Scripting News

A milestone for nytimesriver.com

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:38:26 GMT

nytimesriver is on the first page of results when you search for "NY Times" on Google.

http://google.com/search?q=ny+times

I find that amazing. Maybe because we don't sell links (or take ads).

Marc Canter isn't disclosed

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:14:47 GMT

Google hasn't sworn him to secrecy so he can speculate on what Maka Maka is.

Okay the new Wii works better, but...

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:44:04 GMT

I got past the initial screen this time...

http://mp3.twittergram.com/davewiner/gram02286.mp3

Any help on how to get a stuck disk unstuck in a Wii would be much appreciated.

Look: You can open it and push the disk out manually!

First look at Pownce's API

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:26:43 GMT

A twit last night from Scoble points to a page of docs on a new API for Pownce. Of course I want to check it out, since Pownce is roughly comparable to Twitter, which I use every day, and there is some functionality I'd like to see in the Twitter API. If that functionality is present in Pownce's API, it seems more likely that it will show up eventually in Twitter's.

First, the API is maybe 1/3 complete. If you scroll to the end of the page you'll see a list of areas that haven't yet been covered. The ability to post and read friends-only notes are very important, you can't implement a client without those interfaces.

Examples of things you can do with the API, right now. Click on the link to see the XML that Pownce returns.

1. Get the most recent 10 public notes.

2. Get the most recent 10 public notes from Veronica Belmont.

3. Get my public profile.

4. Get my "first" 100 friends and fans.

Steve Rubel lets one rip!

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 05:35:41 GMT

He had some Wheaties this morning for sure.

My advice...

1. Remember to have fun.

2. We're all bozos on this bus.

3. We're all barking farting chihuahuas.

4. I make shitty software and so do you.

5. It's even worse than it appears.

6. You never learn anything hanging with the same people.

7. Thank heaven for little girls. (A repeat of #6.)

8. It's later than you think.

9. It's not like anyone gets out of this alive.

It's all about context

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:03:11 GMT

A comment by Lane Becker on Scott Rosenberg's blog...

"I've been using Winer's nytimesriver on my iPhone screen for weeks now, and it¹s far and away the best interface when you're reading on a mobile device."

"Which is the point: it's all about context. It's not either/or, and it's not just different readers wanting different things. sometimes it's the same reader wanting different things at different times, in different situations."

Exactly right. I use nytimesriver on my iPhone or Blackberry, but I don't use it on my desktop, where I prefer an interface with more controls. The small screen of a mobile device demands something simpler.

Slowly the word is getting out. I'd like to do it faster. It would be great if the TImes itself looked at this. If they can write about installation art in their lobby, why not tell their readers about a new way of reading Times news on a mobile device?

The Times was a leader in RSS too, but never reported on it. Perhaps there's a blind spot.

And it's also all about point of view

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:31:02 GMT

Good software designers get out of their bodies and become users of software. Because ultimately you don't design software to express yourself, you design it to be useful.

The point of news, as with software, is to be useful to the person using it.

Sorry, it's not about employing editors. Scott Rosenberg, a writer and editor of news can be forgiven for seeing it from his own point of view, but we users of news don't share that point of view. To me, as a software designer, it's no surprise that there are lots of ways to view news. That there used to be one main way to do it is also not a surprise, there were technical limits, that aren't there anymore.

The skill of laying out a paper presentation of the day's news on a big sheet of paper is now an obsolete craft. The only reason we needed people to do that in the past was that was the only way to get written news to massive numbers of users of written news. Now that computer monitors are cheap, and we have little computers that can get us news that fits in our pocket, we can try out lots of ways of arranging it, and maybe we'll even discover something new.

Newly rescued Morning Coffee Notes

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:56:01 GMT

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnOct5.mp3

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnOct6.mp3

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnOct7.mp3

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnSept11.mp3

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnSept27a.mp3

Geek dad and Junior the geek

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:48:23 GMT

At Fry's this afternoon, where I bought two 500GB Firewire drives for $169 each.

Which it turns out I needed because after I got home all three external drives attached to my desktop were reported as damaged beyond repair by the new Mac OS. Coincidence? Lucky that I had exactly the hardware I needed to dig out of the mess? Who knows!

Funny thing is it's taking over 10 hours to do the copying. It won't finish until tomorrow morning, Murphy-willing. When the disks got big, all of a sudden restoring from backups takes a lonnnng time.

Terminal commands to nuke the 3D dock in Leopard

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:24:20 GMT

And recapture some valuable screen real estate and a portion of your sanity.

defaults write com.apple.Dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

Screen shot.

Thanks to Mark Johnson for the tip.

Okay so it's not user friendly

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:27:47 GMT

Thanks Yahoo!

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 20:38:42 GMT

The numbers are up at nytimesriver.com.

Here's why. It's the top link on Yahoo under newspapers.

Two hops off the directory home page.

Very nice!!

Yahoo!

PS: What's next? Link love from the NYT itself?

Dear lord of Leopard...

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 01:19:12 GMT

I want my white menubar back.

I think the idea of the translucent menubar is wrong.

Here's a screen shot.

See how dark it is in the upper-right corner. You look in that corner all the time, it's where the clock is, it's where you see how much battery you have left, how good your wifi signal is, etc. We don't have much room for a dashboard on these machines, but that's where it is. If it changes appearance just because I changed the desktop image, that's new and unexpected behavior, and it can make it hard to read for people with old eyes. And for what purpose? It makes the desktop background choice something that impacts a crucial part of the user interface.

I want an option to have a white menu bar.

1996: "I came here to get my work done."

My Friendfeed coordinates

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:16:01 GMT

It's kind of like Facebook's feed for people who don't do Facebook.

http://friendfeed.com/davew

It seems pretty cool.

I'm a Dog Whisperer fan

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 15:59:37 GMT

I just started watching The Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic Channel a few weeks ago, and I'm hooked.

I really like the way the star, Cesar Millan, explains stuff. He shoots straight, with love. You can't be politically correct and get a dog to behave.

And he never misleads the owners, they have to change in order for the dog to change.

Dogs are very simple, they can't just be your friend. The dog's world is hierarchic. Someone is the boss. If you're not the boss, he or she is. Every pack has a leader.

Watching the show I wish I had a dog so I could try out his ideas.

I also wish news shows were like this, get to the real story, find a solution to the problem.

Maybe he'll run for Governor of California. I'd vote for him.

Sue Polinsky loves the Dog Whisperer too.

My Halloween disguise...

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:15:21 GMT

I have to admit I don't like Halloween, or actually I liked it when I was a kid, a lot, and I would like it as an adult if there was no expectation that adults had to behave like kids!

Well, actually, something I don't like about Halloween is that you have to buy candy and keep it in the house for trick or treaters, and the temptation to eat the junk is overwhelming, and it's not good for adults to eat so much sugar. And you buy too much and you have it left over, and have to find someone to give it to.

So what's left with Halloween? Uhhh, yeah you see there's the problem. So what I do on this holiday is find some friends who feel the same way and go out to dinner. If anyone asks what I go as on Halloween, I say "The Invisible Man."

My first review of Leopard

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 07:12:59 GMT

Update: "I want my white menubar back."

First a little background. I stopped using a Mac in 1997, as Apple was transitioning to the new operating system. I started using the Mac again as my primary OS in late 2005, a little more than two years ago. This is the first new version of the OS to come out since I switched back.

Based on a tour of the new features, pretty late at the end of a long week, it's safe to say an OS is still just an OS, the purpose of the OS is to stay out of your way until you need it. Leopard may be prettier than the last version, I'm not sure it is or isn't. Not sure I'll use many of the new features. For people who hadn't used VNC before, "screen sharing" would certainly be a big new feature if they're working in a networked enviroment. And maybe the new backup code will fit into my routine. I have some ideas about that. (Maybe I'll just have one computer on my LAN that is backed up and copy things there if I want them backed up.)

File sharing is more convenient in Leopard, the shared computers are listed in every Finder window, and this is good. FInding the disks that are available on each of these computers is one step easier too.

The Preferences applicaiton appears largely unchanged, except the Networking section where a lot of functionality seems to be missing. I have to look at this more closely.

The Download stack is lost on me since I don't use Safari or Apple's mail app. I would find it useful if Firefox had a similar feature (but they kind of do, I can direct all downloads to a specific folder).

Update: The Download stack is just a folder, you can direct Firefox to download to it. I think I saw some Apple marketing on this feature that implied that only Apple apps could use it.

All in all, changes to an OS aren't that important. The action is in the apps, and for me, just a couple of primary ones, the web browser and my integrated writing and programming environment. It's been quite a while since there have been meaningful improvements to either, and those improvements would end up meaning a lot more to me than improvements to the OS.

There isn't much you can do, after the Mac has been around for 23 years, that hasn't already been done.

Net-net, my first impression of Leopard is that it isn't a big deal one way or the other.

Matt Neuburg takes a dim view of the changes in Leopard.

PS: I wonder if the next version of the OS will be called Leonard, to honor Leonard Rosenthal, a famous Mac developer in the 80s and 90s.

The scoop on the Leopard delays

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 22:31:44 GMT

7PM: I got my disk.

9:25PM: Updating in Leopard. The OPML Editor seems to work. Whew. Not sure what I would have done if it didn't. When it finally finished installing it started playing some really happy music and of course it sounded really good. Things definitely look nicer. Screen sharing is very nice, nicer than Chicken of the VNC which I had just started using. Obviously there's a lot of new stuff to learn. I'm backing up my laptop now so I can really dig into this tomorrow. I got started on my Mac Mini in the den, a relatively new system. If I had to wipe it, it wouldn't have been that big a deal.

First, the big news is that lines are forming at Apple stores. Send links to pictures. Oh the humanity.

Second, the reason those of us who ordered in advance are not getting our Leopards is that Fedex couldn't handle the load.

Even so, when I called Fedex this morning they said I would have my package today, even though the website says otherwise. Their gears are stipped on a good day. Is Fedex the AT&T of package delivery? Will Apple end up leasing their own fleet of trucks to deliver the next version of Mac OS? I guess we still have to make it through this release.

Will we be able to have a Flash Conference on Monday to discuss Leopard? Only time will tell.

MacInTouch first look. (Clearly canned.)

Ryan Block has his first review up.

Chuck Shotton found a workaround for an issue that seems likely to bite many Leopard newbies.

Raines Cohen was in Austin for the Leopard ship.

You can see how Apple has not! prioritized getting Leopards into the hands of people who might help others get started. John Gruber of Daring Fireball is posting pithy observations on the size of human eyeballs, Brent Simmons is giving up for the day, no Leopard on his doorstep. Are there problems with Leopard? Chuck says so. Do we have any idea the scale of the problems? Nope.

No Leopard for Dave??

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:00:36 GMT

Anyone have an idea what "Future delivery requested" means?

Very perplexed and somewhat unhappy.

No one seems to know what "Future delivery requested" means.

Update: Now the Fedex site says I'll have it by 5:30PM. On the bright side that means I'll get more work done today.

Flash conference, day 2

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:52:04 GMT

Chuck Shotton has his Leopard, but hit a wall. "Leopard's migrate user function has failed 3 times on 3 separate clean installs. This is a seriously broken, critical piece of the OS."

Mossberg and Pogue missed it, didn't make it into USA Today.

That's the motivation behind the flash conference idea. After two or three days, organize the knowledge as covered by the bloggers, really cover it as tech news has never been covered before.

If necessary, have another flashconf two weeks or a month later.