Scripting News for 5/8/2008

Coming soooooon 

We’re working to build a scalable, beautiful new TwitterGram, an application built on the super-powerful SwitchAbit platform.

Comments in Twitter? 

I just posted a Tweet: “After seeing comments blossom in FriendFeed, it seems either Twitter should have comments, or extend the API so someone else can add them.”

Why?

1. People still reply to tweets, expecting a response in a tweet. It’s noise to most of my followers. They send responses (to me) asking what am I responding to. If I answer that, then other people ask what I’m responding to in explaining the other person’s response. Twitter is not symmetric, that’s a good feature, but it makes for a shitty conversation medium, imho.

2. Far more people use Twitter than use FriendFeed. Yes, I think it’s great there are APIs and that makes it possible for FriendFeed to build on what Twitter does. But it is a competitive market and ideas should slosh around among all the products.

3. The length of this post should provide a clue why comments would be good in Twitter. I started writing #1 in Twitter itself, and went over 140 chars before I had expressed a single idea.

Testing Pownce public downloads 

I just uploaded a song I recorded on Tuesday to Pownce. After two tries, it worked. You have to be logged in to download the song but anyone can play it. Hmmm. That removes one potential application I had in mind, Pownce as a podcast-serving platform.

Here’s a screen shot of the post.

Anyone should be able to listen to the song even if they’re not a member of Pownce.

Screen shot of the prefs page for public/not public.

Update: Sometime after it was uploaded it stopped working, people were unable to download the song. Obviously there are still some glitches to work out.

Pownce becomes more useful 

Twitter is still my mainstay in microblogging, but I’m using FriendFeed more, and today Pownce removed an important limit that will make it useful in a way that neither Twitter or FriendFeed are. And because all three have APIs and excellent support for RSS, the chances to combine their strengths makes it possible for each to specialize.

Where Pownce is developing strength is in the area of payloads, but until today they were limited to members of Pownce and for non-pro users, to friends of the uploaders. Now it’s possible to upload files that can be downloaded by anyone. The size limit for payloads used to be 10MB, now it’s 100MB, and for pro users 250MB. Interesting new applications should be possible, making it competitive with services such as YouTube and blip.tv, and because it has an API it’s possible to develop applications with Pownce that are not possible with other services.

Is MySpace opening? 

This post on TechCrunch started a bit of discussion.

Ben Metcalfe posted an interesting video comment there, embedded below.

Scripting News for 5/7/2008

Obama, the Democratic nominee 

1. There’s no doubt now, Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee, and very likely the next President. I doubt if McCain has the sense of entitlement that HRC had but he’s going to run on experience, and we don’t want experience, we want intelligence, honesty and change.

2. Obama will show up once or twice in Kentucky and West Virginia, but it will be relaxed, he’ll do big rallies, town halls, meetups, take a bowling lesson, shoot some hoops.

3. At the same time he’ll tour the following states: Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois, Virginia. I must be leaving some out. The point — illustrate for everyone who might have been listening to HRC that he gets that these are the important states for any Democrat, and it doesn’t matter that HRC got more votes in some of these states, he plans to compete to win all of them. Campaigning in those states signals that he’s on to the next phase of his candidacy.

4. Take a breather, prepare for HRC’s concession, a big party somewhere, and then off to Europe in June to meet with the leaders of the western alliance. A motorcade down the Champs Elysees. The family visits with Gordon Brown’s family. Pay respects to the Queen of England. Show the folks back home that in the Obama Administration the US will have many challenges, but we’ll also have lots of friends to help.

What else? Not sure. What do you think??

Fred Wilson on Bootstrapping 

Fred’s heart is in the right place. He puts money behind technology he likes. This is bootstrapping. Then he bothers the developers with features he needs. He’s a bootstrapper and a hacker. Then Fred reads articles written by other people and listens to a Tim O’Reilly keynote and tries to get everyone into agreement. Reminds me of The Negotiator, William Shatner.

Fred believes in triangulating, I do too. It’s how you find the truth. Obviously I agree with Fred’s conclusion — just today I was working with Jay at Switchabit on a very small project. We spec’d it out, I went to work on it, and after I did it the way we discussed I realized there was a much more direct and simple way to do it, so I re-did it, and again I realized it was too complicated, and I re-did it, sent him a report, he integrated it into his project agreeing that it was much better than what we discussed.

People who believe in big-bangs miss that you learn stuff while you’re implementing stuff and that learning should be recycled back into the project, again and again.

There was an excellent series on PBS a few years back called Connections; in each episode they take you through a series of developments how little pieces of one thing became something much bigger, you start with something small and every step of the way make small improvements and before you know it you’re standing on the moon saying “One small step for man…”

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

I’ve heard bootstrapping described as “paving the cowpaths.”

Twitter was a bootstrap too. There were a lot of small things that needed to get solved before Twitter could work. It may look like it popped up out of nowhere if you don’t know how the pieces came together, but if you do…

One thing that’s feeding epiphany for me is that I’m working with Scott Rosenberg on his history of blogging, which promises to be a great book, and reliving all the steps that got us to where we are.

Soup 

Comcast’s 250GB limit? 

DSLreports piece says Comcast may impose a 250GB monthly limit for customers. If you go over, you pay $15 per 10GB.

Since I got shut down last month for being in the top 1/10th of 1 percent of their customers, without notice, I’m in a pretty good position to evaluate this plan from a customer’s perspective.

Comments…

1. They’re stating publicly that they have a limit and what the limit is. This is better than having an unstated limit that’s a moving target over time and geography.

2. They will provide a site where they tell us how much we’ve used.

2. It gives other ISPs something to compete against. They can offer plans with a 350GB limit or a 1TB limit.

3. It’s not fair to customers to change the terms after they sign up. People always argue it from Comcast’s perspective, never from the customer’s. They may have a right to do it, but it still isn’t fair.

4. How much bandwidth does a product like Slingbox use? Probably not a product Comcast loves very much, btw.

5. There’s a weird connection between this and DMCA notices. Makes me wonder what their real motivation is. Remember Comcast is in the TV business, and video on the Internet is a big bandwidth user.

6. Do you think Comcast should lease their cable to competitors if they’re not going to provide plain vanilla internet access?

7. I want neutral Internet service, so I can build whatever I want to out of it. I don’t mind if there’s a meter, but I don’t like the deal changing after I sign on, makes me wonder what’s coming next.

Scripting News for 5/6/2008

Gary, Indiana 

By popular request, my ode to Gary, Indiana — the town that is turning the world upside down tonight.

Japanese Twitter has ads 

Gotta admit Twitter has interesting bugs! A few minutes ago, while tracking election returns (Obama wins NC yesss!) all of a sudden the Twitter UI changed to Japanese.

Then we started getting ads.

Here’s one with a Toyota ad.

So much for not having a business model!

IRC for Indiana/North Carolina 

I started a chatroom for tomorrow’s primaries.

irc://irc.freenode.net/#indianaNorthCarolinaPrimary

Please join if you want the firehose conversation!

Breaking news on Twitter 

Read this post from John Borthwick, my partner in Switch-A-Bit.

http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/05/06/future-of-news/

Breaking news covered by a loosely coupled ad hoc group of Twitterlings.

Update: Reuters was watching too.

Scripting News for 5/5/2008

Boostrapping a decentralized Twitter 

Overnight Mike Arrington weighed in on the decentralized Twitter discussion. I’m glad he is getting involved, he’s a smart guy and is now using Twitter as an integral part of his communication system. But I have to disagree with the way he characterized my thinking.

I always work in bootstrapping mode, addressing the first big issue, solving the problem, then advancing to the next one. It’s why so many of the ideas I’ve worked on have become popular modes of communication. Big-bang approaches always fail. I’ve spent decades arguing with people who want to reinvent the world in one stroke. They always try anyway and always fail. Bootstrapping is the only way that works.

BTW, I’m not the only one who believes in bootstrapping. Doug Engelbart, who invented many of the things we take for granted today works that way as well.

So the first step in decentralizing Twitter is to get our data safe and stored off twitter.com. Then we need discovery, a way to find people through Twitter, and then without Twitter. There are many ways to do this that work and scale (DNS for one, Skype does it too, without a central server).

It’s also important that we work with Twitter and that they be rewarded for being the primary bootstrapper of this network. I think it’s important because it’s right, and also because we need to incentivize others to do the same.

Also, while others believe the conversational aspects of Twitter are primary, I’m not one of them. I buy into the original vision — “What are you doing?” — and also see it as a link-blogging environment. I have of course used it conversationally, I’ve replied on Twitter to others, but I don’t depend on it because I think this is going to “spam out” — in fact it already is going that way. Just in the last few days I’ve gotten replies from users whose Twitter streams look totally like splogs, and at least a few of them are clearly automated. I block every one of them.

Steve O’Hear: Respect what already exists. Amen!

Is Obama black? 

Yesteray at breakfast at the Sunnyside Cafe in Albany, we arrived late, all the indoor tables were taken so we sat outside. It was frigid cold, for California, in the low 50s. I wasn’t really dressed for it.

We started talking with the man at the next table about how cold it is, and I said it’s nothing, I grew up in NYC and went to school in Wisconsin. The man, who was black and wearing an Obama for President button, said he was from the Bronx, we started talking about the hometown and the good old days (we’re about the same age) and after a while talk turned to politics and he volunteered something that I found jarring. You know Barack Obama isn’t black like I am. Hmmm.

He said Obama was raised by his white mother in Indonesia and his white grandparents in Hawaii and his father who was from Kenya was not an American. I’ve been to Hawaii, it’s not like the Bronx or Chicago, LA or the Deep South where most black Americans live. If you look at a map you’ll see how far away Hawaii is from the US mainland.

So what’s the point? I don’t know, but if if the tables were turned and we were electing the first Jewish president, but his father was from Israel, and his mother was Christian, and he was raised far away from the cultural centers of Jewish life in the US, I’d wonder how much like me he was.

That’s all. I’m still voting for him.

IRC for Indiana/North Carolina 

I started a chatroom for tomorrow’s primaries.

irc://irc.freenode.net/#indianaNorthCarolinaPrimary

Please join if you want the firehose conversation!

If the Dems didn’t have Superdelegates… 

I was wondering if the Democrats, like the Republicans, didn’t have superdelegates, where would the race stand right now. Here are the numbers…

At this moment, Obama has 1491 and Clinton has 1337.

There are 404 delegates remaining in 8 primaries and caucuses.

So with a difference of only 154 delegates, the nomination would not be decided.

However, to take the nomination by 1 delegate, Clinton would have to win 70% or the remaining delegates.

Scripting News for 5/4/2008

Why decentralizing Twitter is so important 

At dinner last night, Scott Rosenberg, researching his history of blogging book, said he couldn’t find any trace of the original version of Tim Berners-Lee’s original site, info.cern.ch. I found this amazing.

When I was maintaining the What Are Weblogs page on weblogs.com, in 2000, I said up-front that TBL’s site was also the first weblog. The crazy thing is I remember looking at the site, with my own eyes, and realizing that I was looking at history, like listening to the first telephone conversation or watching Thomas Edison turn on his first electric light bulb.

Today, in 2008, the network we’re building with Twitter is imho as historic as any of these things, we’re all creating artifacts and connections that are even more fragile than the early web, because, unlike the web, it’s 100 percent centralized. We all trust the owners of Twitter, but they’re human, even with the best intent, we all are taking a risk that the network could disappear at any time. And unlike the Internet which has huge amounts of redundancy built-in, if there’s any redundancy in Twitter, none of us outside the company know about it.

This is just plain unacceptable.

I’m on the case because I care so much about this medium, and if it were to disappear, I would feel partially responsible if I hadn’t raised a huge red flag warning about this very unreliable architecture we’re building on.

And, if you know where there’s a backup of the original info.cern.ch, please post a link here, in a comment.

Update #1: A new web service for Twitter clients.

Update #2: Marc Canter checks in.

Put this one on the calendar 

We had RSS Awareness Day, that was fun, so let’s have another new holiday, next Thursday, May 8 is Chickens Come Home To Roost Day.

You have to fit the phrase into conversation at least once during the day. Example. “It’s bad design to put all your eggs in one basket. One day your chickens will come home to roost.”

Sunset over the bay 

Taken last night on Indian Rock.

A view of the back of Indian Rock on Google Maps.

A new web service for Twitter clients 

Yesterday I wrote about a way to prepare to decentralize Twitter, in the event of a lengthy outage. The goal is to create no extra work or complexity for users. I think this is the responsible way for developers to help because it’s 1. Not a good idea to build a centralized system around a for-profit company and 2. Users generally won’t do anything extra to decentralize to prepare for an outage, but when one happens, they blame us (technologists) for not protecting them. Right or wrong, this is the way it is. So I’m working on a step-by-step bootstrap that, if enough developers go along, will have us reasonably protected against a prolonged Twitter outage. It’s not to say that it’s the only way to do it, but it seems to me that it’s one way.

I said I might put up a web service to store user’s RSS feeds on Amazon S3, and I’d pick up the hosting bill, to help the bootstrap. One developer took me up on the proposal, so I went ahead and implemented it. Here’s how it works.

1. There’s a new XML-RPC service at this address: xmlrpc://rpc.twittergram.com/RPC2

2. The name of the procedure is twittergram.saveFeed.

3. It takes three params: The user’s Twitter username and password, and the text of the feed. The password is only used to authenticate, it is not stored on the server.

4. It returns the URL of the feed as its stored on feeds.twittergram.com.

5. Code (in UserTalk) that works.

local (server = “xmlrpc://rpc.twittergram.com/RPC2″)
local (username = “davewiner”, password = user.twitter.prefs.password)
local (feedtext = tcp.httpreadurl (”http://twitter.scripting.com/daveRss.xml”))
local (url = [server].twittergram.saveFeed (username, password, feedtext))
webbrowser.openurl (url)

6. You can call the routine at most once a minute. This may be increased if it becomes a popular service. My server is limited to 70 calls per hour. Again something will have to be done if it becomes popular.

Scripting News for 5/3/2008

Microblogging should be decentralized 

Scott Hanselman asks the question that should be on all our minds, as we come to depend more and more on Twitter. We need to do something about our over-reliance on a centralized system run by a for-profit company.

Read his whole post and think about what you can do.

One thing right off the bat — if you make a desktop tool for Twitter, you can offer the user the option to store their twitstream as an RSS feed. Just do it in parallel, transparently for the user (although it’s a preference). You can key off their Twitter ID. If you want I’ll set up a service for free hosting of the feed on Amazon S3 (it’s not a very expensive thing) or it’s something you could provide as a bonus feature.

It’s a step in a positive direction for decentralizing. It’s not the whole thing, but it’s a big part of it. And should Twitter ever go off the air for more than a few days, it’ll be the way we put the network back together.

Update #1: I took a walk, and thought some more about this. If there were a way to point, from your Twitter account, to an alternate feed, then your desktop client could cache a pointer to the feed for each person you’re following. If Twitter were to go down, then the desktop client would fall back to polling the feeds. It would probably be slower, but it would work.

If one of the people you follow didn’t have an alternate feed, you’d have to wait for Twitter to come back up to find out what’s new with them. But if they used a desktop client, and the client was maintaining the feed automatically for each user (subject to a pref), then it would notify Twitter where it was storing the feed. Twitter would just have to maintain one more string for each user, alongside the user’s location, link to their website, one-line bio, etc.

However: It would require support from Twitter, Inc. to work.

Rev Chickens-Come-Home-To-Roost 

We wasted another week on Rev Wright, hopefully the last one. No it didn’t drag Obama down, though the right wing is spinning their wish that it would. If only. Keep dreaming.

Yes, Obama is a gifted politician, and that’s why we like him. We need political leadership, we’ve done without it for the last four terms, sixteen years, and we hope that this guy really gets that the power is with us, that we pay the bills, fight the wars, and it’s our hard work and innovation that drive the economy that makes America powerful when we are powerful.

Wright? He’s a deer that got caught in a headlight none of us have ever been in, so we don’t really have a right to judge him. He spun around looking for friends, and found he was radioactive, and it really wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t running for office, in a rhetorical way he totally did inhale and exhale and inhaled again, and again. The only people who really liked his radioactivity were people like Louis Farrakhan and his followers who want to disrupt the US political process.

So what to do with the Wright legacy? I feel sorry for him, but I hope he finds some good people who aren’t out to destroy other good people and he skips writing the book, and he kicks back and lets the member of his flock take the leadership we want and need him to.

See also: Bill Moyers, yesterday, on Rev Wright.

What is a Dual-WAN Router? 

Imagine that water pipes were a new thing, and therefore not reliable. They work for most people most of the time, but sometimes they go down, and then if you want to take a bath or wash the dishes or cook a meal, no luck.

Then you learn that there are two types of water pipes, run by different companies, and it’s very rare that both go down at the same time. So, if you can afford it, you get both water suppliers to pipe into your house, and when one goes down, you go to the street, lift a manhole cover, go down a ladder, and disconnect the one that doesn’t work and hook up the one that does.

It’s a hassle for sure, but you always have water. Then someone invents a T-shaped pipe with two inputs and one output. You hook the two suppliers each to a branch and your house to the third. This way when one goes down, you don’t even know it. The water keeps flowing, you’re happy.

It works the same way with the Internet. Some days Comcast goes down, and others AT&T DSL, but they rarely go down at the same time. I have both because the Internet is still young and unreliable, and I’ve lived with its lack of reliability before and it’s worth a hundred bucks a month to have the luxury of uninterrupted service when one or the other goes down. But until yesterday, if I needed to switch over, I’d have to rewire my network just to switch to the other vendor. But, it turns out they make T-pipes for the Internet, they’re called Dual-WAN Routers. And I got one.

It took a fair amount of fussing-with to get it working, but it has a nice fractional horsepower HTTP server to configure the router, a good help system, and I kind of intuitively get what it does.

Comcast is going to like this, their service is so much faster than AT&T’s that I set it up so that AT&T is the backup. I won’t actually send any packets over their line unless Comcast goes down, or gets pissed at me (it happens) — but they should note that turning me off will no longer get my attention.

And thanks to my parents for buying this lovely gift for me. How did they know I wanted one? Another innovation, Amazon Wishlists. This Dual-WAN Router thing isn’t something I would likely buy for myself, too speculative, I wasn’t at all sure it would be simple enough to set up, or that I really needed it. There is a recession going on after all. And they never would have had a clue that I was interested. But now I have one and I’m very happy to have it.

Why did I decide on Xincom? I read the reviews on Amazon and it seemed the most likely to work.

Sunset at Indian Rock 

A bunch of us went up to Indian Rock to see the sunset.

Click here for the set.

Scripting News for 5/2/2008

Government could help us use less oil and save money 

McCain and Clinton propose a moratorium on Federal gasoline tax for the summer to give the “average American” a break. It must test well with focus groups, but it’s meaningless, because the prices would immediately adjust. If you lower the price, people will take longer trips, drive instead of fly, increasing consumption, driving the price up. There might be a bit of a benefit to drivers for a very short period of time, but in the end it would be a wash. This is what economists say, and it makes sense.

President Bush wants more exploration, and to build more refineries, these are medium to long-term things that likely wouldn’t do anything for us right away.

But wouldn’t switching to smaller European style cars do more to ease the problem than increasing exploration or creating more refineries?

And the money we’d give up for Federal gasoline tax could be better spent on putting high capacity network lines under our streets to increase communication. Some of the car trips must be to exchange information that coud be replaced by moving packets around at gigabit speeds. It wouldn’t cost much to retrofit a few cities with really high speed lines, then we could get to work on developing the services that would make life more interesting, fun and efficient.

Scripting News for 5/2/2008

Yes Virginia, there’s oil in Iraq 

And we wouldn’t have our military there if there wasn’t.

Everyone knows the war in Iraq is about oil, but if a Democrat were to say it the Republicans would challenge his or her patriotism. But what if a Republican said it? What if John McCain, the Republican candidate for President said it? In public, on camera, with mikes, clearly, unambiguously?

You might think it was major news, at least on the same order as whether Obama wears a flag pin or properly salutes the flag?

Would it be news that over 4000 Americans and at least $1 trillion has been piddled away on a really bad deal? That $1 trillion could have bought a lot of oil. Or it could have built some great mass transit. Or it could have paid for Republican tax cuts. Or whatever, who cares — it’s news dammit.

No the press isn’t likely to report this latest McCain truth-leak, that’s why it’s so important that we give generously to the DNC so they can run ads that do their work for them.

I gave them $100 today. For now, I think my donations to Obama aren’t going to change things very much, so I’m switching my donation-flow to the DNC. Their ads defining McCain are good, they’re accurate, and they work. They just have to be run in more states more times.

BTW, MSNBC is being way too soft on McCain when they say he “seemed to suggest” — the usual press BS re McCain. He said it, so report it, without the double-qualification. He didn’t “seem to” and he didn’t “suggest.” He said it, so say he said it. They’re going to soft-pedal it for sure. Arrrgh.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Local fiber 

Lots of information in the comments on yesterday’s post about city-owned fiber in Berkeley.

UPS truck came 

And it delivered two geekish presents.

I’m installing the Eye-Fi card right now. Wish me luck!

It’s going pretty well. Now they want me to connect my card to one of the photo utilities, like Facebook, Flickr, TypePad, Photobucket, Windows Live, Costco (!) and many many more. What they don’t tell you is if every picture you take will be uploaded. That could be pretty embarassing and since my pictures flow to Twitter through TwitterGram, that could be a problem too. A Help option here, explaining, would be useful — but I’m going to assume that only some of my pics get uploaded and wire it up to Flickr.

They also don’t tell you whether you can create a new account from this page.

Answer to the second question — you can create a new account.

Okay, I followed their instructions, took a few pictures of myself, while I was away the browser (Firefox) crashed. I’m trying to get back to where I was but keep hitting this error page.

Ooops, it seems to upload all pictures. That’s not good! I’m going to turn that one off.

Looking for the folder on my hard disk. Nope. Not there.

I’m still the best guy around for breaking software.

Okay slow down. You have to leave the camera on so it can upload the pics? I guess so.

Postscript: I don’t think the Eye-Fi is designed to work well if you take high resolution pictures, which I do with my Canon. I’m going to try using it with my Nikon, which I have set up to take low-rez pics.

Tom Hunt’s FlickrFan discovery 

The other day fellow Berkeleyite Tom Hunt, who uses FlickrFan, came up with a neat way to solve a common problem that I thought I should share.

Here’s the problem. You’re watching pics go by and you see a picture of President Bush speaking at a conference on Children and Faith-based schools and think, man, that’s an interesting picture, I want to show that to a friend.

So you open up the pics folder and see a lot of pics with names like pic091337.jpg, pic091338.jpg and pic091339.jpg. How do you find the one you’re looking for?

Well, there is a way, believe it or not…

Open the screensaverpics folder and type Faith-based schools in the Spotlight box in the upper right corner of the window. 13 pictures show up. Select-All, right-click, Open in Preview. Review them and voila, there’s the one I was looking for.

How did that work?

Well, AP and AFP put metadata on their pics, and the FlickrFan process preserves it, and Spotlight can search it. Here’s the Get Info box for the pic I was looking for. The red arrow points to the metadata.

Tom is a smart guy, and a generous one. Thanks for passing this tip along!

Government could help us use less oil and save money 

McCain and Clinton propose a moratorium on Federal gasoline tax for the summer to give the “average American” a break. It must test well with focus groups, but it’s meaningless, because the prices would immediately adjust. If you lower the price, people will take longer trips, drive instead of fly, increasing consumption, driving the price up. There might be a bit of a benefit to drivers for a very short period of time, but in the end it would be a wash. This is what economists say, and it makes sense.

President Bush wants more exploration, and to build more refineries, these are medium to long-term things that likely wouldn’t do anything for us right away.

But wouldn’t switching to smaller European style cars do more to ease the problem than increasing exploration or creating more refineries?

And the money we’d give up for Federal gasoline tax could be better spent on putting high capacity network lines under our streets to increase communication. Some of the car trips must be to exchange information that coud be replaced by moving packets around at gigabit speeds. It wouldn’t cost much to retrofit a few cities with really high speed lines, then we could get to work on developing the services that would make life more interesting, fun and efficient.

Scripting News for 5/1/2008

Interesting meeting today 

I had a chance meeting with some people today who wanted to talk about bringing fiber to Berkeley. There’s an idea that it could be done in a very Berkeley way, which is to say, the city owns it, and the service providers can tap in, but they don’t get to dictate terms, as we know many of them like to do. I don’t know how exactly I got enlisted, but I guess we’ve got enough Internet celebs in Berkeley to maybe get this done right, politically. Not sure what comes next, but it sure is interesting.

Speaking of Berkeley celebs, I tentatively have a podcast interview with George Lakoff tomorrow.

Snicker snicker heh 

Twitter broken? 

It’s been hard to get through to Twitter today.

Calls through the API fail.

Most accesses to the site get an internal server error.

Nothing about it on the Twitter blog.

Oy.

Happy RSS Awareness Day!! 

Everyone should be aware of RSS today.

Tomorrow? It’s probably okay not to be aware of RSS tomorrow, but there’s no law that says you have to forget.

But today — be aware!

PS: You can vote up RSS Awareness Day on Digg. Help people become more aware of awareness! It’s deep.

PPS: Wouldn’t it be great if Obama said, in one of his stump speeches today, that it’s RSS Awareness Day and I just want y’all to know I’m aware of RSS and you should be too.

Scripting News for 4/30/2008

Tales from the Bizarro world 

The wish list thing is working! 

Today I got two gifts from the Amazon wish list I started. As items come off the list, I add more items.

They were much appreciated! I got the McCartney album CD and a dozen reporter’s notebooks, my favorite way to take notes while I’m programming or writing (along with Pentel sign pens, of which I have hundreds).

You guys are the greatest!!

PS: Someone bought me a great puppet! Awesome!!

Why the press likes Obama again 

First, I’ve given Obama another $100 today for a total of $900. It’s the 30th, the end of a month. Of the three remaining candidates, he’s still by far the best choice. And he still is the best person I’ve ever had the chance to support, imho.

Yesterday he threw Rev Wright under the bus, a term I never liked, and still really don’t, but it was the right thing to do, at exactly the right moment, maybe not for cyncial reasons (the ones the press applies) but for moral reasons. If you’ve been going to a church as long as he’s been going to Wright’s church, it should take a lot to get you to say what Obama said yesterday.

I have friends who have stood by me in tough times, but have done things that disappointed me, and I’ve taken time-outs from the friendships because of this, but it’s pretty rare that the bridges are so thoroughly burned that we never relate as friends again. But it has happened.

If we want to trust Obama, he shouldn’t abandon his pastor just because it would be the expedient thing to do, esp when it was so clear that the press was misrepresenting his sermons. I watched them, in full, and understood what the Reverend was saying, and I also understood that the context wasn’t familiar to me. They were recorded before a member of his congregation was a leading candidate for President, some of them before he was even an Illinois state senator. If you said that this isn’t that unusual for a black church, what choice would I have but to take your word.

Same for a speech at the NAACP. How do I know what’s usual there. If you tell me this is how it goes, I have no basis for saying or believing otherwise.

But the National Press Club? That I understand, and now I see Rev Wright in a whole new light. I still can’t say one way or the other if he acted appropriately in his sermons, but that was not how you address the media. They’re too dangerous. That’s the way you talk on your front porch on a hot weekday evening, hanging out with your friends, arguing politics and gossiping about a neighbor. Not in front of cameras that are broadcasting your words around the world, when you’re talking about someone you supposedly care about, someone who not only is your friend, but is likely the next President of the United States, your country, which you have served, that you say you love.

Look, the explanation is really simple. When you rise, even a little, some friends don’t get it. Ask anyone who’s won a lottery, or Deal or No Deal, or whose company IPO’d successfully. Ask them about the chickens that come home to roost. That’s what happened with Rev Wright. I’m sure of it. I recognize it, having been around the phenomenon, on a much smaller scale, many many times.

Anyway, the reason the press is so happy is that they got caught being assholes. It was just a few days ago I was giving them a hard time for the missing mea culpas. Now they don’t have to retract or apologize for screwing it up, Obama just gave them cover. And so they’re moving on. The Republicans, if they want to bring up this issue, may well find that the press sides with Obama. “We always said Wright was a bad apple,” they will say, and maybe even Obama agreed, but he was being loyal to a friend, and who can fault him for that. It’s a good quality, but enough is enough.

And I don’t think the door is closed forever for Rev Wright. You can be pissed at a friend, for cause or not, and come back from it, esp if someone connects with Wright about the seriousness of what he did, and how much damage he might have done if people took him seriously (they didn’t) and somehow his condemnation of Obama stuck (it didn’t).

I believe Obama, and I believe in Obama because I believe in my country. I care about how the Constitution has been trampled in the last 7.5 years, it’s going to take a lawyer like Obama who doesn’t take shortcuts to first restore our confidence in the architecture of the US, and give us a fresh start in the world, which would see an Obama presidency as a cause for hope for them. Rev Wright didn’t get how many of us now look to Obama to lead us, he may not be ready for it, but that’s not our problem or Obama’s, it’s his.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.