Scripting News

Kasich has an idea!

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 17:41:21 GMT

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich is calling for an end to gerrymandering in Ohio, where he is governor. I was really surprised when I read this, but he's got a really good point, that gerrymandering is hurting the Republican Party as much as it is hurting the Democratic Party, if not more.

In Ohio they set things up so that the Republicans have a 12-4 majority of House seats, even though they're just half the population. The same thing has happened in states that were controlled by Republican legislatures after the last census, in 2010. This has meant that the Republican Party, even though it's not the majority party in the US, has a lock on control of one of the houses of Congress.

Now the problem is that the way things are set up, all of the Republican seats are still vulnerable to challenges from more and more extreme candidates. That's where the lunacy in the Republican Party is coming from. It's why a small minority of the population has extraordinary power in Washington.

The Senate was already tilted to the Republicans because they tend to control less populous states that each have the same representation in the Senate as the most populous ones. So a state like Wyoming, that has a population of a small county in New York State has just as much voice in the Senate as the whole of New York.

I'm sure this isn't making Kasich a lot of friends among incumbents in Ohio House seats, because they have to look even more extreme than they already are, which is saying a lot, to head off the challenges that are coming in 2016.

But until we bite this bullet, government in the US is going to be lunatic.

No matter what, it's a brilliant tactic, at least, by Kasich to throw out a lifeline to more sanity-oriented Republicans, saying "I'm not crazy" like Trump nor crazy like Christie or Cruz, or just a nasty fuck like Rubio or a spineless oligarch like Jeb Bush.

The vision of Central Park

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 17:05:51 GMT

I live in Manhattan, and I'm a big fan of Central Park.

The visionaries who conceived of New York City set aside the land of Central Park long before the city had moved that far north.

They had a sense that the city would grow, but they didn't take any chances with that.

They also created the Erie Canal which caused the port to grow, which caused banking and insurance to grow here, accounting and data processing.

That philosophy continued with the subway system, they built mass transit lines into the middle of farmland, figuring the city would follow. It did.

The reason I mention this is that Central Park is a lot like the open web.

I'm sure there were cynics at the time of its creation like the tech industry today, who thought there was no value in setting aside a portion of the land of the future city for recreation and inspiration, but history has proven them wrong. The real estate on the edge of the park is the most valuable in the city. Over time it has grown more so, as everyone, rich and poor benefit from the open egalitarian, you might even say idealistic space of the park.

We need a similar approach to the web. Otherwise it's just going to end up with a bunch of tall buildings and no reason for anyone with a mind to be there.

The Beatles break-up was a big deal

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 02:18:14 GMT

YouTube is playing John Lennon songs to me tonight.

This was a very intense high growth period for me, when these songs first came out. I realize how there was a lot of grieving involved trying to make sense of what had happened. It's hard to explain how big the Beatles were in my early life. And then to have them break up just as I was becoming a young man, it actually shattered my world in a real way. That's how important the Beatles where. (I was born in 1955 if you want to do the math.)

I still think to this day that John didn't appreciate Paul's talent well enough. George blossomed in the new arrangement. And how Ringo was so steady and everyone's friend. This is how it seemed to the 15-year-old Dave.

It's funny how you just begin to figure this stuff out so many years after it happened.

About the funny new linkblog urls

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 02:01:20 GMT

About the funny URLs you might have seen in my linkblog flow on Facebook, Twitter or in the feed.

I've had a domain for a while looking for something to do with it.

The domain: pocalyp.se.

It's really sweet because it's designed to have prefixes like trump, tech or dave. It's place where I get to have some fun. Technically it's a URL shortener, but oddly the URLs often are longer. ;-)

I know it makes the links more fragile, I'm backing them up in static files so if I stop using this software, I can revert to a static server. It's not a bad backup, I've used it before.

The great thing about it is that it's a way of categorizing and grouping links. I usually get tired of classifying posts, so something I'll actually use is a big deal. So far I'm using this one.

An example: http://beatles.pocalyp.se/0 points to a great John Lennon song.

The code is available on GitHub, MIT License.

PS: There are easter eggs around here. ;-)

PPS: They're kind of like emoji for URLs.

A NY story

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 01:13:16 GMT

The other day I was riding a CitiBike down 6th Ave near the park, and hit a red light, forcing me to come to a stop in a crosswalk, obstructing the path of a guy who obviously works for a bike rental company, because he was walking two bikes across the street, something that's harder to do than it sounds.

He stood there in disbelief, hurling a series of profanities at me at the top of his lungs. Usually when people do this to you in NY they're riding by at speed, or you're riding by, so there's no chance for the retort I had been saving for such situations.

"You have it so tough," I said. "No one has a more difficult life than you."

A NYPD traffic cop, within earshot, heard this and laughed audibly. The guy with the two bikes laughed too.

Sometimes life works.

Trump and marriage equality

Fri, 25 Dec 2015 17:20:45 GMT

One issue Trump hasn't exploited yet is marriage equality.

I suspect that some of the anger among his supporters is that this change happened so quickly, and they had no say in it. They shouldn't of course, have a say. You don't decide equal protection issues by majority rule. But they probably don't see it that way. Abortion and guns have had decades to get established as conservative issues, but their shock at the almost instant change in rules re gay marriage probably is under some of their rage.

It's amazing that this hasn't been mentioned in the Republic debates.

This idea became clear to me as I work my way through Season 2 of Transparent. Not going to spoil anything, so don't worry. I almost gave up on it in episode 4, I was so tired of the characters. But then it got good, real good. And if you know what Transparent is about, you understand how I made the connection to Trump. It's remarkable that they wrote this season long before Trump had a serious following.

Marriage equality is a big issue for them, but it hasn't been talked about yet. I can't imagine Trump will stay away from it much longer, so watch out.

Breakage is not OK

Fri, 25 Dec 2015 10:35:21 GMT

If a developer says he or she is going to break users, thank them for letting you know and then hit the Back button.

Only (some) software developers think breakage is okay. Imagine if you took your car to the dealer for an oil change and when you got in to drive it it didn't work. Version 2.0 says the mechanic when you complain. Now how to get get home?

Or if one day you went to the subway and the station wasn't there. "There aren't any subways," someone says to you. They were deprecated. Didn't you see the version change?

Or the doctor operates on you, a simple procedure on your arm, but in the process takes out your heart. You die. You shouldn't be surprised, hearts are no longer necessary. Sorry you died. Next patient!

The world does not work that way. That software developers think they can get away with this is an indication of some sense of power or indispensibleness that's completely unrealistic. We can get on without you or your software. So keep that in mind when you decide to break users.

All I want for Christmas

Fri, 25 Dec 2015 10:11:56 GMT

My goal for 2016: I want to make software that 100,000 people use and love. That's all I want. A nice community that uses my work for theirs. ;-)

I want to release new features in this software every few months.

I don't really care what the software does, but given my past, it's likely to be about publishing.

I don't really care that much about money, but it should make me some. I've always felt that's how you keep score. Some people have the wrong idea about me, that I want to give it all away. Not true. In my heart I am a commercial developer. Always have been.

I want to teach what I know about making software. I've learned a lot knocking my head against the wall over and over. Some things come easy now that used to be impossible. Mostly I've mastered patience, knowing that if I iterate and ponder and iterate some more, the truth will eventually come to me.

I don't want to be a VC funded developer. I don't want a board of directors. I want to let the software and its users pull me, but mostly my own ideas and dreams. I see software as a performing art. Without users, nothing is happening.

Programming note

Fri, 25 Dec 2015 09:38:16 GMT

I don't put everything in my blog in the RSS feed.

That's because I use the blog to post short items as well as full essays. Still most RSS readers are not able to deal well with the short items. So I tend not to push them through to the feed. If you want the full effect, you need to actually visit the blog from time to time.

Even though this is one of the short items, I sent it to the feed. ;-)

The web is better than your silo, Ev

Thu, 24 Dec 2015 13:12:04 GMT

Evan Williams says we're all going to publish on Facebook and Medium.

I have a few things to say about that.

That's like Hilton saying in the future everyone is going to live in hotels instead of their own homes. Sure it might be more convenient in some ways. You can meet people in the lobby, says Hilton. But it's nice to have your own place. Hotel restaurants usually suck. And sometimes you want to be on your own, without all those other people around. I think at one point they did think everyone would move into hotels. Didn't happen.
If Ev is right then everyone must use mass transit instead of driving their own cars. Heh.
If everyone will be publishing to Medium and Facebook then it'll be Facebook. Why would anyone choose Medium? They're infinitesimal compared to Facebook. Everyone uses Facebook. Seriously, most people, even avid Twitter users, have never heard of Medium.
Eventually there will be features you can't get from the silos, because they are controlled by corporations who won't want users to have certain features. The web is great because of the freedom.
I like that I can add features to my own website. When I get an idea for Facebook, I'm stuck. I can suggest that they implement it, but they never do. I've been down this road so many times. Eventually monocultures stagnate.
Finally, Ev, that's old hype. It didn't happen. People are still publishing to blogs. Twitter still has its 140-char limit. If you want to read something good, it's probably on a blog, still. Ev has been pushing this idea for years now. I would have hesitated before to say he's wrong, but not any more. He's wrong.

And by the way, why can't we publish to his silo and our own sites? We can, as this post illustrates.

washpost.newsriver.org

Thu, 24 Dec 2015 04:54:35 GMT

The Washington Post keeps growing online, so I thought it would be interesting to see what it looks like as a river of news.

So I wrote a little scraper in Frontier to turn their RSS feeds page into an OPML file, and fed the result to River4 .
I put together a single-page viewer at washpost.newsriver.org and let it fill up with stories.
I already found one piece I wouldn't have found before. A George Will op-ed about Donald Trump. I look forward to reading it. (Apparently he doesn't like Trump.)
I've added a WP tab to my collection of rivers page, in case you're using that resource.

And it's giving me some more ideas, which I guess was the point. ;-)

Google, be amazing

Wed, 23 Dec 2015 17:25:48 GMT

When Google says their chat app will have intelligent bots, I assume that means they're going to compete with Slack bots. Here's a radical idea -- how about if they make their bots compatible with Slack bots? That way developers can create bots for both platforms at the same time.

That would be the amazing way to do it. Creating yet another way to do bots would be the predictable tired old computer industry way to do it.

Come on Google, be amazing!

Controlling personality types

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 19:46:47 GMT

Why do people on The Left care what makes people on The Right erupt?

It's so weird, but also somewhat understandable.

It's a way of being controlled by them. It works.

I think it's time to stop caring whether they are happy or not.

It's like arguing with an Internet troll. It's exactly like that. In fact that's what it is.

Why Kraft parmesan cheese?

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 15:46:33 GMT

Why did I put a picture of Kraft Parmesan Cheese in the right margin of the post about 25 years of the web? Glad you asked!

Because it's a flavorless imitation of parmesan cheese, which is supposed to add a strong accent to food. The Kraft version is harmless stuff, like sawdust that melts. It has no parmesan to it, and it probably isn't really cheese.

Why did that picture belong on the post about the wonderful smelly creation known as the world-wide web? Because of what the web has become. An imitation of what it used to be. And just because Kraft makes parmesan-flavored cheese, doesn't mean you can't still get the real thing, if you're willing to look around and go a bit out of your way.

PS: To those who wonder why I'm such a vocal opponent of the push to HTTPS, the reason should now be clear. The side-effect of this push will be to sweep aside the colorful history of the web, to make way for more monoculture. This is exactly the wrong way to go.

PPS: This post is not an invitation to debate anything, not the merits of Kraft products or HTTPS. If you want to engage in a debate try writing a blog post on your site. Thanks.

PPPS: Now Amazon has me "targeted" as someone who is interested in Kraft Parmesan Cheese.

25 years of the web

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 09:44:38 GMT

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the web. A remarkable achievement. A marker for how much impact one person can have. Both before and after it was assumed that only big companies could make world-changing software. How wrong that idea is.

The great thing about the web is the diversity it brought about. The mistake we've made, 25 years later, is being so distracted by money and the appearance of engagement that we have turned that wonderful diversity machine into a monoculture.

The people we celebrate as heroes of tech are the ones who made the most money, and that money is directly proportional to the amount of diversity they destroyed. They are the opposite of heroes. They are carpetbaggers, foreclosers, stealers of the future.

Someone was generous enough to leave some money on the table, so they grabbed it. We should have seen that coming and protected it.

If we want the promise that the web gave us a glimpse of, we can have it back. The raw material of the monoculture are you and me. People. We don't make any money from our use of the web. It can be a tool for more working-together, problem-solving and love-making.

If you have 15 minutes, please listen to a podcast I did on the subject a few days before the 25th anniversary of the web? We forgot so much that we used to know. But it's easy to recover it. You just have to want to.

PS: In case you were wondering why there's a picture of Kraft Parmesan Cheese in the right margin of this post.

We're all searching for meaning

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 09:01:54 GMT

I read somewhere that people are searching for the meaning of life, but I think it's possible to find meaning in life, and this search explains all the trouble we have with existence at this point in the evolution of our species.

Until recently the meaning in our lives was survival. If we created a new generation of humans to follow us, that was enough meaning. So we went on having kids, and inventing new technologies that made survival even more likely.

Until something happened. We crossed a line. The old way we defined survival no longer was the issue. We had medicine, and sewage systems, heating and air conditioning. Survival on the original terms was a done deal. So we went for comfort, and entertainment and drugs to distract us from the fact that our lives no longer had any meaning. We were just, as a friend put it, all waiting for the grim reaper. From birth. There was no purpose, no meaning.

That lasted a few generations, until survival of the species was once again an issue. It's forecast to be in the low 70s on Christmas Eve in NYC this year. Antibiotics aren't working. And people turn to extremism and hate to find meaning. We live with a dim future as a species, and therefore as individuals. None of our ritual changes. We're still living as if our existence could only be assured if we followed the now-obsolete strategies for species survival, burning forests, having more children, consuming more, with more people every generation.

We have a mission, to find ways to work together. But we are failing at that. We have all the tools we need, we just have to wake up from our evolutionary dream.

Luke and Lucas

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 16:23:17 GMT

Something I didn't realize until last night, for some reason.

Luke Skywalker.
George Lucas.

Think the first name of the former derived from the last name of the latter?

Probably so.

WordPress question

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 13:35:06 GMT

A question for WordPress developers.

Is there a way to get a list of all the RSS feeds for blogs hosted on a server?

I don't really care what the format is as long as it's machine readable.

The two best formats would be:

OPML subscription list.
JSON-formatted file, with at least two pieces of info about each feed: the title of the blog and the URL of its RSS feed.

I have an application in mind for this, but need help on the WordPress side.

Thanks!

PS: If you don't want to leave a public reply, you can send email to dave.winer@gmail.com or post a note on the River4 mail list.

PPS: Assume I know nothing about running a WordPress server.

Perpetual forecast until the end

Sat, 19 Dec 2015 20:28:50 GMT

var thisYear = new Date ().getFullYear (), nextYear = thisYear + 1;

console.log ("Forecast: " + nextYear + " will be the hottest year ever recorded, beating the previous record from " + thisYear + ".");

Podcast: Silos vs the Internet

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 22:39:22 GMT

Here's a 15-minute podcast about silos and the Internet.

The Internet says anyone can have a server or a website, and they can link to each other, as long as they follow the protocol. So I can have a website, and so can anyone else.

Facebook, a silo, is different. It's a very powerful communication tool. When I post my writing to Facebook it accomplishes more than if I post it to my site, it's more influential, but that comes at a cost. The fidelity of the content is not preserved, and it's not possible to use that content to bootstrap new more powerful ways of communicating. That's why the Internet is stagnating.

Key point: Mark Zuckerberg can have a Facebook, but he's the only one who gets to do that. It doesn't interoperate with other things like itself. I don't get to have a Facebook, and you don't either. Just Zuck.

And there are lots of other silos that are un-Internet-like, and as a result new kinds of linking and content that behave like the Internet, which held so much promise, have stopped coming. The web was great when it came along, but that's already over 25 years ago.

If we want more, it has to come in the form of the Internet, not a silo, and that will be hard to do, and every day it gets harder.

That's the basic idea that I explore in this podcast. Hope you enjoy! :-)

We can't plead ignorance

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 21:21:22 GMT

If we somehow elect Donald Trump and the US turns into a police state where people are disappeared and there are concentration camps for Muslims and who knows else, we won't be able to say we weren't warned.

Star Wars review: Three Mehs

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 20:14:48 GMT

I went to the new Star Wars movie.

Everyone who is worried about spoilers, really you don't need to. It's a Star Wars movie. Think about what that means. If you forgot, go see the movie, you'll remember right away.

There must be other things you can make a movie about instead of this. You could just go see the first Star Wars movie, and you'd have exactly the same experience.

My three sentence review: I had to go see it. You don't. I promise.

The NYT did not give it a critic's choice. I totally understand why. Now I'll go read the review.

The review is as grandiose and boring as the movie. I don't know why people dote on this movie so much. There was nothing creative or interesting about it. The dialog was like a SNL skit. I don't think they were joking though (if they were they would have put a wink in there somewhere). I kept waiting for them to do something interesting, like have George Takei do a cameo, just to make fun of all the grandmas and grandpas they dragged out for this. He could have made eyes at the new young male lead. They could have had James T Kirk take off his shirt and flirt with the female lead. "These are the voyages..." Both of the new young stars were delicious, btw. The one redeeming quality of the movie.

My one word review: whatever.

HTTPS is expensive security theater

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 13:17:14 GMT

Nieman Lab has a piece about HTTPS, and how 2015 wasn't the year it happened across the web. They hope it will happen in 2016, but it won't happen then either, because the web is too big and HTTPS is fraught with difficulty.

As an experiment I looked at all that I would have to do to support it on just one of my sites, and found the cost to be much higher than any potential benefit.

Let's say I wanted to do it for my main site, scripting.com.

First I'd have to move it off Amazon S3. But I like having it there. It took a lot of iteration to get it there in the first place. It's a huge site for a blog. It's been around since 1994 -- over 20 years. A few years ago I put all that static content in a bucket on S3 and forgot about it. It's just there. Served very cheaply. And I don't have to worry about scale. My RSS feed is there. God knows how many bots are reading it every five seconds. I don't know and I don't (have to) care. Amazon just takes care of it. For very low cost.

Second, if it were easy or even possible (I suspect it's not possible) Amazon would have already offered me the option to switch. For another $5 a month I could turn http://scripting.com/ into https://scripting.com/. But they have not made that offer. Every time I've looked into it, the cost was prohibitive, the amount of time I'd have to put into it was also prohibitive, and the benefit, insignificant. Frankly if the Chinese want to add or remove stuff from my blog, go ahead, have a party. I'm sure they don't care. Honestly, I don't care either.

No money changes hands on any of my sites. I don't ask for credit card numbers or any information anyone could conceivably think of requiring security. When you log on to one of my sites, you're using Twitter's identity system, and they use HTTPS so if it's secure, then so am I.

But apparently HTTPS is not secure. Apparently there are holes in it. So please tell me this is more than security theater? I think the proponents of HTTPS are being as honest with us as the TSA, which is to say not very honest.

My net take -- it's a pointless fire drill. We're meant to prove that we're really here taking care of our sites. But I have a couple dozen sites that are just archives of projects that were completed a long time ago. I'm one person. I don't need make-work projects, I like to create new stuff, I don't need to make Google or Mozilla or the EFF or Nieman Lab happy.

Let's have a discussion about this, but a realistic and respectful one. HTTPS is not the answer to a problem that I have. So I don't have any intention of adapting my sites to support it.

PS: Yes, I've heard about all the things that supposedly make it easy to support. They all have missing pieces. They may get you closer to supporting it, in certain situations, but none of them could take me all the way there without major work on my sites. See above for reasons why I'm not going to undertake that work.

PPS: A discussion on this emerged on Facebook.

Re Trump's plan to kill families

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 18:29:02 GMT

Donald Trump says we can and will kill family members of people who kill Americans. Does that apply to everyone, or just family members of Muslims?

He says they must have known they were going to kill people. How does that not apply to Christians, Jews and atheist families? It seems it must. It's in the Constitution after all.

I don't want to be snarky about this, just respectful. I want to know who Trump plans to kill. If he's being so open with it, let's hear the whole plan.

Should we also kill their doctors and teachers? How about their pets? Baby-sitters? How about their local policemen, should we kill them too? They must have known.

PS: There must be some limit to how crazy we'll let this get.

PPS: I'm afraid to indulge in parody of Trump, for fear the Secret Service will pay me a visit to find out if I'm serious, so I won't. Which raises the question, how does the Secret Service not clamp down on Trump? He's publicly threatening to kill innocent Americans. What am I missing here?? Is it because he's so terrific?

CNN is complicit in the Repub RDF

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 13:48:20 GMT

Why didn't the CNN moderators ask the Republican debaters about climate change and gun violence?

I try to imagine their answer, here are some of the choices.

We had to agree to only ask questions about terrorism or the Repubs wouldn't do the debate.
We figured they would just tell us there is no such thing and we need to worry about mental illness first.
We have a deal with the NRA and the oil companies.
We are owned by the NRA and the oil companies.

One thing is for sure, they aren't even keeping up a pretense at being journalists. This was ostensibly a debate about foreign policy. The climate conference just finished in Paris with a historic agreement. Surely the would-be future President of the US has something to say about that? And they are singling out one act of gun violence in the US for scrutiny and fear-talk. What about the others? We passed the fourth anniversary of Sandy Hook, the day before the debate! What do they have to say about that?

I think the Republicans don't want to talk about gun violence and climate change because it would show their voters who believe gun violence and climate change are huge problems that they are sold out to the gun industry and oil companies. It might snap them out of their reality show trance and realize there is a lot at stake in this election, and these actors are not taking it seriously.

PS: RDF is an acronym for Reality Distortion Field. The term was invented to describe Steve Jobs, but it applies to Trump equally well.

PPS: I addressed this question to Brian Stelter on Twitter. He's the closest thing CNN has to a public editor, as far as I know.

Send marijuana to ISIS

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 07:05:01 GMT

I'm no expert on war or terrorism, but...

After watching last night's Republican debate, I don't think any of them know what they're talking about either.

So here's what I think we can do about "defeating ISIS."

Starve them of publicity. Stop building them up as some kind of worthy opponent. They're a fly. We're the United States of America. The last remaining superpower. They're nothing. They occupy a town in Syria and one in Iraq. We've got thousands of towns that size in the US.

Get some good old American Internet trolls to hassle them on Twitter. That might help.

Best idea I've heard yet, drop bales of marijuana over their territory. Send them comic books and snacks, Doritos and Twinkies. More weed. Keep it coming. Rolling papers. Bob Marley music. Toots and the Maytalls. Peter Tosh.

Defuse the situation.

And ISIS didn't attack us you dummies. Some young disaffected people who read up on how to be badasses did it, maybe on an ISIS blog, or maybe they even went there to learn. But ISIS isn't really a country. They aren't significant enough to be our enemy.

The web can overpower silos if...

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 21:16:41 GMT

The other day I wrote that silos were ruining the web, but I just realized that it's the web that will ruin the silos, if we get our shit together.

Think about it. What is it that makes the web so great?

Linking.

What is it that silos will not do.

Same thing. Linking.

So if linking is really powerful, and it is, imho -- then it should overpower the silos.

Here's the problem.

Linking hasn't gotten an upgrade in many years.

That's not to say an upgrade isn't possible, it is.

But it takes two (or more) to make it happen.

I can't link to anything in a new way if it isn't ready to be linked to in that way. And what we need for that to happen is collaboration.

When news reboots, hopefully..

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 19:53:27 GMT

John Robinson notes that his local paper is much slower than Facebook and Twitter, often reporting local stories two days after it appeared on social media. What's the solution? Not sure there needs to be one. The news is getting where it needs to go. Maybe what's needed is a purpose for a professional news organization.

Problem for them is that they have exaggerated their role. They are aggregators of information and perspectives that we have. The people. We give them what we have and their value is in accurately transferring that information, something they do really poorly in my experience. They don't even seem to try. You hear it all the time, when the news reports on something that you know, the story is unrecognizable.

A great example, for me, is the oft-repeated wrong origin story of podcasting. They get the story from other news people, even crediting themselves for things that tech people did! Why not. They have the power, they think.

So I say good riddance. Hopefully if they are replaced, let them be replaced by people with more humility about their role, and more interest in getting the story right.

What if JavaScript had persistent globals?

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 19:18:25 GMT

Listening to Brendan Eich's interview about the origins of JavaScript, our languages, UserTalk which is embedded in Frontier and JavaScript, the one he embedded in Netscape, syntactically, were quite close. So much so that when Danny Goodman, author of programming books, first saw JavaScript , he asked me if I had worked with them.

Brendan also talks about the what-if's, what if the timing had been different. Or what if he and I knew each other back then. I wonder what if some of the ideas that were baked into Frontier, at the deepest level, had made it into the browser.

For example, persistent memory. The browser has very little of it, through cookies, and then later through localStorage. But the PCs of the day could do a lot more than cookies. I know because in Frontier, first released in 1992, we made all globals persist between invocations of the the environment. So you didn't need to worry about loading and saving files to and from disk. If you created a global, it was there forever, until you deleted it. We did this with an object database, that was the second component of the environment that I implemented. The first, of course, was the outliner, which was used for editing everything from code to menubars and to browse and edit the object database.

This led to some interesting places, and made bigger projects more easily approached by small teams or individuals. Ones that would have been too complex otherwise. I can really feel that now that I am working in JavaScript, 20-plus years later, and my environment doesn't have persistent globals.

How close did we get? Well, a good-size piece of Frontier was integrated in Netscape, thanks to Aleks Totic, an important feature we called menu sharing, which allowed one app to insert a menu into another. We used this feature to add script-written commands to Netscape's menus. This made content management much more facile, a precursor to the Edit This Page button, in 1999, that was the basic feature of blogging software.

My many bots

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 14:22:28 GMT

Podcatch -- the latest podcasts from the feeds my friends follow.

TechBlast -- subscribes to feeds that focus on tech news.

NBA River -- news about basketball.

MLB RIver -- baseball.

There are also two RSS-based Twitter feeds my software maintains:

NYT -- it's been running on and off since 2006, news headlines and links from the New York Times.

NBA -- the Twitter version of the NBA river.

On being appreciated

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 14:06:33 GMT

Over on Facebook, a longtime friend pays tribute to my past accomplishments, mostly 20 years ago, but blows by the work I'm doing now.

A bunch of people Like the post.

It feels like a funeral to me.

Another story...

A close friend from childhood who I see every couple of years for a few minutes, says he knows me very well! To prove it he tells a story of how I was so entertaining, as a child. This also feels like a funeral. I'm not that child anymore. Sure some of who I am originated in that child. But I'm an adult now. Lots of life has passed by since then.

One more story...

I have friends who were children twenty years ago. I had lunch with one of them last weekend. It's wonderful to see what a nice young man he has become. Very very different from the little boy I used to know. Nothing wrong there. People grow up, and they change. I have an idea where this person came from. But that's not where he is now.

So to my friends on Facebook, please, if you love me, know that I am still alive! I am creating new stuff. Stuff you would like, I think, if you looked. Here's one of them, Happy Friends, a mailbox-style reader for Twitter. I can't imagine life without it. It helps me keep up with friends who post infrequently on Twitter. Some of the most valuable friendships I have.

Plot of the new Star Wars movie

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 02:39:23 GMT

The stars from the old Star Wars make appearances. Now they're generals and senior advisors and such.

The good guys fight the bad guys. Things look really bad. But somehow miraculously, and with fantastic special effects, the Federation survives and scores a huge win for justice and freedom. But the threat of the Dark Side is still there.

The old timers get together for one last laugh and admit they can't really do it anymore, turning the franchise over to the new heros.

Electron for Chromebooks?

Sun, 13 Dec 2015 18:55:03 GMT

Chromebooks are super popular.
I'm only now getting a sense for that.
So here's the question. Can you use Electron to develop apps for Chromebooks?
It seems it should be possible. It seems it should be an almost ideal way to package Chromebook apps.
Unless Chromebooks don't have a filesystem.
Maybe every app is in a sandbox. Probably is. But couldn't that sandbox be a filesystem.

More on the creation story of podcasting

Sun, 13 Dec 2015 17:08:09 GMT

It's fun to guess what people and companies are going to name their product or guess at where showrunners are going to take their stories.

A fantastic example. Todd VanDerWerff wrote in Vox, before the last episode of Mad Men aired, the actual ending of the show. It was an amazing accomplishment. I remember watching the finale and gasping at how amazingly right the guy was. I felt a little envy. But mostly I was impressed (also with the elegance of the story, no spoilers). It was a historic, epic accomplishment. Thinking about it now gives me goosebumps.

Now, no one confuses the predicting of the name of a product, or the plot of a TV serial, with actually naming the product, or developing the plot. When Apple came out with its phone, people were already calling it the iPhone. But it was Apple that named it the iPhone, not the people who predicted it would be called iPhone. No one would ever be confused about this.

Correctly guessing the name of a product is not the same thing as naming the product.

To Tow Center re podcasting

Sat, 12 Dec 2015 17:36:23 GMT

I just sent an email to a friend at the Tow Center re their guide to podcasting, that appears to have come out today. I felt it was good enough to put here too.

Not surprising they misunderstood how podcasting came to be, based on who they spoke with.
It's an important story because it's an open uncontrolled technology. You don't have to please Zuck or Dorsey or Tim Cook or anyone else.
No algorithms. No control. How did that happen?
They don't even seem to know or care that it did happen.
This is what you all should be teaching, that there are ways to do journalism that don't have to be controlled by the tech industry. That is not part of the story you tell, but imho it is the most important part.
The upshot of the lack of control: There are lots of discovery apps coming online for podcasting. If it were controlled like content that flows through Facebook or Twitter, there would be room for only one discovery algorithm. I offer my own podcatch.com as an example.
For the future -- freedom of the press. Ultimately Facebook and Twitter are going to exert more control over what flows over their wires. We need new mechanisms that circumvent that control. Podcasting is ready-made for this. But we have to study and appreciate this, not bury it.

PS: Here's a 20-minute podcast I did in Sept on the origins of podcasting.

Silos are screwing up the Internet

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 17:10:26 GMT

Here's how I know it.

Facebook really wants you to post all your stuff to Facebook. Same with Twitter, Medium, probably others. These are just the ones that exert pull on me at this time.

That's why they don't want to put APIs on their services. But to get some of the content they want they have to put on the APIs.

We know this is awkward because when someone comments on my stuff on Medium, the chances I'll see it are really small. On the other side, when I see a post on Facebook that originated on Twitter, I'm not likely to attach an idea onto it, because I'm pretty sure the person who wrote it won't see it.

This will keep going on until there is a default place to post. It's why we gravitate toward default places to post. It's why at least in my world we all post our public code to GitHub.

Of course this sucks. Because GitHub is a company and they may decide someday to only host projects that support a particular political belief. They may find a way of saying it that makes me sound like a bad guy if I won't support their cause. Then I will be torn. Remove my work, or go ahead and accept their requirement. It will be a tough choice when that day comes.

Because we've lived with this approach for the whole life of the Internet, there's always been this problem with posting in multiple places, there are all kinds of systems we can't build. Pipes that go from my hub for all things related to biking to someone else's hub for all things related to meatball heroes. How do we know there are no connections here? There might be. But these places don't exist. Can't exist. Because we split the world up in a different way. The person isn't important, isn't the central organizing structure. Facebook is.

I said before the only places that pull me are Facebook, Twitter, etc. Not true. For food deliveries there's Seamless and Delivery.com. For car rides it's Lyft and Uber. For travel there's Kayak and Expedia.

Maybe Amazon has the right idea. They sell everything. If something new comes along eventually they will sell it. But they kicked Wikileaks off AWS when the government yelled at them. They like to sell web services to the CIA so there goes Wikileaks. That's the GitHub problem. I looked the other way when it happened on AWS. But it makes me worry about leaning too hard on Amazon.

If we could get neutral places on the Internet, with no business models attached to them and no ownership we could create some important new stuff. What? We won't know until we have it.

BOTY coming sooooon

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 21:32:39 GMT

Blogger of the Year coming up in a week or so, certainly before the end of the year.

I have my choice already picked out.

It's not so much the blogger this year, but the blog post.

Stay tuned. ;-)

Trump is the American ISIS

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 21:05:18 GMT

Here's how I got there.

First, we are as damaged by the war in Iraq as Iraq is.

What we lost -- our sense of invincibility. People of my generation already had lost it, through the Vietnam War. But there's a new generation that doesn't remember Vietnam, and didn't learn the lesson. That's what Iraq did for them.

After Iraq kicked our ass, we did what we did after Vietnam. We elected a President who wouldn't go to war. That's what we wanted in 2008. (I still want it, always will, but I'm not the majority.)

We forget so quickly. Or we can be urged to forget. Or a small portion of the country is so angry, so left behind, so wanting to return to medieval times, that they can pretend they don't remember.

Sound familiar? That's what ISIS is selling. Let's go back to a simpler time when our ability to kill each other with hand-held weapons is what mattered. This appeals to young men.

Trump probably isn't finished driving us into the brink. It's a step by step process. Next he's going to say it's too dangerous to let Muslims walk around, we need to round em up.

He doesn't run the government so he can't make that happen, and unless we're complete idiots (we might be) he won't. But his followers have guns, and they can create a lot of mayhem. Esp the young males.

My guess is he will go there. I would hope there would be a limit to how depraved he is, but so far if you had bet on there being a limit you would have lost.

Imagine being an American racist in 2008

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 18:35:45 GMT

Imagine if you were a white racist American in 2008.

I'm not saying you are a racist, just that there are racists. They have a right to be racist. That's one of the great things about this country. You can think what you want and even say what you want. That's protected.

Anyway, imagine you were one of them, and a black man named Barack Obama was just elected President of the United States.

Well, let's be clear about one thing -- as a racist, you just lost.

You lost. It finally happened. One of the worst things that could possibly happen. You are freaking out.

That's all I want to say here. It's something I never considered. I personally was so happy the day Obama was elected, it never occurred to me that there were people who felt exactly the opposite. But of course there were. And what you're seeing now in the Republican electorate is that coming into full bloom.

iPhone problem, help??

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 18:15:13 GMT

Update: The problem cured itself. I went away for a half-hour, left it plugged in, and came back, and it was booted up but not rebooting. First thing I did was initiate a backup. :-)

I'm having a problem with my iPhone 6s-plus.

1. I let the battery run down to empty.

2. Plugged it in to charge it up.

3. Wait a minute.

4. It starts up.

4. It shuts down.

5. Go to 4.

I left it alone for a half-hour and it's still doing it.

What do do?

Great gift for podcast lovers

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 17:28:05 GMT

I don't think I've ever recommended a holiday gift before, but I'm going to this year.

Velodyne vFree bluetooth headphones. $46. Excellent product.

I've had mine since April 2013, and paid $200. I buy headphones on a whim, so I have tried a lot of them. These are my everyday headphones. These are the ones I actually use. All the time. Every day.

Wireless headphones are the way of the future. I can't believe people are still using wired headsets.

This is a great gift for people who listen to music or podcasts on the go.

USPS sign-on fail

Sun, 06 Dec 2015 14:47:47 GMT

Signing up for usps.com was not pleasant and ultimately didn't get me the send-mail-via-email feature I was trying to sign up for.

They insisted my password has to have a lowercase and uppercase letter, a number and a punctuation character. Please, this is not very friendly, esp when I want to sign in via a mobile device whose keyboards are inefficient at case and special chars. I'm perfectly capable of generating a unique password that's highly random without any of those constraints.
When they asked me questions to prove my identity they asked about a mortgage I didn't have, and offered a set of streets I've never lived on. Clearly they think I'm impersonating myself, but they are the ones making a mistake. I never flunk these tests. I think it's because they're using my address, which is a rental, as a way of figuring out who I am. I think I just found out inadvertently who owns the mortgage on my apartment. Not a huge security leak, but it might be a leak. It's good that they're innovating, but it didn't work for me.
I'm no longer giving answers to "security" questions. I don't see why someone who knows where I was born should be able to read my mail, a fact that's on my Wikipedia profile page. These questions are a very weak link in our online security. Let's stop doing this! (Of course these are required, so I just gave wrong answers, saying I was born in Egypt, and my favorite sports team is the Canucks (not the actual answers I gave)).

You can't deprecate Broadway

Sun, 06 Dec 2015 13:55:16 GMT

Under an earlier post, Shrutarshi Basu asks:

Without being able to deprecate APIs, how do we go about fixing or evolving API specifications? What's a good way for API providers to learn from how developers are actually using (or not using their APIs) and make appropriate changes over time?

The answer is simply "no" you can't do it, there's no way. That's why you should be careful when designing a new format or protocol, because once you deploy, that's it, it's done, move on to something else.

Now that doesn't mean there won't be a competing format or protocol in the future. But I don't generally think this is a good idea. I have a motto "Two ways to do something is worse than one, no matter how much better the second way is." The reason is simple, you'll have to support the old way even if you've come up with a better way to do it. So you might as well just live with the original way. It's simpler for everyone.

Look at an example in the real world. In NYC we have a famous street called Broadway that runs approximately north-south most of the length of Manhattan, from the southern tip of the island to the Bronx and Westchester County. It's a very strange street in a city that's a grid of east-west streets and north-south avenues that all meet at right angles because Broadway runs on a diagonal. Everywhere it intersects with an avenue is a "square" (which aren't actually square, btw) and a huge traffic mess. It's mostly avenue but it has a bit of street in it too.

Broadway is weird but it's here to stay. It's an API to the buildings that were built along the street and to the subway lines and the complex of power, water and sewage lines that run underneath it, and more recently phone and computer networks. To deprecate Broadway would cause huge disruption in the city that grew up around it. Even so I imagine at some point early in the history of the city people debated whether such an odd road made sense, and argued that it should be replaced with an API that was more "modern." But it never happened. To this day Broadway, one of the world's most famous streets, thrives and bustles. Skyscrapers rise alongside it at the bottom of the island. Times Square is where the famous New Year's celebration takes place. All the way up to the northern edge of the city and beyond, the oddball road that's neither a street or an avenue occupies a place in the minds of developers and users, and it ain't going nowhere.

If your format or protocol takes off, you're stuck with it, but that's a good thing! Now we have a way to interop. All software is shitty and that includes formats and protocols. Embrace its weirdness. Because the weirder it is the more likely it is that it's doing its job.

BTW, while Broadway itself stays where it is, the things built around it change all the time! It was originally the Wickquasgeck Trail, used by Native Americans, it wandered through woods and swamps. The road developed when the Dutch first settled Manhattan, when it was called New Amsterdam. Back then it was a dirt road that started in 17th century village. Today there are amazing structures built along Broadway, even in my lifetime the world of Broadway has been transformed several times.

New York is a city of constant change. But it accomplishes that by holding some things constant. It's a good model for platform evolution.

The APIs worth building on are the ones that no one can fuck with

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 15:54:18 GMT

On Hacker News the question of when should a platform vendor deprecate an API. Reminds me of a question a dentist once asked me. Which of your teeth should you floss? Only the ones you want to keep. (He answered his own question, witty fellow.)

So the answer for the platform vendor is really simple.

If you want to deprecate an API, maybe you shouldn't be in the API business at all? Because when you deprecate, the developers will wonder, next time, when you will pull the rug out from under their work.

They will have to guess how much use the API will get. And how much is enough for you? How can they possibly gauge that? Maybe next year someone else will be in charge. Maybe they won't like or understand the API. Maybe they don't really tell us the reason they're deprecating. Maybe use has nothing to do with it? Maybe they have a chance for some cred within your organization, and having their name on some "new" technology is a way to do that?

It's a funny game. Really imho the only APIs you can trust are ones that no one owns, where there isn't a single vendor implementing it. That was one of the reasons why I froze RSS in 2002. I wanted to build on it, and didn't want to go back and have to continually re-implement the same functionality because some company or working group at the W3C wanted to rip up the pavement.

A different kind of blogging

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 15:27:01 GMT

I posted this on Facebook a year ago. Worth saving.

I've got a new product designed in my mind. Now I have to get it to appear in software. The idea is this -- I am going to tell a story over many hours or days, even years, and keep coming back to it, maybe a month from now, with a new idea to add.

It should of course be easy for me to do this, but it should also pop up on the radar of people who follow me. In context, along with all the other stuff I've written on this topic.

And -- key point -- I must be able to reorganize it at any time to make a coherent story for a newcomer. Simple reverse-chronology is not good enough.

News industry v Sources Go Direct

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 14:02:18 GMT

Thanks to Mathew Ingram for crediting me with the observation, going back many years now, that the impact of the Internet on journalism is more than just a more efficient distribution system, of news to readers. It's also more efficient at routing information and ideas from sources of news to users of news. This is what I called Sources Go Direct.

I first really felt that when I was running an anchor desk from my house in California on 9/11. I had a great connection with lots of people who were in harm's way in NYC. I was able to make a contribution to the flow of news by simply routing it from the people who had it to the people who wanted it.

It wasn't hard. It was access journalism. I had access to the sources, and I just moved what they were reporting out onto the wire.

In reality that's all journalism ever was. Taking information from sources and publishing it. The Internet makes easier and less expensive. It takes all the glory out of it, which is a good thing imho.

As a software developer, through my work in blogging, podcasting and RSS, I have been able to make the tools better at supporting this model. And there's a way for the existing news industry to participate, but they are clinging to the outdated model, the idea that their front page is a thing. Point offsite from a river of the news sources you follow. That's how you create the next wave of news systems. The tech industry is going this way, quickly now. But it's still not too late.

What if...

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 02:19:14 GMT

What if the tech industry had sprouted in a bike-friendly city like Amsterdam or Copenhagen. We might be working on whole new concepts for cities instead negotiating a compromise with urban sprawl. It's as if Robert Moses won after all.

Suggestion for Dropbox-chasers

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 19:41:45 GMT

With all the companies chasing Dropbox, and the cost of online storage going steadily down, you have to wonder why this stone has gone unturned. There's a killer service lurking out there. I wish it existed.

It's a Dropbox clone. You can move files in and out of folders using the file system software and they sync with other systems that are also running the software.
Some portion of the folder structure is clearly marked as public. In Dropbox this used to be called the Public folder. I have one, but I think new Dropbox accounts starting a few years ago stopped having them.
Items in the Public folder can be accessed over the web.
And (this is the feature none of them have as far as I know) you can assign a domain name to any branch of that folder. It should be easy to do, right-click on a folder, enter the name, click OK. (Charge money for each domain you map. It's worth it.)
Extra credit if you also act as a domain registrar because that can take a hairy step out of the configuration, mapping the domain to the IP address of the server. For programmers this is no problem. For non-technical users, it's achievable, but it would be nice if the service could do it for you. For a fee of course! :moneybag:

Caveats

Please read before saying you can almost do it using with some combination of complex software. Yes we've been through this before.

Coming close is not good enough. I already know how to configure a server to host my files. This feature isn't for me, it's for users.

It's not a "third party opportunity" -- it has to be part of the whole system.

Interviewer: Put a sock in it

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 16:08:37 GMT

If you work as an interviewer Rule #1 is "Let the other person speak."

Put a sock in your mouth if you have to.

So many professional interviewers don't know how to do this.

An example: a recent Today Show interview with Linda Ronstadt. It's so hard to watch.

Update: Here's a much better interview with Ronstadt.

Time to stop the NRA

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 12:59:41 GMT

What's needed is a Republican style campaign to put the blame for the NRA on specific Republican leaders. Drill it in. Repeat over and over. Kill their political careers. Make it impossible for any ambitious Republican to get in bed with the NRA. Time to stop fighting fair.

Daily News front page

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 02:08:05 GMT

Is it terrorism?

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 01:54:46 GMT

The question of whether it's terrorism or not depends on the motives of the perpetrator.

If their purpose is to manipulate the emotions of the survivors to be fearful, and to use that to influence political, economic or war choices, then it's terrorism.

Doesn't matter who's doing it.

If they had some other purpose it's not terror.

Podcast: My online tribes

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 16:33:51 GMT

The opening segment on the latest This American Life is a real eye-opener. Mostly because I see my own online behavior modeled in the way a group of teenage girls use Instagram.

As a result I'm thinking differently about how I use Twitter and Facebook, and am more clear on what I want from each of my villages, the online tribes I belong to.

I recorded a 12 minute podcast to explore the ideas that came to me.

If you use social media, you should listen to both.

This is a test post

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 16:02:56 GMT

I am testing a new feature. Please forgive the intrusion.

Previously, we were very cavalier about whether or not to include a post in the RSS feed. We would include it as soon as it got a title. But that might not be optimal. Maybe we don't want it in the feed at that time? Maybe we never want to include it in the feed?

And if we never include it in a feed, why shouldn't it have a story page? They are useful, even for items that are not yet published. Maybe I want to send someone a pointer to the post? This change will pave the way for that possibility.

Bottom-line: It is now more predictable for the author as to when an item appears in a feed, if ever. I can give an item a title, and until I choose the Publish command in the popup menu, it won't appear in the feed. I am going to test that now. check

Now I'm going to Publish it. And it should then appear in the feed. check

This feature is good-to-go.

How to Reply

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 14:25:10 GMT

To post a reply to a Scripting News story.

Sign in with Twitter. Choose the last command in the rightmost menu in the menubar. Go through the usual authorization dance.

Choose the Reply command in the popup menu in the title-line of the story.

The interface is deliberately difficult at this point because the moderation tools are limited. I want to slowly build community here, to get a feel for what we'll need in that area.

I added a link to this story in the Stuff menu on each story page.

Memory leaks in Node

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 14:11:53 GMT

I have a Node.js question today, regarding memory leaks.

I have a Ubuntu machine on EC2 with 18 processes running in forever.

One of the processes produces a server log that shows the amount of memory available. When it started, a bit over 24 hours ago, it showed there was over 800MB of memory free. Now it's showing 450MB free.

The number fluctuates, but the trend clearly is down.

Restarting the app doesn't change the amount of free memory, which was a surprise. If there was a memory leak I would expect this number would immediately go back to 800MB.

Perhaps there is a leak in one of the other 17 processes?

I have no experience debugging memory leaks in Node, though I have a lot of experience with it in other environments.

I'm wondering how people approach debugging JavaScript memory leaks? Is it something to worry about? I imagine bad things will happen if this number were to hit zero.

If you have an idea, please post a comment.

The web as it was in 1999

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 01:22:48 GMT

oldweb.today is a fascinating site.

Here's a link that opens Netscape Navigator on the Mac, circa 1999.

It opens the home page of Scripting News on October 4, 1999, as it looked then, thanks to archive.org. (That link takes you to my archived version of that page. The content is exactly the same, but my version has been rendered through a more modern template.)

The links work, they take you to places on the web as they were on that day.

Here's a screen shot in case it's hard to get through to the site. I imagine they have a bunch of virtual computers running those old browsers? It would be interesting to know how they do it.

This is a test

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 21:26:34 GMT

Who needs attention!

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 18:22:16 GMT

I'm posting the things I used to post to Twitter and Facebook here.

I went to all the trouble to create software that was good at what they do, even better in some ways, now I'd better use it.

The only way it's important to post to Facebook and Twitter is that I might be missing some attention. But since everyone in those places is doing the same, I'm wondering if there actually any attention to be had! :-)

Annie

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 17:56:27 GMT

http://scripting.com/2015/12/01/annie.png

Be the change

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 16:17:55 GMT

If you think the quality of discourse on the social net is low, as so many do, then you owe it to yourself and everyone else to do something about it.

The technology has so much potential, and it's wasted if all we do is post reminders of what team we're on.

Better yet: don't be on a team at all!

Think for yourself.

Be a party of one.

Say something thought-provoking.

Ask questions.

Leave out the point.

Choose a creative place to post. It can add extra value to your idea.

Be a magnet to attract people to places that have something special.

It's another instance of “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”

You want change. Go ahead. Change.

It really is that simple.

Server switchover

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 02:07:33 GMT

I just switched the server running 1999.io.

The reason is technical. On the original server, the software running on port 80 didn't have the ability to proxy. On the new machine I'm running PagePark, which has that ability.

As a result it should now be possible to read my blog from behind a firewall that blocks web access to ports other than 80. To test that, I've changed the constant in Scripting News to omit the port. It seems to work, but I don't have a corporate style firewall.

Update: It has been verified to work by people who reported the problem.

You know what they say...

Still diggin!

WebSockets connection to scripting.com

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 22:32:29 GMT

Last week I posted the first update on 1999.io, the software I'm using to write this blog. It's coming along well, so it's time for a second update.

This update is for the programmers, although if you're not a programmer, you're totally welcome to listen in.

It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!

Remember that old SNL skit for Shimmer that's a floor wax that's also a dessert topping? Well 1999.io is like that. It's a blogging tool, but it's also a chat application. In fact it started as a chat app, and it became a blogging app. Basically because, as you know, everything I work on eventually becomes a blogging app. It's what I do.

And I also like to create developer toolkits to show others how they can plug into my work, and that's what I'd like to show off today.

A demo app

Here's a web page that contains a JavaScript app that's designed to run in the browser.

It opens a WebSockets connection with the 1999.io server, asking to listen to all the updates for the scripting channel.

When I post something new on this blog, or someone posts or updates a comment, you'll be notified, and will get a copy of the JSON source for the post.

You can try it out by posting a comment under this post. Modify it whenever you want to see something happen in the demo app.

Notes

The code is running in the browser, but it could just as easily run on a server, in Node.js.
The thing to observer is how instantaneous it is (that is if everything is working, knock wood).
Here's the GitHub repository containing the source.
And here's a bookmark for the place in the code where it gets interesting.

A case study in talking points

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 19:21:29 GMT

I referred to "white American Christian terrorists" in a post.

Which got this response from a user named WoodburyDave.

Who are you thinking are the white American Christian terrorists? I am aware of many American secularists who have engaged in mass shootings in the US, as well as, sadly, people who are mentally ill and whose shootings can't really be ascribed to any rational cause.

It's an invitation to debate. But I don't do debates, esp not on my own blog that I pay to host. But it is worth noting how beautifully he carves things up. First, he acknowledges there are such things as Christian terrorists. But he can't think of one. Do you know of any, he wonders.

My use of the term was packed with meaning that he is ignoring, choosing to debate a different question. My point is better-made if there aren't any Christian terrorists. I'm applying the same care with the term that others use for Muslims. Maybe Muslim terrorists are all mentally ill too? Or maybe there aren't any? Shouldn't we cut Muslims the same slack we do for home-grown terrorists who are Christian? Maybe their religion or culture is as irrelevant as WoodburyDave thinks it is for American Christians? I don't hear the Republican candidates for President saying that, however, and they aren't saying it on Fox News either. They've said it the other way. If someone is Christian then they're not a terrorist (Jeb Bush).

Obviously the subtext of my piece was that there is a huge obvious glaring contradiction here. I am not Christian or Muslim, as I am not Republican or Democratic. So I see it better than a partisan would. They're practically condemning people for being Muslim. This is criminally unfair, and also very unwise.

I don't like debating, esp with talking points, which is what WoodburyDave posted here. But I thank him, because his comment gave me the reason to put in moderation. It's time. ;-)

Podcast: Next steps for River4

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 17:36:44 GMT

I recorded a 20-minute podcast about next steps for River4 .

My goal is to make some decisions about the best easiest configuration, so we can get people up and running faster. Even people who aren't very technical.

Right now there are too many choices. I want to narrow those.

This message was initially posted to the River4 mail list. If you want to contribute please consider joining the list.

Also, I apologize for the low volume on this recording. I was inadvertently recording through my Bluetooth headphones on my desk. I sometimes forget to switch the iPhone back before doing these podcasts. So please turn the volume up. ;-)

Knicks without Melo

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 16:27:42 GMT

Okay I do care if the Knicks win, but my primary goal in watching basketball is to see a good game, and last night's overtime loss to the Rockets was that. It was dramatic because Melo was out with a sickness, and that made it possible for the other Knicks to shine.

I prefer the Knicks without Melo. It's a more balanced team, harder to defend. You don't know where the shot is coming from. With Melo on the court, the center of gravity is undeniable. He's going to get the ball. And no one can shine brighter.

And KP isn't shining as bright as he was a couple of weeks ago, and that's fine. He's a young dude in his rookie season. Give him a year or two, if he doesn't get injured, before judging him.

The corner is turned

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:29:45 GMT

Good morning sports fans!

The corner-turn I talked about yesterday is done.

I'm happy to report the new WebSockets code is in the server and seems to be working reliably.

Now we can try to answer the question: Is this a blogging system or a chat system? Because the updates are wired, you get them as immediately as if you were using chat. Writing in the app feels like Twitter or Facebook. And it's built around a CMS, and you can use styling and links, items can have titles, and there's an RSS feed. The server is open source.

Next step: I have to move the server to a different machine, so I can resolve another problem. But I want to let these changes settle in a bit first.

You know how this ends....

Still diggin!

The Plutocrat vs Hitler 2.0

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 21:33:04 GMT

Jeb is full of it because there's basically no difference in the kind of government you'll get from Hillary Clinton and a garden variety Republican presidential candidate. Cruz, Rubio, Christie, Bush or Clinton will fill the job description more or less the same way. We learned that with Obama. Style differences, not very substantial.

So Jeb is a crazy lunatic asshole idiot country-fucker, if he really would work for Trump's election over HRC, because Trump truly is a different breed, and if he were elected we'd be in for a rough ride, even compared to what we've been dealing with the last few years.

We have big problems to address. Climate change. Loose nukes. Internet meltdown, all coming soon. HRC would probably give us some leadership, and honestly probably so would the others. They will all rob the country blind, and further enrich the plutocracy, but if the only other choice is electing Hitler 2.0, I think I'd go for the plutocrat.

PS: But at least Jeb made some headlines. Probably what he was actually trying to do. :-)

Emoji now work properly

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 21:24:16 GMT

Previously, you would enter an emoji code in some text and when you posted, it would be converted to an image. If you edited the text the emoji code would be gone replaced by the image. If you then saved again you'd often get garbage.

Not. Good.

Now it works more rationally.

When the item is rendered, the emoji codes are evaluated. But when you edit them, you see the codes and can change them.

:kiss: :collision: :heart: :boom:

Happy!

PS: If you're reading this in an RSS app you may see the codes too. Depends on whether the reader groks emoji codes. Here's the original post on my blog so you can see what I'm talking about.

PPS: You can test it by posting a reply and entering some emoji codes.

Corner-turns and discontinuity

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 12:40:51 GMT

So many people want to learn to program these days, so I feel more inclined to share what I've learned about programming over the years.

Early in my career I came up with a motto: discontinuities suck.

It's an idea that's borrowed from calculus, which is the study of continuous functions. A discontinuity occurs at a point where a function has no derivative. I'm amazed I still remember that. I was not a great math major, but that's what I was and some of it sunk in. I guess.

Anyway in programming, you try to avoid discontinuities.

But if you can't you create a safety net by taking a backup before you start a project, no matter how small. I do this these days by making it very easy to do one. I just choose a menu command. A second later I'm backed up.

Being backed up means if you get out on a limb and it breaks, instead of having to run the shattered version of the software, you can quickly go back to the last version that worked.

Now you make a change, and maybe another, and test at every step, and still you will release new code that's broken. Stuff that used to work no longer works.

The thing you try to avoid is making a huge change to an app, something I used to think of as a brain transplant, but now call a corner-turn, a move that's so risky that you're likely to have users seeing something broken while you try to fix it in realtime. A discontinuity. You think this doesn't happen to everyone? It does. Some companies like Apple, ship broken operating systems so consistently that people identify themselves by how much breakage they're prepared to endure. My own tolerance is very low. I honestly don't think OSes are worth upgrading. They don't change enough in useful ways to endure the pain of using a system that has a broken feature that you depend on. Microsoft is even worse these days. They try grand experiments like removing the Start menu. I can't imagine what they were thinking. Totally amateur product evolution. A crazy person designed Windows 9, I'm convinced.

Anyway, I had a big corner-turn to make, and decided to do it over the Thanksgiving weekend. That way if everything broke, at least people would feel they had something better to fall back on, like bingeing on The Wire or Orange is the New Black. And in fact, I did break it. And am right now waiting for the software to die again, this time with some new instrumentation in it, so I can possibly better observe the failure!

I do believe I have a good backup, and if I can't figure out what the problem is, I can revert, and Monday morning be running the tried-and-true version of the server. But I actually expect I will debug this, and we'll have turned the corner, and be ready for some new breakage! Hah. It really is a dark art, programming.

I like to think I get better at programming, but maybe I don't really. I haven't figured out how to avoid these critical sections, yet.

Still diggin!

PS: Programmers often type "borked" instead of "broken." It's because for some reason your mind wants to type the word that way, and rather than back up and fix it, you just leave it alone. In every instance in this piece where I typed broken it started as bork instead. Because I care about the English language, I fixed it, instead of being cute.

PPS: A few hours later, I found two problems. One of them probably was the reason the server would crap out after 50 minutes or so. Feeling kind of confident in this corner-turn.

PPPS: Update on Monday morning. The server seems to be running well.

Blogging as a literary form

Sat, 28 Nov 2015 22:21:11 GMT

What if in the future we thought of blogging as a literary form?

If we taught courses in public writing on blogs?
Good use of links.
Building community.
Different voices. Active vs passive.
Style.
What if we had blog writer's retreats?
If we studied the kinds of tools that work best?
Connections with technology? (I would totally benefit from that.)
What if literary writing, like news writing, is going to be captured in silos like Facebook? Is this inevitable? A desirable outcome?

I was thinking -- we have writers retreats for people who write plays, for poets, maybe song writers? Is online writing a dead-end (I don't think so) or will it be supported by traditions developed for other kinds of writing?

A linguist for Reliable Sources?

Sat, 28 Nov 2015 22:10:31 GMT

A suggestion for Brian Stelter for tomorrow's Reliable Sources show.

Find a linguist to do a quick study of reporting on the Colorado Springs shooter, compared with the reporting on the Paris shooters, and tell us about the differences in the language used.

In his or her opinion, what if the Colorado Springs shooter had been dark-skinned, would the language have been different? If he had been African-American? An immigrant?

What if he had been Muslim?

How different would the reporting have been?

My theory based on my own non-expert opinion is that we are far more tolerant of white American Christian terrorists.

BTW, please don't recruit one Republican linguist and one Democratic linguist. It seems like this is more of a scientific question, one that can be answered, without the usual indecisiveness and lack of conclusion of much TV journalism.

A better WebSockets demo

Fri, 27 Nov 2015 19:32:52 GMT

After a few weeks' experience with WebSockets in JavaScript, I've put together a better demo that shows how they are used in a real application.

All the demos I found left out an important part, how to know, from the client, if the server disappeared, and more commonly how to know from the server if the client disappeared. Once you have both these under control you can achieve the promise of WebSockets, with an always-open connection and the server piping data back to the client as soon as it's available.

Here's the new demo app, client and server:

GitHub: betterWebSocketsDemo.

I plan to use this code in 1999.io, that's why I want a code review. If you know what's going on with WebSockets please have a look and let me know if you see anything wrong, or inefficient. Thanks!!

Is Medium the threat to WordPress?

Fri, 27 Nov 2015 15:57:32 GMT

I've heard it said that the new release of WordPress is a response to Medium, something I hadn't thought of at first. After pondering it a bit I decided that if it is, it's misguided.

Medium might be a threat to WordPress, if there were no Facebook. But Facebook is there, and WordPress's customers are under a lot of pressure from Facebook, given that many of them are news publishers, and if WordPress wants to keep them, they need to evolve to help them survive the challenge, by keeping the independent and open web both independent and open.

Medium must also be a little freaked about the Facebook juggernaut. After all, what does Medium do that Facebook doesn't already do on a much larger scale?

Please go back to Hoder's excellent piece, which I think should be right up there with Barlow's Declaration, as one of the seminal pieces of the web, even though it was written just this year. It reminded me that what Facebook is offering is not the web and it isn't the blogosphere, although at first you might be tempted to say it is. (I did say that myself in a discussion on Rebooting the News a few years back, I was wrong.)

Both Medium and WordPress offer the ability to link from a word to another page. As Hoder reminds us this most basic of features of the web. I called this Holding Hands in Cyberspace in 1996. It is the central idea in my Rule of Links piece I wrote for the inaugural BloggerCon. Yes, Facebook provides links in the rarely-used Notes feature. But the typical Facebook post doesn't have them.

Also, both WordPress and Medium offer discovery, as does Facebook with its timeline, although Medium's is better developed. WordPress clearly understands that it needs to provide this function. I would like to see them lead their customers into producing their own rivers. I see this as essential to not letting Facebook run away with the whole thing.

WordPress and Medium are small competitors to Facebook, and both have an investment in the open web. I'd like to see them work together to strengthen the open system against dominance by the silo. I think it's really not a good idea for them to view each other as the enemy. Later, when and if the web survives the challenge, we can talk about them fighting each other for dominance.

This is an instance of the Prisoner's Dilemma which was so well described by Benjamin Franklin: "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." It seems Franklin understood the tech industry, even in the 18th century.

Post-Thanksgiving binge

Fri, 27 Nov 2015 15:40:39 GMT

The first season of The Leftovers was a slog, although the last couple of episodes are really good. Now I'm through the first three episodes of season two, and I'm in full binge mode. Being a holiday weekend, I might just blow off work and watch the remaining five, and then patiently wait for the last two before moving on to something else.

I tried to get into Halt and Catch Fire, but I just can't do it. I have two disadvantages: 1. I am a programmer, so I know that a lot of the technology plots don't make much sense and I find that unsatisfying and 2. I was in the tech business in the period they're covering, and again, I don't believe any of the crazy bullshit they were doing in the show. It has a few moments here and there that are compelling, but not enough to make up for my disappointment and sometimes even disgust at the shortcuts they take.

One more thing, here's a list of twelve bingeable shows from The Verge. Lots interesting stuff on the list. I've watched Lost, the last show they recommend, and I liked it when it was on broadcast TV, but am pretty sure I wouldn't recommend it for a binge. I also watched the first episode of the Man in the High Castle, and I really didn't like it, maybe because I have read the Philip K Dick novel it's derived from, which was wonderful. I may give it another try based on their recommendation.

The View Source command of 1999.io

Thu, 26 Nov 2015 14:01:38 GMT

Did you notice there's a View Source command in the popup menu for each top-level message?

For example, here's the source of the previous post, a podcast about outliners and MS Word. You can see it's in JSON. And it contains all the replies to the post.

JSON is a simple text-based language that's roughly equivalent to XML. It's designed to be easy to process in JavaScript code, but you can read and write it from virtually any language or environment. It's a portable way of sharing computer-oriented information, and like XML it's also human-readable.

I needed this feature to help me debug the software, and decided to leave it in, because it might be useful in other contexts.

Podcast: Outliners vs MS Word

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 23:05:21 GMT

A bunch of people were discussing outliners vs MS Word on Facebook the other day, and I was just working on one of my apps, in my outliner of course, and I wanted to offer a real user-point-of-view of why it's so much better to edit structures in an outliner than in a word processor.

Not talking about quick memos, but projects you're going to work on for months or years. Where the quality of the organization and note-taking determines how far you can go, re complexity.

It's one of the reasons I am able to build such complex software structures, but the end result turns out to be something people can use.

So I recorded an 11-minute podcast on the subject of outliners. I talk mostly about how I use an outliner to write and manage code that I work on over many years.

PS: This was a Facebook post earlier today.

Another test of replying to posts...

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 21:02:13 GMT

Hello again.

I have been working on the editor, and have implemented a few minor fixes and one major fix. It should look and feel quite a bit tighter now.

So if you have a moment...

Log into the site choosing the last command in the menu at the right of the menu bar. If necessary.
Choose Reply from the popup menu next to my name, above.
Enter a little text, a Thanksgiving greeting perhaps.
Click on the text to edit it.
Click the thumb-up icon to Like this post.
Like your own reply!

Please report any problems.

Thank you!

Let Hoder talk to you for a bit...

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 19:54:00 GMT

Did you read Hoder's piece about saving the web?

He was in jail in Iran for six years, while the flow of the web was taken over by social media. That gave him a unique perspective on what was lost.

If you haven't read it, and you love the web, please clear 15 good minutes and sit down with a cup of coffee or whatever you like to drink and listen to him and think.

And yes, it is ironic that he put the piece on Medium, where they are hoping to do a bit more of the same unpleasantness to the web. But at least they support real hyperlinks unlike Twitter and Facebook.

Interview fake Trump

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 19:15:01 GMT

I have a solution for TV re Trump.

Instead of interviewing Trump himself, allowing him to talk over your challenges to his lies, just interview recordings of Trump, and interrupt him whenever you see fit.

The way Jon Stewart used to do it on Daily Show.

You don't need to give him, the person, actual air time.

About 1999.io (coming soon)

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 21:38:51 GMT

A few notes about the new blogging software I'm working on.

It continues on the same approach I took with Manila, and refined with Radio UserLand. A home page from which everything radiates.

A focus on simplicity, an intense level of factoring to reduce the number of steps it takes to post something new or edit an existing post.

I wanted the fluidity of Twitter and Facebook. It should be just as easy to create a new post as it is to write a tweet, of course without the 140 char limit.

Here's a screen shot of me editing the initial version of this post.

The central innovation of Manila was Edit This Page. I take that one step further in this product. If you see something that needs changing, just click, edit, Save. This is easier than Facebook, and of course editing posts is not possible in Twitter.

I think of this as the first post-Twitter post-Facebook blogging system.

The motto of the software: Blogging like it's 1999!

The name of the product: 1999.io.

PS: This is a 1999.io post.

New version of WordPress

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 21:32:30 GMT

The new version of WordPress -- released today -- is a Node app.

And they have a Mac desktop app.

I've tried them both, and they're really nice, and it's still WordPress.

The product has the same familiar organization and structure.

At the same time I'm finishing my own Node-based blogging system. It's really cool that WordPress is running in the same environment. There may be some interesting integrations possible as a result.

But first I have to ship. :->

The problem is America, not Trump

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 13:24:27 GMT

People are saying that the Trump campaign is turning Nazi.

I'd like to offer another theory.

It's turning American.

We in America paint the past as a Norman Rockwell painting. White, suburban, not too rich, but not poor either. Everyone dresses well. Grandpa smokes a pipe and grandma makes great apple pie. The kids play musical instruments and baseball.

But that is not our past.

We brought Africans to America to be our slaves. They didn't need yellow stars because their skin color was enough of a label. We beat them, chained them, murdered them, all the things Nazis did to Jews, over a much longer period of time.

We took our land from Native Americans and killed them too.

We victimize people because of where they come from, how they dress, what books they read, the god they worship, for being too liberal or loving the wrong person. We have done some terrible things here. So you don't have to go to Germany for prior art. There's plenty of it right here in the U.S. of A.

The problem isn't Trump. He's an opportunist. If people voted on issues, he would be a fountain of issues. But they don't. They vote for people who make them feel good and powerful and deserving of love.

The problem isn't Trump, it's America.

20 vs 60

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 13:13:05 GMT

I listened to an interview on NPR this morning with violinist Itzhak Perlman. They asked if he knew more about the violin now, as he turns 70, than when he was 20.

He said "no, but.." and paused.

At this point my brain filled in the answer.

"But I know myself much better!"

Turns out that isn't what he said, but it's still an important idea that I'd like to pass on to my younger friends (I am 60).

When you're 20 you don't even really see yourself. You and the world are the same thing. That's why young people feel there is such a thing as absolute right and wrong in all cases. The world seems simple. It's all about me! And anything that I don't like obviously is wrong, and anything I do like is equally obviously right.

What happens as you grow older is that this sense of being everything can fade away, and as it does, other people and things become visible. You see that there are lots of different types of people, with different experiences, different ways of viewing the world. You can delight in this, and learn from it, and use it to further define yourself.

At 60, I often laugh at myself: "Oh that's just something Dave does."

That would have never occurred to me at 20.

On the other hand, not to say there aren't wonderful things about being 20. Everything is so fresh and new, the world and time seem unlimited, and your abilities. Falling in love at any age is a miracle. And there are rewards that only come from knowledge and experience.

PS: I'm also a better writer at 60.

Podcast: Why Trump might win

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 19:35:54 GMT

A ten-minute podcast explains why Trump is the best bet to win the Republican nomination for President. And also, it's scary to think he might even be elected President.

It isn't about him, it's about us. Spoiler: The problem is that our lives are meaningless. We are desperately searching for meaning. Trump may be the only candidate that gets this.

They say it's a platitude that it's not about them, it's about you (the voters) but it's correct. The lock is the electorate, and the winner is the one with the best key. For now, that's Trump, and to a lesser extent Bernie Sanders.

Bump me baby!

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 19:21:02 GMT

Here's a feature request for Facebook and Apple.

You know how the Apple Watch bumps you when something happens. I like that feeling. It's a Pavlovian thing.
It would be really cool if there was a bump every time someone Liked something of mine on Facebook. No message, no explanation. Just a bump.

Trump happens

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 18:53:18 GMT

There used to be gatekeepers that made sure the crazy candidates looked crazy, but now they get to go direct.

Trump is what happens when social media becomes the platform for discourse.

I always thought Sources Go Direct was a good thing. But like all good things, there's a dark side too, I guess. Trump makes enough people feel good about themselves to quite possibly make him the Republican nominee.

Then the question is what's left of the Republican Party after that?

And of the United States too.

How to get flow

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 17:32:43 GMT

Here's a tip for publications looking for flow over social media..

Write interesting articles about how people use social media.
Even better, write stories about people are making money using social media.
Best of all, how they are getting screwed on social media, both in the good way and the bad.

Do I use Medium?

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 17:06:02 GMT

Hendrik Jeremy Mentz: "I like how @davewiner uses @medium: short, pithy bursts. See his posts on war and terrorism in particular."

Reading this was weird because I don't think of myself as posting to Medium, or that I am using Medium. More accurately, my posts fllow from scripting.com to Medium through RSS.

Then I thought about it a bit, let it sink in, and realized it appears to others as if I am posting there, so it's legit. I do use it. They read it there and that's how they experience my writing.

This is going to take some getting used to.

The Knicks are fun again

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 16:58:28 GMT

Carmelo wasn't on last night but the Knicks won anyway.

This Knicks plays like a team.

It has air supremacy, now with two big men, Lopez and Porzingas.

Porzingas changes everything. He makes shots from all corners, 3-pointers, sky hooks. No one is tall enough to block him, but he blocks shots gets rebounds and putbacks, and all around dominates. He's been in the NBA one month, so you have to wonder where he goes from here.

The Knicks always needed another star so the pressure wouldn't all be on Melo. Now they have it. And as a result all the other Knicks are playing better.

The Knicks are a hard team to defend this year. And that makes all the difference. And they're much more likely to get a second chance after missing a bucket.

Most important to this long-suffering Knicks fan, they're fun to watch!

My basketball karass

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 01:22:17 GMT

I should have a basketball karass, a group of 20 or 30 people I like to go to games with.
Every game should have an official place on the net.
When I go there I see my basketball karass and I can ask questions or make observations, or just scream about the Knicks.
My karass pals are mostly a virtual thing, but sometimes we all get on a plane and go to a game together, at an arena.
I want this now, but it'll probably all happen in the next few years.
I'd like to get a plug in for my nbariver.com site. It's the best place for news about the NBA.

New start for discourse on Scripting

Sat, 21 Nov 2015 15:16:53 GMT

I just made the next round of changes in the way Scripting News. Now you can reply to any post, by logging on via Twitter.

For now, it's open to anyone with a Twitter account. I plan to add a couple of layers of moderation, similar to the conventions we had when I was using Disqus for comments. Only the software will enforce a maximum length, and comments will visible to the author of the post (i.e. me), not public by default.

I've been doing this since the late 70s, so by now we know how this stuff works. If you have a wide-open comment system you attract trolls and spammers, and they keep the interesting ideas out. I am only interested in ideas and new facts. Not in recitals of talking points from MSNBC or Fox. Or CNN. Or anyone. I like thoughts. Not a "moral parade."

But for now I'm happy that the system seems to be working, however awkwardly. Lots of room for polish and thoughtful features.

Still diggin!

This is a test

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 19:19:48 GMT

If you're seeing this in an RSS reader or on Medium, please click this link if you want to help me test my new CMS.

Click the menu in the upper right corner, sign on via Twitter, the last command.
Choose Reply from the popup menu in the byline of the post, A little box should open up below the text.
Type something like Hello World in that box and press Return.
Then you should see the text on the page with your name above it.
If you click on the text you should be able to edit it. Press Return to save changes.
If you like it, click the Thumb-up icon to like it. (You know how that works.)

If it blew up on you somewhere in all that, please accept my apologies!

Change at home, not far away

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 16:52:47 GMT

It is becoming clearer that attacking ISIS in Syria makes as much sense as attacking Iraq did after 9/11. The source of the problem was in the US, not in Iraq. Just as the source of the problem in Europe is in Europe.

We can see it more clearly from our side of the ocean. Doesn't make it any easier to deal with.

And our problem in the US was and is in the US. The problem here is that oil and war make too much money for big corporations, and we're too comfortable in our spoiled lifestyles.

Maybe software can eat that problem too, but I kind of doubt it.

Poetry

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 12:14:02 GMT

I've heard that because of the 140-char limit, Twitter is filled with poetry and that if the limit were eased, there would be no more poems.

Places that send you away

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 15:32:41 GMT

Nick Bilton writes about Nick Denton and Ninja.

He says publishers struggle when they try to be tech companies.

Meanwhile Medium is kicking ass, imho -- and Nick (Denton) should be playing that game too. There's an opening for someone in publishing to challenge Twitter and Facebook in news distribution. It might as well be Denton. But it could just as easily be the Washington Post, or really any publisher who has some flow and a name with which to bootstrap a news system.

The key feature of such a news system is this: point off-site.

The same way My Yahoo kicked ass. The thing they were willing to do that other publishers weren't was to point to articles from their competitors. So you would go to Yahoo to find stories on CNN or MSNBC. Sounds weird to the ears of a publisher trying to create a destination site that's sticky.

But it is the way of the Internet -- People return to places that send them away. How do you think Google did it? Twitter? Facebook? They served as flow distributors before they were originators of news.

Now that Gawker is doing a restart, now would be a great time for them to get into the flow distribution business. Make a place that's great for getting the latest news whether or not it originates from Gawker. We can do a lot better than Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple in this area. A lot!

And before you get all cynical, think -- that's how new things start on the net, by breaking rules that were once considered sacred and delivering value to people with minds.

Podcast: The JavaScript console, hubris

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 15:07:37 GMT

A podcast about developing with a couple of ideas. 9 minutes.

If you are using a browser-based product as part of a development team, or for a developer you like, it's helpful to learn how the JavaScript console works. I explain what it is and briefly how it works.
I also tell the story of how nice it is when you make a big change to a product and it Just Works.

Postscript: This bit of hubris cost me. At the time I was bragging about it, the home page of my blog was broken as well as the display of the podcast itself. Murphy works in mysterious ways!

Your humble servant,

Uncle Davey

PS: I just noticed that the RSS feed hasn't been updating. Oy!

America's origin story

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 19:45:53 GMT

Fred Wilson sent a pointer to a comment on his blog from a young woman whose family emigrated to the US during the Gulf War.

A number of comments.

This is the origin story of America. Every one of us who is not Native American can trace our origin to a story like that one.
The US always responds the way the governors are responding. I grew up in a resentful environment in post-war NYC. My grandparents told of being shot as they crossed a frozen river in Ukraine, running from the Nazis.
Wave after wave of emigrants come, many through NYC and leave behind a richer country. This process defines who we are. That's the US. And the resentment is part of the US too.
Nothing ever is easy when it comes to human beings!

Re-thinking the 1999 blog in 2015

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 15:56:08 GMT

My next project is to do a model story page.

(The page you're reading right now is a story page.)

I always rush through this part quickly, and I did this time too. There are too many other fires to put out to focus too much on what a story page looks like and what it does.

This time around the story page is going to have new features that harken back to Manila, but with the benefit of knowing how the blogging market shaped up.

Tumblr, WordPress, Twitter and Facebook of course didn't exist when we did Manila, but they do now.

JSON is to XML as what is to Node?

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 15:25:20 GMT

When Adam Bosworth evangelized me on using XML in 1998 it was simply a way of representing data in a text-based format. Data in XML could go anywhere that text could, and that was a big deal, because the web was booming, and the thing it was best at was transmitting text.

I was reluctant to get involved, because it was being run by a bunch of big companies, and I had recently seen what they can do to simple ideas with the OpenDoc consortium. All of a sudden they become confusing messes when they get involved. They have their reasons, I don't want to get into that now.

I was told no matter what, I could use XML in the simple mode, with no schema or query languages, just as a way of transmitting data over text.

Sure enough the complexities came, but I held the line, with three simple formats: XML-RPC, RSS and OPML -- none of which built on the architecture astronaut protocols invented by the W3C working groups.

17 years later I would be in a meeting with people I really respect and they said loudly and passionately that they hate XML, for all the reasons I was concerned about in 1998. My point is and was, we've done a lot of building on XML, and the way we use it is exactly as if it were JSON, so really we're doing the same thing with XML that we're now doing with JSON. (All my new formats are JSON, but there's a huge base of continually updating data that's in the XML formats we use.)

The moral of the story is this. Watch out when you commit to a platform that has a major flaw. The flaw in XML was that it was being run by a consortium of large companies. And in Node it's the the way we do async calls, which I've come to love, the same way a smoker loves the way smoke burns his throat (spoken as a former smoker) and a victim of Stockholm Syndrome comes to love his tormentor.

I think I've done more complex async stuff in Node than 99.999 percent of the people who use it. I am kind of proud of this, though I know as a language implementor myself, none of it is necessary. The underlying OS could hide the messy details from the programmer. And get this, I have no doubt that a replacement will come along, very different from Node in every way, so none of our code works, but it will solve this problem in a neat way, burying the async stuff in an OS layer where it belongs, and all of a sudden we'll be using a backwater, semi-obsolete environment. I worry about this a lot.

In tech we love to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I have left a trail of hard-won victories behind me. It would be a lot easier if there was only one syntax that does what basic XML does. But we have two. And for the same reason, I see trouble ahead for Node.