Scripting News

January 2023
  January 19
    We (Adam Curry and myself) approached the Zune people at Microsoft in 2004 to ask to work with us to make a perfect podcast listening and recording device. Basically the PC of podcasting. I wanted to work with them, lived in Seattle at the time, was only working on podcasting at the time. Still to this day such a product does not exist.
  January 18
    My apps still work with the Twitter API. I don't think any developer should try to make hay out of the pain of another developer. I wouldn't do that to you, even if I had questions about the foundation of your product. You see this in sports, no one puts down a competitive team just because one of their star players is injured. For good reason -- it can happen to you too and you don't want to see people do that to you. Remember this isn't just about Twitter, it's about developers too.
    Kevin Williams: "Every time Dave Chappelle comes up, Black folks cape for him, and it's weird. Learning when to let people go when they have done harm to a community, even if it isn't the Black community, is a muscle that has to be trained. Hell, folks haven't let R. Kelly go."
  January 17
    I am pleased to report that news.scripting.com works again.
    I work for the betterment of the network we all share. I'm not trying to get rich or famous, just fix the stuff that's broken. I hope you are doing that too. Keep on truckin.
    When Twitter shuts down client apps everyone says Twitter is bad. But Google deliberately breaks their browser and blames my blog, people don't seem to care, probably because it sounds like Google is being benevolent when they're actually engaging in a huge act of piracy.
    Twitter is getting better folks. You may not like "hard core" but we used to call that "management by shipping" at Living Videotext (my first company). What mattered was delivering features to users. Everything else, bullshit.
    Following up on my GMail problem, a suggestion that I delete all Google-related cookies turned out to be the cure. I once again have access to GMail from my main desktop computer.
    On owning a Tesla
      I have a Tesla Model Y.
      I will no doubt get a new EV in the next couple of years.
      As I bought a new PC every year or so when they were new.
      But I wouldn't miss driving a Tesla now.
      It's like what Harry said to Sally --
        "When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."
      That's how I feel about EVs. It's like driving an amusement park ride every time I go out. I deserve this.
  January 16
    One timeline for each user. Lots of choice, but one timeline. And there has to be a basic agreement on what goes in that timeline. What are the elements of a message. A way to define more types, without going to a standards body, which always crush the individual in favor of the bigco's. Something minimal, orderly, easy to document, lots of example code. Once I get finished with the new FeedLand release, I want to work on this.
    The WordPress user interface must be seen as a platform, a command line, and much higher level writing tools built to run on it. It should be possible to never see the UI of WordPress except for configuration and global settings, much the way you have System Preferences on a Mac. This is why blogging software has languished. The software we use for blogging must fit into the One Timeline paradigm, above.
    When I think of obvious missing tech products, I can’t do most of them, because as soon as the idea gained traction as a product it would be taken over by a big company, partly because users prefer that. So a lot of gaps never get filled. That’s the lesson from twitter shutting down the clients again. It isn’t just twitter, you as an independent developer, can’t step into any platform vendor’s territory, they will eventually take away your business.
    If Google succeeds at burying the open web, we'll create a new open easy to write for web that Google doesn't own. In my piece about this I suggest we should just use the web since it already does what we will ultimately need. There will be too much creativity locked up behind Google's blackmailing, and it has an easy way to escape, we just need to create a new open web. TBL showed us how to do it, we'll just do it again.
    Debuggers and internal docs
      Developers who don't use debuggers limit the complexity of code they can create.
      If you don't document the inner working of your software you will break things unnecessarily, if you're the one who's working on it.
      If someone else is working on it, they'll beg to be allowed to rewrite your code so they can understand what's going on.
    Gmail shut me down
      Last night while I writing some stuff Gmail said it detected that my computer was sending some kinds of unspecified messages, and they were concerned about it, so they logged me off. I could still check my email on my other systems. I tried to go through the "prove this is you" process, but when it said it had sent a message to my phone, no message arrived. When I got to that place on other systems, the message did arrive on my phone.
      I reviewed my account on Google, everything looks fine. The phone I have hooked it up to is an Android. I have a backup email address connected to my account.
      I changed my password, and re-logged-in on my various other systems, everything worked, but not on my desktop. The problem is -- no confirming message ever appears on my phone, or anywhere else I can read my Google chat messages.
      Their help system is unhelpful, they keep telling me things I already know and have tried. I can live without accessing Gmail from my desktop because oddly while Gmail won't work with Chrome, it works fine with Safari. But there are often links in my emails and when I click on them the pages open in Safari. So this is very disruptive to my workflow. I'd rather still use Chrome on my desktop because everything is set up to work there.
      If you have any ideas please post a note here. Thanks!
      Near the end of the day, still can't get GMail to open on my desktop. I've had it try to send me a security message to my Android phone, without luck. I've quit ever app, removed every extension to Chrome, still no luck.
  January 15
    A new this.how doc: Rule 1 means no breakage.
    My local network is incredibly slow at Mac-to-Mac file transfers.
    This debt limit bullshit happens only when a Democrat is president.
    One of the pioneers of an idea called zettelkasten was Arno Schmidt, who also happens to be my great uncle. Quite independently, just before he died, I started working on software that makes it work without the index cards, on a personal computer.
    I want an AI to read my web archive and create an auto-zettle for me. It seems Google should already have this. I bet they do.
    Bingeing report. I watched Band of Brothers all the way through. It's good, but I had forgotten how bloody it is. Since I was in that mode, I watched All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix. Same idea, with 2020's production, a different war, and from the other side. I think the next thing will be They Shall Not Grow Old on HBO. I think an AI could have plotted this path for me.

    FeedLand roadmap
    The new FeedLand server software will be available as open source, so anyone will be able to run a FeedLand instance.

      There's a lot of new stuff here and I don't go into great detail. There is a link to a place to comment or ask questions at the end.
        FeedLand is a feed management system for individuals and groups. So far it's only been offered as a free service on the web. This roadmap explains how that will change.
        The next version will by default not use Twitter for identity. When you sign up you'll specify both a name and an email address. Both must be unique. An email confirms. Click the link and you're sent back with the credentials your browser needs to access your account. The usual dance.
        I do not plan to transition feedland.org to work this way. Recall that we haven't been accepting new members since December 12. Everyone who uses it has a Twitter identity and it's working, and I don't want to screw with that. As long as Twitter is willing to let us use their identity service, we'll keep using it on this server.
        Here's the big news: The new FeedLand server software will be available as open source, so anyone will be able to run a FeedLand instance. It's a Node.js application. Uses MySQL. You may want to hook up an S3 bucket for special features like RSS feeds for Likes. At first email sending will be via Amazon SES, the method I currently use. It will be possible to plug in new drivers to use other email services.
        The open source model is WordPress which uses GPLv2. I want to make it as easy to set up a FeedLand instance as it is to start a new WordPress server.
        People can set up commercial services to host FeedLand for individuals and groups. Every instance is set up to do that.
        It's efficient software. I'm spending about $25 a month to host feedland.org for almost 1000 users.
        The client, which runs in the browser, will not be open source. I don't want to spawn a bunch of incompatible forks. I want FeedLand and its API to be solid. By maintaining control of the client, which btw need not be the only client, I can help be sure that we're starting a developer community with some basic rules about interop. If you want to run FeedLand it has to behave like FeedLand. I've been down this road and watched others go down this road. I think this is the right way to start.
        Typical use-cases: A university department maintaining a FeedLand server to gather new writing from other departments at other universities on topics of interest. Workgroups at companies. It would make a lot of sense for a news org to offer a FeedLand service to readers and their internal news writing staff.
        I don't have dates for any of this. But at this point the path is pretty certain, so I felt it was time to say where FeedLand is going.
      On Friday I posted an earlier version of this roadmap on the FeedLand support repo. I'm sure there will be other changes to this document as we go forward.
      If you have comments or suggestions, you can post them as comments to Friday's post. Comments must conform to our guidelines.
  January 14
    Today's song: Something So Right.
    I don't use WordPress very much, but recently I had a chance to try out the block editor and my reaction was that I can't imagine writing this way. If you're a writer who uses WordPress, do you use the block editor, if so what do you think of it?
    I have the 2015 MacBook Pro running now. It took a lot of iterating to get the right version of the OS running on the machine and to then restore a Time Machine backup on the machine without having one or more extra accounts on the machine. One thing I will never understand is why Macs are so slow at transferring stuff over a local wifi network. All the advice on the net says you need to use faster wifi, but my wifi is very fast. Here are speed test results communicating with a server in NYC, about 100 miles away. Why is it so much faster to communicate with that server than it is to communicate with a laptop that's in the same building?
    I've started listening to Keith Olbermann's podcast again. It's worth another listen because he's explaining why news is like it is, from the point of view of someone who was an insider for years.
    When I first started using Mastodon late last year, like so many others I had questions about what it is, how it works, what is ActivityPub, does it have an API, where is this going, will the BigCo's try to take it over, stuff like that. In the past when new markets appeared, like the personal computer, desktop publishing, the web -- there were always publications that grew up along with the platform, because there's such demand to know about the latest developments. I contacted my friend Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism at CUNY to ask if there was interest in one of their students forming a news site to gather news of the Mastodon world. He liked the idea and now they've taken the next step. They're offering a full scholarship to their "100-day, online certificate program that helps creators establish their own enterprises to serve specific communities/markets." Apply by Feb 3 here.
    Defaulting, explained simply
      Anyone who can understand the rules of baseball or football, who can play poker or Monopoly, can understand the rules of defaulting.
      If the US were to default the same thing would happen to the US that happens to a person if they fail to make a payment on a loan.
        Foreclosure, the lender seizes assets to cover the default.
        Your credit rating goes down and cost of borrowing goes up.
      Today, before default, the US defines what money is. If we create a dollar that's worth a dollar. No other country has this power.
      The world lets us do this for them because a dollar is considered the safest way to store value. That's why the US dollar is the world's dominant reserve currency.
      However if we default, there goes the safety. It's gone, and that kind of trust, built over hundreds of years, once lost will never come back.
      Then we really will be as poor as the oligarchs want us to think we are.
      So, why are the oligarchs who own all our sources of news, willing to let a default actually happen? I think it's a good chance it's due to inbreeding, narcissism, stupidity, selfishness and resentment. They don't believe they will suffer personally if the US turns into an economic basket case. Maybe they won't. For sure, that's all they care about.
      I keep waiting for a news article that doesn’t gloss over the real impact of defaulting. If news were run like journalism this would be the horserace of the millenium. A story with a billion angles. We'd all tune in every night to hear how bad it'll be. But they clearly aren't interested in that. They're interested in keeping their jobs. That probably also explains why we're not responding to the climate crisis or the pandemic.
  January 13
    As many people noticed, the nightly emails didn't go out last night at midnight. The theory they had was that it had something to do with the reported outage at Twitter. Only tangentially. The cause was a linkblog item without a link. The mail-sending software had never encountered such a thing before, and it turns out there was an assumption that all linkblog entries would always have links. So the software lost its mind and went boom. Easy to find, the error message and stack crawl were the last thing in the log. Adding a protection against such a situation was also easy. This is how software gets mature. Sooner or later every weird case shows up and hopefully it will be patched well and documented, so next time it happens the email goes out as it's supposed to. This is all part of the "It's even worse than it appears" philosophy of Scripting News. And, how was this related tangentially to the outage at Twitter? Well that's what the stupid linkblog entry was about. As Maude used to say "God'll get you for that Walter." In this case Walter is me and god is the Software God.
    2000: "Programmers pray to the Software God, Our Lord Murphy, the one who makes sure that anything that can go wrong, does."
    Iconfactory: "Last night at about 7:30pm PST, Twitterrific customers started reporting problems accessing Twitter via the iOS app."
    An RSS OS
      What if you built an operating system around RSS?
      FeedLand is going down this path.
      Feeds are so easy to work with in FeedLand, I want to build all the features with RSS now.
      BTW -- I am not leaving outliners and OPML behind.
      There's a small feature tucked away in the Source namespace that allows an RSS item to be an outline.
      A global network of outlines moving at the speed of RSS.
  January 12
    Medium gets Mastoicized
      It was smart for Medium to embrace Mastodon.
      It gets people talking about Medium again.
      What comes next? Setting up a Masto-instance is easy.
      Will Substack, who stole Medium's thunder, be next to embrace Mastoicism?
      Maybe Mastodon will become WordPress? Just support Markdown and get rid of the character limit and Masto is almost there.
      I spend a lot of time every day using Mastodon and use WordPress only when i'm testing for compatibility with WordPress. Mastodon is much closer to what I think a centralized blogging host should be.
      I keep wondering how this will evolve.
      Meanwhile I'm working every day on FeedLand. Quietly. :smile:
      One thing is for sure -- ActivityPub is complicated.
      It would be a very hard job I imagine to make Medium an ActivityPub node.
      I'm not sure ActivityPub gets you all that much, btw.
      I'm still betting heavy on RSS, just enough syndication.
      Just some random end-of-day thoughts.

    Let RSS be RSS
    RSS is what we use to move documents around the web. That we haven't cared for it is why the current system is so fucked.

      TL;DR: RSS is how we move documents around the web. That it works so poorly is because the big social media companies want it that way. We need products and services with big installed bases to serve as counterweights and help pull RSS out of corp-tech control.
      How I got there...
      Yesterday I wrote something provocative about WordPress.
      HiMY SYeD read it, and commented, on Mastodon:
        What Mastodon is to ActivityPub...
        WordPress is to RSS.
      My first response was:
        Interesting analogy.
        Something to think about.
      After pondering a bit...
        There are other products that could claim ownership of RSS -- like Google Reader, which still controls the market almost 10 years after its demise.
        And Twitter, by not supporting RSS is also a big definer of RSS, in a negative way.
        I think we'll be on solid ground once RSS defines itself and the products get out of the way.
      And I think that's the key point
        RSS has never had a chance to be itself.
        Right from the start, all kinds of people and companies sought to own it. No one succeeded at that, but each of them diluted it, added confusion, took some of its power away and gave back nothing in return. Very typical approach of tech to open tech they didn't create.
        Until we can get RSS leading, as itself, and not being carved up and controlled, we won't really have a good way of moving documents around the web, which is what RSS is for, btw, imho.
        All the usual disclaimers apply.
      PS: I hope people at WordPress read this. Right now they're in the best position to help RSS if they're inclined to do so. There aren't many companies I would credit with possibly wanting to do that. Slack was one, and Automattic is another. I still have to write the howto doc for what it would take for that to happen, subject to discussion of course.

    My new old Mac laptop
    Don't believe that Macs 'just work'. 😀

      I got my 2015 MacBook Pro. Two problems to start.
        It came with Mojave installed. I got this machine because the software I want to use specifically does not run on Mojave. I didn't realize this until after I had copied a huge number of files to the machine via Time Machine backup. I will have to do this again.
        Today they're selling the same $600 machine on Amazon for $389. I wish I had an idea what the price range was. I could have waited a few days. I thought $600 was a good deal, but it's a ripoff.
      Anyway, so I thought this morning I'll just copy a High Sierra installer to the hard drive and run it, but Mojave won't run it. The app is there, but it's grayed out. Who knows why. Presumably it won't run on this machine.
      Next up I went into Recovery mode to install the OS that's in ROM, it was El Capitan. As the machine is rebooting after install it freezes with a totally cryptic error message. Here's a photo.
      A not very encouraging error message from my new MacBook.
      After restarting, the message is gone. I found I couldn't restore from a Time Machine backup because it comes from a machine more advanced than El Capitan. So I then did the minimum to get the machine to boot up, went into the System Preferences app, turned on file sharing and copied an install app for High Sierra. It's running it now.
      Update: After a lot more bullshit work, I think I'm pretty close to having the laptop working the way I need it to. If so, I will be able to travel and still keep up with my development projects.
  January 11
    Jeff Beck Group: I Ain't Superstitious.
    WordPress is in the way. I've avoided saying this because I like Matt, but at some point, it being in the way has to win out. And since when do I not say something because I like the person who made it. It's in the way. I would like to see it move out of the way. I will write a piece soon explaining how they could, and should, do that.
    Today I got the FSD beta for my Model Y, and of course I tried it out, very carefully. And I can validate that it did try to do the worst thing at the worst possible moment. Luckily I have always been a nervous passenger and I wasn't about to trust a bot this much. I intervened at the first sign of trouble.
    Even though I have far fewer followers on Masto, I get much more engagement there than on Twitter. Has it been productive? Hmmm, not sure about that. But I have hope that it will result in collaboration.
    2015: "In order for the open web to flourish again, there have to be tools and services that are open that are more useful than the ones we use in the silos."
    I watched two movies up for Oscars, and found little to recommend either. The Banshees movie is supposed to be a comedy of sorts but it was so painful to watch, not much room for laughter. And I guess I didn't really watch the Fableman movie, walked out after the opening scene. Spielberg's movies have declined into self-obsession. He thinks we're so freaking stupid and he's so freaking wonderful. Come on man do another Jaws. Now that was a movie. One thing I got from Banshees is that the Irish say fecking and I wonder if it means what I think it means. Anyway, I'm looking for something great to watch, and have fallen back to re-watching Band of Brothers. It's been so long since I last watched it that it seems pretty fresh. I long for that kind of story-telling, but they don't seem to make shows like that these days.
    James Corbett: Fecking is used a bit like frack in Battlestar Galactica, with a more limited range of application. And isn't really used in real life the way it is in movie versions of Ireland.
    Can't get Still Crazy After All These Years out of my mind. Such a sad song. Written by Simon when he was 34, but it seems written from the perspective of a person my own age. Best line: "Longing my life away."

    I still love my Tesla
    I actually warned you all that someone like Musk could buy Twitter, and you didn't listen.

      I bought my Tesla before people got all crabby about it.
      And no just because you don't like Elon Musk I'm not going to walk away from a $70K purchase of a product that I absolutely adore.
      Every time I drive my car I feel like it's a huge privilege to drive it.
      I know of no other product that makes me feel that way.
      And yes I think Musk is an asshole too and a danger to our civilization.
      But then I actually warned you all that someone like Musk could buy Twitter, and you didn't listen.
    How you know you're gaslighting
      You're gaslighting when you tell another person how they feel about something.
      If I see myself doing that, I hit the brakes hard, and go for a walk and think about it. And over time I've trained myself not to believe I know how other people are feeling.
      Esp people who I only know from reading their emails or blog posts.
    A sad truth
      A sad truth for all the holier-than-thous is that we all use products made by evil companies all the fecking time.
      I bet you bought something made by Exxon in the last week.
      They might have created a name of a company that makes you think you're not buying from an evil corp, but that's just marketing.
      If you think you're fighting back against The Man by giving grief to a fellow human being, hmm, no.
      Please have a nice day. :smile:
  January 10
    <a href="https://www.facebook.com/dave.winer.12/posts/pfbid0vprNpfNPHpdXbBzJamSrftU1FXguRDNQXk2DgwZXAujeuxDpxLkDvpDUeqpdcvcyl?__cft__[0]=AZWSYJdQOliEcg8ZiyqwtfwCYlmI5PPAna0sTlEMCIwpKQWE6ryxtzeSq77gSvBC4Gt1iALHXWVAsMia9N8D4RLvVMkabaKuWt2AkNdccnqUamGnbIOULTh0Di5MGo__qOSXV_6fTRshLShjM9pOW280&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R">2018: I have a new motto -- if the world is going to end, I might as well have some nice headphones.
    I'd like to have a personal social net that's coffee house size. Play a few tunes, have a couple of drinks, tell a few stories, and come back tomorrow and the night after that. There's a bouncer at the door so if you come in all nasty and shit, we kick your ass out.
    The thing that makes a movie great is suspension of disbelief. If you get into the story, the movie is good. If you are still in the story the next day, it's great.
    I can't get too worked up over the bomb throwers running committees in Congress, considering we had a bomb thrower in the White House for four years, this seems relatively easy.
    His mom must be proud
      asshole. noun, vulgar. a stupid, mean, or contemptible person.
  January 9
    FeedLand: Change in how "Add a few feeds" works.
    Same way I want news to be unbundled, I dont care which service a show or series is on. I pay a lot for the services I subscribe to, but there are still shows I want to see that I can’t and some services I pay for that I almost never watch shows on.
    Programming is rough when you were prepared to work on hooking up the sound system in the penthouse on the 173rd floor, and instead you have to work in the basement where the boiler is spewing all kinds of crap, but you're not clear if it was always doing this and you're just seeing it now because now you're listening.
    In my first job out of college I was in a similar situation and I thought to myself they shouldn't put programmers in offices on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building with windows that open. I found that thought both disturbing and comforting. I guess I figured out the problem, because I'm still here 47 years later. :boom:
    Developers: If you ever want to know how "FeedLand" parses a feed, you can do it with the Feeder app. Here's a link that shows you what FeedLand gets when it reads the Laughing Squid feed.
    Re yesterday's braintrust query, I may be getting closer to understanding where the ER_CON_COUNT_ERROR errors are coming from.

    Likes considered harmful?
    On Micro.blog there's a debate about whether Likes are harmful.

      On Micro.blog there's a debate about whether Likes are harmful.
      Some of my observations from the thread, all in favor of Likes.
        The Like button on various systems is a way of acknowledging that you saw something and thought it was noteworthy. Since micro.blog doesn't have a Like button, what's the proper way of saying that?
        As a person who writes posts that get zero response here (and not on other systems) I wish people had a less-committed way of saying they saw something I wrote. That would be a little bit of feedback where currently I get none.
        If I see something on Micro.blog that I would Like on another system, I don't comment, I just do nothing, not because I'm bashful or overly quiet, rather because this is a language, and a comment has different meaning from a Like.
        In real life there's all kinds of non-verbal communication. you can nod your head, smile. We've come up with a similar language online, I don't think there's any more meaning in this. We're being human. Not a huge surprise.
        Here's a parallel. My TV doesn't have a brightness control. It's an expensive screen, and I imagine that the designers of the system figured "we have a computer in this that knows how to automatically adjust brightness based on room light." But it doesn't work properly, I don't know what the problem is, but there are times the TV is useless because you just can't see what's on the screen, because the lack of a brightness control. Maybe if TVs never had brightness controls I wouldn't miss it, but they do in my mind, require one. Same thing here. Like is something that's part of the language of social media. To try to deny that at this stage is kind of pointless imho.
        I've been in this position myself in the past, trying to buck a larger trend, and the pressure really does get you to support the common way, the sooner you do it, the sooner the pain goes away.
      BTW, "considered harmful" is borrowed from a famous letter by Edsger Dijkstra entitled "goto statement considered harmful."
    We have Likes in FeedLand.
      When you Like something in FeedLand it is added to two feeds:
        A Like feed for all FeedLand users.
        A Like feed for the person who did the Like.
      This is where my personal Likes feed is.
      And the feed for all users of my FeedLand.
  January 8
    I bought a 2015 Mac laptop, used, for $600 via Amazon. I need it because I use "Frontier" as an integral part of my development process, all my build scripts run in Frontier, and while they could be converted to JavaScript, they'd be more complicated and it's a lot of work, and it's worth spending $600 to save all that work. Someday I want to do it because I'd like to use Drummer and its built-in scripting language for the same purpose. I learned a lot about why people choose older Macs. It reminds me of pre-CBS Fender guitars, which still sell at a <a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=Pre-cbs%20Fender%20Guitars&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-153677-346401-4&mkcid=2&mkscid=102&keyword=&crlp=632052376936_&MT_ID=&geo_id=&rlsatarget=dsa-1456167871416&adpos=&device=c&mktype=&loc=1023511&poi=&abcId=&cmpgn=18786426719&sitelnk=&adgroupid=144636292002&network=g&matchtype=&gclid=CjwKCAiA8OmdBhAgEiwAShr403s3aqhTbcuAgTH_yfHqEEFmps2tzdZFrHidJRllPpY8VuLIH0mcYRoCf2IQAvD_BwE">premium, even though Fender sold to CBS in 1965. Maybe Macs peaked? Anyway -- I should get the "new" computer next week, and I'll let you know how it goes. BTW, my main desktop, the one I'm writing this post on, is a 2017 iMac Pro. I love the machine. I hope it works forever.
    Braintrust query: I've got a problem with an app that uses the MySql package in Node running on a Mac. I'm getting a ER_CON_COUNT_ERROR pretty close to startup. I'm taking the message at face value but it's hard for me to believe it's true that my app is making too many connections because I just doubled the max connections from 100 to 200 and still got the error on the very first query it tried to make. The problem goes away when I reboot the machine, but only for a little while, eventually it starts doing this again. This is in an app that has been running without these kinds of errors for months. I haven't tried running the app yet on another machine, but I'm beginning to think this is a not-resolvable issue. I thought I'd pass it by the SQL gurus that read this blog on how to debug this.
    Ads on Twitter
      The ads on Twitter are better.
      Already today I've considered buying something an ad was selling.
      I saw an HBO ad for a movie I just watched and loved, it reminded me that I loved it. Excellent brand advertising.
      And one taught me something I won't forget.
      2008: Perfectly targeted advertising is just information.
  January 7
    A MetaWeblog API ==> ActivityPub gateway in Node.js would be just the thing.
    Winning Time
      I really like Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.
      Almost finished with the ten episodes of Season 1 on HBO Max.
      I like it for a bunch of reasons.
        I like John C. Reilly who plays Jerry Buss the new owner of the Lakers when the season starts. He also btw is really good at audiobooks. I'd listen to any book he narrates. He's Mr Affability. And perfectly cast for the role of Buss.
        I like the style, it's a little weird at first, but it's clever, and they break the fourth wall a few times, to good effect.
        I like that the style reminds me of one of my favorite movies, Any Given Sunday, also a sports movie.
        I like sports movies/shows. And I especially like basketball. It's my favorite sport.
        I like the story how Pat Reilly became the coach of the Lakers and led them to dynasty.
        I like how Kareem became friends with Magic.
        I like that the guy who played Spencer Haywood is the same actor who played Avon Barksdale in The Wire.
        I like that Sally Field plays Jerry Buss's mother! She's awesome as always.
        I like all the actors and roles. That's unusual. With such a huge cast you'd think there would be one impossible to watch character, but no, they're all interesting.
        I like that they will have lots of potential seasons, next up Phil Jackson and how he became the next dynastic coach of the Lakers. And don't forget Kobe and Shaq who probably won't show up until Season 3 or 4.
      I gave it the highest rating on Bingeworthy. It didn't get great reviews. When I finish it, I'll read some of them to see what I missed. ;-)
    The New York Times
      TRUMP INCITES MOB, 1/7/2021.
  January 6
    We still need a simple user-facing storage system that apps can be given access to via OAuth. All the hard stuff like assigning a domain is done via the user interface. Cost per month about what Dropbox costs.
    Tantek is right. Read every word in this piece. The only thing I'd change is calling this "IndieWeb" -- which is imho redundant. It's like saying "WetRain." Everything he says that applies to "Indie" applies to the web as a whole. Otherwise, right on.
    2017: "We're worse than stuck. Twitter hasn't moved in a decade. Google owned then abandoned RSS readers. Facebook smothered linking."
    Today we remember the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, as part of an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States.
    Soviet Union
      Make Way for Corn, 1955.
  January 5
    Howard Rheingold: "I'm appreciating FeedLand -- I decided to follow everyone who follows me [on Mastodon]. I can add the feeds of a few dozen people I want to pay closer attention to under my Mastodon or News categories. Mastodon for the raw feed, Feedland for the curated feed. Once I went through it, the process was clean, straightforward, quick."
    Here's HR's news page.
    Braintrust query: I'm thinking about getting a refurbished Mac laptop. I seem to remember there was a point at which Mac laptops started sucking. Is it safe to buy a 2015 Powerbook? I need to be able to run "Frontier" on it, that's why I can't buy a new one.
    My OPML subscription list via FeedLand.
    I'm now setting up a second FeedLand instance, this one for me personally. Learning what it takes to set one up and smoothing things out. Taking lots of notes. Found a few bugs, but not many. Surprising how little breakage there has been between Instance0 and Instance1.
    If you've been reading this blog since the beginning you know about Fractional Horsepower servers. It's an important idea. That software you think of as running on huge servers in the cloud also can be deployed on much smaller systems, including behind a firewall on a personal computer. Radio UserLand was a server that ran on the desktop, yet very few users knew that. It just ran in the browser, there was a little cloud component to act as a proxy, to do the kinds of things you can't do from a desktop.
    I wasn't very entertained with The Menu on HBO but now I find myself thinking about it a lot, not deliberately. Weird. So I watched it again, and on the second viewing it came together. I've had a similar experience with There Will Be Blood. I didn't like it on the first viewing, but watched it again, and it became one of my favorite movies.
  January 4
    For All Mankind is incredibly lame. There is one moment where there's a bit of The Expanse feel to it, when the daughter is docking with the big ship. I thought "yes that's what this could have been." It gets a turd rating on my Bingeworthy list.
    What's cool about watching the Speaker rollcall for the fourth time is that we get to review the sheer size of the House, hearing the name and voice of every member. It's real, a new kind of programming.
    I want to find "Drummer" or "FeedLand" users who are on Micro.blog so I can follow. If you see this please send me an email. Thanks! 💥
    2015: 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
    I can't stop watching this video. I want to know who each of the performers are. And the stories of each of the soldiers. I have a favorite, but they're all fascinating. I have a lot of Russian blood, my grandparents spoke Russian to each other. I could see a TV series like Lost based on the characters in the video.
    I tuned into a Laura Ingraham interview last night on Fox with one of the 20 reps who voted against McCarthy. His problem is that McCarthy works with Dems to do things that he ran against. What else could he do. Made sense, even though I don't support the things he stands for.
    I am in interop mode
      Looking for products that can interop on the basis of RSS or OPML primarily. That's what I've invested in most heavily.
        FeedLand for RSS.
        Drummer for OPML.
      Though there is crossover.
        Drummer can read an RSS feed.
        FeedLand products OPML feed lists.
    Diego Rivera
      Edsel B Ford, 1932.
  January 3
    Quick audio question about https.
    All of a sudden Twitter has wildly animated ads.
    It might be time for a new political party to form in the House. I'm pretty sure a majority of voters love watching the Repubs fight this way. I sure do. It's an actual bonafide horse race. They should keep doing this until the Republican Party explodes.
    I introduced a problem in "FeedLand" when keyboard navigation in the Feed List feature was added. Basically, if you had a Feed List displayed, an "ask dialog" wouldn't receive your keystrokes, or it would appear to freeze. This dialog appears whenever FL asks for a string, for example to enter a string to search for, or to enter the URL of a feed to subscribe to. I believe I found the problem and fixed it. It's explained here.
    I'm interested in read-only interfaces to MySQL.
  January 2
    It's amazing what AI can do these days.
    If you want to watch me update my blog outline you can do it here. It seems to update in real time. I must have written this thing, but I don't remember doing so. Looking at the JavaScript console, it's quite sexy, hooked into the websocket protocol supported by "Drummer", which is of course where I am editing this mofo. When I let up on the keyboard for a second or two it sends an update. It's not updating on every keystroke; that would be wasteful. It's fun to watch while I type in one window and watch the update in the other one.
    I asked ChatGPT for a title for this blog post -- "A Blogger's New Year's Wish: A Place to Write, Edit, and Publish Without Boundaries."
    BOTY 2022
      Here's a Google search for BOTY.
      After naming Heather Cox Richardson as my BOTY for 2022 yesterday, I got a nice link from Joe Trippi, a famous political campaign manager and a good human being, saying this means something, and that led to a nice thank you from Ms HCR herself. Now I'm a nobody compared to her, but she was so gracious -- it made we wonder if grace is part of what makes someone a great blogger.
      When I think of great blogging I think of Julia Child. She was on a mission to teach everyone who would listen about <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Art-French-Cooking-Vol/dp/0375413405/ref=asc_df_0375413405/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312061146391&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17119945012164616075&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1023511&hvtargid=pla-435445841003&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=60223809057&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=312061146391&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17119945012164616075&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1023511&hvtargid=pla-435445841003">French cooking. She would never miss an opportunity to praise someone for giving it a try. In the same way HCR believes in American democracy, and that appears to be the source of her grace. It certainly is a consistent theme through all her posts, podcasts, and the one book of hers that I have read.
      BTW, I used the word "sass" to describe some of her blogging. I was thinking about the way she talks about Thomas Jefferson. It's good. It says to me, a person who got a fairly standard education in American History from New York public schools, that these founders that we all iconify and think were so great, actually were people, and some of them were not beyond reproach, like Jefferson. That's the source of my use of the term in yesterday's post.
    TV relationships
      I've been bingeing some highly rated but very mediocre TV series. What makes them so bad is how they present human relations. For example, it's very common for one character to approach another and ask "Are you OK?" with the clear implication that they are not. The person who is supposedly hurting, or sad, confused, troubled, about to die, grieving some horrific event (that we might know about) puts on a happy face and says "No everything's fine, what makes you think I'm hurting, sad, confused etc?" We know it's fake and so does the accuser. I imagine that a lot of people watching it think this kind of interaction is okay, but it's actually gaslighting which is a terrible thing to do to another person.
      Another thing is how they portray romantic relationships. A wife is dancing wildly at a party. The husband grabs her and takes her home, and on the way back explains how embarrassing her behavior was to him. I want to yell at him -- hey who cares if you're embarrased. It has nothing to do with you. And she was having fun. I can imagine being married to you is pretty stressful. Etc etc. Or a young dude once gets to have sex with an older woman and is therefore obsessed with her for his whole life, even after he's married to a very nice age-appropriate woman. The way he describes his feelings might be the way an infant would describe their relationship with a caregiver. "Without you I can't live," he says. Sorry but that's bullshit. The baby is dependent. No matter how you feel, you can live without your age-inappropriate GF.
      I think about all the great shows I've binged many times and wish there were more out there.
      If you're interested, here are my Bingeworthy ratings for shows.
      If you see something that you think I would love, feel free to drop me an email.
  January 1
    Happy new year and welcome to 2023. In tech we talk a lot about interop in software, but there is no interop in software without lots of interop between people, so start there. Open an invite to anyone you want to interop with, no matter what the history, let's work together to remove barriers to interop.
    In that spirit, here's an open invitation to developers at Automattic to learn how blogging works in "Drummer". It's very fluid, designed for writers. Does small and large posts easily, in the same data structure. I'll help.
    My wish for us, in the blogging world, for the new year. We'll know it's working if most people feel their best place to write is their blog, where the editing tools work just as they like them to, and there are no boundaries to where those ideas can be published.
    My blogger of the year is Heather Cox Richardson. Every day she teaches us something about what's happening, in a historic context. This is blogging at its best. If she has a business model it isn't in your face. She has something to add and she does it generously and with great expertise and sass. A role model for us all, and a perfect example of the blogging ethos and a perfect choice for my 2022 BOTY.
    The blog archive for 2022 is now complete.
    I'm tired of typing into tiny little boxes.
    Mastodon has a cute way to validate sites as being yours. If you put your masto address in the text of the site that's good enough. But it has to be HTTPS. Oh well. I think they get most things right at Masto, but the trying to force people to adopt HTTPS is selling out to Google and their thirst to own the web, which is imho not theirs to own.
    If you run a blog or other site, check your copyright notices. We're in a new year folks. For example the copyright notice on this blog should've changed. And then I realize there is no freaking copyright notice. I better fix that. Today is a day of fixing things.
    A new application for AI. Rate the humor level of a tweeted "joke" response. If people knew how unfunny their supposed jokes were they might think again before inflicting them on others. Better yet, score people on the quality of the jokes they actually post. Publish that score next to their number of followers.
    Requiring people to use one uppercase, one lowercase, one number, one special character in a password is bullshit. It doesn't make your password more secure. What it does is make it impossible to remember the password.
    I remember when I saw a product that expired after 2000 and thought that I had arrived in the future. Hah. It's 2023 now. That's just ridiculous. It's impossible that I actually have lived this long. It's all bonus from here-on-out.
    In the new year, I miss my mother
      Reading back over the archives of my Facebook posts, the On This Day In posts, it's the biggest gift when I can tell a joke to my future self and make that person who I would become happy all over again.
      I think I enjoy my own writing more than anyone else, anyone that is, except my mom.
      I'm sure she thought I wouldn't miss her when she was gone, but she was wrong about me in so many ways, so why not one more? Every time I look back on some event I measure it by whether or not she was still alive when it happened. It permeates everything I do. I wish it were otherwise, I really do.
      All I can say is if there is anything left of her, almost five years after her passing, I hope she's reading my blog, and I hope she's proud of her son, after all is said and done.
    Diego Rivera
      Night of the Rich, 1928.