting story.

You only get to lose your virginity once

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:29:27 GMT

First, sorry for the light posting, I've had a bad cold for the last 3 days, and have mostly been sleeping and getting caught up on Battlestar Galactica in preparation for the season premiere on Friday. Some call it the SuperBowl of SciFi. I can't wait.

I've been keeping an eye on the blog discussion about the faceoff between Demo and TechCrunch50, trying to figure out what it means.

First, I think what Arrington said about Demo needing to die is way over the top. Can you imagine Pepsi marketing against Coke saying "Coke needs to die." Or even Apple saying to IBM that they need to die. There's a reason people don't go this far in marketing -- it puts others in the uncomfortable position of appearing to agree with you if they buy your product. You don't want anything to stand in the way of that.

Scheduling it on exactly the same days as Demo is too predatory for my taste. Why not win on the merits? Why not let Demo have a chance to morph, to learn from the competition, maybe as a result we'll have two great conferences.

I haven't been to a Demo in many years, but I was one of the founding Demoers of the conference, and was once offered the job of running it (I declined because I was running a software company and felt that would conflict with the demoers).

Originally, only a handful of products were demo'd on stage, most of the demos took place in a ballroom. The presenters were seated, and there were two or three chairs for people receiving demos. All the desks were the same, the signage was the same.

It was designed to be a civilized version of Comdex. Instead of walking between the few far-apart booths that had interesting demos, and having zero percent chance of getting a demo from someone who could answer your questions, at Demo you would be guaranteed that the person giving the demo was either the developer, product manager, or CEO of the company. Someone in a position to answer a question.

Stewart Alsop chose the products, I don't remember if they paid or not (I have an email into Stewart asking) but it wasn't a lot of money. It was nothing like $18,500.

I've started two companies. At either of them, we might have spent $18,500 to get our product in front of the right people. We were spending several times that every month on advertising. Today there aren't as many places to run ads, and startups raise more money. If I were running Demo and there was a product I really wanted to have and they couldn't afford the fee, I'd comp them. I hope IDG does that. (I paid expenses for some people to come to BloggerCon because I wanted them there, and they couldn't afford to come without the stipend.)

However, I can't imagine that I, as an entrepreneur, would choose to roll out my product at either conference. They're both shitty deals for entrepreneurs. At TechCrunch50 there are 50 products. At Demo there are 70. Since they're happening the same week, at best I'm one of 120. I would rather, as Jeremey Toeman advises, roll my product out on a quiet week in the middle of summer when my product is the only new thing shipping. Much better chance of finding new users and maybe getting a review or two. Or pick a venue where not many new products are shipped, like SXSW or Foo Camp (as Twitter and Chumby did, respectively, with good results).

You only get to lose your virginity once, so choose your venue wisely.

Honestly, what both conferences say about the technology industry is that it's way over-supplied with new product. There's no way there's demand for even a fraction of those products. It's probably not true, esp if the rollouts were spaced out over a few months, but blowing them out all at once only serves the conference promoters. It's hard to see what's in it for the entrepreneurs or their investors.

I got a response from Stewart Alsop:

"Calacanis and Arrington are both troublemakers, which as you know could be said about me too. So I can't too exercised about the debate, other than wish they would get their facts straight. Neither one asked me the question you did below, so thank you for asking!

"Demo has always charged a fee to Demonstrate. It has never charged a separate fee to be on stage. One thing that Chris Shipley has done that is different than the original Demo is that every company is introducing a new product that has not been previously demonstrated. (They define "never" broadly, but you get the idea.) When we started Demo, the idea was that all interesting new products that were current would be demonstrated but only truly new products would be shown on stage in live demos (along with bake-offs and other fun stuff, but no panel sessions).

"So all companies that had a station in the demonstration hall paid a fee to demonstrate, which was really to cover the cost of providing the stations and (most important) the infrastructure for having the demos work, although the internet wasn't an issue then; it was client server time and we needed to put in a LAN.

"We (Alsop Louie Partners) had portfolio companies at both events (Cake Financial at TechCrunch and both Ribbit's Amphibian and Redux at Demo 08), so I got to see how both operated. The difference was that TechCrunch was 'inexpensive,' which meant that the infrastructure didn't work well (demonstrators had to be prepared to demo without the internet and the schedule was managed loosely). Demo was on schedule and the infrastructure worked because they had redundant systems.

"On relevance: People still like to get together and do demos to talk about products and design and coding. But it's much less about client apps and PCs now and much more about web apps and systems. Infrastructure and systems don't demo well (remember the bake-off between dBase and Access?). So it's really all about doing demos of Web apps now. It's an open question if that's big enough to draw people to a resort or if it's better in a major city like SF..."

Today's Clinton conference call MP3

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:26:30 GMT

It's always darkest just before dawn, the saying goes. Yesterday I said we probably weren't going to get the campaign conf calls, and today I got one.

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/04/02/call1.mp3

Thanks to Sarah Lai Stirland, Evan Hansen and Michael Calore at Wired for their help in bootstrapping this.

11 years of Scripting News

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:29:31 GMT

To mark the 11th anniversary of Scripting News, here's a pointer to docs on the software I used to edit the site.

http://www.scripting.com/frontier/netscripting/newsPage.html

I thought of what eventually became the weblog as a News Page, a roughly reverse chronologic list of links to news stories. Then as now I edited using the outliner in Frontier.

We made the NewsPage suite and all the other code that ran in the Frontier environment (the "Aretha" release) available in source to anyone who wanted to use it, and amazingly, a fair number of sites poppped up that more or less followed the pattern of Scripting News.

I don't remember them all, but the most notable one (to me) was Robot Wisdom, which was managed for the first few years with this software.

There will be people who give me a hard time for writing this, but that's their problem not mine. One of the benefits of creating something that really took off is that you get to gloat about it.

A Wimax N810

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:50:52 GMT

Nokia announced a new version of the N810 handheld Linux computer designed to work over a Wimax network, which raises the obvious question, does Berkeley have Wimax? What other cities has it? What are the economics?

Podcast followup on campaign conf calls

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:45:55 GMT

Here's a podcast following up on where we're at with getting MP3s of campaign conference calls.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/followupOnCampaignConfCalls.mp3

Summary: It's not looking too good.

Our standard April Fool party

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:22:49 GMT

Watch out for the lunacy tomorrow as April Fools is celebrated on blogs and other websites far and wide. I imagine it's already started since it must be April 1 in New Zealand or Australia by now.

Here on Scripting News we celebrate something else... Our birthday! You see it was on April 1, 1997 that a blog-like website first appeared at www.scripting.com. Last year it was our 10th birthday, which implies that tomorrow is the 11th.

To celebrate, I've cobbled together a humble page that calculates the age of Scripting News with 10 digits of precision.

http://age.scripting.com/

So at midnight tonight, it should flip over. If you like such things you may stay up to see it flip.

Hey it's a geeky site. What else would you suggest?

So enjoy the other sites, and keep coming back through the years, Murphy-willing of course, as we all grow old together.

I love Battlestar Galactica

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:06:15 GMT

Working my way through Season 3, in prep for Season 4, which starts this week.