If you want to understand the utility of outliners, you have to understand renderers and processors. More about this soon.
#
In my humble opinion, the thing to do is insist on being able to buy cable service without paying for Fox. But none of the talking heads will call for this because they all depend on a good relationship with the cable system owners. A very deep conflict of interest, across the board. It's like software devs can't afford to piss off Google or Apple, or else they'll figure out a way to kick them out of their app stores. There was a famous slogan at Microsoft back in the day, "No version of DOS will ship until Lotus doesn't run." I'm sure it was just a joke.
??#I went to a
farm produce stand on 28 in
Mt Tremper yesterday to get fresh local peaches, just now coming into season, and everyone was masked up. I think we're doing the wise thing in NY state. It's easy to put a mask on, much easier than being intubated and dying. The peaches are the best part of the year except for the apple harvest. On the other hand at the hardware store, I was the only one wearing a mask. So maybe it's not
all peaches yet.
#The
NBA free agent season started last night. The
Knicks are
sticking mostly with the players that made last season so much fun. This Knicks fan approves.
Steady as it goes, no superteam-building in Manhattan.
#
Should we be excited about big silos and podcasting? Apple, Spotify, etc. Well if you like the way news works now on the web, I'm sure you'll love what they do to podcasting. On the other hand, what we have now is what most sane users want. So I say resist them if you can.
#
Watching the
Olympics is ridiculously hard given that it's 2021 and our entire entertainment system is computerized and networked. They've had plenty of time to adapt, but the entertainment industry is stuck in the 1980s cable model, where ever they can get away with it. Thankfully
Netflix and
Amazon helped to budge them. There should be, if everything were sane, a network location I can go to where I see the schedule of the whole event, past, present and future. I can schedule reminders for upcoming events. And go back, like using YouTube to watch events I missed. Instead I have to hunt and peck, and depend on luck, and the programmer's sense of what'll be popular, and endure NBC's business model, like only making some events available on Peacock, a service I don't use and do not want to subscribe to. It's the same mess as with
news on the web. I subscribe to services I never watch. There are a hundred thousand shows on and nothing I want to see, and the stuff I do want to see is inaccessible. Come on. Isn't there a person in power somewhere in TV-Land who is just as fed up as everyone else must be? Meanwhile we should give up the pretense that the athletes represent the USA, they rep NBC and should wear a
peacock on their uniforms and salute the NBC flag and their anthem whatever that might be.
#New header graphic --
Joltin Joe hitting one out of the park.
#
There's a great
Simon and Garfunkel song called
Mrs Robinson that has this
lyric -- Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. I am too young to have been a
Joe DiMaggio fan, and I never loved the
Yankees (ugh) but I know what it feels like to be missing a hero. Where is
Donald McNeil? The
Covid crisis is still with us. We knew it wasn't going away that easily. If the
NYT hadn't canned him, I'm sure he would have told us that. Now what? We miss him. At least this former Daily podcast listener turn our lonely eyes to him. Where is his Twitter account? How about a weekly podcast with him and someone to play the role of
Michael Barbaro, an interested neophyte to represent us, to quiz the hardened Old Man of Covid,
Donald McNeil? A weekly commentary on what's going on with Covid. That's a
podcast I'd pay money for, if only for the peace of mind and the chance that his wisdom will save my life, and the lives of others.
#
Drummer is coming along nicely. There's a small test group, that includes a couple of old friends who are experienced software developers. The focus in the first part of this process is
Drummer as a programming environment. I don't want distractions from that at first, because I remember how important it is to review and re-review everything about a platform like this before trying to make it work for users. Programmers at this stage will understand breakage more than others. I'm doing what I've been doing for the last four--plus years, developing for myself, following my wants and intuition, not letting it be driven by others. Ouija boards yield a certain kind of software, the world is filled with it. You can only get so far if you have to reach consensus. I'm driving towards a place I've been before. And I know I'm doing it.
??#Something about
tagging has been bugging me and I think I just figured it out. Suppose you have a topic that's starting to develop, and you want to hijack its links to redirect to a page that includes more information than just a scrolling list of references. Well I have
the glossary for that, I just realized. I can override what double-square brackets means for a certain term, have it link to a page which also has a list of the references. Boom and bing. Do they have these overrides at
LogSeq and other
tools for thought products?
#
I watched
The Color Purple on HBO last night. I'm looking for ways to learn what black people say about the black experience in America through history. It was a weird choice, because, even though the actors are black, it was a
Steven Spielberg movie, like ET or Jaws. Always upbeat, even when a husband is raping his sister-in-law. The weirdest thing to have Indiana Jones type music playing while Oprah Winfrey is being beaten by a mob of white men. So bizarre. But I loved all the actors, esp of course Whoopi Goldberg, and there was at times a bit of suspension of disbelief, but the Spielbergishness of the movie was very awkard.
#Someone should write a book about the lost software ideas of the 70s and 80s. There's a lot of reinventing going on. Layers of reinvention. It'd be great if there was one book earnest devs could read, ones who want to build on what was learned in the past.
#
I usually do my bike rides in the afternoon, but today I knew the park would be really crowded, I live in a place where people go to get away in the summer, so I went first thing in the morning. What they say is true, the exercise powers you through the day. It's now mid-afternoon and I'm still feeling the strength in my body from the workout. I think I may reorient my day.
#
A number of years ago I wrote about the importance of
submission. No point fighting some things. I also was learning at the time that there is nothing you think of, that has to do with values, that isn't projection. Science is different, using your senses and intellect to draw inferences. But opinions and values, is just you broadcasting everything you feel to everyone in the world. But really it's an audience of one, you. Combine the two, and years later I realize that submission to yourself must come before submission to another. Give up the struggles between who you feel you should be and who you actually are. If you submit to yourself, you can stop worrying about that.
??#The monthly ritual is complete. Here's the
OPML for July 2021. And just for fun, I
zipped up an archive going back to May 2017, when I deployed my "new" content management system. It's all a matter of perspective I guess. 2017 seems to me like a short time ago, but then a lot has happened in the interim. Some of it is in the contents of the blog. I think some interesting apps could be built using this archive as a seed. So far there haven't been any takers that I know of, but I think we may be getting close with all the
tools for thought activity.
#
Where is the American heart?
#
I know the American Olympics basketball team is playing right now, where can I watch it? That's a hard question to answer, believe it or not, in 2021. In the early 90s, I did an experiment with my brother, in Palo Alto. We knew the Mets were playing in Los Angeles. We decided to try to find out the score, as an experiment. We knew we were living in information impoverished times, that it would eventually get much better. We tried calling the news organizations in NYC and Los Angeles. They had no idea what the score was. Certainly someone at the news org would know, we said. The person answering the phone didn't know. Tried calling the ballpark. The teams. We couldn't find out the score. Maybe it was possible but we couldn't think of a way to do it. This was before cell phones and before the web.
#
Reds is a fine film, playing on
HBO now.
#
A couple of my sites to check out if you like
art and/or
the NBA.
#A
video demo of why instant updating in outlines is so important for content management applications.
#Tools for thought users hear me. Don't let us get locked in. There's absolutely no need for it. You have the power. This is a pivotal time. Insist on
interop.
#
It would be cool if you could hire a Trump impersonator to speak at a rally or business conference, and have him say whatever you like. Like the way
KFC reinvented Colonel Sanders. Or the
Elvis impersonators you can hire in Las Vegas. Flood the market with fake Trumps. Think of all the good causes he could support in a Trumpian way. Render him harmless.
#There's a
new release of
PagePark with the door closed for serving config.json files in domain folders. I asked for comments yesterday, and there weren't any objections. However this is a potential breakage issue, so I wanted to flag it. There is a new config option that lets you re-open the door, either globally or for a specific domain.
#
- Every time I try to listen to a Daily podcast update on Covid, I realize in a deeper way how the NYT made the wrong decision when they canned Donald McNeil. #
- Here's the tradeoff.#
- What he said made NYT staffers angry.#
- He was providing a continuous perspective on a virus that continues to threaten the human race. He was trusted, for good reason -- he was trust-worthy.#
- So what if the NYT staffers were angry. Maybe being angry is good for them. They are lost. They don't understand that their mission is to do exactly what McNeil was doing. Build trust on vital subject matter. Make the NYT readers the best informed people on the planet. #
- As a lifetime NYT subscriber, the right call would have been to fire the staffers and start over with more people like McNeil.#
- And I wouldn't care if the word he said was insulting to Jews. Please re-watch the Carl Sagan bit about the pale blue dot for a proper sense of perspective. #
I heard from a friend of
Gary Sevitsky, a colleague of mine in the late 70s at the
University of Wisconsin. He and I were both smokers and grad students in Computer Science, so we'd go out for smoking breaks together while working at the Unix lab on
West Dayton St. It was in one of our hallway smoking conversations that he told me about Lisp editors that understood structure. I loved the idea, but I was programming in C, so I decided to build an editor for that language, with the same idea. That started me down a
path that to this day I'm still working on. The combination of outline structures and programming, it's a big deal. I never spoke with him after leaving
Madison, and after the
Guy Kawasaki podcast I heard from a friend of his who said that
Gary had died at age 57, in 2013. He was a kind, brilliant man, and a friend from one of the best times of my life.
#
In the future, kids will learn about the attempt to overthrow the government that failed, but they let the coup leaders stay in Congress and they tried again, and again, and again. Kids of the future will wonder why the people of America didn't force the politicians to evict the terrorists. Instead, it took 20 years to get them out of the government, in the meantime the planet became unlivable, billions died and civilization basically dissolved. Right now that's the story that should be being reported in the news. Wait longer, the story gets worse.
#Howard Beale: "I'm a human being god damn it, my life has value!"
#
Journalism is a ruling class, just like all the rest of them. Like the church they try to reserve a holy position for themselves, but it's a lie.
#The big bug in our system is that the world is run mostly by people who are playing it safe.
#If you're a
PagePark user, here's a
potential security issue I want to fix, but there is breakage, that's why I wanted to check with users first.
#I'm still trying to figure out how to use
tagging. The goal is to create an index, like the index in the back of a book. Maybe when I have enough tags I will be able to create a book from my writing here? It approximates the way we did the index in the back of software manuals at
Living Videotext. Hmm. Maybe tagging would work well for the
Drummer docs? Also my apologies to
email readers, for some reason the tags don't show up in emails. I have to figure out why, but I'm not working near there at this time.
#
I never expect to hear any challenging ideas on cable tv news, but yesterday I actually did hear one, in passing, from a surprising source,
John Heilemann, who I think of as the ultimate
parrot. A good looking person, speaks well, but just shovels shit. But yesterday he said something "out there" not on the script they're all singing from on CNN and MSNBC. He said that Biden's response to the threat to democracy is too weak. He said if Biden was really signed on, he'd be putting roadblocks in the Repubs' way, every day. Using the incredible communication system that the White House can be, if used bravely, to expose the threat, again: Every. Damned. Day. I just gave
Joe Trippi, Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen
grief, for only being willing to dip a toe in the water on the mess we're in. Trippi had an episode where he must've mentioned my name 20 times, but he never told his listeners
what I told him he had to do. And of course he's not doing it. Presumably because he's still holding on to the option of having a career if the Repubs prevail? Doesn't he see that won't happen. And we're all about the same age, in our mid-60s. This isn't time to be thinking about our careers, it's a time in our lives when we can afford to take some risks. Think about it next time you decide to play it safe. (That's the problem with every successful person, you can't trust them, even when they're old, they're so set in the groove of safe-playing, they'll never actually do anything to change how things work. And very few young people are willing to risk, or would know what to do if they did.)
#White Lotus on
HBO got really
good reviews, so I gave it a try. It
sucks. Often overwhelmingly cringe-worthy. However I have watched the first three episodes and I can see that I'm probably going all the way. I also tried
Manifest on
Netflix, a former NBC series that got
mixed reviews. I knew from the start that it was
junk, but I watched anyway because sometimes
Junk TV is just right for the moment. You don't have to pay close attention to what's going on. They were trying to make another Lost, which was okay, but they didn't get there. It's just plain garbage. But it was #1 on Netflix last week. I haven't watched a series on Netflix in a long time, I wonder why I pay for it.
#
Both forms of revenue, advertising and subscriptions,
for news, are unworkable. Take down the paywalls, let me pay per article, then when I'm spending $100 a month, then and only then, offer me a sub, as a way of saving money.
#
I recently saw a video of a very early
Pee-wee Herman standup act. I remember the first time I saw him on TV, it was a bit after this, but I couldn't figure out if he was for real or playing a role. That's
how good he was. Too bad he got cancelled for doing a very natural human thing to do, I can't see how anyone was hurt.
Pee-wee Herman is a comedian who gets so intertwined with the role, like
Rowan Atkinson or
Andy Kaufman, that you can't really tell if they're for real. We always assumed
Robin Williams was an act too, but it's become apparent that the wild riffing comedian was who he really was, and it was part of the
disease he died from.
#Almost every time I visit YouTube they make me confirm that I don't want a free trial for
YouTube TV. Not too smart. Every time I see it I want to tell them, hey, I tried your service and liked it, and would still be using it if you had Knicks games. They could skip the pitch until they got the Knicks, then I would say yes, maybe -- after giving it some thought. But without local games, forget about it. I'll put up with Spectrum. BTW, YTTV is really superior to Spectrum, whose UI is awkward, even after you've gotten used to it. And they don't have a virtual VCR, which was the nicest thing about YouTube TV.
#
Where I live some people call city folk "cityots" -- not sure I'm spelling it right. It's supposed to be an
amalgam of "city" and "idiot." Weird thing, almost everyone who lives here is from the city. It's the
biggest city in the country, it can't help but exert its influence.
#That said, some of them
are idiots. I was out for a walk in the early days of the pandemic when we didn't know much about social distancing or mask wearing, and a man and woman couple were approaching, taking up more than half the (fairly wide) road we all were walking on, making it difficult to pass them without coming too close. As we passed I remarked that they were taking up a lot of space,. The woman pointed to the man and said "he's working on a vaccine" as if (I suppose) to imply he could take up as much of the road as he wanted, was he larger than he appeared? A kind of royalty? I thanked him and said hurry up, and thought to myself what a bunch of assholes. I guess they thought I was a
country bumpkin and not the tech god I imagine I am.
??#For serious
PagePark users, it has a
command line tool, and can run apps. This work was complete over a year ago but I didn't announce it because I wanted to burn it in for a while. I've been using it on a production server without issue for many months, running lots of apps. You still want to use
Forever or something like it to be sure that PagePark stays running, but for the apps that PagePark is managing, it takes care of keeping them running. The Forever people made their great app into a Node package, that's what made this possible. I wrote my own command line tool.
#
Something they don’t teach us in school in
my country is that when we
pledge allegiance to the
flag of the United States of America, we are really pledging allegiance to each other. Because that’s all there is, the people. No dear leader, no state church, just us.
#New tagging feature. Click
here to open the tagref dialog for "NYT." So now I can post tagrefs to Twitter. Heh.
#
- At Living Videotext, we worked with Data General on the DG/One. A 9-pound battery powered luggable. 1984, ran MS-DOS. It was a real portable, you could use it on a plane, in a restaurant, at a meeting. #
- It was rolled out in a huge expensive press conf at a Los Gatos winery. Everything the best. Hundreds of people, great party and a great breakthrough product.#
- But you couldn't read the screen. #
- And they didn't light the demo room.#
- So that's all anyone talked about. #
- They were really good people, spent a lot of money on the product, and it should have changed the world more than it did. But they had the same problem many product people have, they didn't know how to listen.#
- Listening is hard.#
- One of the perks of being on Guy's podcast is you get a reMarkable tablet to play with. I tried using it, and sent him an email which he has forwarded to the development team at the company. Here's the email.#
- I have two physical issues that make it hard for me to use.#
- My eyesight sucks, and if I'm not mistaken the screen isn't backlit. I was going to keep it near my tv-watching chair, I usually watch the news in the evening, and I thought this would be a good time, but the light isn't good, and as it got darker, I had to give up, I just couldn't read the screen.#
- My handwriting, which used to be great, is now a pretty slow way for me to record my ideas. Obviously the reason is I've spent the last 40 years using a keyboard all day every day. #
- Now, as a user -- I found your pitch, on the podcast, compelling. It was a very familiar one. ;-)#
- If I could have quickly found that model, take notes, quickly send it to my desktop somehow, I would overcome the other two problems. #
- In reMarkable, the path to success is cluttered with lots of tutorials that show me how to be an expert user, but I haven't become a newbie yet. A lot of software devs do this. They don't set up their product so it quickly hooks you. And therefore it doesn't get hooked.#
- I learned this over years, the hard way, by failing. It started with the first internal release of what became ThinkTank at the Visicalc company, which I was part of. No one would use my product. I never did figure out how to get them to do that. But by the time the product got those fabulous reviews in the NYT and Infoworld, the software did present itself with the minimum info, and clear clues as to how to be successful. #
- There are engineering techniques to getting a product set up for new users. It involves making lists of steps, and finding ways to eliminate them one at a time. So when you turn the tablet on, the first thing it presents is a wifi login, then immediately, a box you write in (the prompt makes that obvious), and a big button that says "send it to me" where you enter your email address and off you go. Nothing else on the screen, no other "important" information. Give me success, and give me something I can repeat, and later when I decide to use it regularly, I can go looking for other things to do. That should be easy too, but at the right time.#
- The hardware is good Guy. The pencil has a nice feel. I'm sure inside the software it has all the functionality I just described, but it has to be presented in the right way in the right order.#
A new
PagePark feature makes it possible to serve an
OPML file as the home page of a site, even if the file is on another server.
#Rand Paul, taking calls from Kentucky voters, is surprised at the passion of the support he's getting. I found it quite illuminating.
#
Does anyone else think the
Olympics is offensive from a
climate change perspective. All that carbon burning. What if instead we had an Olympics where people did heroic things to put carbon back in the ground.
#You know the saying -- locks are for honest people -- I think this is also true of the Constitution. If enough people decide that they don't respect the rules, then the rules don't hold.
#
- Long time passing.#
- Where have all the magas gone?#
- Long time ago.#
- Where have all the magas gone?#
- They all got covid, every one.#
- Oy! Will they ever learn?#
- Oy! When will they learn?#
To the tune of Where Have All The Flowers Gone by Pete Seeger.#
Yogi Berra: "You can observe a lot by just watching."
#A
remarkable statement from the Republican governor of Alabama about vaccination. A divide is forming in the old Republican party. If journalism wants to help, they need a name. I suggest "post-maga" Repubs.
#Someday there will be one venue for each of the olympics. We don't build another UN campus every four years. Why do we do it for sports?
#
Now that I can see
tagging in action, I changed how tags are displayed. A tag appears as a single-square-bracketed term, in blue. When you hover over it, it's underlined. This is more consistent with the way links work. And single-square-brackets are less intrusive than double, but still convey the idea that where you're going is different from a normal link. Feedback is
welcome. I'm also finding bugs in the tag server. Of course, and that's good.
#Falling in love with
Google Reader and then giving up on open
RSS-based news after it was cancelled is like falling in love with
The Monkees, and giving up on music when their show was
cancelled. Long term the open wholesome tech ecosystem is where the breakthroughs come from. When the users learn to accept that tech companies just harvest these developments, don't manage them or develop them, or care about them, then progress will accelerate, but not until then. The power is strong, but you have to use it.
#
Scott Love sent a link to a
piece that said Google Reader was beautiful, and something huge was lost when they shut it down. Kind of like
American Pie about the death of music, and as wrong. As it turns out, since we now
know how it turned out, having
Google adopt
RSS was a pretty bad thing for everyone, except maybe Google. The tragedy isn't that Google fucked us over so hard, it's that even now, eight years later, people still haven't figured out that companies don't make wholesome tech, they consume it. Leave it like an Amazon rain forest after harvesting.
Google Reader should have been called Exxon Valdez Reader. The author's attitude toward people who understand this tragedy is to dismiss us as na?ve. Which is ridiculous given the premise. It's like saying that we liked the meal but we insisted on it being served it by
Darth Vader. Oh boy he betrayed us! The users have the power, this has always been true, and until now, they have used the power to be idiots.
#
- There's something new on Scripting News today -- tags. #
- When you see a tag reference, click on it to see a list of refs to the same tag. #
- An example of a tag reference. Click it, see what happens: RSS. #
- When you hover over a tag ref, it should turn blue. #
- When you click on one you should see a dialog that looks like this. #
- If the text in the dialog has tags, you can click on them. #
- The left and right arrows move back and forth through the tags you've clicked on like the arrows in a browser. #
- Here's how it works:#
- When I'm writing, my CMS passes the OPML of today's writing to a new server app called a tag server that scans for tags. A tag is simply text that's enclosed in [[double square brackets]].#
- When it finds a tag, it adds it to a database, with the following info: the URL of the OPML file it came from, the path to the tag in the outline, the created attribute of the headline it came from in the outline, and the screenname of the author (for now, just me).#
- Now we can do a query, such as: Find me all the items tagged by davewiner with the term RSS.#
- And that query can be displayed in a dialog when you're reading the blog.#
- A quick video demo.#
- I'll have more to say about this, but first I wanted to introduce the feature so you can try it out. #
- If you have questions or comments, you can post them in this thread. #
What if Twitter or Facebook let you argue privately, one-on-one, with a random
anonymous person who takes the other side on an issue you feel passionately about. You can say whatever you want, the other person can opt out at any time, so can you. Repeat as many times as you like.
#Poll: Who is responsible for more mass-killing lies?
#
Idea: What if the vaccine is like a big gun and the virus is an army of BLMs and Antifas marching down the street, coming right at your house, with your kids inside! You must be a librul, you have no protection.
#Alabama doctor: “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”
#
In the end I was rooting for the Milwaukee
Bucks. I don't understand why, maybe it's because I had been following the east more than the west, largely due to the time difference. Or maybe it was my connection with Wisconsin? Whatever the reason I was happy last night because the Bucks won the series, 4-2, over the Phoenix Suns who are also an excellent team. I felt bad for
Chris Paul, this was his first chance in the finals and at age 37 perhaps his last, after a long playoff career, marred by injuries, and he didn't win, not just because the Bucks wanted it more. The playoff process is a long grind. He was still standing, but the Bucks prevailed -- because of
Giannis Antetokounmpo. He's a superstar in league with the
best, plays through pain, and basically carried the team on his back. He is also famous as a terrible free throw shooter, but last night he made 15 of 16 free throws. Without that, the Bucks would've lost, and we'd be going to a game 7 showdown in Phoenix tomorrow night. The most important thing to me, and Giannis commented on it too, is that the Bucks are a team that was developed through the draft and trades, not as a superteam formed for the purpose of winning a championship, like the detestable
Brooklyn Nets. The two stars of the Bucks, Giannis and
Khris Middleton, have been on the Bucks since 2013. I feel great that the NBA, despite the best efforts of the superteams, is still a game where talent and perseverance wins. The playoffs were good this year, it was the year the Knicks competed well, and
young talent impressed and entertained. Now it's time to shift to the Olympics which start on Friday, and the Mets who are in first place!
#
Still reading the
Autobiography of
Malcolm X. He asks if you think it's a coincidence that the US
dropped the bomb on Japan, a non-white country, instead of Germany, a white country. The official story is we used the bomb as soon as it was ready, but that could just be a story. He asks a good question, and many others. I wish we had more people around today asking questions like that.
#Bezos wants to move manufacturing into space. I had never heard that idea before seeing a quick interview today with
Anderson Cooper of CNN and the two Bezos brothers, who look very much alike. The rich one is the guy in the dorky cowboy hat. He says some industries that use up too much of the earth's resources would be better in space. I started to think about what he might have in mind. Server farms run on solar energy, and cooled by the vacuum of space. Perfect. On the other hand, who would regulate his businesses in space? No OSHA, no unions, no taxes or laws. I bet they're all thinking about this, and I kick myself for not having thought of it myself.
#
Jeff Jarvis wonders why insurance companies haven't weighed in on
Covid vaccination. For example, charging higher rates for unvacinnated people. Now that you mention it, I wonder too.
#
What's "historic" about
Bezos' trip today? The first human in space was
Yuri Gagarin in 1961. The first American was
Alan Shepard. Gagarin orbited earth once. Shepard went up and down, did not orbit.
#
In
Denmark they have a children's show about a
man with a huge penis that he uses to help people. At first it's a little shocking to this American, but why shouldn't we think of a
penis as something friendly and useful. I was brought up to think of my penis as something shameful, dirty, to hide, to apologize for. I can't imagine how I got those ideas, but they were and are there in my infant brain. Eventually we learn to have fun with our penises. Hopefully. Why not start as a kid? Thanks to
John Oliver for his incredible little
tutorial.
#
I decided to watch Tucker Carlson for the first time and was rewarded with a
video of Michael Wolff taking down Brian Stelter, and couldn’t agree more with what Wolff said.
#Dear braintrust: I need to find double-square bracketed tags in some text. I believe I have a
regular expression that does this. Please
check it out. I want to be sure.
??#
Today was a total programming day, followed by a
bike ride on the
rail trail. I have a new feature coming for Scripting News. As soon as I posted this I started writing. It happens that way every damned time.
#
More confirmation that today's blockbuster news about Trump is about the crazy place we were in six months ago. I don't get reporters who think that's acceptable. Their job is to know (and tell us) what crazy place we're in right now. #- Same with the military. The Joint Chiefs guy thought Trump might be doing a Reichstag fire. Great. So WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T HE PREPARE THE MILITARY TO KNOCK IT DOWN BEFORE IT STARTED AND SHIP THE INSURRECTIONISTS OFF TO GITMO. ISN'T THAT WHAT WE DO WITH TERRORISTS?#
- When are some reporters going to get into the present and deal with today's truth. Stop praising the military for *saying* how fukced up everthing is. Praise them for keeping it from getting that way. #
- Let's hope Biden, first thing when he got on the job, sat down with the military and told them they fucked up big, and they better be prepared next time. I suspect he didn't because he hasn't fired any of these nincompoops. #
- We need to stop thinking like pussycats and start getting in front of this. We're getting our asses whipped every time, and we're the United States dammit. #
Memeorandum has been a regular
stop for me for news for decades, is now mostly links to news that's behind paywalls. I couldn’t possibly pay for most of them, too many subs to manage, and I don’t read enough of any individual pub to justify subscribing. I do subscribe to NYT and Washington Post. But I don’t get enough value from either, honestly. This continues to be a
lousy situation. The pubs only talk about how news is broken from their point of view, but the readers point of view matters as much, if not more.
#
If you have a Google phone they know every place you go.
#We're living in the post-apocalyptic world. Somehow we got used to it.
#When will I be able to set an alarm on my iPhone that wakes me up when there are five minutes left in the fourth quarter of the game I’m watching?
#
- From the Washington Post via Political Wire:#
- Around the world, scientists and public health officials fear that the world’s protracted battle against the coronavirus is at a delicate and dangerous moment.#
- Reality checks abound. Coronavirus infections are surging in places with low vaccination rates. SARS-CoV-2 is continuing to mutate. Researchers have confirmed the delta variant is far more transmissible than earlier strains. Although the vaccines remain remarkably effective, the virus has bountiful opportunities to find new ways to evade immunity. Most of the world remains unvaccinated.#
- And so the end of the pandemic remains somewhere over the horizon.#
Poll: How long do you think
racism has existed?
#
Rupert Murdoch should be more famous for what he's doing to the world. He mostly stays out of view. That should stop. He should stop just
being a punchline for
MSNBC jokes. He's trying to kill more hundreds of thousands of Americans. And of course not just in America.
#
I don't own any Facebook stock, and in general do not approve of how the company conducts itself, but
President Biden's
line about how
Facebook is killing people is horribly misdirected. If he said Rupert Murdoch were killing people, before Facebook, then he'd be credible.
#
- I was talking with a developer yesterday and the question came up, what about huge outlines? How does OPML handle those? That gave me a chance to tell the story about how i'm archiving Scripting News, and how include nodes work. #
- All systems have to evolve as projects get bigger -- you break it up into components and link them together in a single document. That makes the code more manageable, and makes it possible to reuse the pieces. Every serious system has to provide for breaking big things up into smaller, reusable bits. For example... #
- Node.js has packages. You can include a package in an app, or in another package, with a require call, like this:
const fs = require ("fs"); Then you can refer to exported bits from the "fs" package in your app as if they were part of it, because they are. #
- The programming language C has the #include directive:
#include "standard.h". The C preprocessor reads the file, and replaces the #include directive with the contents of the file. Includes can contain includes. #
- Wikipedia has a survey page explaining how inclusion works in other languages, such as Fortran, Pascal, PHP. #
- OPML has include nodes which have a type attribute whose value is include and a url attribute which is the address of an OPML file. When the user expands an include node, the outliner reads the contents of the OPML file and inserts it as subs of the include node. To the user, if the net is sufficiently fast, and the file is a manageable size, they wouldn't need to know that it was an include node. #
- An example. I archive my blog, which is written in an outliner, and saved as OPML, at the beginning of every month. I save the previous month in a repository on GitHub, and empty out the outline I edit. The CMS that builds the HTML rendering and the RSS version of my blog is able to jump month boundaries. So I have a convenient-size outline for editing, and everything else just hums along. #
- But what if I wanted an outline of all my blog posts going back to May 2017? I would do that with include nodes. And just for fun, I did exactly that. #
- Here's an OPML file that contains includes for each of the months of 2018, 2019 and 2020. If you have an outliner that can expand includes, then you can view all the writing for those years in one outline#
Podcast:
The question we're not willing to discuss. We need new leadership, and it's not the
Lincoln Project. Their war is within the Republican Party, which is not the war we're fighting. Our war is whether we go back to
slavery, or do we live up to the promise of the country post-Civil War and
Great Society. We need black leadership. We need to respond to the slavers very clearly, no, we will not discuss what you want to do. Your only choice is whether you will change or you will crawl back into the hole you came out of. There is no other choice. And we need to expel from Congress every traitor to the Constitution, and there are many of them. No half-steps. Nothing that makes people feel like everything is okay, that our war is winnable with stark advertising.
#Trust me,
watch this 18 minute video. It's a real
mind bomb on
racism. 18 minutes, for a brain explosion. That's a pretty good deal.
#I have not been able to find
Guy Kawasaki's
podcast feed. The usual tricks aren't working. Here's his Apple Podcasts
preview page. Usually if you give that URL to the
GetRSSFeed app, it returns with the address of the
RSS podcast feed. This is
where it took me. I
viewed the XML, and it shows me an HTML page? If anyone can figure out the URL of his podcast feed, please let me know. Thanks.
#A link to my
Glitch server, running the latest
PagePark. It might take a while to load, I'm using the free version, for now.
#Why is it that Senate Majority Leaders of either party are always putzes? Is there some advantage in not having someone you can respect, even a little, in this job?
#Isn’t the
re in refactoring redundant?
#
I'm trying to figure out how to show bike trails in Kingston NY, on Google Maps.
#Sometimes I get stressed, like everyone else. I have a technique for working my way through it. I ask myself this question: What would Dave do if he wasn't stressed out. Change the perspective. I'm now outside myself, am an observer of myself. Often I have no trouble writing down a few things. Then I do one of those things. If it works, I get into it, and an hour or two later I forgot why I was stressed.
#
We swear allegiance to each other.
#
In the early days of the web there were
mind bombs everywhere.
#My
tweet about GitHub yesterday got a fair amount of attention. I'm glad, because the idea is powerful and works. Further if GitHub/Microsoft made this a business priority, it could be streamlined for end-users, and be a revenue source, and an incredible developer platform, beyond what it already does. I would love to begin a conversation with MS, privately if they want, to figure out what's possible here.
#
I've been reading the
Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it's transformative for me. He's talking about whiteness from the point of view of a black man of my parents' generation. I can't agree with some of what he says, he's talking nasty shit about my people, and it's as oppressive as anything anyone says about blacks, even the stuff he quotes. Don't respond to oppression with more oppression. But overriding that is the bigger point, that the United States has been destroying the lives of black people since inception. I just spent
18 minutes with the flipside of Malcolm X, a white academic,
John Biewen, explaining what it means to be white, in the same context as that which X describes, but from from the other side of the relationship. I think if you watch
this video, it'll be the most transformative 18 minute video experience you've had in a long time.
#Our ancestors were slaves, no matter your skin color, or where your ancestors came from. This is a mind bomb that has yet to go off in the brains of white Americans. But it must.
#The source of all our problems is that our government is controlled by stupid, mean, willfully ignorant rich assholes.
#
Good morning sports fans! The
NBA finals resume tonight, I'm actually going to miss basketball when it's over. But then the
Olympics start, and after that my attention will finally turn to the Mets. I've got the rest of the year planned out. But the weather. Oy does it suck. I know there
are droughts and
heat domes elsewhere, but here we're living in a constant state of deluge. I take my bike ride every day, rain or shine. I used to skip rainy days but this summer that's not an option because it rains every damned day, and not just drizzle, hours of downpour. And the thunder last night. Who could sleep through that. Not this sports fan. I just want some beautiful warm summer weather. On the other hand the new rose bush I planted really seems to like all the wetness.
#Toaster ovens are now called "air fryers." That's weird, but I just bought one, a
Cuisinart, as recommended by
Wirecutter. I love it. I've been using it every night, and my eating has become more healthy, and also much tastier. Total win.
#
Let's see.
Martha Stewart and
Snoop Dogg recommend this new Bic lighter because it's great for lighting candles, and more! Haha omg. Lol.
??#
Something very scary just happened. There's a bug in
Drummer that it sometimes updates the wrong outline when an
I/O update comes in. This can result in
hilarity when somehow the updates overwrite the file for
Scripting News, and it seems there is no backup. It's a bug. And bugs hurt! I looked everywhere and kicked myself virtually for not maintaining a backup of this vital file. Every time I publish there should be a copy preserved. Well, it turns out that
was happening. I post the outline to the instantOutlines
repo, and thanks to the power and elegance of GitHub, there's a snapshot of
every update, going back to when I
started doing
this on
June 17. Catastrophe averted. Whew. And wow GitHub is starting to turn into a very nice network file system.
#We're finding that the
LogSeq people and I have the same values re software and users. In yesterday's Twitter thread, they asked what would be the
perfect storage system. I said: "my answer, for now, is
daveappserver. But it isn't perfect, it's what we can do now that meets the criteria for now and the near future (the vision, the direction I want to go in). I think we share that. We want users to be as independent as possible, and to empower all levels of technical interest. I don't want the responsibility of keeping the world's ideas online. I want that distributed with rock-solid interop." I think that's about as concise a definition of why I do things the way I do them. As I was sure they would, the Logseq folk agreed.
#The best approach to solving our problems is to spread the gospel of journalism, to everyone who wants to learn. Teach elementary school students. Make a semester of journalism required for all college grads. The model of journalism of the past no longer works. That's why lies are winning, people have no idea of the elements of good journalism.Teach senior citizens how to do good journalism.
#Brandon Toner is trying to get
PagePark running on his Ubuntu server at Digital Ocean. It seems like he's pretty close, but is stuck on a DNS question. He uses Namecheap, a service I am not familiar with. If you have set up a PagePark server, and have a few minutes could you
help him out? Thanks.
#
Click
this link to see the latest capture of the home page of my blog.
#The US can print as much money as we like, and the world will send us real products and services. So stop complaining about how much money Jeff Bezos has. We have orders of magnitude more. Get our shit together and win more elections, soon, we can do anything.
#When we're successful with
Tools for Thought, you will be able to write beautiful rendering software, and have it work with *every* notetaking tool. Much as an RSS feed isn't for any specific news reader, they can all read every feed. We will do the same for idea processing tools.
#
Photo by
Rick Smolan of yours truly at a tech conference in 1991 (guessing).
#
It'd be interesting to have a list of pubs that don't have a
paywall.
#
- This piece started as a Twitter thread. #
- A few days ago the Oatmeal person lamented that RSS was not a wave anymore. It's more like a big lake not a roiling ocean. People go boating, have a picnic, swim in RSS-land, but it isn't like a moon mission or even a Sting concert. :-) #
- I responded that RSS could be fun again if people would work with each other. Instead of being in it for their own glory, only -- people have to see the benefit of other people and products winning alongside them. #
- This is not the way tech thinks, or news. They all build self-contained castles. And very rarely do people work together. And that's why RSS stays where it is. Its growth feeds off collaboration.#
- People don't know this, but RSS got its initial wave, the one you all remember so fondly, from a collaboration between UserLand Software and the New York Times.#
- We're still coasting off the energy unleashed in that combo. That's how stuff like this happens. People still have the myth of The Great Visionary who sees the right path and leads us out of the wilderness. But that's not how it works.#
- Instead, two parties with enough power and influence decide, consciously and deliberately, to work together.#
- If you want to win big, put aside self-glorification and getting ahead for a brief moment, and focus on how you and someone else can break through, creating something that could never exist otherwise. For everyone, not just yourself.#
- And if someone offers to work with you, think of reasons to say yes.#
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
