Scripting News for 9/12/2006

After all the hassling today with the phone company I still don’t have a dial tone at the house. I came back to the apartment, ready to sign up with Comcast, but they won’t sign me up unless I transfer my old service. But I don’t want to transfer my service I want service at both places. Never mind, we can’t even do that unless you come down to our office to prove that you’re not the old owners who apparently owe them money. Okay, I give up. It’s apparently impossible to get Internet service in Berkeley. Grace Davis says I need a personal assistant.  

I got burned again by the Firefox bug/feature where it implements permanent redirects without looping the server in, and this was really elaborately fcuked up. Okay, so I had a bug in some software and it was redirecting where it shouldn’t, and because I was doing permanent redirects, once I fixed the bug there was nothing I could do to Firefox to tell it to forget about my mistake (or was there? is there some programmer’s switch I can flip that tells it to forget about all the redirects it’s remembering? that would solve the problem). Anyway, so I map a different domain to the app, as I did last month when I hit this wall, and I used that one instead. However, I forgot to change the domain for the cookie the app was returning. So I spent hours chasing down a bug in some ancient mainResponder code that I haven’t looked at in this milennium, and therefore didn’t trust, when the problem was somewhere very far away, in my work around for this new weird and programmer-unfriendly behavior of Firefox’s. Now I know some idiot is saying it’s my fault for having bugs, but that’s ridiculous. If I have to write bug-free code to use Firefox as a development tool, well then I’d better find another browser. Unless there’s some hidden nerd switch (see above). 

Pretty soon Scoble will be more popular than Jesus. :-) 

MacWorld report on Apple’s announcements. 

Interesting back and forth between the leaders of the Wikipedia and Britannica communities. In defense of Britannica, there is indeed an important difference, Britannica tells you who the editors are, and Wikipedia can’t. When directly asked about that, Wales dodges. I feel sympathy for the Britannicans, and I’m embarassed that the people from the web, which is where I hail from, are so hostile toward the print folk. When Wales cites an accuracy issue for Britannica (calling it “bad publicity”), it’s clear they did the right thing, when the 12-year old boy found the errors, they thanked him, and made the corrections. What else would you have them do? Have no mistakes? Oh come now. At the end of the supposed bad publicity, “Lucian said that despite the mistakes, he still thought the encyclopaedia was the best reference book he knew.” Bravo. The Britannica guy isn’t as aggressive a debater as Wales, but when you look past that, there is a balance, you just have to find it yourself. At the outset Wales seemed to accept that both approaches are valuable, and you know what, he could have stopped right there. Yes, both approaches are valuable. QED. 

Good morning. Real busy yesterday and today with New House Stuff. I’ll miss the Apple announcement, probably won’t have a net connection either (today I’m waiting for the DSL installer). Like everyone else I’m looking forward to hearing what Apple will announce. And amazingly my Macs (knock wood) are actually behaving these days. However if they announce a replacement for either of my machines (or my 60GB iPod) I expect them to fail completely and never boot again (praise Murphy, praise Steve). 

Postscript on the DSL installation. I waited until noon and then called SBC/Yahoo to find out where the installer was. They said they weren’t sending anyone out and I didn’t need to be there. Except when I signed up they said I had to be there. Not an auspicious beginning. Four hours waiting for an installer that wasn’t coming.  

5/7/97: “A programmer is a rigorous scientist determined to coax the truth out of the ones and zeros.” 

Scripting News for 9/11/2006

An OPML directory of all the Digg rivers. It will automatically update when they add, remove or rename the feeds. 

Ted Leonsis: “As I entered the hotel where I am speaking today, the national anthem was being played, and we held a moment of silence in the lobby of the hotel.” 

Wired News on how blogging blossomed on 9/11/01. 

Amyloo has a mobile visualization page. “Get a rough idea of how a website looks when viewed using a mobile device.” 

Scripting News for 9/10/2006

When I read this headline on GigaOm, I thought a Disney character had started a podcast, and wondered if perhaps the chipmunks had started one too. :-) 

This press release is the first I heard that the EFF (apparently) would like to speak for podcasters. Watch out for the EFF, they tend to sell us out for the tech industry, an industry that has major conflicts with people and organizations that create content. When asked to help us out with Google their answer was “tough shit.” Hey they could have at least engaged in respectful discourse, but they clearly didn’t care what we think. I was pretty sure they’d eventually care. Now they do, and they’re trying to gloss over the fact that they haven’t got our support. I suppose Cory Doctorow speaks for some podcasters, but he sure doesn’t speak for me. Evan Williams? Does he do podcasts? 

Grace Davis: “I’m thinking that the anniversary of Katrina will be overshadowed by the five year anniversary of 9/11 and as much as I was horrified about 9/11, I think Katrina was worse, far worse.” 

I’ve become a regular user of Technorati, but the ads are really annoying because they have these animated characters who speak, out loud: “Please type your message in the text box and let me say it.” Well I tried it a few times of course, like everyone else I had the characters say really stupid things, laughed a few times. I’ve thought about having an animated avatar on my website, even tried to design one with their excellent software, now please it’s time for another ad! I’m not going to type my message (as if I had one) in their text box so some piece of software can mangle it. Goodbye avatar! Please. 

Speaking of Technorati, I realized it’s a River of Links, where Google is like a hierarchic news website (although wasn’t originally hierarchic these days it’s becoming more so). The analogy appears perfect. The first link on the first page in Technorati is not the most relevant, it’s the most recent. The first link on the River of News is the most recent, but it could be a bit of sports news, while news of the stock market crash is two screens down. So, if you’ve been fumbling over the distinction, currency is what a river is all about. When you’re reading Technorati, you keep going until you see something you’ve already seen. Same with the River of News. 

Jim Moore reports on the arrival of ex-Iranian president Khatami at Harvard, for a speech at the Kennedy School later today. “Numerous agents emerged from the cars and surrounded the front of the hotel, with guns drawn, sweeping back and forth over the crowd that quickly came to attention.” 

I have to admit I giggled and then snickered when I read the story of the fake Craigslist posting from a “woman” seeking abusive sex from straight men, and how the guy who impersonated the woman published the responses, which included explicit pictures of the men, their email addresses and names (one works at Microsoft) and cell phone numbers. Having read this piece at Wired, where we’re asked to consider our reaction if he was impersonating “A middle aged woman who doesn’t know she has terrible taste in poetry looking for a man who will buy her flowers, take her for walks on beaches and compose saccharine poems that rhyme,”, I realize I was wrong. Our attitudes toward men, even from other men, sucks. He lists a bunch of other options if the middle aged woman scenario didn’t get to your decency. 

Yesterday I listened to a rather long but worthwhile podcast from the NY Times Magazine ethicist, Randy Cohen, that’s part of a series called Times Talks. I’m a big fan of his column, and the segment he does on NPR every Sunday. The podcast is an hour-plus of rambling, he’s not a good speech giver, but no matter, his point was very powerful. We’ve long assumed that ethical behavior is an indicator of character, but wait, that might not be what’s going on. Social scientists do experiments that show that under different circumstances, a person might not call the fire department when the room they’re in is on fire (if three other people go on doing what they’re doing); or might call it in (if they’re alone). Same person, same character, different circumstances. He shows a lot of other compelling examples. So I giggled and snickered because other people did? Maybe so. Maybe I waited to find out how other people reacted before deciding how I would react. Once I read the column in Wired and realized that other people were parsing it differently (ethically, empathetically) I felt free to let my ethics, my empathy, come to the front. So, I think there’s a lot to Cohen’s thesis, having just conducted the experiment, informally, with my own behavior. 

Scripting News for 9/9/2006

NewsRiver.org: How mobile Rivers work.  

An open suggestion to the people working on the Digg rivers, it would be great to have an OPML file of all your rivers, then it could fit into the directory of rivers that I’m working on.  

Scoble: “Now I can get Digg while walking on the beach!” 

Proof that Scoble is a media hacker. 

Today was the day I got my new house. Nice feeling. Had a bunch of friends over, then we went to lunch. The place is absolutely empty, no furniture, and not quite 100 percent clean. So on Monday I’m having a cleaning crew come through, to clean the place top to bottom. Then I think I’m going to have the floors re-done, and then paint the walls. There’s no furniture, no belongings to get in the way, and no one living there, yet, to get annoyed. :-) 

On Thursday, Niall Kennedy will lead a tour of the Letterman Digital Arts Center during the lunch break of the Future of Web Apps summit. I’m thinking of going, it’s only $295 (wish they took Paypal) and it’s local, primarily for the schmooze. Not sure. You think a lot of people are going? Hmmm. 

Flickr photos from Podcamp. 

Scripting News for 9/8/2006

The NY Times launched a new mobile site today.  

Michael Gartenberg reviews the new Times mobile site.  

Michael Levin says the new Times site is a river, but it’s a hierarchy, the opposite of a river. Rivers are reverse chronologies, like weblogs.  

Digg goes River, and Arrington reviews. They were inspired by our rivers, and give credit, which is appreciated.  

It’s cool that Digg links to Scripting, and even better that they link from their mobile version to mine. What’s coming next must be a web that works for mobile users, where we never click a link to a page designed to be rendered on a big-screen.  

Facebook does an about-face. :-) 

Best wishes to everyone at Podcamp which kicks off this evening with a party at Harvard Law School (5:30-7:30PM tonight, Pound Hall, #213.). Wish I could be there, but there’s lots going on here in California. Have a great time, and do lots of podcasts! (Duh.) :-) 

Amyloo wonders if Steve Gillmor was invited to speak at Office 2.0. That would make a lot of sense. 

East Bay entrepreneurs 

Last night we had a dinner for people running East Bay startups. It was a first meetup, I got to see some people I hadn’t seen in quite some time, which was really good; and some who like myself are East Bay newbies. We decided to do this as a regular thing, however I am not organizing it, I’m better at participating than organizing.

For some reason there’s less startup activity on the east side than on the other side of the bay. Not sure why, but I see this as a chance to bootstrap something more thoughtful and with more longevity. I hope it doesn’t become super-heated and bubbly. And I also hope there’s a streak of doing-good that isn’t part of the Silicon Valley culture.

Facebook 1-2-3 

Okay Facebook did good.

But Facebook also did bad.

Good: Bring innovative new feature to users at no charge, and not in response to competitive pressure.

Bad: The users had no control over the new feature.

Let me explain.

The feature they introduced tells users what’s new with their friends. It makes people more efficient at browsing the network of Facebook users they’re connected to. It’s a feature I understand because, as Rex Hammock points out, it’s very much like the River of News aggregators I’ve been developing since 1999.

Facebook is absolutely correct that no new information is available now that wasn’t available before, but only in a theoretic sense. An example might help explain how the users feel. Suppose you lived in a small city of 5000 people, on a small street that 20 people walked by every day. Because of the way the streets are aranged, most of the 20 people are neighbors, people you know well, the kind of people you trust to watch your kids if you have to run some errands. You leave the gate to your yard open because there’s a nice shade tree there, and you leave a bowl of fruit out because you want your neighbors to feel welcome as they walk by. Come sit a spell and visit, life is good. Maybe two or three of your neighbors come for a visit a day. They get to rest, and you get to catch up on the gossip of the day.

Then the city changes the way traffic flows, you still put out the bowl of fruit and your gate is still open, but now instead of 20 people passing your property, 2000 people pass. And you only know 20 of them! Now your yard is filled with strangers, people with odd habits. The same rules apply, your gate is open, all passers-by are welcome, but the result is very different. Someone should have given you a heads-up letting you know this change was coming. Maybe you would have put a lock on the gate and given keys to your friends.

Now, on a much larger scale, with Facebook’s user base, the heads-up has to be done by word of mouth, and opt-in. Instead of forcing all the users to make sense of this all at once, bootstrap a new network on your old one, call it Facebook Plus, or Facebook Big City Life, of Facebook Now, put some futuristic imagery out there, and require users to sign up for an upgrade to their account, which would work thusly.

Suppose I upgraded, and my friend Jane (in my network) also upgraded. Then Jane has a News page, and on that page all my changes show up, along with the changes of all members of her network that have also upgraded. I also have a News page and Jane’s updates show up there, as do all the changes of members of my network who have upgraded.

Now change comes gradually, and users drive the change. When I run into Joan at the bookstore and she tells me she broke up with her boyfriend, I realize I didn’t see that on my News page and ask if she’s upgraded. Now I, a user, her friend, explain how it works. She decides if she wants to participate or not. That’s what users are complaining about, and rightly so. They need to control how their network sees them. They’re entitled to. This was the implicit deal they had with you, and you broke it. You did good by moving the product forward in an innovative way. And you did bad by taking the users out of the loop.

Later: Facebook does an about-face.

Scripting News for 9/7/2006

Guardian: “Dave Winer’s ‘river of news’ finally looks like catching on.” 

On this day in 2004, a drive from Kelowna to Seattle. 

Valleywag says John Doerr’s departure from the Sun board signals a looming Sun sell-off. 

Jason Pontin reads Scripting News.  

Om Malik: “Treo has issues.” 

Chris Heuer: “I was not saying anything about the O’Reilly situation in the hopes I might be able to one day talk to him about what’s going on.” 

Fred Wilson explains the change at Facebook that’s sparking a revolt by users. “Social networks to date have been these big unmanageable messes. Facebook is addressing that by giving users a tool to consolidate the information they care about.” 

The RSS “ttl” element and P2P networks 

There’s been some recent discussion of the RSS 2.0 ttl element. There’s a bit of history to it, and a grand plan that as far as I know, was never put into action.

The initial discussion of the element was on 5/19/02, as part of document proposing three new elements: pubDate, guid and ttl. It was linked to from Scripting News on that day.

In April and May of 2002, we were working with Streamcast Networks, the makers of the Morpheus P2P client on integrating RSS with Gnutella. The ttl element was the key that would allow the network, which consisted of many millions of nodes, to share RSS feeds that were hosted on servers that likely couldn’t take the pounding such a network could deliver. At the time, Morpheus was trying to re-launch after being shut down by a court order. I learned a lot from their CTO, Darrell Smith, who I spoke with several times, at length, in the spring of 2002.

Here’s how ttl was intended to work. Suppose you have a copy of Gnutella running on your machine, and I have one running on my machine. My machine wants a copy of a certain feed, so it asks your machine if it has it. Your copy of Gnutella looks in its cache, finds a copy of the feed, takes the lastBuildDate, adds its ttl value. If the resulting time is greater than the current time, it says yes, I can give you that, otherwise it says no. If your Gnutella strikes out, if everyone it asks says no, it reads the feed from the feed’s server.

I’m not sure what happened at Morpheus, but this was just before I got knocked out in June, and I didn’t return to UserLand after that, so the project with Streamcast was never completed. The ttl element, however, made it into the RSS 2.0 spec, later that year, and it’s still there, presumably ready to be used should this problem ever appear. Of course, in practice, in 2006, there aren’t many feeds that receive so many hits as to require this peer-to-peer treatment. The market went a different way, at least for now.

Hope this helps.

Roasted hot green peas 

Super yummy!

Scripting News for 9/6/2006

My Craig Cline story: “There are very few people who will stand with you when you know you’re right. Everyone who knew Craig knew someone like that, and that made us special too.” 

Dale Dougherty: “Craig was big like a brown bear: slow and watchful, deliberate yet excitable.” 

Michael Gartenberg tastes the tea-leaves on next week’s Apple announcement by rating today’s news of refreshes for the Mac mini and iMac lines. 

On this day, four years ago: The road to RSS 2.0.  

Mike Arrington: Six Apart Acquires Rojo. “The crowded and highly competitive feed reader space, dominated by Bloglines, Newsgator and others, was a tough playground to hang out in.” 

Guardian on the rivers 

Guardian article about NYTimesRiver and BBCRiver. Thanks!

“Dave Winer’s ‘river of news’ finally looks like catching on — at least on mobile phones and other portable devices. In fact, it was Winer getting a BlackBerry that kicked off the latest round of enthusiasm. On his blog, Winer noted that he ‘reached nirvana’ on the San Francisco light railway.”

I have definitely noticed the traffic on the rivers slowly going up. One interesting phenomenon is that the search engine crawlers pickup up story headlines every day or so when they scan, and for some reason they’re highly relevant, so they often make it into the first page of links. Of course when people looking for information click the link, the story has long-since scrolled off the river. But these are probably the kind fo people who follow news, so they’re gradually getting introduced to the idea, and word of mouth of course feeds it too. And thoughtful reviews like the one in the Guardian don’t hurt either!

Water service RSS 

I’ve been ordering all the services required for my new house, which I get the keys for on Friday. Pretty exciting! What’s remarkable is that all the sites have RSS feeds. Of course the phone company, and the ISP have feeds. (I’m getting high speed DSL from Yahoo/AT&T with 5 static IP addresses, for $80 a month, an improvement over the T1 line I used to have, it’s faster, and costs less than 1/10th the price). The water service, electric company and gas companies all have RSS feeds, prominently displayed on their home pages. That was a surprise.

I’m seeing feeds everywhere. The other day I was looking at the website of UserLand’s attorneys, and not only do they have a feed, prominently and proudly displayed on their home page, but one of the partners, Tim Hale, is even doing a podcast! I guess the future has caught up with us. All the stuff that we developed in the 90s has now become mainstream. I imagine that the utility companies don’t know that their new customer helped them find new ways to communicate, I wonder if our old friends at Russo & Hale do? Haven’t talked with them in a while, hope they’re doing well.

Postscript: According to Tim Harrison, they block port 80 on the DSL.

My Craig Cline story 

I actually have two stories to tell, both have been told before, but I want to tell them again. Now that Craig has passed, I suppose there’s more that can be told. Isn’t it funny how that works. While someone is alive you don’t know what’s fair to write about and what’s not, and it’s often not a very comfortable thing to ask, so you err on the side of caution. But once they’re gone, who’s left to object?

On 8/10/00, I wrote about spending an hour on the phone, riveted, listening to a friend tell a story of his heart attack. Starting with chest pain on the east coast, a plane trip home, a drive up the hill to his Woodside home, and then being evacuated by helicopter to Stanford Hospital, where he was lucky to be when the actual attack came. If it hadn’t happened there he wouldn’t have lived, my friend recounted. The friend was Craig.

To keep my cool while listening to the story I had to massage my own chest and remind myself that I wasn’t having a heart attack, although at the time I did actually have heart disease, and knew it, but I hadn’t told anyone, not even Craig. Then two years later, I asked Craig over to my house, a few nights before I was going to a cardiologist. When I told him about my symptoms he urged me to go to Stanford Hospital, right down the street. He offered to drive me. I said no, I wanted to wait and do it the right way. Now I know how foolish that was. I guess part of you wants to be, if not free of the disease, free of the certain knowledge, as long as possible. When I finally went in for my checkup I didn’t come back until my chest had been ripped open and four arteries from my leg had been grafted onto my heart, giving me at least four more years of life. (Knock wood.)

Craig and I have a lot of bonds, our love of technology, an absolute sense of integrity (to the point of being boring, and making enemies for it, Craig made enemies too), and we both had bodies that paid the price for the way we lived. I still have my body, for now; he lost his on Saturday.

(Do I go back and change the tense on the writing to the past tense? Where I say we have bonds must that change to had bonds? I’m going to keep it in the present tense, not ready yet to let go.)

Like Jory, I confided my personal life to Craig, frustrations with lovers, one in particular, who Craig also called a friend. As with Jory, his advice was great, but did I pay attention? That’s not the way these things work.

The second story of Craig is one I’ve told a few times here on Scripting News, most recently on 8/30 of this year, less than a week ago. Craig was on my mind because I was thinking about a visit. I knew he was gravely ill, and that he couldn’t speak. I imagined that I would do most of the talking, and what would I talk about? I would tell him a tale of his own heroism, a story I tell every young person I come to know, and will as long as I live, the one about Craig and the guy from Apple, how he looked him in the eye and told him in his Craig-like way, that whatever Dave wants to do is okay with him. I will tell the young woman or man how great it feels to be so trusted by one so wise, and that as long as they are true to their heart, they will have my support as I had Craig’s on that day in 1997. It may seem a small thing, but in this world there is very little of that kind of friendship, there are very few people who will stand with you when you know you’re right. Everyone who knew Craig knew someone like that, and that made us special too.

Scripting News for 9/5/2006

Google: “News archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives.” I spent a bit of time ego-searching, it’s very interesting, too bad a lot of the good stuff is behind paywalls, esp the NY Times and MacWEEK. Time Mag has an open archive.  

NY Times: Silicon Valley to Receive Free Wi-Fi. “The project will cover 1,500 square miles in 38 cities in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Santa Cruz Counties, an area of 2.4 million residents.” 

ReadWriteWeb on Doug Engelbart’s Hyperscope 1.0, a modern web app. Its native file format is OPML. :-) 

Here’s an example of a Hyperscope document. View source reveals that it is an OPML document with a stylesheet.  

Little-known fact: Scripting News is the top hit when you do an image search for Katherine Harris.  

In preparation for PodCamp, which starts on Friday (with a party at Berkman Center), they’re getting together an archive of the first podcasts. I’m honored that the very first one is an interview Chris Lydon and I did at Berkman, on July 8, 2003. It’s actually a pretty good one! :-) 

Rocketboom asks where were you on Sept 11? 

WTC from the ESB webcam, 9/11/01. 

Raw Socket: “Standing in Shibuya Crossing, Howard Rheingold saw people looking at their phones instead of talking into them, and that blew his mind. That’s the Shibuya epiphany.” 

From Gayle Cline: “We are creating a memorial garden spot on the ranch, so if anyone wants to contribute potted plants, or memorabilia, they should have them sent here.” 

Tim Bray: “Craig was a good man.” 

According to the Wikipedia page on Craig Cline, Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly credits him with coining the term “Web 2.0.” 

Meryl Evans: “The term came to life when Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media brainstormed with MediaLive’s Craig Cline.” 

Scripting News for 9/4/2006

Jory’s remembrance of Craig. She was with him when he died on Saturday. 

Don Hopkins demonstrates his new wireless remote control technology for “rock and roll.” 

Raw Socket: “Mobility is being packaged differently so old-time webheads can digest it.” 

Five years ago today I had a strange technical dream, in which the kernel of my scripting environment temporarily squared the speed of light (saving the old speed on the stack) to make the code run faster.  

Tom, I didn’t get invited because I said I didn’t want an invite. If I’d got one I’d decline to go. Been saying that publicly for 2 years. Hope that clears things up.  

Scripting News for 9/3/2006

Craig Cline, former head of Seybold Publishing, died yesterday after a long illness. His wife Gayle and six children were at his bedside.  

We’ve started a site to accumulate stories of Craig’s life, to provide information about the memorial service, and a mailbox for people to send messages to the family.  

A picture of Craig, leading the Mobile Blogging discussion at BloggerCon III, in November 2004.  

Mike Zornek: “Craig was a great guy. I really enjoyed working for him.” 

Three Rivers by Bob Stepno. Hmmmm. 

Mac Bittorrent clients, via Om. 

I continue to have problems with all three of my Macs. The new black MacBook shuts down on its own in the middle of my work. The original G4 laptop is still blue-screening, and my dual CPU desktop G4 is blue-screening more frequently (on average once a day). I’m seriously thinking about shopping for a new computer, a Windows machine, fed up with the awful Mac hardware. In the meantime I’m using the old Sony Vaio as my mobile computer. The software isn’t as nice as the Mac, and the screen is much harder on my old eyes, but, knock wood, it works and the Macs don’t.  

Bret Fausett: “I now travel only with Thinkpads. They are expensive, but extremely reliable.” 

New header graphic. One of a few taken when my Mac was new. 

From time to time I hear that people miss the comment link in the right margin of Scripting News. (Actually I hear “It’s too bad you don’t allow comments.”) So I moved it up, made it larger and bold face. Here’s a screen shot that shows where it is, in case you don’t see it.