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I have to admit Trump is doing something clever.
He's going to meet with Wayne LaPierre to suggest that he get behind an weapon ban for people on terrorist watch lists.
It's cute because the NRA endorsed him. They pretty much have to listen.
It's irreverent. It's the tail wagging the dog. And it's probably going to work.
You know they said Nixon could go to China because he was a Republican.
Everyone expects a Democrat to be for gun control.
But a Republican getting behind it is really subversive. Even if it is DJ Trump. And even if it doesn't go nearly far enough.
Another reason to like it is that while it won't likely get Trump any Democratic votes it sure is going to piss off a lot of Republicans, and expose them for the unthinking heartless NRA puppets that they are. I'm getting my popcorn out.
I had an idea watching last night's Finals game, Golden State vs Cleveland. At the end of the third quarter, the Warriors were playing Hack-a-Shaq with Tristan Thompson, the Cleveland big man who is a bad foul shooter.
There's a lot of hand-wringing over the practice, it destroys the flow of the game, but it's legal, and when one team puts a guy on the court who can't shoot free throws, the door is open.
Anyway, the NBA hasn't come up with a rule that would effectively stop it. During the game, feeling the frustration, I wondered why they don't flip it around. After a certain number of fouls committed on a player, the team being fouled can choose a different free throw shooter for the guy being Shaq'd.
That would provide a limit on repeated fouling of the bad free-throw shooter. Make the limit 6, the same number of fouls that cause a player to foul out of a game.
Why do we only talk about gun violence in the immediate aftermath of a mass killing? If we want to change the laws in the US we have to develop a longer attention span.
We had a fantastic opportunity to talk about meaningful ways to change the laws in the faceoff between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. It's fairly obvious that at least at one point in his political career Sanders was backed by the NRA. His excuse that he represented a rural state while true was nonsense. He was running for President, of all the states, including states where people die from gun violence every day. Clinton didn't want to push it, but that doesn't mean voters couldn't have made it an issue. We totally could have.
We make the mistake of falling for candidates as if they were sports teams, and not insisting that they represent our interests. We think voting for a person is like rooting for the Warriors or Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. Politics is good sport, for sure -- but the political decisions we make, or don't make, can result in 50 people dead on a Saturday night in an Orlando night club. The bullets are real, as is the blood.
We will never create the change so many say they want until we can sustain the feeling and carry it through to Election Day.
The most effective thing we could do is to organize to end the careers of reps who are funded by the NRA. Make it impossible, at least in some states, for them to take their money. We don't need to win everywhere, just in enough places to pass the laws we need to at least slow the process by which potential mass murderers get weapons of mass murder.
There are ways to do this, it's a relatively easy thing to do, it just requires a sustained commitment.
If you want to diminish the power of the NRA, there's really only one way you and I can do it, by organizing to replace NRA-owned reps with ones that aren't.
The best time to organize is just before a major election, which of course is right now.
I'm thinking primarily of Congressional races. There's a pretty clear widely understood choice in the Presidential election this year.
This is not about "taking your guns away" -- unless you want to kill dozens of people rapidly. If that's what you want, then I think most people would agree that it's a good thing to take your gun away.
To make a difference, look at people who are running for Congress in your area, and see which ones are approved by the NRA and which aren't.
Work against the ones the NRA likes, and support the ones the NRA opposes. That means:
Now is a highly leveraged time to be politically active. In normal times it's hard to get anything to change, but now is a time when change can happen.
Don't let the politicians define what change means. Define it for yourself and then put it into action.
In today's earlier post I suggest that other Silicon Valley CEOs and VCs could back Gawker in defense of Thiel's legal attack, by buying it out of bankruptcy.
So much has been written about why what Thiel did will have a chilling effect on the struggling world of journalism. It effects bloggers too.
Putting the pieces back together later might be impossible. And free expression is something SV depends on, more than it may know.
Look where I'm writing this now, to give you an idea. (This is a cross-post of something I wrote on Facebook.)
So far I am able to use Facebook to criticize Facebook, but who knows whether they demote it via the algorithm. I imagine they might have some levers behind the scenes.
The more FB and others stand by and do nothing as Gawker is destroyed, the less faith I have in their neutrality.
I'm thinking of a few liberal tech CEOs and VCs who I would like to see step up here. Not going to put their names in this post. But I wanted to put the idea out there.
So Gawker is going away.
Peter Thiel wins. The first round.
But I don't think this will be a pure win for Silicon Valley.
It goes to the quality of their product.
Who would trust Silicon Valley to run the world's social network? That's a trick question. Right now we all do. So the attitude of the owners of Silicon Valley toward free expression matters very much.
Social networks are about people sharing ideas and information, right? And the people who own the social networks will sue people, bankrupt them, for sharing ideas and information they don't like. No one said that Peter Thiel was not gay, right? No one said that was not Hulk Hogan in the video? In other words it wasn't about the truth, because Gawker had the truth on their side. This is all about the power of money. What it can buy you and what it can't.
But these social networks aren't used for serious stuff, right?
You haven't been paying attention. Even if Twitter, for example, is something of a joke now, with its 140-char limit, it's mostly grunts and snorts, put-downs and shutups, look at what kind of President the Republicans are about to nominate. The Twitter President. The President of Grunts and Snorts. It's serious and a joke at the same time!
I'm sure at Facebook they think of their users as sad poor people who don't have anything interesting to do. After all they don't live in Silicon Valley! They don't hang out with us! They are poor and are truly nobody. If they got mad at us what difference would it make? It's not as if they have anywhere to go. We have them, as if we care.
Any billionaire in Silicon Valley could have backed Gawker's defense. They must have thought it was good that Gawker would finally go away. I understand the relief. I have been the target of Gawker crap. But it will ultimately be a very expensive and unsatisfying relief. And it won't last long.
Perhaps in the future you will have to be a billionaire to own a Gawker. Hey luckily one is for sale. If a billionaire thought Thiel was wrong, they could buy Gawker out of bankruptcy and restart it. With one objective -- to out Peter Thiel not as a gay man, but rather as a fascist-loving enemy of the people. Now that would be something worth watching! :-)
This is just Round One. Who knows what comes next. But I can imagine a future where the pain of Peter is just beginning.
PS: Gawker/Thiel in a nutshell. Should it be possible for billionaires to insist on obedience from everyone else? If not, what are the limits?
Two podcasts one good one not.
The good one is an All Songs Considered interview with Paul McCartney. They wanted to know how he writes songs. He tells us. Stories about being Paul McCartney writing songs. It's intelligent, modest, interesting, curious, and he's someone we know, so we care about his story.
And The Americans podcast continues to be unusable. So sad because it's such an excellent TV show. I'd like to know what the writers and actors of the show think about the story and the characters. Instead they tend to drift into their own personal idiosyncrasies without stories, and we don't know them so I pretty much always skip out about five or ten minutes into it, wishing they'd get serious and talk about the work they're doing right now that is so well-done and interesting.
Simple equation. We know the characters they play, not the actors. So let's talk about the spy family and the FBI guy who lives across the street. The actors? We only know them as people who play the parts.
The art of podcasting is pure story-telling. If we know you then your personal anecdotes are interesting. If not, no problem, just tell stories about things we care about.. To the extent that you do, your podcast is worth listening to.
Well, it seems 1999.io is about finished.
What that means is that it appears to be stable, it can be used for what it was designed to do. There are docs for getting people started, and a home page that links to it all. Here's the reviewer's guide page. It says what makes 1999.io different from other blogging software like WordPress, Ghost, Tumblr, Blogger, Medium, Drupal, etc.
1999.io picks up the thread from the blogging software I started in the 90s, culminating with Radio UserLand in 2002. Lots of good ideas there that weren't picked up by the competitors. 1999.io goes way beyond Radio, with a more powerful Edit This Page feature, liveblogging, and easy backups and mobility. The UI is better -- easier to learn and use, and more flexible, inspired by Facebook and Twitter, and the immediacy of JavaScript in the browser.
1999.io pushes the state of the art in blogging. And yes, blogging software matters, despite what some people say. Software is cyclic, one year mobile is big, next year it's chatbots. Silos are the norm for a while, then radically open platforms. One thing you can be sure of is that next year it'll be something else.
Fashion fluctuates quickly but development of software lines extend over decades. Blogging can trace its beginnings to word processing, desktop publishing, presentation software and outlining software, and then through browser-based apps, to social networks. I firmly believe people running their own servers will be a big deal in the years to come, as the Minecraft generation comes of age, and at the same time the cloud will continue to grow with hosted apps. It's all going to be big. And people will always need writing tools, and that's what 1999.io is -- the best writing tool I could imagine and implement in 2016.
It was time for an update. Long overdue.
I would love to work with the people at WordPress, Drupal and all the other blogging vendors but especially with open source developers to build more interop between our environments. Toward that end I've invested in making the RSS that 1999.io generates absolutely state of the art. I made it clean, and made it work with all the major RSS consumers and added new features in partnership with River5 (I know the developer personally).
I am building on WebSockets. Very reliable high performance technology, the kind of stuff you can implement once and then forget it. It just works.
Anyway if you want to know what 1999.io is about, check out the feature list.
Create a test site. Or set up your own server.
Let's have fun!
Still diggin!
Dave
Something people don't seem to get about Trump right now.
He's still running in the primary. The longer he keeps doing this, the harder it will be for him to run a general election campaign.
Here's a 10-minute podcast that explains
Net-net: Stop worrying about Trump. He's self-destructing right now.
I wrote a utility that generates the monthly archive pages for all the early months that were missing.
Here are links to the archive pages, so now hopefully they'll show up in the search engines.
And from now-on they will be generated automatically.
We are in the middle of a political revolution, but it's not the one Bernie Sanders called for.
Instead our political system has re-formed around the limits of Twitter and cable news.
It didn't start with Twitter. And it won't end with Twitter.
Of course Trump rose to the top, he's the master of the mindless soundbite, and that's what Twitter excels at.
Now journalism has figured out Trump, they just repeat the question, over and over, and he responds with the same meaningless words. Let's see what comes after this. But this is new behavior. Politics never worked like this before.
Hopefully historians of politics and journalism are keeping careful notes of the transformation that's happening now.
I still get better news from my rivers than I do from either Facebook or Twitter. My technology is nowhere near as complex as theirs, because my only goal is to provide links to lots of interesting news stories.
There's no business model attached to my rivers, that's where all the weight and complexity comes from in the algorithms of the social nets. They need to make money off the flow. I don't. I just want more better news.
I have MLB, NBA, Guardian, Washington Post and podcasting single-page rivers. I also have a multi-tab page that combines most of these, along with my own personal river, with the feeds I personally want to follow, that don't fit in the other categories.
The newest single-page river is one focused on political news.
There's also a river panel on my blog's home page.
These are just some of the ways rivers can be used to build community.
I share my rivers with anyone who wants to read them, and quite a few people do. It's not going to generate the flow of a big platform, yet -- but it certainly could. And unlike the others, I have been updating the software openly under the MIT License, which is the most liberal.
We know how to deploy river software. I keep beating the drum on this, expecting that one day the news industry will figure out that there's nothing hard about reading systems for news, without the tech industry business model.
In other words, there's an opportunity for the news industry to disrupt the tech industry. Not something the tech industry is going to be all that interested in you knowing about of course. So you don't see innovations in river technology on Techmeme.
Just knock on my door, news industry, any time, you'll find a friendly software developer here anxious to help you be successful.
There's a slogan Vote With Your Feet that's kind of elegant. Saying something isn't as powerful as doing it. If you want to effect change, move. It's another version of Be The Change You Seek, a shortened version of Mahatma Gandhi's slogan. Influencing others to do what you want isn't as important as doing it yourself.
A simple corollary -- if you see something that reflects your values, don't just Like it, RT it.
Help the idea build circulation. Be generous with your influence. Add weight to ideas that are important. I try to remember to do that myself. If you see me RT something of yours it's because I thought the idea was important and I wanted more people to see it.
Even if you just have 25 followers, it's important.
It's how we change the culture of the Web of Ideas from "Me First!" to "Working together to make the world better."
It works even when we collaborate inside silos. And we can help the silo owners see that there's a bigger world that they can enable, by opening their systems to bring more people in. That building higher walls is a good way to make sure everyone leaves, eventually.
I read earlier today that it would be a bad outcome if all the web required a Facebook or SnapChat login. Maybe so. Maybe that's a wakeup call for Twitter, that they could ally themselves with the open web, and always choose to do what the open web asks them to do. Once upon a time the big companies of the open web loved the open web. Maybe that can happen again. I think the first company that does so will rule the world. In a gentle way of course, because they will always know they can be replaced.
One way to loosen the ties is to share your beliefs and if someone else expresses it well, share that expression. Maybe they won't reciprocate, but maybe you'll benefit anyway, by having greater circulation for ideas that matter.
And ultimately the open web will make a difference, as it did before, when we learned that people return to places that send them away. You just have to trust the universe. It may sound dorky but it's one of the lessons of technology. Might be the biggest lesson.
Back in 1994 when I started blogging, the conventional wisdom was there was no new Mac software. Everyone who said it knew it wasn't true, but for some reason they said it anyway. It appeared in countless news stories, and seemed to be on its way to becoming self-fulfilling.
The problem was solved by creating blogging, then RSS, so we could create new reality-based conventional wisdom. It worked spectacularly well.
The tech industry didn't like reality, their eventual response to RSS was to say it was dead. It has since survived a lot of attempts to kill it. Google concentrated it and then stuck the whole thing in a bag and dumped it into a river. But that wasn't enough to kill it. The pulse is still beating.
But smart people still say RSS is dead.
Words have precise meanings. It's imprecise to say something inanimate that was never alive is now dead. What data do you have? Is there any other possible interpretation? How anecdotal is it. If hundreds of thousands of people use something every day, what's your justification for saying it's dead? Any chance of finding a different less dramatic and more accurate way to say what you're trying to convey?
Thing is unless you're a monopolist, and there aren't many of them, it isn't in your interest to make open formats and protocols diminish. You get more choice and innovation if they thrive. You may impress some people with your bold thinking, but they are the wrong people to want to impress. If you don't want to fight for the open web, at least don't fight against it.
Thanks for listening.
Hey Jack -- I know you've got a lot on your plate with Twitter, but the blogosphere could use some help and Twitter is in a great place to do it, and it could be a pretty big win-win.
Right now Facebook is completely dominating us. There's no good outlet for blog posts that integrates well with FB because they don't allow linking in their timeline posts.
If you look through Facebook, you won't find many outbound links, they do all kinds of things to discourage it.
So they're turning the web into a Facebook thing. Because that's where we have to post to get engagement. But we can't use the rest of the web. And that's the problem.
Twitter of course today isn't much help because of the 140-char limit.
Maybe you could help by simply adding an HTML type, and doing a scan on the text entering the system to make sure only certain features are being used, like:
With that we could reboot the blogosphere, provide lots of new content flows, route around Facebook's dominance, and also btw provide a strong incentive for FB to add these features too.
What's good is that it establishes Twitter as a leader. Wouldn't hurt.
And I'd be willing to bet you have this technology ready to roll. ;-)
Dave
PS: I think I have to turn this into a blog post, but I really did write this as an email to you.
PPS: I am a Twitter shareholder. I bought a bunch of stock at $33. I'm ready to roll the dice. I bet anyone holding $TWTR now is ready too.
Back in the 80s, news orgs developed a process of reviewing software products. It got pretty formal. They had reviewers who specialized, some reviewed databases, some did word processing programs, others did outliners and presentation software, which is what my company produced.
The review process fed back into how we developed products. Since we knew what the reviewers were looking for, we could make sure our products covered all the bases. And we also clearly understood what made our product different and better than the competition. We highlighted those differences in the reviewer's guide.
They were usually 10 to 20 pages, printed, with illustrations. Written in non-hyped, clear and simple prose. Bullet items. Creating the guide was a product marketing function. Part of the PR for the product, but also part of the development process. As I'd work on a product with a team, I'd always be thinking about what we'd say in the reviewer's guide.
Also it served as a checklist for sales people. These are the things you should highlight in your demos with resellers and at user conferences. As the CEO, I needed a script for talking with reporters. This isn't the kind of stuff you want to do by the seat of the pants. It also formed a checklist for the press release announcing the product and the packaging. The reviewer's guide is part of the process of coming up with a great demo of the product.
Even though we don't have reviewers anymore, I still do reviewer's guides for my important product releases. So I've been working on the reviewer's guide for 1999.io. And asking some of the early users of the product and also friends who haven't yet used the product to have a look and tell me what they think.
I recorded a ten minute podcast to explain what the concept means. I wanted to share that with everyone. Maybe at some point we will start reviewing products again, and when that happens, it will help to have a template for what a reviewer's guide is.
PS: We're using GitHub to talk about the RG.
Hillary Clinton said all the things I was thinking as I watched Trump's interviews and speeches. Probably the things many others were thinking too.
I said all that I could, so did many others, but she's the only one who can say it officially and who can say it all. We're lucky that he's only won the primary, because then there would be no one who could tell the truth about Trump, the full truth, slowly and carefully, with poise, confidence, even humor -- but she delivered it dead-pan serious. As serious as a heart attack. Because, as she says, this is reality, not reality TV.
Her speech lets us relax. Up until that point, I honestly didn't think she, or anyone else had what it took to stand up to Trump. My feeling was we'd have to let the campaign run its course and hope the voters knew how to avoid disaster. Now there's less to worry about, because she's willing to embrace the madness and call it what it is. And remind us that we're better.
This comes at a time when the press, that Trump has been so good at exploiting, has figured out how to challenge him, and make him look like the incoherent poser that he really is.
We're not alone in our realization. That's what we get.
And after all the crying by Sanders and his supporters about The Establishment, that's exactly what we need to take hold here. I don't think they get that the United States is a thing, with a history and a presence in the world. That our standard of living, such as it is, would be a lot worse if we weren't the dominant force on the planet. If our dollar weren't the reserve currency of the world. At one point in the campaign, Trump even said he might default. What kind of insanity is that?
A personal note. Last year I turned 60. The even-decade birthdays are a big deal. There was 20, 30, 40, 50 and now 60. Each has its own meaning. As one reaches 60, if you've had a life of accomplishment, you feel confident in your understanding of the world and more importantly who you are. It's time to cut losses on ideas that didn't pan out. And focus on the things that work.
It's true for countries too. What Clinton said on Thursday was just right. The US is a strong country, and we have a lot of things right, but we must cut our losses on things that aren't working out. She reminded us why she is the only person who ran for President in 2016 who is able to do the job. That's exactly what I needed to hear.
Trump is a nightmare that's almost over. He doesn't have a second act. His schtick is good for a TV reality show, perhaps even a sitcom. But being President is serious business. There was a vacuum to fill, and HRC filled it perfectly. What a relief.
An experiment in using GitHub for discourse around a blog.
I set up a repository for Scripting News. From time to time I may ask questions there, to try to pull together information and pointers for topics that may be of mutual interest. Maybe even upload sample code for building tools that hook up to this blog? Who knows...
Today I ask a couple of questions about liveblogging software.
If you have any pointers or ideas, please post a note there, or where ever you see me on the internets.
PS: A second question re example code for the GitHub API.
This is based on tea-leave reading since we don't have much visibility into what's discussed at Facebook board meetings.
Question: Were the other FB board members appalled by his active role in trying to drive Gawker out of business, do they support it, or are their views conflicted?
We can be sure they were not appalled, because he's still on the board, and they won't ask him to step down. At best they were conflicted, and it seems likely they support him.
One big topic at FB board meetings is certainly their progress at getting unblocked in China. We know they really want to be let back in. Their stated mission is to network all of humanity. A substantial part of humanity lives in China. Imagine what the negotiations between China and Facebook must be like.
We know that Chinese citizens don't have anything like our First Amendment. Their right to speak is non-existent. So Facebook would have to help the Chinese government keep people on-topic on Facebook if they have any hope of being unblocked.
So if they're ready to help in China, and they must be, why would they have a problem with Thiel acting in a role similar to the Chinese government here in the US? For all we know he's acting as a proxy for the Facebook board.
If Facebook develops speech-curtailing features for China, why not make them available to governments all around the world? And perhaps China doesn't limit their demands on speech to just Chinese citizens? Why wouldn't they want assurances that Facebook could control the speech of people all over the world?
Snowden showed us how much collaboration there is between the US govt and big tech companies. I don't think there was ever any promise made that this would stop, or that we have all the information, or that they aren't collaborating in ways we don't know about.
We got some data yesterday when Facebook's COO refused to comment on Thiel's role in the Gawker/Hulk Hogan trial. We now have a slightly better understanding of who Facebook really is, beneath the hype.
When the web was booting up, in 1996, a law was passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton, called the Communication Decency Act. It was eventually overturned by Federal courts because it was unconstitutional, obviously so -- it basically said the First Amendment doesn't apply to the web.
All of that was an amazing abandonment by our elected government. A new medium that was already being used for publishing. Blogging was well along on its bootstrap. No First Amendment.
But that wasn't the biggest betrayal. We waited for print publishers to come to the defense of the web, but they never did. They never said that this was an atrocity against free speech. I would never forget that betrayal of their stated principles simply because the words were being transmitted electronically instead of being printed on paper.
Today's statement by Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, that Peter Thiel would remain on the Facebook board, was another moment like that.
Facebook could have and imho should have said something like this.
Free speech is essential Facebook's success. We were offended and frightened by the precedent set by our board member and friend Peter Thiel. We've told him that he can no longer be on Facebook's board, representing the interests of the shareholders and the users of our network, because it would say that we support control of other people's speech by rich and powerful public figures. We've always understood that this was possible, but we can't appear to in any way support this power actually being used to silence critics, especially by someone who has a fiduciary responsibility to our company. We chose to end the relationship. Thiel has resigned as a member of Facebook's board, effective immediately.
Instead, like the print publications in 1996, silence. Impossible to understand. Their business does depend on free speech. Clearly they don't understand this. Ultimately a platform that doesn't fight for freedom can't expect to carry it.
I just realized very few people use the different forms of Like on Facebook.
And when they do it's almost always Love. :heart:
I just clicked on Anger for a post, and immediately wanted to withdraw it, because I was concerned I'd be judged. :anger:
No one wants to ever admit to being angry! :-)
I had to put the smily there so you'd know I wasn't angry about that. :cat:
Hahaha. I wanted to say that again so you were sure.
In the early years of this blog I wrote a lot about the personal struggles of people who had attained financial independence only to find out that it revealed that money was not what was standing in the way of happiness. That's contrary to the message of our society, which is this:
I was fascinated with this topic, because a few years earlier, when the company I founded went public, I had achieved this independence, and found that I wasn't happy. I felt like I had done all that had been asked of me, and I was promised happiness, and I had been cheated, and wanted to understand why.
Before I hit the mother lode, I was just another gold digger, struggling to make payroll, even though my company had offices on Easy Street (not a joke) in Mountain View. I was actually having as much fun as you could have, but didn't know it at the time.
One evening, I was walking around the neighborhood of the office when I met a friend of a friend, let's call him Joe (not his real name) and stopped to chat. I had heard that he was very rich, and asked why he lived in such a modest middle-class neighborhood when he could afford an estate in Los Altos Hills or Portola Valley. He said he preferred to live a modest life, to live within his ability to use his wealth, and just kept the money as a cushion in case something went bad, someone in his family got sick, or some other emergency.
I thought then this was puzzling, I didn't get it, but now, with the benefit of almost 30 years of hindsight, I realize he was totally right. One of the biggest mistakes rich people make is to try to live larger than a single human being can. A mathematical impossibility. You can buy a big house, but you can only sleep in one bedroom at a time. You can own twenty fantastic cars, airplanes and yachts, but you can only be in one at a time. You can own an NBA team and a MLB team, and you get to sit in the nicest seat in the house at games, but you still can only sit in one seat. In other words, your humanity doesn't increase just because your wealth did. You don't get bigger.
And it's even worse than it appears -- the struggle to live more than one life will fail, and it will make you feel like a failure, just as you felt before you made the money! So being rich does not mean success if your goal is to achieve immortal super-human-ness.
You can see that horrific struggle in Peter Thiel's actions and statements. He says he's going to live forever, and so will today's college grads. And I assume in the back of his mind he's also going to solve the problem of just getting one body to use. He will persevere and find a way to sleep in his San Francisco mansion and his New York penthouse at the same time. But here's the problem -- even if he achieves these goals, and of course he won't -- he still won't be happy.
I can say this with some certainty because I've been down the road he's on, and I got off. And I just watched. Watched as the super-rich of my generation got old and their arteries hardened. They got used to talking to servants, and having their asses kissed at all times, and never having to listen to anyone tell them they're full of shit. I'm a few years older than Thiel, and if he had seen what I have seen, he wouldn't be so happy about living forever.
I think we all need a struggle, I think that's where our creativity comes from. We need something that feels unattainable, but actually is not. But the struggle to rise above our humanity, that's not going to happen for any of us. And the desire to have it robs your very human life of any value.
Joe had it right. Live a gentle human-size life. Go for a walk in your middle-class neighborhood and run into a friend of a friend and share what you see, and influence their life for the better. That's the kind of thing a human can do. And it is, imho, where happiness comes from.
I stumbled across an antidote for 2016 election blues. I'm slowly working my way through the first season of The West Wing. It happened by accident. I started listening to the West Wing podcast, and that got me interested in watching the show again.
It's surprising how much of the story still applies, even though political technology has moved a lot since 1999 when it first aired. And many of the things they debate were long-ago settled. You can see that a lot of progress has taken place, and presumably it's all that progress that's causing so much trouble now.
Sure, it's a fantasy version of what happens in the White House, but since we're already being forced to consider another actor's version, why not look at one that is overly functional and lovably fun, instead of nightmarish. The trance invoked by TWW is like a good trip down memory lane.
Man we had our shit together back then.
It's good medicine!
Slowly but surely we're rounding out the feature set of 1999.io. Now we maintain a monthly archive page for each blog.
The important thing is that all the text is there, and it's being maintained automatically by the CMS. And there was a tweak that gets the full months text pre-loaded when you start the editor.
Here's the release note for 1999.io server sysops and users.
Let's build one really great venue for summer sports, and one for winter.
And then build no more.
It's a luxury we can't afford. We already burn a huge amount of carbon to get people in and out every four years, but we spend a lot more building the venue, and for what purpose?
Sure, the Olympics is symbolic. Even though it consumes a lot of carbon creating the venues every four years, it's a tiny drop in the bucket. But it's time to make symbolic sacrifices to help lead the way to real sacrifice, which is coming whether we want it or not.
The Zika virus gives us pause to think. Enough with the Olympic extravagance. We don't rebuild the UN every four years. So we can make due with really great venues, but just two.
I'm still putting the pieces back from the disk crash that happened earlier in May. The rainbow cursor mess.
The other day I wanted to do some work with Electron.
There's an Electron version of the 1999.io app.
I wanted to have another look at that, and another project I'm working on that's also Electron-based.
So I needed to reinstall Electron. So I did. And nothing worked.
Now the question is, did I do something weird when I last installed Electron that I'm now forgetting. I looked back over my notes. Nothing obvious.
So I waited for a fresh start, and sat down with a nice glass of iced coffee, and set about figuring out what was wrong.
I'll save all the blind alleys and wrong guesses.
Two things changed.
Now, instead of this:
var remote = require ("remote");
var dialog = remote.require ("dialog");
You now say:
var remote = require ("electron").remote;
var dialog = remote.dialog;
Apparently I had an older version of Electron and there was a breaking change in an intervening version. I hate it when that happens. Look away for awhile and your app breaks in mysterious ways. Oy.
Anyway now it's documented. ;-)
I want to offer Scripting News via email.
I'd like to use an existing service if possible.
It should read my RSS feed periodically, and when a new item shows up, mail it to subscribers. With whatever options people like.
I would use MailChimp but they require that my physical address be attached to every email. I can't imagine this is really a legal requirement as they say it is on their site.
If you have any ideas, either respond to the Facebook version of this post or send me a tweet with a pointer. Thanks! :-)
Hmmm, I just had an idea. I wonder if this could work via Twitter DMs? They are now unlimited in length.
PS: It would be extra cool if the service understood the Instant Articles feed elements to make the resulting email look even better.
I'm glad that Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and tech billionaire has stepped up on Gawker's side. It's both opportunistic and correct. He's siding with the users. I wonder if anyone else in the Valley considered doing that?
In most industries and politics, the smart money tries to get aligned with the users, or at least appear to. Look at Slack's recent marketing. They talk about the amazing projects smart people do with Slack. Now think of what Thiel's funding of the Gawker lawsuit says -- "We really don't care what you know, as long as we don't get hurt." Assuming that Gawker has really hurt Thiel. If they did, why didn't he sue on his own behalf?
You'll know that tech has gained some maturity and has a vision when they compete to get on the side of tech users. As long as it's adversarial, their business built on a hollow foundation.
When the Mac came out Apple did something new for personal computers, they published a human interface guidelines document, a thick book, written in easy to understand English, but it was also technical. It was a guide for developers showing how to make Macintosh software that was as usable as possible for everyone. And while it made it more difficult for developers at first, over time it made it easier, because many of the design questions were answered. It was good for business too, because people could use more software if there was a consistency to its design.
Dear friends,
I wrote a post boasting about the smooth new Story Page rendering in 1999.io, and wouldn't you know it, when I published the link that's when the page broke. Famous last words. Never be too boastful.
God'll get you for that Walter. ;-)
Here's the link and the page now is working properly.
http://scripting.com/2016/05/27/1285.html
Dave
PS: Thanks to tlepasse for helping me debug the problem. ;-)
I made a bunch of improvements to the way 1999.io generates story pages. The net result is that pages should now load more smoothly.
Here's an example of a story page.
Working in this area is complicated because, while the pages look simple, they are actually all these things at the same time:
Each of those features has conflicting needs and are there for different reasons.
We need pages to be static because some people read pages without JavaScript turned on, it makes it easier for search engines to index the pages, and eventually dynamic servers disappear and we want the pages to be useful as long as possible, even if the server running the CMS goes away.
Stories are editable with a single click, because that's how we like our blogging systems. The big innovation in the year 1999 was Edit This Page. In the 2016 version of blogging, it's even easier. Just click on the text you want to edit, and if you have permission, you just go ahead and edit. No menus, dialogs, nothing to remember other than click, edit, save. It's pretty much as simple as it can possibly be.
Pages are live because sometimes we edit after we publish and we want readers to have the latest version, whether or not they reload the page.
I wanted to brag a little, of course, but also want to let readers know to watch out for problems with display of stories and let me know if there are any. Thanks!
I know what Hillary should do. I'm going to tell you now.
And we have to hope it works. That's all we have. ;-)
