Scripting News

ABC News/Facebook debate fiasco

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:54:32 GMT

The Internet doesn't have time zones, and while my colleagues in the blogosphere who happen to be located in the Eastern or Central time zones were watching the debate live on TV, we in the western states were left to either wait three hours, or DIY a Ustream webcast of the debate, which we did. About half way through we figured out how to make the local New Hampshire ABC affiliate webcast work on a Mac, and it was a little easier to understand what was going on.

In 2008, sixteen years into the web, there's no excuse for not broadcasting a political event live to the world. If ABC News hasn't got the ability to do it, then ABC News shouldn't be running it. That Facebook lent its name and reputation to this fiasco is amazing. Why didn't they speak up?

BTW, otoh, Charles Gibson was a great moderator and the format was, in every way, fantastic. What a shame we all couldn't experience at the same time.

Two FlickrFan change notes

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:12:46 GMT

Two new bits of news for FlickrFan users.

1. Change Note #22. If FlickrFan is opening in the wrong browser, there's a new preference that tells it to open the desktop website in the default browser, and not to bother launching a browser. You should use this feature if you find it annoying that FlickrFan launches Firefox or Safari. Eventually, if everything goes well, we'll phase out the feature. Didn't want to do it all at once because it's a dangerous place for breakage. One step at a time.

2. Change Note #23. If for some reason your copy of FlickrFan isn't updating, you can always get the latest version, quickly, without losing any of your data or prefs or downloading any pictures again. (Key point.)

Open source hardware in the news

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 18:28:07 GMT

Bug Labs moves closer to shipping. Yesterday they announced pricing for their component, open source gadget hardware kit.

NY Times: "Neuros Technology International, creator of a new video recorder, has decided to go in a different direction. The company, based in Chicago, is providing full documentation of the hardware platform for its recorder, the Neuros OSD (for open source device), so that skilled users can customize or 'hack' the device -- and then pass along the improvements to others."

Phil Torrone, a longtime champion of open source hardware, must be happy.

Me, who's always looking for, and never finding the perfect podcast player, has more hope if the users get to develop the products.

Logitech Squeezebox

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:32:03 GMT

This product makes big claims, but it's hard to tell through the hype how it works or even what it actually does.

Here's what it sounds like to me. It's an iPod-like device with a built-in hard disk that somehow synchs with a desktop or laptop PC (or Mac?). It also has a transmitter of some kind (FM, wifi, ???) and proprietary receivers can be anywhere in the house, with speakers attached, and you can control any or all of the systems with the hand-held unit.

Screen shot of the back of the unit.

CNET Australia has a review (they seem to like it).

There is an Amazon page for the product ($299) and 11 user reviews. So this isn't a new product? Huh?

Update: There's a new version of the product that's apparently quite different from the previous version. The comments have the scoop, from users, who love the product.

Today's political schedule

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:47:06 GMT

You can do a pretty good job of following the politics leading up to Tuesday's New Hampshire primary from television in rain-soaked California.

CNN has an excellent program running all afternoon called The Ballot Bowl. The format is really simple. They have cameras following the candidates and they're broadcasting their town hall stump speeches. They're authentic, based on my experience in the campaign for the 2004 New Hampshire primary.

The NY Times has an excellent resource (no RSS feed apparently) that lists the candidates' schedules. It's also possible to import the schedule into Google Calendar as an overlay.

ABCNews is hosting two 90-minute debates, one for each party, tonight starting at 4PM Pacific. Tomorrow Fox News is hosting a controversial Republican debate, which the Republican Party has withdrawn from because they won't let Ron Paul participate. He's polling third among the Republican candidates in New Hampshire. For once the Republicans got it right.

Update: Apparently ABCNews isn't broadcasting the debate live to the west coast, delaying it three hours to 7PM. Grrrr.

In the very limited time betw Iowa and New Hampshire there's a lot of action and drama. Romney all of a sudden is shamlessly the candidate for change. There was an Ahmadinejad moment when I thought for sure he was doing parody, but he was serious. He's changed his attire, but his pitch is still the sleazy VP-Sales who got promoted to CEO. Change change change, I can change too, just watch. Please die now. I don't think anyone stands for Romney.

Giuliani and Thompson are still nowhere to be seen.

Edwards is doing a good job of keeping the game on.

McCain is earnest and honest, but he's old and small and tired.

Obama has the aura of a front-runner and Hillary seems to believe that if only Iraq were still the big issue she would be where Obama is. Even so, according to recent polls she's likely to win New Hampshire.

A lot of my friends on Twitter dismiss Huckabee, and to be clear, I could not vote for a Republican this year, no matter who their candidate is, but he is a fantastic American personality. Elections are all about feelings, not policies or positions or even records as the pundits insist. Who you vote for is a function of how you feel about the country and the world in relation to yourself. The candidate who comes closest to validating your feelings is the person you vote for. I think we'll tire of Obama quickly, and we're already tired of HIllary. I think the rational choice for each party, although many disagree, is Edwards and Huckabee because each of them tap into the well of frustration Americans feel about everything.

But my guess, which will ~~probably~~ certainly turn out wrong, is that the Dems will nominate Obama and the Reps will nominate Huckabee, and Huck will win.

PS: After writing this, I wonder if George Lakoff would agree. I think I've just used a very Lakoffish process, unwittingly.

PPS: I went to UW-Madison. Bucky Badger is the school mascot. Our favorite cheer and T-shirt said Fuck em Bucky! It occurred to me the same slogan would work for Huckabee.

How to open a web page in the user's default browser

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:32:32 GMT

On the Mac, in a Frontier or OPML Editor script.

sys.unixShellCommand("open http://scripting.com/")

I want to be able to find this tidbit later in Google. Please ignore.

Trade Secrets 2.0?

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 04:01:34 GMT

Just got off the phone with Scoble.

He told me about a blog post he just put up, entitled Erased.

He says something really simple. When Facebook had an issue with him, they erased his presence.

Seems they could have frozen his account leaving his presence as-is until they could figure out what to do about it.

Anyhooo...

We want to do a podcast from our phone conversations. I'd love to use Twittergram, but we're limited there to 30 seconds. I wanted to use BlogTalkRadio, but their service does so much more than we want, and you can't just call it when you have an idea you want to record. I'd like to try something other than Utterz, so if you know of something, please let either Scoble or myself know.

Think of it as Trade Secrets 2.0. It's the same idea that got me doing a podcast with Adam Curry in 2004. We were having interesting private phone conversations where we'd get around to saying sheez why the fuck aren't we recording this stuff. Scoble and I are at the same place now.

So if you know of some service we could use, or if you can convince the BTR guys to give us the service we want (that would be my first choice) please let me know.

Today's song

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 04:27:37 GMT

And I keep on fighting for the things I want
Though I know that when you're dead you can't
But I'd rather be a free man in my grave
Than living as a puppet or a slave

Jimmy Cliff, The Harder they Come.

FlickrFan public demo

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:42:49 GMT

At the public demo on the 17th, I will talk about the idea of the Networked Living Room built on RSS. Low-tech, open, all moving parts replaceable. Not just photos, that's step one.

Sign up on Upcoming. Still some space left.

Question about Amazon web services

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:35:46 GMT

I'm working with the new Amazon SimpleDB web service, and have found the docs kind of useful but as often is the case, the one piece of info you need is impossible to find. Here's what I'm looking for.

1. I can use their Javascript "scratchpad" app to create a URL that creates a domain. When I paste the URL into a browser window, the domain does in fact get created.

2. When I try to do the same from a script, using the Unix command line curl tool, I get a response that seems to be saying (not sure) that the GET method is not supported for this web service. Here's the exact text of the error message. And here's the command I used. (The signature is obscured for obvious reasons.)

3. This is what a good response looks like.

Update: Charlie Wood came up with the answer.

Quote of the day

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:51:17 GMT

Huckabee: "People would rather elect a president who reminds them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off."

More 10-year anniversaries

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:26:17 GMT

In April of last year we celebrated ten years of Scripting News.

December was the 10-year anniversary of scriptingNews format along with Netscape become what we now call RSS. The first applications started coming online in January 1998. Roughly ten years ago, more or less.

And we're approaching the 10-year anniversary of XML-RPC, a format whose Wikipedia page says "the entire description can be printed on two pages of paper." And it's one of the few bits of Internet work that I've done that has withstood attempts to muddy its origins and confuse its developers.

Today's XML-RPC is exactly as it was 10 years ago, which, if you were developing XML-RPC apps means that your apps still work, and that's a good thing. Nothing that's come along before or since rivals XML-RPC for simplicity and utility.

FlickrFan public demo, Jan 17 in SF, 5PM

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:13:02 GMT

It's totally appropriate that the first public demo of FlickrFan will be at Yahoo in SF during MacWorld Expo. We have room for about 85 people, we'll have soft drinks and pizza, it'll go for an hour-plus, including discussion.

Yahoo's San Francisco office is at 500 Third St, near Bryant, the old Organic offices, in the same building as Wired.

If you want to come, sign up at Upcoming.

Thanks to Salim Ismail, Chad Dickerson and Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo for graciously hosting my humble product and self.

Om is my brother now

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:46:15 GMT

I knew this was going to be heavy when I saw the title, and it sure was. Heart disease is serious, but you can live with it, as I've found out. I had bypass surgery in 2002, and I'm still here. You can also quit smoking, it's easy when you have motivation.

Om, when you're feeling better let's go for a walk.

Dave

Update: Valleywag shows it has a heart.

Yikes it happened again

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:10:19 GMT

Yesterday a funny thing happened with a package on its way from Amazon to me. Today they found it and it went on the truck "out for delivery." I waited and waited, but alas, it never arrived.

And the other package took a similar trip. Dallas to Rockford to Oakland to San Pablo to Lost by Carrier. Oy oy oy.

0 for 2, Amazon. :-(

Scoble and his Facebook data

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:34:11 GMT

There's a fascinating debate today going on about Scoble and his Facebook data. Here's the story so far. Plaxo, on behalf of Scoble, ran a screen scraper on his Facebook account to download information about at least some of his Facebook friends. Facebook detected the scraper and turned off his account, with an email explaining that he had violated their terms of service.

The debate: Who is right -- Scoble or Facebook?

While there are certainly arguments that Facebook has some rightness, most of it, imho, is with Scoble. Sure, some of the data may "belong" to his friends, like their birthday and mail address. Technically of course the data doesn't belong to anyone, it's data about them, and many organizations have this data. Are bloggers really saying that organizations have more rights than people? Isn't blogging all about a level playing field? My bank knows my birthday and my email address. Why shouldn't Scoble? (Maybe he shouldn't.)

Scoble called a few minutes ago. I asked what the consensus was. He said it was about 70 percent in his favor, 30 percent in Facebook's. I think we can win over the 30 percent by saying that there should be a system whereby people can decide how much information they want to share with Scoble, or people like Scoble, or me, or people like me, or BofA or the DEA, KGB or CIA. Further, that system is not Facebook, unless they change.

Now, I think there's a pretty good chance that Facebook will change and give Scoble his data and turn his account back on. I think Facebook wants to give us access to our data, but if they just turned the feature on, there would be a shitstorm, kind of like the one that's raging right now. Except this time Facebook has defenders, which they must find refreshing, because every time there's been a shitstorm around Facebook they've always been seen as 100 percent evil by most people. (Not by me, btw.)

Maybe they're getting smart there over at Facebook. Maybe they will relent, kind of admit they were wrong, and secretly be happy that they got to open their network up some more.

However, if Facebook doesn't open up and allow people a system to say who can access what information, we still have to create that system somehow. Google could have done it, but they didn't. Same with Yahoo or Microsoft. These companies don't want to empower the users, but if they studied history, they'd see that the evolution of computers always comes in fits and starts. A period when the technology is new and people are snowed by the companies and let them have full control. Gradually people understand what's going on, and figure out they're being screwed but they accept it. And then explosively the whole thing disintegrates in a new layer of technology.

It's a big effin loop we're in. One of these times around one of the companies that feels (incorrectly) that they have a lock on their users, will voluntarily give it up and be a leader in Generation N+1. I've never seen it happen, but in theory I think it could.

In other words, Apple and Microsoft could have invented the web instead of TBL. DEC and Data General could have invented the personal computer instead of Apple and Microsoft (I know this is a simplification, there were lots of individuals and small companies that did it.) And IBM could have invented the minicomputer instead of DEC and Data General. And btw, the NY Times and CNN could have invented blogging, Youtube and RSS.

So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation -- or a last gasp of the generation that's about to run out of gas. It's their choice. And it's fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle.

From a former Apple genius

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 04:50:47 GMT

Of all the comments on the hard drive, and there have been hundreds, this one explains it best.

I'm sorry to hear about your experience at the Apple Store. I was a "genius" for a year and can assure you that the policy regarding HDs was frustrating to us as well. In warranty it wasn't so hard to justify, but out of warranty customers often had a problem with it. My recommendation to them (and to you) is the same. AASPs often do not have the same contractual obligations with HD manufacturers that Apple does, so they may very well let you keep it. If you still wanted to have it done through an Apple store, take a magnet to it before you hand it over. The techs have better things to do than trawl through your personal data (there are exceptions, of course), but if it sets your mind at ease- go for it. Honestly, I would do this in your position because I have read of people getting reman drives with other people's data still on them. But that would have nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with the companies contracted to remanufacture the HDs.

Not much more to say after that. I will probably write a summary tomorrow.

Twitter's business model

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:11:55 GMT

When I was in college, professors used to ask questions that are much harder than the question Allen Stern asks in this piece.

The NY Times crossword puzzle is harder.

Geez, installing a new hard disk in a MacBook is harder, and as I've found out that's pretty easy.

Okay what is Twitter's business model?

They give away access to the API only to find that add-on devs have a business model selling Twitter clients while Twitter itself is left sucking air.

And this is some kind of problem?

We should all be so lucky.

Here's what you do if you're Twitter.

Distribution.

How much you want to bet that Twitteriffic reaches a very small number of Twitter users.

Twitter, of course, reaches every Twitter user.

So what could be easier than to offer to sell everyone a client that makes Twitter work a lot better?

And of course Twitter would be entitled to some of that money.

Now, imagine that Twitter was really ambitious and they wanted to design a cell phone around Twitter. One that could make phone calls and play MP3s and do SMS but also had Twitter baked in.

Okay, so you can't imagine Twitter getting into the hardware business or being a cell phone service provider. But what if one of those did a deal with Twitter, or even bought Twitter? Then you'd be paying a monthly service fee to use Twitter, and might have chosen TMobile or Sprint over Verizon or AT&T because they have Twitter and the other guys have Microsoft's ripoff of Twitter. Or Google's. I think there's a premium for being the original guy, if you play it right (I never do, but Evan Williams does this pretty well.)

Anyway, there are lots of ways for Twitter to make money once there are enough users. And right now their business is to grow and their first priority is to stabilize their service. This isn't based on inside knowledge, but comes from reading the tea leaves and applying common sense.

I never learn

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 03:49:02 GMT

Okay I wanted something for Christmas and I didn't get it, so I decided on 12/31 to buy it for myself. I opted for one-day shipping which meant it would arrive on 1/2, which is today.

So I was following it on the Amazon site, as it made its way from Louisville to Oakland to San Pablo, to oooops.

I don't know, is it just me, or are we getting too deep into this computer thing.

New FlickrFan feature

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:25:10 GMT

Change #21: Subscribe to a Flickr tag.

Makes it easy to subscribe to new Flickr pictures that are tagged with snowstorm, for example.