I know this is "supposed" to be a tech blog, but let me tell you something. I was a rabid Knicks fan long before I had any interest in compilers or outliners or blogging tools. And the Knicks I loved were the legendary team that won two world championships and had the kind of depth and character that today's Knicks are showing. So I have some thoughts about today's Knicks, and I want to write them up.

I could write a long piece and I started to but it's really a simple idea.

I don't care if the Knicks win the championship this year or any year. What I care about is this team of young people who are shining. And the spirit of the team is something to behold. And there are two players that really don't belong. These are the two guys who, going into the 2012 season, were supposed to be the stars. They weren't doing it before, and they haven't gotten on board, and I don't want to wait. Because magic isn't something you screw around with. The Knicks have it now, but they need to clean up, and get focused. They have enough talent on the team that they can afford to do some grooming.

Bottom-line: Trade or put on waivers the two stars -- Stoudemire and Anthony.

And let's get on with the new Knicks.

 3/4/2012; 6:27:03 PM.

We shouldn't have to shorten urls. It's only because of a fairly selfish and unwise company in San Francisco that we're adding an extra layer of fragility to an already loosely-coupled network. Introducing another point of failure.

But with all that disclaimed, we still need url-shorteners.

And the point of url-shorteners is to be short.

The shorter the better.

Today I have got something working I've wanted to play with for a long time. Instead of using pages inside a site, like all other url-shorteners, I wanted to try having hostnames as short urls.

So here's a short url: 1.blork.ly. Try it, it works!

Now with an even shorter domain, blork.ly is not optimal, the names can be even shorter. But they're already 4 or 5 characters shorter than bit.ly urls. So it's off to a good start.

 3/3/2012; 9:16:29 PM.

 3/3/2012; 5:52:02 PM.

I mentioned this in passing in an earlier post, but it deserves special attention.

PandoDaily, a new publication spun out of the ashes of TechCrunch, ran a piece mocking the concerns about the lack of security for personal data on iPhones.

So, if they're really so unconcerned, considering that they probably use iPhones too, would they be willing to publish their address books, now -- today -- in entirety, without any editing. Every contact, phone number, address, email address, every bit of data they have put into their iPhones. So that everyone can see it?

Please include your calendar, and all photos. Remember, no editing, no selection. Everything on your phone is public, now.

And available for everyone to download.

If they do this, I will give $100 to Sarah Lacy's favorite Kickstarter project and express my admiration for the consistency of their philosophy.

Update: Hacker News thread on this topic.

 3/2/2012; 9:16:22 AM.

Sometime in the spring of 1997, the date is subject to discussion, a blog first appeared at www.scripting.com.

The one you're reading right now, Scripting News.

You'll find that no other blog has yet claimed 15 years on the planet. Just as five years ago we were first to reach the ten-year milestone.

It's tough being first because people don't know what to make of it.

Whether you think the first day was February 1, as Rudolf Ammann does (and he has done the research) or if you think as I do that it's April 1 (maybe because it gives me something non-idiotic to do on one of two blog holidays), the fact is this blog both has been here for a long time and has (the thing I'm most proud of) inspired many others to open their veins on the Internet for all to see!

BTW, my first blog-like site was DaveNet, started in October 1994. And there was also the Frontier News page, and the 24 Hours of Democracy site, all of which led to Scripting News. In terms of blogging tools, there was a parade of those as well. AutoWeb, Clay Basket, NewsPage, the website framework, Manila, Radio.

Dewey Defeats Truman

The random rotating header graphic for today is one of my favorites. Harry Truman holding up a newspaper saying he had lost the election, one that he had just won. I love it for so many reasons. First, don't be upset when everyone counts you out. I've had people say that my career was over, so many times, and so far they've always been wrong. You'd think by now they would stop predicting it, but nope -- they still think you can't be innovative, even when you've spent a life studying and practicing innovation.

They also said Truman was a shit president, but what did they know. Turns out he was one of our best presidents. He got us through all kinds of tough binds, and did it with an understated purely American grace. He looked meek, but he also gave em hell, and had something funny to say about it.

No one thought he could follow the great Franklin Roosevelt, who was indeed a great president. But he held his own and gave geeks all over America hope.

PandoDaily needs a clue

Read this piece if you're suffering from low blood pressure.

This is what a company town looks like. What matters is what the money people want. Our private info? Oh come on, lighten up.

Well, the problem is they're users too, in Silicon Valley, and their competitors, now that they know it's open season on contact info, photos and calendar info, are probably going to start going after it, if they haven't already done so.

Can't wait to see their tune change when they finally get a clue. Unless they're all willing to publish their address books now, in entirety, without editing? If they were willing to do that, well I'd eat my words.

Funniest picture ever?

I think this might be the most funny picture ever posted to this blog.

 3/2/2012; 8:48:29 AM.

Lately Republicans have gotten deeply intimately involved in female sexuality. I think they have a problem however, because they're being very gender-biased. I think it's time for us men to demand equal attention!

Men use contraceptives too. Let me explain how that works. Never mind. I assume we're all adults here.

Does the Catholic Church object to paying for vasectomies? I guess that gets right to the point.

How could the Republicans have missed this. If this is not about women, why are they always talking about female birth control?

They really drove themselves into a deep corner here. Hard to see how they dick their way out of this one.

 3/1/2012; 3:49:47 PM.

When we were looking at iPhones and address books, it turned out that every app on the iPhone was allowed to take a copy of the address book and upload it where ever it wanted without permission and without even notifying the user. It's hard to believe that Apple could not have seen this as a problem for users, if they empathized with users. How could they not? Don't they use their own devices?

I hate to think that all these companies have the names, addresses and phone numbers of pretty much everyone I've dated in the last few years. Every member of my family, every friend. I don't think there are any kids under 13 in there, but I'm sure some people keep contact information for their children, nieces and nephews or grandchildren in their address books?

The blase approach the industry took to this issue is only surprising if you assume they were surprised. I'm sure they weren't. When you think about the business models of most of the companies that get funded these days, you can see what a gold mine this information is. I read yesterday that Google doesn't care if you use Google Plus for anything, if you never come back. They just wanted your biographical info so they could target ads at you better. How much would they like to know the names and contact info for everyone who's important enough to make it into your address book.

When we were doing the investigation, it also turned up that photos were just as open to apps as contact info. Do you have any pictures on your phone of things you haven't uploaded because you don't want to share them with the world? Too bad. They're pretty much shared. Don't use your phone to take pictures of anything you wouldn't want everyone to see.

I'm not installing any software unless I personally know the developer and have heard them say in their own words that they are not doing anything mischievous with the data, and won't as long as they work for the company in question. And I sure as hell am not installing software from any companies whose business models are vague to me. Because I assume they will grab as much info as they can. Because I assume that's their business model. Better safe than sorry. Forewarned is forearmed.

BTW, one more thing -- the tech press is covering this story in slow motion. You should also be aware that any iOS app can access your calendar and your cellular carrier info. I haven't seen ths appear in any story that's been linked to from TechMeme.

PS: The camera on Android devices is even less secure.

 3/1/2012; 3:37:28 PM.

I think at the dawn of PCs there was a company with a name like The People's Computer Company. If not, it could have been the name of the whole industry.

This is what all the heroes of the 80s were thinking at the beginning. We're building tools to give power to the people.

It was an extension of the culture we grew up in, the 60s and 70s. Power to the People was a big idea then. I think it's going to be a big one again, in reaction to what the computer industry of the generation after the hippies is doing. Zuck is going to create rebellion. Apple and Larry and Sergei too.

The first product of the PPC will be a PC (of course) with all its ports open. With disk drives and an Ethernet jack. Slots. Nothing new. But the things that are disappearing from the "Post-PC" computers everyone is talking about will still be there on the Post-Post-PC.

I don't mind carrying around something a little more clunky if it can be connected to something we haven't dreamt up yet.

That's what was great about the original PC industry. It's what we'll come to value in the new one.

 2/29/2012; 6:23:23 PM.

Must remember to write a blog post about this.

The tech industry has been absorbed by the ad industry, and vice versa.

However, there is, imho, still room for a tech industry that is not merged with the ad industry.

In fact, if we want to have a tech industry at all, we'd better invest in the "other" one, because advertising isn't much to bet on long-term. Seriously.

I had this flash reading a TechCrunch piece about Foursquare. It hit me that Dennis has been getting his education in advertising for the last few years. Now instead of talking features for users he talks about features for advertisers.

Yes, I'm sure there's a lot of money in this. But it wasn't why I got into tech. I don't like advertising very much. I don't mind if it's funny (like the E-trade ads with the kids) but much of what passes for advertising these day is pretty humiliating, for everyone involved.

Like the ads in front of movies, and the ads they play during breaks at NBA games. Why? I paid $200 for my seat. If I paid $225 could I have it without the ads?

Oh well, looks like I went ahead and wrote the blog post.

 2/29/2012; 5:41:42 PM.

Big tech companies don't trust users, small tech companies have no choice. This is why smaller companies, like Dropbox, tend to be forces against lock-in, and big tech companies try to lock users in.

That's why Dropbox is so useful and the stuff that the big companies have produced so far has been so crippled.

It's a good thing that Apple didn't buy Dropbox because you certainly wouldn't be able to store any kind of file you want in any structure you like inside an Apple-owned Dropbox.

The BigCo guys would tell you it's a formula for chaos to give users so much power, but they've been saying that forever, and they've been right in their own contexts, and wrong in the larger one. Big tech companies come and go, but this idea of not trusting users has been a constant.

So to think that Dropbox couldn't grow to become a platform the size of Apple or Amazon, well you have to make that argument, you can't just say it. It's the kind of careless inside talk I'd expect from an average tech writer, not the great Farhad Manjoo! (No sarcasm, not even the slightest bit.)

Google thinks files and folders are obsolete ideas. Oy. That's like Ford and Exxon thinking that roads and traffic lights are obsolete. It's true perhaps that we could invent better ways to store user's info today, but that's the way we store information. It's not going to change just because a product manager at Google or Microsoft thinks it should.

When Google finally releases their GDrive product, I bet it will manage files and folders the way Dropbox does. Who do we have to thank for that? Dropbox. But if history is a guide, they'll probably screw it up some other way. Limit the power of users in some way that Dropbox doesn't.

Re Bill Gurley's assertion that there's something special about the Dropbox synchronization algorithm, I'm a Dropbox user and I don't see it. I think the algorithm has some cosmetic glitches. No matter, it's still a useful product (this is not a bug report). The advantage Dropbox has is that it's a small company that's got a big idea, and they're executing well. The big competitors are good at huffing and puffing, and impressing reporters, but that's not where the fight is won or lost.

Now to Farhad's assumption that this service has to be free -- why? That's so depressing. What else in life is free? If I want to eat lunch I pay the restaurant. If I want to ride on the subway, I have to pay to do so. Again, in a very untypical fashion, Farhad just states that it's obvious that it has to be free. Well, that requires an argument. Maybe he's right, but why?

I like the fact that I pay for Dropbox. That means that they would be wrong to attach a horribly invasive business model to mining what could be some of my most sensitive data. It's really foolish to give all that stuff to a company without having a customer relationship with them.

As to the niceties, having it be able to remember the state of all your apps, it doesn't matter to me. Everything about how I use computers is so chaotic, it would be a very small thing to remember which apps and which windows within the apps were open. You know what I'd like even more -- having iPad browser tabs not refresh when you activate them. One of the most annoying features ever. But Topolsky wants Dropbox to know about the state of apps and windows, and maybe a lot of others do too. Let's see if we can get it. Maybe if the users got active and said to the people who make the operating systems that we want Dropbox and we want those features, they would work with them to give us what we want. But if I had to choose between good relatively safe synchronization that Dropbox provides and the mess that Apple provides, well, there's no choice.

But the really huge big gaping hole in Farhad's piece is that any of the big vendors are going to work better with their big compeitors than they would with the upstart Dropbox. Apple's synch server will give you lots of neat features but only for your Apple-made devices. Same with Google and Microsoft. That's a pretty worthless feature if you own an Android phone, an Amazon tablet and an Apple desktop.

Farhad has fallen into the trap that all tech writers seem to fall into eventually. They stop seeing the user as an important factor in the outcome of tech industry warfare. But if you look at history, not only are the users important, they're the only constant power. And they vote out lock-in, eventually. And that tends to favor Dropbox, not the incumbents.

Dropbox has the opportunity to build a platform that sits outside all the platforms we've come to know. Their challenge is to get users to care whether they can connect their Dropbox data to the devices they use. So far, they've done better than anyone else. And they won't have to deal with the second-guessing and turf wars that happen inside big companies. I don't think it's a slam dunk that Dropbox will grow to be a huge tech company, but I also don't think their product is just a feature.

Steve Jobs didn't say these things about other people's products, btw, because he had given it a lot of thought. He did it because he had a nasty streak, and he was trying to demoralize a competitor who didn't want to sell to him. I'm pretty sure they do this in other industries too. I've seen it done many times in tech.

 2/27/2012; 8:48:45 AM.

I love it when software gets to the stage that the worldoutline is getting to.

For the last year, while under development, it's been a hot steamy mess. But I use my messes, and I have users, so every time I had to undo a mistake, or had to change my mind about how something worked, it meant a difficult "corner-turn" where breakage would happen, and putting the pieces back together was often hard work.

But it seems to have paid off. The last set of changes have been cleanups. Taking out half-done experiments, and relying on frameworks that were experimental before but now are rely-able (or reliable). And as a side-product it's gotten faster and faster, to the point where I can now link to pieces on the worldoutline from Twitter without taking the server offline while the bots that hack Twitter pound every link you push through there (Twitter might try to do something about this btw).

I just published a piece about infinite loops you might find interesting. I think it's really cool that all of a sudden people are curious about how programs work. I love to tell stories, and it's a challenge to find human terms to explain programming concepts. Everything in programming, of course, is human -- the languages were designed by people, used by people. They fit our way of thinking. If insects had evolved into a high form of life maybe they would have come up with a different kind of programming. Hey for all we know they have. (That's how programmers think, always questioning assumptions.)

Anyway, I expect to post more "over there" and at some point, "here" will move "there" as well. That's another thing about the tech world, everything is scaffolding, it's always just here to provide a basis for the next big thing that will replace this old thing.

 2/26/2012; 10:02:02 AM.

I did a podcast with Adam Curry yesterday. 

Except for one glitchy Rebooting the News last year, this is the first podcast we've done together since 2005, the early days of podcasting.

http://adam.curry.com/2012/02/24/wop120120224final.mp3

I know we need to get a feed going. We will do that, reallll sooon now.

BTW, one more thing -- sometime this month, according to Rudolf Ammann, this blog will be was 15 years old! Almost old enough to drive.

 2/25/2012; 10:40:29 AM.

I just read Mathew Ingram's report on John Paton's talk about the future of news. I agree with what Paton says, but with an important caveat. He doesn't go far enough. The change he describes will not be at equilibrium. It is not the shape of the news system of the future. The practice he describes will not hold back the tide.

What I've advocated to news organizations for 15 years, which has been ignored probably because it is so distasteful to the people in positions of power in the news industry, is that they reform around the idea of sources with the ability to communicate direct to readers. The role of news professionals in this future is to choose quotes from each of the sources to form something like stories. To distribute authority through the trust that readers have in their name, a trust that is rapidly diminishing, with good cause. In this model not only is the gatekeeping function gone, but so is the media function. We live in the age of disintermediation. A fancy way of saying we've disempowered the entity in the middle. Perhaps not eliminated them, but they no longer rule.

If you want proof it's all around. Rick Santorum was able to become a leading candidate without money or the support of the media. Same with every other front-runner in the 2012 election cycle, except for Romney and Obama. The media worked actively against the Occupy movement, but that didn't slow it down. The story got out anyway.

There was an obvious opportunity here before blogging took hold, by offering to host the platforms for the most influential people in your community. It's probably still not too late to do this, but it won't be as powerful today as it would have been before WordPress, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.

The news people may still not like this because they aren't the heroes, but get this -- they never were, and this is where I agree with Paton emphatically. The bug in the mental model of news people is that they are gatekeepers. This may have been true because the means of distribution were expensive, but it's no longer true. And besides, the news writers were just employees anyway, the people with the power were the people with the capital to buy the machinery.

PS: If I were advising an existing publication how to get started down the Sources Go Direct path, I'd urge them to start a river, aggregating the feeds of the bloggers you most admire, and the other news sources they read. Share your sources with your readers, understanding that almost no one is purely a source or purely a reader. Mix it all up. Create a soup of ideas and taste it frequently. Connect everyone that's important to you, as fast as you can, as automatically as possible, and put the pedal to the metal and take your foot off the brake.

 2/24/2012; 9:43:06 AM.

I understand that the Catholic Church doesn't want to pay for insurance for its employees that includes coverage for contraception, even though they are required to do so by law. I take them at their word that it's a matter of conscience. With the Republicans, who have made this their issue, I have doubts about it being about conscience. But I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, for the sake of argument.

The death penalty is also a matter of conscience for a lot of Americans. It's abhorrent to them that people be killed in the name of justice, especially when some of these people are innocent. As one of these people, myself, it's a horror not only that they're being killed or murdered in my name, but also that, through my taxes, I have to pay for it.

So, if we're to establish a new precedent that Americans should not be required to pay for things they find morally abhorrent, then the death penalty is going to have be funded some other way, not through public money.

PS: It seems the Catholic Church would agree, btw -- since they oppose the death penalty. I wonder why they haven't refused to pay taxes until the government gets out of the business of killing its own citizens.

PPS: Ooops. I didn't realize that churches don't pay taxes. So why then don't they STFU about paying for moral things. They don't pay, we do. I don't see where they have any say in it.

 2/24/2012; 9:13:46 AM.

There was a time, in the year 2000, when everyone was talking music. Everywhere you went. You'd be checking out the cucumbers and lettuce at the supermarket and the person next to you would ask if you were using Napster, and before you could answer they'd be off telling you what they found and how amazing the experience was.

That was already twelve years ago, but I'll never forget it. All of sudden something wonderful and unexpected had happened. Outside the normal. It wasn't planned by some marketing guy. The world had changed and it was great, and we didn't know what the limits were. Or how it would end.

I remember thinking -- I wish Jerry had been here to see this. The other day at the Knicks game I said to one of my friends that this was the first huge thing Steve Jobs missed. (Later I realized that he more or less missed Occupy too, which was just as big as either Napster or Linsanity).

So this led me to a tweet this morning, where I compared the the opportunity the Knicks and basketball have to the opportunity presented by Napster, and realized they're going to blow it. When we were at the game the other day, they had the usual things to keep fans entertained during timeouts. But we didn't need them! Here we were soaking up something as great as Beatlemania or Napster, and they're shooting cheap t-shirts -- advertising for crying out loud -- into the audience as if we needed anything to occupy us.

On the way out of the Garden you could see the signage hadn't changed yet. They had huge pictures of stars, who were still technically playing for the Knicks, but they weren't the story. Don't they have any actual fans working for the team? Yeah they were selling Lin jerseys, the street-level marketers knew how to adjust, but the corporate ones? Imagine what their meetings must be like. Imagine all the sleazy promotions they must be planning.

But they didn't create Jeremy Lin. They didn't even see him. Are they going to define them? Are we going to hate them? (Of course, the only question is what exactly will they do to make us hate them.) This is still America, and we're still run by lawyers and accountants. We just had a breakout of soul, a lot like the joy people had with Napster. Bloomberg shut down Occupy. This too will end. But for right now -- it sure is wonderful!

BTW, a few days ago I wrote about the Beatles, and what happened with them, how Beatlemania ended. One of the four really wanted to be a Beatle. That wasn't enough to drive them forward.

 2/23/2012; 3:50:13 PM.

Suppose Facebook or Twitter wanted to be really good netizens, and let you use their service to log onto other services, but to not lock you in. How might that work?

Well, I wouldn't be known on other nets as @davewiner, instead I would be known as dave.scripting.com. That name would be a CNAME for Facebook, if I was using Facebook to guarantee I really am who I say I am. But if, in five or ten years, I decided to use another service, one with a neat feature Facebook doesn't offer, I could point dave.scripting.com at the other server.

It would be like changing your credit card number, something we have to deal with from time to time. Not a great thing, but then not too bad either. You get reminded of all the things you're paying for automatically. I actually like to go through that ritual from time to time. In this case you'd be reminded of all the services that have access to your personal stuff.

I doubt if Facebook would do this, but then a commercial ID hosting service, one that charged me say $10 a year to be my identity server, might be willing to offer such a service and make it easy for me to switch.

And here's the funny part. Such services already exist and they work really well. They're called registrars.

 2/23/2012; 1:04:56 PM.

After all these years, the reasons I write my blog remain the same.

1. To influence.

2. To be influenced.

Hopefully, in both cases, for the better. I want to learn things that make what I do better informed, more valuable (however that is defined) and more timely. And I want to reciprocate, to give others the benefit of what I am learning.

The people who read this blog, by and large, are really smart. I'm learning that because, after turning off the comments, I'm hearing from people about my blog that surprise me. People I didn't know read it. If I knew they did, I might ask them what they think about this or that. Or to fill in a bit of knowledge that I am missing and don't find online. But if I don't know they're reading, I don't know to ask.

Further, they read the comments too. That's a surprise. But they don't contribute. Now, to me -- that's not good. In fact, that's bad.

And some read the comments because they like to see my response to off-topic stuff. To that I say *@#$*(&@#. What a waste. I work so hard, really -- every damn day -- to create software that makes this stuff work better, and that's what you look to me for? To those people, hope you find some other place for your emotional thrill. I'm not in that business.

The Mail Pages, very early in the evolution of Scripting News, were the ideal. They were a lot of work, a lot more than comments. But the result was incredible. It was like the stage at a really good conference. The people had important information and perspectives to share, and lots of them shared. They were excited about a new medium and it showed. It was the kind of excitement you see in basketball players the last few weeks, the thrill they're experiencing, that they were always capable of, catalyzed by an improbable star. Newness brings out goodness, it seems.

I hear that some people feel there's a virtue in being silent. I don't. I see it as selfishness. You're willing to take but you're not willing to give. Not a big fan of people who do that.

It's the same gripe I have with the tech investors. When the holes are being dug they don't have any help to offer, but when the ideas are ready for commercializing, they are happy to take the work and run with it. Great. Where's the profit in figuring out what's next? Where's the incentive? Having been around this block repeatedly and seeing unbelievable selfishness, I find myself wishing there was a way to say No, you didn't help so you can't have the benefit.

I've actually had people say, to my face, that my job is to work for free, and their job is to make the money. How could someone actually let those words come out of their mouth, with a straight face, with any honor or self-respect? These are people with kids, who presumably teach them to share what they have, and to help run the house. Yes people do things they don't want to do, because they need doing. So, as adults, why don't they roll up their sleeves and help?

Think about what you want from the net. And what you're willing to give up for that. Perhaps a few of your ideas? Or nuggets of truth you learn by doing what you do? Or if you spot an error in someone else's work, are you willing to help out by writing a great bug report? Think about it when you look for the comments and don't find them. They're not here now quite possibly because you weren't willing to contribute.

If you are willing to help, if you are a generous person, then what's stopping you?

PS: I love that the rotating header for today is the BSOD. Totally random. I had no role in chosing it other than writing the code that uses a random number generator.

 2/23/2012; 8:24:45 AM.

Part of me thinks I should be an insider at SXSW, that because I am one of the founders of the community, and a developer of the technology that SXSW bootstrapped out of, and continues to grow through, that they should have at some point asked me to talk. It's a matter of honor, I guess, and some amount of pride.

I've asked them, many times, why I was never invited to speak, they haven't been willing to answer. They've asked me to apologize for offering my own explanation, in a comment a few years ago on Marc Canter's blog -- and I've said I would be happy to, if they would tell me the real reason I'm on their short blacklist (maybe at the top of it).

I know you can apply to speak now, I even started to fill out the forms last year, but they asked so many "Who Are You" kind of questions, and my pride kept kicking in. Why don't you know who I am? I am willing to play the hamster up to a point, in some contexts. But this is so totally over the top.

There were years, at the beginning, when you had to get an invite and they weren't willing to provide one. They still invite people to speak on their keynote stage. Ahh, I'm not important enough. But they've invited people, many of them, onto that stage to talk about my work, my contributions -- so why can't I speak for them too?

I know it's supposed to be a lot of fun, and some of the participants have been very nice to me, offered good places to stay for free, etc. But I want to get past the gatekeepers. I'd like to be invited, for real, by the people who run the show. I think they've benefitted from my generosity, why not reciprocate?

Update: Paul Ford says the theme of the web is Why Wasn't I Consulted?

 2/22/2012; 11:37:08 AM.

The Repubs say they don't like Keynsian economics. Not sure what they don't like about it, because they seem to favor some very Keynesian ideas when they talk about "job creators" and growth trickling down.

When you cut the taxes of people who supposedly create jobs to encourage them to create more jobs, you're stimulating them, whether they create jobs or not. I believe they mostly just pocket the profits, and don't worry too much about creating jobs (I've got personal experience with this, when I pay very low taxes on windfalls, I don't generally think that any obligations come with the lower taxes, I don't even see it as lower taxes, just low taxes). This theory seems quite Keynesian to me.

But when the stimulus is in the form of paying teachers, cops, sanitation workers, construction crews, etc -- that's socialism! And supposedly discredited because it's Keynesian. But what's the difference? You're just choosing to stimulate different people. Never mind that it's likely to create more jobs because the people you're stimulating can't afford to pocket the profits, they have to spend it because they don't have much of a surplus.

The Repubs, who are I assume educated people themselves, act like the elites they decry, by ignoring their education, and pretending there's a difference between subsidizing the rich and subsidizing the working classes. There are differences, but they're not moral, just pragmatic.

Glad I don't have comments so I don't have to hear about how I'm a liberal (I'm not, I'm actually very conservative). But what the heck, why not call people names before even beginning to find out who they are?

 2/22/2012; 10:24:45 AM.

A few weeks ago I noticed that my river was filled with FreshAir podcasts. Hundreds of them, dating back to 2007. One for every weekday for five years.

I figured something glitchy happened, and shrugged it off. Sometimes people adjust their content management system, and the feed guids all change, so the aggregator thinks they're all new. It's a bit more expensive in the case of podcasts because it downloads them all, and it wipes out all the other MP3s in my Podcatcher folder, because it's managed by the software to only use a fixed amount of storage. So every time a new podcast is downloaded, the oldest one is removed.

But then it happened again. And again. So I had to do something about it.

I was busy with another project so I did the simplest quickest thing, I unsubbed. But this meant I had to go to the FreshAir site to manually see what's new, because I like to listen to FreshAir on my daily walk. Not always, but often.

This morning I didn't feel like tackling my next big project, so I did something "lite" -- I made a change to the way River2 works to allow for this quirk in the FreshAir podcast.

Here's how it works.

This keeps the flow marching forward in time, not backward -- but allows items to appear out of order in the feed, and for items to be published a bit after the feed's pubDate for that item.

Now I'm going to see if:

Here's the worknote for this item.

 2/22/2012; 10:03:38 AM.

I would probably not attempt this post if I had comments because of the hoots it would get from some of the 12-year-old minds that occupy the comments of tech blogs.

Anyway...

One of my favorite movies of all time is As Good As It Gets.

I like it because it's like an inkblot test. Depending on whether you're male or female, gay or straight, young or old, even black or white, you see something different. For each of us the story revolves around a different character. Even though the story is, imho, how they really aren't as different as you might think.

My point of view. Women tend to look at men in a very superficial way. I know because, like Melvin, I've been having this conversation with women my whole life. They think we do things "because" of other things, and when you find out what those other things are, you find out how low an opinion they have of us.

We all look at Carol the Waitress, at first, and see a saint. But if you look at it from the man's point point of view, you see that she's not really giving Melvin a chance to be himself. I like her, but I want her to be nice to Melvin! And despite herself, she actually likes the part of the guy she thinks she doesn't. Or whatever. It's soooo confusing, which is the best part of the movie, because all this stuff, when you're in the middle of it, is very very very confusing (in a wonderful way of course, or we wouldn't bother).

I thought of this movie today because the Republicans are reminding me of Melvin Udall, the character played by Jack Nicholson. Carol Connelly would, it seems, have a question to ask the Republicans about this vaginal ultrasound law they want to have in Virginia for women getting abortions.

"Do you have any control over how creepy you allow yourself to get?"

I'm sure the Republicans, as a party, somewhere inside their collective, tortured soul, think they're doing something good here. But.. I don't know where to begin, so I won't.

 2/21/2012; 11:19:56 AM.

You may have read here or elsewhere that comments are no longer part of Scripting News. I looked at it this way. We could either try to fix the problems with the existing comment system, or we could revisit the whole idea of relative writing.

The first option was not actually an option because I don't have the ability to change Disqus, the commenting software we were using. And while I have written commenting software, and even have debugged source code available for download (it's part of manila.root), I don't have any interest in trying to fix commenting software. We know where the problems are. And Disqus and the others have done a good job of taking these things to their logical conclusion. From here on it looks like they'll be refining, adding features, debugging and scaling. Not taking a fresh look. (If they are, we can hopefully connect our efforts. I love working with others on open formats and protocols.)

Now, relative writing. WTF is that.

Start off by what is not relative writing.

I had a sandwich for lunch.

That's about me and my sandwich. It's not about someone else's writing. It's not relative.

Joe wrote a wonderful essay about the sandwich he had for lunch. I thought it was very expressive and colorful. He really captured the flavor of the sandwich. And he expressed a vision for the future. Tomorrow he's planning on having tuna salad. And on Thursday he expects it will be hot pastrami.

In that example, I'm writing about someone else's writing. That's relative.

The first bit doesn't need to be connected (or related) to any other writing, although I might want to link to a story about sandwiches or food, or maybe someone reading it doesn't know what lunch is, so I might link to a definition of lunch. But you can understand what I'm saying without reading someone else's writing.

I'm of the opinion that the best, most powerful, most useful writing is non-relative. That too much relative writing is of the form: "I have an opinion about something like this." They don't often express the opinion very well. And quite often it's confused with the person writing it. For example, when I say hackathons are nonsense, a lot of people respond as if I said you are nonsense, or the hackathons you love are nonsense. Obviously my experience is colored by the hackathons I've been to or heard about. And my view of them is based on who I am, not who you are. A lot of what people had to say about it helped me see how they view the world, and how different it is from the way I view the world. That's good! But the confusion isn't so good. It's why people try to hurt others, because they've confused the other person with their own feelings. But I'm rambling.

Let's say I see something on Twitter that I'd like to do some writing about. That of course would be relative. Somehow I want to attach my writing to the tweet. They offer almost no good way of doing that. Same with Facebook and Google and whatever. Same with the comments I had here on Scripting News.

What I'm hoping is that we can develop good ways of connecting writing, on a consensual basis. I'd like to team up with people whose writing complements mine. People who have ideas that I would like to see gain more exposure. Without opening it up to spammers and emotional thrill-seekers. That's the challenge, to strike a balance, to create something new and better.

Once a long time ago I wrote about how when a big tree falls it creates room for lots of new growth. It's always that way. One door closes and another opens. Carmelo Anthony is injured -- and -- Jeremy Lin! Just one example. I actually had a big tree fall near my house in California right around the time Jerry Garcia died. It helped me understand that this is the way things are and it's neither good nor bad. But comments going away here immediately gave me ideas on what could take their place. That, to me, is purely good.

 2/21/2012; 10:13:22 AM.

How many Jeremy Lins sat on the bench, never got in the game, got dropped by four teams, and never were picked up by another team. Went on to become a psychologist or high school basketball coach, married someone nice, and never made more than $300K per year.

 2/20/2012; 3:18:24 PM.

Why did the college basketball teams miss his talent?

Why did the NBA?

Really simple. People see what they expect to see.

Great quote in Moneyball about this.

"People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn't be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins."

This lesson doesn't just apply to basketball or baseball or sports, it applies to everything.

And btw, the reason people didn't expect he'd be a great basketball player was his race. So we're going to get a chance to clear up some racism now, so that's another good thing.

PS: I went to the Knicks game today and he's every bit as exciting a player in person as he is on TV. What a gift!

 2/19/2012; 8:46:48 PM.

I finally decided today that even though sometimes I get some value from having comments here on Scripting News, in balance they're not worth the trouble. So I'm turning them off.

There may be times in the future when I want to solicit input from readers. I'll find another way to do that.

BTW, as I sat down to actually turn them off, a comment on my whimsical post about Jackson Pollock came in that confirmed I'm making the right decision.

 2/19/2012; 8:26:56 PM.