Scripting News

Why I say I'm a blogger

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:08:35 GMT

There's been some confusion about why I tell company reps, when I'm pretty sure I'm going to write up the experience, that I'm a blogger. I say it because I would want to know, if I were in their shoes, that what I was saying was going to be reported publicly. It's the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

For example, I said it to Edgar, the Comcast rep who threatened to cut me off and refused to put it in writing.

I also included the fact that I told him, and his response, in the report, because I want my readers to know that he knew he was on the record. I also want to influence other bloggers. People have a right to know when they're speaking publicly and when it's private.

Some people have suggested that this means that I'm wrong for believing that the other person might care, or thinking that they should. Well, I haven't said that I thought they would care, in fact, I've never had a company rep say it made a difference, they always say it doesn't, and have never seen it actually make a difference in the treatment I get.

Now, if you ask me should they care, I would say yes.

One of the reasons I believe in blogging is that it can reform business, giving power to the users, where we were powerless before. If I didn't have a blog what could I have done to get Comcast to pay attention? Tell my friends and relatives? Sure, they know that isn't very powerful. But when any customer could also be a publisher, well that does change things. This new power to publish can help us all get a better deal.

These days I never make a purchasing decision without looking on the Internet to see what other people's experience has been. I've had people tell me that when I write positively about a product, they buy it. I've also heard people say that if I've had a bad experience, they don't.

And I don't think it just applies to business. I think it will eventually get us better political leadership, it might even that effect this year.

Comcast is down again

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:05:28 GMT

For the third time in three days, my Comcast service is out.

I'm posting this using my EVDO modem.

The first time it was deliberate. The second time they say it was natural. I'll let you know what it is this time.

I've twitted comcastcares.

Cable TV seems to be out too.

PS: These are the first outages I've had in almost 2 years living in this house.

PPS: 11:30AM it's back up.

Barack flips off Hillary!

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:52:47 GMT

Okay my inner-8-year-old really likes this one!

Here's a YouTube video of Obama speaking yesterday.

At 1 minute 20 seconds in, while he's talking about Hillary Clinton, he scratches his cheek, and instead of using his index finger, he flips her off.

LOL!

Links for 04/18/2008

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:25:36 GMT

NakedJen is featured in a NY Times article about people who write about divorces on blogs.

I got something to say

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:59:53 GMT

A ten-minute quickie rant.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/cn08Apr17.mp3

Hey Barack Obama was really saying something important in the "bitter" quote and in last night's debate, and all the idiot pundits on TV are blowing by it.

A new camera!

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:19:16 GMT

I got a new camera, first one in 4 years.

Click here for a set of pics taken on a Berkeley neighborhood walk this afternoon.

A new reason to hate Comcast

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:45:52 GMT

As long as I've been a customer of Comcast I've been writing how much I wish they'd sell their Internet business to a company that doesn't hate its customers so much. But sometimes you forget, when the service is good, you just cruise along, happy and productive.

And so I was blissfully forgetful until I read, on Twitter, that Dave Sifry was testing the bandwidth on Comcast with PowerBoost and was blown away by how great it was. I had Comcast as a backup, rarely used it, so I hooked it up, tried it out and I got even better bandwidth than Sifry did. Amazingly I was getting 28 megabits down, about 3 megabits up. So I started using it on my LAN, I kept my DSL service, but I'm not using it as much.

Then this morning around 9AM the service went down. I called the service number, and was quickly directed to call a special number. I couldn't record the call because I didn't have Skype working, but I wish I had found a way. The recording said I was talking to their legal services department, Press 1 if you are stealing content, 2 if you are using too much bandwidth, 3 if Comcast hates your guts, 4 if you're a criminal. (I don't remember the exact wording, this wasn't it, but the implication was that I was guilty of abuse, me, a paying customer, in good standing. By pressing a button I was admitting to doing something wrong.)

Update: Later I called the number back and recorded the opening sequence.

I was quickly connected to a man who told me I had been deliberately disconnected because they had tried to call me and I didn't pick up. The number they called was my Blackberry, which I disconnected a couple of months ago because I never use it, I much prefer the iPhone. Then he threatened me. He told me I was in the top 1/10th of 1 percent of all their Internet users and that if I didn't immediately stop using so much bandwidth they would suspend my service for 12 months. I asked if I could get this in writing, he said no. I asked how much bandwith would be acceptable, he wouldn't say. I told him this wasn't much of a threat if they weren't willing to put it in writing, and I wasn't intimidated. I also told him I was a blogger and would be writing it up. He didn't care.

Now, before I called the first number, I posted about the outage to Twitter, and sent a direct message to comcastcares, an amazing account, staffed by a guy named Frank who works at Comcast in Philadelphia, who really does seem to care. A few days ago, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch mentioned on Twitter that his Comcast service was down, they contacted him immediately, and had a service tech at his place the next day (I think). Mike was so pleased with the service he said he'd be willing to pay double if they could keep it up. Pretty impressive.

So I spoke with Frank on the phone after receiving the threat. He asked me to write it up, and I am doing so here.

I also recorded a podcast with Christina Warren of Download Squad.

A bunch of ideas and questions resulted.

1. They should have sent me a letter. This idea of disconnecting customers to get them to call is utterly unprofessional and disrespectful and should get them in trouble with the FTC and the FCC and everyone who uses Comcast or who works at Comcast who has any self-respect. The letter should have said something like this: "We noticed that you're using a lot of bandwidth, and we're happy you like the Internet so much, and like our PowerBoost service, but if you're going to use this much bandwidth you should seriously consider getting our higher-class service, which will cost $X more per month, but along with it you get 5 new features that only our most special customers get." I told Christina, there are few things I'm so happy to spend money on as bandwidth and Internet connectivity. It's so easy to make it a positive instead of treating a customer as a criminal.

2. I used AT&T DSL the same way I use Comcast and they never threatened me. So their claims in their commercials that they're better than AT&T are bogus. I still love Comcast's commericals, esp the faux news announcer and the turtles, all who ridicule AT&T but I think Comcast is dishonest, they're selling something they don't deliver on. (Except PowerBoost really is awesomely fast when they haven't cut you off.)

3. I can see where people would be very intimidated to have their service turned off and to be lectured the way they lectured me.

4. Honestly, I think Comcast should give me my service for free and let's work to create new services that use more bandwidth so they can sell them to customers as part of the upsell to people who use a lot of bandwidth.

5. I figured out why I use so much more bandwidth than the average Internet user. I have five computers, all Macs, all sucking down FlickrFan pictures once an hour. That adds up to quite a few gigs. It would be easy to cut back. Not sure I will though, cause I hate to be lectured and threatened by companies I pay $180 per month to.

6. The thing that amazes me, that is totally unacceptable, is that they refused to put the threat in writing. I knew, having dealt with lawyers enough, that I had a right to receive the threat in writing, and I wanted to scan it and put it on Flickr along with my $3 million Comcast bill.

7. I've now spent all of today working for Comcast. Should I send them a bill?

8. What's the big issue with bandwidth anyway? Does a company like Comcast pay their ISP for bandwidth? Do they even have an ISP?

Update: A plausible explanation of why they'd want to constrain bandwidth usage.

A little help?

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:03:12 GMT

I woke up the other day motivated to learn XCode 3.0 and make some small improvements to the OPML Editor. I want to add a few verbs that make it easier to monitor object databases that grow large. I would have put these features in years ago if I knew that this would be the big hassle in keeping a server-side OPML app running.

So I tried getting it to compile, but the Mac headers are a moving target and now there are lots of warnings about things being deprecated (these obviously aren't deal-stoppers) but there are also errors.

It's been a long time since I worked in C on the Mac, so I thought I'd ask for help. If you're a Mac developer and have a few spare cycles, what changes are necessary to get the project to build?

The source code is here.

http://sourcelisting.scripting.com/code/OPML-10.1a8-src.zip

Any help would be much appreciated.

Links for 04/15/2008

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:45:23 GMT

Gallup daily tracking poll: Obama 51%, Clinton 40%.

Political notes

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:41:38 GMT

Jay Rosen reports that the Obama quotes that are driving the political talk today came from Mayhill Fowler, a reporter writing for OffTheBus, an organization he founded with Arianna Huffington. Jay's piece is a must-read if you want to understand how the people are reshaping political discourse in 2008.

Update: The NY Times, unlike other MSM outlets, gives proper credit to Fowler.

Hillary Clinton says that the last two Democratic candidates lost because Republican charges that they were elite stuck. My response: This time is different. Gore had the baggage of the Clinton presidency to overcome, and even so the race was so close that many people felt he actually won and his election was unfairly overturned by the Supreme Court. I voted for Kerry, but with far less enthusiasm than I will vote for Obama, a candidate I believe in. I believe Obama made a mistake, but there's no choice as far as I'm concerned, between him and the other two candidates. HRC is every bit as elite and far more out of touch, and too cyncial to be my President. McCain is a slightly better George Bush, we need a sharp turn away from Bush, and only Obama offers that.

Obama keeps missing a big opportunity to spin higher. Last night on CNN's Compassion Forum, a question came up asking whether he would take a pledge to fight poverty. He almost said what I keep hoping he'll say -- he'll accept the challenge but only if the electorate agrees to stay involved after the election. I think we're desperate to make a difference, and we want to do more than vote. A Presidential candidate who gives us a mission, work we can do to make the US stronger and the world better will be far more than a President, he or she would be a leader. At times Obama comes close, when he says we'll help young people pay for college if they agree to provide service. How about a service program that involves everyone. I think it would be a far more popular idea than it might seem at first.

On the other hand, it seems at this time that Obama is going to have to attack HRC really hard, to knock her out. I think that's what the press wants, and I think that's what this ominous poll from Pennsylvania is saying. To close the deal, Obama is going to have to kill the Clintons, politically. It's not enough to hope that they'll just go away. He has to do it to them. I don't like this because it hurts the possibility of him having a positive Presidency, but I think it's what it's come to now. I'm sure some of my friends who support Obama will disagree.

It's time for the Obama campaign to engage with the press. A detailed campaign to explain, publicly, why Obama is much more competitive against John McCain in the general election. Why aren't they responding to the Clinton claims that he can't beat McCain. Respond to the kitchen sink campaign on every detail. You may not respect HRC, but you have to act as if you do.

Is my candidate too elite?

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:20:15 GMT

I winced when I heard the quote that's making the rounds this week in the political blogosphere. I didn't like it because unlike the Rev Wright controversy, I doubt if much good can come from it, and because my guy, Obama, was, imho, wrong. By his own standards, the comment was wrong, and I hope he gets why.

To equate geography with intellect is as wrong as to equate it with race, ethnicity, gender or age.

It may be true that there are some people who live in small towns in rural America who are bitter and closed-minded, who have bad lives and blame the badness on illegal immigrants, gay people who want to get married, or conspiracies to separate them from their guns. (I've deliberately overstated Obama's quote, to be in line with what people who don't like him react to.) But it certainly isn't true of all of them, and as long as there's one good person living there, it's unfair, it's wrong to make general statements about the class.

This came home when, on Twitter, I said I thought he was wrong, and a correspondent from Texas suggested it may be because I come from Berkeley and people from Berkeley are more "insulated" from some reality they aren't insulated from in Texas. I could have responded by saying something generally negative about people from Texas, and that would be on par with the kind of discourse we've been having in the US for the last few decades. I didn't. We have spirited political discussions in Berkeley, which disproves the idea that you can predict the way someone thinks by knowing they come from here.

Now I like Obama because he rejects this kind of thinking. He wants us to look at black people, and consider the possibility that they're smart, caring people who value the good things we believe in, education, good health, being kind to others, etc. He wants blacks to look at whites and not see superficial good-weather friends, people you can count on, brothers and sisters even. I could go on. This is my philosophy too. And after the election of 2004, I wrote that this time the middle of the country was insisting, over the objections of the two coasts, that we have to work with them before we can go where we think we need to go (i.e. get out of the Iraq misadventure). A high price to pay to get us to listen. And did we listen? Well, in his awful quote, Obama said no -- we aren't. Because when you reject people as a class, that's what ignorance is built out of, literally, it's how you ignore what's real, and respond to your beliefs, which are usually fairly negative. It's the opposite of respect, and it's wrong.

Now I believe that Obama is a good man, and really believes the things he says, but he's tired, even exhausted from the campaign and he slipped and made a mistake. If we believe our Presidents don't make mistakes, surely the last 15 years, two terms of Clinton and Bush, convinced us that our Presidents are very human and they make lots of mistakes, some very big ones. So, making a mistake certainly does not disqualify Obama.

The other two remaining candidates, Clinton and McCain have made far worse blunders, and have retracted them, and we've let them off the hook. I wonder if it's possible for Clinton to get up and say, okay, can we call it even. I did something dumb with the Bosnia story, and Obama did something dumb with this story about rural people clinging to superstition. I know I'd respect HRC about a billion percent more if she could do that. And it certainly seems within the realm of possibility that McCain might. Check out this ad he did about discourse in the United States and see if it doesn't put a lump in your throat. It's worth playing every time it seems the Republicans are about to sling some mud.

Yeah I'm optimistic. I think some good can and will come out of this.

My two cents on this week's Bitchmeme

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:55:39 GMT

A Bitchmeme is something that happens on weekends when new stories are in short supply so ideas that otherwise would be buried on Techmeme rise to the top. Usually they're people complaining about something or other which is why they're called Bitchmemes and not Happymemes or Sarcasticmemes.

This week's Bitchmeme is about comments on blogs and where they belong, on the blog, or on an aggregator. For example, when this item is viewed through FriendFeed they will allow comments on it over there and I'll probably miss them unless I go look for them. I will certainly miss the comments on Shyftr which I have never heard of until today and have never used, but from what I hear it does the same thing. Is this a good or bad thing? Well if you like to know what people think it's bad. If you ask a question in a post, as I often do, you might miss some good info.

But what we cast to the wind, someone will eventually gather for us. Before Technorati, all we had were referrer logs to find out who was talking about us. Technorati is a bit better. There will of course eventually be the equivalent of Technorati, which assembles in one place, all the comments about each blog post. Wouldn't be too hard to do.

But RSS 2.0, believe it or not, has a solution built-in, the <comments> element. If more blog publishing tools supported it, then FriendFeed et al could use it.

Let me walk through how it works.

1. Here's my RSS feed, and here's a screen shot showing the comments element on this post.

2. Here's an example of an aggregator that supports the comments element. If an item has comments, theres a little pencil icon next to it. Just click the pencil to go to the comments. Pretty simple, or so it seems.

Nothing more to it.

Those are my two cents.

PS: An example of a post of mine that ironically became a Bitchmeme. I say ironically because it was a bitch about how crap (e.g. that post) ends up on Techmeme cause of the cesspool nature of the so-called tech blogosphere. If you don't get the joke, don't bother, it's not actually that funny.

From Hello World to Guestbook

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:13:49 GMT

The prototype app for any development environment is Hello World, a program that starts up, displays the text Hello World and then exits. That's the first thing they show you how to do in any development environment, and it's often the hardest step because to get it running you have to get over all the things that make your computer different from the one the tutorial was written on.

Yesterday I got the Hello World app for Google's appengine running on my system. The hurdles were: 1. My text editor attaches an invisible ".txt" extension to the filenames of all files it creates and 2. Unix files have the newline character as the line delimiter not carriage return. Once these were fixed, the Hello World app ran.

Then it was a short sprint through all the features in the Google tutorial that led to a Guestbook app, which is now deployed and running on Google's "appspot" server.

http://dwtestbed.appspot.com/

You can try it out. Scroll to the bottom and enter some text. Then log in, and do it again.

They provide a very nice dashboard for me to monitor the Guestbook app. Here's a screen shot. It shows you how much of the resources allocated to my app are being used: CPU, network bandwidth, server storage, number of emails sent.

I wanted to give it a scripting.com domain, but the process for doing so is way too complex and (not sure) I think it might cost money. Amazon has this down to its bare simplicity, just point a domain at their server, and name the top-level bucket the same as the domain and it just figures it out.

Anyway, on the whole the process with Google's AppEngine was mostly painless and quite rewarding. Next steps will reveal how flexible it is, how easily I can turn my simple guestbook into something more useful.

BTW, I recall that Python has excellent XML-RPC support. I wonder if that's enabled in Google's environment?

Getting started with dev_appserver.py on a Mac

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:32:34 GMT

I want to work my way through the AppEngine tutorial on google.com. I've got a sub-folder set up in my Documents folder that contains the Helloworld app, per the instructions. But I get an error from dev_appserver.py that indicates (I think) that it's not finding the folder. I've tried every variation of changing directories and specifying paths, and keep getting the same error.

Update #1: Kevin Marks figured out the problem. Textedit was adding an invisible .txt extension on the file. I wrote a script to remove the extension and got past that problem. Now I'm getting a syntax error on the Python file.

Update #2: It's Unix, the line-end char has to be \\n.

Update #3: http://dwtestbed.appspot.com/

Update #4: Screen shot of the app dashboard.

Doc's brush with mortality

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:13:35 GMT

A couple of evenings ago I got a call from Nicco Mele, who now lives in Boston with his lovely wife Morra Aarons, and is my partner on the Sunday Gang podcast (we're planning another this week). Nicco had just come from visiting with Doc Searls in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA, where Doc was having a blood clot in his lung examined and treated.

I spoke with Doc the next morning, to listen him tell the story and to provide whatever inspiration I could. Doc's illness, while not requiring the surgery that mine required almost six years ago, was just as serious. I didn't say anything to anyone, but now Doc is writing about it, and he's doing a great job of explaining the process.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/04/10/walking-vs-working/

I'm glad he's getting out and moving around. He's picked a fantastic time of year to do it, spring is just starting up in the Boston area. Working can wait. Get that blood flowing Doc. I hope to take a walk with you soon.

Why I didn't delete my Twitter account

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:51:02 GMT

Hugh MacLeod is a great idea provocateur.

Today he explains why he deleted his Twitter account.

I love social experiments, and this one is a doozy. There were certain things I found unappealing about Twitter. I didn't like the way a few people were using it. Rather than nuke the whole garden, I just got out the shovel and shears and did some digging and pruning. Cut back a limb here and there, and all of a sudden Twitter works a lot better. For me.

I didn't delete my Twitter account and I don't plan to because Twitter is a lab where we're creating the next network. As long as I'm still diggin I'm going to want to keep creating.

But I respect Hugh, and he is part of Twitter even as he withdraws from Twitter.

Early notes on GoogleApps

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:56:16 GMT

The last few years when something new hits the tech blogosphere, I usually kick back and think while so many others scramble for position on Techmeme. I find that by doing this I can usually find the nugget that they're all missing, assuming it's an area I'm interested in, of course, and know something about.

So I'm still hanging back, but wanted to post a couple of thoughts about Google's AppEngine announcement last night.

1. Amazon has a huge lead, and that lead is worth a lot. But Google's presence is going to change how Amazon thinks about the market, and it's good news for developers that they have competition. That means better deals for us. It already does, because as I predicted, and rationalized, Google's offering is free, although the limits are pretty serious. (500MB of storage means you could do a calendar or a spreadsheet, but not an email app with enclosures, or an RSS storage app with enclosures. Data is big these days. How many megabytes is a code update from Apple?)

2. I'm really pissed at Microsoft. Why? They wasted billions on Vista when they should have been virtualizing Windows and making their developers' investments apply to the net. I know it sounds outlandish, but it really isn't. Amazon doesn't offer EC2 for Windows, just Linux. And I'm stuck with two Windows boxes at my hosting company, hosting a dead fucking end. My bet on Microsoft in the late 90s just ran out of gas.

3. Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer. Now Google is taking the black magic out of operating a scalable web app. Python is the new BASIC.

I mentioned #3 on 1/28 in this piece.

Man I love that li'l old pig

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:58:06 GMT

He sure knew what he was talking about!

Hope he didn't get into too much trouble.

Why the Bear Sterns bailout was a good thing for small investors

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:43:07 GMT

First, a caveat, I am far from a financial expert, so I may have some of this wrong, if so, please set me straight.

The cable news shows didn't do a good job of covering the Fed's bailout of Bear Stearns, and as a result there's a misunderstanding about whether it's good or bad. It is, imho, an unqualified good thing because it saved us from a run on the banks, something we haven't seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

First to be clear, a run had already started. That's what was going on with Bear Stearns.

A run is a form of panic. You hear a rumor that your bank is in trouble, so you go down to the bank to withdraw all your savings. You tell a few of your friends, and they tell a few, and all of a sudden the bank's reserve is gone (banks don't keep all your money, they lend most of it out, that's how they make money). Meanwhile one of your neighbors who keeps her savings at a different bank gets the idea that her money might not be safe, so she goes to withdraw all her money, tells her friends and so on, and eventually their reserve is depleted and they have to refuse requests for withdrawals.

A bank run a viral thing, and once one gets going, there's no way to stop it. But the US govt did do something to prevent runs, with the FDIC, a government entity that insures deposits. This really did prevent runs, we haven't had one since.

Now here comes a new form of bank, offering better returns than the insured bank accounts, people feel safe putting their money there, but they are not insured. Like Bear Stearns, where a run started on March 11 of this year, putting the Fed in a difficult position, stop it, by backing the accounts, or let it run. Thankfully they did the right thing, and stopped it. Why? Because if they hadn't, every one with a savings account at any brokerage firm might have lost his or her savings! We came perilously close to a complete meltdown, and most people don't even know it.

I have a theory why they aren't explaining this on CNN, Fox and MSNBC -- and they may be doing the right thing -- that by explaining how close we came to an across-the-board run they might precipitate one. Now the government is acting, we hope quickly, to get FDIC-like insurance in place for brokerage accounts, and charging the companies appropriately for it, so they pay in advance (unlike Bear Stearns), so the general taxpayers of the US don't end up footing the bill, and hope that while this system is being put in place, everyone who has their savings in a brokerage feels comfortable leaving them there, at least for the time-being.

But note that Bear Stearns didn't get the bailout, the people with deposits there got it. True, the rest of the brokerage industry got a reprieve, but that didn't cost us anything, at least not yet.

PS: It's a Wonderful Life features a bank run.

Burnout in the blogosphere

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:30:59 GMT

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselved to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost did kill me.

In the process I learned a lot about heart disease. It seems the Times didn't take the time to check with a doctor to see if the premise of the article was reasonable or even possible. Could you work yourself into a heart attack? Perhaps. But not in a year or two, it takes decades for heart disease to become symptomatic. They did autopsies of soldiers killed in the Korean War and found that many of them already had heart disease, some of them in their teens and early twenties. They wouldn't have known until they were in their forties, fifties or sixties, maybe even later.

There were other reasons to hate the Times piece, but those were amply covered elsewhere.