Dave Winer's "Scripting News" weblog

Should you learn to code?

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:08:21 GMT

I have to weigh in on this.

You should learn enough about anything to find out if you love it.

I had no idea I was good at writing software until, on a lark, I enrolled in a Computer Science class at Tulane University in 1975. So I'd say, looking back, that was a good thing. If it worked out for me, why not give it a shot.

But programming is at one end of a spectrum. It's like mountain climbing or spelunking, not like bungee jumping or hiking in the Alps. Programming is hard. And it's definitely not for everyone.

I think the reason well-intentioned programmers get irritated by the sudden rush of people like Mike Bloomberg who breathlessly exclaim that they're going to learn to program, is that it's disrespectful. This is something programmers learn to live with. Because we know how the machine works, and most people don't, they don't like to listen to us. Even when we're saying sensible things that aren't very deep or technical. Just listen! thinks the programmer, knowing that it won't work.

The thought that anyone could do it and it would be a walk in the park is just one facet of disrespect. When a skilled guy like Jeff Atwood, who has created some great software, blows up over this, that's what's probably going on. I feel the same way, yet I am an advocate for demystifying technology, for removing techies from the clouds, bringing them back to earth to inhabit with the rest of the mortals.

We need to strike a balance. If you're going to learn to code, it's going to be hard. But if you're going to be a great programmer you have to start somewhere, and like home people relating to tourists, we should encourage it.

But it might be more useful if more people attempted the equivalent of the hike in the Alps instead of trying to scale Mount Everest or even McKinley.

And we should all learn to listen better, because there is very little of that going on these days. Working together too.

Quick idea for Quora

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:51:38 GMT

Quora just raised $50 million. Quora is a very nicely done piece of software. Almost everyone thinks so. But I also think they're too late. There are already plenty of corporate blogging silos for people to write into. And the demand for them never was that high. So I think it would be interesting, with all their money and nice software, if they tried a pivot.

Here's the idea...

1. Position relative to wordpress.com. A simpler more modern, better-designed version. Updated.

2. If possible release the back-end as open source, so you can complete the picture. If not, start work on that, and make it shine. Make it an app platform that will appeal to developers.

3. Create a very simple document-oriented API with pub-sub. I recommend OPML because my tools already work with that format.

4. People can use your web interface to create and edit public documents, with a twist. Users can also provide the URL of a document, and you provide me with an endpoint that I can ping when it updates.

5. Also support the flipside of the protocol as well. Provide a URL for the document, and are willing to ping a subscriber when it updates.

6. This is recursive. Documents can contain other documents each of which supports this protocol.

Congratulations, you've just participated in the bootstrap of a document-oriented Internet, one where links are rendered in place. No one captures or controls anyone's content. You don't have to export documents, because they never were imported. There are a lot of places we can go from here. And the fallback is Quora doing the same thing it was going to do anyway. Except you've opened the door to lots of developers. The same door, btw, that the big guys have closed.

This is just a quickie. It doesn't have to be Quora. It could even be Wordpress. But it is a different model from the usual 2012 business model. I think that's a good thing. It's time to develop new models, because the current one is oversubscribed.

Chrome is better, day 2

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:23:19 GMT

I'm now four days into using Chrome as my primary browser, after switching from Firefox.

Top-line review: My work is better. Not just in the browser, everywhere. Having a strong competent tool in web browsing brings confidence to all my writing and programming work.

I started a thread about this yesterday.

A story. When I got angel funding for my first company, the lead investor arranged for the company to get me a car. I had been driving a rented Dodge Omni, month to month, a real piece of shit. I didn't have credit, or money for a down payment. So every month I scraped together the rent for it. They got me a lease for a new gray BMW 318i. It was an even worse piece of shit. BMW's misguided attempt to go downmarket. I didn't understand that at the time, because I had never driven a BMW before. All I knew is that I missed the piece of shit Omni.

My friend, Guy Kawasaki, who worked at Apple, had a white BMW 535 that I lusted after. So after we shipped our first product, a pretty big hit, I told the board I was dumping the 318 and got myself a 535. White. Just like Guy's. I loved that car. It was a total eye-opener. I didn't know cars could feel like that. You could feel the tires connect with the road through the steering wheel. It handled precisely. Did exactly what you wanted it to do. All my cars prior to that were blown around in the backflow created by trucks. This car cruised right through.

In case you haven't already figured it out, the 318 is Firefox, and the 535 is Chrome.

Now I hope I don't have to write a piece a few weeks from now explaining how Chrome is announcing every site I visit on Google-Plus or emailing it to ex-girlfriends or future employers. :-(

PS: I still to this day drive a BMW, though they're just another shit company treating its customers like scum. But their cars are lovely.

Run against the Republican Party

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:59:17 GMT

I saw Romney interviewed on Fox, and all the arguments about him being awkward and a flawed human being, to me, are unconvincing. To balance those, I look at what I know about the President. Honestly, measuring one man against another, it's a draw.

The reason I'll almost certainly vote for Obama in the fall is that he is not a Republican.

The thought of them controlling the government again, is a real motivator. I saw what they did in August with the debt ceiling. And I see it coming again and again. This is a party that's taken a very wrong turn. I think a United States run by Republicans is in mortal danger. Even Republicans must see that. They need get a message that if they ever want power again they have to clean up their party and get it aligned with the interests of the United States. They once were a sane party. If we elect the insane version of the Republicans, we deserve what we get.

I'm afraid the President will try to win without winning back the House and retaining control of the Senate. This would be an awful mistake. Maybe the President can do a good deed for the country and make this a question of the United States retaining some semblance of sanity.

Which iPad is better, continued

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:40:49 GMT

On Friday I wrote a piece that suggested, perhaps, that the iPad 2 is a better device than the iPad 3.

The reasons: 1. Battery life. 2. Weight. 3. Heat.

I don't see that much difference in screen quality. Sure the new iPad has a nicer screen. But 1-2-3 above are pretty important too.

So I keep both around. Sometimes I have trouble telling which one is which.

Surefire way to tell: Turn on the pad, see how much battery is left. If it's 80 percent, it's the old one. The other one usually runs with about 20 percent.

An offer to universities

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:19:36 GMT

Earlier this month I made an offer to news organizations, that I would work with one or two or all of them to revolutionize the way they offer news to their community. I have a very simple proposal, which I outlined in the piece. It would require guts. But it takes guts to live, and there's no security in any of it. No takers, so far, but John Robinson of the News-Record in Greensboro, NC called publicly on editors to do it. For which I am thankful.

I have a similar offer to universities. I thought I might outline it here, although I've written about the idea quite a few times.

Here's the proposal.

Let's start a program where we teach students to run their own servers. They set one up, install a few apps and administer them. Support users. If they want, add features, or even write their own server-side apps.

This is not an idle or simple idea, it's a revolutionary one.

We always get stuck in this loop in relationship to technology. We, users, get caught waiting for the guys in the air-conditioned palaces to give us the stuff we want. Eventually we get tired, and break out of the wonderful jails they create for us. Then we do this dance again. And again. We should also teach the students the history of tech, so they can, in their careers which will stretch deep into the 21st Century, to recognize this, and to circumvent it.

Taking the mystique out of running a server is step one. A server is just a laptop that is on all the time and has a persistent net connection. And a fixed address. You can get to it from where ever you are, from any device. Otherwise it's just a computer. That's the Aha! moment. From there, it's pure fun (for a certain kind of person, of course).

I think ultimately this should be a required course, but I doubt that will happen. Just as I believe every student should take a semester of accounting, so they know how to do their own taxes, and know how to vote on matters of tax policy. And I also think in the age of blogging, every student should take an introductory class in journalism, so they know how to ask questions, and to tell a story, and the importance of disclosure. With everyone writing publicly, it would be great if an education included some practice at doing this well.

Universities are right to move onto the Internet. But that's not just a matter of putting the faculty online, teaching TED-like classes, which no doubt are, and deseve to be, popular. It's also a matter of putting the future on the Internet, in meaningful and powerful ways. For that, the place to turn is the student body.

Switched to Chrome

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:57:50 GMT

A quick note that I switched from Firefox to Chrome on my main desktop computer, and plan to make the switch everywhere over the next few weeks.

I decided to switch finally because Firefox is trying to get me to switch to version 12 from 3.6. I've been warned by them that there will be no more security updates for 3.6. And over the last few days I've been given warnings by the software that they will soon automatically move me into what I see as a tester's program.

I appreciate that Firefox existed when I needed to get off Windows. I didn't want to use the OS vendor's browser, Safarin, on the Mac. I learned that limited my options in getting off the Windows platform. Didn't want to repeat that mistake.

But I don't like a user interface that's a moving target.

If Firefox were just moving the browser to provide more features for web developers, I'd consider going with them. But they're actively changing the UI of the browser. And that's not something I'm willing to be forced into.

I wrote about this in June of last year.

So I switched to Chrome. Not sure it will be any better. I will, of course, let you know.

Paywalls are backward-looking

Sat, 12 May 2012 15:57:10 GMT

Mathew Ingram, writing in GigaOm, offers three reasons he doesn't like paywalls. His second reason is "Paywalls are backward-looking, not forward-looking," which is the one that resonates with me.

Before the Internet, news orgs had a natural paywall, the distribution system. If you wanted to read the paper you had to buy the paper. And the ink, and the gasoline it took to get it to where you are. In fact, everything that determined the structure of the news activity, that made it a business, was organized around the distribution system.

But that's been over now for quite some time. And paywalls express a desperate wish to go back to a time when there was a reason to pay. Now news, if it wants to continue, must find a new reason.

I think there are plenty of ideas here. But linear problem-solution thinking won't get you there. This is the box we have to get out of. Because change comes whether or not our minds can conceive of it. That's the magic of new generations. Their minds are not limited the way ours are. Things we feel will "always" be one way really never are.

I always thought my generation would be different, but you have to work at keeping your mind agile. For one reason or another, I have been blessed with the ability to do this. This gets people angry with me. To me the world looks like one big crowd of folks yelling "Who does he think he is!" -- which has taught me to appear more humble than I really am. I'm pretty sure I understand where news is heading.

Anyway, here's how it goes.

The model of news we used to practice was started to solve a business problem. A guy named Reuters who lived in London, wanted to know what was going on in the markets elsewhere in Europe. He found that the faster he got this information, the more money he could make. Then he learned that he could sell access to the flow of information for even more money. Then he wanted information from America. So he invested some of his profits from Europe in better ways of doing that.

We went from horses and boats, to carrier pigeons, to telegraphs, to cross-Atlantic cables, all to drive better access to information. And huge fortunes were made doing it.

That's a simplification of course, but it's the basic idea. Information wasn't flowing well. You could make money by making it flow better. And that led to more efficiencies. And then it branched out into other kinds of news because they affected market prices. And eventually a new model emerged, of news as entertainment that could cause people to watch advertisements.

You can see this in a movie starring Edward G. Robinson as Mr. Reuters. It's not a great movie. But it does help explain the idea.

Now, I live in NYC. I really like living here. But the Internet in NYC is a lot like news flow in Europe before Reuters revolutionized it. It really sucks for most of us. Why couldn't someone make it their business to solve this problem? If they do, I believe they will become the news organization of the future. Assuming people still want to live in NYC. And it seems that quite a few people do!

I think you have to look at things this way. Where are the inefficiencies, and can you do something to erase them? If so, that's probably a good business. But like all businesses, there are risks, and no guarantees. You have to try it before you know if it works. Most big news thinkers are not business people, so they don't seem to understand this. But the tech guys do think this way. And that's why that's where the new forward-looking movement is coming from.

Paywalls go the other way, they remove efficiencies. It's hard to see how, long-term, that can be profitable.

What paywalls are really asking is how are the news people of the past going to hold their lock on the flow of information in the future. And that's not a great question, because the answer is they aren't. Let's hope no one does. But of course that's a lot to hope for.

PS: I love how my random algorithm chooses header images for Scripting News. Today's choice is from a remote stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway in Saskatechewan. I drove there in 2004, going from Boston to Seattle.

User's review of Dark Shadows

Fri, 11 May 2012 22:28:17 GMT

Nothing special, like every other Hollywood piece of shit movie.

One thing was promising, because it was set in 1972, they could include lots of great old songs, which was fine for a while, until they hacked up two really great old favorite Alice Cooper songs. Especially Ballad of Dwight Fry.

And Alice Cooper is such a great stageman, and got to do none of it in this movie. He just stood there like an idiot holding a microphone.

Why can't Tim Burton do a movie like Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands, or one of the stop motion greats he did, Nightmare Before Christmas, or Corpse Bride. Those movies had humor and soul, even grabbed your heart. Lately his movies have really sucked. This one got great reviews so I had high expectations, but maybe that's why I hated it so much, because it was such an ordinary stupid dull idiotic plotless movie, with no characters. Awful.

My favorite Tim Burton movie is still Beetlejuice. I think I'll watch it tonight to remind me how much fun a good haunted house movie can be.

Now, I'm sure NakedJen will love it. And I respect her for that. But I give a huge thumbs-down. Terrible waste of talent.

BTW, I'm sure it'll make huge money. It's exactly teh kind of movie that packs in the kiddies.

Blogging and Kickstarter go together

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:57:44 GMT

I had a thought that goes back to the very early days of blogging, and a theory I had then, which thanks to Kickstarter seems to either be about to come true, or has already come true.

It goes like this.

1. Companies are terrible at listening to their users.

2. But users have the most valuable ideas for products, locked up in their experiences with current products.

3. They can see the problems because they have a different point of view from the vendors. And point of view is very important when it comes to products. It's as important as technical knowledge.

4. In the old way of doing things the product guys are geniuses and every so often they come down from the mountain and bestow their gifts on us mere mortals, and we praise them and thank them, and pay them, and then they ignore us. (See item #1.)

5. But once the users can communicate with each other, we will be able to pool our experience, and given enough time, smart users will learn the technology well enough to make the products that (key point here) they know there is demand for. Because they are the ones demanding it.

I figured that blogging communities would form and out of that would come new products and businesses, and products that more closely match the way people really are, not the way the companies imagine we are. I've been inside enough companies to know how badly companies abstract the needs and wants of users.

Now, Kickstarter, an idea I knew was right from the get-go (wish I had had a chance to invest) is either tapping into the knowledge that users have that vendors are missing big opportunities because of poor vision. I think sites like gdgt and Stack Overflow are tapping into the other side of it, providing venues for smart users to share experience. Eventually the two will meet. Threads will start on these sites and migrate to Kickstarter, and the mutual-itch will turn into a vision, and it gets funded, and is realized. Or at least have a chance to be realized.

BTW, as an aside -- what led me to this is my interest in communicating cameras. The products here are moving way too slowly. So when Canon came out with with a camera with wifi earlier this year, I immediately bought one, without a second thought. But it is a tantalizing disappointment, because they designed it in a fairly brain-dead way. I couldn't get it to work. So I started a thread. And after a while Jeff Hellman, a person who reads my site, figured out how to get it to work, and posted a howto, which I then tried and it worked! Hey. That's pretty cool. But there are too many steps and too much software to install. The company, like all companies, thought we needed them to make this work. We just need them to create a bridge, we can make it work better without their help.

There's a next step to this. Let's jailbreak this mofo like they open up iPhones, and get the Canon camera to act as a file server. All I want is SMB file sharing on the thing. I don't care if it's protected, at least not at first. Let it boot up as a read-only device that I can access as a file server from any computer on my LAN. I'll let my router provide the security.

Even better -- put an HTTP server on it. That idea, my friends, goes back to 1997. How ridiculous to have to wait that long! Whole lives have been lived in the interim (well almost).

And there's another idea I'm desperate to see done right -- a podcast player. Apple still doesn't understand podcasting. Sorry. I know you all think they invented it, but they don't do it right. I'll write another post about this soon, but I'm pretty sure it's already in the archive here on scripting.com.

This is why the real power of blogging has yet to be realized, imho. When it's done, industry will have been restructured around communities of users who communicate (see the similarities in the words). Today we're still in the world where the companies market to us through social networks. That is vestigial. Marketing isn't as important as experience.

Which iPad is better?

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:37:08 GMT

Like all dutiful Apple customers I plunked down the money to get the latest and greatest iPad in March. The screen was nice, at first, but very quickly it became normal. The gee-whiz effect faded almost immediately.

I got the LTE version, and that feature is great, but I don't really use it a lot because I'm almost always close enough to wifi. But I'm sure I'll take a train trip where it will be nice to have blazing fast Internet access. And I like the fact that it can share its connection with other devices. I used that feature, when waiting at the DMV to get my New York State driver's license.

I've been using the iPad a lot recently because I've been watching a lot of basketball. It's a great TV companion. But that has meant that I'm always running up against the battery issue. Because the new iPad has more pixels, presumably, it uses more power. Presumably that's why they gave it a bigger battery, and that takes longer to charge. The computer is heavier, and it runs hot. It's not hugely uncomfortable, but you do notice both things, the increased weight and heat.

The other day, with the battery running down, I had an idea. I charged up my old iPad, so it would serve as a backup, next time the battery ran down on the new iPad. And the next day I got to use it, and here's the thing -- I like it better than the new one! It's lighter, the battery lasts longer, and when it runs down it charges much more quickly. Having gotten used to the new iPad, the old one feels like an upgrade!

I thought that was worth a blog post.

Gmail on the move

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:13:09 GMT

In 2005, Google came out with an email service, and like a lot of other people I signed up. I liked it because it kept spam out of my way. It was fairly miraculous how it did that. On the other hand, I didn't like the way they bundled emails into conversations. But I eventually became accustomed to that, even though to this day it's hard to manage.

I was more or less a happy Gmail user until they started trying to turn it into the dreaded Google-Plus.

Gmail is nice to have, but I don't want to blur the line between private email and public writing. The two activities should be as far apart as possible.

I wouldn't mind paying to use Gmail. But this isn't a good thing they're doing, trying to turn email into something else.

The 2012 Knicks are over

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:54:52 GMT

I watched all the way to the bitter end.

All I can say is thank god it's over.

They had their brilliant moments, but at the end they were a rag-tag crew of nincompoops.

The Miami Heat, who put the Knicks down, in contrast are a vector. They're pointed toward an outcome. They mean business. If there's any justice they will be in the finals this year, playing Oklahoma City in one for the ages. Whoever wins will have defeated a great team.

The Knicks aren't a team. And they aren't that great as individuals. And in basketball only teams matter. It's not a sport for individuals.

Now, I look forward to finding other causes to believe in!

PS: The NYT tells the same story, with more detail and a great closing paragraph. I won't spoil it here.

When carpetbaggers rule

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:34:45 GMT

I loved this piece about angel investor Kevin Hartz.

He says "When I see a massive number of new investors and carpetbaggers coming in, it's time to get out."

We'e singing the same song, except we're playing different parts.

When I see products, customers, performance and value not being important, I said it's time to move off to the side and invest for the long-term. Unfortunately I've never been able to convince the actual money investors to bet along with me. They like to skip all that, expecting what seems to them as magic, but to the people who do the work -- risky investment.

They invest in the people who make them feel good. That's pretty dumb, imho -- long-term, while it might yield spectacular returns, short-term. It's probably not wise, either.

Finally, a spring bike ride

Wed, 09 May 2012 18:04:49 GMT

I've been getting into a groove, doing the same ride every day. Enter the park at Columbus Circle. Ride around the park drive, but take the cutoff before the big hill at Harlem Meer. To make up for that, I do an extra circuit around the front part of the park. So I actually get more mileage than one circuit. But I'm getting stronger. Pretty soon I'll start going the full route.

The difference between this year's standard ride and last year's is this -- hills! At first I swore I'd never get used to it. But when I rode in Menlo Park/Woodside in Calif, I did a lot of hill riding. So I can do it. I just have to get in shape.

My rides are getting me more oxytocin or whatever it is that you get high on. Because I float after I ride. And if I miss a day, as I did yesterday, I get very grouchy. I think it's called withdrawal.

One more thing. It's wet and humid today and the park is filled with smells. These are magic smells. I'd get this experience when I lived in suburban Boston, because these were the smells of childhood, the good ones (there were bad ones too, like the smell of the incinerators burning garbage, they used to do that in NY when I was growing up). Boston was close, but these are the exact smells my brain is programmed to recognize as "home" -- proof that our lower brains are programmed just like all animals, to find comfort in being in a familiar place, even at a sub-conscious level. Another reason my heart is activated on these rides (the other being, of course, exercise!).

This makes me feel good. Happy to say.

Map: 7.5 miles, 43 minutes.

Can you tell if a company is crazy?

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:38:49 GMT

Farhad Manjoo, one of my favorite tech writers, has a stimulating piece today about Amazon. He says he can't figure out what they're doing, how they intend to make money. What's the razor and what's the blade? He wonders if they know.

In the old days companies offered the same deal to everyone. They had to because they didn't have all this information about us and computers and actuarial tables, and years of experimentation to guide them. That's not true anymore, and especially not true of Amazon. That's the first thing you have to realize. They're blazing a new trail in selling things. No one has been down this path before. Yet there are others that are on the path.

They made me the same offer they made him. Because I pay $79 a year for Prime, I can have one book a month for free. They pay the publisher on my behalf. And it's not all books.

They might make me an offer on one book and another to Farhad. You just don't know. One thing's for sure, their algorithm has a hunch that if it does this, I might do that. And if I do that, maybe I'll do something else. Somewhere on that path I will trip over the wire and Amazon will make $100. That's how they make money. They can't explain it, any more than a hedge fund guy can tell you why his algorithm just decided to buy 214,203 shares of Podunk Mining Co and turn around and sell it five minutes later. He might, if he did a lot of data dumps, be able to trace back and see how it made the choice, but by then it'll have done 813,329 more transactions.

More and more you and I are hamsters. They're making money off the pellets. That's the best we know.

BTW, I asked my friend NakedJen, who is a serious dog person, what she thinks her dogs think she's doing when she picks up the prizes they leave in the park. She carefully puts them in plastic bags. Later it appears she is depositing them in a bank. What must the dog think about her relationship with Jen?

Sorry if that's too vivid an example, but hopefully it makes the point.

BTW, he thinks Apple has a straight relationship with us, more straight than Amazon's, but I bet he's wrong about that. They've just managed to make us feel more comfortable about it. They hire from the same talent pool as Amazon.

Is Twitter right?

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:26:58 GMT

Twitter is getting all kinds of kudos for not turning over the tweet history of a user in response to a New York State subpoena. But what are the facts of the case, and is Twitter doing the right thing?

Here's a BBC story on the issue, and one from the ACLU.

Here's the question -- were these public tweets? If so, that's like asking for the archive of a blog.

Which raises another question. Yes we know that Twitter's archive is unreliable, that after a certain period of time tweets become inaccessible unless you have a direct link to them. What that period is is uncertain. And why you can access them when they are inaccessible is another mystery.

Is the State of New York just asking for help working around a glitch in Twitter's software?

What is Twitter's explanation?

Now, if this user's tweets were private, that's another matter. I would say it's still a gray area, that the tweets are somewhere between public and private. Does Twitter's terms say what's a permissible use of a private tweet that you have access to?

Neither of the two articles dive into this story in enough depth to ask these questions, which imho are crucial to deciding whether or not Twitter is acting correctly.

Also, btw, to NYS which I happen to be a resident of -- this is ridiculous. These people are citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. There were a lot of people at the Brooklyn Bridge that day, and it wasn't clear what the police instructions were. Why don't you work with the citizens. These are the people you work for -- aren't they? Please. Pick your battles.

Another btw to NYS, even though I think what you're doing is wrong, you might check with the Library of Congress. They have a complete archive of the flow of Twitter. Our tax dollars at work! (He said sarcastically, the government has no business investing taxpayer dollars in private companies.) Thanks to @dannyhorowitz for the link.

Death in the news

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:07:00 GMT

The only time the world "dead" belongs in the headline of a news story is when something that was formerly alive is no longer. A person, animal or plant. That's a legitimate use of the word in news. I can't think of another use that isn't some kind of revenge or spite. Because things that were never living can't be dead.

Fred Wilson has a blog post about this today, which means it will probably be picked up on TechMeme, where a lot of former TechCrunchers, especially Mike Arrington, Steve Gillmor and MG Siegler will probably see it. These three people went on a campaign to plant a meme about RSS that I still hear about every day, usually in the form of a well-intentioned person saying that RSS isn't you-know-what. Every time this happens I put a pin in virtual voodoo dolls of each of their spirits, esp since two of them are former friends. For some reason they decided to put this bell around RSS's neck. Their idea worked. It didn't hurt RSS, it just gave it a smell that isn't very nice. And this for something that never did them any harm, and that they still use on their blogs, and for all I know in their reading of the web. If they don't they're not very well-informed because the news still flows through RSS, and honestly it's hard to imagine a day when it doesn't.

It's shit like this that makes me cry for tech. That such carpetbaggers have gotten control of the flow of ideas. It's very much like the world that we encountered before blogging. And then I remind myself that we marginalized that generation of gatekeepers, and we can do it again. We will do it again.

Menus everywhere

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:31:01 GMT

There's a new Bootstrap menu on scripting.com.

Gotta say it's been a long time coming. And then yesterday I realized I was within a few inches of putting it together. So that's what I did this morning.

You can see from the menu that my Scripting News world, which is one-half of my online existence, has a blog, a linkblog, a top-40 list (which is a nice feature of the linkblog), a place for discussion (threads), a river and a personal site.

The linkblog is the content you see in the gray box in the right margin on Scripting pages.

The other half of my online life is my work. There's a worknote for this bit. If you look in the menubar of that site you'll see how that side fits together.

Note that all of this is hosted on my own servers, I'm not depending on Facebook, Twitter, Google or even Wordpress or Tumblr for my hosting (special mention for the latter two because they wouldn't lock me in, the others would).

I've also been investing in smoothing out all the components to make it possible for more people to install it on their own servers, on EC2 or Rackpace or elsewhere. Right now it's easiest on EC2. That's where EC2 For Poets fits in.

It's a big universe for one guy to manage. It's no wonder my back hurts!

River of News -- FTW!

Mon, 07 May 2012 14:40:09 GMT

I had no idea how Jason Pontin's piece, Why Publishers Don't Like Apps, would end, but it was a riveting story, for a guy like me, who believes that what comes first in news is what's new.

I don't think that fancy layout trumps newness. The name "news" tells you what's important about news. Newness. So if you follow that clue, it leads you to the obvious conclusion that news should present first the newest bits we have. What's next? The second newest bits. And third, fourth and so on.

News is one of those things that is that simple. But it takes people a while to get there if they don't allocate the time to take walks in the park and think about this stuff in an organized way. Maybe, as Steve Jobs said, it helps to have dropped acid when you were young.

Pontin has discovered the truth of rivers. He says that Flipboard is an RSS reader. It is! And if you want to do RSS for news the best way to go is rivers.

Why do the Flipboards of the world get the attention from tech execs, VCs, users and the press? It has always been thus. Hypercard was more popular with editors than outliners. They always go for the flashy bits. They think that a glittery carousel is how information should work, ignoring that history hasn't worked that way. Books don't win because of flash. They win because they're readable. It's the words that provide the excitement. Anything that gets in the way is going by the wayside.

Okay so I feel slightly vindicated here. Now while I have your attention, let me point in the next direction. Once you have a river, do something bold and daring. Add the feeds of your favorite bloggers and share the resulting flow with your readers. Let your community compete for readership. And let them feel a stronger bond to you. Then when you learn about that, do some more. (And btw, you're now competing, effectively with your competitors, Facebook and Twitter. Don't kid yourselves, these guys are moving in your direction. You have to move in theirs and be independent of them. Or be crushed.)

I wish I could work with the teams of the best publications. If that could happen, we'd kick ass. But I'm here on the sidelines giving advice that you guys take on very very slowly. It's frustrating, because it's been clear that rivers are the way to go, to me, for a very long time. A lot of ground has been lost in the publishing business while we wait. There's a lot of running room in front of this idea. We can move quickly, if publishers have the will.

PS: The new EC2 for Poets tutorial gets you all the way through a River. Takes a few minutes. And it's free for a year if you're a new Amazon customer.

PPS: This is my personal river. I take my own medicine. It includes lots of feeds from people who read this site. And I'm always open to adding more.

It matters that Yahoo's CEO lied

Sat, 05 May 2012 21:44:34 GMT

Yahoo's CEO lied about having a Computer Science degree.

That's a fact. It can be spun in a lot of different ways, but that doesn't matter.

In CEO-level business, that kind of lie is material.

I've done two major corporate transactions, and contemplated a number of others that made it past letter of intent and into due diligence. In this mode, the lawyers emhphasize over and over that you want to disclose every liability, no matter how small, up front, before the deal is signed. Any liability that is discovered later will cost you. If the liability is big enough, you could have to return all the money, and your liability isn't even limited to that. I had one bizarre case where I was being sued by my own lawyer, and advised by another to settle or risk losing everything.

When you're working at the level of CEO of a public company, as the Yahoo CEO is, by definition, at all times, you want to preserve your right to litigate. And given Yahoo's litigious nature under this CEO, you gotta figure that'll bring out the litigators from all over.

While I've only had an occasional glimpse of the lawyer hell that corporate CEOs live in, it's hard to imagine going into that kind of constant battle with this kind of exposure. How can you sue someone for breach of contract when you lied to get your job. It's a pretty awkward situation. Never mind what it says to people who apply for jobs at Yahoo. Don't worry about lying on your resume. We don't take that stuff seriously here at Yahoo.

And just imagine the shareholder suits if they don't fire the guy.

They're going to have to do it. Yeah, it's definitely a bad day for Yahoo, and they don't have too many good ones. But it's really unthinkable that he stays.

Politics is not a sport

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:04:43 GMT

Yesterday I wrote that the Knicks season was over. Even if they were to miraculously win the next four games, it would still be over. Because the illusion of an all-for-one and one-for-all cause is broken. The bubble has burst. For me it wasn't the firing of the coach, or whether there was room for anyone on the court with Carmelo Anthony, though in retrospect, those were really clear signals that this was a mess, not a cause.

What had attracted me to the Knicks was of course Linsanity. Because here, for a brief moment, it didn't seem to be entirely about money. The young man, overcoming prejudice, breaking through and shining bright through vision, talent and vitality -- that was hugely attractive.

The image of Stoudemire sitting on the bench next to Lin killed all that was left of my enthusiasm for the Knicks. I don't care how much they are paying him. He doesn't belong there. The fans shouldn't have been booing the Heat players as much as the Knicks management who didn't have the good sense to keep Stoudemire out of view.

Anyway, this connects nicely with a blog post published a few hours ago by Paul Krugman at the NY Times.

He points out that facts aren't facts, according to some in politics, if they come from the wrong people.

There, he put his finger on the problem.

Many people see politics as I see sports. There are two teams, and my team is going to beat yours, and nothing else matters. Winning is everything. And that's a bad mistake. Because as we noted yesterday, while sports is a simulation of war -- it's harmless to project tribalism on the symbols of basketball or baseball -- it's not harmless to do that with politics. We're not manipuating symbols there. There are real armies and economies at stake. Nuclear weapons. The viability of the planet. The future of our species. If we see this as war, then it is war. How much do you know about war, and do you really want to usher it in so quickly, without thinking.

That's the problem. Politics and sports are not the same thing. One is frivolous and the other is anything but.

The Knicks season ended last night

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:17:46 GMT

If you've been reading this site since 1995 you know that I am mystical about sports. That means I see the mystery in it. I don't see things as entirely deterministic, at least not in the sphere that you and I occupy (assuming that gods don't bother reading my rants).

In that spirit, last night's game had moments when the Knicks looked like they could win, but it was not meant to be. And like the awful way the Bay Area handled the World Series of 1989, when the As played the Giants, the Knicks doomed their own game by putting Amare Stoudemire on the bench, along with all the courageous warriors who suited up to face the enemy, and did not inflict wounds on themselves so they wouldn't have to play.

You do realize that sports is our simulation for war, in a day when wars are fought by drones, and when the bodies are kept out of view, and when taxes go down instead of up in wartime. We, as humans, have a need for war simulation at least. We need to feel that our strongest men are doing battle to preserve the honor of our tribe. And a deserter has no place of honor alongside Chandler and Anthony, even Bibby and Novak -- people who give their all for the cause. No place.

Put a picture of the young fallen hero Iman Shumpert in the seat that would be occupied by Stoudemire. Or a roll of toilet paper. I don't care. But Stoudemire had no place on the bench last night.

The place for deserters is a firing squad. Would you like to say anything before we shoot you? "I didn't punch the glass with a closed fist." Okay thank you. Then the blindfold goes on. Ready. Aim. Fire.

The pivotal scene in the great movie Patton is very much like this moment. The General is touring a hospital, pinning medals on soldiers who were injured or killed in battle. You can tell that he really feels this. Then he sees a soldier, sitting up, and asks him what's wrong. He's scared, he says. Patton blows up. Get the fuck out of my hospital, he says (paraphrasing).

You can't put a coward on the bench, a pretender, alongside heroes, and expect to win in battle. It's pretty simple.

The Knicks have to stand for something other than money. Okay, you gave $80 million to a coward. You lost $80 million. Too bad. Now get that asshole out of there.

How a wifi camera should work

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:04:17 GMT

Sometime in the last few months Canon released a couple of cameras that support wifi. If you've been following Scripting News for a few years, you know this is an event I've been waiting for. And since I had a birthday coming up, I decided to spring for it. I'm going to give my old Canon point-and-click to my Mom. She needs a new camera. And I need a new toy!

Which has turned out to be a real puzzle. How do you get the wifi to work?

I started a thread for that, detailing my experience so far.

Here's how I think the camera should work:

1. Turn it on.

2. Like either of my smartphones, an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy running Android, it automatically connects to my router, which I had previously told it the password to. (That much seems to work with the Canon.)

3. Go to my desktop Mac. The camera appears in my list of nearby computers.

4. Click on the icon, see the disk, same as any other computer on the LAN.

5. Open the disk, open the folders and there are my pics.

6. Use the Finder to copy them where ever I want. (They are my pictures, yes?)

Reading the docs, which are, as usual, awful, or the reviews on Amazon, makes me pretty sure this isn't the way it works. Instead, you somehow have to connect to the desktop from the camera and then use its unfamiliar and awkward UI on its low-rez screen (which is really cheap of them because the screen is actually very high resolultion, it's the software that doesn't have enough pixels and that's just memory, and not very much) to copy the files from the camera to the computer. That's exactly the wrong way to do it. But I'm pretty sure that's the way it works.

There have been some reviews of this product in the usual tech pubs. Gizmodo claims they got the camera to connect to the computer, but they didn't say how they did it other than "it's a bit of a pain."

The other day I wrote a piece about how I like to spend enough time with my own products to make sure stuff like this works and isn't embarassingly difficult. It's products like this Canon camera that have taught me how a lot of product makers don't give a shit. Or their companies don't let them give a shit. Net-effect is the same.

BTW, it takes a really sharp picture. This is why I want to use a Canon camera that communicates instead of using a smartphone that takes pictures. Here's the same pic at full resolution. Look at all the detail!

PS: The manual on the CD included with the camera says nothing about wifi.

PPS: Peter Rojas started a thread on gdgt to try to figure out how to get the Canon 320 wifi working.

A back-handed compliment

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:38:32 GMT

"I think you're an okay person. Why do people say you're an asshole?"

This used to happen a lot, not so much these days, but it still happens.

What do you say when someone says that. There are so many things wrong with it. I don't even want to try to list them.

I tend to want to respond with something approximating the truth.

The "people" who say this, if there really are any, are doing it behind my back, not to my face. We both know that's not a highly principled thing to do, right?

I'd like to say I don't care, but I'm a human being, and we are approval-seeking animals. So when you say that, and it registers -- and believe me it registers -- my body chemistry reacts as if I've been threatened. I then have to have an internal conversation about it to compensate. "There really is no threat," I say to myself. And that's energy I'd rather not spend.

But maybe there is a threat. Who knows. It's such a vague statement. You know what, if you say that to me, you aren't being a friend. Maybe that's the best, simplest, thing to say.

Chrome is better

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:34:53 GMT

I've spend a couple of days working fulltime in Chrome, and it's improved my workflow.

New directory displayer

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:45:48 GMT

With the new directory displayer you get a two-level slice of the hierarchy. So if you view from the top of the worknotes site, for example, you get the months and days. Click on a month and you get the days and story titles.

JPM's $2 billion loss? I don't get it

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:48:58 GMT

I've heard or read a half dozen reports on the $2 billion loss at JPMorgan, but don't understand why this is such a big deal. To a bank the size of JPM, $2 billion isn't very much money. If a company like GM or Microsoft lost $2 billion on a product, they'd shrug it off and go on. Probably happens all the time. Why is this so important?

Interesting at Livefyre

Sat, 12 May 2012 20:36:18 GMT

I was leaving a comment at Pando's site and noticed a funny URL in the web interface pointing to 127.0.0.1:8795. They must have a desktop client that has a builtin HTTP server. Anyone know what's up?

Is computer science relevant?

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:00:44 GMT

I've heard people say that it is irrelevant whether or not the CEO of Yahoo has a degree in CS. This gives me chills. Should the CEO of a pharm company have a degree in medicine? Why not? No wonder so many opportunities are missed in tech. Ugh.

Using Disqus 2012

Tue, 08 May 2012 21:44:56 GMT

I don't know all the features that are in the new version of Disqus, the commenting software we use here. I thought we'd dive right in and see. If you've used it elsewhere and know what's up with it, what we should look for, feel free to post a comment.

Examples of great blog design?

Fri, 04 May 2012 22:02:30 GMT

I'm looking for examples of beautiful yet simple and efficient (fast loading, easy to read) designs for blog stories.

Canon 320 Wifi setup

Wed, 02 May 2012 22:29:36 GMT

I got the Canon 320 with wifi and of course immediately tried to set up the wifi access. The instructions in the manual are crap. They tell you to press buttons but they don't tell you where they are. And of course there's nothing like the buttons they describe on the camera or on any of the screens I was able to find. So far no luck.

Should journalists play roles in movies?

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:24:06 GMT

Lately I've been noticing more journalists appearing in movies that are essentially fiction, or totally fiction.

I can see Clyde shaking his head

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:32:21 GMT

I watched the first game of the Knicks playoff series with the Heat on TNT. I didn't know that MSG was also broadcasting them. That is of course where I watched Game 2, last night.

Organ donor podcast

Tue, 01 May 2012 15:13:05 GMT

I am an organ donor, but when I heard this podcast, I came to understand that no one really knows when death occurs. Sometimes it's cut and dry, but other times, not so.

Great NBA Playoffs RSS feed?

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:42:33 GMT

I'm looking for a great feed for news of the NBA playoffs. I want to know the scores as games complete. All the news before the games. Scheduling. Injuries. Nba.com's feed is fairly pathetic. I want a great one. Got a pointer?

What's the dispute between Sun and Google?

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:38:22 GMT

I haven't been paying attention to the court battle between Google and Sun. Just letting the headlines roll by.

Add external items to scripting2 feed

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:41:45 GMT

I want to bring content from this world to readers of Scripting News, without adding posts to Scripting News.