Scripting News

When they criticize P.O.O.T.U.S.

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:46:31 GMT

I just invented a new acronym: President Obama Of The United States.

Knock wood.

Okay it really looks like he's going to win, forgive me for saying that, I know it's not a good idea, and I don't really believe it but just in case...

I saw this picture on the wall in a scene in last night's 60 Minutes. Leslie Stahl is interviewing Ray Odierno, the new US commander in Iraq. He was showing off some new technique of hunting down the bad guys with drones, very impressive, except I just watched Generation Kill on HBO and I can't help but wondering if it's a fraud and a hoax. Anyway. On the wall is this portrait of President Bush superimposed on the American flag with the Statue of Liberty in the background.

Whuh?

That's pretty outrageously out there.

So when my guy Barack, POOTUS, is in the White House and the wingnuts are giving him shit about how he seems to be enjoying the trappings of the presidency, I'm going to ask them to have a look at this picture and see if Dubya wasn't just a teeeeeny bit over the top here.

Autumn colors

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:28:26 GMT

Michelle Malkin, like her party, is out of touch

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 19:41:22 GMT

Michelle Malkin has some imagery that shows that there are people with evil imaginations about the Republican candidates, and if the threats are credible the Secret Service should prosecute them to the full extent of the law. If Governor Palin or Senator McCain were hurt or killed because we didn't take action now, it would be a national tragedy the country wouldn't recover from for a long time. (But does she really think Madonna is a physical threat to her candidate?)

There's a world of difference between a random "out there" nutcase expressing his or her rage graphically on a website and the Republican Party's candidates pushing the anger and hate, and not responding in revulsion when they see it at one of their rallies -- and continue to push it after it's taken root. I was relieved to see McCain denounce the hate on Friday, but there were many times when he said nothing, and so far his running mate has not said a word to object when people have threatened Senator Obama at her rallies. That's just crazy. Doesn't she understand that she and her family are equally threatened by this lunacy? They are, for sure.

I don't think Malkin is stupid, but I do wonder if she understands how it would wreck our country if harm came to Senator Obama. And how it would reflect on her party if they played a role in promoting the hate behind the attack. I can only assume she hasn't thought it through. Please Ms. Malkin, get off the ledge, come back to reality.

Electoral vote calculators

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:21:50 GMT

CNN, NPR and USA Today both have interactive maps that allow you to play what-if with the electoral vote map. I'm sure there are others. But I wish one of them allowed me to embed the map in my blog, and have it automatically update as I edit it. They would take over the web in an instant.

As it is, it's a lot of fun to play prognosticator. Here's the map as I think it'll turn out. I almost painted Indiana and West Virginia blue, but then I decided that's too much and went back to red. Let's look back here on November 5 to see how it turned out (assuming the world is still here).

Update: Kos has a very nice map that editable and embeddable, but it's too big to be useful here. I have embedded it in a page on the OPML Howto site.

Waiting for November 4

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 15:47:05 GMT

Are the markets are waiting to find out who wins the election?

Will trust return if the voters go... for Obama? Republican?

Me, I can't wait for the election to be over. But I'm totally looking forward to the final debate (we're doing another debate party at the Hillside Club, Wednesday 5:30PM, $5) and I'm totally looking forward to the W movie that opens on October 17 (next Friday).

Thinking about a blogger's event for election returns on November 4. A newsroom where 20 bloggers report on the returns in real time, Hypercamp-like.

After November 4, the credit markets will unfreeze, all people who were laid off will be re-hired. The stock market will soar to 20,000. Housing prices resume their march to the sky, home owners once again can borrow against the soaring value of their homes. Massive amounts of oil will be discovered in the middle of the Nevada desert, and scientists at Cal will find a way to convert carbon dioxide into gasoline so we won't even need to tap our newfound reserve. President Obama takes office and announces he's eliminated taxes and retired the national debt, and we all can work three-day weeks. A new drug is discovered that reverses the aging process. Microsoft relents and buys Yahoo at $200 per share.

A note about conferences

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:35:11 GMT

I was recently invited to keynote a prestigious conference in a European city. I agreed to speak but only on the condition that they cover my expenses. I didn't ask to be paid for my time, but after they said no, I realize I should have.

Here's why. I didn't have a product to pitch or have a company that could benefit from the PR. If I were in their shoes (and I have been) I would insist on covering expenses, otherwise the talks would just be advertisements. It seems analogous to asking a vendor to write an article in your publication, and somehow expecting that it wouldn't be an advertisement.

That's why most conferences aren't worth going to -- you're being pitched by people with a business model for being there. However if conferences were treated like journals, where you were required to only share your knowledge and not promote your products, they might be more interesting.

BTW, this came up once before -- with a conference about syndication in NYC. I agreed to speak but only if they covered expenses. They said no. They thought they were being generous by letting me speak for free! I thought they were being hypocritical, every other speaker there was promoting a product, I didn't have a product to promote.

So I thought -- why not offer my services to promote someone else's product. (When they found out they disinvited me. Ouch!)

How the world got this crazy I don't know, but it must be part of the bubble that's bursting now.

Bottom line -- if you're speaking at a conference and they're not at least covering expenses, it's probably all advertising.

Will this election end in a civil war?

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:13:10 GMT

During the Democratic primary, as the choice narrowed to Obama and Clinton, it was pretty common for people to say that no matter what we'd have a strong nominee and President. There was a lot of confidence that either candidate would win the election over the Republican alternative, and would go on to be a strong leader.

As the campaign went on, this feeling faded -- losing became unthinkable on both sides, and the campaign turned ugly -- but there was still something held in reserve, some places we did not go. I can't speak for anyone else as to why we didn't go for broke, but my own opinion is that we felt that after the primary we'd have to work together. And while there was some discussion before the DNC that the party was split, the convention unified the party.

What about after the general election, now less than a month away? The same logic applies. We'll all be Americans, and we must unite behind the President, no matter how unthinkable that might seem now. But there's a lot of concern, expressed openly, that there will be violence if Obama wins -- that somehow the Republicans will not feel that an African-American, even if he wins the Electoral College, is a legitimate President. If so, this is a prescription for nothing less than civil war.

I know what it feels like to be bewildered by the choice made by our country. I felt we were poised on a precipice of disaster in 2004 when we re-elected President Bush, but I accepted the result. I said at the time that we need to listen to the Americans who voted for him, because they must be trying to say something. Well, I spent four years listening and nothing came back. So we worked and patiently waited as our country continued to fumble and blunder and waste opportunity after opportunity. Now, facing a global economic collapse, and who knows what politically and militarily, our country will have to either unite, or fly apart.

I'm going to add my voice, as humble and unpowerful as it is, to the growing chorus asking the Republicans to take a step back, and think longer term, bigger picture. This is not going to end well if we can't agree that whoever wins this election is our leader for the next four years, at a time when we desperately need leadership. There's an awful spirit to this competition that says when it's over we will not unite, and that would be a disaster.

McCain must give a speech, like the one given by Obama when racial issues came to the front earlier this year, and say clearly that no matter who wins, we must unite behind the new President. I have no doubt that Obama would echo this. Then during the remaining weeks of the campaign we can rebuild the spirit that America is famous for, and prepare to face the huge challenges that are in front of (all of) us.

Update #1: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Update #2: He's going in the right direction, believe it or not, despite the certainty of some of the commenters here that it would be tantamount to conceding.

Where to go?

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:10:53 GMT

I've got the rest of the month reserved for travel, to see the election up front and close up, with camera, laptop, audio, video and EVDO. I'm trying to figure out if I should go, and where.

I want to be in a state that both campaigns see as critical, so I can drive from city to city and be in the crowds at rallies and talk to the people there. Not like this guy who baited them (they seemed like partisans, not the monsters he was making them out to be). Just want to know what they think. And not as a campaign worker for Obama, though I have given money to his campaign.

Part of the problem is that McCain isn't going to all the places he should be. He just spent two days in Wisconsin. I could park my kiester there, and be pretty sure at some point I'd see surrogates for both campaigns, but I want to go where the stars are going.

Florida may be the best bet. I know the state really well, spent a lot of time there over many years, all parts -- western, northern, east coast and west.

Any thoughts? I'd probably leave a week from tomorrow. Fly to a city, rent a car, and then go to the first campaign event.

Also I'm looking for pages on both Republican and Democratic sites that say where the candidates will be in the next 24-48 hours. I know they make the info available to the press, but as usual I can't get either campaign to respond to me as if I were press.

Maybe New Mexico? Not too hard to pick a spot there. And it's close to Colorado.

McCain is a coward

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:32:03 GMT

He says in this interview that no one has accused him of lacking courage. He must not be listening.

Everything about McCain these days is cowardice.

Snoozing to victory?

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:53:00 GMT

Flirting her way to victory?

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:13:57 GMT

Guardian: "At least three times, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked."

Country First

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:43:21 GMT

The hypocrisy of the Republicans is so caustic and damaging in so many ways I hardly know where to begin. But the thing that gets me most is this idea that they put "Country First." What a crock. When they attack people who support their opponents, they're attacking half of the country they say they love and supposedly put first. I've had trouble putting my finger on this for years but there it is. Love isn't something you just talk about, it's something you do.

Think of it this way, Al Gore got more than 50 percent of the votes in the 2000 election. John Kerry got pretty close to 50 percent. Win or lose, Barack Obama will get 50 percent, more or less. So if you love America, it seems you must love the people who voted for Gore, Kerry and Obama too. Otherwise, please explain specifically what it is that you love cause it ain't America.

Another one that ticks me off, as a taxpayer -- the Republicans say that paying taxes isn't an act of patriotism. Well, what is it then? That's a straight question. I've given a lot of money to this country in the form of taxes. I don't resent it, but I do resent people who probably have given less than I have (the Palins) saying it isn't an act of patriotism. I even call it My Patriotic Duty, so I don't feel like it's such a blow when I write those checks to the the U.S. Treasury with all those zeros at the end. It's the price you pay for living in a great country, Ms. Palin. That's something you need to learn about this country and its relationship to its citizens. Esp since you propose to be one of our leaders.

The politics of the Republicans this year has crossed the line, as Joe Biden said today, so well. When one of your supporters yells Treason! or Kill Him! in one of your rallies, in response to your words, a response is called for, yet no response came. You need to stop and say "Wait a minute -- Country First asshole." We're not going to get anywhere by killing our opponents, the leaders of half our citizens. That's a civil war, Republicans -- we fought one of those, and it came pretty close to destroying us. It's time to back off the precipice Ms. Palin and Mr. McCain.

Further, we're told, often, of John McCain's courage and heroism. I expected McCain, a supposed man of honor, to address the personal integrity issues about Obama in yesterday's debate. He didn't. I visualize McCain as a coward hiding behind the skirts of his running mate, without the guts to say to Obama's face, the terrible things they've been accusing him of when he's not present to defend himself. Either you have the honor to say it to his face, or don't say it behind his back, or don't pretend to have honor and courage, to love your country and to put it first.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington with a new title.

My Fellow Prisoners

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:08:01 GMT

As Sarah Palin said so well: "Thanks but no thanks."

Had my fill of Nashville

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:29:54 GMT

FiveThirtyEight: "By the way, a special shout out for an absolutely horrible experience on the campus of Belmont University. I'm not sure I've ever been to a less welcoming place. We hated this campus and the staff here so much that we left to watch the debate at a pizza joint. I don't like to regret things, but it would be hard to overstate how terrible a day this has been, and how crappy every interaction we had in Tennessee was. It was a terrible decision to leave Indiana and come down here. That had to be said for the record."

Yup, been there myself.

Advice for Chris Messina

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:12:48 GMT

If you're interested in how formats and protocols evolve on the web, you might want to listen to Steve Gillmor's interview of Chris Messina on yesterday's Gillmor Gang.

I used to do roughly what Chris does, but I got tired of all the kitchen sinks being thrown at me because of my success from people who work at big tech companies. They have all kinds of techniques for thwarting success, but one simple motive, as I've come to understand it.

All big tech companies are basically the same inside, they all have too many people so they expend a lot of energy fighting with each other over who has the right to do this or that. There's always someone looking over your shoulder for a sign that you're blowing it, so they can tell someone at a higher level in management about your failure, so they can snatch the project for themselves.

When an independent developer such as Chris or myself is introduced to this mess, it's usually at the behest of someone very high up the structure of the big tech company because we tend to be visible to the outside world, relative to the typical grunt inside the BigCo. Our visibility and our introduction by the TopGuy immediately breeds resentment -- before they even meet you they don't like you, or worse, are committed to your failure. And while there may be penalties for hitting someone inside the corporate hierarchy, there's no penalty for offing the outsider. Inside the company they're playing a big game of musical chairs, but we outsiders can't play -- there's no mechanism whereby we can get a chair.

But no one lays it out for us this clearly. It takes years of trying to work with the BigCo's to figure out that while the TopGuy smiles and shakes our hand at conferences, and maybe even says kind things about us in a press release, there is zero chance that the people who actually make the decisions, the Ouija board of all the engineers and their managers, will work with us.

I should say almost zero instead of zero. I've had two examples of times when BigTechCos said they were working with me, and really did do the work, and several examples outside the tech industry, in publishing. In one case, with XML-RPC in 1998, it was because a handful of engineers who really were mavericks (unlike John McCain who just throws spitballs from the back of the room) and believed in something, and were respected enough inside Microsoft to cut through the corporate bullshit, but only for a very short period of time (really just two or three weeks). The machine eventually clamped down and turned it into a mess, owned by the W3C and IBM, Sun, and 18,000 other BigCos and BigCo-wannabes.

The other example was RSS, which only worked because the company I was working with, Netscape, evaporated into thin air in the middle of the project! So, if after getting a TopGuy to go for it, somehow you're lucky enough that the company self-destructs, you actually can get something done with a BigCo.

I recognize from Chris's rap on the GG podcast that he gets something important that most BigCo guys don't. The question, asked by the BigCo guy, isn't why invent another way to do standards, that's what Lakoff calls "framing" -- assuming something in the question that isn't actually what's going on. You don't start out trying to create a standard (and I'd encourage Chris to drop the word from his vocabulary) -- what you want to do is make a product, and allow others to compete with you, so you aren't locking your users in. That's the virtue of the development process Chris and his buddies are advocating. If a standard pops out, it happens later in the process.

Chris is an idealist and it's good to have them around, for sure. And it's also good to think of his work as the proving ground for standards work at the IETF and W3C that will come later, but unfortunatley I'm pretty sure they don't see it that way. When it comes time to reinvent OAuth they will probably try to break it. I say try, because if you play it right they won't be able to.

So my advice to Chris is, if it isn't already obvious, don't explain why the BigCos aren't following your lead, shrug your shoulders and let them do the explaining. Eventually if you do your job well, they will follow, they'll have to. They will never follow out of the goodness of their hearts, because (sorry to say) that's not what they do.

Update: RSS.com is for sale, minimum bid $500K. Oy.

Watch-The-Debate-In-Berkeley 2.0

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:28:10 GMT

Let's watch tonight's debate together. Barack Obama and John McCain. 5:30PM at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St.

$5 suggested contribution to cover expenses. This is a non-partisan affair, you don't have to support either candidate.

Last time we had about 200 people, not sure how many will show up this time. The projection should be better this time. We're probably going to go with CNN, because of their fancy real-time polling tech, but I'll bring the EyeTV receiver with me, in any case.

Raines is arranging for Cheesboard pizza, as last time -- but instead of All You Can Eat, this time it's Pay Per Slice.

It was really nice last time to watch the debate with 200 fellow Californians, and people mostly didn't talk over the candidates, which of course is really good.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1185738/

If you're in the area hope to see you there tonight.

IRC for tonight's debate

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:03:57 GMT

The debate starts at 6PM Pacific.

irc://irc.freenode.net/#presidentDebate2

Seeya on the IRC!

Keating Economics

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:24:14 GMT

Now you can download the 13-minute movie via BitTorrent.

http://www.mininova.org/tor/1882614

Thanks to RaveDelay for providing a complete copy of the movie! It appears to be complete and high-def.

Why is McCain talking about the sixties?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:29:12 GMT

Internet fallout from the crashing market?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:35:56 GMT

The stock market continues to crash, down almost 500 points today, below 10K for the first time in four years. I'm taking a bath, but not as bad as some, since I sold all my stocks in January and have been getting back in very very gradually.

However, I'm concerned about the health of some of the Internet companies I depend on. It doesn't take many failures for the Internet that we depend on to start going dark. What if for example your domain registrar were to go under, or the company hosting your DNS, or your colo facility? There are a lot of points of failure that in normal times could be easily replaced to keep your web presence up. But it's time to start thinking about how that might work. And who you can trust.

I assume we can trust Google and Microsoft to stay on the air? eBay? Amazon? What about TechCrunch? Scripting News? :-(

I'm not just starting to think about this, but I haven't wanted to say anything unless I was fairly sure that it was going to become a prolonged thing. It's looking more like that every day. I guess the future is starting and it's got different rules from the recent past.