Scripting News

Watch-The-Debate-In-Berkeley 2.0

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:28:10 GMT

Let's watch tonight's debate together. Barack Obama and John McCain. 5:30PM at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St.

$5 suggested contribution to cover expenses. This is a non-partisan affair, you don't have to support either candidate.

Last time we had about 85 people, not sure how many will show up this time. The projection should be better this time. We're probably going to go with CNN, because of their fancy real-time polling tech, but I'll bring the EyeTV receiver with me, in any case.

Raines is arranging for Cheesboard pizza, as last time -- but instead of All You Can Eat, this time it's Pay Per Slice.

It was really nice last time to watch the debate with 200 fellow Californians, and people mostly didn't talk over the candidates, which of course is really good.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1185738/

If you're in the area hope to see you there tonight.

Advice for Chris Messina

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:12:48 GMT

If you're interested in how formats and protocols evolve on the web, you might want to listen to Steve Gillmor's interview of Chris Messina on yesterday's Gillmor Gang.

I used to do roughly what Chris does, but I got tired of all the kitchen sinks being thrown at me because of my success from people who work at big tech companies. They have all kinds of techniques for thwarting success, but one simple motive, as I've come to understand it.

All big tech companies are basically the same inside, they all have too many people so they expend a lot of energy fighting with each other over who has the right to do this or that. There's always someone looking over your shoulder for a sign that you're blowing it, so they can tell someone at a higher level in management about your failure, so they can snatch the project for themselves.

When an independent developer such as Chris or myself is introduced to this mess, it's usually at the behest of someone very high up the structure of the big tech company because we tend to be visible to the outside world, relative to the typical grunt inside the BigCo. Our visibility and our introduction by the TopGuy immediately breeds resentment -- before they even meet you they don't like you, or worse, are committed to your failure. And while there may be penalties for hitting someone inside the corporate hierarchy, there's no penalty for offing the outsider. Inside the company they're playing a big game of musical chairs, but we outsiders can't play -- there's no mechanism whereby we can get a chair.

But no one lays it out for us this clearly. It takes years of trying to work with the BigCo's to figure out that while the TopGuy smiles and shakes our hand at conferences, and maybe even says kind things about us in a press release, there is zero chance that the people who actually make the decisions, the Ouija board of all the engineers and their managers, will work with us.

I should say almost zero instead of zero. I've had two examples of times when BigTechCos said they were working with me, and really did do the work, and several examples outside the tech industry, in publishing. In one case, with XML-RPC in 1998, it was because a handful of engineers who really were mavericks (unlike John McCain who just throws spitballs from the back of the room) and believed in something, and were respected enough inside Microsoft to cut through the corporate bullshit, but only for a very short period of time (really just two or three weeks). The machine eventually clamped down and turned it into a mess, owned by the W3C and IBM, Sun, and 18,000 other BigCos and BigCo-wannabes.

The other example was RSS, which only worked because the company I was working with, Netscape, evaporated into thin air in the middle of the project! So, if after getting a TopGuy to go for it, somehow you're lucky enough that the company self-destructs, you actually can get something done with a BigCo.

I recognize from Chris's rap on the GG podcast that he gets something important that most BigCo guys don't. The question, asked by the BigCo guy, isn't why invent another way to do standards, that's what Lakoff calls "framing" -- assuming something in the question that isn't actually what's going on. You don't start out trying to create a standard (and I'd encourage Chris to drop the word from his vocabulary) -- what you want to do is make a product, and allow others to compete with you, so you aren't locking your users in. That's the virtue of the development process Chris and his buddies are advocating. If a standard pops out, it happens later in the process.

Chris is an idealist and it's good to have them around, for sure. And it's also good to think of his work as the proving ground for standards work at the IETF and W3C that will come later, but unfortunatley I'm pretty sure they don't see it that way. When it comes time to reinvent OAuth they will probably try to break it. I say try, because if you play it right they won't be able to.

So my advice to Chris is, if it isn't already obvious, don't explain why the BigCos aren't following your lead, shrug your shoulders and let them do the explaining. Eventually if you do your job well, they will follow, they'll have to. They will never follow out of the goodness of their hearts, because (sorry to say) that's not what they do.

Update: RSS.com is for sale, minimum bid $500K. Oy.

Keating Economics

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:24:14 GMT

Now you can download the 13-minute movie via BitTorrent.

http://www.mininova.org/tor/1882614

Thanks to RaveDelay for providing a complete copy of the movie! It appears to be complete and high-def.

Why is McCain talking about the sixties?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:29:12 GMT

Internet fallout from the crashing market?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:35:56 GMT

The stock market continues to crash, down almost 500 points today, below 10K for the first time in four years. I'm taking a bath, but not as bad as some, since I sold all my stocks in January and have been getting back in very very gradually.

However, I'm concerned about the health of some of the Internet companies I depend on. It doesn't take many failures for the Internet that we depend on to start going dark. What if for example your domain registrar were to go under, or the company hosting your DNS, or your colo facility? There are a lot of points of failure that in normal times could be easily replaced to keep your web presence up. But it's time to start thinking about how that might work. And who you can trust.

I assume we can trust Google and Microsoft to stay on the air? eBay? Amazon? What about TechCrunch? Scripting News? :-(

I'm not just starting to think about this, but I haven't wanted to say anything unless I was fairly sure that it was going to become a prolonged thing. It's looking more like that every day. I guess the future is starting and it's got different rules from the recent past.

The answer is in

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:50:36 GMT

To the question I asked last night about the market being at a bottom..

No.

Market at bottom?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:26:09 GMT

Guardian: Now Wall Street may shun $700bn bail-out. "Analysts believe that the mere presence of the government as buyer of last resort will be enough to get credit markets moving again, and that a large number of banks would not need to take part for the legislation to succeed."

Time to buy?

Update: Latest This American Life tutorial on the financial crisis.

I'd like to have a word with Republicans

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:06:06 GMT

If there are any Republicans out there...

I know some of you are honorable people, good Americans, taxpayers, people who love your families, pay your taxes, do your best to live by the Golden Rule. People who try to do the right thing, whatever that is. It's to those Republicans that I wish to have a few words.

1. Barack Obama is an honorable person. You may not agree with him, or like where he would take our country, that's your right of course, but he doesn't "pal around" with terrorists. I think we all know that, right? If you have any doubts, you can skip the rest of this post, and please don't leave any comments.

2. Your candidate is pretty safe from Democratic counter-attacks because the they don't resort to tactics like that. Note that it would be easy to do so, McCain has lots of skeletons in his closet. The press knows about them, people who study this stuff do too. And Obama has the money to make these national issues, but he isn't doing it.

3. All you need to know about me is that I've voted Republican in Presidential elections more often than I've voted Democratic. I belong to neither party. I only want good choices, I would love to have a choice for President where the toughest part of the decision is which of two excellent candidates do I vote for. Unfortunately I've never had that problem, quite the opposite, it's always been a matter of holding my nose and voting for someone I can't stand, only because I couldn't stand the other guy more. This election is the first time I've ever felt like I was voting for a good man. I've done my homework, read his books, watched him in some very difficult sitatuations, observed the kind of campaign he's running and the organization he's building. I would be proud to have him lead my country, I think he would do a good job, for all of us.

4. This crazy stuff about him palling around with terrorists is only serving to burn whatever bridges your party has left with people like me. If it goes far enough I will not only never vote Republican again, but I will swear an oath to do everything I can to put your party out of its misery, for the good of all Americans.

5. I urge you to use whatever influence you have with your party to get them to stick to the economy, the wars, energy, taxes, health care, education, housing, infrastructure, the stuff that is the proper domain of politicians. Deliberately misleading like this is bad politics.

6. Thanks for listening.

John McCain's health records must be released

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:46:31 GMT

T. Boone Who?

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:14:12 GMT

I've been meaning to write this piece for a while.

First thing you gotta know, T. Boone Pickens is the guy who funded the Swiftboat ads that trashed the reputation of John Kerry during the 2004 election. Kerry is a war veteran, who, according to the frequently stated values of the right wing, deserves our gratitude and respect. The same way John McCain is always reminding us that he was a P.O.W. -- Kerry is that kind of hero. You don't see Democrats running ads attacking McCain's service like the ones Pickens ran, because they're not the low-life scum that he is. For what he did, he deserves our eternal loathing and hatred. A man like that has no honor. There is no trusting such a person. Ever.

I felt I had to say something when I saw him on stage at the Big Tent at the DNC in Denver, after seeing him on countless TV ads trying to sell himself as a leader for energy independence for the United States.

I thought to myself now that guy is truly clueless. Doesn't he know that he burned his bridges? That most of the people who care about energy independence are the exact same people who loathe him for the kind of right wing scorched earth zero-honor politics he practices? Hasn't anyone told him that he's wasting his time and money -- that his reputation is shit with all intelligent and honorable Americans?

I felt I had an obligation to tell him this, even though I've never met the guy. He should know he's wasting his money. Now I've cleared that one up I can move on with my life.

And his plight should serve as a warning to anyone who is thinking of running Swiftboat-like ads this year. Someday you may want to do something serious. Don't burn your bridges. Try to keep a bit of honor in your life, you might want to use it someday.

Greatest Hits of the Republican Party

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:54:28 GMT

That's a young Rumsfeld at the left.

And Kissinger has reared his head in the McCain campaign.

Guess who else was lurking in the shadows of the Nixon Presidency? And of course the current Republican standard bearer is completely surrounded by people one step removed from both Bush and Nixon.

We also know that Rove was an associate of convicted Watergate conspirator Donald Segretti.

No wonder so many core ideas of the Nixon era are accepted, unquestioned by the current crop of Republicos.

John McCain is channeling Nixon now

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:21:45 GMT

The Republicans of 2008 tried to sell us Ronald Reagan, but switched to Teddy Roosevelt when Reagan's deregulation became the financial collapse of 2008. Now they seem to be switching again, in yet another reckless attempt to reignite culture wars, trying to sell us the Republican Party of Richard Nixon.

McCain is quoted in today's NY Times, asking "How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?" I had to look twice to be sure who was being quoted and who he was talking about. Yup it was McCain and he was talking about William Ayers, who in the 60s was a member of the Weather Underground.

What McCain isn't telling you, and many Americans are too young to remember, including the Democratic nominee for President, is that there were two sides to the culture war of the 60s. The side he is adopting, the side of Richard Nixon, was that there is a Silent Majority that supported the war in Vietnam, and the side represented by the anti-war movement, who, it turns out actually did reflect the opinion of the majority of Americans, that the war in Vietnam was a terrible mistake. If one were to measure the goodness of one side over the other based on how many innocents they killed, there's no doubt that McCain's side killed far more. Orders of magnitude more.

In Thursday's debate the Republican candidate said that every Presidency makes mistakes, and it's true of generations too. She said we shouldn't look back to the Bush Administration for their mistakes, so what is the point of McCain digging up the mistakes of Nixon? Or maybe it does deserve looking at, if so, at least Ayers has moved on and done something constructive with his life. McCain, who likely bombed his share of innocents in the 60s, didn't learn, and took us into another senseless war in which we are again killing huge numbers of innocents.

If we're going to have this discussion, and re-litigate the outrages of the 60s, let's look at it from both sides. Or perhaps as so many have, we should just move on and deal with the problems of today and learn from the mistakes of the past.

Update #1: Jane Smiley writing at Huffpost saw the same irony. "John McCain's defense is that he was performing his patriotic duty, and that's what William Ayers would have said, too." Again, the perennial response to Republicans is that they don't have an exclusive on love of country. I wonder when they'll ever hear that and stop claiming one.

Update #2: In my travels I came across this 1972 infomercial for Nixon. You gotta watch it. It'll give you a fresh perspective on how all this Republican michegas got started.

October surprise?

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:23:05 GMT

I just listened to a chilling but fascinating edition of FreshAir.

So chilling and thought-provoking it will certainly help you forget Sarah Palin, and might just get you to forget the subprime meltdown crisis depression, etc.

http://bit.ly/3AQzbV

The big question -- will an October Surprise, one that gives us four more years of Republican rule in the US be an American attack on Iran, or an American-approved attack by Israel?

The subject of the interview, Robert Baer, is absolutely sure that if that happens, the Iranians will shut down the flow of oil to the world from the entire Persian Gulf.

That's the Straits of Hormuz, the place all the arrows are pointing at. It's tiny. All the oil from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, etc flows through there. If Iran wants they can shut that down at any time. Attack Iran, they say, and that's the end of oil. Baer says that would start a depression that makes the subprime meltdown look like a day in the park. He calls it a Hail Mary Pass, one that Bush might throw, one last chance to save his legacy and keep the White House in Republican hands.

Have a listen, if you have the time. It's riveting radio.

Time Loves a Hero

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:39:18 GMT

Random news links to start the day.

If you're following the news of the election as it heads into the final stretch, I can't recommend highly enough our NewsJunk headline service. There's so much news. It's an excellent way to keep up. Via: the website, RSS, mobile, Twitter, FF, identi.ca, google group. If you can think of another way let me know. News is breaking so fast, and imho, this is the best way to stay informed.

The event at the Hillside Club was an unqualified success. A couple of hundred people showed up. We're going to try to do it again for the Presidential debates. (One problem -- somehow the Obama people got the idea this was a campaign event, it wasn't. Next time we have to make that much more clear.)

I kept thinking "Sarah Palin sandbagged us" -- that the interviews she did were deliberately bad to set the debate expectations unbelievably low. I still despise everything she stands for, but she did a credible debate, as did Joe Biden.

The title of this section is a great Little Feat song, one of my favorite bands. Founded in the 70s as a spinout of the Mothers of Invention, it was named after Lowell George's feet, which were very little. He mis-spelled the word as a tribute to the Beatles. Time Loves a Hero always made me think of my uncle, who took a fishing boat to Jamaica not Puerto Rico, and whose birthday, had he lived, was this week on Oct 1.

I love the way you can get a low-rez version of almost any song on YouTube and I love that the music industry hasn't shut it down. I don't often have cause to thank the music industry, so Thanks!

Random news of the day

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:08:26 GMT

Just some news items I wanted to share.

IRC for tonight's debate, which starts at 6PM Pacific.

What the meltdown looks like.

McCain is pulling out of Michigan.

Obama radio commercial playing in southern Virginia.

Celebrities debate whether you should vot.

Katrina 2.0

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:18:51 GMT

Last night I wrote a long piece, and as often happens, as I wrote I did more thinking and as it settled in overnight and through the morning, the story distilled and the conclusion became clearer.

Katrina was more than a hurricane, it was a disaster, that happened in three stages:

1. A category 3 hurricane, followed by relief. The city was still standing. A few broken windows, but nothing that couldn't quickly be repaired.

2. Everyone goes to sleep, wakes up the next morning to find the levees had broken and the city was flooded.

3. National paralysis. Some of the needed resources had been deployed elsewhere. We became a nation of Brownies all doing a heckuva job. People were killed in the flood and on the streets as the New Orleans was looted, while we watched in horror, unable to help, as an American city died, right there on CNN.

Katrina never ended, three years later, it's still not over. New Orleans is still broken. Whole families were wiped out in the disaster, and while we don't spend much time on it in our national discourse, even as the election approaches, it's still there, reminding us of something. But we're not learning the lesson, and now our nation faces a Katrina-scale disaster, across the entire country, and like New Orleans on the first night of Katrina, it hasn't sunk in.

There will be no place to go if we wake up tomorrow to find the financial levees have broken and our nation is under water. People don't understand how much momentum there is to an economy, and when the wheels stop turning, they don't just start up again. It will take years if not decades to get them going again, as it will take that long to reboot New Orleans, if it ever happens.

A commenter asked what to do, which is a fair question -- and the answer is easy, as long as you accept that we're in a Katrina-scale disaster. Don't got to sleep, and if the levees break, and even if we act they're still pretty likely to break, don't accept Brownie-level incompetence. Require more of yourself (key point) and your leaders.

Imho, we are in another Katrina. It's easy to be fooled into believing that like New Orleans we may still dodge the bullet, the unthinkable is of course hard to think about. But after Katrina 1.0, it should not be hard to imagine the same thing happening to all of us, at one time. That's what's at stake.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Homer Simpson votes for Obama

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:53:15 GMT

IRC for tomorrow's debate

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:38:55 GMT

The live chat for tomorrow's debate, which we will attempt to project at the Hillside Club...

irc://irc.freenode.net/#vpdebate

See you there!

MockCain.com

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:50:22 GMT

I buy too many domains -- I admit it.

I get an idea, see if it's taken, often it's not, and impulsively -- I grab. So I got an idea for a site that gathers election humor about McCain and Palin, and then thought of a name and it wasn't taken, and a few weeks later..

http://mockcain.com/

If you find a video or graphic, or a joke of any kind about the Republican nominee and his running mate, pass it along as a comment here.

Let's have fun!

PS: Follow MockCain on Twitter, FF or identi.ca or RSS.

Thanks to Werner and Ray

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:16:37 GMT

Today Amazon announced that there would be a way to run Windows instances in EC2. For many of us, that's a big deal, it'll mean that I can deploy applications that run in the OPML Editor that use the sliding scalability of EC2. I can't wait to design apps for this environment.

This morning I sent an email to Werner Vogels at Amazon and Ray Ozzie at Microsoft, both readers of this blog, thanking them for making this happen. I assume Microsoft gave Amazon more flexible terms for Windows licensing, which makes it more competitive with Linux. Makes my day!

I asked for this specifically on Scripting News in April.