Naked Morning coffee notes

  Just a few random notes for my outliner in the morning.
  1. We had the plenary for the NJFF last night, here in NY of course. NakedJen and I went to see Mission Impossible in the IMAX theater on Broadway and 68th St. It was a great way to kick it off. It was like a roller coaster ride. And intellectual palate cleanse. Very light fare. But the images were thrilling. I thought the scenes with Tom Cruise flying around on the tower in Dubai were going to be the climax, and horrifying -- and they were that, but the climax came later, with a missile headed for Seattle or was it San Francisco? The writing was pretty shitty, sometimes movies can be appreciated for their shittiness. This movie was a fine way to start the fest. (Which now is a three-day affair?)
  1a. Tonight's movie might be Carnage, starring the wonderful Kate Winslet.
  1b. Listings for theaters around Lincoln Center.
  1c. The best part of the movie was the preview for some new Batman movie, in IMAX of course. Super-thrilling! Freaky.
  2. I was quoted in several places telling people to kill their GoDaddy accounts. That was incorrect. I think it's a pointless gesture. Dan Gillmor asked why. SOPA is not yet law, not even close. It seems likely it won't make it through all the hurdles. This time. But they'll keep coming back. And if they ever do get a law that tries to turn the Internet into a movie theater, that's the time to act. Occupy the movie theaters. Shame the actors whose lawyers are foreclosing on the Internet the way a banker forecloses on a bad mortgage. You can't be popular with the people, Mr and Ms Hollywood Star, and support killing free expression on the net. It's an either/or thing. It's like a Hollywood action film. There are good guys and bad guys. If you don't act out against what your industry is doing to our freedom, then you're the bad guy. We should all be looking for a lot more than outspoken-ness from our favorite movie and recording stars, esp the ones who use social media. Not just speeches or symbolic gestures, real action. That's why now is not the time, because there can only be symbolism now. Later, if it comes to that, there can be movement.
  3. I'm doing more digging into JavaScript. It is indeed very close to UserTalk, the language I designed. So I understand how it works. I'm finding the curly braces and semi-colons to be a nuisance (I forget to put them in, our language doesn't require them). But I'm liking doing software that runs in the browser, with very limited communication with servers. Having worried about scaling for all these years, it's fun to be relieved of that concern.
  4. The project I'm doing is integrating rivers with the Bootstrap Toolkit, in an entirely static way. My prototype for this work is my personal river. Note that the RT's work. All you have to do is set up a linkblog server that can "catch" the kind of message it throws. Do a view source to see how the scripts work. And you can see how I edit the template, in an outline of course, and I use Dropbox to connect the outliner with the web app. Works like a charm. (I mirror my dropbox public folder in my own S3 space, that's what dropbox.scripting.com is.)
    Parameters to the linkblog are: title, link, description.
    Your server has to understand these, offer the user a chance to edit the post you built using these three values, and submit it post it to their linkblog and/or feed.
    Here's an <a href="http://yourserver.com/?link=http%3A//feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/businessNews/~3/5GXogC4xcXw/us-themepark-investment-idUSTRE7BN06J20111224&title=%26quot%3BTheme%20Park%202.0%26quot%3B%20features%20pricey%2C%20high-tech%20attractions&description=ORLANDO%2C%20Fla%20%28Reuters%29%20-%20Investment%20in%20theme%20parks%20and%20cutting-edge%20attractions%20along%20the%20lines%20of%20the%20Wizarding%20World%20of%20Harry%20Potter%20at%20Universal%20Orlando%20surged%20during%20the%20recession%2C%20leading%20one%20developer%20to%20suggest%20the%20business%20is%20entering%20a%20new%20Golden%20Age.">example of a call.
  5. With cookies and JavaScript you can almost do a real application.
  6. I need a good reference book for JavaScript. Real quick, show me how all the syntax works, and give me a list of all the built-in verbs.