Scripting News

Amazon EC2/Windows update

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:22:00 GMT

A few observations after a full week of using for real deployed applications.

1. It works. No problems, absolutely reliable.

2. The docs could be vastly improved. They should take a "Hello World" approach, and tell you the minimum you need to know to get a Notepad window up. Since it runs Windows and so many people use Windows, this could be a mass-market product. The idea of having a virtual computer running "up there" is really powerful and it shouldn't just be for programmers.

3. In the end, the cost isn't prohibitive. I'm paying $300 a month for two colocated servers. I expect to pay about $200 a month for the same service at Amazon. I probably wouldn't switch just for the cost savings, but for the extra reliability, I'll take it.

4. They make a big deal about how the servers can disappear, but in the week it's been running, it hasn't gone down once.

5. One bother is that you only get one IP address per machine. I really could use three or four. On my colo service I get five. Yes, I know I can set things up so that addresses are delegated, but it's a PITA.

Obama's decency

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:40:42 GMT

Conservative blogger and lawyer Patterico makes the case for Obama's decency. He admits that all the evidence could be dismissed as tactics to win an election, but then so could anything anyone does be so dismissed. I went through the same process in deciding about Obama, saw the same evidence, while looking for the slightest crack -- never saw it. He's a tough politician, but he doesn't cut corners.

There are a lot of good people in the world, I know quite a few, but what's remarkable about Obama:

1. He's risen so high. When asked today what Presidents he's turned to for advice since winning the election, he offered, with a smile -- Lincoln. As the therapist in The West Wing observed to the fictional President Jed Bartlet, "This is a hell of a curve you get graded on now." But even that's not the most impressive thing.

Update: I had to find the scene. Here's the MP3. Great stuff. Season 3, Episode 13 at minute 37 approx.

2. There are a lot of good decent people in the world, but few of them get credit for it. Obama gets credit. Now, what kind of example will this provide, and how will it change things? Are we looking at an antidote to cynicism? It's clear to me that unless we can create a strain of idealism, we're not going to come through the challenges ahead.

In a piece I wrote earlier today, talking about volunteerism replacing professionalism in journalism, I don't think many people reading it believed that people will work to make our world better without being paid. This has always frustrated me, because the evidence is everywhere that people do. We just elected a President through millions of selfless acts on the part of millions, yet people still doubt that selflessness exists and is so powerful.

I don't know why but today has been a rough day for me. Haven't been this aimless in a long time. Something needs to be processed and I'm not sure what it is. Coming to grips with what's next is not easy, I guess.

Time for a walk!

PS: The Economist doesn't know the first thing about blogging.

PPS: StumbleUpon discovered MockCain.com today.

New moderator for Meet the Press?

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:33:57 GMT

If you recall, Tom Brokaw signed on to moderate MTP through the election. I thought he did mostly a good job, an improvement over the previous management. A couple of times I thought he crossed the line into advocacy, but on the whole, well done.

Now the big question -- who's next?

People I hope it's not: Andrea Mitchell (boring, petty, insidery, bird-like). David Gregory (just boring).

Someone I could live with: Chuck Todd, would bring excellent guests on the show, he has everyone's respect. But he's a numbers guy and numbers aren't the game now that the election is over. You need someone who's better at political nuance. He's better as a sidekick than the main act.

Someone else I could live with: Mika Brzezinski, co-host of Morning Joe, starting to step out on her own, subbing for Gregory (whose show has a new name indicating he's probably not the choice for MTP). She is intelligent, experienced, and has been in the background too much for all the talent she has.

Now the person I really want who they'll never pick: Aaron Brown. I can't say enough about his interviewing style, intelligent, humorous, disarming, he's the kind of guy you'd like to spill the beans to and then realize you just screwed yourself. My benchmark for this job is who would Lindsay Graham have a hard time bullshitting. Only one answer there -- Aaron Brown.

Like I said, it'll never happen. :-(

Changing the way we do news

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:47:58 GMT

What didn't change in the 2008 election is the way news flowed. This is a big disappointment to me and something that causes great concern. I see the newspapers dying, and the broacast media failing to do news, and I want to evolve to the next thing, but it doesn't seem that's the way it'll go. Instead we're likely to see a sudden collapse, and a void, much like the financial collapse in September. This would be tragic, unneccesary, a very bad for us.

The next thing, btw, involves the same spirit of volunteerism that drove the Obama campaign. It should be possible for a citizen like you or me to take a one month leave of absence, just like doing jury duty, and go to a news story and camp out and cover it. It's not so hard to do. If a citizen can be trained to render a life and death decision (sometimes) fairly and carefully, we can also learn to get "Just the facts ma'am" and report the news alongside the pros. In case the pros should either disappear or fail to be professional.

In order to do this we're going to need the cooperation of the people who the press covers, for example, a new administration taking office. But unless they get this big idea real soon, it can't happen.

People are thinking too small, imho. Bloggers in the White House briefing room? Of course. But if the same gatekeeping applies, you're just going to have people who get through the gates. There's really no difference betw a columnist that works for the Washington Post and one who writes for Talking Point Memo. Yet some how we should feel that we're being better represented by the latter? I don't. They're still gatekeepers, and people like you and me are on the outside looking in, getting the news they want to give us, through their lens, from their perspective, and missing a lot of what's going on and what matters. The only way to turn the system upside down is to just do it, and have a system whereby fresh blood comes in, systematically.

It's been flattering when people have said I should be the country's CTO. First of all, it isn't going to happen, and second, I'm not a good candidate. Most of the technology you'd need to be a good CTO is stuff I just use, and am not an expert at. (That said, one of the first things our new CTO should do is uncover and expose the games Comcast and other big Internet vendors are playing with public access to the net. We paid for the development of the net through tax dollars, they can use it, like everyone else but it's not their place to throttle or control it.)

The job I really want is designing and implementing an open platform for news for our government, and of course that would quickly become the way of doing news in all walks of life. We need something fast here, even the strongest news organizations are seriously undermined and could disappear within months. Just having a blogger inside the new administration is not nearly enough.

Anyway, I'm thinking that a flash conference in NY, DC or Cambridge, like the one we did after the 2004 election at Stanford, might be a good idea. Last night I asked Jay Rosen at NYU what he thought of this, and he was positive. We might do it. I'm thinking about new non-BloggerCon formats, that get people talking about specific ideas as opposed to having wide-ranging discussions. I think we've now learned enough about blogging and public media to work on the next level of change.

Postpartem blues

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:40:35 GMT

What a rush the last few days have been.

Geez, never mind the last few days -- it's been going on since January, since the Iowa Caucus. A continuing stream of "Wait For This" spans of time. First it was New Hampshire, then Super Tuesday, then Texas and Ohio. Then a month of downtime, followed by Pennsylvania and the early May primaries (can't remember what states they were) finally Indiana and North Carolina, and Tim Russert proclaiming we now know who the Democratic nominee will be. Whew.

I think at that time we really knew who the next President would be, but who cares. There were ways to pretend at least that the stuff between then and now mattered.

Now it's all over and I know what has to come next. No matter what the expectation, built up over so much time, can't be matched by reality. Like many others, I imagine, it's time now to look elsewhere for meaning. We will have an African-American president, a Democrat, a smart man with big ambition. It'll be interesting to watch him, but not all-consuming as it was.

What comes next? I honestly don't know.

A new way to use the Internet

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:36:20 GMT

After years of intense opinionating...

Watching some newborn puppies sleep.

Prop 8

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:07:15 GMT

NY Times: "California voters have adopted a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, The Associated Press reported Wednesday, joining voters in two other states who went to the polls Tuesday to overturn such unions."

I voted against Prop 8.

My thoughts on marriage are -- if you have kids you probably should be married, but if you don't who cares what you call your relationship. That's between you and your partner. You want to call it marriage, no problem as far as I'm concerned. I'm a libertarian in that regard. Stay focused on the big stuff and what happens between two consenting adults is none of my business.

And I think married heteros generally are assholes about this. If their marriages are so weak that they need to make it exclusive then maybe they ought to take a look inward instead of focusing their fear on people they don't know or understand (which is what their opposition to gay marriage really is saying, imho).

On the other hand... (And I'm going to catch hell for this.)

I have a friend who I didn't know was gay until he told me he was married and I thought that meant he had a wife (the female kind), but it turns out it was another guy. Truthfully -- I found this shocking, and a bit uncomfortable, and being a Californian, I said "I find this shocking and it makes me a bit uncomfortable" and my friend, also being Californian said he understood, which I'm sure he did.

I remember in 1980, the first time I went to Jamaica to visit my uncle. I was on the beach by myself and I realized I was the only white person. I freaked (not visibly of course) -- not wholly unlike the reaction I had to my friend's gay marriage, above. I remember why I was scared, but I don't understand it. Where I grew up, in NYC, we thought it was dangerous to be alone among so many blacks. I'm sure we were over-reacting, but it seemed real. Here it is not too much later, and the change we're talking about is inside me. Slowly, I've come to see black people differently. Very differently.

The obvious point -- eventually the shock will dissipate, and there will be a time when people don't understand why something like Prop 8 would pass. Transitions like this take time. There's no other way. But this change is coming, for sure.

My first post about Barack Obama

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:50:44 GMT

On 7/26/04, at the blogger's breakfast at the DNC, this weird guy who people said great things about came to talk to us. His name was Barack Obama. Here's the whole post:

Barack Obama, who's running for the Senate in Illinois, spoke briefly at the Blogger's Breakfast. He's an up and coming star of the Democratic Party, according to David Weinberger, he'll be President in 12 years.

Dr Dave was off by 8 years.

Bonus: Here's a teeny picture of Obama that day.

Today's song

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:30:20 GMT

Sarah we hardly knew ye

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:46:38 GMT

When she was announced as a candidate I was virtually alone in believing the choice wouldn't age well. When I turned out to be correct, I didn't want to gloat, because the election wasn't over, and there was no way to be absolutely sure. Now we are.

I don't think she killed the McCain candidacy, but had the economy not soured, I think she would have brought him down. It was such a bonehead decision, it was all the proof anyone needed that a McCain presidency would be as filled with disaster as the Bush presidency. Obama was absolutely right in saying that voting for McCain was signing up for another four years of Republican lunacy.

Now I hear people saying something equally wrong about Palin -- that she has a shot at leading the Republican Party in 2012. It isn't going to happen. That's not how American politics works.

We don't give losers a second chance in this country. (Yes, of course there are exceptions, but she isn't one of them, read on.)

Kerry thought he could run for President in 2008 after losing in a squeaker in 2004. It took a month or so before he realized that the Republicans would throw the exact same book at him they developed four years earlier, and while it wasn't fair then, it did work and it would work again.

Same with Palin. What little we really know about her is more than we wanted to know. When she shows up, if she's dumb enough to show up, as a candidate for President in 2010 or 2011, all we'll think of is the Katie Couric interview, and Charlie this and Charlie that, thanks but no thanks to the bridge to nowhere, the hypocrisy of a hockey mom who loves expensive clothes, and the pit bull with lipstick mavericky maverick reformer who fired a commissioner who wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law.

Palin is no longer a candidate, she's a punchline.

Election aftermath -- Obama's mandate

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:25:54 GMT

Cleaning up some loose ends.

Obama won Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, two states that were on McCain's slim path to a win. Once those were decided, it was over. I felt the networks could have called the election then, but they didn't.

When Obama won Ohio, it was even more certain. In order to win McCain would have had to win California, Oregon and Washington, and that structurally just couldn't happen. I told my friends who were gathered around the TV, in my opinion, it was over. I twittered it. If McCain were to win at this point, it would be the biggest bit of history in 100 years, including 9/11, the use of the atom bomb, World War II itself, the Mets winning the World Series in 1969. You get the idea. Things of that nature are so improbable they just don't happen.

Missouri went to McCain by the slimmest margin, thereby losing its bellwether status. It no longer always goes with the winner. Even the Boston Red Sox had to eventually beat out the Yankees for the championship.

I've read that Obama doesn't have a mandate, but I don't know what planet you have to come from to draw that conclusion. He has the strongest mandate in so many ways, it's likely he doesn't want that much mandate, and will disappoint in some or many ways. Can he really get us out of Iraq quickly enough to please all who want a quick exit? The public works projects that are going to be needed to keep us out of a depression give us a chance to fix the problems we so desperately want to fix, energy, health care, education, infrastructure. Those are the four biggies.

North Carolina still isn't decided, and I understand that Georgia wasn't decided until very late. Our guy almost won that state too. The whole Red State thing is now questionable. Yes there are still some, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, the Dakotas. But the south with all its newly energized African-American voters and the midwest are now all in play. A new political reality is shaping up, beyond the last four elections -- and that's the stuff of mandates.

We can bail out the auto industry, but in return they have to use the public money to underwrite new products that get the mileage that European cars get. If you've ever been to a European capital you know how oversized American cars are. There, in a nutshell, is the problem with Detroit -- it's really a problem with America. That's one reason we use so much energy. We can make some huge cuts there without having to invent anything, just copy the Europeans.

The good thing about Obama is that, armed with a mandate, he will know what to do with it.

What's next?

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:21:04 GMT

Now the next question is -- what comes next?

Probably some writing. But not yet. My to-do list is very long. I need to get my car serviced. Pay some bills and call some friends. After that, I don't know. Hey at least there's one thing that isn't on my list -- I get to stay in the USA.

I wonder what our election looks like to people outside the U.S.

Curious -- there was so much angst, now that Obama is our President-elect, what changed -- what comes next for you?

We won!

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Eat some pie tonight

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:51:55 GMT

When Obama wins tonight, celebrate with some pie. If possible, sweet potato pie, but in a pinch any pie will do.

We're having peach pie and pecan pie tonight.

All diets are officially suspended for the night.

Today's song

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:32:02 GMT

Dedicated to our soon-to-be-ex-President, George W. Bush.

IRC for Election Day

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 02:23:44 GMT

We've had IRC for every major event of the 2008 election dating back to the first caucuses and primaries, and through the presidential and vice-presidential debates.

So it seems fitting that we have one final IRC chat for this season, as we share information, points of view, scandals and touching moments of the last day of this election -- hopefully with a happy ending, for as many of us as possible.

irc://irc.freenode.net/#electionDay

See you in the chatroom!

"cheesecake"

$99 netbooks

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:01:44 GMT

Watch out iPhone, here come the netbooks.

For some people, even today's relatively bulky netbook computers are replacements for iPhones. That's what happened for me. The day I got my Eee PC 901 in July was when I more or less stopped using my iPhone as a computer.

But a netbook with Skype and a service plan is a lot like a cell phone, but unlike Apple's offering, it runs an OS with a wealth of software and developer know-how that is wide open. There's no gatekeeper who gets to say who can and can't put whatever software they want on a netbook.

And watch out Google, it beats Android too -- again so many more people know how to program Windows, it runs everything. For that reason I'm not running out to buy an Android phone, but I already own two netbooks.

Another bet I'd make -- the netbooks are going to shrink to phone size. You can see the space being made in the Asus product line. They're dropping the 7-inch screens in favor of the 10-inch ones, the keyboards on the 7-inch models aren't very usable, but they'll surely have a netbook form factor the size of a cell phone that plugs into a USB port on my laptop-like netbook. And each will cost $99 with a service plan, and they've lovely computers.

This is the future.

Heard on MSNBC

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:06:23 GMT

"The first 16 presidents could have owned Barack Obama as property." -- Jonathan Alter, on MSNBC this morning.

Never thought of it that way, but it's true.

Opting-out of political smears

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:40:48 GMT

I don't think reporters should pass on misleading stories. It would be better to act as a firewall, a defense against obvious campaign lies. It should be especially easy when they charges are aimed at the media itself.

Example. Sarah Palin, in the last days of the campaign, is saying that the SF Chronicle withheld comments from Obama saying he would "bankrupt the coal industry."

CNN: Palin knocks Obama over months-old coal comments.

The statement she's referring to was made in January, when Obama was still pretty green, and spoke perhaps a little too directly, with too much of truth. I don't think he said he would or wanted to bankrupt the coal industry, rather that he wanted to do something to reverse global warming. Almost anything we do to keep this planet habitable by our species will make it harder for the coal industry, which by definition pumps carbon to the atmosphere. Coal is carbon, pure and simple, and when you burn it, it goes into the atmosphere. That should be expensive. We should encourage development of technology that generates electricity without doing that.

Anyway, the Chronicle says it published the comments in print and as full video. I think MSNBC should check that out before passing through the Palin charge without comment. You don't have to call her a liar, you could just ignore the statement.

SF Chronicle: Palin suggests Chronicle withheld Obama remarks.

In any case, it's gratifying in the final days of the campaign to see the media not getting totally obsessed with other obvious smears. It's just the extremes in the blogosphere that are focusing on the crazy stuff. Maybe that could be the norm in political coverage.

Olbermann on SNL

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:18:17 GMT