Scripting News

John McCain, spawn of the devil? You decide.

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:53:53 GMT

More fun, less stuff

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:47:25 GMT

Bush 1.0

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:18:29 GMT

Nancy & Newt siting on a couch

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:57:30 GMT

Spooky white plant

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:01:29 GMT

Dusty Miller is "grown primarily for its attractive silver-gray foliage..."

IRC for Pennsylvania Primary

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:40:40 GMT

I started a chatroom for tonight's primay.

irc://irc.freenode.net/#PennsylvaniaPrimary

CNN, MSNBC say it's too early to call but HRC is leading.

How to follow me on FriendFeed

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:22:03 GMT

I'm designating FriendFeed as my backup, when Twitter goes down, you can catch my stream, uninterrupted, over there.

Here's how to follow me on FriendFeed.

1. Open an account on FriendFeed, or sign in to an existing account.

2. http://friendfeed.com/davew

3. You should see a "Subscribe to Dave Winer" button below my name. Click it.

4. When Twitter goes down, you can get my full stream, uninterrupted, at FriendFeed. I won't be able to tell you that when Twitter is down, so try to remember it.

5. If you prefer to use a different service, let me know, and I'll try to set it up so you can follow me there. If you can set it up yourself, here's the OPML version of my stream (the source), and the RSS feed derived from the OPML. Pretty sure I'll release the OPML Editor-based tool I'm using to manage the stream.

How to decouple from Twitter, now

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:45:07 GMT

Twitter is still out.

Mike Arrington posits that because they have a monopoly there is no reason for them to hurry to get back online. I agree. That's why we have to break the monopoly now.

And it's not as dire as it may seem, esp for people who use a desktop client.

Here's what the developers of these products can do to make users safe from Twitter outages: Offer users the option to have their stream of outbound tweets saved as an RSS feed that can be read by FriendFeed and other RSS-based tools, in addition to posting directly to Twitter.

Then, the user can do what I did in FriendFeed, point it to the RSS feed, and turn off FriendFeed's connection to Twitter.

In FriendFeed, everyone will still see your updates though a little more slowly. And when Twitter goes down, everyone who cares about your updates can switch over to FriendFeed, perhaps temporarily. That's what Scoble is recommending.

I think FriendFeed should deliberately try to appeal to Twitter users, by reorganizing their UI to be familiar to us, but so far they haven't wanted to do that. However, at some point, some ambitious entrepreneur is going to want to compete with Twitter directly, and all they'll have to do is latch onto our RSS feeds and voila, you don't need Twitter to be up to have the same effect as Twitter. (Is anyone out there ready to go? This would be a fantastic week to launch.)

The only way this bootstrap can happen is if Twitter is down for an extended period while important stuff is going on. Well today is the long-awaited Pennsylvania primary, and the Web 2.0 expo is happening this week in SF. How will we manage without Twitter? Necessity is the mother of invention, imho.

I'd encourage the people who make the desktop tools to get on this right away. If developers want to discuss it here, I'll be online through the day (and grasping for whatever returns are coming in from PA).

A new strategy for Twitter outages

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:32:33 GMT

Okay, I've bit the bullet, I'm going to change what I do when Twitter is down.

1. When Twitter is down I will post updates to an RSS feed.

http://twitter.scripting.com/daveRss.xml

2. You may follow this feed in any tool that can follow an RSS feed. These include FriendFeed, Jaiku and of course many others.

I want to accumulate a list of services that can follow RSS feeds in a Twitter-like fashion (i.e. river of updates). If you know of others, please post a comment here, with detailed user-level instructions for following a feed. I will try to figure out how to add a feed to my profile on FriendFeed. (Any help would be appreciated.)

I feel pretty good about this. I have a nice tool that I might use even when Twitter is up.

Update #1: I've fixed FriendFeed so it's now following, in addition to the feed for scripting.com, and my Twitter and Flickr accounts, also my "rainy day" feed, above. So, if Twitter goes down, you can just start using FriendFeed instead if you want to follow my tweets. Pretty cool. Let's hope they know how to scale!

Update #2: Here's a screen shot that illustrates items from the rainy day feed showing up in my FriendFeed stream. If you follow me over there, you'll get the updates automatically, you don't have to do a thing.

Update #3: Here's a screen shot of the outliner-based tool that I use to author the rainy day feed. I've turned off the connection betw Twitter and FriendFeed, so I'm now committed to using this tool to author my Twitter stream. I think it'll be okay. Already my posting volume is back to normal, even though the Twitter outage persists.

If this were a normal day on Twitter...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:54:53 GMT

It wouldn't be a normal day, because tomorrow is the Pennsylvania primary and a lot of polls are coming out right now, and they're presenting an interesting story. But that story can't be told, because our main communiation platform, Twitter, is down.

Yes, it serves me right, and I, of all people, know better, than to build a network on a single point of failure, depending on one company, that is known for producing unreliable systems in an industry with incredibly thin skin (how can they get better if they won't listen). In other words, this is hardly Murphy's Law, it was easily predictable. It was likely.

In my own defense, we were lulled by months of relatively reliable service from Twitter into believing they were on the path to even more reliability. I stopped encouraging potential competitors to enter the market, now look where we are. No second source (Pownce, as much as I like it, is not a replacement for Twitter, neither is FriendFeed, though I thought they might be, but they said they weren't interested when I visited with them).

We need some big infrastructure companies to get into this game. One is not good enough. We also need standards so that tools that are built to work with one work with the others. There's no time for a standards body, so if you're getting into this business, please, just use the Twitter API, as imperfect as it may seem.

No matter how reliable Twitter seems in the future I won't change my mind about this. We need them to have serious competition, so we have a Plan B when something like this happens, which it will, not a matter of probability, imho.

Update: A new strategy for dealing with Twitter outages. A "rainy day" RSS feed of downtime tweets. Important if you depend on my twitterings.

The Twitter outage persists

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:25:05 GMT

Monday morning, the outage that started Friday night, is still going on.

As a test, I posted a picture last night before signing off, only 62 reads, which is very low for a link that should have gone to over 8000 people. (Admittedly it was Sunday night in the Calif, but Twitter is a world wide thing, and it's already 7:30AM on the east coast of the United States.)

Also, still no notice of the outage and what they're doing to clear it on the Twitter blog.

http://blog.twitter.com/

Not good. :-(

PS: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels checks in on the Twitter outage.

What does an algorithm think?

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:52:12 GMT

The only person who knows what it means to be on Techmeme is a former roommate of the person who has always been at the top of every list ranking popularity on Techmeme. I'd rather be judged by people, not code, but if we're supposed to accept the judgment of code, there should be more than one person who knows how it works. And when it says consistently that the author's friend is #1, that's kind of fishy, murky, two bit, Karl Rove. Alberto Gonzalez, third world, banana republic, cheap.

Further, to call most of the posts that show up on Techmeme "tech" is a bit of a stretch. Most of the authors don't know the first thing about technology, never took a computer science class, have never written code, and don't admit that understanding tech is a prerequisite for writing about it. Further, most of the articles that get linked to by Techmeme aren't about technology, they're about who's buying who, or who's on top of who, or advertising, bubbles, PR, linkbait, etc.

BTW, I temporarily turned off Techmeme so no one can say I'm trolling for links from Techmeme.

A new kind of Twitter outage

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:35:12 GMT

I wasn't sure there was an outage until I read this post on ParisLemon and then this on CNET. I noticed it last night when I came back from a seder after posting a picture from a gas station with a very funny name (or so I thought). Usually when I post a pic to Twitter, even a boring one, even in the middle of the weekend, between 300 and 400 people visit (Flickr keeps track). This time only 60 people had clicked on the link.

Same thing happened with a picture of Wikimedia Foundation lawyer Mike Godwin that I took at the French Hotel in Berkeley yesterday, and a post-seder movie walk through an amazing candy store in Lafayette, taken with my new camera (it takes great movies too).

I also noticed that some of my twits from Friday night were gone. And I had said some controversial things that no one had agreed with or objected to.

Usually when Twitter goes down you get a screen saying it's gone, but this is a new kind of outage, and obviously not a good thing.

ReadWriteWeb turns 5

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:34:03 GMT

Congratulations to founder Richard MacManus and the team at ReadWriteWeb for achieving five years of technical excellence.

Keep up the great work!

Suspension of disbelief applies to networking

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:04:24 GMT

Every creative endeavor involves the concept of suspension of disbelief in some way. I suppose they call it different things in different areas. When Ted Nelson saw an early version of my outliner he exclaimed "It's a virtuality!" Same thing as suspension of disbelief.

The concept comes from the movies or is it literature. When you're watching a great movie, like The Godfather, Casablanca, The Departed or Chicago, you get sucked into the plot so much that your mind is in the reality of the movie, not the reality of the theater. Music can do it. I'm listening to an old Elton John song I haven't heard since the 70s. I remember being a high school student listening to it on the car radio as I was learning to drive. "Hand in hand went music and the rhyme."

Suspension of disbelief can be experienced, profoundly, when you're interrupted. If all of a sudden during a great Bogart/Bergman scene the lights come on or the film breaks. You're sitting there in a room, where did this room come from? I was in Morocco, now I'm in West Newton, MA. It was hot, now all of a sudden I feel cold.

Getting Suspension Of Disbelief broken is like waking up from a dream that felt real.

I mention it because in the last few days I've discovered that the concept applies to the Internet too. All of a sudden I have a roommate as I use the net, a very judgemental person who has a very strong opinion of how I should be using it, and how my use of it departs from their expectation.

From Comcast's Excessive Use FAQ, these are examples of activities that represent excessive use.

Sending 20,000 high-resolution photos,

Sending 40 million emails;

Downloading 50,000 songs; or

Viewing 8,000 movie trailers.

It's not so much the numbers that disturb me, after all none of these represent any of the things I do with the net. However, I do definitely download more than 20,000 medium resolution pictures a month. They're not high-resolution, they're medium. And this is a totally legitimate, legal and wonderful use of the net, imho. And one that I'm fairly sure zero people at Comcast have even heard of, much less understand.

I definitely don't send 40 million emails. I get it, they want to shut down spammers. Good, I support this one, for sure.

I don't download excessive numbers of songs, and I don't think I watch any movie trailers. But this is where I get weirded out. See, Comcast doesn't mention how many movies I can download without being deemed excessive, or how many I can stream from Netflix or Blockbuster, it's as if they don't even recognize the activity. And since they haven't told me how much I'm allowed to use without getting disconnected permanently, not even verbally (and certainly not in writing), there goes the suspension of disbelief. Every minute I'm using the net I'm thinking about whether Comcast approves.

What does Comcast think about movies on the Internet, after all it competes with the cable TV services they offer. I imagine they think I should just use their movies on demand. What does Comcast think about podcasting? How about RSS aggregators? Do they know what these things are? How many podcasts can I download without seeming weird? How many news feeds?

I have an application that reads about 100 feeds every ten minutes. So that's 600 feed-reads an hour, or 14400 per day, or 432,000 a month. Does that seem excessive? Not to me, but I could see where Edgar the Comcast Cop might think so. (And the NY Times and the BBC, who provide the content, know I'm doing it, and they don't object.)

Here's the problem. When they say I am in the top 1/10th of 1 percent of all their users, they're right -- in terms of the weirdness of my use of the net. I'm doing things that almost no one else is doing. But that's the cool thing about the Internet, I'm allowed to do that. It's none of their business what I use the net for, anymore than the water company can prohibit me from making lemonade or beer from the water they deliver to my house. The bread company is not entitled to an opinion whether I make a tuna sandwich or French Toast, or feed toasted crumbs to birds who live in my neighborhood. Ford Motor Company can't stop me from using my car to drive to Tahoe or to Vancouver or to Santa Cruz. I can even use the car to transport CDs I borrow from a friend who lives on the other side of town. These are my choices, and none of their business.

I get concerned because the stuff I was experimenting with ten years ago hasn't even shown up on today's Excessive Use FAQ. This is all old stuff now. Do they understand what FlickrFan is, and why a user might very legitimately and legally want to download over 20,000 pictures a month?

Read their FAQ and see if it doesn't chill you, if it doesn't alter the way you use the net, if it doesn't break the suspension of disbelief. There's a very inappropriate Big Brother feel to it. They need to get out of my space, as long as I'm a customer who pays his bills, how I use the net is none of their business. If they want to change the terms to limit the amount of bits that can travel to and fro, fine. But I have a feeling they care about things other than how much, they care what -- and that's wrong. They ought to be very careful about expressing these opinions, and they aren't being careful.

I've been here before, in 1999, when Conxion cut me off because I used a T1-line I leased from them to criticize their service. It's not a good place to be. Do you think it's excessive use of Comcast's service to use my cable modem to criticize them, as I'm doing here? Hmmm. Worth a bit thought.

Why I say I'm a blogger

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:08:35 GMT

There's been some confusion about why I tell company reps, when I'm pretty sure I'm going to write up the experience, that I'm a blogger. I say it because I would want to know, if I were in their shoes, that what I was saying was going to be reported publicly. It's the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

For example, I said it to Edgar, the Comcast rep who threatened to cut me off and refused to put it in writing.

I also included the fact that I told him, and his response, in the report, because I want my readers to know that he knew he was on the record. I also want to influence other bloggers. People have a right to know when they're speaking publicly and when it's private.

Some people have suggested that this means that I'm wrong for believing that the other person might care, or thinking that they should. Well, I haven't said that I thought they would care, in fact, I've never had a company rep say it made a difference, they always say it doesn't, and have never seen it actually make a difference in the treatment I get.

Now, if you ask me should they care, I would say yes.

One of the reasons I believe in blogging is that it can reform business, giving power to the users, where we were powerless before. If I didn't have a blog what could I have done to get Comcast to pay attention? Tell my friends and relatives? Sure, they know that isn't very powerful. But when any customer could also be a publisher, well that does change things. This new power to publish can help us all get a better deal.

These days I never make a purchasing decision without looking on the Internet to see what other people's experience has been. I've had people tell me that when I write positively about a product, they buy it. I've also heard people say that if I've had a bad experience, they don't.

And I don't think it just applies to business. I think it will eventually get us better political leadership, it might even that effect this year.

Comcast is down again

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:05:28 GMT

For the third time in three days, my Comcast service is out.

I'm posting this using my EVDO modem.

The first time it was deliberate. The second time they say it was natural. I'll let you know what it is this time.

I've twitted comcastcares.

Cable TV seems to be out too.

PS: These are the first outages I've had in almost 2 years living in this house.

PPS: 11:30AM it's back up.

Barack flips off Hillary!

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:52:47 GMT

Okay my inner-8-year-old really likes this one!

Here's a YouTube video of Obama speaking yesterday.

At 1 minute 20 seconds in, while he's talking about Hillary Clinton, he scratches his cheek, and instead of using his index finger, he flips her off.

LOL!

Links for 04/18/2008

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:25:36 GMT

NakedJen is featured in a NY Times article about people who write about divorces on blogs.

I got something to say

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:59:53 GMT

A ten-minute quickie rant.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/cn08Apr17.mp3

Hey Barack Obama was really saying something important in the "bitter" quote and in last night's debate, and all the idiot pundits on TV are blowing by it.