Scripting News

Microblogging should be decentralized

Sat, 03 May 2008 21:07:04 GMT

Scott Hanselman asks the question that should be on all our minds, as we come to depend more and more on Twitter. We need to do something about our over-reliance on a centralized system run by a for-profit company.

Read his whole post and think about what you can do.

One thing right off the bat -- if you make a desktop tool for Twitter, you can offer the user the option to store their twitstream as an RSS feed. Just do it in parallel, transparently for the user (although it's a preference). You can key off their Twitter ID. If you want I'll set up a service for free hosting of the feed on Amazon S3 (it's not a very expensive thing) or it's something you could provide as a bonus feature.

It's a step in a positive direction for decentralizing. It's not the whole thing, but it's a big part of it. And should Twitter ever go off the air for more than a few days, it'll be the way we put the network back together.

Update #1: I took a walk, and thought some more about this. If there were a way to point, from your Twitter account, to an alternate feed, then your desktop client could cache a pointer to the feed for each person you're following. If Twitter were to go down, then the desktop client would fall back to polling the feeds. It would probably be slower, but it would work.

If one of the people you follow didn't have an alternate feed, you'd have to wait for Twitter to come back up to find out what's new with them. But if they used a desktop client, and the client was maintaining the feed automatically for each user (subject to a pref), then it would notify Twitter where it was storing the feed. Twitter would just have to maintain one more string for each user, alongside the user's location, link to their website, one-line bio, etc.

However: It would require support from Twitter, Inc. to work.

Rev Chickens-Come-Home-To-Roost

Sat, 03 May 2008 19:43:52 GMT

We wasted another week on Rev Wright, hopefully the last one. No it didn't drag Obama down, though the right wing is spinning their wish that it would. If only. Keep dreaming.

Yes, Obama is a gifted politician, and that's why we like him. We need political leadership, we've done without it for the last four terms, sixteen years, and we hope that this guy really gets that the power is with us, that we pay the bills, fight the wars, and it's our hard work and innovation that drive the economy that makes America powerful when we are powerful.

Wright? He's a deer that got caught in a headlight none of us have ever been in, so we don't really have a right to judge him. He spun around looking for friends, and found he was radioactive, and it really wasn't his fault. He wasn't running for office, in a rhetorical way he totally did inhale and exhale and inhaled again, and again. The only people who really liked his radioactivity were people like Louis Farrakhan and his followers who want to disrupt the US political process.

So what to do with the Wright legacy? I feel sorry for him, but I hope he finds some good people who aren't out to destroy other good people and he skips writing the book, and he kicks back and lets the member of his flock take the leadership we want and need him to.

See also: Bill Moyers, yesterday, on Rev Wright.

What is a Dual-WAN Router?

Sat, 03 May 2008 18:23:11 GMT

Imagine that water pipes were a new thing, and therefore not reliable. They work for most people most of the time, but sometimes they go down, and then if you want to take a bath or wash the dishes or cook a meal, no luck.

Then you learn that there are two types of water pipes, run by different companies, and it's very rare that both go down at the same time. So, if you can afford it, you get both water suppliers to pipe into your house, and when one goes down, you go to the street, lift a manhole cover, go down a ladder, and disconnect the one that doesn't work and hook up the one that does.

It's a hassle for sure, but you always have water. Then someone invents a T-shaped pipe with two inputs and one output. You hook the two suppliers each to a branch and your house to the third. This way when one goes down, you don't even know it. The water keeps flowing, you're happy.

It works the same way with the Internet. Some days Comcast goes down, and others AT&T DSL, but they rarely go down at the same time. I have both because the Internet is still young and unreliable, and I've lived with its lack of reliability before and it's worth a hundred bucks a month to have the luxury of uninterrupted service when one or the other goes down. But until yesterday, if I needed to switch over, I'd have to rewire my network just to switch to the other vendor. But, it turns out they make T-pipes for the Internet, they're called Dual-WAN Routers. And I got one.

It took a fair amount of fussing-with to get it working, but it has a nice fractional horsepower HTTP server to configure the router, a good help system, and I kind of intuitively get what it does.

Comcast is going to like this, their service is so much faster than AT&T's that I set it up so that AT&T is the backup. I won't actually send any packets over their line unless Comcast goes down, or gets pissed at me (it happens) -- but they should note that turning me off will no longer get my attention.

And thanks to my parents for buying this lovely gift for me. How did they know I wanted one? Another innovation, Amazon Wishlists. This Dual-WAN Router thing isn't something I would likely buy for myself, too speculative, I wasn't at all sure it would be simple enough to set up, or that I really needed it. There is a recession going on after all. And they never would have had a clue that I was interested. But now I have one and I'm very happy to have it.

Why did I decide on Xincom? I read the reviews on Amazon and it seemed the most likely to work.

Sunset at Indian Rock

Sun, 04 May 2008 03:40:12 GMT

A bunch of us went up to Indian Rock to see the sunset.

Click here for the set.

Yes Virginia, there's oil in Iraq

Sat, 03 May 2008 02:24:24 GMT

And we wouldn't have our military there if there wasn't.

Everyone knows the war in Iraq is about oil, but if a Democrat were to say it the Republicans would challenge his or her patriotism. But what if a Republican said it? What if John McCain, the Republican candidate for President said it? In public, on camera, with mikes, clearly, unambiguously?

You might think it was major news, at least on the same order as whether Obama wears a flag pin or properly salutes the flag?

Would it be news that over 4000 Americans and at least $1 trillion has been piddled away on a really bad deal? That $1 trillion could have bought a lot of oil. Or it could have built some great mass transit. Or it could have paid for Republican tax cuts. Or whatever, who cares -- it's news dammit.

No the press isn't likely to report this latest McCain truth-leak, that's why it's so important that we give generously to the DNC so they can run ads that do their work for them.

I gave them $100 today. For now, I think my donations to Obama aren't going to change things very much, so I'm switching my donation-flow to the DNC. Their ads defining McCain are good, they're accurate, and they work. They just have to be run in more states more times.

BTW, MSNBC is being way too soft on McCain when they say he "seemed to suggest" -- the usual press BS re McCain. He said it, so report it, without the double-qualification. He didn't "seem to" and he didn't "suggest." He said it, so say he said it. They're going to soft-pedal it for sure. Arrrgh.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Local fiber

Sat, 03 May 2008 02:15:58 GMT

Lots of information in the comments on yesterday's post about city-owned fiber in Berkeley.

UPS truck came

Fri, 02 May 2008 23:48:07 GMT

And it delivered two geekish presents.

I'm installing the Eye-Fi card right now. Wish me luck!

It's going pretty well. Now they want me to connect my card to one of the photo utilities, like Facebook, Flickr, TypePad, Photobucket, Windows Live, Costco (!) and many many more. What they don't tell you is if every picture you take will be uploaded. That could be pretty embarassing and since my pictures flow to Twitter through TwitterGram, that could be a problem too. A Help option here, explaining, would be useful -- but I'm going to assume that only some of my pics get uploaded and wire it up to Flickr.

They also don't tell you whether you can create a new account from this page.

Answer to the second question -- you can create a new account.

Okay, I followed their instructions, took a few pictures of myself, while I was away the browser (Firefox) crashed. I'm trying to get back to where I was but keep hitting this error page.

Ooops, it seems to upload all pictures. That's not good! I'm going to turn that one off.

Looking for the folder on my hard disk. Nope. Not there.

I'm still the best guy around for breaking software.

Okay slow down. You have to leave the camera on so it can upload the pics? I guess so.

Postscript: I don't think the Eye-Fi is designed to work well if you take high resolution pictures, which I do with my Canon. I'm going to try using it with my Nikon, which I have set up to take low-rez pics.

Tom Hunt's FlickrFan discovery

Fri, 02 May 2008 17:11:02 GMT

The other day fellow Berkeleyite Tom Hunt, who uses FlickrFan, came up with a neat way to solve a common problem that I thought I should share.

Here's the problem. You're watching pics go by and you see a picture of President Bush speaking at a conference on Children and Faith-based schools and think, man, that's an interesting picture, I want to show that to a friend.

So you open up the pics folder and see a lot of pics with names like pic091337.jpg, pic091338.jpg and pic091339.jpg. How do you find the one you're looking for?

Well, there is a way, believe it or not...

Open the screensaverpics folder and type Faith-based schools in the Spotlight box in the upper right corner of the window. 13 pictures show up. Select-All, right-click, Open in Preview. Review them and voila, there's the one I was looking for.

How did that work?

Well, AP and AFP put metadata on their pics, and the FlickrFan process preserves it, and Spotlight can search it. Here's the Get Info box for the pic I was looking for. The red arrow points to the metadata.

Tom is a smart guy, and a generous one. Thanks for passing this tip along!

Government could help us use less oil and save money

Fri, 02 May 2008 16:27:21 GMT

McCain and Clinton propose a moratorium on Federal gasoline tax for the summer to give the "average American" a break. It must test well with focus groups, but it's meaningless, because the prices would immediately adjust. If you lower the price, people will take longer trips, drive instead of fly, increasing consumption, driving the price up. There might be a bit of a benefit to drivers for a very short period of time, but in the end it would be a wash. This is what economists say, and it makes sense.

President Bush wants more exploration, and to build more refineries, these are medium to long-term things that likely wouldn't do anything for us right away.

But wouldn't switching to smaller European style cars do more to ease the problem than increasing exploration or creating more refineries?

And the money we'd give up for Federal gasoline tax could be better spent on putting high capacity network lines under our streets to increase communication. Some of the car trips must be to exchange information that coud be replaced by moving packets around at gigabit speeds. It wouldn't cost much to retrofit a few cities with really high speed lines, then we could get to work on developing the services that would make life more interesting, fun and efficient.

Interesting meeting today

Fri, 02 May 2008 04:23:53 GMT

I had a chance meeting with some people today who wanted to talk about bringing fiber to Berkeley. There's an idea that it could be done in a very Berkeley way, which is to say, the city owns it, and the service providers can tap in, but they don't get to dictate terms, as we know many of them like to do. I don't know how exactly I got enlisted, but I guess we've got enough Internet celebs in Berkeley to maybe get this done right, politically. Not sure what comes next, but it sure is interesting.

Speaking of Berkeley celebs, I tentatively have a podcast interview with George Lakoff tomorrow.

Snicker snicker heh

Fri, 02 May 2008 04:09:55 GMT

Twitter broken?

Fri, 02 May 2008 02:38:53 GMT

It's been hard to get through to Twitter today.

Calls through the API fail.

Most accesses to the site get an internal server error.

Nothing about it on the Twitter blog.

Oy.

Happy RSS Awareness Day!!

Thu, 01 May 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Everyone should be aware of RSS today.

Tomorrow? It's probably okay not to be aware of RSS tomorrow, but there's no law that says you have to forget.

But today -- be aware!

PS: You can vote up RSS Awareness Day on Digg. Help people become more aware of awareness! It's deep.

PPS: Wouldn't it be great if Obama said, in one of his stump speeches today, that it's RSS Awareness Day and I just want y'all to know I'm aware of RSS and you should be too.

Tales from the Bizarro world

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:45:13 GMT

The wish list thing is working!

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:46:48 GMT

Today I got two gifts from the Amazon wish list I started. As items come off the list, I add more items.

They were much appreciated! I got the McCartney album CD and a dozen reporter's notebooks, my favorite way to take notes while I'm programming or writing (along with Pentel sign pens, of which I have hundreds).

You guys are the greatest!!

PS: Someone bought me a great puppet! Awesome!!

Why the press likes Obama again

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:39:53 GMT

First, I've given Obama another $100 today for a total of $900. It's the 30th, the end of a month. Of the three remaining candidates, he's still by far the best choice. And he still is the best person I've ever had the chance to support, imho.

Yesterday he threw Rev Wright under the bus, a term I never liked, and still really don't, but it was the right thing to do, at exactly the right moment, maybe not for cyncial reasons (the ones the press applies) but for moral reasons. If you've been going to a church as long as he's been going to Wright's church, it should take a lot to get you to say what Obama said yesterday.

I have friends who have stood by me in tough times, but have done things that disappointed me, and I've taken time-outs from the friendships because of this, but it's pretty rare that the bridges are so thoroughly burned that we never relate as friends again. But it has happened.

If we want to trust Obama, he shouldn't abandon his pastor just because it would be the expedient thing to do, esp when it was so clear that the press was misrepresenting his sermons. I watched them, in full, and understood what the Reverend was saying, and I also understood that the context wasn't familiar to me. They were recorded before a member of his congregation was a leading candidate for President, some of them before he was even an Illinois state senator. If you said that this isn't that unusual for a black church, what choice would I have but to take your word.

Same for a speech at the NAACP. How do I know what's usual there. If you tell me this is how it goes, I have no basis for saying or believing otherwise.

But the National Press Club? That I understand, and now I see Rev Wright in a whole new light. I still can't say one way or the other if he acted appropriately in his sermons, but that was not how you address the media. They're too dangerous. That's the way you talk on your front porch on a hot weekday evening, hanging out with your friends, arguing politics and gossiping about a neighbor. Not in front of cameras that are broadcasting your words around the world, when you're talking about someone you supposedly care about, someone who not only is your friend, but is likely the next President of the United States, your country, which you have served, that you say you love.

Look, the explanation is really simple. When you rise, even a little, some friends don't get it. Ask anyone who's won a lottery, or Deal or No Deal, or whose company IPO'd successfully. Ask them about the chickens that come home to roost. That's what happened with Rev Wright. I'm sure of it. I recognize it, having been around the phenomenon, on a much smaller scale, many many times.

Anyway, the reason the press is so happy is that they got caught being assholes. It was just a few days ago I was giving them a hard time for the missing mea culpas. Now they don't have to retract or apologize for screwing it up, Obama just gave them cover. And so they're moving on. The Republicans, if they want to bring up this issue, may well find that the press sides with Obama. "We always said Wright was a bad apple," they will say, and maybe even Obama agreed, but he was being loyal to a friend, and who can fault him for that. It's a good quality, but enough is enough.

And I don't think the door is closed forever for Rev Wright. You can be pissed at a friend, for cause or not, and come back from it, esp if someone connects with Wright about the seriousness of what he did, and how much damage he might have done if people took him seriously (they didn't) and somehow his condemnation of Obama stuck (it didn't).

I believe Obama, and I believe in Obama because I believe in my country. I care about how the Constitution has been trampled in the last 7.5 years, it's going to take a lawyer like Obama who doesn't take shortcuts to first restore our confidence in the architecture of the US, and give us a fresh start in the world, which would see an Obama presidency as a cause for hope for them. Rev Wright didn't get how many of us now look to Obama to lead us, he may not be ready for it, but that's not our problem or Obama's, it's his.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Buffet of human fool

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:06:00 GMT

Yesterday I had an epiphany that Rev Wright might not be any more of a problem for President Obama than Billy Carter was for President Carter. To which there was an repeated chorus of "You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your pastor." I know I know. I meant that Wright is as irrevocably linked to Obama as Billy was to Jimmy. But maybe not. Maybe Wright was so outrageous that the idea of him being a persistent noose around Obama's neck is so distasteful to the pundit class, that they're going to sweep him out on their own? Oh that would be so sweet. They created the monster, he turns out to be even worse in reality, so bad even they can't stand him, so out he goes.

I've read piece after piece about how it's time for Obama to throw him under the bus. But the irony is that he probably doesn't have to do it now. The press created Wright, and they are uncreating him. It's "undo," at a human level.

I liken his appearance yesterday at the National Press club to shark-infested water. Wright was joking in a way that one jokes with friends. But he wasn't with friends (though he brought some with him, they were the ones cheering him on). He was in the water with sharks and feeding them high quality chum and putting blood in the water and screaming look I can swim with the sharks, this is fun, it isn't bad, I'm the boss, the new Martin Luther King, but I own the president. I'm the power behind the man, and you're all going to be taking orders from me, starting now. The sharks said "Oh boy a full course all you can eat buffet of human fool!"

If the Clintons set this up, as some think they did, they overplayed their hand, they were too good.

Eugene Robinson wrote today in the Washington Post: "Politically, by surfacing now, [Wright] was throwing Barack Obama under the bus. Sadly, it's time for Obama to return the favor. "

This suggests a one-day conference after the primaries are over with religious leaders of all faiths and races to discuss religion in a world where the President may be of mixed race. Focus on the positive, we're going through all our race issues this political season. It's messy, but we're learning a lot. Be sure to invite many many formerly Republican religious leaders. Some serious lemonade can be made out of the Wright lemon.

PS: There's an piece coming soon -- Barack Obama as a coral reef. See this piece on Twitter as a coral reef for a preview.

Funky Time cover

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:11:54 GMT

Om blesses our humble startup

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:53:51 GMT

Om Malik writes about SwitchABit, BetaWorks, Twittergram, John Borthwick and myself.

I have a meeting to go to, I'll write a blog post about SwitchABit when I get back.

Short version: Excited!

Berkeley street at dusk

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:07:22 GMT

Click on the pic for details.